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manager Piniella. A year later Piniella was gone, too. Piniella moved on to manage the Seattle Mariners, and in 1998 he brought in the 62-year-old Williams as pitching coach.
e 63-year-old Williams got involved in a brawl during a Yankees-Mariners game on August 7, 1999. Yankees and Mariners pitchers exchanged beanballs, leading to a bench-clearing brawl in the ninth inning after Mariners pitcher Frank Rodriguez attacked Yankees catcher Joe Girardi in the on-deck circle. In the melee, Williams grabbed Yankees slugger Paul O’Neill, 30 years his junior, by the neck to pull him out of the ght.16 Despite his toughness in a brawl, new GM Pat Gillick chose not to retain Williams after the season.
Seattle was Williams’s last stop as a pitching coach, but it did not end his work in baseball. He followed old friend Lou Piniella to the Rays when Piniella became their manager; Williams scouted for them. As late as 2010, when he was 74 years old, he scouted for the Washington Nationals before o cially retiring from baseball.
8 Ibid.
9 Neyer, 116.
10 Ibid.
11 Tom Owen, baseballbytheletters.blogspot.com/2010/07/stan- williams-escapes-baseball-card.html
12 Richard Lemanski, Lakeland Ledger, February 27, 1995. 13 Mark Frost, Game Six, 62.
14 Frost, 63.
15 Cairns, 341-42.
16 Buster Olney, New York Times, August 8, 1999. 17 Irv Moss, Denver Post, April 18, 2013.
In April 2013 the former Denver high school star was inducted into the Colorado Sports Hall of Fame. Even at the age of 77 he still had the competitive spirit. He told the audience at his induction, “I would still want to pitch every day.”17
Sources
Cairns, Bob. Pen Men (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1992). Durocher, Leo, with Ed Linn. Nice Guys Finish Last (New York:
Simon and Schuster, 1975).
Frost, Mark. Game Six: Cincinnati, Boston and the 1975 World Series (New York: Hyperion, 2009).
James, Bill. e Bill James Guide to Baseball Managers (New York: Scribners, 1997).
James, Bill. Solid Fool ’s Gold (Chicago: ACTA Sports, 2011). Neyer, Rob. Rob Neyer’s Big Book of Baseball Blunders (New York:
Fireside Books, 2006).
Boston Globe. Denver Post.
Lakeland (Florida) Ledger. Los Angeles Times.
New York Times.
baseballreference.com.
sabr.org. Baseballbytheletters.blogspot.com.
Notes
1 Bill James, Solid Fool ’s Gold, 91-93.
2 Irv Moss, Denver Post, October 26, 2007.
3 Bill James. e Bill James Guide to Baseball Managers, 202-204.
4 Bob Cairns, Pen Men, 207-208.
5 Cairns, 210.
6 Rob Neyer, Rob Neyer’s Big Book of Baseball Blunders, 113, 114.
7 Neyer, 115.