No Minor Accomplishment

BALTIMORE

The more time you spend in baseball's purgatories -- the minors, the instructional league and winter ball -- the more tales you learn to tell. The war stories help keep you sane, as long as living them in the first place doesn't drive you crazy.

So, on the day the Baltimore Orioles named Dave Trembley their manager for '08, the 55-year-old was not basking in his amazing one-year rise from minor league manager to rookie big league bullpen coach to bench coach to interim manager and, now, to full-time manager. Instead, the square-jawed, forthright Trembley, who blends no-nonsense with a hint of a twinkle, was recalling the hard knocks of 22 years in the minors, the last 20 as a manager, plus 16 straight seasons in the instructional league and, in some of those endless years of 365-day baseball, a trip to manage in Mexico or Venezuela, as well.

Once, managing Magallanes in Venezuela, Trembley was paid weekly in cash, $9,000 in all, which he quickly stuffed in every mattress and sofa cushion in his apartment. "The last week of the season, I found the whole place ransacked. They got everything," Trembley said. He went to the U.S. Consulate to tell his sad story. "Instead, they told me, 'Sir, you are lucky. The same banditos robbed the woman who lived in the apartment right above you. But they killed her."

Managing Navajoa in the Mexican Pacific League, Trembley received from his owner a tiny Volkswagen, with writing that looked like advertising on the side.

"Just going down the road, people would throw vegetables and apples at me. I got hit in the head with a tomato. Always after we lost, it seemed like," said Trembley, who went to his boss after his tires were slashed. "He told me, 'Those aren't ads on the side of your car. It says, 'This car is driven by the manager of Navajoa.' "

The only thing being thrown at Trembley these days is praise. In recompense for eons of excellent service, including manager of the year honors in three minor leagues, the straight talker who never played a day of pro ball was given the lowest job in the show -- bullpen coach, supervising the relief pitching lunatics.

Then, in case anybody still believes that baseball didn't invent karma, things started to happen. No organization, not the Cubs, Pirates, Padres or O's, ever had Dave Trembley on its fast track to be a major league manager. "I was always the guy who was the teacher," he said. But fate changed that. When Sam Perlozzo was fired June 18, the logical interim manager might have been Tom Trebelhorn, who'd managed seven years in the majors, but he was away caring for his ailing wife. Leo Mazzone and Terry Crowley were renowned coaches of pitching and hitting, but never managers. So, Trembley was suddenly the manager, though maybe just for a few days, since the Orioles were hot to sign ex-Marlins manager Joe Girardi.

However, Girardi spurned the Orioles. Meanwhile, Trembley didn't hesitate. He simply took over the clubhouse with his blunt but upbeat manner, just as he had 12 times in 10 different bush league cities.

"You could hear a pin drop in that room," O's executive Mike Flanagan said of Trembley's first-day speech. "It wasn't planned. It was from the heart. He went around the room, named names. We held the bus. I thought he had 'em right there.' "

Before his first game as a big league manager, Trembley told the Orioles they would take infield practice -- the kind of rah-rah, whip-it-around-the-horn stuff you do in junior college or the minors for morale, team unity and fun. Instead of sulking, the $96 million Orioles bought into Trembley's intensity.