Inside Baseball: The Best of Tom Verducci (4 page)

“I thought I had a hell of a year managing,” Johnson says of that second-place finish. “And then I had that problem with Frank. That told me they had taken the attitude, ‘We have to win every year. We’re great.’ Now I’m thinking, Jeez, no matter what I’ve done before, that don’t mean diddly-squat. So any time a trade came along that could make the ball club better immediately, I was for it because I could be gone at any moment.

“Sometimes you’ve got to take a step back to go forward,” Johnson says. “The plan had been to eventually trade Mookie and give the job to Lenny. He’d struggle for a while, and the team wouldn’t be as good without Mookie, but we’d be better off down the road. We stopped worrying about that. I’m as guilty as anybody.”

McIlvaine made the trade the day after running it past Johnson and after Cashen—much to his subsequent regret—endorsed it. There was one unmentioned element that clinched the deal. Samuel was Latin. “We were desperate to have a Latin on the team,” says one Mets official, “especially with the great Latin American population in the city. We thought New York would love him.”

Problem was, Samuel hated New York and was even less comfortable in centerfield. Since trading Dykstra and then Wilson (for Jeff Musselman) six weeks later, the Mets auditioned 17 players in centerfield, and none held the job for a full season.

By July 31, 1989, the Mets were seven games out. They panicked again. McIlvaine traded Aguilera, Tapani, West and two lesser pitching prospects to the Twins for Viola. Again Cashen would come to regret his endorsement.

With McIlvaine as director of scouting in the early ’80s, the Mets built the foundation for their winning teams from a superlative farm system. A snapshot of their minor league system at the start of the ’83 season included Aguilera, Dykstra, Gooden, Magadan, McDowell, Mitchell, Myers, Strawberry, Mark Carreon, Ron Darling, Tim Leary, Randy Milligan, Greg Olson, Calvin Schiraldi, Walt Terrell and other future big leaguers. Since the time Scioscia hit that home run off Gooden (and as McIlvaine had become more involved on the major league level), the Mets have not had a single player in their system who has 100 hits in a big league season and only one pitcher who has won as many as 10 games in a given year. That pitcher, Tapani, has done so four times—for Minnesota. “I didn’t want to give up Aguilera,” McIlvaine says. “He was just getting comfortable closing games. West had a good arm, but I knew he didn’t have what it takes inside. Tapani is the one who surprised me. I thought he was a five-inning starting pitcher who couldn’t go two days in a row if you put him in the bullpen.”

The Mets’ farm system was drying up, and here was McIlvaine squandering what little was left. “This one,” he said at the time, “could backfire right in my face if Viola doesn’t perform up to expectations.” The Mets made up just one game on the first-place Cubs after the trade, with Viola going 5–5. He spent two more years in New York—going 38–32 overall, including a combined 13–20 in August, September and October—before leaving as a free agent. “That’s the kind of thinking,” Wilpon says of the shortsighted trade, “that doesn’t work out.”

Viola was tormented by the carousel of grotesque fielders the Mets annually put on display. “I’m not surprised to see what’s happened to the Mets,” says Viola, who bolted after the 1991 season to sign with the Red Sox. “I saw it coming. What happened is they had too many people out of position. And I mean starting from the front office on down.” Gregg Jefferies, a hitting phenom who was touted by McIlvaine as a future batting champ, came up in 1988 as a third baseman, moved to second base and then back to third—he displayed not a bit of elegance at either position—before the Mets moved him one last time: to Kansas City, following the ’91 season. Howard Johnson began 1990 at third base, ’91 at shortstop and ’92 in centerfield. During those three seasons the Mets’ Opening Day lineup featured different players at six positions every year. “The Mets have always been an offensive-minded club,” says Dallas Green, who last season became the Mets’ fifth manager in three years. “I could never understand why they ignored defense, with all the good pitching they had. It’s a mistake we’re not going to continue to make.”

Midway through the 1989 season McIlvaine and Harazin were telling Cashen that he had to fire Davey Johnson. “The team is getting away from him,” McIlvaine said. Johnson knew it was a stressful, transitional year. The co-captains, Carter and first baseman Keith Hernandez, repeatedly broke down physically in what would be their last season with the club. Gooden, the emotional cornerstone of the franchise, tore a muscle in his throwing shoulder. Cashen chose to bring back Johnson to start the ’90 season, and McIlvaine continued trading. He sent Myers to Cincinnati for John Franco because he feared Myers was weightlifting himself out of baseball. Myers has since won an NLCS Most Valuable Player award and set the league save record for a single season. Franco has been hurt or ineffective much of the past three seasons. Less than two months into the season Cashen agreed that Johnson had to go.

Initially the Mets responded to Johnson’s successor, Harrelson, and on Sept. 3, 1990, they were in first place, one-half game ahead of the Pirates. They lost their next five games, though, including three crucial games in Pittsburgh. In the third game of that series, on the recommendation of McIlvaine, Harrelson started Julio Valera, a 21-year-old righthander with one career start in the big leagues, rather than the veteran Darling. Valera allowed five runs while getting only six outs in a 7–1 defeat. Except during the first three weeks of a season, the Mets have not been in first place since.

AFTER THE 1988 season Wilpon and Doubleday wanted Cashen to begin a transition into a consultant’s role, allowing McIlvaine to assume full control of the baseball operations and Harazin the business side. “We wanted it to be a gradual process,” Wilpon says. But two years later Cashen was still the ultimate authority in the organization, with no official change imminent, though McIlvaine and Harazin were doing much more of the spadework. While Cashen grew comfortable running the club in a patriarchal manner, the owners were content to stretch out the front-office transition another year. Finally, when the Padres asked McIlvaine in September 1990 to be their G.M., he figured, “If I’m going to do all the work, I might as well get all the blame or credit, and make the decision myself.” So on Oct. 2, 1990, McIlvaine signed a five-year contract to be general manager of the Padres. His departure was provoked in part by the razzing his nine-year-old son, Timmy, took in school. “Your dad traded Lenny Dykstra,” kids would say—and worse.

“All of a sudden, the plan of succession was no plan at all,” Wilpon says. “We were stunned when Joe left.” No one was more stunned than Cashen, who was 65 and having a house built in Florida to accommodate a more leisurely life. Suddenly he had to run the team again on a full-time basis. He had neither the energy nor the interest for it.

Cashen was a self-proclaimed “dinosaur” who was growing increasingly bitter about the explosion in players’ salaries. “I admit,” he says, “that I look at the money being spent as if it were mine.” He had built winning teams in Baltimore and New York, but now the business and its players were changing, and Cashen was not. One month after McIlvaine left, Strawberry left too—in part because of Cashen.

In midsummer of ’90, just when the Mets and Strawberry—a moody outfielder prone to lapse into stretches of indifferent play—were rolling, Cashen had scoffed in a television interview that Strawberry, a potential free agent, wasn’t worth the money Oakland slugger Jose Canseco was getting. The tone and timing of the comments were inappropriate, especially with a player like Strawberry, who never seemed to be sure what he wanted. McIlvaine, who played minor league ball and studied at a seminary, had a better touch with players. But contrary to the owners’ plan, this was Cashen’s team.

“At that point Darryl was leaning toward staying with us,” McIlvaine would say later. “But after that it all changed. Darryl just wants to be loved. When Frank said what he said, Darryl felt his friends had deserted him. That did it.”

It was in September, with the Mets trailing Pittsburgh by three games with six to play, that Cashen finally decided he wanted Strawberry gone. Strawberry had said his back was too sore to play, and he watched the Mets lose two of their next three games and be eliminated. He never played again for them. “That,” Cashen says, “was the last straw. Here was a guy who didn’t want to play with the season on the line. Darryl had had great Septembers for us. But I think he lost some of his hunger for winning.”

Strawberry decided to sign a five-year, $20.25 million contract with the Dodgers in November ’90. Cashen was relieved to be rid of Strawberry, who seemed to launch as many controversies as home runs. (He holds the franchise record, 252.) “We’ll be a better team without him,” Cashen promised, obviously unprepared for the team’s 208–277 free-fall since then.

For 10 years Cashen had disdained the free-agent game, insulated by that rich farm system. He quickly changed that posture after his best player and best baseball mind left him in the space of five weeks in 1990. At the urging of Harrelson and Harazin, he signed Coleman to a four-year, $11.95 million contract. It was an act of desperation that accelerated the decline of the Mets as much as any other single move.

By the end of the 1991 season Cashen finally agreed to step aside. Against their better judgment, Wilpon and Doubleday turned the entire operation over to Harazin, a bookish former management labor lawyer who admitted to never having owned a pair of blue jeans. More important, as Wilpon knew, Harazin’s baseball knowledge was dangerously shallow.

“Al was running both sides of the business,” Wilpon says. “I think that was a mistake. The days of one general manager doing everything are over. Nelson and I knew it then. But we liked Al and decided to give it a shot. It was a costly shot for us.”

The Mets’ problems deepened. Last June, Wilpon realized that putting Harazin at the helm of the entire organization had been a mistake, just as his gut had forewarned him. He was entertaining Doubleday, his neighbor, at his Long Island home one day when the two men resolved to take action. “We have to go back to our plan,” Wilpon said of their old intention to separate the baseball and business operations of the club. Doubleday agreed. Harazin, though, wasn’t so amenable. He quit rather than be confined to running the business operations.

McIlvaine was rehired to run the baseball operations on July 8, after having left the Padres four weeks earlier in a dispute over a directive from the San Diego owners to trade the club’s high-salaried players. The Mets considered no one else for the job. It was a curious choice, given McIlvaine’s checkered trading record in his first tour in New York. Wilpon, though, believed McIlvaine’s expertise at evaluating young talent was what the Mets needed most as they started rebuilding. McIlvaine has already allowed oft-injured pitcher Sid Fernandez, Howard Johnson and Murray to leave as free agents, while considering trades involving Bonilla and Saberhagen that will bring the Mets some prospects.

This October, McIlvaine sat behind the backstop at Veterans Stadium and watched Dykstra star in the World Series, another obvious reminder of his and the franchise’s failings. Yes, Scioscia had kept the Mets out of the World Series in 1988. But since then Aguilera, Cone, Dykstra, Mitchell, Myers, Tapani and West had helped their teams get there. Of course, none of those teams was the Mets.

“COME HERE, let me show you something,” Wilpon says. He rises from a chair in the Fifth Avenue office of his real estate company and walks across the room to a white rectangular box that is so large it is resting across four chairs. There is a great sense of purpose in his walk now. He is finished watching others run his baseball team. The Mets won’t embarrass him again the way they did in 1993.

“It was,” he says, “one of the most painful years of my life. To see what happened with this team was very, very painful. That’s why I tell you this is a whole new thing we’re starting.”

Wilpon wants former Mets such as Tom Seaver, Mookie Wilson, Lee Mazzilli and Rafael Santana to come work for the organization. He wants “the greatest community outreach program” in sports. He wants grand entranceways and redesigned fan services at what has been a tacky Shea Stadium. He wants updated, cheery uniforms for the ushers. He has ordered intensive customer-relations training for all of the organization’s business managers, including himself. He has talked with the Disney people, Universal Studio executives and other resort managers to learn how to attract and treat customers.

“Go to any of my buildings right now,” he says. “I guarantee you, you won’t find a piece of paper on the floor.”

Wilpon pulls away the lid from the large white box. Inside is an architectural model of a sprawling entertainment complex. The centerpiece is a grass-surface stadium with a retractable dome, to be built within five years near the current Shea Stadium site and financed by state and city bonds. The stadium is surrounded by several pavilions that resemble huge tents. Wilpon explains they are state-of-the-art exhibit halls that he intends to be the permanent home of the World’s Fair. That portion of the complex will be privately funded.

Wilpon opens and closes the little retractable dome, which splits open at the center like dual sliding doors. It is a perfectly happy and orderly place. The little plastic trees are always full and green. There is never any traffic on the access roads. It is kept immaculately clean. This is the world Fred Wilpon wants for the Mets. He wants the litter of a five-year decline swept up. He wants not a single piece of paper on the floor.