Remembering Sparky Anderson, South Dakota's shining diamond, as baseball’s postseason approaches
There’s not much baseball being played in South Dakota in October. This is a time for football, soccer and other activities. High schools are hosting alumni for homecoming festivities and games.
The traditional pheasant season starts on Oct. 21, and hunting is a passion for many South Dakotans and visitors to our state. Baseball? The diamonds are pretty quiet except for a few hardcore players.
But for some of us, this is the best time of year for baseball. The playoffs start today, October 2. For a month, there will be a game or games almost every day as the Great American Pastime builds to a crescendo with the World Series, which opens on Friday, Oct. 27.
A South Dakota native was a regular at the Fall Classic, leading his teams there five times, and winning three championships. It’s why I always think of George “Sparky” Anderson (seen above, left, with then President George W. Bush and another baseball legend, Yogi Berra, in a 2001 White House photo posted on wikimediacommons) every year as the leaves burst into color and the nights turn cool.
That’s when action heats up on a few diamonds across North America as the best ballplayers in the world compete for a title. It looks like an exciting month. The Minnesota Twins won the American League Central Division and are one of 12 teams that will battle for the 2023 title.
Anderson guided the Cincinnati Reds of the National League to the World Series in 1970, 1972, and 1975-76, winning championships those last two seasons. He led the American League’s Detroit Tigers to a championship in 1984.
Sparky was the first manager to win 100 games in both leagues and the first to win titles in both. Only Tony LaRussa, who won it all with the 1989 Oakland Athletics and the 2006 and 2011 St. Louis Cardinals, also led champions from the AL and NL.
While Sparky managed the “Detroits,” as he called his team, more than twice as long as he ran the Reds, his heart was always with the Big Red Machine. On his National Baseball Hall of Fame plaque, there is a C emblazoned on his cap.
He is the only South Dakota native in Cooperstown, and he was very proud of it. Anderson loved baseball his entire life. He was a great manager, but never a terrific player.
The wiry, hot-headed infielder — he earned the nickname Sparky — played one year in the big leagues, hitting just .218 with no homers for a last-place Phillies team in 1959.
He was a bush league player and manager for 17 years. Sparky was a third-base coach for the Padres in 1969 when he was offered the Cincinnati manager’s job. He was great from the start, as the 1970 Reds won 102 games and made the World Series.
He went back to the Fall Classic four more times. Sparky won seven division titles, five pennants and three World Series. The 1975-76 Reds, with Johnny Bench, Pete Rose, Joe Morgan and Tony Perez, won back-to-back titles and may be the greatest team ever.
The Reds fell short in 1977 and ’78, and Sparky was fired, which stunned him. But he took over the woeful Tigers in mid-1979, and said he had a five-year plan. Sure enough, Detroit started the 1984 season 35-5, and breezed to the championship.
Sparky led the Tigers for another 11 years before he retired, making a final postseason appearance in 1987, when they were upset by the Twins in the playoffs. He then stayed home, played golf daily, and loved to retrieve lost golf balls and tell funny, rambling stories about baseball.
Sparky was a true baseball character, beloved across the game.
He also made it a point to come back to Bridgewater, S.D., where he was born on Feb. 22, 1934. That’s just when teams are in spring training, preparing for the long season.
The Andersons moved to California when he was a boy, but he never forgot his prairie roots.
Anderson and his wife Carol would come home for reunions, or would stop at a downtown café to see old friends. Sparky was nationally known, but in Bridgewater, he was still George, the painter’s kid, and he liked that. He was proud of his dad Leroy Anderson, and always spoke warmly about his hometown.
“I remember more about South Dakota than any part of my life. I remember all the sights, the sounds, the smells, the people,” he wrote in his autobiography “Sparky.” “Maybe I remember Bridgewater so well because I was so happy. It wasn’t till managing took its place that I was ever so happy again.”
He returned to South Dakota for his inductions into the South Dakota Sports Hall of Fame and the South Dakota Hall of Fame. He was famous for four decades, but never lost touch with his roots.
Anderson died at 76 on Nov. 4, 2010, after a battle with dementia. The first week in November is when the gloves, bats and balls are packed away for a winter’s rest.
For more than a quarter-century, Sparky was one of the most successful managers in baseball history. It seemed fitting that he waited to die until after the World Series that year.
Strangely enough, I was reading one of Sparky’s books and planning to write a story or column about him in October 2010.
I learned of his declining health through an email exchange with his close friend Dan Ewald, a sportswriter who co-wrote two Anderson biographies and produced another book about their relationship. Ewald said Sparky remained deeply fond of his hometown, but would be unable to discuss it with me. I wish I’d tried a year or two earlier.
I did write a story about his South Dakota roots, and found plenty of people from Bridgewater, a small McCook County town, who knew and liked him.
“I think he was one of the nicest men I ever met,” said Jerry Paweltzki. “He was very easy to visit with.”
Paweltzki said he spoke with Anderson many times when he returned to Bridgewater to attend school reunions, help raise money for the local football field or simply to stop at a local coffee shop.
“He was back four or five times,” Paweltzki told me.
In 2010, I drove over to Bridgewater, where their most famous native son’s face smiles on a sign. It’s located right next to Sparky Anderson Field.
Tom Lawrence has written for several newspapers and websites in South Dakota and other states and contributed to The New York Times, NPR, The Telegraph, The Daily Beast and other media outlets.
