NEW YORK -- Lou Piniella looked at Larry Bowa a year ago and saw a lot of himself in his third-base coach at Seattle. It turned out he was right -- both wound up with Manager of the Year awards Wednesday.
Piniella won the American League honor for the second time for leading the Mariners to a record-setting season, and Bowa won the National League award for keeping the surprising Philadelphia Phillies in playoff contention until the final three days of the season.
“I recognized he knew baseball,” Piniella said. “I recognized that he had leadership qualities. As the season progressed, I even told him, `You should think about managing at the big-league level again and not be satisfied being a third-base coach.”´
Piniella, whose Mariners tied the major league record of 116 wins, received 22 first-place votes and six seconds for 128 points from a panel of the Baseball Writers´ Association.
Bowa got 18 first-place votes, six seconds and five thirds in the separate NL voting, for 113 points.
Piniella, 58, and Bowa, 55, have similar intense styles, but Piniella has calmed down during 15 years as a major league manager.
“I do have the intensity,” said Bowa, whose contract was extended Wednesday for two years through 2004. “I think I´ve learned to bottle it up a little bit better than before. I´m still very intense. I´m not going to lie about that.”
Bowa, fired by San Diego after compiling an 81-127 record in 1987-88, said Piniella warned him about his intensity.
“There was a time during the course of the year when I was very high,” Bowa said, “and you have to sort of back off there.”
Piniella said it was difficult for him to acquire patience.
“I came to realize a manager can´t be more intense than his team,” he said. “He has to find the level of intensity his team has and hover around it -- in fact, better, hover slightly below it.”
Oakland´s Art Howe was second in the AL voting for the third consecutive season, getting five first-place votes and 77 points. Minnesota´s Tom Kelly was third with 25 points.
Jimy Williams, fired by Boston on Aug. 16 after keeping his team in contention for most of the season, finished fourth with 12 third-place votes and 12 points. He was the first manager fired during a season to receive any votes since the BBWAA began the manager awards in 1983.
At the time Williams was fired, Boston was 65-53, two games behind Oakland in the AL wild-card standings and five games behind the New York Yankees in the AL East.
Boston went 17-26 under Williams´ successor, Joe Kerrigan, and finished 13 1/2 games behind the Yankees and 19 1/2 games in back of the Athletics.
Jim Tracy, the first-year manager of the Los Angeles Dodgers, was second in the NL voting with 48 points, followed by Tony La Russa of St. Louis with 38 and Bob Brenly of Arizona with 33.
Piniella, who also won the award with Seattle in 1995, became the first manager to twice lead teams to first-place finishes after leading from opening day, first accomplishing the feat with the 1990 Cincinnati Reds.
“The only danger of opening up a big lead is if complacency sets in, you can go into a tailspin,” Piniella said. “My coaching staff and my players did an outstanding job of making sure that didn´t happen.”
Seattle went 116-46, breaking the AL record for wins set by the 1998 Yankees (114-48) and tying the mark set by the 1906 Chicago Cubs (116-36). The Mariners then were eliminated by the Yankees in the second round of the playoffs, 4-1.
“Just a lot of wins, a lot of wins,” Piniella said. “I hope when we go into spring training next year, people don´t expect a duplication.”
Ballots for the awards had to be postmarked before the start of the playoffs.
