Happy Friday. Thanks for reading.
Lee Elia will be remembered for one thing, and that’s not because his life was not full or that he had no interests. It’s just, that one thing — it might last forever.
Elia, who passed on Wednesday at age 87, was a major league player, coach and manager. He was not an especially successful player, and his managerial record with the Phillies and Cubs clocks in at solidly sub-.500. Rather, Elia’s excellence lay in his chosen passion as a baseball lifer, helping successive generations of young talent figure out their paths to the most elite levels of the sport. It’s not a win-loss record that anyone bothers compiling, but it is 100% real, because it involves straight coaching — one on one, down in the dirt, where players live and worry and breathe and suffer, and sometimes make it.
“Baseball has lost a giant,” said Seattle Mariners manager Dan Wilson, one of the hundreds if not thousands of players whose careers were graced by time with Elia. “He was like a father to me and taught me how to be a big leaguer.”
When I covered baseball on a regular basis, everybody in the sport knew who Lee Elia was, and most players hoped that they might wind up getting coached by him at some point. His reputation was that sturdy. Good man. Great instructor. Always has your back.
Has your back — Lee proved that!
By doing the one thing for which he’ll always be known.
And that’s why baseball can’t quit him.
Below you’ll find the link to the one thing. First, though, let me caution you that this is the most utterly NSFW link that I’ve ever included in one of these posts. You don’t want a co-worker catching you mid-belly-laugh while this audio is playing.
Also — let me provide a little context. Elia was managing the Cubs at this time, late April of 1983. They’d gone 73-89 under Elia the year before, and they were off to a 5-14 start by this point.
The day before Elia’s epic post-game rant, the Cubs had lost to the Padres 3-1 in front of a small, dissolute crowd of a few thousand at Wrigley Field. It was a day game, because every game for the Cubs back then was a day game — Wrigley didn’t install permanent lighting until 1988. (I mention this because the whole day-game concept comes into play in Elia’s comments.)
And so: April 29, 1983. Middle of a Friday afternoon, temperature in the mid-60s, chilly because they’d had a little rain. The Cubs lose to the Dodgers, 4-3, to fall to 5-14. The listed attendance at Wrigley is 9,391. Let’s assume the beer was flowing.
As Elia later recounted to the New York Times, he was leaving the field after the club’s third loss in four games when he noticed one of his players, outfielder Keith Moreland, getting verbally barbecued by a few unhappy fans. Moreland took a little of it, then started toward the stands.
“Security guards break it off,” Elia remembered. “Then we walk another six or seven yards, where the tarp is, and someone says something to (Cubs shortstop) Larry Bowa. He jumps in there. There’s a lot of shoving.”
And then — something just snapped in Lee Elia. He’d had enough.
It is said that there is no surviving video of that post-game scene. Here is what we’ve got. Fortunately, it’s enough.
Postscript: Lee was right.
I mean, not about the fans. I don’t think we can go there. But Lee was right in passionately standing up for his players. They were far closer to putting it all together than anyone could have realized in that heated moment. Elia saw it. He saw it slowly beginning to gel.
Lee got the boot late in that 1983 season, the Cubs straggling along at 54-69. It sounds incredible today that he survived even one day past that all-time rant, but in fact he made it to late August before the axe fell.
Jim Frey, who’d formerly managed the Royals, took over as manager the following season. Those 1984 Cubs went 96-65, won the N.L. East, and came within a game of making the World Series — and they did so with most of the players whose backs Lee Elia had during the sometimes-miserable days of the season before. Moreland, Bowa, Ryne Sandberg, Ron Cey, Leon Durham…Elia wasn’t wrong. Mis-timed, sure, and too profane by a fair amount, and maybe a little hard on the ol’ day-game crowd. But about his guys, he wasn’t wrong.
“He was just sticking up for his players,” Joel Bierig, formerly of the Chicago Sun-Times and one of the few reporters present for Elia’s rant, told The Athletic a couple of years ago. Isn’t that a simple little epitaph? For a true baseball man, it ought to do.
What an absolute beauty!!!
Absolute GOLD.