PORT ST. LUCIE – You want to know about pressure, real pressure, the kind you put on yourself, the kind you put on every at-bat, every swing, every trip to the batting cage, every jog around the ballpark, every time you walk the razor-thin line between major leaguer and minor leaguer?
Jerry Manuel can tell you about that kind of pressure, if you want to hear the stories. He can tell you about being a first-round draft selection, about being judged the 20th-most promising player in the draft of 1972 at the tender age of 18, about making the big leagues at 21 for 18 at bats with the 1975 Tigers . . .
MURPHY GLAD HE’S NOT ONE TOO MANY
And about getting all of 109 at-bats in The Show the rest of his life.
“I hit .150,” he says, laughing, hitting the number on the head because, let’s be honest, it isn’t a hard number to remember. “Maybe with ‘some help,’ I coulda hit .175.”
Maybe he’s right. Maybe even if there had been a steroid culture in the ’70s, if there had been magic potions and mysterious concoctions available that promised him a 10-year career, that would allow him a taste of the big money that was just entering the sport then, maybe that would have been enough to make 25-year old Jerry Manuel do something that makes 55-year-old Jerry Manuel shake his head sadly.
“You want to say no, no way, there’s no chance that you’d ever do something that you know would bruise your conscience,” Manuel says. “But here’s the thing about that: you just don’t know. I know how I’d like to think I’d have reacted in that situation. But I really don’t know. Nobody knows until they have to do it.”
Today, on the other side of Florida, Alex Rodriguez will stand in front of a pile of inquisitors and he will answer for the choices he made when he was 25, choices for which he has been alternately vilified and crucified over the past few weeks, much of it a justified, if joyless, public prosecution.
The game that belongs to bold-faced names like Alex Rodriguez also belongs to the lifers like Jerry Manuel, who before forging a place for himself as a coach and a manager was destined to be just a few forgettable lines of agate type in the Baseball Encyclopedia, same as thousands of other forgotten names. It is a role Rodriguez says he respects. It is one Manuel has proven he does, across 35 years of noble baseball service.
And it is a game that, Manuel believes, is as resilient as anything in American life. Gambling scandals couldn’t kill it. Strikes haven’t killed it. Cocaine didn’t kill it. Collusion didn’t kill it. Steroids? They’ve worked the sport over pretty good, and now they’ve enveloped its biggest star. But they won’t kill it, either.
“It’s a game populated by human beings,” Manuel says. “And so when you remember that, and you remember that human beings err, and they err a lot, then sometimes you’re going to have things that happen to the game that nobody wants to see. But baseball . . . she always finds a way to bounce back, from anything. She’s strong that way. She’s tough. She’s a fighter.”
It is reassuring to hear this kind of talk from someone like Manuel, someone who has devoted so much of his life to the game, someone who has seen firsthand how cold and how cruel the game can be in its Darwinian selection.
“You start with an ultra-competitive game,” he says, “and you fill it out with ultra-competitive people, and personalities, and you’re going to wind up with a culture that rewards the competitive spirit. That’s the way it should be. But there are things that go along with that sometimes, too.”
And sometimes, the collateral damage reaches back and slams square into the game itself. That’s when it really grabs the attention of the lifers, of men like Jerry Manuel, who know the temptations that will always lurk for those who toil both at the game’s fringes as well as its heart. But also understand just how strong that heart really is.