from The Bergen Record

By BILL PENNINGTON
Sports Columnist

Oct. 19, 1996

NEW YORK -- The biggest, most public moments of his baseball life have swathed Don Zimmer in thorough disappointment.

As manager of the 1978 Boston Red Sox, he watched a 14-game lead dissolve, and then, a playoff game lead evaporate when Bucky Dent's pop fly landed over the ledge and into the net at Fenway Park's left field. Eleven years later, he was reinvented as the sage manager of the division-winning 1989 Chicago Cubs. For that accomplishment, he got to witness a fielding error late in a pivotal postseason game, costing him a berth in the World Series.

But Don Zimmer is back for another session in the dugout spotlight. This year, at 65 years old, the man they called "The Gerbil" in Boston is "The Confidant" to Joe Torre, forever shoulder to shoulder with the manager of the 1996 American League champion Yankees.

Zimmer, who has announced his retirement so often you'd think he was a prize fighter, is a part of every baseball scene in Torre's heavily documented October story. And when the World Series opens tonight, his role will only be magnified.

"He deserves to be a big part of our story, and our success," Torre says. "I can't tell you how much more secure he makes me feel as a manager. We sit there and discuss strategy during a game. We kid around during the game. We react and we calm each other.

"I will come up with an idea that I might think is bizarre, but I get to bounce it off him -- off a guy who has managed four different clubs -- and it reassures me about what I'm thinking. That has been very big for me."

Because he's had the misfortune of managing for two of the more accursed franchises in American sports -- the Red Sox and the Cubs -- and because of his Popeye-like appearance, and maybe because he was the opening day third baseman for the unblessed 1962 Mets, baseball fans may reckon Zimmer as luckless, or at least as having a star-crossed baseball life.

Zimmer laughs at such a suggestion.

"I'm going to be in my fifth World Series," Zimmer said inside the Yankees clubhouse, referring to his three visits with the Dodgers in the Fifties and his trip to the 1975 Series as the third base coach of the Red Sox.

"I've been around for, involved in, or close to some of the greatest games and greatest times in baseball. I came up in what they now call the golden era of baseball. That's why, when I retired last year, I could do so knowing I'd seen a lot. And that was that."

Of course, "that" wasn't that for Zimmer. He did walk out of the Colorado Rockies dugout in the fifth inning of a game June 5, 1995, giving up his job as bench coach to manager Don Baylor. And he did go home to Treasure Island, Fla., and to his wife of 45 years -- former high school sweetheart Jean, who he married at home plate of a minor league park in Elmira, N.Y. And he did tell all who asked -- reporters mostly -- that he was retired, out of baseball, done, kaput.

"I was retired and I wasn't going to be calling anyone for a job -- not anyone," says Zimmer, who also retired as Butch Hobson's bench coach in Boston in 1992. "But in my heart, I wondered if there might be another chance at a championship with some team."

And then the phone rang.

"I called Don and asked him to be my bench coach," Torre says. "There was this silence at the other end of the phone."

"I was dumbfounded," Zimmer says. "And then I thought about my friendship with George Steinbrenner."

Torre: "He said to me: 'Did George ask you to call me?' "

Zimmer: "I just wanted to know whose idea it was."

Torre: "I didn't really have to convince him it was my idea, because he was No. 1 on my list and he knew I was sincere about that."

"It's been one of the most exciting seasons I've ever been around," Zimmer says.

"Getting Don next to me is one of the greatest moves I've ever made," Torre says.

Torre and Zimmer have been managing so long, and in so many places, that people forget how good they were as players. Zimmer was not in Torre's class as a hitter, but he was on some stellar teams, including the championship Dodgers of 1955 and 1959.

Zimmer was fleet, slim, and a spark plug of a player who once stole home 10 times in a minor league season. He tripled in his first major league at-bat, homered in his first American League at-bat, and played every position except pitcher in a 12-year major league career. He was seriously beaned in 1953 and 1956, and both times could not return to the field until the next season.

As a manager, he is also probably more accomplished than most remember. He won 99, 97, and 91 games with the Red Sox and was National League Manager of the Year in 1989. Overall, his managerial record is 885-858.

He was the starting second baseman in the seventh game of the 1955 World Series when the Dodgers finally brought the title home to Brooklyn. And Zimmer likes to tell the story of how Dodgers manager Walter Alston removed him from that game in the seventh inning, sending Junior Gilliam to second base and allowing Sandy Amoros to be in left field so he could make his famous, game-saving catch off the bat of Yogi Berra.

"He's entering his 48th year in baseball," Torre says. "How could I not take advantage of a resource like that?

"And besides, he's a gambler and I like that. Not the horses. I mean, in the dugout during the game. Early in the year when we both thought we'd have to run some because we didn't have much power, he was right with me on that. And that helped."

Zimmer has been right with Torre all along. Including the pennant clinching victory in Baltimore, when Zimmer was the first to hug and congratulate Torre on his first World Series berth.

"I wanted that win so bad for him," Zimmer said. "That's the thing. With all he's gone through, how could you not root for a guy like that? He's handled these players so well. He's had to bench .300 hitters, guys who are going into the Hall of Fame.

"He's done the right thing, he's done what he had to, and those players have remained his biggest supporters. That says a lot about the man. I'm just thrilled."

For Joe Torre, or for himself?

"For Joe," Zimmer says. "For Joe, first. And well, then for me, too."

Torre and Zimmer, inseparable again.