This skipper immersed himself in the game
He was Captain Ahab, and he never did catch up with that damnable Great White Whale.
Major league games managed: 3,942. World championships: none. Pennants: none.
No one ever managed as many games without winning one pennant. No one deserved that fate less. Gene Mauch cared about baseball. Oh, how he cared about baseball. He lived it, breathed it, thought about it in a way the great preponderance of his contemporaries found impossible to comprehend. Most of all, he felt it.
''If you win 100 games in a year," he once told me, ''that's a pretty good year, right? You might win a championship. But if you win 100 games, that means you die 62 times."
He wasn't kidding.
The interview was conducted during the last week of September 1986. The Red Sox and Mauch's California Angels were about to wrap up their respective divisions, and I was sent to Anaheim for the week to gather feature-story material for our postseason preview section. Getting the players was easy. Getting the manager to talk was not so easy. Day after day, it was nope, nope, nope, sorry, got no time, nope, sorry, nope, too busy, nope. But on my last day, Captain Ahab, moved by something (pity? disgust? latent sense of responsibility?), reluctantly -- and I cannot stress this enough -- very reluctantly agreed to talk about Gene Mauch.
''The whole thing doesn't revolve around Gene Mauch," he hissed. ''There have been no Gene Mauch stories written out here this year. Ask the writers. There have already been 4,000 Gene Mauch stories. Go look up the clips. Write what you want, and I'll sanction it.
''I feel a little guilty standing around talking about all this. My job is to win this game tonight, and for me to give as so much as one thought to anything else is criminal. I don't care what anyone else thinks. For me to give one thought to anything else is criminal, and that's the way I feel about it."
Now do you understand why the word most frequently associated with Gene Mauch was ''intense"?
Mauch did not suffer journalistic fools gladly. His reasoning was that, no matter who you were, no matter how much time and effort you put into studying the game, its history, and how it can and should be played, or how many experts you have talked to, you could not possibly have put as much time and effort, or have applied quite the same intellect to the task, as he did. I remember, for example, someone asking an innocent question about his lineup one night after a Twins-Red Sox game.
''Don't question my lineups!" he thundered. ''I spend all winter working on lineups."
He wasn't kidding.
Mauch did not enjoy being held accountable to the likes of, well, me. (Peter Gammons, maybe.) ''I play 486 games a year," he said on that September afternoon. ''I play one game before with myself. Then there is the actual game. And, unfortunately, there is the third game I have to play again for the people that want to write about it."
We live in an era of Sabermetrics and legions of earnest amateurs who spend a great deal of time pondering the many fascinating and charming aspects of baseball, but before we knew any of these people existed, there was Gene Mauch, bringing a new scrutiny to the game. It was a common belief during the nearly three decades Mauch managed the Phillies, Expos, Twins, and Angels that nobody carried around more pure baseball knowledge. And it was an absolute given that nobody smoldered with more pure, yes, intensity, than the silver-thatched skipper.
His peers regarded him with awe. In his book, ''Man In The Dugout," Sparky Anderson had this to say: ''If you had the best club, you had a chance to beat him. If he had the best club, you had no chance. If the clubs were even, he had the advantage. I managed against him for a long time. I always had the better teams."
He was the acknowledged master of what we now refer to as Small Ball. Mauch believed that every single run was precious, and it was classic Mauch to call for a first-inning sacrifice bunt if the leadoff man reached base. There were many who thought this particular Mauchism represented an innate stubbornness, at best, and perhaps even utter Ahablike madness. Speaking for many, longtime major league catcher Joe Ferguson once said, ''You play for one run; that is all you are going to get."
But that was the Mauch way, and so was utilizing a five-man infield or making double switches before we knew what to call them. Mauch thought of everything, it seemed. Forget about challenging him on a rule.
The sad reality is that Mauch is best remembered for three that got away. He was managing the Phillies when they squandered a 6 1/2-game lead with 12 to play in 1964. The Phillies lost 10 straight, and the rap on Mauch was that he panicked and overworked primary starters Jim Bunning and Chris Short. He was the California manager when the Angels took a 2-0 lead in the best-of-five 1982 ALCS against Milwaukee, and then lost three straight.
And then there was the 1986 ALCS.
A scant two weeks after our conversation, Mauch's Angels had a 3-1 series lead against the Red Sox. They took a 5-2 lead into the ninth inning of Game 5. Then Don Baylor hit a two-run homer and Dave Henderson delivered the go-ahead blast off Donnie Moore. The Angels tied the game in the ninth, but the Red Sox eventually pulled out Game 5 and the rest is glorious history in Boston and a sad tale in Anaheim. For the rest of his life, Mauch said he only spoke of it if ''someone has the temerity to ask me about it."
Many say he overmanaged his way out of the '64 and '86 pennants, and maybe he did. Gene Mauch, who died of cancer at age 79 Monday, might have been better off if his brain had not been so stuffed with data. But that was Gene Mauch. He might have been better off if he didn't care so much. But that, too, was Gene Mauch.
God help God if he dares to ask Gene Mauch about Game 5.
Bob Ryan is a Globe columnist. His e-mail address is ryan@globe.com. 
