CLEARWATER, Fla. — When Charlie Manuel began to speak again, he could not talk. It had been five days since his stroke. His heart was better. He’d regain the feeling in his right side with time. But, last September, there were no words.
“I knew what I wanted to say,” Manuel said months later. “That really gets to you. You know what to say and you can’t say it.”
Manuel is the ultimate baseball lifer, with more than six decades in the game. The Phillies’ all-time winningest manager, known for his love of hitting, trademark malapropisms and colorful language, was always most at home behind the batting cage. Five months after the Phillies fired him as manager in 2013, they hired him as an advisor to the front office. He hadn’t yet budged. The role is now largely ceremonial, but Manuel had never viewed it that way. “I’m real, for one thing,” Manuel said. “I’m honest.” He was a constant at spring training. He had bullied his way through constant health problems, to hell and back in 80 years. This was different.
The stroke had damaged a specific part of his brain that controls language expression; the doctors diagnosed Manuel with expressive aphasia and dysarthria. It was the most demoralized and discouraged his wife, Missy, had ever seen him. He exists to…
