Inside the Mind of a … Genius?

One of his more eloquent moments came when reporters asked him how a pitcher had managed to injure himself in his sleep. “I don’t know,” Manuel said. “I didn’t sleep with him.”

Yet his players hold a different view. Down at spring training, I asked pitcher Tom Gordon how Manuel ranks among the managers he’s played for. “I’d say Charlie might be the best,” Gordon replied. That’s thunderous praise from someone who has, over two decades, played for almost a dozen managers, including Joe Torre at the Yankees. “He’s that good.”

Strangely enough, it’s his plain speech that’s Manuel’s finest strength. “There’s enough pressure in the major leagues as it is. There’s enough pressure in Philadelphia as an athlete,” catcher Chris Coste told me. “He has that rare ability to take as much pressure off you as possible.” Manuel makes his guys laugh; he recently cut a commercial for the Phillies in which he stubs his “pinky toe” while berating players in the locker room. In February, during spring training, Manuel told pitcher Kyle Kendrick he’d been traded to a Japanese team, providing fudged paperwork to “prove” it. (Kendrick bought it.)

Manuel is more than just a locker-room jester, though. “He’s a good communicator,” Coste said.

I pictured Manuel, transfixed by flashbulbs. “People are going to laugh when they read that,” I said.

Coste’s eyes narrowed. “He’s a good communicator with us.”

I remembered Manuel’s savant-like lucidity when he gave me a batting lesson: 60/40 balance to the rear, hands above the ball, find your shortest distance to the ball. But that wasn’t Coste’s point. He meant that Manuel tells the truth, and sticks to the essence: When a player performs ­poorly, Manuel tells him so. When someone performs well, likewise. His straightforward manner, regardless of stuttering or grammatical errors, stops the churn of guesswork in a player’s head. All those distractions go out — out into the black void — and all that remains is the game itself.

In his day, Bowa tried to reach that baseball Zen — literally. He took up transcendental meditation, striving for “­enlightenment.” And the meditation would help — until a batter made a crucial strikeout, or an outfielder fumbled a catch. Then Bowa would detonate again. Poses and mantras couldn’t change Bowa because calmness wasn’t in him. He couldn’t graft inorganic placidity onto his nature.

As a young man, Manuel was like that, too — quick fists and a loud mouth, a ­brawler from the backwoods of western Virginia. That wasn’t his true nature, though. It would take a strange interlude halfway around the world to bring out the natural Zen of Charlie. First, however, he had to get out of Virginia.

LONG DAY, HIS grandfather would say, stepping into the house. Long day, so I’m goin’ back to my room. No visitors.

Then the familiar rhythm: clump, clump, clackack: boot, boot, door. The old man mined zinc and lead from the tilted earth of southwest Virginia, and he yielded more metal than conversation.

Charlie’s own father preached at the local Holiness Church. It’s a strict denomination that adheres to a rigid fundamentalist code, and the father believed in a lot of things. He disbelieved in many more, like sports. A waste of time, he said.

So after some number of minutes had passed, Charlie — who was just a boy — would rise and enter the grandfather’s room. There the old man would be waiting, smiling. And together they would listen to baseball on the radio.

Charlie Manuel and his grandfather, sitting on the edge of a bed in the Virginia hills, listening to baseball on the radio in the middle of the 20th century: They cut across space and time. Everything beyond the bedroom door fell away into the void of nonexistence — Charlie’s father’s opinions, especially — as they listened to Dizzy Dean drawl out the games. They ran the first-base line with young Mickey Mantle. Touched home plate with elegant Ted Williams, and tiny Yogi Berra. And stood with that fellow Jackie Robinson, as he ignored calls of “nigger” from the dugout of the hate-able Philadelphia Phillies.

Nothing else mattered, because nothing else was. Baseball was the center of everything for Charlie — not only his escape, but his hope.

Charlie’s father would never consent to a bat and ball, so the boy found rocks in the fields near his home, and practiced hitting them with a stick. The Dodgers are down by three in the bottom of the ninth, Dizzy might announce to the trees and hills. And here comes Manuel to the plate. He’s in fine form today. The toss: a rock hanging in the air: the crack of wood on stone.

Charlie’s grandfather took him to the mining company’s store, where the employees spent their paychecks each Saturday. There was a black man there — a barber, remarkably, at the time — who started a county baseball league. At 11, Charlie joined a team, scrambling to play with grown men. And then, in seventh grade, where sport wasn’t a waste of time, Charlie joined another team, and then he was on his way — a power hitter, sending the cowhide rocks great distances, signed by the Minnesota Twins organization as an outfielder in 1963, right out of high school.