Saturday was the biggest day in 18-year-old Braedyn Houck’s baseball career.
Cameras were lined up as the Parry McCluer High School senior took his place behind home plate on the Fighting Blues’ home field.
All eyes would have been on the kid in jersey No. 11 had it not been for the figure on the pitcher’s mound.
There stood 81-year-old Charlie Manuel, who wore a Parry McCluer baseball uniform himself 62 years ago before embarking on a six-year Major League career as a player and 12 more years as an MLB manager, including a 2008 World Series championship with the Philadelphia Phillies.
The old guy was set to throw out the ceremonial first pitch before Parry McCluer’s game against rival Rockbridge County on a day when the Buena Vista school named its playing facility “Charlie Manuel Field.”
Manuel bounced the throw. Houck caught not only the ball but the significance. Moments later, the kid was clutching a signed baseball from Buena Vista’s favorite and most famous son.
“I mean, he’s got a sign downtown when you come in to Buena Vista,” Houck said. “It’s amazing. It’s an honor. A guy like that to come through here … getting him to sign a ball, it’s special.”
*****
Charlie Manuel was born in the back seat of a car in Northfork, West Virginia.
One of 11 children of Charles Sr., and June Manuel, he spent his early childhood living in Wythe County and in the Grayson County town of Fries.
His father was a Pentecostal preacher who relocated the family to Buena Vista when Charlie was 12.
Manuel was a four-sport star at Parry McCluer, and married before he graduated from high school in 1963. A national magazine named him a second-team basketball All-American, and he earned a basketball scholarship offer from the University of North Carolina.
He also was offered an academic scholarship to the University of Pennsylvania, but in the spring of Charlie’s senior year at Parry McCluer, his father, Charles Sr., committed suicide in the face of mounting health problems.
With a young wife, a mother, five younger brothers and five sisters to help support, Charlie accepted a $30,000 bonus to sign a professional baseball contract with the Minnesota Twins.
He began his career not far from his first home, batting .358 in 58 games for Wytheville of the Appalachian League.
Manuel made his Major League debut on April 8, 1969, going 0 for 1 as a pinch-hitter in a 4-3 loss to the Kansas City Royals.
He played four seasons with the Twins and two more with the Los Angeles Dodgers before leaving the Major Leagues to play professionally in Japan. In four seasons, the left-handed slugger became one of the most successful American players to play overseas.
Manuel worked as a Minor League manager for the Twins and Cleveland Indians before he was named Cleveland’s manager in 2000.
He spent three seasons with the Indians before the Phillies hired him in 2005. Manuel won 780 games in nine seasons with Philadelphia.
Manuel managed Hall of Fame players such as Jim Thome, Roy Halladay and 2025 inductee and Tazewell County native Billy Wagner. His managerial career peaked in 2008 when the Phillies defeated Tampa Bay four games to one to claim Philadelphia’s first World Series in 28 years.
Friends, family and baseball fans of all ages turned out at Parry McCluer to honor Manuel, who has recovered from a 2024 stroke that required him to undergo speech rehabilitation.
“My memories of Buena Vista will always be here,” Manuel said Saturday. “I love being back where I grew up. I have a lot of friends here, my childhood buddies. I love everything about it. I’ve been in baseball a long time. Actually, it feels like it went by real quick.”
*****
Charlie Manuel’s first baseball memory involves failing to make his Little League team in Fries.
As a youngster, he had a paper route and was accustomed to covering long distances on foot. He lived 2 or 3 miles from the local post office, and one day he was expecting a special package.
The post office opened at 6 a.m., and he walked all the way from home to be there when the glass door was unlocked. He unwrapped the box, took out the contents and walked all the way home in a new pair of baseball cleats.
The shoes fit, but Manuel didn’t.
He did not make the cut.
However, Manuel played as an 11-year-old on a YMCA team in Grayson County that had an age minimum of 14. He had two hits in his first game of organized baseball. Later, in a game in Pulaski, he hit a home run over the right-field fence.
“I’ve been playing ever since,” he said.
Manuel’s family moved from Southwest Virginia to Buena Vista when he was in the seventh grade. His father was the pastor at the Pentecostal Holiness Church, and the Manuel clan lived around the corner in a brick house on Walnut Avenue.
“I liked Fries because it was quiet,” Charlie said. “When I got to Buena Vista it was more lively. When I first moved here, I liked it. When I got to know everybody, I loved it. I wouldn’t change my childhood for nothing.”
Wendell Coleman took little notice of the new kid at first, not until Manuel hit one out of the park as an eighth-grader in a junior varsity game against Nelson County. One year ahead in school and just as sports-crazed, Coleman adopted Manuel as a best buddy.
“Anywhere there was a baseball game, Charlie Manuel and I were there,” said Coleman, who played college football at North Carolina State. “That’s the love we had for the game. We drove all the way up to Staunton to play American Legion ball. It was what we did.
“I’ll tell you what though. He was good in baseball, but basketball was his game.” 
Manuel and Coleman were key members of Parry McCluer’s 1961 state runner-up team coached by Gene Mehaffey, a Bristol, Tennessee native who won more than 500 games as an NCAA Division III head coach.
Mehaffey coached Parry McCluer to a four-year record of 80-17 with two state runner-up finishes.
Parry McCluer’s current school building opened in 2001. The old school still stands across town as a middle school. The old baseball field sits behind the school behind a concrete wall, the infield dirt and baselines long gone.
“I look at this gym today, I want to shoot some jump shots,” Manuel said amid a reception in the sparkling facility. “I want to go out there with Wendell Coleman. Wendell would foul me though.”
Around Buena Vista, Manuel is known as “Fook,” a shortened version of his middle name, “Fuqua.”
When Manuel was managing the Phillies in games against the Washington Nationals, Coleman made sure to arrive early at Nationals Park and greet his old friend.
“I walked down behind the [Phillies] dugout. The players were coming out, stretching and loosening up,” Coleman said.
“All of a sudden, here he comes. “I yelled, ‘Fook!’ Oh my God, he knew that was somebody from back home. He got a baseball, signed it, threw it up there to me. We chatted. As I was leaving, the fans that were already there, they thought I was somebody. They wanted my autograph.”
*****
Charlie Manuel batted .198 in four years with Minnesota and two with the Dodgers after hitting .290 with 133 HRs in his minor league career.
With the Twins, Manuel had the distinction of being the 500th strikeout victim in the career of MLB all-tie leader Nolan Ryan.
“Yeah, well who was the 499th? [Harmon] Killebrew. Who was the 498th? [Tony] Oliva. He wasn’t just striking me out. He was striking everybody out,” Manuel said.
And just who was the first pitcher to strike him out?
“My sister, Janet,” he said.
He found the pitching more to his liking in Japan, leading the Yakult Swallows to the league championship in 1979 and winning league MVP honors with the Kintetsu Buffaloes in 1979, followed by an even better season in 1980 when he batted .325 with 48 home runs and 129 runs batted in.
Manuel had even more success as a manager.
His Indians’ farm teams won Pacific Coast League and International League championships in the early 1990s. As Cleveland’s hitting coach, he helped the Tribe reach the World Series in 1995 and 1997.
Manuel’s 2001 Cleveland team won the American League Central Division crown, but he was fired midway through the 2002 season, finishing with a 220-190 record.
The Phillies hired Manuel in 2004 in a front-office capacity, but the following year he became the manager, leading Philadelphia within a game of qualifying for the National League playoffs.
In 2008, the pieces all fit. The Phillies took out Milwaukee in four games in the NLDS and eliminated Los Angeles in five games for the NL pennant. However, on the same day Philadelphia stopped the Dodgers in Game 2, Manuel’s mother, June, died at age 87 in Roanoke where Manuel maintained a home for a time in Roanoke County.
Seventeen days later, Philadelphia defeated Tampa Bay in Game 5 of the 2008 World Series, winning three games by one run. Manuel took Philadelphia back to the Series in 2009, but the Phils lost in six games to the New York Yankees.
After leading Philadelphia to a fifth consecutive NL East title in 2012, Philadelphia fired Manuel in August during the 2013 season.
While the Phillies hired him as a hitting instructor in 2019 at age 75, Manuel finished his managerial career with a record of 1,000-826.
“I’m who I am,” he said. “I want to be fair and honest. I want to treat people like I wanted to be treated. I was tough on my players. We had rules. If I didn’t like something and we didn’t have a rule for it, I’d put a rule in. It was my way or the highway. Sometimes I got the highway.”
Manuel, who now lives in Florida, is a charter member of the athletic hall of fame at Parry McCluer, where he batted .538 as a senior. Saturday’s honor means his name will be on the school’s field as long as baseball is played.
“I’m standing here … because I had great players,” he said. “I’ve been lucky all my life. I’ve been lucky at everything. It seems like my life I’d get into a rhythm when something bad would happen to me, something good would happen to me.”
***** 
How quickly has time passed?
An old man now 81, tossing a ball on a baseball field on a sunny Saturday to a young man, 18.
It marches on.
“I’ve had a long ride, but it was worth every bit of it,” Manuel said. “I got to live the way I wanted to and I didn’t have to go to work.” 
