Major League Baseball
Hargrove, Little have much in common

By Larry Stone
Seattle Times staff reporter

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Mike Hargrove and Grady Little, the two known finalists for the Mariners' managerial job, are united by more than the motorcycles each acquired in this past year of managerial hiatus — a Harley for Hargrove, a Kawasaki for Little.

Both are 54-year-old Texans with folksy manners and strong reputations as players' managers. They have traveled intertwining paths in their recent baseball lives. And both are lifers in the sport who, in their current positions as high-level advisers, still hunger to manage after getting fired within 28 days of each other following the 2003 season.

Little interviewed for Hargrove's old Baltimore Orioles job last year, days after he was let go by the Boston Red Sox following a wild-card season in which they came within five outs of Boston's first World Series appearance since 1986.

Little's ouster came in the wake of his hotly contested, but ill-fated, decision to leave in Pedro Martinez against the New York Yankees in the eighth inning of the decisive game of the American League Championship Series.

Asked last week about the challenge of taking over a Mariners team that had lost 99 games, Little's countrified wit surfaced.

"I'm coming from an area 12 months ago where I don't think anything is difficult," said Little, who won 93 and 95 games in his two Boston seasons and received solid support from his Red Sox players after his ouster.

In 2000-01, Little spent two years as Cleveland's bench coach under Charlie Manuel, who succeeded Hargrove when the Indians fired him in 1999 (and is currently a candidate for the vacant Philadelphia Phillies' managerial job, as is Little).

Little preceded his two years in Cleveland with a two-year stint as Boston Red Sox bench coach under Jimy Williams, another reputed Mariners candidate.

Hargrove managed the Indians in a period of remarkable renaissance, winning five straight division titles and putting them in two World Series. In 1997, the Indians were one out from the franchise's first title since 1948 before the Florida Marlins rallied to win; Hargrove's record in nine seasons was a sterling 721-591.

Fired after the Indians squandered a two-game lead to the Red Sox in the 1999 division series, Hargrove moved immediately to Baltimore, where he failed to revive the Orioles. After a 91-loss season in 2003, bringing his overall record to 275-372, Hargrove was fired — though it should be noted that Jim Beattie and Mike Flanagan, the co-general managers who let him go after their first season on the job, inherited Hargrove and have not prospered under his successor, Lee Mazzilli.

Hargrove spent this year working for Cleveland GM Mark Shapiro, while Little was an adviser to Cubs GM Jim Hendry.

Shapiro yesterday called Hargrove "a consummate baseball man, very strong, very consistent, with a tremendous amount of baseball experience and knowledge."

There were intimations at both Cleveland and Baltimore that management was looking for a more fiery presence in the dugout — a similar lament to one that has been associated with fired Mariners manager Bob Melvin. But Shapiro believes Hargrove's passion is unassailable.

"He's a model of consistency and extremely patient," Shapiro said. "In this game, if you're able to maintain those things in the face of some commotion around you, you're often rewarded. In Cleveland, a lot of our success was due to his patience and consistency."

Little's route to a major-league managerial job was a testament to perseverance. After taking a four-year break in the late 1970s to try his hand as a cotton farmer in Texas, Little managed 16 years in the minor leagues for Baltimore and Atlanta — so successfully that Baseball America named him the top minor-league manager of the past 20 years.

After several major-league interviews failed to land him a job, Little finally was hired by the Red Sox in March 2002, lauded by CEO Larry Lucchino as having "beneath the charm and the NASCAR exterior a real quiet confidence and honesty and respect."

The Red Sox, of course, seemed to have a different opinion after the 2003 playoffs, though apparently the Martinez decision was less a factor in Little's ouster than his reported reluctance to adhere to the Red Sox emphasis on heavy statistical analysis. Yet his players praised him after his stormy departure.

"The bottom line is that Grady was an unbelievable person," Kevin Millar told the Boston Globe. "How he dealt with 25 guys with 25 egos and 25 different salaries might sometimes have gotten overlooked, but he did an unbelievable job."

Shapiro, who was assistant GM during Little's tenure in Cleveland, called him "a tremendously positive person, a great communicator, and a great baseball man."

"He's someone who has grinded it out with years of experience in the minor leagues, out of pure passion for the game. Coming out of that, he's seen and experienced almost everything. He brings an infinite amount of knowledge to the game."

Larry Stone: 206-464-3146 or lstone@seattletimes.com