Don Zimmer

A 72-year-old man in a windbreaker charged a professional pitcher on a mound in front of 34,000 people, and somehow that's not even the most interesting thing about Don Zimmer's life in baseball. That's the moment everybody remembers -- Fenway, October 11, 2003, Pedro Martinez tossing him to the grass like he weighed nothing -- but Zimmer had already survived a fractured skull, three franchises' worth of firings, and one very memorable wedding at home plate before he ever sat next to Joe Torre in the Yankees dugout.

He was the Yankees' bench coach from 1996 to 2003, the guy Torre leaned on through four championships, and by the time he left the Bronx he'd been in professional baseball for over half a century. Not bad for a guy who once got read his last rites by a priest in a hospital room (figuratively -- but only barely).

The Beaning That Almost Ended Everything

Zimmer signed with the Brooklyn Dodgers in 1949 for a $2,500 bonus -- turned down a hometown discount from the Cincinnati Reds, who could only offer $2,000 and a demotion to Class B ball (I'd have taken the extra $500 too). Four years later, on July 7, 1953, a pitch from Columbus's Jim Kirk caught him in the head while he was playing shortstop for Triple-A St. Paul. Fractured his skull. Left him unconscious for more than a week. Doctors drilled holes in it and put metal buttons in to relieve the pressure.

He was told he might never play again.

He was back in big-league camp the next spring.

That's the whole Don Zimmer story in miniature, honestly -- get knocked flat, show back up anyway. He made his Yankees legend doing exactly that decades later, but the pattern started in a hospital bed in 1953.

A Career That Touched Everybody

Zimmer's playing days read like a tour of mid-century National League chaos. He came up with Brooklyn in 1954, moved to LA with the Dodgers, and won a title both places -- 1955 in Brooklyn, the only one that franchise ever got there, and 1959 out west, where his batting average cratered to .169 sharing shortstop with Maury Wills and his only Series appearance was as a pinch-runner. He got his lone All-Star nod with the Cubs in 1961. Then, in 1962, the expansion Mets took him for $125,000 and he started the single worst team in modern baseball history's first-ever game, at third base (the '62 Mets went 40-120, so at least he has that going for him).

He finished up in Washington in 1965, retired with a .235 average across 1,095 games, and immediately started the second half of his baseball life -- the part where he stopped hitting and started getting fired.

The Managing Years (And a Correction, While We're At It)

Zimmer managed four teams, and not one of those tenures ended quietly. San Diego in '72-'73, where he inherited a mess mid-season and rode it down to 60-102 while owner Arnholt Smith dumped payroll around him. Texas in '81-'82, fired in July after a 38-58 start. Boston from 1976 to 1980, which gave the world both a 99-win season and the single most Boston sports collapse imaginable -- a 14-game lead evaporated, the Yankees swept a four-game set at Fenway by a combined 42-9 (still called the "Boston Massacre"), and it all ended with Bucky Dent's home run in a one-game playoff. Red Sox pitcher Bill Lee, who didn't care for how Zimmer ran the staff that year, nicknamed him "The Gerbil." It stuck for the rest of his life.

Chicago gave him his one real triumph -- the 1989 NL East title, six games clear of the Mets, and Manager of the Year to go with it. Two years later, the Cubs fired him anyway.

Four teams managed: Padres, Red Sox, Rangers, Cubs. Not the Rockies -- Zimmer coached for Colorado's 1993 expansion staff under manager Don Baylor, and never had the top job there. (Worth clearing up, since it's an easy detail to get backwards -- coaching third base for an expansion team and running one are very different jobs.) He quit that gig mid-game in June 1995, walked out of the dugout in the fifth inning against the Cardinals and cleared out his locker. Less than a year later, he was in the Bronx.

Torre's Right Hand

Joe Torre brought Zimmer in as his bench coach for the 1996 season, and it turned into the best stretch of Zimmer's career by a wide margin. Four championships -- 1996, 1998, 1999, 2000 -- plus pennants in 2001 and 2003 that didn't finish the job. When Torre got diagnosed with prostate cancer in March 1999 and went to St. Louis for surgery, it was Zimmer who ran the club for the season's first 36 games, going 21-15 before handing the reins back. The record officially belongs to Torre. The work was Zimmer's.

He was 65 years old when he took that Yankees job and 72 when it ended. Most people are retired for a decade by then. Zimmer was chirping at players from the top step of a World Series dugout.

I told the whole world I was wrong and that I was embarrassed by what I'd done, for the Yankees, the Red Sox, the fans, the umpires and my family.

That quote is about the incident everybody actually remembers him for -- the ALCS Game 3 brawl at Fenway where Zimmer charged Pedro Martinez and got thrown to the ground, the single image that survives 2003 more than almost anything else that happened that October. The full story -- Karim Garcia getting hit, Manny Ramirez charging Clemens, the fines, all of it -- is already told in full here. What matters for this bio is simpler: a man in his 70s ran at a professional athlete because he couldn't stand watching his team get shown up, and never once pretended it was the right call afterward. That's Zimmer. Wrong, loud about being wrong, and completely unbothered by looking foolish doing it.

Leaving, and the Decade After

The Steinbrenner relationship had been fraying for a couple of years by 2003, and after that season Zimmer had had enough. He walked away from the Yankees for good and took a senior advisor job with the Tampa Bay Devil Rays, close to his home in Treasure Island, Florida. It wasn't much of a job on paper -- show up to spring training in uniform, watch games from the suite during the season -- but it kept him in a dugout, or close enough to one, for another ten years. The Rays retired his uniform number, 66, in his honor. It wasn't random: Zimmer bumped his own uniform number up by one every year to track how long he'd been in professional baseball, so by 2014 it read like an odometer.

He died June 4, 2014, in Dunedin, Florida, of heart failure, 83 years old, following complications from surgery that April. Sixty-six years in the game, almost 63 of them married to the same woman he wed at home plate in Elmira, New York, back in 1951 (only Don Zimmer marries at home plate between games of a doubleheader and treats it as a normal Tuesday).

Frequently Asked Questions

What years was Don Zimmer the Yankees' bench coach?

Zimmer served as the Yankees' bench coach from 1996 through 2003 under manager Joe Torre, a run that included four World Series titles (1996, 1998, 1999, and 2000).

Did Don Zimmer ever manage the Yankees?

Not officially, but he came close. When Joe Torre underwent prostate cancer surgery in March 1999, Zimmer ran the team for the first 36 games of the season, going 21-15, before Torre returned. The record is credited to Torre.

What happened between Don Zimmer and Pedro Martinez?

During Game 3 of the 2003 ALCS at Fenway Park on October 11, 2003, the 72-year-old Zimmer charged at Martinez during a bench-clearing brawl and was thrown to the ground. Read the full account here.

What teams did Don Zimmer manage before the Yankees?

Zimmer managed the San Diego Padres (1972-73), Boston Red Sox (1976-80), Texas Rangers (1981-82), and Chicago Cubs (1988-91). He also coached -- but never managed -- for the expansion Colorado Rockies from 1993 to 1995 under manager Don Baylor.

When did Don Zimmer die?

Don Zimmer died on June 4, 2014, in Dunedin, Florida, at age 83, following complications from heart surgery earlier that year.