“I played for 10 years in the big leagues, and I wish I’d had managers who stuck with me a little bit longer. I know what it means to build confidence in guys. If they’re looking over their shoulder all the time, then they’re not really comfortable out there in what they’re doing. You’ve gotta build some trust in them and they’ll build some trust in you. They will believe in you and they’ll play for you as hard as they can, because they know that you trust them and care about them and you want them to have the best opportunity to succeed. The season is long, and you can do something to a person that will damage you for the rest of the season—taking a guy out too early or pinch-hitting for a guy or something.
“I used to get a lot of heat for not pinch-hitting a guy I gave a day off. If I gave Robbie [Alomar] a day off, it’s a day off. No matter what came up in that game, he wasn’t going to hit that day. People don’t understand that if he goes up there and gets a base hit, then he had a great day—but if he goes out there and makes an error, it can ruin his whole day. Why have the day off? It helps if you were a player and you understand those sorts of things. I wanted to give my guys as much of a chance as I could. When you’re not hitting the ball, people are looking at you kind of funny, or you think they are, or think they’re talking about you. They probably are but I think when you can show the player that “I believe in you, you’re going to come out of this,” he’s going to play hard for you, he’s going to give you everything he has.
“I was fortunate enough to play for [San Diego Padres manager] Preston Gomez. God bless his soul, he’s not around anymore. He was kind of like a dad for me. Preston always tried to be a couple innings ahead of the opposition in knowing what was going to happen. It’s not that tough to do. I’m not going to say you have to be that smart, you just have to go through the situations—what if this happens, what if that happens—and to be ready for it. When I was a pinch hitter in the last part of my career, sometimes I got the last-second “Get a bat and get ready. Get down the hole and get ready.” I’ve always tried to let guys have some time to think about who they might face and what they might try to do.
One thing that I preach to my players, something I learned from Hank Aaron [the two were roommates while playing for the Atlanta Braves], is that you don’t look in the past. If you have a great day, you enjoy it that night and the next is a different day. If you have a bad day, you look at what you could’ve done to make it a better day and then you leave that in the past. [Aaron] taught me a lot of things, as well as tying a tie. He got me back in the game. When he was farm director for the Braves, he asked me to come work with him—never said work for him, he said, “Work with me”—and the third time he called me, I said OK. And the rest of it’s pretty much history.
—As told to Evan Rosser
This story originally appeared in Sportsnet magazine. Subscribe here.