Baseball’s Lachemann brothers don’t know what the week leading up to the Super Bowl has been like for brothers John and Jim Harbaugh; the Lachemanns haven’t had the equivalent World Series experience that the Harbaughs have had with the Super Bowl. Born exactly 15 months apart, John, 50, coaches the Baltimore Ravens, Jim, 49, the San Francisco 49ers.
But Rene Lachemann said, “Each one is getting their team prepared. So much is going on in football. When it’s all done and over with, since they can’t meet for Thanksgiving, maybe they can for the Fourth of July and the winner has the right to say ‘ok, bring me a hamburger or a beer.’”
“That’s how brothers are,” he added. “Whoever wins will needle the other. It’s only human nature. We still battle in everything.”
The Lachemann brothers, Rene and Marcel, hold a unique place in modern baseball history. They are the only brothers who have managed in the major leagues since 1900, which is considered Major League Baseball’s modern era.
Although they have worn baseball uniforms for many years, pacing back and forth in dugouts far longer than the Harbaugh brothers have stood on the sidelines, the Lachemanns have not managed their teams into the World Series, let alone managed them against each other in the World Series.
The Harbaughs coached their teams to the Super Bowl this year, making them the first brothers to coach against each other as head coaches in the National Football League’s championship game.
According to Elias Sports Bureau, three other sets of baseball brothers managed in the majors before 1900 and before the advent of the World Series: Harry and George Wright, Deacon and Will White, Dave and Jack Rowe. But the Lachemanns have been the only major league managing brothers in the 120 years since Harry Wright completed his 23-year, 2,209-game, Hall-of-Fame career in 1893.
Rene, a catcher when he played, managed eight seasons with three teams – Mariners, Brewers, Marlins – plus a game with the Cubs in 2002 after they fired Don Baylor.
Marcel was a pitcher who after his playing career only wanted to be a pitching coach. He was the Marlins’ and Rene’s pitching coach in 1994.
“Marcel had worked for the Angels a long time,” Rene recalled of Marcel’s nine-year tenure as the Angels’ pitching coach. “When I got the job with the Marlins, I brought my brother in as pitching coach. He was highly sought after at the time. The middle of the next season the Angels called. He was never looking to manage.”
“It was definitely different being with your brother,” Marcel said. “I always had a very good relationship with the manager. The relationship between manager and pitching coach is very important. To do it with your brother is special. We used to sit down after games and talk for hours.”
Lachemann confirmed what his younger brother said, that what he really wanted to do was be a pitching coach. “When Bill Bavasi called and asked for permission to talk to me, it caught me by surprise,” he said.
Marcel nevertheless became the Angels’ manager, and the former executive chef of the Biltmore Hotel in Los Angeles had two managers in the family.
“It made my dad extremely happy, having two sons managing major league baseball teams,” Rene said.
It got even better. Bill Lachemann’s oldest son, also Bill, a long-time minor league coach, became Marcel’s bullpen coach, giving the Lachemann family three members in major league uniforms.
“Dad was tickled pink to be able to say all three of his sons were in the big leagues,” Bill Lachemann said.
Prospects, however, did not look bright for Marcel’s first full season in Anaheim; the Angels had a poor 30-44 record for his part of the 1994 season.
“We were kind of in a rebuilding process with the Angels,” Marcel said by telephone last week of the 1995 season. “We had a lot of older players. We weren’t going anywhere so we figured we’d get some of the young guys in the system, guys like Jim Edmonds and J.T. Snow.
“We had a young team. We went on a tear after the All-Star break and built an 11-game lead. We came very close.”
Marcel managed the 1995 Angels to a 64-38 record and a 10 ½-game division lead at mid-August.
But Rene’s team was not keeping pace. At mid-August the Marlins were 18 ½ games from first, and their deficit only grew as the season went on. The Lachemanns were not destined that season to be the first brothers to manage against each other in the World Series.
The Angels, as it turned out, collapsed in the last seven weeks of the season, averaging two losses in every three games for a 14-28 record.
“We wound up in a tie for first,” Bill said, “and we got beat by Randy Johnson in a playoff game in Seattle. It was frustrating.”
“It drove him crazy,” Rene said of Marcel and the Angels’ collapse, adding, “He had a better chance of getting there” – the World Series – “than I did, but it didn’t last very long.”
Worse, the patriarch of the Lachemann family died at the age of 95 four days before the Angels’ three-hit playoff loss to Johnson.
Marcel didn’t make it through the 1996 season. He resigned after 111 games and a 52-59 record.
Rene’s teams never had a .500 record and never finished higher than fourth place.
In the second of the many seasons he served as a coach, though, Rene was a strike away from winning a World Series ring.
“We were a strike away 10 times,” said Lachemann, referring to Game 6 of the 1986 World Series. He was the Red Sox third base coach. “Everything was working for us. My two kids were with me. They were in the clubhouse. All the stuff was set up there. When we got the first two guys, I said this is over. Ten times we had two strikes.”
But the Red Sox didn’t get the third strike before the Mets rallied in the 10th inning and Mookie Wilson’s grounder trickled between Bill Buckner’s legs.
“It was the highest up and lowest down in my entire life,” Lachemann said. “Ten times we had two strikes and couldn’t put the game away.”
Ring delayed until the 1989 World Series, the second of three straight Rene reached with the Oakland Athletics as their third base coach.
Now 67 years old, Rene will be Colorado’s first base coach this year, his 50th straight in professional baseball, joining the Rockies at the request of their new manager, Walt Weiss, who played for him in Florida.
“I’ve never really worked anywhere else,” Rene said.
“It’s close to 148 or 149 years between all three of us,” said big brother Bill, 78, a roving catching coordinator with the Angels. “It’s not work; it’s something we love to do. It’s a joy. Once it becomes work I’ll quit.”
Of his younger brothers, he said, “They enjoy what they do.
We’ve talked about it. I know there have been brothers in the big leagues, but I didn’t know they were the only managers.”
“All the stuff we’ve accomplished is from mom and dad,” Bill added of the brothers’ Swiss-born parents. “Our mom was from Switzerland, but she was a baseball lady. Our dad’s work habits were unbelievable. He worked 16 or 18 hours a day.”
Growing up in Los Angeles, Marcel and Rene “fought a lot,” Rene said. “He would tease me. I threw a paint brush at him once and it splattered a patio. I knew we’d be in trouble when my dad came home.” They were children at the time.
As teen-agers, Bill related, Marcel and Rene had “very successful” high school baseball careers. “We were all catchers,” Bill said. Marcel went to the University of Southern California and was successful as a pitcher there. Rene attended U.S.C. for only a semester, leaving to sign with the Kansas City Athletics.
“He was one of the youngest catchers in the big leagues,” Bill said of Rene, who played in his first major league game on this 20th birthday in 1965. But he hurt his arm, and his career ended three years and one month later in 1968, the year before Marcel pitched for the Athletics.
“We played together in the minors,” said Marcel, now 71 and a special assistant to the Angels’ general manager. “We were close growing up but never as close as when we were together in baseball.”
When they managed in the mid-90s, Rene said, “we were in different leagues, but we talked maybe once or twice a week. We talked about certain things. If there was a player in our league, he might have interest in what I thought of him. It was a dream being in the major leagues together.”
The dream, however, fell short of being in the World Series together.
METS UNLIKELY TO BEAR BURDEN OF BOURN
Perfect storm is a phrase I don’t care for. It is used in speech and writing so much that it has quickly become trite. However, the Mets’ predicament prompts me to make an exception and use it because the Mets are engulfed in the convergence of two factors that create their perfect storm.
The Mets desperately need an established outfielder, and there is a pretty good one available as a free agent. However, Michael Bourn would be costly to sign in two ways.
First, there is the asking price of Bourn’s agent, Scott Boras. However many millions that price is, it’s far more than the Mets want to or can spend, given their Madoff-impoverished status.
Second, there is the first-round draft choice they would lose if they signed Bourn because the Atlanta Braves made him a $13.3 million qualifying offer that he rejected.
Under ordinary circumstances, the Mets would pick 10th in next June’s draft and be exempt from losing the draft choice as compensation because the new collective bargaining draft rules exempt the first 10 selecting teams from having to compensate teams whose free agents they sign.
Next June’s draft, however, is not ordinary for the Mets. They will actually select 11th, bumped down a notch because the Pittsburgh Pirates did not sign their first-round pick last year, Mark Appel, a pitcher from Stanford.
In that circumstance, under the new rules, the Pirates will get a substitute selection in the first round next June but one notch below the spot in which they drafted last June.
Appel was the eighth player chosen last June, meaning the Pirates will select ninth next June, dropping Toronto to 10th and the Mets to 11th, putting the Mets in the perilous position of losing the draft pick if they sign Bourn.
The Mets are a mess, and the draft issue only makes them messier.
MLB AND NHL DOWN. NBA TO GO?
Could Donald Fehr turn his sports labor career into a trifecta? He is not prepared to say.
“I don’t make comments about internal affairs of other organizations,” Fehr said Saturday in response to a question about the shaky leadership of the National Basketball Players Association.
Fehr is head of the National Hockey League Players Association and recently reached agreement with the N.H.L. on a 10-year labor contract that ended a nearly four-month lockout. Previously he headed the baseball players union for 26 years.
The N.B.A.’s executive committee last Friday placed its leader, Billy Hunter, on indefinite leave following an independent audit that seriously questioned aspects of Hunter’s leadership.
While the union appears headed toward making a change, one veteran sports labor expert cautioned against jumping to conclusions. “That position is a long way from opening up,” he said.
The process, he added, is just beginning. “You don’t really know what’s going on,” he said, “who’s making decisions, who has the authority to make decisions.”
The N.B.A. union has had a succession of leaders in the past two decades and is currently experiencing internal strife.
While Fehr would have no negotiating responsibilities for years and would most likely leave the hockey union before the expiration of the new agreement, he has much work to do in fixing the union’s operation. But the idea of fixing another union could appeal to him.
TAKE YOUR PICK: DI OR CCCCCI
The National Football League stubbornly sticks to its Super Bowl Roman numerals though few fans can identify the year of a particular game designated by its Roman numeral.
However, in the spirit of the occasion, which is XLVII, this column is No. DI of the Web site that began in July 2008. I had intended noting D last week, but I got wrapped up in steroids and human growth hormone, and it escaped me. So here’s to DI and the start of the second 500 (don’t bet on it).