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Legacy: Slack's influence on local baseball remains strong
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Published: June 16, 2008
Professional baseball would have been played at Ernie Shore Field for the past 53 years without Bill Slack.
But it wouldn't have been as interesting, or as much fun. And judging from Slack's performance in his 12 1/2 seasons as manager of the Winston-Salem Red Sox, it wouldn't have been as good.
When the Carolina League named its all-time all-star team in 1995 to commemorate its 50th season, Slack was named the manager. There was really no other choice, given Slack's four league pennants and three other trips to the playoffs.
He showed up on July 5, 1963, having turned 30 only two months and three days before. He was driving a Pontiac roomy enough for his wife, Pat, four kids and all his worldly belongings, and rented a house on Knollwood Street, across from Miller Park.
The first half of the season had been spent managing Wellsville of the New York-Penn League, before he was dispatched by the parent Boston Red Sox to Winston-Salem to relieve Matt Sczesny, a friend, as manager.
He quickly fell in love with the town, which over the next 45 years would return the love in kind. He became one of us, who just happened to know as much about baseball, and people, as anyone who ever walked into Ernie Shore Field.
And he was smitten by the ballpark, then only 7 years old.
"I always felt like it was a picture-postcard park, with the grassy area going all the way down one side and all the way down the other side," he recalled last week. "That's the first thing that struck me.
"I came in here and said ‘This is the big leagues compared to Wellsville.'"
Accustomed to the deep snows of Maine, where he had spent the past couple of winters, he and his family took to the milder Sunbelt climate. Ernie Shore, then in his 29th year as Sheriff of Forsyth County, helped get him an offseason job at McLean Trucking, loading and unloading trucks on the docks. He bought a house on Hoyt Street, where he remained until Pat died in 2001.
Slack managed in a day when managers in the low minors didn't have a staff. He was the staff. He pitched three or four sessions of batting practice a day, hit infield, made out the lineup card, coached third and pretty much made every decision that had to be made.
In his various capacities as manager, pitching coach, third-base coach, hitting coach, spring-training instructor and father confessor, Slack threw countless numbers of pitches, both during games and batting practice. But as the fates of baseball would have it, it wasn't until he had retired, and was sawing a low-hanging branch in the yard of his house in Ardmore that he felt a sharp pain in his right, pitching shoulder.
A trip to the doctor revealed he had torn his rotator cuff.
A native of Petrolia, Ontario, Slack signed with the Boston Red Sox in 1952 as a pitcher-infielder and remained with the organization until 1985 when Dennis Bastien, the owner of the Winston-Salem Spirits, changed the team's affiliation from the Red Sox to the Chicago Cubs. But Bill Slack never had to look for work. Recognizing his expertise in the fine art of pitching, people always looked for him.
Hank Aaron came looking in 1985. As farm director of the Atlanta Braves, he needed a steady hand to help bring along a wave of exciting young pitching prospects. In his 14 seasons with Atlanta, Slack had more than a little to do with the development of Tom Glavine, John Smoltz, Steve Avery and Mark Wohlers.
He became close friends with Aaron, and once asked him what was the scariest moment of his life in baseball.
"I was thinking he was going to say `The Ku Klux Klan were running after me,"' Slack said. "He would tell you about that stuff.
"He said, ‘Probably as scary a moment as I had was when I was 17. My momma put me on the train in Mobile, Alabama, and it was going to Winston-Salem, North Carolina. She packed me a big brown bag of sandwiches and stuff to eat and she put me on this seat right here and said ‘Don't you get off of this seat until you get to Winston-Salem and there will be somebody there to meet you.'
"That's when he joined the Indianapolis Clowns."
The record shows that Aaron was actually 18 when he played for the Clowns of the Negro American League, but the emotions remained 40-some years later.
Slack tried to retire in 1999, but baseball wouldn't allow it. Texas hired him as a minor-league coach in 2001, and the Kansas City Royals persuaded him to work as the pitching coach for the CL's Wilmington Blue Rocks for the 2002 and 2003 seasons.
In 2002, he was named to the Canadian Baseball Hall of Fame. The community service award given annually by the Winston-Salem Warthogs is named for him. His No. 37 is honored on the left-field wall at Ernie Shore Field.
He's a living treasure whose stories of the game and those who played it are priceless.
When Jim Lonborg signed with the Boston Red Sox in 1964, fresh out of Stanford, he was assigned to Winston-Salem. Slack was his first manager.
Three years later, he was struggling, having compiled records of 9-17 and 10-10 in his first two major-league seasons. In spring training of 1967, Lonborg asked Slack what was wrong.
Slack replied that he was impressed with Lonborg's hard fastball that rode in on right-handers and his sharp-breaking slider. But he had noticed that once Lonborg got two strikes on a batter, he invariably tried to put him away with the slider.
"Try running that fastball in on them with two strikes," Slack advised. That would back batters off the plate, rather than letting them crowd the plate looking for the slider that would break away from them.
That season, Lonborg pitched the Red Sox into the World Series, winning the Cy Young Award with a 22-9 record and 3.16 ERA. He also hit 19 batters, more than any other AL pitcher.
The year before he had hit seven.
The Winston-Salem Warthogs will turn Ernie Shore Field over to Wake Forest after this season and move to their new ballpark on the southwest edge of downtown. The new park won't be worth the brick, mortar and sod of which it is built unless it honors a man that has meant as much to the town and the baseball played here as Bill Slack.
"I'm the greatest ambassador of the state of North Carolina and Winston-Salem as you've ever seen," Slack said. "And I can prove it, because I've been in every state in the United States, and there's no place any better than Winston-Salem, North Carolina."
■ Dan Collins can be reached at 727-7323 or at dcollins@wsjournal.com .
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