Inside the Mind of a … Genius?

I pulled something from my finger and dropped it to the ground.

“That was a piece of my hand!” I said, grinning maniacally.

Manuel nodded. “That’s a good boy.”

I took up the bat again and thought, There’s more here than first appears.

ENTERING A MAJOR LEAGUE clubhouse is like stepping into the paddock before a Thoroughbred race: High-strung and expensive athletes stamp their hooves and snort, wound tight by pressure and competition. It’s purposeful. Owners keep players, like horses, pushed to the nervous peak where performance meets breakdown. A manager must corral and focus that energy.

Phillies GM Pat Gillick says that’s quite a trick. Players make enormous money now — more than their managers, often — and they can move on quickly. “These guys are almost independent contractors, making millions of dollars,” he says. “There are only so many techniques you can use with them.”

That was Larry Bowa’s trouble, Gillick says. Bowa is a great coach, but a terrible manager. He’s a genius with the hardware of baseball, the strategy, the numbers. And Manuel’s been beaten up by fans and the Philly media for shakiness in those areas, for being a step behind with his in-game strategy. But people who understand the demands of managing debunk the idea that Charlie is, well, dumb.

“The average baseball manager — a C-minus or D-plus — is a better manager than most Fortune 500 CEOs,” Jeff Angus told me recently. He’s a baseball and business expert who wrote a book about both, Management By Baseball. “A baseball manager is making 300 critical decisions per game. Most CEOs would melt down.”

The notion that Charlie Manuel is an idiot — “Elmer Befuddled” — is ludicrous, Angus said: “With baseball, we have this illusion of certainty. And fans in Philadelphia are unusually sophisticated. But knowing the game and managing the game are not the same.”

Anyway, those decisions — whom to play, when to remove a pitcher and so forth — are endlessly debated but overrated. The most important part of managing baseball is the same as managing anything — dealing with people, in this case ridiculously well-paid entertainers who perform feats of athletic derring-do before millions of people. Derring-do that requires great focus and confidence. When Larry Bowa exploded in the dugout, which he frequently did, he spooked his players.

Bowa wasn’t unique. When some major-league baseball managers walk through their clubhouses, players visibly stiffen. But when Manuel walks through the Phillies clubhouse, the players do the opposite. They relax. He’s got two children of his own — a son and daughter — but Manuel serves as a father figure to his whole roster of players. Among them, he almost looks like a bobble-head of himself, endlessly nodding and smiling.

“He is our leader,” Ryan Howard told me. “Charlie keeps us loose.”

Manuel’s biggest liability — by all appearances, at least — might be his terrible communication skills. In press conferences, the bright lights seem to overexpose his thoughts, so that he ends up sputtering half-sentences and jumbled metaphors. Like the time a few years back when, asked about then-first baseman Jim Thome, he uncorked, “I think, I think that Jimmy, I think Jimmy, he’s been here two years now, and I think that he also has to like, you gotta get to know him, and I think the more, the longer he’s here and the fact that, you know, like, just once he feels like he’s settled in and everything … ” And so forth.