By Bob Hertzel
PITTSBURGH — “The game has given me heaven on earth. I can never repay the game for what it has done for me.”– Former Pittsburgh Pirates manager Chuck Tanner, a Fourth of July baby who turned 91 on this Fourth of July.
All things considered, Chuck Tanner would have rather spent his birthday at the ball park, as he had for what seemed like his entire life.
“It’s crazy how the game gets inside you,” he said.
He couldn’t because this past spring he had some heart problems and they didn’t want him driving back and forth from his home in New Castle on a daily basis and it is, in its way, driving him crazy. His connection these days is through the television.
Funny, isn’t it, that Tanner is still in New Castle. He’s seen the world because of baseball, been to all of America’s great cities, but he always returned home.
Maybe it’s because of the way he left.
“I was 17,” he recalled, “and I could have gone to college or gone to play baseball. My dad told me that I was 17, old enough to make up my own mind.”
Wasn’t really much of a choice for Tanner. “I want to play baseball,” he said.
“OK, but don’t come home until you play in the big leagues,” his father answered.
He remembers that day like it was yesterday.
“He was cutting my hair under a tree with clippers. We didn’t have much money,” Tanner said.
It almost didn’t happen for Chuck Tanner. He was playing C ball in Eau Claire, Wis., under a one-time major leaguer named Andy Cohen.
“The ball park was on a peninsula,” Tanner explained. “You had to cross a bridge to get there. Well one day, there were two ground balls to right field, both went right through my legs. We lost the game.
“After the game I’m going home over that bridge and I stopped and just sat there on the bridge. I remember thinking, ‘Maybe I’ll just jump and kill myself.’”
Tanner decided to drive on.
“Next morning at 10 we had a meeting and Andy Cohen stood there and said, ‘Yesterday is yesterday. You erase it, just like a blackboard. Today is the most important game you’ll play.’”
That night Tanner hit two home runs and drove in five runs.
“Going across that bridge I was saying to myself ‘I’ll be with the Braves in a month,’ Tanner said, laughing at the memory.
And that’s how the eternal optimist was born in Chuck Tanner.
It was hardly a month, however, when the Braves called on Tanner. Those were days
when you learned your trade in the minor leagues and Tanner didn’t get the big leagues for another 7 years.
But it hardly mattered because those were wonderful years for a kid who was becoming a man playing a child’s game.
He remembers the spring of 1951 when he found himself playing for former major leaguer Dixie Howell, who had been nicknamed “The People’s Cherce” when he played in Brooklyn. He was supposed to be an extra man to be used in the spring and then sent back to A-ball and was surprised to even find himself still around when the famed Brooklyn Dodgers came through Atlanta on their way north from spring training.
“I figured I better get myself a good seat on the bench to see this,” Tanner said, only to hear Walker call his name starting in the outfield and batting second.
“Don Newcombe’s on the mound,” Tanner said. “Big jaw. Looked like he was 6-foot-10. I just told myself I’m going up there and swinging at everything. If it’s at my head, I’m swinging.”
First pitch, fastball. “I hit it back through the middle, almost took his head off,” Tanner said.
The second time up, Tanner found another first-pitch fastball that he hit into the alley in right-center for a three-run double.
Third time up catcher Roy Campanella says to him “You’re really swinging that bat, kid.”
Newcombe threw him three fastballs. “I swung and missed at each one, but they were the three greatest swings I ever took,” Tanner said.
And his day wasn’t over. He batted once against reliever Dan Bankhead, hit another bases-loaded double. He drove in six runs and his AA Atlanta team beat “The Boys of Summer”, 7-6.
With that in his background, is it any surprise that Chuck Tanner hit the first major league pitch he ever saw for home run on April 12, 1955?
The rest of the story, of course, you know. He became a manager, stole 341 bases with a slow Oakland team, won a World Championship in 1979 in Pittsburgh while becoming baseball’s Good Humor man.
“I could still manage today,” Tanner said. “I just couldn’t travel.”
E-mail Bob Hertzel at bhertzel@hotmail.com.
