they'd be repelled by it. Isn't it funny that one kind of behavior is expected from a football coach and another from a baseball manager? And they both have essentially the same job. It seems to me it takes a certain amount of mental toughness to keep control of your emotions. You owe it to management, your players and the fans to keep yourself under control at critical moments. San Diego Padres In late 1984, Boros was hired as the director of minor league instruction for the San Diego Padres. When the Padres manager Dick Williams resigned suddenly at the start of spring training in late February 1986, Boros was hired to replace him. Boros was perceived as the antithesis of the "gruff and uncommunicative" Williams. Boros noted, "Dick likes to be aloof, apart from the players. I like to be close to them. I really like young players and enjoy working with them." Sports Illustrated wrote as follows about the contrast between Williams and Boros: The move may not have been as revolutionary as the introduction of the McDLT, but last week the hamburger-funded San Diego Padres went from the hot of Dick Williams to the cool of Steve Boros. . . . [I]t marked the greatest contrast in successive baseball managers since, well, since Steve Boros followed Billy Martin in Oakland." In an interview with the San Diego Union at the start of the 1986 season, Boros assured Padres fans that he would not make extensive use of the computer as he had in Oakland. The resulting article noted: At Oakland, Boros used computers extensively, studying percentages and tendencies to guide his strategic decisions, but at heart, he is a humanist. He would rather read a good baseball novel than a complex statistical analysis of the game. 'I found that players are very suspicious of computers, much like the general public,' he said. 'They fear them as cold and impersonal and inhuman. I couldn't make them understand that I was still going to make my own decisions, I wasn't going to let the computer make them for me. I'm going to use some data and stats here, but we won't have a computer and a programmer in the clubhouse like we did in Oakland. One of Boros' first managerial decisions resulted from stiff competition for the starting first baseman job. Steve Garvey began the season as the team's