From the top step of the Rockies’ dugout, manager Jim Tracy can feel the pain of Broncos coach Josh McDaniels.
“What’s the story with Brandon Marshall?” Tracy asked. Then, after several minutes to consider how a rocky relationship between the local NFL club and its petulant receiver could spill into a contentious mess, Tracy added: “You know, it reminds me a little of a player I once had on the team in Los Angeles: Milton Bradley.”
Well, truth be told, McDaniels would like to compare notes and share histories with Tracy.
“I’d love to meet him,” McDaniels told me, offering to forward a phone number so Tracy could give a holler. “Are the Rockies at home this week? Maybe I could get away to see a game.”
OK, so here’s guessing McDaniels doesn’t need (or want) football advice from a baseball manager. But right here, right now, in this town, we’re absolutely certain the embattled Broncos coach could use all the friends he can get.
And nobody knows how to put a deft touch on the male ego better than Tracy, who can execute a man hug and actually make it look cool.
Tracy has become an instant folk hero in a sports-crazy town. By reassembling pieces of crumbled Rockies into a bona fide playoff contender, the new manager could not stand taller if he climbed Longs Peak.
Then there’s McDaniels. These days, inciting real anger in Broncomaniacs can be as easy as mentioning Kid McD, whose nickname constitutes fighting words in Denver because the rookie coach: A) dumped quarterback Jay Cutler, and B) isn’t Mike Shanahan.
Although sprung from generations as different as disco and hip-hop, deep roots in the Midwest intertwine the pasts of Tracy and McDaniels. They’ve never met. But these two men feel like they know each other.
McDaniels and Tracy were born 240 miles and two decades apart in stout Ohio towns where broad-shouldered men sweated for paychecks at the iron works or in the brickyards, while raw-boned boys tried to do their fathers proud on the football field.
“High school football in Ohio is so critical to people’s happiness. As a young kid, you grow up anticipating your chance to be in the middle of all that,” McDaniels said. “From August through the end of November, people live, die, eat, sleep and breathe football.”
This sports connection between McDaniels and Tracy is as strong as the heartbeat pounding anxiously against a teenage boy’s chest as he dashes to the huddle in a packed high school stadium.
So the same question was first asked of Tracy as he savored a recent victory in his office at Coors Field, then later posed to McDaniels across a picnic table at Dove Valley after a Broncos practice.
Who was the first coach to influence your decision to join the profession?
It was funny, but I swear both the 53-year-old manager of the Rockies and the 33-year-old Broncos coach straightened up, and seemed to grow an inch taller, before giving uncannily similar responses.
“T-Bone Malone,” Tracy said.
“I wanted to win every game for my dad,” McDaniels said.
Thom McDaniels won games with his son playing quarterback for Canton McKinley, the high school whose next-door neighbor is the Pro Football Hall of Fame.
Tracy caught passes at Badin High in Hamilton for coach Terry Malone, whose 360 career victories is the Ohio prep record.
Football taught McDaniels as much about life as anything discovered in geometry or biology books. What did he learn?
“In athletics, you learn to win for other people, because you can’t coach for yourself and succeed,” said McDaniels, before revealing the flipside: “No matter what you do, you can’t make everybody happy.” When told those basic tenets, Tracy nodded his chin in recognition.
But it’s how they apply these philosophies that define the fickle public impression of Tracy or McDaniels. The Broncos coach has swung a hammer on a proud franchise, while the Rockies manager has guided his ballclub in the right direction with a squeeze on the elbow.
After a testy showdown with Cutler, the rookie coach of the Broncos now paces on the sideline wearing a hoodie in the style of ornery Bill Belichick, his mentor in New England. From afar, it’s easy to draw McDaniels in broad strokes as Mini Bill, a short man straining to act big on the NFL stage.
Never mind that Broncos staffers privately marvel at how much the tension has eased in the halls of Dove Valley with McDaniels giving the orders rather than Shanahan, or that tight end Daniel Graham, who once played for the Patriots, insists his young boss in Denver is far quicker with a smile than Belichick ever was.
Confronted with insubordination from Marshall, however, the stance taken by McDaniels was refreshingly old-school, but definitely hard line.
“I hope that every player we bring in here is motivated by the concept of winning a championship. . . . If that’s not a player’s motivation, it’s tough to get your team to play as one,” McDaniels said. “If players don’t want to go out and win championships, and that’s not the motivating factor, it’s hard to inject that into them.”
Maybe it’s the mellowing influence of age or the more gentle rhythms of baseball, but the Rockies manager seems to take a softer approach.
There is a photograph snapped in 2004 of Tracy during his tenure with the Dodgers that sticks in my mind. The scene: A wicked confrontation at home plate, where the notoriously flammable Bradley breathes fire on umpire Terry Craft.
And into madness Tracy rushed, placing his body in the angry space between player and ump. He stood up for Bradley, while also clamping down on the quivering hand in which the L.A. outfielder held his bat.
The dust-up earned Bradley a four-game ban. What was more telling? Tracy took a one-game suspension for arguing the points his player was too incensed to make.
“You’ve got to find a way to reel a difficult player in. You can’t create a standoff, or else everybody is going to lose,” Tracy said. “You’ve got to make that player feel like, in order for this team to be successful, we need you.”
In an era ruled by football systems and baseball metrics, Tracy has emerged from frustrating failures in the Los Angeles and Pittsburgh dugouts as a manager in full, realizing the human touch is what ultimately transforms X’s and O’s into W’s rather than L’s. This is stuff McDaniels cannot possibly fully comprehend as a young coach in helter-skelter pursuit of changing everything in the Broncos’ world.
Coors Field stands within shouting distance of the stadium where the Broncos played Arizona in an exhibition game Thursday night, yet McDaniels and Tracy have never talked?
So, as the leading candidate for National League manager of the year walked through the Colorado clubhouse before Thursday’s 8-3 loss to the New York Mets, he was stopped and handed a torn piece of paper with contact information for McDaniels. “Thank you,” Tracy said, as he read the phone number. “Thank you.”
Mark Kiszla: 303-954-1053 or mkiszla@denverpost.com
