In Charlie We Trust

SQUEEZED INTO the suitcase Charlie Manuel carried with him when he joined the Minnesota Twins in the spring of 1969 were the odds and ends of a wardrobe that looked like it had been collected on a stroll through Goodwill: tennis shoes, a handful of T-shirts, some jeans and a sport coat that he would remember as "kind of a burlap thing." To get him through some of his early road trips, for which players back then were obliged to wear a coat and tie, Manuel borrowed some dress shirts and some other pieces of apparel from his teammate, Rich Reese, who was more or less the same size. Chances are Manuel would have kept dressing that haphazard way were it not for the intervention of his manager, Billy Martin, who got an eyeful of him one day and, as Reese remembers, told the young outfielder from Buena Vista, Va., "Man, you got to dress up."

So Martin sent him out shopping in Cleveland. To give him some pointers, Reese went along on the excursion with Manuel, who in a place Martin recommend spotted a gray suit with pinstripes and wide lapels. Sizing himself up in the mirror in the store, Manuel could not have been more pleased with how he looked. "Kind of like a Confederate general," he says. Manuel found a gray shirt to go with the suit, and a yellow-and-green tie. When he got to the clubhouse the following day, the ensemble was hanging in his locker - paid for in full by Martin. It was the side of Billy that few in the public saw, yet it underscored the curious complexity of the man, who with one hand would shower a player with affection and with the other clock him with a sucker punch.

"You should have seen that suit," says Manuel, seated behind his desk at Citizens Bank Park early one day in September. "I guess it cost $190 or something like that. I remember it was double-breasted with eight buttons on it."

Manuel smiles. "I used to walk by the store years later when I was with the Indians," he adds. "And I would always think of that suit."