Red Sox Rule by Michael Holley Read Free Book Online

matter of your team. That is, you wouldn’t have one. This is the culture of comfort, so much so that even confrontations have to be handled with peace in mind. It’s neither good nor bad; it just is. A manager who cannot adjust to “building good relationships” with players and overseeing an environment in which “players hold each other accountable and police themselves” will not make it. He can’t. The game has too many powerful tentacles attached to it: agents, lengthy and lucrative player contracts, and a multibillion-dollar television deal that spans free TV as well as cable. This is no kind of town for a counterculture sheriff.
    “There’s no way in hell I could manage in today’s game,” says the 78-year-old Williams. “The players are making so muchmoney today that they’re the ones calling the shots.” It probably seems that way to Williams because he’s from the school of misnamed “managers”; he didn’t manage as much as he directed. He wasn’t an imposing man, or at least the stat sheet said he wasn’t supposed to be. He stood 6 feet tall and weighed 175 pounds. It didn’t matter. He was demanding when he was talking baseball; if the subject was anything else and Williams had been drinking, players learned to avert their eyes when he walked toward the back of the plane. He could be scary.
    As a player, Williams spent the final two seasons of his career as a utility man with the Red Sox. Three years later, in 1967, he became the 37-year-old manager in Boston. In between, he managed the Red Sox’s Triple-A team in Toronto. In his ironically titled memoir, No More Mr. Nice Guy , he recalled how he came to be known as a managerial fighter while in Canada. One of his players, Mickey Sinks, asked Williams if he thought the pitcher deserved to be called to the big leagues at the end of the season. Williams answered no; Sinks answered with a fist to the manager’s right eye. Predictably, a scuffle ensued and the men wrestled until a trainer heard the commotion in Williams’s office and broke up the fight.
    “Apparently, I’d strained so much while bear-hugging Mickey Sinks that I’d shit my pants,” Williams wrote. “Ruined that $49.95 seersucker suit…I called a clubhouse meeting the next day and brought out the pants. Let them see where I strained. Let them smell the stench. I told them: ‘You mess with me, I’ll shit all over you.’ Then when they finished laughing, I added: ‘If this is what it takes to win, everybody in this room will be wearing diapers.’ They didn’t laugh then.”
    In 1967, Williams was given a three-year contract to manage the Red Sox. His baseball and his Boston were less complicatedthen. There was media interest in the team, but it was nothing like the 135-person horde that covers each Red Sox game today. Williams joked that he had “four writers covering us—two for me and two against me.” Curt Flood hadn’t yet challenged baseball’s reserve clause in court, so players were still a decade away from free agency. Under those rules, neither the players nor their union were powerful enough to prevent Williams or any other manager from ruling with a heavy touch. That’s not to say that all successful managers of the era were similar to Williams. Red Schoendienst, the manager of Williams’s hometown team, the St. Louis Cardinals, was as cool as Williams was intense. The difference, then, was that he wasn’t required to be. If you had strong personal relationships with players, it was more choice than job requirement.
    Williams couldn’t wait to get his hands on the 1967 Red Sox. They had finished 9th in the 10-team American League in 1966. They averaged 10,000 fans per game. And Williams, of course, thought they were soft.
    “It was a country club,” he says from his Las Vegas–area home. “I tried to change the whole complexion of what that team was about.”
    He started by stripping the captaincy away from future Hall of Famer Carl Yastrzemski.