Hello Twins fans.
You don’t know this, but I’ve always liked you. Well, at least the concept on you. Love your team, your town, and your State. Lakes… I mean, who doesn’t love lakes?
Now you have one more reason for me to love you = Neil Allen.
I played for Neil back in 2011. Lemme tell ya, you’ve not heard a baseball story until you’ve heard Neil tell one of his, “So I got drunk, got on random plane and just showed up someplace else ’cause that’s what I did between starts” stories. Mind = blown.
Honest to God, his tales of drunken wandering are the stuff of legend. They make Doc Ellis’s LSD no hitter story look like a PBS special. Ask him to tell you about the time he was out all night at a bar and woke up—still at the bar—just in time to run to the ball park and get suited up for batting practice. He would’ve gotten away with it too if it weren’t for the fact that he put his cowboy boots back on instead of his spikes… Hard to discreetly shag batting practice with cowboy boots on.
Wo-oh-oh-oh … I’m not taking a crap on the man by telling you these details. No sir. He’s an excellent coach. A fantastic choice! Twinkie pitchers will love him! The PTA board may not ask him to come speak, but, who cares about that, they’re all a bunch of tight assess anyway. In baseball, the stuff that makes you look like a human resources nightmare is often the stuff that makes you credible to players. Seriously.
A coach comes in and he’s a clean as a whistle, never gotten into any kind of shenanigans, owns no chunk of baseball history… that coach will have a hard time relating to his players. Show me a coach that’s hopped a plan while piss drunk and showed up in the middle of Arkansas while the team is a time zone a way with no memory of how it happened and I’ll show you a captivated pitching staff! Hand to heart, I begged him to let me write a book of his stories from his previous life. Begged. And I think I learned more about how to get the job done when you didn’t have your best stuff from Neil than I did any other coach in creation.
Oh, and I say previous life because that wild behavior is long gone now. The Neil coming to Twinkie Town is a great guy, cleaned up, and been a straight shooter for years now. It’s inspirationally, really. But make no mistake, his past is a strength that, while not the most appealing thing see on a church bulletin, is dynamite in a locker room. He’ll be an instant hit.
Neil has seen both sides of the game: What it can give you and what it can take away. He’s experienced “The Life” as we say, and that’s a big, intangible because pitchers get hit by the life harder than most of the boys on the roster. They just have too much free time on their hands…
This also makes Neil a great manager of head cases. I don’t know which ones are nut bags on your roster, but I’m sure you’ve got a few because every team has a few. I say that as one myself.
How about a story? You like stories right? This one involves Neil and Alexander Torres.
Young Alexander was a hard-headed little punk when he first arrived in Triple A Durham. I say that in a loving way because I adore the guy now. But back then he had a fiery, competitive side. Was a little immature. He didn’t like to be critiqued which meant he wasn’t the easiest guy to coach. You could explain almost all of it through the lens of previous success. What I mean to say is, because Torres always had success doing things his way, there wasn’t a lot of reason for him to change things up. The Bigs were on the horizon so, why not do what you did to get yourself where you are? It’s logical. Baseball Logical. And sometimes in baseball the best coaching advice is the advice you ignore in favor of your gut instinct.
You know, Neil could have taken offense to all that. I mean, Torres hadn’t done shit yet so who was he to be so brash and bullheaded?
But Neil knew that Torres was young, and, since Torres was just a by product of what his success taught him to be, it wasn’t all Torres’ fault. Moreover, a pitcher needs to have the right to reject coaching advice—it’s their career after all. Neil also knew that if Torres kept trying to throw harder when he was in trouble on the bump, trying to strike everyone out and getting mad when he had bad results, he’d burn himself out. No need to pick a fight, all learning would happen in due time.
Sure enough, Torres—a great guy aside from that immaturity issue that was about to be corrected—started walking oodles of batters, struggling to make it to the 5th inning, and found himself plum out of confidence, like all pitchers do when what they used to know just isn’t working anymore.
That’s when Neil stepped in, and he didn’t have to force any advice—it was snapped up by a pitcher who was hungry to turn things around. Sometimes you just have to let a guy fail. Sometimes that’s the only way to reach them. Sometimes you just need to wait for the right moment.
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: A good coach is an excellent manipulator. They know you better than you know you and they speak to that inside, invisible person. Sometimes that means the coach has to wait for the right moment, but good manipulators are patient. It’s what makes Maddon so good. It’s what makes Showalter so good. And it’s what makes Allen so good.
You’ll have fun with Neil. God knows I did.
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