THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Thursday, April 6, 1995 TAG: 9504060492
SECTION: SPORTS PAGE: C1 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY TOM ROBINSON, STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: NORFOLK LENGTH: Long : 140 lines
You play baseball by a code, says Colbert Dale ``Toby'' Harrah. A code that says nothing about getting to know your enemy, the very people who want to see you lose, for pete's sake. And what's worse than losing?
So that is why Harrah, the Norfolk Tides' manager, vows that his guys will keep to themselves this season during pregame drills, the traditional time for ballplayers to wander across the lines to renew acquaintances.
``Fraternizing. That's my biggest pet peeve,'' Harrah says, the words jumping staccato from beneath a golden mustache. ``I don't think it's necessary. This is supposed to be competitive.''
Harrah illustrates his point. He played 16 years as a big league infielder, four as an All-Star, and early on, the great Orioles righthander Jim Palmer had his number. But as they became veterans, Palmer broke the sound barrier between the players. Palmer humanized himself, and to Harrah it made all the difference.
``He started saying, `Hi, how's it going,' '' Harrah says. ``And I started wearing him out.''
A leather-faced adopted Texan who lives on 36 acres in Fort Worth, Harrah doesn't mess with the honorable tenets of the game, the foundation of a life in pro baseball that begins its 29th season tonight: Play hard. Play right. Get dirty. Answer the bell, which Harrah did with a Ripken-esque fervor for nine years in the Texas heat.
Above all, play to win.
``I came to play the game,'' says Harrah, 46, who succeeds his former boss with the Texas Rangers, Bobby Valentine, in Norfolk. ``I was a player. I wasn't a defensive player or an offensive player. I wasn't a base-stealer, I wasn't a home-run hitter. I was a player. I came to compete. That was it.''
In truth, Harrah was all those things at various times for four American League clubs - the Washington Senators, Rangers, Cleveland Indians and New York Yankees - from 1971 through 1986.
Once a light-hitting shortstop, Harrah in 1977 hit 27 home runs and led the league with 109 walks for the Rangers. The next year, he stole 31 bases. In '82, he hit .304, got hit by pitches 12 times and played all 162 games for Cleveland. He played shortstop, third base and second base.
And from the time he broke in with Ted Williams' Senators for eight games in 1969 - he was 0 for 1 in that brief audition - till the day he quit, Harrah was a good fielder with one of the game's great throwing arms - an arm that allowed Harrah to throw a no-hitter, he says, in the only high school game he ever pitched.
``I can't think of anybody else who had that kind of arm strength,'' says New York Mets coach Mike Cubbage, Harrah's former Texas teammate, who admired Harrah's example. ``He played the game the old-school way, the way it was intended to be played. Whatever it took.
``He wasn't a dirty player, but whatever it took to win, he was going to try to do it. He was one of those guys who had it in his blood.''
The baseball ethic developed on the fields of Marion County, Ohio, where Harrah's family moved from his birthplace of Sissonville, W.Va. One of nine children, Harrah actually started at Ohio Northern University as a football player before he received an offer to sign with the Philadelphia Phillies, for $500, at Christmas 1966.
``I thought it was all the money in the world,'' Harrah says. It wasn't the first time the money didn't match Harrah's ability, but that says more about Harrah than anything else. Money is and was important. But the game was something more.
In the dawning era of a representative for every player, Harrah jumped into the boat of noted agent Jerry Kapstein. For one year. He ditched Kapstein after he saw the percentage the agent took from his first deal. Harrah and his accountant and best friend John Esch handled contract talks together the rest of his career.
``We had to keep as a closely guarded secret that Toby would've basically played for meal money,'' Esch says.
Says Harrah: ``I knew there were times I didn't get what I was worth. Every time I went in to talk contract, when I came out I knew I could've gotten more. But I was pretty happy with what I ended up getting.
``I just always felt that I wanted (baseball) to be more than a business. I wanted it to be a game, and I wanted it to be personal. And it was personal up until the last couple of years that I played.''
Harrah labored those final seasons, a result of heart surgery after his fine 1982 season with the Indians. A murmur he had always lived with had worsened, and surgery was advised by more than one doctor.
Harrah, then 34, had the operation but never regained his stride. He never again hit more than nine home runs, and in 1984 he suffered his worst season. Harrah hit .217 as a platoon player for the Yankees, then engineered a trade back to Texas, where he rebounded to hit .270 his next-to-last season.
``That's the only thing I really feel bad about,'' Harrah said of his time with the Yankees, who had traded for him. ``I had never worked so hard to get ready to play. Growing up, the Yankees were my team. Mickey Mantle was my favorite player. But I didn't play well for them.''
Upon retiring, Harrah was retained by the Rangers as their Triple-A manager in Oklahoma City. He was there two seasons before Valentine promoted him to his staff.
Valentine was fired in July 1992 and Harrah was appointed to manage the Rangers' final 76 games, in which he compiled a 32-44 record. But Kevin Kennedy was hired to manage in 1993, and Harrah returned to the minors as a hitting instructor before the Rangers' new management cut him loose last winter.
``I was better at the end than I was when I started,'' Harrah says when asked if he had failed as a big-league manager. ``I played kids at the time. Now, I knew winning was important; I wasn't born yesterday. But I also knew that in order to win next year, we had to look at some players and see what they could do.''
So Harrah comes to the Tides to develop kids, and with his eyes on another big league job, like most Triple-A managers. And besides excessive chit-chat with the opponent, the thing he says he will tolerate least in his players is lack of effort. Which is hardly surprising.
Harrah once fell 25 feet from a roof onto a brick porch before spring training, paint from a fallen can blinding him. He couldn't raise his arms for a week, played in no exhibition games, then got four hits on opening day.
He was hit by pitches 63 times, and twice they broke his hand. Once he missed a month with appendicitis. The summer heat in Arlington was oppressive. But the next day off Harrah asks for will be his first.
``All I know, and I don't know much,'' Harrah says, ``is I can't think of anything else to do but go to the ballpark, put a uniform on and compete to win.'' ILLUSTRATION: [Color Photo]
MARTIN SMITH-RODDEN
Staff
``I was a player. I came to compete. That was it,'' Toby Harrah
says. Now a manager, he expects nothing less of his Tides.
COLBERT DALE "TOBY" HARRAH
Born: Oct. 26, 1948, in Sissonville, W.Va.
Raised: New Bloomington, Ohio.
Resides: Fort Worth, Texas.
Height: 6-0
Weight: 180
Family: Once divorced. Married to Janet Beane for 16 years.
Children, Toby, 21; Haley, 16; Katie, 14; Thomas, 11.
Major league experience: Infielder for 16 years with the
Washington Senators, Texas Rangers, Cleveland Indians and New York
Yankees. Lifetime batting average of .264 Four-time American League
All-Star. Rangers' all-time leader in runs scored (582) and walks
(668). Second in games (1,220) and hits (1,086).
Managerial experience: Triple-A Oklahoma City in 1987 (69-71) and
1988 (67-74). Interim manager of Texas Rangers in 1992 (32-44).
KEYWORDS: PROFILE by CNB