The obits of Gene Mauch dwelled on his teams' failure to win when it really counted. Anyone care to comment on the Phillies' notorious collapse in 1964? Was it his fault?

The obits also mentioned the Donnie Moore game. Did Moore commit suicide because of this loss, or is that just speculation?

I've read that it's a hindsight media creation that Moore committed suicide because of his surrendering the Henderson homer, but I can't cite sources, unfortunately.

Moore had a lot of problems off the field at the time, including a divorce that apparently was rather nasty. I recall reading a quote from some baseball source who said it was nonsense to infer that Moore committed suicide because of the Henderson homer--that he was much more immune to on-field problems than that view would have supposed.

But it makes for a nicer story to think that the homer so devastated him that he couldn't function anymore.

Veteran Philadelphia baseball columnist Bill Conlin had a nice tribute to Mauch in the Philadelphia Daily News today. I love Eddie Sawyer's quote about the 1960 Phillies therein:


Bill Conlin | Time simply ran out for 'Little General'

This was one time No. 4 didn't stumble at the finish line. This was one time the "Little General" didn't run out of starting pitchers, games or innings.

Nobody stole home on him in the 16th inning, the way Willie Davis did in Los Angeles, a seemingly harmless blip on the 1964 radar screen for a Phillies team about to go home for its final stand with just 12 games to play and a lead that had stretched to 6 ½ games.

Gene Mauch, a man whose life was a series of heightened expectations and shattering disappointments, did not expect that life to be a long one.

"I'm a man in a hurry, podnuh," he told me one night in the hotel bar of the Chase-Park Plaza Hotel in St. Louis. "The men in my family die young. My father, his brothers, all the men were gone before they reached 42."

This was 1967. Mauch would turn 42 that Nov. 18 and he was responding to my question about the urgency and intensity he brought to managing the game of baseball. "I need to win a pennant and play in a World Series before I'm out of time," he said. "It's as simple as that."

It turned out the time he had left was tilted more in his favor than his luck, his timing or the talent on the four teams he managed for a total of 26 seasons.

No. 4 died yesterday in Rancho Mirage, Calif., after a bout with cancer that was longer and harder than any of the pennant races that slipped away from the smartest baseball man I have known. He was 79. He had outlived his father and uncles by at least 37 years.

Mauch was a short, trim, handsome man with ice-blue eyes. He had a middle infielder's body and he played at the journeyman level for six major league teams during his 13-year career. Mauch had the honor of being the first of a half-dozen shortstops - including Don Zimmer - to be stuck behind Brooklyn Dodgers legend Pee Wee Reese in the era before free agency. With Reese in the service, Mauch made his big-league debut as the Opening Day shortstop for the 1944 Dodgers at the age of 18.

"I was just good enough to play behind a lot of good shortstops and second basemen," Mauch told me years ago. "Early on I decided I wanted to manage, so I always made sure on the bench I was sitting near the smartest guys on the ballclub."

Caddying for the regulars on the Dodgers, Pirates, Cubs, Braves, Cardinals and Red Sox, Mauch formulated the style and theories that would become the foundation of his unique managing style. He postulated that there was a finite number of star players in baseball to build ballclubs around and a relatively infinite number of lesser players whose strengths had to be exploited by putting them in situations that minimized their weaknesses.

His personal biggest weakness - and this is me talking - was to put too much faith in the ability of his veteran players, particularly aging pitchers. When a big game was on the line, Mauch wanted a veteran batting or a grizzled pitcher grinding for the final out.

The 10-game losing streak that gave the 1964 Phillies unwanted fame as architect of the most spectacular collapse in sports history is recited to childhood fans like a nursery rhyme. However, many baseball men believe to this day the most remarkable aspect of that historic season was not the collapse itself, but the job Mauch did on the way to the commanding lead the Phillies established in a National League brimming with future Hall of Famers.

I replaced Stan Hochman on the baseball beat for this newspaper in 1966. It was a tough act made tougher by the fact I picked up the club for the home opener without benefit of spring training. The beat writer for the Inquirer was Allen Lewis. The Bulletin beat man was the colorful Ray Kelly. Between them they had nearly a half-century of baseball writing experience. Kelly's mentor had been Connie Mack. "You better pay close attention, podnuh," Mauch told me early on, "or you're gonna get your butt kicked." He gave me a crash course. A uniform was provided and I worked out regularly with the team on the road, shagging flies during BP, reliving my high school pitching days in the bullpen by winging my half-fastball to a great baseball man named Andy Seminick.

Mauch gave me tough love. As the dregs of the near-miss 1964 team dragged toward the end of the decade with Rich Allen's myriad troubles the main focus, it became obvious No. 4 would soon be moving on. There was an infamous West Coast trip where Allen staged a sitdown strike where he was being fined huge amounts. A peace was finally negotiated by owner Bob Carpenter. The fines were reduced. But Mauch had been left out of the loop and felt his authority was badly compromised. On the next homestand, Gene's first wife, Nina Lee, his only real love besides baseball, was hospitalized in Los Angeles in 1968 with a serious illness. He flew home to be with her. While he was away, Carpenter and general manager John Quinn fired him. It was a cowardly act - "The coward does it with a kiss, the brave man with a sword," Oscar Wilde wrote of the duplicity of man.

Mauch resurfaced as manager of the 1969 expansion Expos. When Allen vanished during a 21-day suspension in 1969, I called Mauch in Montreal and asked how he would handle the situation. In one of those patented responses where a marvelous sound bite was always preceded by a pregnant pause, Mauch said, "I'd find him... I'd fine him... And I'd play him."

The Little General - his bearing was often Napoleonic - was a sound-bite machine before the term was invented.

Of longtime friend and future manager Alvin Dark, Mauch said (with a trace of sarcasm): "He's the kind of man we'd all like to be if we had the time."

After Allen severely dislocated a shoulder stealing a base in 1966: "The only one strong enough to hurt Richie Allen is Richie Allen."

When a visiting writer asked if a slumping Allen was having trouble with the high fastball, Mauch paused a full 30 seconds and replied: "No, the fast highball."

Explaining to former Daily News sports editor Larry Merchant why he stopped using relief ace Jack Baldschun in the 1964 stretch: "I could see the fear in his eyes."

Mauch was just 34 when John Quinn hired the young Triple A manager he had admired to manage the wretched 1960 Phillies. Whiz Kids manager Eddie Sawyer had come back, but threw up his hands after Opening Day. He left behind this immortal line: "I'm 49 years old and I want to live to be 50."

At his first press conference, Mauch surveyed a room filled with veteran media members and said this: "Nobody's going to outthink me between the white lines."

Umpires consulted him on the rules. Gene didn't invent the double-switch - you listening, Cholly? - but he turned it into an art form that enabled generations of managers stuck with rosters loaded with journeymen to put those players in the best possible situations.

You've probably noticed that catchers no longer venture into dugouts to catch pop fouls. After Mauch leveled Mets catcher Jerry Grote with a body block that dislodged him from the baseball, a rule was passed that fielders could not enter dugouts, but must be given room to make a catch if they reached in.

Not many people know this. Mauch did have one passion he permitted himself besides baseball, bridge, gin rummy and golf. As a teenager growing up in Los Angeles, Mauch spent many summer nights at the Balboa Beach Ballroom, home of big-band jazz giant Stan Kenton's orchestra. Mauch became a devoted fan of great female vocalist Anita O'Day.

After a game one day in Cincinnati, I was talking to third-base coach Don Hoak in the hotel lobby. Mauch went hurrying out the door, dressed to the nines.

"He's going to see Anita O'Day," said Hoak, himself married to pop-singing star Jill Corey. "She's performing 100 miles away and the first show starts at 9 o'clock."

Thanks for posting the column, Wordy. I was surprised to read that Conlin worked out with the team. It was a different era.

Sure, ADK. A different era, indeed. Conlin was on XM's Home Plate show today reminiscing about his career and Mauch. That motivated me to see if I could find his column online. Had you heard of him? I had, but I couldn't have placed the city in which he wrote or the paper for which he wrote.

Interesting note about the Mauch obits today, though. Were there really two steals of home against the 1964 Phillies that resulted in losses in that 10-game slide? If so, that is pretty unusual to have two steals of home decide games within a 10-game span. Or is either Richard Goldstein of the New York Times or Conlin possibly confusing the sequence of events?

Here's part of Goldstein's Mauch obit:

"Mauch's 1964 Phillies seemed headed for the franchise's first pennant since the 1950 Whiz Kids team, holding a lead of six and a half games over the St. Louis Cardinals and Cincinnati Reds with 12 games to play.

But it all unraveled, beginning on Sept. 21, when Cincinnati's Chico Ruiz stole home to give the Reds a 1-0 victory over the Phillies. That was the beginning of a 10-game Phillies losing streak. The Phils ended the season tied with the Reds for second place, a game behind the Cardinals. The debacle left Mauch facing criticism that he overworked his ace starting pitchers, Jim Bunning and Chris Short, in the final weeks."

And Conlin writes about Willie Davis' steal of home:

"Nobody stole home on him in the 16th inning, the way Willie Davis did in Los Angeles, a seemingly harmless blip on the 1964 radar screen for a Phillies team about to go home for its final stand with just 12 games to play and a lead that had stretched to 6 ½ games."

Yeah, I've heard of Conlin, though I haven't read him. As to the two steals of home, that's a good question. I wonder if a Phillies fan or someone with a good overall knowledge of baseball history, such as Wayne or Wabberjocky, would know the answer.

In re Donnie Moore:

It's impossible to know with certainty why anyone commits suicide. But I read an interview with Moore's widow in which she said he was never the same after that homer.

Certainly it's safe to say it couldn't have been the only cause, since a mentally healthy person would not be driven to suicide by losing a baseball game. But it may well be true that the homer exacerbated or triggered deeper problems.

Sorry, I don't know about the two steals of home, but would like to.

I agree with Matthew about Donnie Moore: The guy had problems besides that one pitch. That home run sure wouldn't help, though.

Bill Conlin was the main NL guy for the Sporting News back in the day.

I had never heard of the steals before, either, but they're described in the box scores/play-by-play listings on retrosheet (www.retrosheet.org, one of the best baseball sites on the Web). A brief summary:

On September 19, the Phils lost to the Dodgers (at L.A.) 4-3. In the 16th the Dodgers had Willie Davis on 3rd and Tommy Davis on 2nd with 2 out. Baldschun had just come in to pitch to Frank Howard (!), and Willie Davis stole home to win the game.

Just two games later, on September 21 (at Philadelphia), Chico Ruiz of the Reds stole home with two outs in the 6th inning (and Frank Robinson at bat). Mahaffey was pitching and Dalrymple was catching. It was the only run of the game.

Very unusual for it to happen twice in three games. Both were apparently "pure" steals of home (as opposed to having runners on first and third, where the runner from first also steals to draw a throw), and both happened with big hitters at the plate.

Stealing home: Ty Cobb did it eight times in 1912. Pete Reiser was credited with eight in 1946 but claimed nine: "In Chicago I stole home and [George] Magerkurth hollered: 'You're out!' Then he dropped his voice and he said: '------, I missed it.' He'd already had his thumb in the air. I had nine out of nine." (W.C. Heinz, "The Rocky Road of Pistol Pete," reprinted in The Second Fireside Book of Baseball.)

Really good stuff, Jeff and Oed. Thanks.