Advertisement

New Mariner Manager Impressing Players : Lefebvre Doesn’t Pull Any Punches

Share
Times Staff Writer

Jim Lefebvre calls them his Elmer Gantry speeches: A little fire and brimstone to start each spring morning.

Sometimes the new manager of the Seattle Mariners borrows from Bull Halsey or Vince Lombardi or Sadaharu Oh. Sometimes he quotes from the Bible or the philosophy of Zen. Always, though, he mixes in thoughts and expressions from his own fertile and hyper mind.

How hyper?

“Jimmy can sit down to talk about hitting for an hour and break into a sweat because he gets so excited,” his twin brother, Tip, the pitching coach at UCLA, said.

Advertisement

“He’s always been hyper. We get together for a family dinner and he never stops looking at his watch. He’s always looking for a vase or piece of furniture to rearrange.”

Lefebvre, a graduate of Inglewood’s Morningside High School and a former Dodger infielder, now hopes to rearrange the future of an organization that has employed nine managers in 12 years and never reached .500.

The Walter Mitty dream that came alive for the late Danny Kaye, one of the team’s original owners, has become a nightmare.

Players can’t wait to flee the dimensional constraints of the cold, gray Kingdome and a pattern of economic restraints by management.

Mike Moore, the Mariners’ best right-handed pitcher, signed with the Oakland Athletics as a free agent in November. Mark Langston, their best left-handed pitcher, is expected to leave as a free agent after the 1989 season.

Is it any wonder that the 46-year-old Lefebvre, generally considered baseball’s most promising new manager since Bobby Valentine took the Texas Rangers’ reins, feels the need to work on his players’ psyches?

Advertisement

He arrives at Tempe Stadium at 7:30 each morning to plot the day’s activities. Two hours later, he is delivering a Gantry-type sermon to the players, preaching positives.

“I feel my strength is in the areas of teaching and motivation,” Lefebvre said.

“I feel my strength is that I get people to commit themselves, but I also realize that positive thinking has no value unless it’s backed up by substance, by solid fundamentals, and that’s what we’re stressing.”

A student of great leaders, Lefebvre honed his motivational skills during a long friendship with Dodger Manager Tom Lasorda.

That relationship ended bitterly, though, in a 1980 shouting match and punch-out.

The two haven’t spoken since, but Lefebvre still says he carries “a lot of Tommy Lasorda in me.”

Said Mike Paul, who was a coach with Lefebvre on Tony LaRussa’s Oakland staff last year and is now the Seattle pitching coach:

“Jimmy picks everybody up. In Oakland he would even slap the batboys on the back to make sure they were psyched. ‘Big game tonight,’ he’d say. ‘Gotta be ready.’ ”

Advertisement

The Mariners seem impressed.

“He’s talked to me more in a few weeks than (former manager) Dick Williams did in two years,” relief pitcher Jerry Reed said.

Said outfielder Jay Buhner, citing Lefebvre’s drive and intensity:

“It’s kind of like getting an instant confidence boost. It’s amazing.”

Acquired from the New York Yankees last summer, Buhner hit .306 in August and .136 in September.

He was summoned to Seattle last winter and spent a week getting one-on-one hitting instruction from Lefebvre, who was there on a speaking tour, though he lives in Scottsdale, Ariz., with wife Ruth and their three children: Briana, 4; Bryce, 2, and Brittany, 4 months.

“If Jimmy doesn’t leave you with the feeling you can hit .400, I don’t know who could,” Buhner said.

In this difficult attempt to save the Mariners from another shipwreck, Lefebvre can draw on the experiences of a varied career.

He spent eight years as the Dodgers’ second baseman, compiled a .251 average, helped form an all-switch-hitting infield with Wes Parker, Maury Wills and Jim Gilliam, won the National League’s rookie-of-the-year award in 1965 and played in two World Series and an All-Star game.

Advertisement

He went on to play four more years in Japan, where he was exposed to Zen and a more demanding work ethic than even his own and became only the second American--Johnny Logan was the other--to play on a World Series winner and champion of Japan.

He returned to manage the Dodgers’ Pioneer League team in 1977, coached under Lasorda for two years, spent two more on the coaching staff of the San Francisco Giants, served two years as personnel director of the Giants, managed the Giants’ triple-A team in Phoenix for two years, then joined the A’s as LaRussa’s third base coach and batting instructor.

Lefebvre is now in the 28th year of his professional odyssey. He is most often applauded for his skill in coaching hitters and motivating people--of all ages. As co-founder of Athletes for Youth, an anti-drug program, he has been honored at the White House.

How unfortunate, it seems, that in his hometown of Los Angeles he may be best remembered for the manner in which his relationship with Lasorda ended.

Neither will now discuss the incident, but according to reports and interviews at the time, it stemmed from events during the 1979 season, after which Lefebvre was replaced as Dodger batting coach by Manny Mota.

Lefebvre later said that Lasorda--envious, perhaps--was undermining his work with the hitters. Lasorda claimed that Lefebvre went over his head, to then-Vice President Al Campanis, in an attempt to get a center-field camera to film the hitters.

Advertisement

“I told Tommy I could never get in to talk to him about it because his office was always filled with Hollywood types,” Lefebvre said in the spring of 1980.

The punch that ended the relationship was thrown on Feb. 17 of that year in a KNBC studio in Burbank, where they were guests on the same show. The tapings were arranged for different times so that they wouldn’t encounter each other, but they inadvertently met on an empty sound stage.

Lasorda lashed at Lefebvre verbally, according to Lefebvre.

“He used four-letter words you wouldn’t believe,” Lefebvre said in a subsequent interview.

“I told him, ‘Tommy, that’s the last time you can say those things to me. I’m not employed by you anymore.’ I started to walk away and he took off his coat and pulled his arm back and I decked him. I think I split his lip. There was a lot of blood. He said he wanted to keep on going, but someone was holding him back. The only regret I had then was that I knew I’d never be able to wear a Dodger uniform again.”

In an ensuing interview with the Sporting News, Lasorda said he was hit with a sucker punch, prompting Lefebvre to say, “He’s right. It was the sucker who got punched.”

Sitting in the bleachers at Tempe Stadium the other day, Lefebvre said it was a bitter way to end a friendship.

“But I’m not going to let one moment spoil what I think about him,” he added. “I had problems with Tommy, but I also respect him.”

Advertisement

Lefebvre cited Lasorda’s energy, his ability to motivate players to play above their abilities and his talent for getting players to relax.

“He’s locked into Dodger blue, but he could win anywhere,” Lefebvre said.

Said Lasorda, from Vero Beach: “Just write that I wish him well and think he’ll do fine. He’s a hard worker, and that’s the main thing.”

Lefebvre attributes his work ethic to his father, Ben, a former baseball coach at Pepperdine who is also a respected batting instructor and collaborated with Jim on an acclaimed textbook, “The Making of a Hitter.”

Ben and Virginia Lefebvre ran a summer baseball school on Catalina when Jim, Tip and younger brother Gil, now a cross-country coach at Belmont High, were growing up. Lefebvre remembers the lessons and lectures there, and the intense games the brothers played in the back yard of their small Hawthorne area farm.

“I couldn’t begin to count the number of pitches Dad threw to us, but it was the long talks that really made an impact,” Lefebvre said, adding that his father had an early version of Bobby McFerrin’s philosophy.

“ ‘Why worry?’ he’d say. ‘When you’re worrying, you can’t be successful, you can’t be winning. Don’t clutter your brain with negative thinking.’

Advertisement

“He’d always remind us that you have to be consistent, that you have to grind it out daily to be a success.”

Much later, in Japan, the great hitter Oh taught him the value of Zen, which extended his father’s lessons.

“Most people look on Zen as a religion, but it’s more a philosophy, a concept of concentration that frees the mind,” said Lefebvre, who explained the four stages of awareness and how Zen allows an athlete to go beyond his ability.

“Skill is an act of will,” he said. “You can do anything you set your mind to.”

Lefebvre also said that the Japanese emphasis on detail and team made an impact.

“The Japanese say that the nail that sticks up will be hammered down,” he said. “And that’s what they do. If you get too big, if you place yourself ahead of the team, they put you in front of a wall and hammer grounders at you.”

When excited, when on a roll, Lefebvre talks in machine-gun bursts, passionate about his subject, his job, his sport. He is a baseball lifer, he said, and wants people around him who share his attachment to the game.

“I always wanted to be the best I could be, no matter what job I was doing,” he said. “I’m sure every player thinks about managing, but it was never an obsession.

Advertisement

“It kind of seeped into my blood, and I always felt that in time the right opportunity would come.”

Seattle? The right opportunity?

He was also interviewed by the Angels and Chicago White Sox, but Lefebvre said he began to feel that Seattle was the best situation of all. Only part of it was the offer of two years and an option on a third, as well as the chance to select his own coaches.

“Some good baseball people tried to talk me out of it,” he said. “They said it was a mess, a bad organization, a losing environment. But wasn’t that what they said when Vince Lombardi went into Green Bay?

“I mean, Tony LaRussa said to me, ‘How many times do you get this opportunity?’ And the more I looked at the opportunity, the more I liked it.

“How often do you get to take a club that has never won, to start at the bottom and work your way up?

“It’s a tremendous challenge and I want the players to understand just what the possibilities are, that we can do some things to really motivate and lift a town that is dying for it to happen.”

Advertisement

Lefebvre paused, gathering his thoughts as if this were a speech to his team. He recalled how Admiral William F. (Bull) Halsey once said, “There are no great men, only great challenges that ordinary men are forced by circumstances to meet.”

Said Lefebvre: “Halsey played for bigger stakes but it’s the same at any level. It’s people caring and working hard. It’s people accepting opportunities and challenges, and I’ve always been that kind of person.”

So, he is working on the Mariners’ psyches, dealing in philosophies and platitudes, asking only that the players listen with open minds and offering assurance that they will never hear a negative from him.

“I learned from Chuck Knox that you never coach caution into your players,” he said. “Be aggressive and keep it simple because simplicity breeds security and security breeds confidence. It’s that simple.”

Not quite. Lefebvre knows that when the rhetoric stops he will be judged strictly on games won and lost. He accepts that and isn’t asking for time.

“I have no timetable, no three-year plan,” he said. “If I put three years on it, people will say, ‘Well, he’s got two years to coast.’ We’re going after it starting right now.”

Advertisement

In the process, Lefebvre said, he hopes to show the same professionalism as LaRussa, the same ability to let his players play and coaches coach as Walter Alston.

He is more hyper than either, though.

“A couple years ago . . . I started to worry about myself and wondered if I was too hyper, too intense,” Lefebvre said.

“I even started to tone it down, but then I said, ‘Hey, this isn’t me. I don’t want to be something I’m not.’ I even talked to Tony (LaRussa) about it and he said, ‘I want you to be what you want to be. I want you to be aggressive and enthusiastic.’ ”

The Mariners seem impressed. Pitcher Bill Swift wondered, however, if the hyper Lefebvre has enough hype to cover the 45 days of spring training with a different daily message. It might be too much for Gantry, but Lefebvre laughed and said, “No problem. I’ve got 60 ready.”

Advertisement