It was a drizzly morning In Plant City, Fla., a good day for the ripening strawberries in the central Florida fields, but a bad day for baseball on the mucky infields of the Cincinnati Reds spring training complex.
Lou Piniella sat in his office, the rain beating a steady thrum on the window behind him.
It was one of his first days as manager of the Reds, a replacement for Pete Rose, banned from the game the previous year for betting on baseball.
I'd never dealt with Sweet Lou but as I sat in a folding chair in front of his desk, he looked at me and said, "Hal, you've been around this game a long time. What does this team need most?"
I thought about it for a moment, thinking to myself, "No manager has ever asked me my opinion on his team?" And then I said, "It needs a legitimate leadoff hitter." Piniella said nothing, just stared at a picture of Ted Kluszewski hanging on his office wall.
A month or so into the season, Piniella said, "You were right, Hal. This team needs a legitimate leadoff hitter."
But it really didn't need one. He used Chris Sabo and he used Barry Larkin as his leadoff men during the season, neither a prototypical leadoff hitter.
But it worked. The 1990 team won its first nine games, went wire-to-wire as the leader of the division and beat the Oakland Athletics in four straight in the World Series.
Everybody knows about that team -- Sweet Lou, Eric Davis, Sabo, Larkin, Bret Boone, Joe Oliver, Hal Morris, Billy Hatcher, Herm Winningham, Todd Benzinger and starting pitchers Jose Rijo, Tom Browning and Danny Jackson and The Nasty Boys in the bullpen -- Norm Chsrlton, Randy Myers and Rob Dibble.
It was a rough-and-tumble team, ready to fight at the drop of an adjective or the drop of a bat.
But it also was a team of characters and shenanigans. They were an irreverent bunch. Myers once tasered Piniella just to show him what it felt like.
Oliver was an always smiling, fun-loving catcher who did a perfect imitation of Phillies announcer Harry Kalas calling a home run, "There's a lonnnnnng drive. . ." Oliver had an extra large head and one day second baseman Bret Boone walked over to him and said, "Which would you rather have, a million dollars or Joe Oliver's head full of nickels?"
Pitcher Scott Scudder felt the wrath of revenge by The Nasty Boys when Scudder pulled a prank during spring training on Norm Charlton, who wore cowboy boots. Scudder filled a large bucket of water and dropped the boots into the bucket, then put them in a freezer. He then put the boots, frozen in ice in the bucket, in front of Charlton's locker.
Charlton looked at the boots, knew exactly who had done it and said, "Scuds, we don't get even, we get ahead."
A few days later Scudder went to the players parking lot after a workout and his Jeep was sitting on cement blocks, all four wheels resting on the top of the vehicle. Charlton and Dibble had gotten ahead.
There was a large retaining pond behind the right field wall at Plant City Stadium, full of water moccasins. One day Myers took a shovel and went hunting. He dispatched several snakes, put their carcasses on the shovel and marched into the clubhouse. Baseball players can move fast and on this day they moved faster than they had ever moved in their lives. A couple scrambled to the tops of their lockers and cowered in fear.
Jackson, a 23-game winner in 1988, was one of the toughest of the tough on the 1990 team. He lost one game when an outfielder misplayed a fly ball. When the media walked into the clubhouse, Jackson's wooden locker was in splinters after Jackson took a bat to it.
A writer asked, "Danny, did that misplayed fly ball cost you the game, disrupt your concentration?"
Jackson stared at the man for several excruciating seconds and said, "What I'd like to do right now is unscrew your head and spit down your neck."
The 1990 team started the season 9-0 and pitcher Tom Browning said, "Damn, we might win 'em all. We might go 162-0."
They didn't, but after 45 games they were 33-12 and never looked over their shoulders the rest of the season.
Rijo, who won two games in the World Series and was MVP, never visited the trainer's room and never encased his shoulder in ice. He had his own remedy, important from his native Dominican Republic. It was a bottle of snake oil, complete with the snakeskin at the bottom of the jar. And he rubbed it on his arm every game before he pitched.
Sabo, who wore large goggles when he played, was dubbed Spuds by Pete Rose, who thought he looked like the dog, Spuds McKenzie on Budweiser commercials.
Sabo was a fan favorite and a great player -- and a bit eccentric.
It was 1990 but he drove a 1983 Ford Escort with more than 200,000 miles on it, an eyesore in the players parking lot next to a string of Mercedes and Porches. When somebody asked Sabo why he didn't purchase a new car, he said, "Why? That's a good car."
One day he drove close friend Paul O'Neill to the game and O'Neill asked Sabo if he could turn on the radio. "Sure," said Sabo. "But the aerial is there on the floor and you have to hold it out the window to get reception."
Dibble, another tough guy who would throw a pitch high and tight to his mother if she crowded the plate, was once asked if he feared any hitter.
"Nobody can hit me, nobody who ever played this game can hit me," he said. And he meant it and took that mentality to the mound every time he threw a pitch.
Sabo said it all for the blue collar Reds when he stood in front of a microphone on Fountain Square during the World Series celebration and said, with authority, "We kicked their ass."
