Tony La Russa's humble Vancouver beginnings

Tony La Russa, an intense 23-year-old infielder, joined the Vancouver Mounties in May, 1968. The team finished in last place, but the roster included five future major-league managers. Photograph courtesy the David Eskenazi Collection.

By Tom Hawthorn
Special to The Globe and Mail
October 27, 2011

Tony La Russa changes pitchers as often as Lady Gaga changes wardrobes.

The manager of the St. Louis Cardinals is a mad genius of the diamond. His stratagems have earned him two World Series titles. Only the legendary Connie Mark and John McGraw have enjoyed more victories as managers.

Yet, in Game Five of the World Series, the Cardinals brain trust suffered from brain cramps.

A fresh pitcher arrived with orders to issue an intentional walk. After making four easy lobs, he was dismissed for the night.

A failed hit-and-run play resulted in the slow-footed Allen Craig churning along the base path like a doomed dispatch runner in the mud on the Western Front.

After the game, a 4-1 win for the Texas Rangers, who can claim their first World Series with a victory in St. Louis on Thursday night, La Russa blamed crowd noise and confusion on the telephone to the bullpen for the fiasco.

At one point, he greeted a reliever on the pitching mound with the words, “What are you doing here?”

La Russa’s pitching coach, Dave Duncan, told the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, “How this happened, I have no idea. But I blame myself.”

Back in British Columbia, the drama was watched on television with keen interest by two former ball players.

Gerry Reimer, 73, of Enderby and Wayne Norton, 68, of Port Moody, played together on the Vancouver Mounties in 1968. Reimer covered first base, while Norton patrolled behind him in right field. The team’s starting catcher was Duncan, while the second baseman was La Russa, an intense 23-year-old with more ambition than skill.

The infielder arrived in Vancouver after being demoted by the parent Oakland A’s. At the time, the sportswriter Greg Douglas wrote that the prospect “knows only one way to approach a game and that is to hustle until you simply run out of breath.”

All hoped to catch on with a big-league club. Duncan and La Russa made it. Reimer and Norton did not.

Norton has kept his hand in the game, too, as a Seattle Mariners scout responsible for Canada and Europe. Looking back, he can see why La Russa had only modest success as a major leaguer, spreading 132 games over six seasons on three clubs.

“He had limited tools as a player,” he said. “There are five tools you look for” — fielding, arm strength, running speed, hitting for power, and hitting for average — “and he was not outstanding in any of them.”

Norton spent several seasons with La Russa in the Athletics system.

“I roomed with him on the road,” he said. “In Des Moines (Iowa), Vancouver, and Birmingham (Ala.). He was serious and dedicated.”

The 1968 Mounties included three Canadians on the roster, a rarity at the time, as Norton and Reimer were joined by right-handed pitcher Vern Handrahan, a mailman from Prince Edward Island known for chewing toothpicks, a nervous habit he maintained even while on the mound pitching.

Reimer remembers the Mounties being a close-knit squad. He had the team over for a barbecue at his house on Windsor Street, a long fly ball from the park. The company and the home-cooked meal were welcomed by out-of-towners like Duncan and La Russa.

Reimer also remembers a friendly atmosphere at Capilano (now Nat Bailey) Stadium, where he recalls his four-year-old son being bounced on the knee of one of the Phillipone brothers, owners of the notorious Penthouse Cabaret, a strip club frequently raided by police.

It was a woeful season for the Mounties, whose 58-88 record was the worst in the Pacific Coast League, a Triple-A circuit. According to a report in the Sporting News, Vancouver went a stretch of 33 games during which the team hit only two home runs. La Russa, not a power hitter, smacked them both. Many games were attended by fewer than 1,000 fans.

Mickey Vernon, the Mounties’ kindly manager, allowed the players to participate in stunts in the hope of attracting more people to the park. The Panamanian Ossie Chavarria, who liked Vancouver so much that he settled in the neighbouring suburb of Burnaby, played all nine positions in one game. In another, the clubhouse attendant, a 19-year-old university undergraduate, convinced the manager to allow him to be the starting pitcher for the final game of the season.

The kid did all right, allowing just one run over three innings. He even struck out a batter.

The game lasted just 64 minutes, as both teams were eager to get on with civilian life.

The rookie’s career lasted but the one game. (He signed a contract for the day in which he was paid $25. He was promptly fined $25 for wearing his spikes in the team’s business office.) He later became a teacher and a union president. Ernest (Kit) Krieger, who is now the registrar of the B.C. College of Teachers, caught up with La Russa while attending a baseball game in Miami earlier this year.

He reminded the Cardinals skipper about the final game of the 1968 season, the one that ended so quickly.

The manager sized up the paunchy, grey-haired, bespectacled 62-year-old in front of him.

“You pitched that game?!” he said.

Oddly, the woeful ’68 Mounties produced five major-league managers — La Russa, Steve Boros, Joe Nossek, and the brothers Rene and Marcel Lachemann.

While Norton is cheering for La Russa, Reimer is not. The son who bounced on the cabaret owner’s knee went on to crack a major-league roster. Kevin Reimer, a slugger like his father, broke in with the Texas Rangers.

The linescore foe the final game of the Vancouver Mounties' woeful 1968 season. Teenaged pitcher Kit Krieger made his debut as a professional by pitching the first three innings. It was also his final game. Note how the Sporting News misspelled his name.

A tip of the cap to baseball's Charlie Metro

Charlie Metro lights a stogie for Spider Jorgensen after the infielder won a game for the Vancouver Mounties with an extra-inning home run. Photographs courtesy the David Eskenazi collection.

By Tom Hawthorn
The Tyee
April 6, 2011

Charlie Metro, a tough guy, had a reputation as a scourge of umpires. Once, when an umpire showed him an entry in the baseball rule book, Metro snatched the offending document before shredding it and tossing the confetti over his shoulder.

When Metro was hired to manage the Vancouver Mounties baseball club, the owners took out an insurance policy from Lloyd’s of London. The firm agreed to cover the first $500 worth of fines generated by their new skipper.

Metro was unforgiving when it came to his own players, too. He forced pitchers to run to stay in shape, which is not the kind of pampering to which hurlers are accustomed. Metro once absentmindedly left a young prospect to run sprints on the outfield grass at Capilano (now Nat Bailey) Stadium. After a while, the pitcher staggered like a lost Foreign Legionnaire in search of an oasis. The pitcher never did make the majors, but Pat Gillick turned out to be a terrific general manager.

Another baseball season has launched. Before the first pitch, dismal teams and powerhouses alike are equal in the standings. When Metro arrived on the West Coast for the start of the 1957 season, he took over a squad recovering from finishing a dismal 38 1/2 games out of first place in the Pacific Coast League. Not much was expected.

The Mounties soon showed themselves to be contenders, a surprising turnaround that made Metro a popular figure in the city, if not always among his players. One of his wisest moves was promoting infielder Johnny (Spider) Jorgensen to become a playing coach. Spider’s role was to be good cop to Metro’s bad cop.

Metro spent 47 years in baseball, three of those in Vancouver, a city that figures prominently in Safe by a Mile, his 2002 autobiography written with history professor Tom Altherr. “Things were greener in Vancouver than any place I’d ever seen,” Metro wrote. In those seasons, he gave the city a winning baseball team, managed to help save the career of a future hall of famer, and issued the first call for a domed stadium. A quarter-century later, he was invited to the opening of BC Place Stadium. He called it a good place to play football.

Metro died, aged 91, on March 18 in Buckingham, Va., succumbing to mesothelioma, a rare lung cancer. Charles Moreskonich, the son of Ukrainian immigrants, was raised in coal country in western Pennsylvania. The oldest of nine children, he worked in the bituminous mines, a dangerous job. The manager of his first baseball team was a former player known as Stumpy after losing fingers in a mine explosion.

As a boy, Charlie walked miles with his father, Metro, to a neighbouring town to watch baseball. When he started playing, the local newspaper squeezed only a few letters from his family name into box scores. Charlie, who was already known as Little Metro, took Metro as his last name.

At age 12, he hitchhiked to New York to see a game at Yankee Stadium. He also went to Forbes Field in Pittsburgh, where he saw the Pirates play, as well as the Homestead Grays of the Negro Leagues.

He skipped a day of classes at high school to try out for the St. Louis Browns. He was offered a $60 per month minor-league contract by scout Jack Fournier, a former major-leaguer. Metro demanded $100. He told Jack Fournier that he wanted the extra money the buy his mother a washing machine. Fournier was suspicious of the excuse, but, impressed by the boy’s moxie, ordered a $100 cheque to be written. Young Charlie refused to take it (not only did he not have a bank account, he was not certain what a cheque was). He insisted on being given 100 dollar bills.

At 18, Metro donned the uniform of the Easton Browns for the 1937 season before leaving for Virginia to play outfield for the Pennington Gap Lee Bears of the Appalachian League. After seven seasons in the minors, including stints in Texas with the Palestine Pals and the Texarkana Twins, the wartime shortage of players led to his promotion to the majors, where he would play for the Detroit Tigers and Philadelphia Athletics. Years later, he would get laughs by saying “I hit .400 — .200 each year.” The quip was typical Metro. In fact, he played three seasons. His career average: .193. When the war ended and players came home, Metro once again found himself in the minors, where he added managerial duties to help extend his career.

He skippered clubs in such metropolises as Idaho Falls, Idaho, and Terre Haute, Ind., before Cedric Tallis hired him in December, 1956. The Mounties had had a dismal first season after owner Brick Laws moved them up the coast from Oakland. Capilano Stadium drained so poorly during a rainy summer that wags referred to the damp outfield as Laws’ Lagoon.

Metro had the Mounties contending from the start. He had no qualms about upsetting baseball convention. In a preseason exhibition game, he presented a lineup featuring eight African-American players, possibly the first time that happened outside the Negro Leagues.

In his three seasons as Mounties skipper, Metro gave opportunities to several black players, including Joe Taylor, Joe Durham, Charlie Beamon, Lenny Green, Connie Johnson, and catcher Charlie White, whose “brainy” position many managers in baseball reserved only for white players.

Metro insisted his pitchers follow his running regimen. Soon, even the notoriously sore-armed George Bamberger became strong enough to avoid injury. (Bamberger would adopt Metro’s philosophy as a pitching coach for the Baltimore Orioles, including a season in which the staff counted four 20-game winners.) The manager also called on the young fireballer Chuck Estrada and the veteran Erv Palica, at whom he used to yell the dugout encouragement, “Don’t hang the curve ball!”

The skipper did not care for excuses. When Metro slotted Jim Marshall to start a game against a left-handed starter, the slugger complained that everyone knew he couldn’t hit lefties. “Well,” Metro replied, “you’ve got 30 seconds to learn.”

In 1959, the Mounties boasted a stellar infield with shortstop Ron Hansen, second baseman Marv Breeding, and, most notably, third baseman Brooks Robinson, who suffered an injury that could have ended his career during a game at Capilano. While chasing a foul ball, he impaled his catching arm on a metal hook projecting from the dugout. Metro rushed out to hold his prized prospect’s arm steady as trainer Harold (Doc) Younker fetched a stepladder. The trainer wriggled the arm free. (“He didn’t even use swear words,” Younker once told me. “I guess he hadn’t learned them yet.”) Their quick thinking prevented serious damage and Robinson, later to be nicknamed The Human Vacuum Cleaner for his skill at scooping ground balls, went on to a long career capped by induction into the Baseball Hall of Fame at Cooperstown, N.Y.

The Mounties finished second, third and second under Metro’s guidance. He was named league manager of the year in 1957. He went on to manage briefly in the majors, including a turn as part of the Chicago Cubs’ failed “College of Coaches” experiment in which the job was rotated among several skippers.

A serious taskmaster, Metro never lost the impish sense that can make baseball so much fun. In the meaningless final game of the 1958 season, the 39-year-old skipper pencilled himself in as starting pitcher. He also placed his name atop the batting order. He went 0-for-2 at the plate and surrendered a couple of runs to take the loss.

Vancouver Mounties manager Charlie Metro offers a rebuttal to an umpire's verdict during a 1958 Pacific Coast League match. Emmett Ashford (left), who went on to become the first African-American umpire in the major leagues, later heard Metro arguments when the latter managed the Kansas City Royals. Photograph courtesy the David Eskenazi Collection.