Right off the bat it’s important to note that today’s column isn’t intended as a moral judgment but, rather, as a simple acknowledgement that the passing of a baseball lifer brings to my mind, at least, the realization that the baseball we watch today is a little colder than the baseball I grew up with.
Former Phillies manager Frank Lucchesi passed away on Saturday at the age of 92. If you’re under the age of 55 you probably don’t remember him in red pinstripes – he managed here for a little more than two inglorious years during the early ‘70s. He was post-Dick Allen and pre-Mike Schmidt because, hey, somebody had to be.
Might as well have been Lucchesi, a minor league journeyman who was handed the reins of a club that had been adrift since 1965 and would remain unmoored until 1974, two years after he had departed. The medical profession follows the mandate, "First, Do No Harm," and that was pretty much the guiding principle behind Lucchesi’s hiring following the 1969 season. Just don’t make this worse. Which was no simple task, given what had gone on the previous few seasons. By that standard his tenure here was a smashing success.
But that’s not what I remember. When I think of Lucchesi I can’t help but recall the brutal beat-down administered by Lenny Randle during spring training 1977 after he became convinced that Lucchesi, now managing the Texas Rangers, favored the prospect Bump Wills over Randle at second base. Randle struggled during the ’76 season while Wills was the hotshot prospect tearing up the Pacific Coast League – the first round draft pick, the golden-boy son of Maury Wills who, at least as Randle saw it, could do no wrong in Lucchesi’s eyes.
After promising Randle before camp opened that there would be an open competition for the starting position, Lucchesi penciled Wills’s name in his exhibition lineup about twice as often as Randle’s, and Randle believed that the fix was in. After a couple of teammates talked Randle out of walking out of camp, Lucchesi remarked: “I wish they’d have let him go. If he thinks I’m going to beg him to stay on this team, he’s wrong. I’m sick of punks making $80,000 a year moaning and groaning about their situation.”
Whether there was a racial connotation to the word “punks” was an open question among the Texas baseball literati; Lucchesi was an old-school guy and this wasn’t the first time he was accused of being insensitive towards players of color. While managing the Phils’ AAA club in Little Rock in 1963 he repeatedly downplayed the daily racist taunts Allen was subjected to from the fans behind the dugout, contending that any damage done to Allen’s psyche during his time there was self-inflicted. So he had a track record, although it wasn’t clear whether he meant anything particularly odorous this time around.
No matter. A few days later Randle cold-cocked him on the field before a game. Lucchesi, still in his street clothes, dropped to the ground, where Randle hit him two more times. Lucchesi would wind up in the hospital for a week and undergo plastic surgery to repair the damage. It was a brutal assault delivered by a player who was otherwise known as affable and easygoing. A model teammate. Who became so enraged over what he believed was a personal grudge against him that he couldn’t control himself.
I wonder if Randle would have lashed out as he did had Lucchesi had access to the reams of data managers have at their fingertips today. If Lucchesi could have referred Randle to the metrics, he could have informed him that he had regressed significantly during the 1976 season and had been, in fact, trending downward for a while. His OPS+ in ’76 was only 63; his defensive metrics were worse. Randle might have been upset at being compelled to confront the flesh and blood of his career as little more than a spreadsheet but he would have understood that this wasn’t personal. This was business. Cold, hard business. Where the numbers dictate who plays and who sits. And as much as you might want to, you can’t cold-cock an algorithm.
“’Kill him! Kill the umpire!’ shouted some one on the stand; And it’s likely they’d have killed him had not Casey raised his hand.” From the time Casey went to bat in Ernest Thayer's 1888 poem until very recently, passion ruled the game. Pretty much everything was personal. Nowadays, not so much. Rather than call for the head of the umpire, fans and managers now scream for replay review. Outside of balls and strikes we know that technology will take care of everything, resolving all disputes and questions with dispassion and precision. The days of a screaming Earl Weaver kicking dirt and spitting invective at the flamboyant umpire Ron Luciano (who once threw the Orioles manager out of both ends of a doubleheader) are over. The personal has been legislated out of the game. Passion is now passé.
No, I’m not wistful over what was, in fact, a criminal assault. But Lucchesi’s passing does remind me of a time when baseball was a little more personal, a little more emotional. The blood ran hotter in baseball not all that long ago. We may know more now than we ever did. It’s just a little harder to get as worked up about it as we once did.
