Don Zimmer - # 79

He was number 79 on the list.

Don Zimmer, who spent 66 years in baseball, dies at 83

Don Zimmer, one of baseball’s most recognizable and beloved figures, who played on the Brooklyn Dodgers’ only championship team in 1955 and later was a coach for a New York Yankees dynasty that won four World Series titles, died Wednesday at a hospital in Dunedin, Fla. He was 83.

His death was announced by the Tampa Bay Rays, the team he worked for as an adviser. He had been in failing health since a stroke in 2012 and had complications from heart-valve surgery in April.

After signing his first professional contract in 1949, Mr. Zimmer went on to spend his entire working life in baseball — 66 years as of this season. He finished his 12-year major-league playing career with the Washington Senators in 1965, managed four teams in the major leagues and gained perhaps his greatest renown as a feisty coach of the Yankees from 1996 to 2003.

He was on the same Dodgers team as Jackie Robinson in the 1950s, played under gnomic Hall of Fame manager Casey Stengel with the original New York Mets and stayed in the game long enough to be a mentor to Yankees stars Derek Jeter, Andy Pettitte and Mariano Rivera. Jeter would rub Mr. Zimmer’s bald head for good luck.

During baseball’s long 162-game season, Mr. Zimmer could be counted on for comic relief. In 1999, after he was struck in the head by a foul ball in the Yankees’ dugout, Mr. Zimmer showed up for work the next day wearing a combat helmet.

He also had a deep knowledge of baseball, which he put to use as the Yankees’ bench coach. Between 1996 and 2000, as Mr. Zimmer sat beside manager Joe Torre, offering advice on strategy, the team won the World Series four times in five years.

“I don’t want no credit for doin’ anything,” Mr. Zimmer said in a 2001 interview with Esquire magazine. “I sit next to Joe like a bump on a log — that’s the way I leave it.”

Despite his jovial ways, Mr. Zimmer was known throughout his career as a spirited competitor who never backed down from a challenge. He was considered a future star in 1953, when he was struck in the temple by a pitch while playing in the minor leagues. Players did not wear protective batting helmets in those days, and Mr. Zimmer suffered a broken skull.

He did not regain consciousness for 13 days. Holes were drilled in his skull to relieve pressure on his brain. Contrary to a commonly repeated story, Mr. Zimmer did not have a metal plate in his skull. The holes were filled with metallic plugs. By the beginning of the 1954 season, he was back in action.

“You know what the pitchers did?” he told ESPN baseball writer Tim Kurkjian. “They threw at me to see if I was scared. I moved closer to the plate.”

During the 2003 American League Championship Series between the Yankees and the Boston Red Sox, Mr. Zimmer ran on the field during a brawl. He charged Red Sox pitcher Pedro Martinez, who sidestepped the roundhouse punches of the portly 72-year-old coach and flung him to the ground.

Mr. Zimmer apologized the next day for embarrassing his team and the game of baseball, although many thought no apologies were needed. Asked why he ran toward Martinez, he said, “I sure wasn’t going over there to kiss him.”

 

Mr. Zimmer was also one of the few Yankees employees willing to stand up to the team’s often-tyrannical owner, George Steinbrenner. During one ­locker-room meeting, Steinbrenner lashed out at his club, saying, “If there is anybody in this room who thinks they are doing everything they can to help the Yankees, win, you can leave right now.”

 

It was really just George's way of saying everybody needed to work harder, and I'm sure he didn't expect anyone to take him up on his offer. But the words were barely out of his mouth when Zim popped up out of his chair and marched right out of the room without so much as a sideways glance at George. I think George was so taken aback that he didn't say a word, and suddenly Zim was gone.

Zimmer made his major league debut in 1954, filling in briefly for Pee Wee Reese, the Dodgers’ future Hall of Fame shortstop and Zimmer’s boyhood idol. He hit 15 home runs in 88 games for the Dodgers’ 1955 World Series championship team, but he endured a second severe beaning in 1956 against the Cincinnati Reds. It left his cheekbone shattered and his eyesight damaged.

“All I’ve ever been is a simple baseball man, but it’s never ceased to amaze me how so many far more accomplished people I’ve met in this life wanted to be one, too,” he said in “The Zen of Zim” (2004), a book written with Bill Madden. “What a game, this baseball!”

In a passage from Mel Stottlemyre' 2007 autobiography, the Yankees' former pitching coach recounts the events that started Don Zimmer's feud with George Steinbrenner, which eventually led to Zimmer resigning from the Yankees in 2003.

The time was the spring of 1999, when Zimmer was forced to manage as Joe Torre was recuperating from prostate cancer surgery. Steinbrenner had thrown a fit at the end of spring training over Hideki Irabu's failure to cover first base, insulting him by publicly calling him a "fat, puss-y toad."

As a result, Irabu refused to pitch, and stayed behind in Tampa as the team flew to the west coast to start the season, forcing Zimmer to pencil in Ramiro Mendoza to start the third game of the season instead.

However, Steinbrenner quickly patched things up with Irabu in Tampa and then had organizational pitching coach Billy Connors call Zimmer to tell him he wanted Irabu to start the third game as originally planned. Zimmer refused, saying he'd already told the team of the change in plans.

George apparently decided not to push Zim any further on the matter. Irabu, meanwhile, showed up while we were in Los Angeles for an exhibition game, and he was very contrite. He apologized to the team and told us he was ready to pitch whenever we needed him.

Mendoza wound up making the start against the Oakland A's, pitching eight shutout innings, and, with us holding a 4-0 lead, Zim and I decided we'd use Irabu to pitch the ninth. He got the last three outs and afterward Zim joked that everything had worked out perfectly.

"George said he wanted Irabu to pitch on Wednesday," he told reporters, "and he did."

He was called "The Gerbil" by his nemesis, Red Sox pitcher Bill Lee, was a journeyman infielder for 12 years and an original member of the New York Mets, a team which lost a still-record 120 games in its inaugural season of 1962.

Don Zimmer gained a reputation as one of the best third base coaches ever, a field position that, arguably, is second in importance only to that of the manager himself. In an example of the Peter Principle at work ("In a hierarchically structured administration, people tend to be promoted up to their "level of incompetence"), after Red Sox manager Darrell Johnson was fired during the 1976 season, Zim was raised to the cat-bird seat. From 1976 through the time he was fired in 1980, the great Red Sox teams he managed consistently failed to reach the post-season, despite featuring such Hall of Famers as Carl Yastrzemski, Carlton Fisk, Ferguson Jenkins and Dennis Eckersley, and such Hall of Fame-caliber players as Jim Rice, Dwight Evans, Fred Lynn and 'George Boomer Scott'.

“Great baseball man. A baseball lifer. Was a mentor to me,” teary-eyed Yankees manager Joe Girardi said.

Zimmer played on the original New York Mets, saw his Boston Red Sox beaten by Bucky Dent’s playoff homer and got tossed to the ground by Pedro Martinez during a brawl.

Zimmer’s No. 66 Rays jersey had been worn recently by longtime Tampa Bay third base coach Tom Foley in tribute — the team wanted that, and MLB decided a coach should wear it.

“I loved Zim. I loved his passion. He was a great, great guy. He was a great baseball guy,” Yankees executive Hank Steinbrenner told The Associated Press. “Everybody loved him.”

Zimmer was the 1989 NL Manager of the Year with the Cubs and was at Yankee Stadium for three perfect games, by Don Larsen in the 1956 World Series and by David Cone and David Wells in the late 1990s.

“Zim was a great man, and there are no words to explain what he brought to us and what he meant to me,” Rays star Evan Longoria said.

“He taught me a lot of things, and those days of sitting in the dugout with him will be missed,” he said.

Said Rays pitcher David Price: “Zim was a very special person to all of us. A very special person in baseball, period.”

 

Teams

As player

 

    Brooklyn / Los Angeles Dodgers (1954–1959)

    Chicago Cubs (1960–1961)

    New York Mets (1962)

    Cincinnati Reds (1962)

    Los Angeles Dodgers (1963)

    Washington Senators (1963–1965)

    Toei Flyers (1966)

 

As manager

 

    San Diego Padres (1972–1973)

    Boston Red Sox (1976–1980)

    Texas Rangers (1981–1982)

    Chicago Cubs (1988–1991)

 

As coach

 

    Montreal Expos (1971)

    San Diego Padres (1972)

    Boston Red Sox (1974–1976)

    New York Yankees (1983)

    Chicago Cubs (1984–1986)

    New York Yankees (1986)

    San Francisco Giants (1987)

    Boston Red Sox (1992)

    Colorado Rockies (1993–1995)

    New York Yankees (1996–2003)

    Tampa Bay Devil Rays / Rays (2004–2014)