He Doesn’t Like Job of Putting Out Fires

Marcel Lachemann already had so much on his mind before the fire that burned his dad.

As a boy, Marcel and his brothers, Bill and Rene, were the sons of the Swiss-born chef at the Biltmore Hotel in downtown Los Angeles. He was a small, tempestuous man in a tall, starched hat. Today, that man lives peaceably in the Leisure World retirement community in Laguna Hills, and is father to two of major league baseball’s 28 managers.

“He smokes a pipe, and when he lights his pipe he uses a wooden match. The head of that match must have dropped down onto his chair. And it just smoldered,” Marcel recounts, hunched forward from his Anaheim Stadium dugout seat, a few hours before a game. “He was awake when it happened. The fire just ignited. It burned 18% of his body. There’s a caretaker there 24 hours a day, and she covered him with a blanket and smothered it.”

This was a few weeks ago, and it frightened the Lachemann brothers. Marcel wishes they could be with their father more.

“He’ll be 95 in August.”

But the demands of managing a big league baseball team can consume so much of a man’s time. It saps your energy and devours your hours. Rene Lachemann’s team, the Florida Marlins, is fighting to stay out of last place. Marcel Lachemann’s team, the Angels, is in first place, with the aid of Marcel’s older brother Bill, their bullpen coach. Either way, it’s work, work, work.

And Marcel is not enjoying it much.

“I liked coaching better,” he says.

A pitching coach could devote more hands-on time to his players. Be responsible for a select number of individuals and not for everything and anything. This is the Angel manager’s observation, and he is speaking from experience, having been pitching coach for five Angel managers in 1984-92, then later serving Rene the same way.

“But here, in this job,” Marcel says, metaphorically, “you’re putting out fires all the time.”

He is 54 now, waited a long time for this chance and is making the most of it. Baseball people will tell you that Marcel Lachemann will be manager of the year. Some will even tell you that Rene got the manager’s job in Florida not merely because of his previous track record in Seattle and Milwaukee, but because he promised to lure Marcel away from Anaheim to coach his pitchers.

On the day Rene took that job, he said, “I don’t need any ‘yes men’ around me.”

He needed and wanted Marcel. But when the Angels made an abrupt managing change on May 17, 1994, it was to them that Marcel felt compelled to say yes.

The brothers Lachemann still talk all the time. They talk about strategy, unconcerned about conflict of interest with their teams belonging to different leagues. And they talk about Bill Lachemann the elder, who is never far from their thoughts, wherever baseball’s road may take them.

Rene worked as a banquet boy at the Biltmore when he was 12. He helped out in his dad’s kitchen, tossing salads and squeezing oranges for fresh juice. Around the hotel, a running gag was to refer to the chef as “Little Hitler,” because of Bill Lachemann’s penchant for yelling at the help. Bill was a 5- foot-5 man whose hat, painstakingly starched by his wife, made him look 6 feet 5.

One thing was for sure, the Lachemanns usually ate well at home. Their mother prepared the prime cuts of meat and other delicacies that Bill brought home. Having left Geneva, Switzerland, at age 14, he trained in France to be a chef, met his wife-to-be, Denise, through mutual correspondence and moved to New York, Chicago and Dallas before settling in 1930 in L.A.

“We had football tickets on the 50 at the Coliseum,” Rene recalls. “Right behind Bob Hope.”

The hard work their father did at the hotel--seven-day weeks, 14-hour days--influenced the sons’ work habits later on. Marcel has zero tolerance for people who fail to give an effort. One of his favorite maxims is: “There are no shortcuts. Hard work is the answer to success.”

This is why the first-place Angels are led by someone who is first to arrive and last to leave. As soon as Marcel gets to the park, he goes for a 2 1/2-mile jog. He doesn’t stint. He puts in the hours. Ask him why the Angels are successful this season, and Marcel harks back to spring training, to all the “situational hitting” they had to do. Work, work, work.

He waited out the strike, saying now, “I can’t conceive of baseball ever shutting down like that again. If they do, you might just as well close the door, because people won’t ever come back again.”

He weeded out Mitch Williams, trotted out Lee Smith, sweated out trading Chad Curtis, waited out Jim Edmonds and J.T. Snow until their bats got hot, rooted out Garret Anderson and Troy Percival from the farm and brought out the all-star in Gary DiSarcina. He got the team off to a good start, taking three of four in Toronto, a town that, Lachemann says, “had been a chamber of horrors for us.”

For a manager, though, there is always a distraction. Always a fire. Lachemann blew his cool in Boston after a player or two missed a coach’s signs. He did a Little Hitler act of his own that day.

But keeping calm is important. One night during the 1994 season, the Lachemann brothers got another call about their father. Bill had been found on the floor, by a carpet stained with blood. A folding chair had snapped shut, cutting off the top of his finger. He had fractured vertebrae as well.

Marcel and Rene both came to visit. Their father asked how their baseball teams were doing.

“Not so hot,” Rene replied.

“Well,” their dad said, “one run here, one run there, you’ll be all right.”

They still take his advice.