Gene Collier: Thrift Went His Own Way

Thursday, September 21, 2006
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

In the small Virginia hamlet of Locust Hill, Mr. and Mrs. Thrift ran a Depression Era general store off Route 33, peddling everything from seeds to saddles, milk to mulch, cat food to corsets.

Mrs. Thrift was a schoolteacher, but her brightest pupil was at home at her feet, an intellectual sponge she somehow named Sydnor. When it was finally time to unleash young Sydnor on the educational system, an administrative debate swirled around whether to start Syd in the fourth grade, his mental aptitudes were so extraordinary. The compromise made him the smartest kid in the second-grade room, and he would be the smartest kid in just about every room for what was left of his 77 years.

When Syd Thrift died the other day in a Delaware hospital, he was still the most successful Pirates general manager of the past 20 years, even though he had lost still another front-office power struggle and departed early in 1989. In a book he published a few years later, he coined the term "corporate masturbation" for the kind of business model-driven baseball he felt afflicted certain organizations, not to name names.

"I'm an advocate of excellence in a close-minded community," Syd lamented.

Another favorite platitude: "The worst thing you can have is traditional people."

Syd Thrift was a thinker of the first order who disdained the known and embraced the unknown. The ways in which he tried to bring science, psychology, mathematics, probability, physiology, ophthalmology and homespun bird-dog wisdom (he once told Branch Rickey that all minor-league managers should have to spend a year training a bird dog to learn how to make things perfectly clear) to the closed society of hard-line baseball knowledge was as revealing as it was often downright comic.

Standing around the batting cage the day before he was fired by George Steinbrenner later in that summer of 1989, Syd didn't want to talk about the particulars of his first baseball stop after the Pirates, but pulling a hot dog from the inside pocket of his ever-rumpled sportcoat, he offered a wonderfully sarcastic summary:

"One thing about workin' 'round here," he said in his near perfect Foghorn Leghorn cadence. "There's no pressure!"

Syd threw his head back and laughed, and though a lot of baseball people and a lot of the game's old-guard executives found him less than amusing, the Pirates laughed their way through the late 1980s due mostly to the trades the sly old Virginia bird-dogger pulled on some supposedly more sophisticated front offices. He got Doug Drabek from the New York Yankees, Andy Van Slyke and Mike LaValliere from the St. Louis Cardinals, Bobby Bonilla from the Chicago White Sox and rushed Barry Bonds out of the Pirates' Hawaiian minor-league outpost, all of them forming the nucleus of three consecutive National League East champions.

A few years before that, he'd hired then 41-year-old Jim Leyland, who was working on an undistinguished career as a baseball lifer somewhere among the army of anonymous baseline coaches. Leyland, who had learned the game in every traditional way, came to respect Syd Thrift immensely.

"I don't think you can buy everything that's new," Leyland once told me of Thrift's constant innovations. "You can't get away from the concept that the game is still played the way it's been played, but it doesn't cost anything to listen. A lot of people getting involved in gimmicks, but Syd has a reason for everything he does."

Syd's great mission, in baseball and in life, was, as he often said, "to find out the 'why'."

Why does a four-seam fastball fly harder than a two-seamer? Why does a runner get picked off first base? Why don't more teams employ my time-measured lead theory?

That was one of his greatest hits. The time-measured lead. Just about anything that could be measured, Syd would measure. He once convinced Pirates assistant general manager Larry Doughty that the height of pop-ups should be measured, as it might reveal something about the batter's swing. In time-measured lead theory, the pitcher's pickoff move to first would be timed, and the runner positioned so that he was never too far off the bag that he couldn't get back in 1.4 seconds, or whatever the pitcher's move typically consumed.

Syd was a talking river of theories, and it didn't matter who was listening or who was laughing. When Bonilla launched a homer into the upper deck at Three Rivers Stadium, the only player other than Willie Stargell to do so, Thrift figured Bonilla had finally bought into his theories on the so-called two-strike approach to hitting.

I asked Bonilla to outline his understanding of that theory. He looked at me as though I should quickly name my planet of origin.

"There's an amazing thing about him," Leyland said at the time. "He can be talking to you around the batting cage and judging a player at the same time. It's amazing how thorough he is that way. He can come into the clubhouse and be laughing and joking, but out of the corner of his eye he'll see something that's not quite right, somebody acting unusual or something."
And that would be the start of it.

And then Sydnor W. Thrift Jr. would find out the 'why.'

And pretty much all we've known around these Pirates since is the why not.

(Gene Collier can be reached at gcollier@post-gazette or 412-263-1283. )