Coaching Career
Following his active playing career, he served two terms (1962–63; 1968–71) as the third-base coach of the Angels and one year (1985) in that role with the San Francisco Giants. He also had a long career as a minor league manager in the Angels, Giants, San Diego Padres and Pittsburgh Pirates organizations. Over 21 seasons stretched between 1964 and 1989, Bridges' teams won 1,300 games and lost 1,358 (.489).
His minor league managerial career is profiled in Jim Bouton's collection of baseball articles and essays entitled I Managed Good, But Boy Did They Play Bad.
The Great American Baseball Card Flipping, Trading and Bubble Gum Book, Brendan C. Boyd & Fred C. Harris, Little Brown & Co, 1973, began a lengthy writeup next to a picture of a baseball card of the square-jawed, crew-cut, tobacco-chewing Bridges on p. 103: "Rocky Bridges looked like a ballplayer. In fact, he may have looked more like a ballplayer than any other ballplayer who ever lived."
Read more about this topic: Rocky Bridges
Famous quotes containing the word career:
“He was at a starting point which makes many a man’s career a fine subject for betting, if there were any gentlemen given to that amusement who could appreciate the complicated probabilities of an arduous purpose, with all the possible thwartings and furtherings of circumstance, all the niceties of inward balance, by which a man swings and makes his point or else is carried headlong.”
—George Eliot [Mary Ann (or Marian)