Trammell, Gibson Will Wear Unfamiliar Colors In 2007

First, Alan Trammell had to be imagined in a Chicago Cubs uniform. Now, Kirk Gibson in the purple, gold, and black of the Arizona Diamondbacks?

It's true. Tram is the new bench coach for just-as-new manager Lou Piniella in Chicago, and Gibby just signed on to help his old teammate Bob Melvin as the D-Backs bench coach. What's next? Lance Parrish as the bullpen coach for the Toronto Blue Jays?

If anything, Trammell and Gibson should change places. For it is Trammell, the San Diego kid, who I can more picture toiling in the Arizona desert, while Gibson, the Michiganian, is more suited, it seems, for the northern climate of Chicago. Gibson, in fact, wouldn't be out of place sitting in a dugout in the frozen tundra of Antarctica.

But there they are, two former Tigers heroes who were drummed out of town after serving their purpose as part of the 1984 Gang who mostly filled out the coaching staff here while the team was something you looked at with one eye open and the other closed. Well, maybe with both eyes closed. Trammell will wear the famous red "C" on his blue baseball cap, and I wonder how he'll look in pinstripes? Gibby at least has one thing in Arizona that matches his personality: the fearsome Diamondback Snake that sometimes adorns the baseball lids there.





Trammell's case is interesting. When a player who's played his entire career in one city, in any sport, is then hired as that team's coach, he has all but guaranteed that he won't be leaving town under his own volition. How can they fire Alan Trammell? Just watch. The Packers fired Bart Starr, after all -- but only after many years of failure. But what makes Tram's situation unique is that those types rarely turn up someplace else. Kudos to Piniella for disregarding Trammell's 300 losses in three seasons as Tigers manager, realizing that not even John McGraw or Joe McCarthy could have succeeded under such conditions. Instead, Lou looked at Trammell's baseball knowledge, and rightly assumed that his time spent as a manager, despite the long odds against him, could only help him develop as a baseball bench mind.

As for Gibson, he wasn't all that well-liked, or even respected, by certain segments of the Tigers clubhouse last season. Whispers arose that he was derisively nicknamed "Two Swings" by the internal detractors, a reference to his two famous World Series homers, off Goose Gossage and Dennis Eckersley. Maybe he has mellowed some. When I spoke to him in September about a possible feature story for MCS Magazine, he was soft-spoken but still fiercely loyal to Trammell, his old boss.

"If the Tigers had any class at all, they'd fly Tram in for Game 1 of the playoffs and let him throw out the first pitch," Gibby told me, and then he quickly agreed with me when I told him that was highly unlikely.

Yet who threw out the first pitch of Game 2 of the World Series? Alan Trammell. And HIS old boss, Sparky Anderson.

Gibson did, after all, have some clairvoyance about that. Bob Melvin might have seen that intangible when he tabbed old #23 to sit on his bench in AZ.

Maybe it's appropriate, on second thought, that Gibson should coach in Arizona. He never did shrivel from the heat.