Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: FRIDAY, June 15, 1990 TAG: 9006140368
SECTION: CURRENT PAGE: NRV-6 EDITION: NEW RIVER VALLEY
SOURCE: RAY COX SPORTSWRITER
DATELINE: PULASKI LENGTH: Long
"How'd you like to be a player-coach?" an official of the Atlanta Braves organization asked.
In one way, the offer was a way of giving the young North Carolinian a vote of confidence. It was the Braves' way of saying, "Hey, we think you're a good baseball man. We think you have a head for this game."
But in another way, it was the organization's way of drilling Ingle in the ribs with an inside pitch. They might as well have come out and said it:
"Son, you ain't a prospect."
That's about the toughest thing a career minor-league player ever has to hear.
No big leagues for you, fellow. Take those dreams and stow them on the shelf along with your first glove from Little League.
But still, in Ingle's case, they weren't telling him to pack it in and go find another line of work. Being the smart baseball guy that he was, he accepted their offer to stick around.
"They told me they'd love for me to be in the organization and I told them I'd love to be there," he said.
And here he is, at 32, preparing for his first season as a professional baseball manager. Ingle will be the skipper of the Braves' Appalachian League rookie team this summer.
"I'm here to learn," he said. "We all are."
To see Ingle for the first time, a visitor to the P-Braves' cramped clubhouse might wonder what exactly went wrong in his playing career. Ingle looks like a ballplayer. At 6 feet 3, 190 pounds, he must have been a real strapper of an infielder, even by pro standards.
At Appalachian State, he was an All America shortstop, batting nearly .500 as a junior and being passed late in the season for the NCAA batting crown.
As a high school player in Forest City, N.C., he went 17-0 with a microscopic earned run average and led his team to the state championship. He had 16 starts and 16 complete games and a win in relief.
Such exploits in high school and college attracted the interest of another Forest City man, venerable Braves scout Smoky Burgess.
Ingle showed some stuff in the minors. In 1985, he batted .256 with 18 doubles, nine home runs and 46 runs batted in at Class AA Greenville, S.C.; .252 with 13 doubles and five homers in 62 games in 1986; .318 in a brief stint at AAA Richmond at the end of the '86 season.
But he was betrayed by his knees - both of them - and a couple of bad years. The cartilage went in his right knee while trying to turn a double play in 1981, his second year in the minors. Then, after taking the rest of the summer off to heal, he busted up the other knee in fall Instructional League.
"The guy took me out on a roll block on a hit-and-run play," he said. "Severely sprained my left knee."
The next season he batted .226, that coming on the heels of a .202 campaign the year in the partial season in which he was injured.
"I think that opened their eyes," he said.
Nevertheless, he still had a slick glove and he could play just about anywhere: short, second, third, the outfield. He even pitched in some games that had gotten out of hand.
Matter of fact, the Minnesota Twins had drafted him as a pitcher out of high school, but he declined and headed up the road to Appalachian State.
"I was glad I did that," he said. "I wanted to play every day, not pitch once a week."
Perhaps his career may have turned out very differently had he gone to the minors as a pitcher. That sort of speculation draws a shrug.
"Maybe, but I'm still glad I did what I did. I got to play every day and I got three years of college. I still plan to go back at some point and finish college."
Meanwhile, he's been getting the sort of higher education that prepares someone for a career in baseball management. He was a player-coach starting in 1983. By 1988, he was a full-time instructor at Durham. Last year, he assumed duties as a full-time coach specializing in defense at Greenville, where he's spent plenty of time in the past decade.
This past fall during Instructional League, he spent his first days as a manager while orchestrating the Braves' West Palm Beach club.
Now here he is, in the sparse furnishing of the Pulaski field manager's office, among the cardboard crates of new gray playing pants.
A man doesn't have a whole lot to tell Ingle that he doesn't already know about the minor leagues, even the low, low minors such as the Appalachian League. He's been here: rookie shortstop, 1979, Kingsport, Tenn.
"I'm looking forward to getting back," he said. "This is a good league. The ballparks are nice and the travel isn't bad at all. You remember, I'm a guy coming from a league where they had 10-hour bus rides."
Nothing like a little bus-borne death march from Memphis, Tenn., to Orlando, Fla., for a three-game set starting the evening you arrive in town.
But that's not the roughest part of pro ball for Ingle and many others in the trade. His wife, the former Rebecca Taylor of Savannah, Ga., (he calls her Bebe, pronounced "B-B") and two children, 7-year-old son Taylor and 4-year-old daughter Meaghan, will be staying back home in Forest City.
"They'll be coming up on weekends, but a lot of times, we'll be on the road or have a split weekend at home and on the road. It's going to be tough. Sometimes, you go on a 8-12-day road and come back home and it seems like they've grown so much and learned so much more since the last time you saw them.
"It's hard on them. It's hard on my wife. She has a good job, but she says she just has to stay busy so she won't miss me. It's hard on me. It's a sacrifice."
The good part is that he gets to go to the ballpark every day. There, he's got a lot of fine fellows to work with. Cloyd Boyer, of the baseball Boyers of Missouri, is the pitching coach and a former P-Braves manager who has spent a lifetime in professional baseball. Randy Phillips, a Greenville guy, is an all-around coach.
Former big leaguers such as John Grubb, who will spend at least the first two weeks of the season here, and the likes of Willie Stargell and Luke Appling will be cruising through as roving hitting instructors.
Said Ingle: "It's going to be exciting."
by CNB