From the Magazine: Charlie Manuel, Phillies … Genius?
In honor of Opening Day — the Phils are just getting started against the Nationals as I type — we offer Matthew Teague’s surprising profile of Phillies manager Charlie Manuel. For three years, the media and fans have hammered Manuel for being a bumbling, stumbling idiot. Funny — his players think he’s brilliant.
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.
Read the rest of Matthew Teague’s “Inside the Mind of a … Genuis?”
PHOTO: Bob Croslin, from the April 2008 issue of Philadelphia magazine
