It was the winter of 1979. Earlier that year, Spikes manager Brad Fischer was cut from the Oakland Athletics' system after just one year of playing.
He was out of baseball. He got married and was working for an engineering company when a phone call came.
It was the farm director for the A's asking Fischer if he wanted to manage in the team's organization. He talked things over with his wife, Mary, and came to a conclusion. He wanted to get back into baseball. Two days later, the farm director called back and offered Fischer a job coaching short-season class-A baseball in Medford, Ore.
That began a 27-year career spent in the Oakland organization, that sent him all the way to Oakland, until this season.
But it wasn't always easy for Fischer, especially during those early years in Medford.
"First year there it was real bad," Fischer said. "[Former Oakland owner Charlie] Finley still owned the team and we didn't sign any players so I had to hold a tryout a week before the season started to sign 10 players so I had enough to play.
"This was back when the A's were real bad, so it was a challenge in itself because I didn't have a pitching coach. I had a trainer that was 67 years old and it was just him and I. Holding this tryout, I had over 100 kids from the West Coast show up and that was a challenge in itself."
That team finished 22-48.
Fischer has told his Spikes plenty of stories like that.
"I've gotten my fair share of stories, all of them are relevant, all of them are good," shortstop Chase d'Arnaud said. Having to hold a tryout to field a team wasn't the only thing that didn't go right for Fischer in his rookie year managing.
The team traveled on a beat-up 1947 Greyhound bus to make trips across the Northwest League. The bus, which eventually would be sold to Universal Studios and refurbished to be used in movies, ran on gasoline.
No problem? Not exactly.
There was no way for the driver to gauge how much gas was in the bus so a stick was kept underneath the front seat. The stick was used like a dipstick to check oil but only with gasoline. It would be stuck down into the gas tank and there were levels marked on the stick to indicate how much gas the bus did or didn't have.
A far cry from the coach buses the Spikes travel in today.
"We push started that bus three times that summer," Fischer said. "The whole team would get out and push-start that bus."
Medford was a temporary stop for Fischer along his rise in the A's organization. He spent two years there before an encounter with former New York Yankees and Oakland Athletics manager Billy Martin.
Fischer was at an airport in Phoenix waiting to pick up his wife when Martin, who had a few drinks in him, recognized Fischer and approached him.
"He recognized me and we started talking for a few minutes," Fischer said. "He put his arm around me and said 'Hey kid, where do you want to manage next year?' My response was 'I understand we're putting a team in Madison, Wisconsin. That's closer to home for me, I'd love to manage that team.' He said the job's yours. So that's how I ended up in Madison, Wisconsin. And he actually remembered it the next day."
His stay in Madison didn't last long, either. It only took Fischer three years before he climbed up the next step in the organizational ladder to class-AA. This time it allowed him to manage two of the best and most controversial players of the past 20 years.
They were the "bash brothers," Jose Canseco and Mark McGwire. The two players who would revolutionize baseball in the late '80s and '90s.
From the moment the two stepped on his ballfield in Huntsville, Ala., Fischer knew he had the once in a generation talent that most managers would kill for.
"You could tell both guys were going to be real good players," Fischer said. "Canseco might have been the most talented guy I ever had in all those years, even to this day. He could do things on the field that I had never seen anybody do. He was just young and green, I mean he was just learning. He could run, he could throw, he had power. There wasn't anything on the field he couldn't do. He was always a challenge to manage because he was real headstrong; he always wanted to do things his own way.
"McGwire was totally different than Canseco. Canseco came from high school in Florida, McGwire was a college kid from USC who had high expectations right from the beginning. At the time we were trying to make McGwire a third baseman. He was still a good hitter, had lots of power. It was a tale of two different guys. Both were going to be tremendous players, you knew that. But Canseco was kind of a young, wild, never been to college guy and McGwire was a little more polished three-year college guy."
Those two were just some of the major leaguers that Fischer had during his time in Huntsville.
The list includes Walt Weiss, Terry Steinbach, Tim Belcher and Stan Javier.
Nearly a decade later, Fischer was reunited with Steinbach and McGwire when he became the bullpen coach for the Oakland A's. Eighteen years after he signed with A's, he finally made it to the big leagues.
Like his first year managing, Fischer's first couple of years as a Major League coach was "a little bit nerve-wracking."
In his second year, the A's were abysmal. They finished 65-97 and traded Mark McGwire to St. Louis for three players that turned out to be nothing.
But things turned around for Fischer and the A's. They began to regain the form of the franchise that was dominant in the late '80s and strung together four straight playoff appearances.
They didn't make the World Series in any of those four years, with each loss more heartbreaking than the last. But no loss was as crushing as their loss to the Yankees in the 2001 American League Divisional Series. That series was famous for the play made by Yankee shortstop Derek Jeter where he cut off a throw on the first-base line and in air was able to flip the ball to Yankee catcher Jorge Posada who tagged Oakland's Jeremy Giambi out.
"That was heartbreaking. That was a backbreaker, not just because we lost but we felt we had a team that could play in the World Series that year," Fischer said. "We had [Miguel] Tejada, [Jason] Giambi, Johnny Damon, Jermaine Dye the list goes on with good players. We had good pitching that year with [Mark] Mulder, [Tim] Hudson, [Barry] Zito and Kevin Appier was there. We just had it lined up. We should have won. And then we went to Yankee Stadium and won the first two games, we were on cloud nine."
Fischer remembers walking off the field in Yankee Stadium and into the clubhouse. There, the A's owner was standing there, shaking everybody's hand. Fischer said the atmosphere was like they had won the series. Then, the team flew back to Oakland and played the next game. That game was pitched by Mike Mussina and the Yankees won, 1-0. It was the game where Jeter made the play that has been a mainstay on the highlight reels and it was a momentum changer. From there, it was all Yankees.
"That was tough. For that game five to fly all the way back to New York that was tough. I remember our plane was low on fuel and we had to stop somewhere in Missouri and pick up fuel. We didn't get there until early in the morning, like five in the morning and had to play that night. That was a tough experience. That loss was devastating at that point."
Fischer spent six more years with the A's splitting time between first base and bullpen coach.
One of the coaches that Fischer worked with in Oakland was Boston manager Terry Francona. State College third baseman Jeremy Farrell's dad, John, is the pitching coach on Francona's staff. That relationship gave Farrell some insight on draft day about what he would expect.
"Actually I was in Boston when I was drafted and Terry Francona with was Brad in Oakland and had tremendous things to say about him," Farrell said. " [He] said there was nobody better for your first manager and was actually really excited for me that I was going to be able to come play for Brad."
After last year, Fischer's contracted was not renewed by the A's. For the first time in almost 30 years, he was no longer an employee of the A's. He was jobless.
He spent most of the off-season making phone calls to organizations, trying to get back into the game when he was offered the job of Pittsburgh Pirates minor league catching instructor and Spikes manager by Pirates general manager Neal Huntington.
His work showed off immediately. While he was sitting at his desk in the early morning last week, a Pirates Insider magazine sat in the right-hand corner of his desk. On the cover was Pirates catcher Ryan Doumit. Doumit has had a career year with the Pirates this year and Fischer was one of the ones to work with the catcher.
Now, his job is to work with players who are mostly fresh out of college or instructional league. His players relish the chance to be managed by a man who spent more time in professional baseball than they have alive.
"Great manager, love him half to death just one of the friendliest guys I've ever met," pitcher Brian Leach said. "A great coach, too, really knows what he's talking about, obviously because he's been in the major leagues, he's seen it all. He's really relaxed, he tries to keep the players positive, try not to get too down on yourselves but he'll let you know when we need to get on the horse and ride."
