Inside the Mind of a … Genius?

Sunrise was still an hour away, so Charlie Manuel flipped on a series of humming lights. A world of wire and net sprang into existence.

“Awright, awright,” he said in his Appalachian accent. “You, um, you ready for this? Yeah. Awright. Are you sure?”

Yes, I’m ready for this, I thought. I’ve known how to do this since I was three.

Manuel dragged a bucket of balls to the middle of the batting cage, an insultingly short distance from the plate. Beyond the cage lay nothing but silence and blackness; we might as well have stood in outer space. “I’m just gonna throw you a few real soft ones, at first,” he said.

For heaven’s sake. I’m an American.

“Awright,” he said. “Here it comes.” He dipped his hand into the bucket and began the pitch, and I was immediately distracted by two elements of his windup.

First, he was doing it underhand. When a major-league baseball manager offers you a hitting lesson and then proceeds in a style familiar to little girls everywhere, it’s a clear sign of low expectation. Second, his face drew into a rictus of expression, lips pulled up and away from his teeth. He was smiling. Such joy is an almost unrecognizable feature on a big-league manager.

Manuel’s Phillies were a few days into spring training. Players arrived each morning and cantered into the clubhouse with a certain lift, a certain tilt, a certain swing. This year the Phillies start the season as division champions for the first time in a decade and a half. Last season was a sweaty, palpitating ride; the Phillies started by losing 11 of their first 15 games, then had key players — stars Ryan Howard and Chase Utley — fall to injury. The team, which has lost more games in its history than any other team in any other professional sport, earned the dubious distinction of dropping its 10,000th as a franchise.

In those dark days, people across the city mocked the 64-year-old manager. They mocked his congenial demeanor. They mocked his decisions. They mocked his accent, and called him names. “Moron.” “Elmer Befuddled.” “Idiot.”

Then, against all prediction, the Phillies surged late in the season, winning 13 of 17 games and squeaking past the Mets to win their division and head to the playoffs for the first time since Czechoslovakia was a unified country.

And yet, in those bright days, people still mocked Manuel: the gentle moron. The kindly idiot. When it became clear that the Phillies would lose in the playoffs to Colorado, a Daily News columnist wrote, in what must have been a pass at Blue Ridge colloquial, “Sorry, Charlie. You’ve done laid all your eggs in one basket and all you have to do to cook an omelet with them is win three straight games against a team hot enough to melt a cast-iron frying pain [sic].”

Many people pined for the days of Larry Bowa, Manuel’s fiery predecessor, who spent four years exploding all over his players. Granted, he never managed to frighten his team into success. But viewed from a distance, flying Bowa shrapnel did seem effective and satisfying. The guy embodied all the wrath pent up by Phillies fans, even as he caused it. He looked like we felt.

But now here stood Charlie Manuel, the bumbling ball coach, with a baseball in his hand: “Yeah, aw, awright, here we go … ”

He lobbed the ball in my direction, and I hit a dribbler that bounced past him and his bucket. He glared at my bat, then strode to the plate to take it away. “Hitting a baseball is about balance, rhythm and technique,” he said. His stutter was gone.

“You need a 60/40 balance to the rear,” he said, “and you need to keep your hands above the ball, coming down to find your shortest distance to the ball.”

He had transformed into a creature of perfect clarity. As he tossed pitches, I apologized for missing a couple, muttering about my church’s softball league. He gave a quiet wave of his hand. A hand to say: Enough of that.

Later I mentioned that my eyes weren’t focusing properly, due to my contact lenses. “Bullcrap,” he said, chuckling.

“I went to the eye doctor.”

“Bullcrap.” A dismissive wave. “Relax yer right hand.”

Over a half-hour or so, he carved away all politeness, all embarrassment, all outside concerns and excuses, until nothing remained in my head but balance and hands and one downward angle. Everything else lay banished to the vacuum outside the cage, in the pre-dawn black.

The almighty Yogi Berra, who has uttered more malapropisms than even tongue-tied Charlie Manuel, once said, “Think! How the hell are you gonna think and hit at the same time?” Philadelphians have long called Charlie Manuel empty-headed, and maybe in one sense, they were right.

After a shocking number of pitches and much improvement, I stepped away from the plate and looked at my left hand. A rivulet of blood ran into my palm from under my wedding band. On any other day, in any other place, I would have stopped and searched for bandages. But Manuel’s strange, quiescent manner had a propulsive quality; the calmer he became, the more I burned to knock the ball naked from its leather.