It’s hard to determine exactly what your legacy will be in baseball. You’d like to hope that it’s your finest moment — your clutch hit, your record-breaking moment, your postseason heroics. Sometimes, you’re remembered for something else entirely. Lee Elia, for example, was a baseball lifer who spent more than 50 years in the game as a ballplayer, coach, manager and more. But a 3-minute rant while he was managing the Cubs is the thing that people will think of when they think of Lee Elia. It’s not fair, but maybe the best thing you can do in that situation is just go with it. Bill Buckner (ironically, a player on that ill-fated 1983 Cubs team) ended up filming commercials poking fun at his World Series error. And Elia came to look at his profane moment of fame with a sense of humor, in time. Elia died on July 9 in Odessa, FL, just a few days shy of his 88th birthday. He played for the Chicago White Sox (1966) and Chicago Cubs (1968), and he later managed the Cubs (1982-83) and Philadelphia Phillies (1987-88), but that was a small sliver of his baseball career.

Lee Constantine Elia was born in Philadelphia on July 16, 1937. He stood 5’11” and was a top-notch football player, serving as a quarterback, running back and kicker for Olney High School in Philadelphia and then at Bordentown Military Institute. He was also a talented shortstop and was part of an American Legion All-Star Game, played at Connie Mack Stadium in 1955. Playing for the “Senators,” Elia scored the first run of the game after reaching on the throwing error, and he later singled. As a senior in 1956, he was named to The Star-Ledger‘s All-State Baseball First Team as a third baseman. He batted .640 in 12 games and and drew scouts to the BMI parade grounds. After graduation, Elia attended the University of Delaware. On October 20, 1956, he scored 3 touchdowns, 2 as a running back and 1 as a receiver, to lead the school’s freshman football team to a 26-12 win over Lafayette. He was forced to miss his sophomore football season after dislocating his hip in 1957. It wasn’t a sports-related injury; he was attempting to jump over a stream while walking through the Cherry Blossom Festival in Washington D.C. and landed awkwardly in wet sand.

Elia was able to play his sophomore baseball season, and then he spent the summer in the Nova Scotia League, where he was the leader in doubles and triples. The 21-year-old signed with the Philadelphia Phillies on September 15, 1958, for a reported $30,000 bonus, and he began his pro career the following year with Elmira of the New York-Penn League. Elia got off to a hot start with a .387 batting average through his first 62 at-bats, and the Philadelphia Enquirer noted that the Phillies “may have a future big-league shortstop tucked away at Elmira, NY.” He finished with a .297 batting average and was named to the league’s All-Star Game. He hit 8 home runs with 66 RBIs, and he stole 19 bases, too. Elia dropped down to .233 in 1960 with Class-A Williamsport, but then he brought his average back up to .266 in 1961 with Double-A Chattanooga. He played both third base and shortstop as well as a little bit in the outfield. His fielding was a little hit-and-miss, but he was pretty consistent at the plate, hitting in the .260s with a little pop in his bat. He reached 18 home runs with Triple-A Arkansas in 1963 and followed it up with 16 in ’64. The Phillies and Chicago White Sox worked out two deals on November 30, 1964, with Philadelphia sending outfielder Danny Cater to the White Sox for pitcher Ray Herbert. Separately, the two teams swapped minor-leaguers, with the White Sox getting Elia and the Phillies getting first baseman/outfielder Joeff Long.

Elia was fine with leaving the Phillies organization, because manager Gene Mauch didn’t want him in the majors. “He wanted [Bobby] Wine and [Ruben] Amaro,” Elia explained in July 1965. “Well, the Phillies paid me a good salary and treated me very fine. I was satisfied. But then I was traded to the White Sox last year and I was really happy.” Elia hit 29 home runs for Triple-A Indianapolis in his first year with the new organization, and he drove in 75 runs while batting .261. The White Sox brought several Indianapolis players to the majors when injuries occurred, but Elia was never picked despite his career year as a power hitter. Apparently, there were some reports that he couldn’t hit breaking pitches, and he took exception to it. “Someone must have been sending in something wrong on me,” he said. “[Scout] Less Moss was here any saw me having trouble with sliders and maybe he told them I couldn’t hit breaking stuff… of my 22 homers, at least half of them have been on breaking pitches. I must be able to hit ’em pretty good.”

The White Sox brought Elia to the majors in 1966, so evidently they were satisfied about his ability to hit breaking pitches. He was a pinch-runner on April 23 and had his first at-bat as a pinch-hitter on April 27. He struck out against Boston’s Guido Grilli. Elia was then sent to the minors and hit 4 home runs for Indianapolis before being recalled again in late May as a substitute for injured shortstop Ron Hansen. He was given a start at shortstop on May 28 against New York. The came was called after 5 innings due to rain and ended in a 2-2 tie, but Elia still managed to git his first hit against Fritz Peterson and score his first run before the rains came. He was a starter for the entire month of June and batted .222, but there were some highlights. During a 6-game hitting streak from June 2 to June 6, Elia had a double, 2 triples and his first major-league home run off California pitcher Jack Sanford. Starting in July, most of the starts at shortstop went to Jerry Adair, and Elia became a part-time player and pinch-runner. In 80 games, he slashed .205/.265/.297 and drove in 22 runs. He also committed 14 errors at shortstop for a .954 fielding percentage.

Elia spent all of 1967 in the minor leagues, first with Indianapolis and then with Tacoma after being part of a minor league trade between the White Sox and Chicago Cubs. The Cubs purchased his contract from Tacoma in October and added him to the team’s roster in 1968. Aside from 13 games with Tacoma, Elia spent the entire season with the Cubs… on the bench. The team’s starting shortstop was All-Star Don Kessinger. who hardly ever took days off, so Elia appeared as a pinch-hitter or backup infielder about 3 or four games per month. His first Cubs hit came on April 19 against St. Louis, and his second hit was also against the Cardinals — almost 4 months later. Elia pinch-hit in the 13th inning against St. Louis on August 4 and singled in the game-winning run off Joe Hoerner, giving Chicago a 6-5 victory. The game, held on Stan Musial Appreciation Day in Busch Stadium, saw the Cubs score 5 runs off Bob Gibson in 11 innings (raising his ERA all the way to 1.08) and hit two game-tying home runs before Elia’s heroics. “From a spectator’s point of view, this was the most memorable game I’ve ever seen, even as a fan. That was true whether we won or lost or whether or not I had anything to do with it,” Elia said. On the season, he appeared in 15 games and was 3-for-17 with 3 RBIs. The Cubs returned him to the minor leagues in 1969 and later sold his contract to Syracuse, but a May knee surgery limited Elia to 20 games and essentially ended his career.

Over parts of 2 seasons, Elia played in a total of 95 games in the majors, with a .203/.262/.288 slash line. He had 5 doubles, 2 triples and 4 home runs among his 43 hits. He drove in 25 runs and scored 17 times.

The Cubs offered Elia a managerial role in their organization, but he decided to spend 1969 in the real world. He sold life insurance in Philadelphia and played in the semipro Pen-Del League at night. He re-entered baseball as a coach for the Eugene Emeralds, the Phillies’ Triple-A team in the Pacific Coast League, in 1973. The team lost several infielders due to injuries and promotions to the parent club, so Elia was pressed into service as a player for a few weeks. The 35-year-old hit .286 in 16 games with a homer. On defense, he played like a 35-year-old who was 4 years removed from a playing career, and he stuck to coaching after that emergency stint. His first managerial experience came with the Class-A Spartanburg Phillies in 1975, and he led the team to the Western Carolinas League championship. He also was fined $250 by league president Wallace McKenna for pulling his team off the field in a dispute with an umpire, resulting in the forfeit of a game. He moved up to Double-A Reading in 1977 and Triple-A Oklahoma City in 1979, winning titles at all three levels. By the time he was taking Oklahoma City into the playoffs, he was already considering how he would manage in the majors. Not that he would change his style. “If I’m ticked off at something in the big leagues and I want to flip a table, I’ll flip a table,” he told the Philadelphia Inquirer in September 1979. “What’s the difference if I flip a table in front of Bowa or Boone or Schmidt? What the hell’s the difference? I’m still going to do it because it’s me. I’m not going to change because there are guys there that I very much respect, guys I’ve admired over the years. It’s not going to make me different.”

While Elia could be fiery when upset, he could also be a calming, motivating factor for his players. Oklahoma City’s Keith Moreland credited Elia with keeping the team together during a poor start to the season. Second baseman Ramon Aviles also praised the manager. “I’ve been playing 10 years with different managers, and I’ve never been more relaxed than this year. This man is doing a great job. I’ve learned a lot just watching him.”

Dallas Green, the Phillies’ farm director who launched Elia’s managerial career, became the Phillies’ manager in the middle of 1979 and named Elia his third base coach. The Phillies won the World Series that year, and many of the players on the roster played under Elia on their way through the minors. Green was then hired by the Chicago Cubs in October 1981 to serve as general manager/executive vice president, and one of his first moves was to make Elia the team’s manager. Unlike the champion Phillies, the Cubs were closer to the bottom of the standings than the top. He said he wouldn’t put a timetable on the Cubs’ success “until I see what we’ve got, but I don’t take anything with the idea of losing. Somehow, some way we will be competitive,” he vowed.

Elia’s managerial career got off to a rocky start. Green added free agents Ferguson Jenkins and Bill Campbell and acquired several players from the Phillies, including Dickie Noles, Keith Moreland, Larry Bowa and, most notably, Ryne Sandberg. The Cubs finished spring training on a winning streak, giving hope that the team could surprise critics. Instead, the team went 7-14 in April. In May, Elia got into a physical confrontation with first baseman Bill Buckner during a Padres game in which Buckner was knocked down by a pitch. He came back to the dugout and told Cubs reliever Dan Larson he needed to retaliate. Larson hit the first batter he faced, Tim Flannery, and that led to Elia and Buckner grappling in the dugout. “I told him I will tell the pitcher when to do things in the manner I want them done,” Elia said. Buckner took himself out of the next game, claiming that Elia damaged a nerve in his neck. “The way things have boiled up I don’t feel comfortable being in the same room with Lee,” Buckner said, adding that a trade was probably in the best interest of everyone. The two eventually patched things up enough to continue a professional relationship, but the Cubs finished in fifth place with a 73-89 record. On the plus side, Elia showed uncommon patience when Sandberg got off to a horrid start at the plate. “I kept remembering Don Kessinger in 1966 and the way Leo [Durocher, former Cubs manager] stuck with him. He was rough in a lot of ways, but he just needed that one year,” Elia said. He moved Sandberg from third base to second base late in the season, and Sandberg started there for most of the next two decades on his way to the Hall of Fame.

The Cubs lost 4-3 to the Los Angeles Dodgers on April 29, 1983, to drop their record on the new season to 5-14. After scoring 2 runs in the first inning, the Dodgers hit two home runs off starter Paul Moskau to tie the game at 3, and then Lee Smith allowed the go-ahead run to score in the eighth inning on a wild pitch. The 9,381 fans at Wrigley Field let the Cubs know what they thought of the team, showering the players with boos and garbage as they made their way to the clubhouse entrance near the left field line. When the reporters came to interview Elia in his office, he let loose with a 3-minute rant about the fans at Wrigley. “About 85 percent of the world is working. The other 15 percent come out here,” is one of the more memorable lines, and almost every sentence is punctuated with a few choice expletives. If it had just been newspaper reporters present, the comments would have been newsworthy but edited for publication. However, radio reporter Les Grobstein happened to be there with a tape recorder, and he preserved every single swear. That recording became the stuff of legend once it was released to the local radio stations, in both bleeped and unbleeped versions. Within hours, Green had arranged a press conference for Elia to publicly apologize.

I just can’t do it justice by reprinting an edited version. Here you go. Just be warned, the 3-minute recording is extremely not safe for work. There are a few things worth noting. One, Elia was defending his players, which a manager should do. He may have gone about it in the worst way possible, but the players knew that Elia had their backs. And he wasn’t the only frustrated Cub out there. At that same game, Moreland had to be restrained from climbing onto the roof of the Cubs dugout to deal with three drunk hecklers himself. Finally, Elia hit on an uncomfortable truth. The idea of Wrigley Field being the Friendly Confines can be true… when things are going well. When things are bad, it’s a different story, and there are probably more than a few ballplayers who can share stories about hostile Cubs fans at Wrigley Field.

“I guess I lost it,” Elia said later. “I get frustrated because a lot of positive things have transpired around here in the last year-and-a-half that don’t show on the record. I’m aware that the fans have to be frustrated also because we haven’t executed when we should and we haven’t hit like we should and like we can. My frustrations just peaked. It’s obvious the fans have the same frustrations and I was out of line.”

The next day, the Cubs clobbered the Dodgers 7-2, and it would be great to say that Elia’s comments fired the team up and spurred a massive winning streak. The team did play better for a time and got within a game of .500 in early July. But the losses mounted after that point, and the final straw came after a 5-3 loss to the Atlanta Braves on August 19. Elia told reporters, “We’ve never heard of this guy Gerald Perry,” referring to the Braves rookie who homered and drove in 3 runs in the loss. Green felt that the comment showed a lack of preparation. “That was an embarrassment to the team and the whole organization,” Green said after announcing that Charlie Fox would replace Elia. “Lee should have known better.” The players, including Buckner, had kind words for Elia, who left with a 54-69 record. “There’s not a player in this room who thinks it’s his fault… He’s a very competitive person, a super human being,” said outfielder Gary Woods.

Elia didn’t hear a copy of the tape until a week or so later. “At first, I couldn’t believe it came out of me. I’ll be honest with you, I didn’t feel very good over what I heard,” he told UPI editor Milton Richman in 1984. Elia said that he had given a heated talk to the team after the loss, and he was still emotional when the reporters started asking questions about the team’s slow start. He didn’t know he was going too far in his response until he saw coach Ruben Amaro waving his arms in the doorway. “Compadre, you said some things you never should’ve said,” Amaro told him once the press had left.

Elia returned to the Phillies and managed the Triple-A team in Portland in 1984. He was named bench coach for Phillies manager John Felske in 1985 and became his replacement when Felske was fired on June 18, 1987. He took control of a team that was 29-32 and guided them to a 51-50 record the rest of the season. He was very optimistic going into the 1988 season, so much so that he raised expectations that couldn’t be met. Veterans like Mike Schmidt, Lance Parrish and Juan Samuel had disappointing seasons, and Elia was fired by new general manager Lee Thomas on September 23, with 9 games left in the season. The team had a 60-92-1 record and finished in last place in the NL East. One of the criticisms of him was that he was too nice and didn’t publicly call out his underperforming players. “In retrospect, maybe I should been a little more vocal outside the locker room. But that’s not my way,” he said in his farewell press conference. In 4 seasons as a big-league manager, he had a 238-300 record.

Elia never managed in the majors again, but he continued to work in organized baseball for decades. He was a part of Dallas Green’s coaching staff during Green’s short tenure as Yankees manager in 1989. He returned to coaching in the minors for Philadelphia and took Scranton/Wilkes-Barre to the International League championship series in 1992. After being named IL Manager of the Year in ’92, Elia returned to the majors as an in-demand coach. He spent 8 seasons with the Seattle Mariners as a bench coach and hitting coach, and one of his success stories was helping Alex Rodriguez adjust to the majors in 1996 by having him study videos of Edgar Martinez’s approach. He also had stints as a coach for the Toronto Blue Jays, Tampa Bay Devil Rays and Baltimore Orioles and held front office jobs with Philadelphia (director of minor league personnel/instructor), Los Angeles (special assistant to the general manager) and Atlanta (special assistant to player development, senior advisor to player development). He retired to Florida after the 2018 season, having spent most of the previous 59 years in baseball in one form or another.

Elia was a prostate cancer survivor and had lost his father to the same disease. When the 25th anniversary of his infamous rant came around in 2008, he contributed a special item for an auction to raise funds for the Chicago Baseball Cancer Charities. He autographed a baseball and included the inscription “PRINT IT!” — a nod to one of the lines from the tirade. The baseball also had a chip with a recording of Elia expressing his love for Chicago Cubs fans. “One of the few pure things left in this business is the Chicago Cubs’ fans,” he said.

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