Sparky Anderson was at work at his desk in the catacombs of Tiger Stadium, alone in his thoughts.
It was maybe It was maybe 2:30 or 3 on a midweek afternoon, hours before the night's ballgame, and he was tinkering with his pitching staff.
He loved to tinker -- that's what wise, old baseball managers do.
"Georgie," I said, standing at the doorway in his clubhouse.
"Jerome," he said, "C'mon in."
It was just the two of us, a one-on-one interview.
"I'm putting Eric King in the bullpen," Sparky offered. "He needs to work out of there."
Eric King could throw flames. Sometimes out of control. He was a favorite of Sparky's and now the manager was modifying the Tigers' starting rotation.
"We gotta make changes," he said.
Sparky went into one of his seven-minute monologues about the state of the Tigers, the state of America, about Babe Ruth, Kirk Gibson and Reggie Jackson. On and on.
Finally, he came to the end of his one-way speech.
"I'm starting Eric King Saturday," he told me.
"Georgie," I responded, "you just told me you're putting Eric King in the bullpen."
He looked across the desk and grinned -- trapped in his own verbiage.
There is no count of the times Sparky Anderson rescued me -- and others of my profession -- hours before a ballgame. I'd arrive at the ballpark, my mind a blank, my notebook empty, in dire need of a column subject.
And Sparky would rush in and save me with a story, an anecdote, a comment -- a stream of consciousness.
The world changed. But he never changed -- grizzled and gaunt. A raconteur, a man who made baseball fun for his ballplayers, the fans and those of us who depended on his witticisms and mangled language for our daily columns.
George Anderson died Thursday at age 76, following a lengthy illness. His influence will remain imperishable. His influence on great and good ballplayers -- Johnny Bench, Pete Rose and Joe Morgan in Cincinnati; Kirk Gibson, Alan Trammell, Lou Whitaker, Jack Morris and Lance Parrish in Detroit.
And his influence on his sport, Major League Baseball.
"Sparky is show business," he wrote in his memoir, 'They Call Me Sparky,' produced in collaboration with former Detroit baseball writer Dan Ewald.
"He never met a camera he didn't like," Ewald wrote. "He never left a reporter's notebook empty. When he was in those five World Series, no one had more fun than him. Without Sparky, George would have turned into a stone sitting in front of a TV set."
Show business for sure!
He indulged in exaggerated blather.
'If you don't like Dave Rucker, you don't like ice cream," he told us one day in Detroit.
Rucker melted faster as a pitcher than ice cream.
"Chris Pittaro is the best-looking rookie I've had in 15 years," Sparky said one day during spring training in Lakeland, Fla. "And that's etched in cement."
The cement was shattered soon after the season started.
"Mike Laga will make you forget every power hitter who ever lived," Sparky proclaimed one spring.
Laga, a decent guy, but overmatched, soon became forgettable.
That was Sparky, but so was this bit of judgment:
"Kirk Gibson is the next Mickey Mantle," he told us one spring training down in Lakeland. We giggled and wrote it. The young Gibson struggled and then became a World Series star, first with the Tigers and then with the Dodgers.
On a dark, October Sunday in Detroit, Sparky looked out from the Tigers' dugout with Gibson at home plate.
"Five," said Sparky, waving his right hand at Gibson.
Gibson flashed back 10.
A 10-buck wager had been set.
And Gibson promptly hit his first historic World Series home run to lead the Tigers to a Game 5 victory over the Padres in the 1984 Series. Sparky became the first manager to win the World Series in both the American and National leagues. He had won four National League pennants and two World Series in Cincinnati.
For one of those quaint reasons never truly explained for firing managers, Sparky was let go after nine seasons in Cincinnati. He was the most successful manager in baseball with the Reds. One autumn day after the Reds had won 92 games and finished second in the 1978 season, Sparky walked into the Reds' front office.
"I thought I'd be getting a raise," Sparky would say later.
Instead, Dick Wagner, the Reds' president, told Sparky he was being fired.
Partway into the 1979 season, the Tigers hired him as the manager of their young, farm system-produced ballclub. Five years later, the Tigers started the schedule 35-5, an historic beginning of a season. Behind Trammell, Whitaker, Gibson, Parrish, Morris, Dan Petry and Willie Hernandez, the Tigers went on to win their last World Series to date.
And then, in Detroit, in 1996, after two subpar seasons, Sparky was bumped out. Shoved into retirement. For a couple of years Mike Ilitch's assistants had dropped hints that Sparky would be a goner. Sparky had fallen into disfavor with Ilitch when he refused to manage replacement players during Major League Baseball's work stoppage in 1994.
The players were on strike, and in essence, so was Sparky.
"There ain't no place in baseball for replacement players," Sparky told the media in announcing his stance.
"I ain't no martyr, I ain't no hero, and I don't want no bowl of chocolate ice cream and cherries for doing the right thing."
It was a show of a man's character, and two years later it cost him his job.
Georgie Anderson was unique, unparalleled. And he saved my butt so many afternoons when I went to the ballpark with my head empty, in need of some words or wisdom or witticism.
'Jerome, c'mon in" -- the words forever ring in my ears.
(Jerry Green is a retired sports writer who started writing sports for The Detroit News on an ancient Remington typewriter in 1963.)
