From: Metro Sports | Baseball | Tuesday, March 16, 1999

Life's Good for Former Poster Boy

Lee Mazzilli's photo, that handsome babyface mug, was on posters in 85 subway stations recommending a visit to Shea Stadium, where the posters were selling for $7. Those Mets were awful and Mazzilli was about the only reason to ride into Flushing.

He hit .300, stole 30, 40 bases, and was good for 15 or so home runs back then. The average attendance that 1979 season was less than 9,000, and there's no telling how much lower it would have been without Mazzilli wiggling into his uniform, one tapered pant leg at a time. The headline could have been "Local Boy Makes Pretty Good."

"I remember when I was coming up, 20 years ago," he said the other day, sitting in the Yankees' dugout at Legends Field. "It feels like a blink of my eye. It's frightening."

Mazzilli is down the block today, barking at the Yanks' minor leaguers. He's 43 years old, the manager of their Double-A team at Norwich, Conn. He isn't the last person you might think would become a manager, but next-to-last is about right.

He was the shy Met, forever ducking the spotlight. "I had a hard time dealing with playing in New York," he said.

"It took me a while to say, 'This is my job, my livelihood.' I was never a flamboyant guy."

Not much has changed. He and his wife, Danni, show up at parties and when they ask where Lee is, her usual answer is, "Just look in the corner."

The last year he played was 1989, but the Dodgers, still interested, got in touch with his agent the next spring. "I had enough," Mazzilli remembers. "I said no. My agent said, 'What's the matter?' and I said 'Nothing. I had enough."'

He walked away from baseball and into broadcasting. Took acting classes that led to an off-Broadway play, "Tony and Tina's Wedding." For five months, he was Tony. There might have been more work, "But it was all in California," he said. "I didn't want to go. If I wanted to go, I would have."

The outfielder said the same thing when he was the same age as the kids he now manages. The producers of "Laverne & Shirley," a hit sitcom, offered Mazzilli the chance to audition for a continuing role.

He turned it down, saying he wasn't ready. A chain of clothing stores doing TV commercials with his Mets' manager, Joe Torre, later reached out for Mazzilli. After he signed a contract, he discovered they wanted to give him, in his agent's words, "a mucho macho image. Lee found it revolting." Turned them down, too.

No telling how many other shots he ducked. "I wanted to be a manager ever since I played schoolyard ball at Lincoln (HS)," he said. "I was always a student of the game. I talked to the Mets about managing, but they didn't get to the point."

It was near the end of the '96 season and Mazzilli's old friend, Torre, was a big story in New York. Nice to have people in important places. Mazzilli visited the Stadium, but before he went into the manager's office he turned a corner, he said, "and I almost walked into Bob Watson (the general manager). We exchanged pleasantries, blah, blah, blah, and he asked me what I was doing. I told him I was trying to get back in the game, managing."

Watson called him about an opening at the Class-A Tampa club. Before he retreated into his corner, or found it revolting, Mazzilli had a conversation with his wife. "She's the driving force behind me coming back," he says. "She knew managing was my first love, and you always go back to your first love. She was the one who pushed me out the door."

He spent two seasons at Tampa, and reached the league's championship series last year. And now it's Norwich, a step up.

"I'm paying my dues," he says, "but I absolutely and truly love what I'm doing. I really, really enjoy it." I ask about managing in the big leagues and Mazzilli, who used to play it safe, said, "That's what I'd like to do. Yeah. Sure. And the way they keep adding teams, I might have a chance." But he must have been listening to himself. "Let's see what happens," he said, moving back into the corner.