The Mouth That Roared (35 page)

My son outlasted me in the Yankees organization. In 1990, he got a shot at Triple-A after Opening Day major league rosters temporarily expanded to 27 players due to a recent labor stoppage. That caused a domino effect in the minor leagues that allowed for his promotion. He pitched in two games for the Columbus Clippers. Then he was told to return to Double-A. Rather than accepting the demotion, he decided to retire. He wanted to go out on his own terms.

John returned to the University of Arizona to finish his studies. His degree in geological engineering guaranteed him a comfortable living after baseball. But John had baseball in his blood. While working full-time for an engineering firm in Tucson, he squeezed in some unpaid, part-time scouting for the Orioles. His smarts and experience as a pro player equipped him well for that job. Gordon Goldsberry, my farm director in Chicago who had since moved on to Baltimore, eventually hired him as a paid scout. John has worked in that capacity ever since, most recently with the Dodgers.

*

I heard through the grapevine that baseball commissioner Bart Giamatti chewed out George Steinbrenner for letting me go. When I was in Chicago and Bart was the president of the National League, we became good friends. He valued my opinion on the issues of the day and appointed me to several committees, including one that studied the state of umpiring in the game.

He and I came from very different backgrounds. Bart was a writer, a philosopher, and a Yale man. I was a career baseball guy. What we shared was a deep love for the game. I’m confident Bart would have established himself as one of the best commissioners ever had he not died of a heart attack about a year into his tenure.

Bart wasn’t the only high-ranking baseball official in my corner.

Following my dismissal from the Yankees, National League president Bill White, a former Phillies teammate of mine, called to see if I’d be interested in replacing Pete Rose as manager of the Cincinnati Reds. He was willing to put in a good word for me with team owner Marge Schott. Bill thought Cincinnati would benefit from having a strong manager who could help keep Marge in check. He also believed the Reds needed a big-name skipper to succeed Rose, whom Bart had permanently banned from baseball in 1989 for betting on games.

“I’d really like you to take the job, Dallas,” Bill told me in the winter of 1989.

I wanted no part of it.

“Goddamn, Bill, I just got fired by one ogre,” I told him. “Now you want me to go into another ogre’s den? I don’t think I can do that. I don’t want to go from the frying pan into the fire.”

“Well, I tried,” Bill said, laughing. “You think Piniella would be interested?”

Lou was braver—or more masochistic—than I. He went into the ogre’s den, and it paid off for him. The Reds won a World Series in his first season on the job. Of course, he also had to deal with all of Marge’s nonsense, which eventually forced her to sell the team.

*

According to the newspapers, the Braves were on the verge of hiring me to succeed Bobby Cox as general manager. I was never even contacted about the job, which ended up going to John Schuerholz. I was still cashing Steinbrenner’s checks, so I took it easy for a while on my new farm in Conowingo, Maryland, which was about half an hour from our property in West Grove, Pennsylvania. Sylvia and I also traveled around the region, visiting Civil War battle sites in Pennsylvania and Virginia. We both are huge admirers of Abraham Lincoln. Sylvia wrote a college research paper on him, and I’ve read loads of books about his presidency. From my standpoint, he was the ultimate leader, a man willing to fight for his convictions.

I knew baseball would beckon me back. It always did.

In 1991, at the age of 56, I was back in New York after joining the Mets front office as a scout. That surprised a lot of baseball writers. “Why would Dallas Green, still in the prime of his career, accept a lowly scouting job after holding such high-profile positions in Philadelphia, Chicago, and New York?” they wondered. It didn’t compute with them that I took the job because I loved scouting and player development. Soon, I read news reports describing me as the Mets’ “manager-in-waiting.”

That bothered me. It wasn’t in my nature to take a job just because I was waiting for someone else to lose his job. I’ve always hated people who do that.

Bud Harrelson was the Mets manager, and I never lobbied for his job.

As a Mets scout, I enjoyed attending their front office meetings and talking about the finer points of the game. It was an ideal situation for me. I lived on my farm and scouted future Mets opponents when they played in Philadelphia. I went to the ballpark at night, wrote up my reports in the morning, and enjoyed working in the fresh air of the farm during the day.

When Harrelson got fired with a week left in the 1991 season, Mets general manager Frank Cashen never approached me about the vacancy. Frank and I knew each other well from my days as GM of the Cubs. He and his wife were friends with Sylvia and me. But Frank knew I enjoyed my work as a scout.

Frank stepped down as GM before the Mets hired a new manager. His successor, Al Harazin, hired former Indians and White Sox manager Jeff Torborg to a four-year deal. Jeff inherited a team loaded with veteran talent.

The writers concluded I had been jilted and wasn’t long for the Mets. They had me penciled in as an executive with one of the expansion teams in Colorado or Florida. Those reports were completely false.

Under Torborg, the Mets were expected to compete for a postseason berth. With all the high-priced players on the roster, it came as a shock when they struggled to a fifth-place finish in 1992.

After they got off to a terrible start in 1993, my phone rang.

It was Harazin.

“We need an aggressive leader to run this team,” he told me.

To that point, only Casey Stengel and Yogi Berra had managed both the Mets and the Yankees. I was about to join that list.

*

In 1962, the expansion Mets, managed by Stengel, lost 120 games. I witnessed their futility firsthand. On an August day at the Polo Grounds that season, I pitched 10⅓ innings of one-run ball in a game won by the Phillies in 15 innings. That outing against the Mets, the longest of my major league career, trimmed a lot of points off my ERA.

In 1986, the Mets won a franchise-high 108 games en route to a World Series title. With the Yankees in a funk that lasted longer than a decade, the center of the baseball universe started to shift from the Bronx to Queens.

Somehow, the Mets I managed in 1993 had more in common with the ’62 club than the ’86 team.

Since finishing 91–71 in 1990, the team had gone into a rapid decline. Despite having the highest payroll in baseball in 1992, they finished 18 games under .500. And a 13–25 start to the ’93 season suggested the team was still in free fall.

We weren’t just also-rans, we were
very expensive
also-rans.

I took on the challenge of managing the Mets for the same reason I had taken all of my other jobs. I liked to try and fix troubled teams.

Even though I came from within the organization, I confess I didn’t know much about the major league Mets. As a scout, I spent all my time watching other teams play. But it didn’t take a lot of observation and analysis to figure out why they had struggled to win games under Torborg.

“Another manager has gone down, because the players didn’t perform up to their capabilities,” I said at my introductory press conference. “I’m here to win games regardless of whose feelings get hurt.”

That was a variation of my message in 1979 when I replaced Danny Ozark in Philadelphia. Like Ozark, Torborg had a reputation for being a players’ manager. He didn’t like to offend or criticize anyone. Yet his guys still complained about him. One of their beefs was that he announced starting lineups on his pregame radio show before posting them in the clubhouse.

On paper, the ’93 Mets looked nowhere near as dreadful as their record indicated. The team included Eddie Murray at first base, Bobby Bonilla and Vince Coleman in the outfield, longtime Met Howard Johnson at third, and newly acquired Tony Fernandez at shortstop. The starting rotation included two key members of the ’86 World Series team, Dwight Gooden and Sid Fernandez. It also featured two-time Cy Young Award winner Bret Saberhagen and capable closer John Franco for late-inning save situations.

In reality, the team was god-awful.

We showed no improvement in my first months on the job. At the All-Star break, the Mets had the worst record in the majors, even though two expansion teams were introduced that season. Harazin’s short tenure as GM had already ended. Co-owners Fred Wilpon and Nelson Doubleday replaced him with Joe McIlvaine, the Mets’ director of baseball operations when they won the World Series in ’86.

*

It’s easy to identify why Harazin failed. By the time he took over in the fall of 1991, Keith Hernandez, Darryl Strawberry, Gary Carter, Ron Darling, and much of the backbone of the great Mets teams of the late 1980s were gone. In an attempt to keep the team afloat, Harazin stocked the roster with expensive veterans acquired in trades and free agency. He just wasn’t a very skilled talent evaluator.

He also had tough luck; even moves that seemed beyond reproach backfired on him. Before the ’93 season, he acquired Tony Fernandez, one of the best all-around shortstops in the game, in a trade with San Diego. He hardly gave up anything in return, because the Padres were simply looking to shed salary.

Fernandez’s career with the Mets lasted 173 at-bats. He hit just .225, and I dropped him from second to eighth in the batting order. On June 11, with our record at 19–38, Harazin traded Fernandez to the Blue Jays, where he hit .306 the rest of the season and helped Toronto win a World Series.

By the halfway point of the ’93 season, Franco admitted the team had grown used to losing. Gooden said the game was no fun at all anymore.

They were speaking for the whole team. In the clubhouse and out on the field, I saw no fire, emotion, or sign that anybody gave a damn. The only bit of energy came from young second baseman Jeff Kent’s frequent temper tantrums. Kent, who came to us in a trade for pitcher David Cone, was in his first season as a full-time player in the majors. He was an enigma. Unlike most of his teammates, he demonstrated a clear will to succeed. But when things didn’t go his way, he tended to go a little berserk. After a strikeout or pop out, he’d hurl his bat or helmet in the dugout or get into a shouting match with himself. He said he was motivated by a fear of failure. At least that meant he cared. He hit .270 with 21 home runs and 80 RBIs in 1993. He also committed 22 errors in the field, which translated into 22 outbursts in the dugout between innings.

It’s difficult to stop a team on a downward spiral.

And in 1993, the signs of our ineptitude were everywhere. That made our games difficult for me to watch. As I said after one particularly sloppy effort, “I can’t live with a lack of work. We played like kindergarten people.”

And to make matters worse, we acted like kindergarten people, too.

*

I had always thought highly of Bret Saberhagen’s ability and felt his stuff was still sharp enough to make him an ace in our rotation. Once I got to know him, however, I observed how little time he spent working at his craft. Since becoming a Met, he had put off-the-field pleasures and clubhouse antics ahead of baseball. While out with a knee injury in 1993, Sabes did further damage to his body while tooling around on a jet ski at his house in Long Island. He didn’t pitch again that season.

He endangered his own health in the boating accident. But his other screwup that season put other people in harm’s way. After a game against Florida, he decided it would be funny to spray bleach on a group of reporters conducting interviews in the clubhouse. That earned him a five-day suspension at the start of the ’94 season.

Among my challenges in New York was making sure Sabes got his priorities back in order.

Saberhagen’s incidents weren’t the only off-the-field distraction in 1993.

Bobby Bonilla almost got into a fistfight with Bob Klapisch, a journalist who wrote a book about the ’92 team titled
The Worst Team Money Could Buy
. Bobby, who may or may not have actually read the book, got in Klapisch’s face early in the season and threatened to knock his teeth out. The equipment of a nearby television crew ended up taking the brunt of Bobby’s anger.

Later that April, Vince Coleman struck Gooden on the shoulder while making a practice swing with a golf club. The accident caused Dwight to be scratched from his scheduled start that night.

There was certainly a lot of competition in 1993 for Stupidest Act of the Year by a New York Met. But Coleman clinched the prize in July with an unbelievably dumb—and criminal—act in the parking lot at Dodger Stadium.

After a game, Coleman set off what at first was thought to be a large firecracker. The blast injured three people, including a two-year-old girl walking with her parents. Investigators later concluded the explosive device was similar to a quarter-stick of dynamite.

I couldn’t for the life of me figure out what Coleman was thinking. It was harmless fun when our pitchers set off small firecrackers in the bullpen after the performance of the national anthem, but Coleman’s behavior showed terrible judgment.