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Manuel's love of the game rubbing off on Phillies

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Jon Paul Morosi

Jon Paul Morosi is a national MLB writer for FOXSports.com. He previously covered baseball for the Detroit Free Press and Seattle Post-Intelligencer. He began his journalism career at the Bay City Times in his native Michigan. Follow him on Twitter.

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Updated Oct 26, 2009 11:27 PM ET
     
 

PHILADELPHIA

Charlie Manuel is four wins away from joining the company of Tony La Russa, Tommy Lasorda, Dick Williams and other managers with two world titles. He is one series away from entering the exclusive club of those who won consecutive championships; Joe Torre, Sparky Anderson and Casey Stengel reside there. With his team in the World Series once again, the next couple weeks will go a long way toward determining history's view of Manuel. If Philadelphia wins, there will be talk of Manuel's folksy wisdom and burgeoning legacy. But no one expects Manuel to engage in much self-promotion. "I would have to guess that Charlie's not thinking about his legacy right now," Ed Wade, the Phillies general manager when Manuel was hired, said Friday in a telephone interview. "He's probably thinking, 'Who's the next guy that will come through the door to talk baseball with me?' "He's not worried about whether they're going to build another Rocky statue for him in Philadelphia. He's just looking for the chance to talk baseball and be part of the game." Manuel, 65, is not the most famous or recognizable skipper in baseball. But he is absolutely among the best. His 447 victories in Philadelphia are the most of any National League manager over the past five seasons. More than La Russa in St. Louis. More than Bobby Cox in Atlanta. He has won three division titles in the past three years. The Angels' Mike Scioscia is the only other manager who can make the same claim. And perhaps most impressively, Manuel is the only manager in either league to win two pennants over the past five seasons. "I think that people, right now, are realizing what kind of manager he is, what kind of baseball man he is," said Luis Isaac, who coached under Manuel during his tenure as the Cleveland manager. "There's a lot of great managers who never won one World Series, or two, or two in a row." Manuel was a hitter by trade and remains a hitting instructor at heart. He was a hitting coach for the mashing Indians of the 1990s, which certainly helped his reputation as a guru. Ruben Amaro Jr., a reserve on the '94 and '95 Cleveland teams, remarked Friday that he always got the same number of swings in batting practice as Manny Ramirez and Jim Thome. "He believed in treating everybody fairly," Amaro said. Good thing he did. Amaro, the Phillies general manager, is now Manuel's boss. Manuel's managerial skills, while impressive, may be surpassed by his legendary abilities as a storyteller. An otherwise ordinary news conference on Friday afternoon offered the latest evidence. After a series of questions on normal, in-between-series subjects — Pedro Martinez, Cole Hamels, the bullpen — someone asked Manuel to share his "sharpest memories" of his first season as a manager, with Class A Wisconsin Rapids in 1983. His answer went on for nearly seven minutes. Among the highlights: ... "If you want to know the truth, when I first started managing, I didn't know nothing about the game. The only thing I knew how to do was play right field, play some first base, and I thought I could hit." ... "I used to mow the field. I put the lines down and the pitching rubber and home plate. I had this pitcher, one night early in the season, come in swearing, and he said, 'I'm telling you, home plate's crooked.' I got real upset with him. I go, 'What the hell you talking about? I put the damn plate in.' I go out the next day, and we start measuring it off with a string. And it was off. It was off about 18 inches." ... "The locker room was maybe not much bigger than my office. We had two showers. You flush the commode, and the shower would absolutely scald you. I had a good time, really. I even drove the bus." ... "I could fish at night. I could walk right outside the locker room. There's a river about a block away. I'd have a Greenbelt Beer, a Star Beer, Old Style. Old Style was big. I used say Old Style was my lucky beer. You know, we'd get on a roll or something, I'd be drinking Old Style. It was all good." He was talking about stuff that happened 26 years ago. And yet it all seemed pretty current to the manager of the NL champs. Imagine if Manuel had been asked about, say, the 1986 Toledo Mud Hens. He managed that team, too. But the tales, whether completely accurate or acceptably fuzzy, serve a purpose. Told through his drawl and sometimes-wandering sentences, they speak to Manuel's sincerity. They help him relate to players of a different generation who are from places that don't at all resemble Manuel's tiny Virginia hometown. Many times during the season they worked together, Wade would approach Manuel's office door to find two or three players inside, simply talking about baseball. "Phony can play for a while, but genuine plays forever," Wade said. "And Charlie's genuine. Guys know that. They know what they're getting from this guy. He really cares about them. He has credibility." "When Charlie took over, his job was to come here and change the attitude, make it more of a players' atmosphere as opposed to the old regime," shortstop Jimmy Rollins said. "It was very militant around here. The team didn't have a lot of success, so a lot of things you were doing was for show, kind of like eyewash." And the stories, Rollins acknowledged, are part of the attitude change. "Charlie's got something every single day," Rollins said. "I understand the stories. I don't always get his little sayings and things. Some things, it's like, 'That is country.' "Somebody takes a 2-0 fastball, and he'd look at me like, 'J-Roll, you see that little McDonald's sign up there (in the third deck)? I'd hit the 'o' in that sign when I was playing.' Stuff like that, all the time. I'm like, 'Charlie, Charlie, Charlie.' " But it works, and Rollins is among the many Phillies players who realize that. As closer Brad Lidge struggled through a mystifying season. Manuel handled him with care. The reward for Manuel's trust: five scoreless outings so far this postseason. "He's been great for me this year," Lidge said. "He stuck with me. Charlie's not a guy that panics. He just doesn't. He knows the game, and he knows his players, and that's what he's going to go with." When Manuel arrived in Philadelphia, he was 60 years old and had a modest 220 major league victories. Much has changed since. Although he had some difficult moments early in his tenure — because, as Wade put it, "he didn't sound like he was from Philadelphia" — Manuel is now among the more popular sports figures in a tough, passionate town. When the Phillies clinched the NL pennant on Wednesday night, a sellout crowd at Citizens Bank Park chanted his name: CHAR-LIE! CHAR-LIE! Just a guess, but I don't think that happened at Wisconsin Rapids.

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