Houston Astros

Some mornings when he's driving to the ballpark Larry Dierker catches himself practicing his batting signs in the rearview mirror, and he chuckles at the sight. But then everything about his overnight transformation from Astros broadcaster to the team's manager has been somewhat amusing. Dierker wore shorts to what he thought was a casual meeting with the Houston brass in October when owner Drayton McLane suddenly offered him the manager's job. A former Astros and Cardinals pitcher with no coaching or managing experience, Dierker had gone to the broadcast booth two years after retiring as a player, and that's where he spent the past 18 seasons.

So spring training was a little different for Dierker this year. The Hawaiian-print shirts he used to wear around camp stayed in the closet. There were no more late nights drinking beer and listening to big-band music at the Big Bamboo, his favorite Kissimmee, Fla., bar. There wasn't even time for golf. Instead, Dierker carried a baseball rule book, studied tendencies of other managers and called every coach he knew for advice about mastering the minutiae of managing. He had to draw up practice schedules, find out whether he had to call time to pull a pitcher and, of course, develop his own system of signals to send to his players from the dugout. "I'm still not sure if I can do this job," Dierker says. "But I think I can."

So do the people who hired him. "This decision has been called everything from off-the-wall to a big publicity stunt," says Houston general manager Gerry Hunsicker. "But we didn't just take some Joe Blow out of the broadcast booth and hand him our team. If you think that, then you don't know Larry."

A righthander from Hollywood, Dierker made his big league debut for the franchise on Sept. 22, 1964, his 18th birthday, and struck out Willie Mays in the first inning. He went on to win 137 games in a 14-year career, during which he once won 20 games and threw a no-hitter. But as the club's broadcaster he had watched and analyzed more Houston games than anyone now affiliated with the team and had witnessed the best and worst of the league's managers.

After accepting the job, Dierker surrounded himself with experienced coaches—such as Bill Virdon, a former Astros manager with 40 years in the big leagues—and then approached his new assignment in typically laid-back fashion. When centerfielder Derek Bell went to the manager's office to complain that he was uncomfortable trying to play a new position, Dierker responded, "Hey, Derek, so am I."

Dierker wants his players to learn to think for themselves so that eventually they can do things such as make adjustments in the field on their own. He's trying to improve communications between the manager and the players, which had broken down after three straight runner-up finishes in the Central Division under former manager Terry Collins.

"Whether he was a ball boy or a broadcaster before doesn't matter," says first baseman and team MVP Jeff Bagwell. "We have to make this work." It already has in other places. The last manager to move from the TV booth to the dugout was Joe Torre, who led the Yankees to the world championship last year.

[This article contains a table. Please see hardcopy of magazine or PDF.]