Whatever the reason, Manuel's unusually lengthy answers - combining minor-league memories, his managerial thought processes, and the unique Manuelian syntax - sometimes meandered like that famed serpentine stretch of this city's Lombard Street.
Manuel took the writers, most of whom were concerned only with getting a usable quote about Hamels or Giants Game 3 starter Matt Cain, on a verbal voyage through his biography.
There were stops in Cleveland, the minor leagues, 1970s Baltimore, the Phillies' dugout, everywhere, it seemed, but Japan, which was odd because he usually misses no opportunity to discuss his days as a slugger there.
The highlight might have come when he was asked to detail his relationship with Phillies pitching coach Rich Dubee. Manuel settled into his response like a man who'd just eaten the finest meal and was hoping someone would ask about it.
He began by explaining the trust between Dubee and himself. Then, as if encountering a mental detour sign, he veered off that road. It would be several hundred words before he returned.
He explained how he used to work with pitching coach Dick Pole as Cleveland's manager; how the two of them used to watch pitchers in the Indians' bullpen; how he wouldn't appreciate anyone doing that to him if he were a coach; how he used to be a hitting coach in the minor leagues; how he sometimes threw batting practice for four hours down there; how he'd occasionally bring his teams to the ballpark at 10 a.m.; back to how he's learned to leave coaches alone; and, finally, a return to the point of the original question, his respect for Dubee.
As Philadelphians have come to learn about Manuel, most of what he says bears up to scrutiny. Still, four hours of batting practice is a prodigious heap of hurling, perhaps the physical equivalent of a 552-word answer, which is precisely how long the Dubee response ran - perhaps staggered would be a better verb.
"I'm not boasting and bragging about it, but I will tell you this," Manuel said. "I threw more than ten minutes a day. I used to throw batting practice anywhere from one hour to four hours."
For many in the media, Manuel is a modern-day Casey Stengel, shrewd and savvy about baseball but given to obtuse verbal outbursts, a habit he exhibited in reply to an inquiry on how Hamels had changed since 2008. He had the transcribers scrambling to keep up.
"I think he has more arsenal, more equipment, whatever you want to call it, more pitches. But I think at the same time, when he's on - I never got on this guy about his breaking ball. I used to always want him to throw more against lefthanded pitchers, and I've talked and told him before - I used to tell him after a game to throw more breaking balls, but I never - I wasn't very strong about it, about insisting it and things like that because he was good with his fastball and change-up," Manuel began.
The thing about Manuel is, regardless of all the syntactically strangled sentences, he gets his point across. Just ask his players. The problem comes when you try to read it.
Sometimes, particularly in his shorter responses, you got the sense that Manuel didn't really have a good answer but, in order to maintain his solid relationship with the media, he was going to keep talking until he got to one.
Take how he differentiated between Citizens Bank Park and AT&T Park, where this NLCS will resume Tuesday afternoon:
"I think this ballpark's bigger and it's got - the way it's made, it's a little bit different from Citizens Bank Park, of course, the way it's cut. And at the same time I think that they're more used to this yard than - of course, we were used to Citizens Bank Park, but they're more used to this park than we were, of course, because this is their home park."
Sometimes, Manuel's answers took on a length they didn't warrant because, occasionally, the words and the point just wandered away on their own, as when he was describing Hamels' NL division series-ending strikeout of Cincinnati's Scott Rolen.
"Finally, if you're sitting there, I'm sitting in the dugout watching him and I'm thinking and all of a sudden when he throws him a high fastball and throws the ball right by him, I guarantee if he would relate to it, he knew he had an idea, and he was very confident that he was going to throw a fastball by him, up. And I guarantee you he could tell, he knew that he - he says to himself, I guarantee you, he says, 'I know I can throw the ball by this guy right now, up.' When he's on and he's that good, he's very good."
The next line is the five-page transcript's last:
The moderator: "Thank you, Charlie."
Contact staff writer Frank Fitzpatrick
at 215-854-5068 or at ffitzpatrick@phillynews.com.
