Inside the Mind of a … Genius?

MANUEL DID LOSE control that one time.

In April of last year — the abyss of the Phillies’ season, well before the late rise — Manuel met with the press after a humiliating 8-1 loss to the Mets. Radio talker Howard Eskin, who has led a years-long spitball campaign against Manuel, insinuated that the team was losing because he wasn’t hard enough on his players: Maybe Manuel didn’t care enough to get angry.

Sure, Larry Bowa never won a championship. But at least he cared enough to pitch a fit.

“Why don’t you drop by my office?” Manuel said. “I’ll be waitin’ on you.”

When Eskin followed him, Manuel heaped whole bucketfuls of anger on the radioman’s head. Eskin then made a circuit of media appearances to talk about Manuel and “his problem.”

Manuel’s problem, of course, was roundly misunderstood. Some people felt it was the manager’s temper. The New York Times thought he might be sensitive about his Southern accent. Eskin, predictably, felt it was about Eskin. The problem wasn’t any such thing. What had happened was that someone — anyone — had questioned the depth of Manuel’s devotion to baseball, the game he had seen as “the only thing in the world to do” since he was a kid.

During spring training, one of Manuel’s staff members told me, with affection, “Charlie has Forrest Gumped his way to the top. He’s met, like, six U.S. presidents. Traveled around the world. Managed major-league teams. Amazing.”

That’s not quite true. Happenstance didn’t carry Charlie Manuel to the top of a major-league baseball team. Even his knowledge — his unexpected articulation about the “balance, rhythm and technique” of hitting — didn’t carry him. Something else did.

Just before the Yankees game, I walked past their dugout and saw the stars there, lined up like broad-shouldered wax figures: Derek Jeter, Abreu, Rodriguez. And there, on a bench by himself, I saw a tiny, stooped figure. Yogi Berra.

In a quiet corner of the dugout, I asked Berra about Manuel’s management style, and he smiled. “His players like him,” he said, nodding. “He loves the game.”

That affection is important, he said. Could it be the key to a ballclub’s success? Berra nodded again. “Well,” he said with a grin. “Pitching helps you, too.”

Then I did something dumb: I asked Berra to sign a baseball for me. His face lit up, and he did so, in a cheerful blue ink. Then I turned to find a Yankees PR man staring at my ball. “I know you didn’t just ask him for an autograph,” he said, clearly angry. “I know you didn’t.”

“I did.”

After receiving a lecture about the players’ pre-game focus, press credentials and so forth, I was sent away. The sting of the encounter stayed with me throughout the game. Afterward, sitting in Manuel’s office, I blurted out, “I did something unprofessional, when I talked to Yogi Berra.”

He looked up from some paperwork. “What did you do?”

“I asked him to sign a ball.”

Manuel considered this a moment. “Of course you did,” he said. “It’s Yogi Berra.”

I realized then, with sudden clarity, that what sets Charlie Manuel apart from other managers — the quality that separates him from his predecessors — is humility. That’s when I could see what his six years in Japan had given him. His childhood, his injuries, his discipline in an environment so different from home, all conspired to make him a humble man. He lives in a state of “no mind,” seemingly without regard for himself at all.

It is this quality in Manuel — the fullness of his humility — that makes his team want to win for him. He is, as Yogi Berra once put it, an “overwhelming underdog.” Baseball, it turns out, is a very simple game when you’re in love with it.