BALTIMORE
"The Orioles just hired their new manager -- Lee Mazzilli," I told a friend Friday.
"Good, maybe he can help their pitching like he did with the Braves," he said.
"No," I said. "Not Leo Mazzone. Lee Mazzilli."
"Who's he?"
Outside New York, where Mazzilli was a local favorite as a Mets player long ago and respected as a first base coach with the Yankees for the last four years, the new Orioles' manager is as little-known and lightly qualified as any rookie skipper you'll find.
After "Who's he?" the next two predictable reactions may well be, "Mike Hargrove was fired for this?" and "Is this the work of Peter Angelos?"
As it turns out, Mazzilli has never met Angelos. They have no mutual relatives and presumably do not belong to any secret societies. So, snuff the conspiracy theories. Assistant general manager Jim Beattie "didn't know Lee" when the interviewing process began.
So, how on earth did Mazzilli get onto the Orioles' short list, much less beat out a half-dozen candidates who -- by traditional "credentials" -- all had him out-gunned?
If the Orioles wanted experience, they interviewed Grady Little, who won tons of games in Boston the last two years, and Terry Francona. Granted, Little is still radioactive. But Mazzilli has only managed three years in the low minors.
If they'd wanted a famous name and ex-Oriole, they interviewed Eddie Murray. Ex-Oriole Rich Dauer, now a Brewers coach, was also a contender. And, most pointedly, the Orioles passed over their enormously popular bench coach Sam Perlozzo, whose résumé is almost exactly like Mazzilli's -- except better in every measurable category.
No Orioles roots here: Mazzilli's first comment at his news conference Friday at Camden Yards was, "I want to thank the New York Yankees and George Steinbrenner."
Finally, if the Orioles had wanted a Yankees coach, they could have had one with more experience and higher status in the New York dugout, Willie Randolph, a classy, qualified man who keeps missing such jobs.
Assistant GM Mike Flanagan, who has known Mazzilli since 1989 when they were Blue Jays teammates, brought him into the picture. In a four-hour interview after the World Series, Mazzilli hit it off so well with both Flanagan and Beattie that he turned the whole selection process upside down. The co-GMs felt so at home with Mazzilli that they had the baseball equivalent of a whirlwind romance.
"It was Mike's thought that this was someone we should talk to," said Beattie. "I didn't know him at all. "I always thought of Lee Mazzilli as the 'Italian Stallion from New York City,' " Beattie said. "You might think a guy like that would be very superficial. But when you sit down and talk with him, you think, 'This is a great baseball mind.' "
"Coming out of Lee's interview, we were like, 'Wow.' We were very excited as a group. You don't want to be blown away by [one] good interview. That's when you follow up by talking to your contacts in the game who know him well."
Flanagan described the process more simply. "After the interview, We went, 'The search is over.' "
You can call Beattie and Flanagan daring, or, if Mazzilli fails, you can nickname them "Dumb" and Dumber" for tearing up the standard script and going with their gut. But, for once during the Angelos regime, intelligent career baseball people have been put in charge of the club and, in this instance, they've picked their man for baseball reasons.
"Lee has a lot of 'foxhole qualities,' " Flanagan said. "Presence, confidence, leadership. Everybody can say the right words, but certain people can pull off what they say."
Mazzilli was known as a cocky New York heartthrob 25 years ago when he was a switch-hitting one-time all-star outfielder for the Mets. He's kept just enough of that edge. "Thank you all [for your patience]," he said at his news conference. "These 10-year contracts take a little time to work out."
Beattie did a nice double-take, since the deal is for two years.
"This is a good, good ballclub, not a rebuilding ballclub. Once we believe that, as I believe it, we'll be on our way," said Mazzilli, who watched the Orioles from the other dugout 18 times last season and must see a great deal that the rest of baseball has missed. "We need to revamp a little bit, tweak things around."
Has Mazzilli, with his energy and New York Attitude, sold the Orioles a bill of goods they desperately wanted to buy? Is it possible Mazzilli was simply the only candidate for the job who told Beattie and Flanagan that, like them, he saw a team that should stop thinking in terms of "just competing" but, instead, of "winning every game."
Yes, it's definitely possible. But it's also possible that the entire Orioles organization has become so beaten down, demoralized and accustomed to lowered expectations that Mazzilli's sense of himself as a Yankees-style "winner" may be important. Not nearly as important, of course, as signing a free agent who can hit 35 home runs and developing at least two more starting pitchers.
If Mazzilli's enthusiasm doesn't produce victories, then some of his bumptiousness may come back to bite him. In his first day on the job, he suggested that his Orioles should have a combination of qualities that, according to biology, must be impossible: "fire in the blood and ice in the veins." Wouldn't the fire and the ice kind of neutralize each other, Lee, and just leave you with players full of lukewarm, watery blood?
Still, Mazzilli has a spontaneity and spice the Orioles haven't seen in many years. The new manager, one of the few to jump from first base coach right over the normal job progression of third base coach, then bench coach to skipper, got a congratulatory call from Derek Jeter. "He said if we drill him, he's going to charge [me in] the dugout. That's my boy," said Mazzilli.
It's the casual "that's my boy," said off-handedly by a career .259 hitter when referring to a future Hall of Famer, that defines Mazzilli. Is that natural leadership? Or just sizzle that won't cook the steak?
Win or lose, Mazzilli will be something just a little different for Baltimore, that's for sure. Asked why he'd gotten back in baseball in '96 after being away from the game so long, he said, "My wife kicked me out of the house."
"You were home seven years," blurted his wife, Dani, from the crowd. "It was time."
Now is indeed Mazzilli's time, one that, just two weeks ago, almost nobody in baseball would have predicted and that even he never dreamed could arrive so suddenly.
