Phil Garner debates with umpire Larry Young in 2006. He didn’t always act like his Scrap Iron nickname.
Phil Garner was nicknamed Scrap Iron for his feisty side but had a side gentle enough that he once promised his wife to hit a grand slam for her when she missed the first one he hit as a major leaguer. Don’t make promises you can’t keep. Unless you can. And he did.
Garner was a rough-and-ready second baseman whose fortés did not include power hitting. (He averaged nine homers a year lifetime.) So, after Mrs. Garner missed him taking Cardinals pitcher Bob Forsch in the bottom of the sixth on 14 September 1978, the loving husband promised her another salami slice ASAP.
Naturally, it came the next day, against the Montreal Expos. And neither Garner had to wait beyond the bottom of the first, when hubby squared off against Woodie Fryman with the pads padded and hit one over the left field fence. It was the first time a National League player sliced salami in back-to-back games in 77 years.
That was the guy who’d grow up to manage the Astros to their first pennant in 2005, when they were still a National League club. The bad news was the Astros grappling their way to it through the Cardinals only to get swept by the White Sox.
And, the who’d go from there to the Athletics’ front office as an advisor, to the team who once traded him after the guy they traded to manage the Pirates, Chuck Tanner, told his new team to trade for the second base slasher. In that advisory role, Garner proved invaluable to an old teammate named Bob Melvin, when both were Giants and Garner was near the end of the line.
Maybe that was also because, when managing the Brewers and the Tigers once upon a time, Garner made Melvin his bench coach at both stops, and Melvin appreciated Garner talking to him in terms of actualities and not what-ifs.
“When he would talk to me,” said Melvin to The Athletic‘s Tyler Kepner about Garner, who died of pancreatic cancer Saturday night, “he would always say, ‘When you manage …’ Not one time did he ever say, ‘If you manage …’ And it just resonated with me that he had that much confidence in me. Obviously, I did end up managing, and a lot of my philosophies and a lot of my values in baseball come from him. There’s no more impactful guy in my career than Phil Garner.”
Garner did that in a lot of places. When he became a Pirate, he engaged in some good-natured jousting with Hall of Famer Dave Parker, who’d first been astonished that his team sent six players to Oakland in the swap that made Garner a Pirate in the first place.
Parker zinged him, Garner zinged back, and the new guy’s “initiation was complete,” as Parker remembered in his memoir, Cobra, “and I had a new sparring partner.” He also had an almost immediate appreciation for Garner one spring training afternoon after Garner’s arrival.
“In the twilight,” the Cobra wrote, “ol’ Scrap Iron was still out there, hours later, taking extra fielding practice at third base. As pissed as I was about the trade, I knew it was the smart move and we got ourselves a winning player.” A guy to win a World Series with, as they did with the Fam-I-Lee Pirates of 1979.
And, a guy who knew how to help bring a roster together, as the team’s relief ace Kent Tekulve told Kepner. “Our team was known to be, oh, a little rowdy, a little cocky, and nobody was safe in the clubhouse,” Tekluve began.
It didn’t matter where you stood in the pecking order, everybody was fair game, and a lot of that was Gar. It was hilarious every day when we’d come in. Whichever one got there first—Parker or Gar—you were waiting for the second one, because it was going to start. You’ve got this 6-foot, 5-inch, huge Black guy and this 5-foot, 9-inch little redneck, and they’d just start in on each other, and that spread. Everybody’s involved now.
And he knew what was going on. I mean, Phil was a smart guy. He knew if he got on Parker, then everybody else would get on him, too. And Parker liked that, because that gave him a reason to prove you wrong.
That’s the man whom Tigers pitcher C.J. Nitkowski once ripped publicly after “a frustrating game,” as Kepner phrased it. Garner bawled him out for it in a clubhouse meeting the next day . . . but accepted the pitcher’s apology privately. Garner even tried to acquire Nitkowski when managing the Astros later on.
“It really spoke to me and made me reflect on how I want to handle myself,” said Nitkowski, who went from the mound to the broadcast booth in due course. “He showed what professionalism looks like, and what forgiveness looks like.”
Another of his pitchers, Steve Sparks, remembered a tough loss that stirred Garner to “shredding us in the locker room” and turning the postgame food spread into a miniature landfill. If Garner couldn’t cool himself off, his lady could—and did.
“At the end of [the tirade],” Sparks remembered, “his wife Carol has a Harley-Davidson wheeled into the clubhouse for his birthday—and right away he turns into Jerry Seinfeld in the ‘schmoopie’ episode, from one character to another in the blink of an eye. He was so relatable. He knew how to laugh at himself.”
Hopefully some of that laughter will come through the tears when they lay the body to rest and wish the man a safe journey home to the Lord. Where Dave Parker’s just liable to be waiting for him with a cold beer in hand and a mouthful of wisecracks with which to serve it.
First published by Sports-Central.
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