Reading Eagle - October 29, 1980

Green Gets An A-Minus – Schmidt

 

NEW YORK (AP) – You can tuck it away in the joy of a world championship or hide it in the corner of the trainer’s room, but one way or another, sooner or later, the Philadelphia Phillies find the road to controversy.

 

There was, for example, a rather innocent request, made of Mike Schmidt, most valuable player in the World Series, who was honored at a luncheon Tuesday.   He was asked to rate Phillies Manager Dallas Green.

 

Schmidt considered the question for a moment.

 

“A-minus,”  he decided.

 

Minus?

 

“Hey, that’s a pretty grade, you know,” said Schmidt.  “You can’t say too much bad about A-minus.”

 

But A-minus is not A and Schmidt was asked where he felt his manager had fallen short.

 

“Well, I think there are times when he may say something after a game about a player that he might regret… that he might not have wanted to say,” Schmidt said.  “It’s my own opinion, but I think sometimes he wasn’t tactful enough with the press when the subject was his own players.”

 

Green is a blunt, to-the-point man.  He preached teamwork to the Phillies this year and sold them on the “We, not I,” approach to baseball.

 

“The manager has to be part of that ‘We,” though,” said Schmidt.  “If it’s ‘We, not I,’ for the players, then it has to be ‘We, not they,” for the manager.

 

The Phillies have been painted as a non-team, certainly not molded in the tradition of Pittsburgh’s “Fam-il-ee” which won the world championship a year ago.  But Schmidt thought the blub did a great deal in 1980 to dispel that image.

 

“We re-established the concept of a team,” he said.  “I’m not sure, as a team, we knew how good we were.”

 

Green thought the Phillies’ discovery of teamwork was the most important ingredient in their season’s success.

 

“’We, not I,’ is the simple way to put it,” the manager said.  “What we did was break down the class distinction between the eight starters and the bench, the starting pitchers and the relievers.  We were a team.”

 

Schmidt, of course, was an important part of the homogenization during the regular season as well as the playoffs and World Series.

 

“Michael Jack Schmidt deserved this,” the manager said of his third baseman’s Series MVP award.  “He was the guy who had to glue us together.  If he collapsed, we were in trouble.  He stayed tough. 

McBride Criticizes

 

PHILADELPHIA (UPI) – Philadelphia Phillies’ outfielder Bake McBride says teammate Mike Schmidt didn’t deserve to be named the Most Valuable Player of the World Series.

 

“If anybody should get it, it ought to be catcher Bob Boone or shortstop Larry Bowa,” McBride said in an interview published Tuesday in the Philadelphia Daily News.

 

“They contributed more than anybody on the team.”

 

Schmidt, who batted .381 in the Series with two home runs and seven RBIs, was honored Tuesday in New York as the Series MVP.

 

“I guess the reason Schmidt got it was the last game,” McBride said of the third baseman’s two RBIs in the Series’ sixth and deciding game.

 

McBride also indicated he felt Schmidt, who hit 48 homers and drove in 121 runs during the regular season, should not be the automatic winner of the National League MVP award.

 

“A guy leads the league in homers and RBIs, he should be considered,” the Phils’ right fielder said.  “But just because he leads the league in homers, that doesn’t mean he should win automatically.

 

“Consistency to me, that’s the key thing.  Schmidt wasn’t consistent.  He hit in spurts.”

World Series Boosts NBC

 

NEW YORK (AP) – The thousands of Americans who sat glued to their TV sets for the final game of baseball’s World Series helped make NBC the winner of the network’s prime-time ratings race for the week ending Oct. 26, according to figures from the A.C. Neilsen Co.

NBC, which has now led the Neilsen ratings for four of the past six weeks, claims a lead of nearly four ratings points over runner-up ABC for the season to date.

 

However, NBC maintains the 1980-81 season began with “Shogun” week, Sept. 15-21, while ABC and CBS argue that the season, delayed by the recently resolved actors’ strike, began Monday.

 

Indisputable is NBC’s dominance since mid-September, and the most recent Neilsen survey yielded figures to continue that trend.  NBC won the week with an average rating of 19.6, to 17.6 for CBS and 17.1 for ABC.  The networks say that means in an average prime-time minute during the week, 19.6 percent of the nation’s TV-equipped homes were tuned to NBC.

 

Key to NBC’s latest triumph was the deciding game in the World Series, won by Philadelphia over Kansas City.  The rating for the baseball game was 40, and Neilsen says that means of all the homes in the country with television, 40 percent saw at least part of the game.

 

The pre-game show was runner-up in the ratings, with two CBS programs, “60 Minutes” and “Dallas,” third and fourth and “Love Boat” on ABC, fifth.

 

Two other Top 10 shows were from NBC, “Real People” in sixth place and “Sophia Loren:  Her Own Story,” in seventh.

 

A good deal of prime-time in the most recent week surveyed was consumed by specials and movies, and 16 of the 73 programs broadcast were paid political spots for the presidential candidates.

 

The highest-rated of the political ads was a Ronald Reagan commercial on CBS on Friday – 18th for the week, perhaps a result more of its place in the schedule that of viewer preference.  ABC alone does not include political spots in its calculations of weekly averages.

 

Of the movies and specials, “The Last Song” on CBS finished 10th for the week, trailed by two animated shows, “Life’s a Circus, Charlie Brown,” 11th, and “It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown,” in 12th place, both from CBS.

 

A CBS movie, “Pleasure Palace,” was 16th, with “A Cry for Love,” an NBC film, in 17th place.

 

Four of the week’s six lowest-rated shows were political spots, with “NBC Magazine with David Brinkley” 72nd and a “CBS Reports” production, “The Saudis,” 73rd – last.