I’m sure you can find your own links.
Quite a character for many, many years.
RIP Sparky
Oh damn. Another part of my childhood gone. One of those rare managers that were bigger than the game. I’m not sure if they really exist any more.
Sparky could give a long winded explanation after a game and you would wonder what the hell he said when he finished.
He had a bunch of platoon players when he was in Detroit. When he put them in, they did something important, over and over. It was amazing. He was involved in several charities too.
I guess you don’t know until they’re done.
Sparky, is, I’m sure, already filling out a lineup card in God’s league. Probably gonna get into an argument with an ump, too.
There’s umps in heaven? 
RIP, Sparky.
Hear hear. They don’t make managers like Sparky Anderson anymore. At least Jim Leyland is still kicking around (and managing the Tigers no less!).
Here, here!
RIP Sparky. 
He suffered from Dementia these past few years.
Leyland is a youngster by comparison. He is only 65. He just looks old and always has. I guess Torre was the man with the earliest manager’s job of those that were active this year. He was player/manager of the Mets in '77, 9 years before Leyland got the Pirates job.
Man, Sparky and Ernie in one year.
I still remember the 75 and 76 World Series and I’m not a sports fanatic. He and the reds were larger than life. It wasn’t one or two players, it was a whole universe of shining stars.
If my memory doesn’t trick me, it was:
C Bench
1B Perez
2B Morgan
3B Rose
SS Concepcion
LF Foster
CF Geronimo
RF Griffey Sr
SP Gullett
SP Nolan
RP Eastwick
MGR Anderson
Man, that Big Red Machine could kick butt.
Wouldn’t today have been the last game of the World Series? Kinda fitting. Lots of fond memories of one very distinguished character.
He also was one of if not the first managers in those days to yank a starting pitcher early if necessary and make full use of his bullpen, hence the nickname “Captain Hook”.
RIP Sparky.
Has anyone been better at putting together good offensive lineups? There was the Big Red Machine, obviously, but all of his Tigers teams had great hitting, even when the pitching wasn’t all there.
Which makes him just like Sparky.
Remember the great Tigers team in 1984, when white-haired Sparky led them to 104-58 and the World Series? Anderson was just 50. He always looked 15 years older than he was.
It has often been said that those Reds teams might well have had the best lineup ever fielded. I think perhaps they were.
The 1976 Reds scored 33% more runs than the AVERAGE NL team. If any other team in baseball has ever scored 4 runs to the average team’s 3, I cannot find them. The 1927 Yankees didn’t do that. The 2001 Mariners didn’t do it. The 2010 Reds were the best offensive team in the NL but to be as dominant as the 1976 Reds, they were have had to score 145 more runs then they did; it would be like the same team except Orlando Cabrera hits 30 homers, Jonny Gomes bats .380, and Ramon Hernandez hits like Joe Mauer. Maybe that would be enough.
Plus the '76 Reds could pick it and throw it, I’ll tell you. Bench, Morgan, Conception… back then George Foster wasn’t half bad. There isn’t a bad glove in that lineup.
I dunno if Sparky had much to do with assembling that team but he got as much out of that lineup as anyone has ever gotten out of a lineup.
I met him once at a spring training game between the Tigers and the Dodgers. I couldn’t believe that anyone was smoking in the stands at a baseball game in the late 1990s.
I met him several times. My son met him too,but I doubt he remembers it.
Sparky went to the Reds and the Tigers at exactly the right time. He could have run the Reds from Hawaii by postcard.
Then he moved to Detroit just when the farm club had stocked him up with a bunch of talented young players. Sparky said often, write down the lineup and let them play. if they are good enough, you will be thought of as a great manager.
Sparky was only 36 when he took the Reds to the World Series in 1970, but he already had white hair. He always seemed like an old timer, even when he was pretty young.
I remember an umpire named Al Clark used to pointedly call him George at all times. “I refuse to call a grown man Sparky,” he used to say.
Jim Leyland is only 65? Wow. I remember him managing the Pirates in the late 80s and looking like an old man then. Hard to imagine he was only in his early 40s, and according to Wikipedia, his kids weren’t even born yet.