Dallas Green

Two words got Dallas Green fired in the Bronx, and he knew it the moment they left his mouth. "Manager George," he called the owner who'd hired him -- a label that was funnier because it was true, and truer because nobody else had said it out loud. George Steinbrenner had run through 18 managers by the time Green arrived in 1989. None of them had summarized the whole arrangement in two words. Green did, and 121 games into the job, he was gone.

He'd earned the right to say it. Nine years earlier, Green had managed the Philadelphia Phillies to their first championship in franchise history, running a clubhouse full of future Hall of Famers who didn't always want to be managed. He knew what it took to win a World Series and what it took to hold a room together. What he found out in New York was that none of it mattered if the man signing the checks wanted to run the bullpen himself.

The Kid From Delaware

George Dallas Green Jr. was born August 4, 1934, in Newport, Delaware, a kid who grew into a 6-foot-5, 210-pound right-hander with a fastball good enough to get him a look. At the University of Delaware, he went 6-0 with a school-record 0.88 ERA as a junior in 1955 -- numbers that got Phillies scout Jocko Collins to sign him as an amateur free agent before his senior year was even a question.

The pitching career that followed was ordinary. Green threw for the Phillies, Washington Senators, and New York Mets between 1960 and 1967, finishing 20-22 with a 4.26 ERA over 185 games. He was a big man who threw hard and didn't miss enough bats to stick as a regular. (He'd later joke that his playing career mostly taught him what not to do as a manager -- a decent trade, in the end.)

Retirement in 1967 turned out to be the useful part of his career. Green moved into player development with the Phillies -- managing at Huron and Pulaski, winning an Appalachian League title in 1969, then climbing to farm director by the mid-1970s. Working under general manager Paul Owens, Green's development pipeline built the core of the Phillies teams that would define the franchise for the next decade. He wasn't just watching the roster get built. He was the guy building it.

One Championship

Owner Ruly Carpenter fired Danny Ozark on August 31, 1979, with the three-time defending NL East champs stumbling to a fourth-place finish, and handed the job to Green with 30 games left. Green went 19-11 down the stretch -- not a save-the-season kind of finish, but enough to make the case for keeping him.

1980 was the payoff. Philadelphia went 91-71, won the NL East by a single game over Montreal, then beat the Houston Astros in a five-game NLCS that included three straight extra-inning games (the Phillies closed it out 8-7 in Game 5 on October 12). The World Series against Kansas City went six games. Tug McGraw struck out Willie Wilson to end it on October 21, 1980 -- a 4-1 win that gave the Phillies their first championship in a history that stretched back to 1883. Mike Schmidt was named Series MVP. Green was the manager who'd finally gotten it done.

He didn't get much time to enjoy it. The 1981 season split into two halves because of a players' strike, and Green's Phillies won the first half at 34-21 before fading to 25-27 in the second -- good enough to make the strike-created playoff format anyway. They lost the NLDS to Montreal in five games, the first-ever postseason game played in Canada opening that series. Green's three-year Phillies record finished at 169-130, a .565 mark he'd never come close to matching anywhere else.

He didn't stick around to find out if 1982 would be different. The Chicago Cubs hired him as general manager on October 15, 1981, and Green spent six years rebuilding that organization -- trading for Ryne Sandberg, building the 1984 division winner, and picking public fights with the city of Chicago over installing lights at Wrigley Field (he floated moving the whole operation to Comiskey Park, or out to Schaumburg, if the city wouldn't budge). He resigned in 1987 after a last-place finish, gone before the Cubs actually turned the lights on in 1988. He'd done the hard, thankless part. Someone else got to flip the switch.

121 Games in the Bronx

George Steinbrenner hired Green to manage the Yankees before the 1989 season, replacing Lou Piniella, who'd been fired for the second time and left to manage Cincinnati. On paper, Green looked like exactly what the job needed -- a big, blunt disciplinarian who'd already won it all somewhere else. He wasn't intimidated by star players. He wasn't afraid of a fight (a 6-foot-5 man rarely is). What he wasn't prepared for was an owner who wanted to have the fight with him instead of letting him have it with the players.

The clashes started almost immediately, mostly over Green's coaching staff. He wanted the authority to pick his own guys. Steinbrenner wanted a say in every one of them. It's the same argument that had chewed up every Yankees manager since the mid-1970s, and Green -- who'd handled Pete Rose, Steve Carlton, and Mike Schmidt without needing the owner's permission -- wasn't built to lose it quietly.

The trade of Rickey Henderson to Oakland on June 21, 1989 didn't help. The front office moved the roster's most dynamic player out from under its own manager in the middle of a losing season, and Green was left trying to win with even less than he'd started with. Andy Hawkins led the pitching staff at 15-15 with a 4.80 ERA. The lineup, without Henderson, had little margin for error.

None of it was enough to save him. Steinbrenner fired Green on August 18, 1989, with the Yankees sitting at 56-65 -- his 121st and last game in the job. Bucky Dent, promoted straight from the minors, took over for the final 40 games and went 18-22.

Green's exit interview became the more famous part of the story. Years later, on MLB Network's "Studio 42 with Bob Costas," he explained exactly how it happened.

He didn't say it out of spite, and he was clear about that later. "I always respected Mr. Steinbrenner," Green said in the same interview. "He put his money where his mouth was. He loved New York and he wanted good things to happen for the Yankees and for New York." The nickname wasn't an insult so much as an accurate job description -- Steinbrenner wasn't hiring managers to manage, he was hiring them to answer for decisions he'd already made himself. Green just said it where people could hear him. He admitted the timing was bad. He never said the label was wrong.

After the Bronx

Green wasn't done managing. The Mets hired him on May 21, 1993, to replace Jeff Torborg, and Green went 46-78 the rest of that season -- a combined 59-103 for New York's first 100-loss year since 1967. It got better, if not by much: a 69-75 second-place finish in 1995 was the high point of a tenure that never got the Mets to October. The Mets fired him on August 26, 1996, at 59-72, after Green publicly said he didn't think prized young arms Jason Isringhausen and Paul Wilson belonged in the majors yet. Bobby Valentine got the job next.

Add it up across three organizations -- Philadelphia, New York (Yankees), and New York (Mets) -- and Green finished his managerial career at 454-478, a .487 winning percentage carrying one pennant and one championship. His Yankees stint was a near-miss, just nine games under .500 in barely a third of a season. The Mets years were the real drag on the resume, 54 games under .500 across four seasons. Philadelphia remained the only place he'd ever won anything.

Green died March 22, 2017, in Philadelphia, at 82. Six years earlier, his granddaughter Christina-Taylor Green -- nine years old, born on September 11, 2001, and just elected student council president at her Tucson elementary school -- was killed in the mass shooting that targeted Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords. Green spoke about her publicly more than once in his final years, always briefly, never for long. The man who'd once reduced George Steinbrenner to two words never found an easy way to talk about that loss at all.