Welts cover Wally Backman’s right leg.
The manager of the Joliet JackHammers proudly displayed the worst of the half-dozen marks that dot his thigh and calf, the product of an off-day paintball excursion with front-office staff. His arms are covered with even bigger red splotches.
Behold one beaten-up baseball manager, in so many ways.
“I told him he should have worn long sleeves,” kidded Wally Backman Jr., his son, who plays third base for the JackHammers.
Taking steps to avert the blows would have betrayed the style of Backman, the scrappy former second baseman who won a World Series with the Mets in 1986 and once was considered a rising star as a manager in the White Sox’s organization.
Long sleeves? Whether it’s a game of paintball or the politics of the profession he loves, Backman is not the type to equip himself with the protective layers of support men in his position often seek.
No handlers, no frills and no $*$&!!!! no-comments.
Among Backman’s managerial peers, only Ozzie Guillen’s words might travel from the brain through his mouth faster. Now that would be a race. The words rush out every bit as profanely and candidly, too, which would make Backman a joy for the JackHammer press corps … if there were one.
“There’s a lot of stuff out there that’s made me look like a drunken wife-beater, to be honest with you, and that’s the furthest thing from the truth,” Backman said.
“All I want now is to get an interview with a major-league team to explain all I have to explain. I’ll go through each police report. I don’t mind rehashing it.”
Go ahead and ask Backman any detail about a 1999 DUI conviction that cost him a $560 fine and a night in jail and he won’t try to change the subject or deny he enjoys an occasional drink. In fact, there is a six-pack of beer in the mini-fridge behind his desk, and Backman admitted he likes to “have a cocktail with the guys once in a while.”
The domestic-violence arrest a year after that? Backman will demonstrate how he used his foot to knock down the locked front door to his home in Pineville, Ore.
As Backman tells it, he returned home after a quarrel with his wife that night, and a female friend picked up a bat he used in the 1986 World Series and delivered a bone-breaking blow to his forearm. He will show you the 8-inch scar without your asking.
The irony is that had Backman been this open with the Arizona Diamondbacks about the arrests and about problems with the Internal Revenue Service, they might not have fired him five days after hiring him in 2004. But fire Backman they did after the revelations came out in a New York Times story. Team officials said Backman answered “No” in his interview when they asked him if there was anything that might prevent them from hiring him.
“If I could have two days back in my life, it’d be the DUI and the domestic incident, [but] I don’t think two days of anybody’s life should cost them his career,” Backman said.
“How many people have got arrested for DUI and haven’t lost their jobs over them? Our president did [in 1976]. Others have and kept their jobs. Why should it affect me so long?”
Needs a chance
Backman looks older than 48 as he rubs his fingers through his thinning gray hair, pondering the answer in his cluttered supply closet of an office. He lights another cigarette, going through them as if he were endorsing Marlboro.
“I just want back in affiliated ball at any level — everybody knows that,” Backman said. “I want a chance one day to manage in the big leagues.”
Addressing the messy past impeding his path back to a major-league dugout, Backman practically dares the establishment to give him one more shot.
Take the Mets’ job, suddenly open after Willie Randolph’s firing Tuesday. Backman was scheduled to interview with general manager Omar Minaya in 2004, when Randolph got the job, but backed out when the Diamondbacks hired him. He remains on good terms with the Mets’ front office.
“I know I could help if I was given the chance,” he said.
With the Wilpon family still in charge and Backman’s name still popular enough among fans to have an online petition to hire him in circulation, Backman wants to know what has changed since ’04. Team officials insist Jerry Manuel is the manager the rest of this season, and nobody around the organization disputes the description of Backman as “a radical choice,” as one Mets beat writer put it.
Around MLB, that’s the perception Backman still has to overcome before any GM takes a chance. Or as Mike Curtin, the Backman backer who organized the petition, put it, “Wally Backman is still a baseball pariah.”
“I don’t know if he’s being blackballed or what,” said former Mets teammate Gary Carter, the manager of the Orange County Flyers, who openly campaigned for the Mets’ job when Randolph still had it.
“But Wally’s a very capable big-league manager and, like me, is going to do all he can do to prove it.”
Fiery nature endures
Part of Backman’s career rehabilitation strategy, after a tumultuous season managing the South Georgia Peanuts in the now-defunct South County League, included saying yes when Joliet approached him. The proximity to Chicago, a regular MLB stop, was a factor in his decision.
Backman went 59-28 in Georgia and had seven of his 11 players improve enough to sign affiliated contracts, but the experience didn’t seem to do much to repair his image.
After one ejection, Backman hurled 22 bats and a bucket of baseballs onto the field, then confronted the opposing team’s broadcaster for calling the act “childish.”
He received an eight-game suspension. He also had two players suspended for violating the league’s drug-testing program and inspired a local blogger to begin a campaign against him.
If that sounds like the script for a reality-TV show, it is. A film crew followed Backman’s team all season and put together “Playing for Peanuts,” which airs Sunday nights on Comcast SportsNet in Chicago and provides a glimpse of Backman’s combustible yet likable personality.
“I try to win at every level because even at the minor-league level, winning is part of development,” Backman said. “You have to teach players how to win. It’s structured a little different here. But I still love running a game.”
It doesn’t bother Backman to work 40 miles from a U.S. Cellular Field he once thought might be his home. He managed Sox minor leaguers for three seasons, leading Birmingham to a 2002 Double-A championship, and was rumored to be in the mix for the manager’s job when Manuel was fired in 2003.
Backman has heard the rumors that had him rooting for the Sox to lose in ’03 so they would fire Manuel and feeling slighted enough to leave the organization when Guillen got the job. But Backman claims it was the Sox’s decision, not his, to part ways, and he understands why Guillen was the right choice at the right time.
“There were a lot of people in the organization who wanted me to get the job, and some of them are still there, but Ozzie had a better background with [Sox Chairman Jerry Reinsdorf],” Backman said. “All that being said, Ozzie deserved it … and the rest is history.”
Still has winning ways
The present finds Backman shaking his head as he watches his team full of flawed players commit three errors in one inning. In the top half, a runner ran through the third-base coach’s stop sign and was thrown out at home by 20 feet. The independent league dugout is a long way from Chase Field in Phoenix or Shea Stadium in New York.
Backman could have a long wait, too, although nobody’s complaining in Joliet.
“I definitely had heard some stories and I did some research, so, yeah, I was a little nervous at first,” JackHammers GM Kelly Sufka said.
“But he has been unbelievable. Spring training was like a real spring training. We wanted to win, and we knew had a winner in Wally.”
Indeed, the JackHammers are winning (16-14), with Backman getting more credit than fame. In a comfy suite inside Silver Cross Field, for instance, a menu offers a “Wally Bachman (sic) Burger Plate” for $8.50.
As Backman would be among the first to point out, it’s OK. Everybody makes mistakes.
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dhaugh@tribune.com
