Mills has a team at home to thank

Published online on Tuesday, Oct. 27, 2009

The phone rang at Bert and Sue Holt's apartment in Visalia. This was Sunday.

Sue answered and the man on the other end said, "Mom?" which is odd to hear from someone who is not your son.

The caller was Brad Mills, and despite his sloppy cell-phone fingers, he'd actually gotten pretty close. The Holts have been like second parents for 30 years, since Mills played ball for Bert at College of the Sequoias.

While she had Mills on the phone, Sue wanted to know if he had any news. He did. The Astros had asked him back for a third interview. This time, he told her, it sounded better.

So Mills flew to Houston on Monday, and on Tuesday they put him in charge, officially. And this time, he dialed the right number.

"It's amazing," says 80-year-old Margaret Mills. "I'm the mother of the manager of the Houston Astros."

At an age most people start thinking about retirement, Mills is starting a career. On Tuesday, the Astros named him the 19th manager of their franchise, and that's if you count Salty Parker (managed one game while they waited for Leo Durocher to get to town) and Dave Clark (interim for 13 games this season after Cecil Cooper was fired). Mills has been managing and coaching in pro baseball for 22 years, but this is his first shot as a major league manager. He beat out Clark and Phil Garner, the only Astros manager to make the World Series.

By manager standards, Mills is still in his prime at age 52, but it's been a long trip since he tore the ligaments in his right knee and retired as a player in 1987. He started managing in the minors that season and never envisioned a life in any other profession -- not real estate like his brother, or farming like his parents. It was just this game.

"You could say [managing in the majors] was a goal," he said Tuesday in a phone interview, "but at the same time, I wanted to be around the game. I wanted to work with guys. I love teaching the game. I love just talking about the game."

His mother is right. It is amazing. The manager of the Astros lives in a modest home in Visalia. He played high school ball at Exeter and college ball at COS. His parents still have 15 acres of orange trees in Lemon Cove, and Jim Mills, Brad's 86-year-old father, still starts the pumps and checks the irrigation ditch himself. His son, Beau, now in the Indians' organization, played at Fresno State.

"I've lived in the Valley a long time," Brad said an hour after his introduction in Houston. "It's a very special place, and not just the Valley. Visalia has got some very special people, people that are very close. I'm sure I've got a lot of messages on my cell phone. I had to turn it off because it was running out of juice."

Last Friday, Mills came by COS baseball practice to drop off souvenirs for a fundraiser. When you've been the bench coach of the Boston Red Sox the past six years, you have access to quality souvenirs. Of course, a lot of Mills' career has been helped along by Boston manager Terry Francona, including a strong recommendation this weekend to Houston.

Mills and Francona were teammates at the University of Arizona three decades ago, and Francona hired Mills in Philadelphia and then Boston. But Mills cultivated this opportunity on his own, in places such as Wytheville, Va., and Charleston, W.Va., and Peoria, Ill., and Des Moines, Iowa. He spent 11 years filling out lineups in the minors, massaging egos, talking youngsters out of slumps.

He spent another 11 years as a major league coach, where he was known for the same thing he's known for in Visalia, being a first-class guy and a good communicator.

In the winter, Mills still plays golf and eats breakfast with his old coach, Bert Holt. Holt retired last winter from scouting after 21 years, and now volunteers his time at COS. Last Friday, Mills made sure to subtly let Holt know how much he had learned from him.

"It was [quite a compliment]," Holt said, "and I treated it that way."

From a major league manager, as it turns out.