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PHILADELPHIA - It’s a wonder what two homers can do for a manager - like make people forget you nearly blew Game 1 of the NLCS, right at the start. There it was in the very first inning Thursday night, an opportunity for Charlie Manuel to demonstrate he was smarter than the dugout bench supporting his weight. All he had to do was order his starter, Cole Hamels, to walk Manny Ramirez or at least to pitch around him carefully with one out, a runner on second and first base open. You talk about Ryan’s swing and his stride. I think he’s only had about nine chances to swing the bat actually in the series. CHARLIE MANUEL: That becomes very important because that goes to show you that they’re trying to get him to chase balls out of the zone, and he’s got to be very patient, and like I said, he’s got to be patient and getting balls to hit and stay in the middle of the field or hit the ball to left field. Then when he does that, that’s what brings him right back around.

CHARLIE MANUEL: Milwaukee has got a lot of right handed hitters. I wanted to keep Feliz on them in the game. CHARLIE MANUEL: You know, like I said, we come to the ballpark today, we know exactly where we’re at, and we came to win.

June Manuel, the 87-year-old mother of Philadelphia Phillies manager Charlie Manuel, died Friday morning, the Phillies announced. Manuel, who watched batting practice from his usual spot behind the cage on Friday afternoon, will manage Game 2 of the National League Championship Series against the Los Angeles Dodgers. Philadelphia Philadelphia Philadelphia Philadelphia Philadelphia Phillies manager Charlie Manuel was unable to attend Friday’s media briefing prior to Game 2 of the National League Championship Series against the Los Angeles Dodgers after learning of the death of his mother. Charlie Manuel plans to manage the Philadelphia Phillies against the Los Angeles Dodgers in Game 2 of the NLCS despite the death of his mother.

PHILADELPHIA - Nobody knows more about Manny Ramirez ‘ swing than Phillies’ manager Charlie Manuel, his former hitting coach and manager in the minors and with the Cleveland Indians. It would reason that if anyone has an advantage in knowing how to pitch him, it would be Manuel. That’s not a bad advantage to have when your team is about to face his Dodgers team in the National League championship. Father and son. It is a clich”, true enough, but both the Dodgers’ Manny Ramirez and Phillies manager Charlie Manuel say that it describes the relationship between the two of them, a relationship that dates to Ramirez’ earliest days in the Cleveland Cleveland Indians organization.

My guess is that if you polled a thousand baseball fans as to who was a better manager between Dodgers head man Joe Torre and Phillies skipper Charlie Manuel, you”d get about 997 responses for Torre, with perhaps a three-vote margin of error. On the merits, this makes some sense: Torre has four world championships on his resume and a nationally known icon who stars in credit card commercials in. Charlie Manuel calls baseball an “every day” game, which is not to be confused with an everyday game. There is nothing ordinary about baseball, particularly at the time of year when all the days add up and, for the lucky teams, they finally add up to something. There was an opportunity for Charlie Manuel to demonstrate he was smarter than the dugout bench supporting his weight. All he had to do was tell Cole Hamels to walk Manny Ramirez or at least to pitch around him. Charlie Manuel looked on from the dugout while his players celebrated a division championship, and he sat in his office after they took the party back on the field.

Phillies Manager Charlie Manuel was scheduled to speak in the interview room at 1:15 p.m., but that was canceled because his mother, June, has died. Feliz is a pure third baseman, while Dobbs is a jack-of-all-trades utility player. Phils manager Charlie Manuel said he started Feliz in Game 1 because of defensive considerations. Still Feliz misplayed a hard shot to his back-hand. Manuel, the mother of Phils manager Charlie Manuel, died this morning at age 87 after a brief illness at a hospital near her Virginia home. Manuel canceled his pregame press appearance, but stayed at the ballpark and will manage today’s NLCS game against the. A grieving Charlie Manuel plans to be in the Philadelphia Phillies’ dugout Friday afternoon for Game 2 of the NLCS, just hours after his mother died.

The mother of manager Charlie Manuel passed away, the. Earlier in the week I inscribed on these very pages that Chase Utley and Pat Burrell were the two main pieces to the NLCS puzzle. Manuel’s pregame news conference Friday was canceled. He did not speak to the media on the field. Manuel said of his mother in a 2005 Mother’s Day postcard for MLB.com: “I can’t imagine a better person in the world than my mother.

It’s never a good time for that to happen, but what a particularly bad time this is. No word on whether he’ll be in the dugout this afternoon. The YEARS 1974 and 1975 might seem like mere footnotes in a baseball life that has stretched for more than 40 years. Charlie Manuel’s brief stint as an outfielder with the Dodgers played a major role in his eventual job as a major league manager. The Dodgers have Manny Ramirez on a hot streak that ousted the touted Cubs, but Charlie Manuel’s team has been on a recent roll, too.

She was 8 Manuel was just finishing up a meeting with his coaches at Citizens Bank.

Manuel felt the need to do the macho thing, to prove early in this series that Hamels and his guys were not going to shape their entire game strategy around the awesome powers of Super-Manny.

I got the emails from friends and family after Manuel was hired there. They called him a hillbilly, a hick. I didn’t think he’d last. He was goaded by a TV sports anchor and talk show host, the kind of guy whose ego made him Manuel’s polar opposite. Inappropriate? Alert us. Manuel and Wedge were managers for Cleveland because they filled one major criteria: They worked for cheap. Neither is Albert Einstein and I wonder how Manuel communicates with his players since they probably can’t understand a word he says. I was never a fan of either manager as the only thing either knew about major league pitching was that they couldn’t hit it.

I grew up in Philadelphia but that’s not why Manuel is my sentimental favorite to be in a champagne-soaked clubhouse in late October. I still root for people on occasion. As nice a guy as Sabathia is, Manuel holding the World Series trophy would be a piece of well-deserved justice that might not come along for him ever again at his age.

Charlie wasn’t good enough to keep here but certainly good enough to do a great job in Phillie. I hope they win it all. Inappropriate? Alert us. I used to work with Charlie when he was the manager at Colorado Springs. The great thing about Charlie is that there is no pretense to him. Charlie may not be the most eloquent speaker but he has more common sense and baseball knowledge in his little finger than 90 percent of the other managers in baseball - including our blinking, twitching idiot Wedge.

Charlie lived and worked in Japan for a number of years. During that time, he had to deal with Japanese media and would have picked up a fundamental level of language usage.

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