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" Let Larry Dierker talk about the great five minutes. He&amp;#039;s done it before, whenever his Houston Astros visited a city that they hadn&amp;#039;t visited since dierker collapsed in the dugout last june. &amp;quot;every time i went into a new city after it happened, i had to do the seizure interview,&amp;quot; he explains. &amp;quot;then, of course, there was the newspaper seizure interview and then all the tv seizure interviews. It got tiresome to keep talking about it, but it&amp;#039;s flattering to know that so many people care.&amp;quot; But it&amp;#039;s not tiresome for him to talk about the great five minutes, so let him roll it all out. After all, lazarus is a damn good act--always has been, an accounting of life returning by degrees and inches, by minutes and seconds, one sense at a time.  &amp;quot;First,&amp;quot; he says, recalling the first clear seconds he&amp;#039;d had in the three days following surgery, &amp;quot;I just sort of tentatively swung my legs around and put them on the floor. That felt all right, so then I stood up. I put my feet on the ground, so I knew I could stand. I took a couple of steps and I knew I could walk. I thought, Well, I&amp;#039;d really like a cup of coffee. So I walked down to the nurses&amp;#039; station and I said, &amp;#039;Do you have any coffee?&amp;#039; so I knew then I could talk. They kind of looked at me and said, &amp;#039;Yeah.&amp;#039; They brought me the coffee and it was warm, so I knew I could feel that, and I drank some, so I knew I could taste. There was a newspaper lying there, and I picked it up and I walked back to my room and I sat in a chair and had a cup of coffee and my newspaper. I knew then that I could read. So, in that five-minute stretch, I knew I could do anything. I don&amp;#039;t think I&amp;#039;ll ever do anything that I enjoy more than I enjoyed that five minutes. Sitting there and being able to taste a cup of coffee and read a newspaper--well, that just felt like heaven to me.&amp;quot; GRADUALLY, the Houston Astros begin to filter into the ball yards that stand beyond the fields in which both the Osceola County Fair and the Silver Spurs Rodeo have encamped simultaneously. Out amid the trailers that clutter the fields, rodeo horses stir at their tethers. Closer in, near the back of the ball yards, people have lined up for the day&amp;#039;s livestock judging. Soon, out at the rodeo, men will fall off angry horses. Soon, back over at the fair, a blue ribbon will be hung on a pig. Soon, slow and eternal, the Ferris wheel will begin to turn. This is where the Astros train, in Kissimmee, deep in old Florida, Confederate Florida, bait-bucket, gun-shop, All-U-Can-Eat, un-Moused Florida. Today, eight months after the Great Five Minutes, at the beginning of spring training, the coaches have already settled into a routine--a hard morning of meetings followed by a harder afternoon of golf. As diligently as baseball romantics sell the notion of spring training as a metaphor for life&amp;#039;s energetic vernal renewal, most geraniums work harder in the spring than baseball people do. There are innumerable moments--and this is one of them--when spring training takes on all the vitality of a turtle sunning itself on a flat rock. There&amp;#039;s no hurry for Larry Dierker, who&amp;#039;s managed these Astros for three seasons, which is approximately two and a half seasons longer than many people gave him when he came out of the broadcast booth to take the job at the end of the 1996 season. A lanky six four, he&amp;#039;s still towheaded, if that&amp;#039;s possible when you&amp;#039;re fifty-three years old, and there is in his demeanor the kind of walking deadpan pause that seems to have departed American humor with the demise of Jack Benny. As he moves through the clubhouse, the atmosphere--which wasn&amp;#039;t exactly something out of Ibsen to begin with--lightens even further, as though everything in the place might just float up to the ceiling. &amp;quot;It&amp;#039;s almost as though I didn&amp;#039;t choose baseball,&amp;quot; Dierker says. &amp;quot;It&amp;#039;s like baseball chose me. That&amp;#039;s what I&amp;#039;d believe if I were inclined to believe in fate, which I never have been in my life, but as the years go on, I&amp;#039;m more inclined to believe in fate than I ever was before.&amp;quot; He is a lifer with this franchise, so much so that his history with it goes all the way back to 1964 and the original houston colt 45&amp;#039;s, who played in colt stadium, a ballpark that differed from the average roadside reptile farm only in that a professional baseball team played there. subsequently, of course, the team changed its name because it was moving into the astrodome, the eighth wonder of the world--which, alas, this past fall joined the temple of diana, the hanging gardens of babylon, and the colossus of rhodes in the roll call of defunct wonders of the world--and dierker was on the first team that played there. he was an eighteen-year-old phenom with an overpowering fastball, a drop-dead curveball, and enough command of them both to win 137 games in thirteen seasons. The third batter he faced in his career was Willie Mays, whom he got looking with a 3--2 slider. He threw a no-hitter in 1976, one year before his arm fell apart. Through all of that, Dierker&amp;#039;s quirky personality withstood all of baseball&amp;#039;s assaults upon it. Most baseball teams are characterized by a distressing conformity and by an alarmingly prideful anti-intellectualism. (For example, this accounts for someone like Yankee coach Don Zimmer&amp;#039;s being considered cute, despite his curdled contempt for anyone who might, say, read in his general vicinity.) From the beginning of his career, Dierker was able to avoid that trap while simultaneously avoiding the deadly tag of clubhouse flake. While pitching for the Astros, Dierker picked up his college degree, beginning as a business major at UC Santa Barbara and ending up as an English major at the University of Houston. In 1969, when Dierker was the ace of the Astros staff, Houston traded Dooley Womack to the Seattle Pilots for veteran reliever Jim Bouton, who brought with him a knuckleball and a diary that later became Ball Four, which became one of the most revolutionary phenomena in the history of American sports. Bouton&amp;#039;s keen eye for baseball eccentricity quickly focused on the twenty-two-year-old Dierker as he killed time between innings of a tense ballgame by singing &amp;quot;Rocky Raccoon&amp;quot; in the Astros&amp;#039; dugout. Bouton saw in Dierker what other people have come to see--that Dierker is in baseball, but he is not of baseball. &amp;quot;That&amp;#039;s probably true in me to a great extent,&amp;quot; Dierker says. &amp;quot;I don&amp;#039;t think I&amp;#039;m the typical baseball personality, because I have some interests that probably aren&amp;#039;t found in too many other guys. At the same time, I&amp;#039;m perfectly comfortable within the baseball culture.&amp;quot; With Dierker as their manager, and with two of the finest players in the game in Craig Biggio and Jeff Bagwell, the Astros have won the National League&amp;#039;s Central Division for three consecutive seasons. However, as has been the case for the team&amp;#039;s entire history, Houston remains an orphan franchise, more famous for the peculiar Wonder of the World in which it played its games than for anything else.  The Astros have never made it to a World Series. In their most recent successes, they&amp;#039;ve been overshadowed generally by the Atlanta Braves and, within their own division, by Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa, who together have turned the lower half of the division into baseball&amp;#039;s most popular cabaret act. And now, this season, things are not likely to improve, since Ken Griffey Jr. landed in Cincinnati, which means that the three greatest power hitters in the gameare in the NL Central and none of them play for the Astros. Winning is no longer enough to get noticed, not hardly enough. &amp;quot;I think,&amp;quot; says Houston general manager Gerry Hunsicker, &amp;quot;that this has been sort of a nondescript franchise since its inception.&amp;quot; However, last June 13, America&amp;#039;s attention focused on the Astros. In the eighth inning of a game in which his Astros were leading San Diego 4--1, Dierker collapsed in a terrifying grand mal seizure in the Houston dugout. He subsequently was operated on, and a tangled fist of blood vessels was removed from his brain. His recovery is a complete one, but before we deal with what happened in Larry Dierker&amp;#039;s brain last season, we should examine, briefly, what use he&amp;#039;d made of it before June 13, 1999. This is someone who looked up from the lights of a place in California and saw bright lights on the horizon, a boy who went off one day to join the rodeo but who, in his own winding way, always went back to school again. FOR A WHILE OVER THE LAST COUPLE OF SEASONS, LARRY DIERKER KEPT A DIARY. HE EVEN PLANNED TO PUBLISH IT, HAD A MAJOR NEW YORK PUBLISHING HOUSE ALL HOT FOR IT. THEN HE WENT BACK THROUGH IT, REALIZED HOW HONEST IT WAS, REMEMBERED WHAT HAPPENED TO BOUTON AFTER BALL FOUR was published, and decided to keep the diary private for a while. &amp;quot;It was mostly for my family,&amp;quot; he explains. &amp;quot;It was about my life in baseball and all that. I read it, and I figured I could get in trouble.&amp;quot;  His life in baseball is not like many lives in baseball. For example, we&amp;#039;ve talked about Hawaiian shirts already. (Dierker, it seems, shares my enthusiasm for the retro fifties style of exorbitantly hibiscus-drenched couture, and he&amp;#039;s been quite complimentary about the peculiarly gaudy example of the genre that I&amp;#039;ve worn on this first day of spring training. His, it should be noted, is a muted blue with what appear to be scenes from some of the early Beach Boys records. I make it a draw, all things considered.) Now we are talking about books. Every year, he picks a big, thick one to help him get through spring training. Last season, it was From Here to Eternity. This year, it&amp;#039;s A Man in Full. &amp;quot;You know,&amp;quot; he says, &amp;quot;I&amp;#039;ll read on the plane. I won&amp;#039;t come in here and read. When I come in here, I&amp;#039;m into what everyone else is doing. What&amp;#039;s different for me is what I do when I leave the clubhouse, not what I do when I&amp;#039;m here.&amp;quot; I&amp;#039;m struck at this point by something that Jim Bouton told me about Dierker. &amp;quot;Larry was able to walk into a room with anybody and feel comfortable. He could feel at home with Ph.D.&amp;#039;s and M.D.&amp;#039;s and pitching coaches. The great thing about him was that he was able to be an interesting person, and at the same time, in the clubhouse, he was one of the boys.&amp;quot; Indeed, the poignant subtext to Ball Four consists largely of Bouton&amp;#039;s fruitless attempts to achieve the same kind of balance between a distinct individual and a baseball yobbo that comes so naturally to Dierker. &amp;quot;Look,&amp;quot; Dierker muses, &amp;quot;this is what I think baseball culture is. Part of baseball culture is to come out to the park way earlier than you have to be here and sit around in your underwear. It&amp;#039;s just a come-out-early-and-hang-around culture. And when I was a player, it was a come-out-early-and-stay-late culture. You stayed, and you didn&amp;#039;t go back on the bus, so you had a few beers and talked about the game.  &amp;quot;I think the underlying implication of all that is that what we&amp;#039;re doing is really important--that you&amp;#039;re somebody special as long as you&amp;#039;re out here, and once you leave you&amp;#039;re on your own.&amp;quot; It was a culture that Dierker walked into straight out of Taft High School in the San Fernando Valley, and it&amp;#039;s one from which he never moved far after his pitching career ended in 1977. &amp;quot;I tried to be a real estate broker,&amp;quot; he says. &amp;quot;That turned out to be a mistake.&amp;quot; Instead, in 1979, he took a job with the Astros&amp;#039; marketing department in which he not only sold season-ticket packages, he also broadcast the team&amp;#039;s games. As always, Dierker&amp;#039;s perspective was slightly askew, and the fans loved him. In his spare time, he began writing columns for the Houston Chronicle and soon developed every writer&amp;#039;s disdain for clumsy editing. &amp;quot;He&amp;#039;d be in the press box screaming because somebody changed a comma,&amp;quot; says one amazed colleague. &amp;quot;He became a real columnist in a hurry.&amp;quot; By 1996, the Astros had stopped playing for their hot-tempered manager, Terry Collins. When Houston owner Drayton McLane moved Dierker out of the broadcast booth and into the dugout, baseball was somewhat agog. (While rare, such a move is not unprecedented. San Diego did much the same thing with Jerry Coleman, and the most notable example comes from the NBA, where Pat Riley left the microphone so that Magic Johnson could make him a genius on the bench.) It was not Dierker&amp;#039;s qualifications that raised eyebrows so much as his personality. For the Astros, going from Collins to Dierker was like going from Captain Bligh to Captain Spaulding. Still, Dierker was exactly what was needed for a young team that was wound so tightly that its talent had no chance to expand and grow.  &amp;quot;A lot of managers say they have an open-door policy, but they don&amp;#039;t,&amp;quot; says Hunsicker. &amp;quot;Larry&amp;#039;s door really is open. The lines of communication are open here.&amp;quot; He delegates authority to his coaches--especially to pitching coach Vern Ruhle and bench coach Matt Galante--and he is given to occasional bursts of improvisational strategizing. Most notably, Dierker is inclined to let his starting pitchers pitch their way out of trouble. Unlike most managers, Dierker&amp;#039;s knee does not jerk toward his bullpen. His personnel moves elsewhere on the diamond have more to do with hunches and instinct than with La Russan calculation and often reveal a blithe unconcern for what the Book might mandate. His system worked well enough to put the Astros in first place again last June 13 when the Padres came to town. The team took a three-run lead, and Hunsicker was watching from the general manager&amp;#039;s box when he noticed a burst of excitement in the Houston dugout. Hunsicker craned his neck, but his view was blocked by an agitated knot of players and coaches. Frustrated and alarmed, he called the dugout. Vern Ruhle answered. His voice was shaking. He was scared to death. PLAYERS CAN HANDLE broken ankles, parenthetical fingers, and even the consequences of a fastball to the occipital region. But this was different--&amp;quot;really nonbaseball&amp;quot; is the way Ruhle puts it. Dierker collapsed and went into such violent convulsions that when Derek Bell, a powerful Houston outfielder, tried to hold his manager down, a convulsion nearly tossed Bell across the dugout floor. As the ambulance took Dierker away, players from both teams knelt and prayed. Two days later, a neurosurgeon named Rob Parrish opened Dierker&amp;#039;s skull and removed an arteriovenous malformation (AVM), a condition in which blood flows directly from an artery into a vein with no intervening capillaries to control the pressure. Dierker&amp;#039;s AVM had ruptured, causing the seizure. For two days, Dierker was largely oblivious. On the third day, he woke up, swung his legs to the floor, and embarked on the Great Five Minutes. &amp;quot;I&amp;#039;ve been to Hawaii, and I&amp;#039;ve been to Aspen,&amp;quot; Dierker says. &amp;quot;None of that was as much fun as that coffee and a newspaper.&amp;quot; There were some ramifications, though. Dierker was put on antiseizure medication, and he was forbidden to drive a car for six months. He had to do all the Seizure Interviews in every town, and he would tell people that the doctors wouldn&amp;#039;t let him do any more head butts, and that would always get a laugh. The mail kept rolling in, barrels of it, from all over the world. &amp;quot;You know,&amp;quot; Dierker muses, &amp;quot;most of the time, the only contact we have with the fans is when we see them in the hotel lobby at two in the morning. This was different. None of these letters wanted anything. People just wanted to say they cared.&amp;quot; He was back managing the Astros on July 15, guiding the team to another division championship and another playoff loss. Back to thinking about baseball again. Back to thinking, which is a good thing, like a cup of coffee and the newspaper. &amp;quot;You know,&amp;quot; Dierker says, &amp;quot;I think I had a pretty good concept of what&amp;#039;s important--you know, your place in the world as to who you are. You have to put who you are ahead of what you do. I knew that before. I know it now.&amp;quot; So, on a warm day in Osceola County, on a February day when the rodeo and the county fair are both spread out on the fields around the ball yards, the first of the Astros arrive, and the clubhouse suddenly resounds with more F-bombs than an audition hall for Death Row Records. Ah, baseball culture. Outside, as his team gathers itself for the season, Larry Dierker does the first TV Seizure Interview of the new millennium. &amp;quot;One-two, one-two, test?&amp;quot; comes the call from the distant rodeo grandstand. Closer in, behind Dierker&amp;#039;s head, the Ferris wheel begins to turn. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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