The Mouth That Roared (37 page)

In Greg Maddux, Tom Glavine, and John Smoltz, they most certainly had one of the best pitching rotations in baseball history.

Maddux, who I drafted in Chicago, was at the peak of his career in 1994. He had won the previous two Cy Young Awards and was about to win another two in a row. Every time I saw Greg pitch, I thought to myself,
How the hell could the Cubs have let this guy go?
But Cubs GM Larry Himes couldn’t re-sign Maddux after the 1992 season. That was obviously a huge mistake.

When I had Greg in the minors, I took immediate notice of how well he commanded his pitches. Command is what pitching’s all about. A lot of guys can throw fastballs in the upper 90s, but if they can’t put their pitches where they want them, they can’t win. I’ve never been awed by great arms, because I’ve seen too many guys with great arms who couldn’t pitch. Greg could always throw strikes at will, but he became a great pitcher when he also learned how to locate pitches in a way that exploited a hitter’s weaknesses. That’s the difference between control and command.

The Braves would go on to win 11 consecutive NL East titles. From a manager’s standpoint, I viewed Bobby Cox as a driving force behind the team’s success. He was one of my all-time favorite managers. Critics point out that for all those division titles, Coxey won just one World Series. I’d counter that by saying there were a lot of years when he got more out of his team than most managers would have.

*

I would have liked to start from scratch in 1994, with a whole new roster of Mets players ready to commit themselves to my program. That’s not how baseball works, however, so we had to make do with cutting ties with as many problem players as possible.

We traded Vince Coleman and his fireworks collection to the Royals for outfielder Kevin McReynolds, a former Met. We let Eddie Murray sign as a free agent with the Indians. And we also didn’t make an effort to re-sign a disenchanted Howard Johnson, who landed in Colorado.

When you’re coming off a 103-loss season, very little about your team is carved in stone. Few everyday jobs were guaranteed, and I was open to any and all possible changes.

We had question marks all over the diamond. A couple of weeks before the start of the season, I still didn’t know who’d be starting at catcher, first base, or shortstop. I hadn’t decided who would hit leadoff or fill the back end of the pitching rotation. And other than John Franco, our bullpen situation was completely unsettled.

Todd Hundley beat out Kelly Stinnett for the starting catcher’s job. We acquired first baseman David Segui in a trade with the Orioles. And Jose Vizcaino, a shortstop and leadoff hitter, came over from the Cubs in exchange for Anthony Young.

But on Opening Day, middle relief and the third and fourth spots in our rotation were still up in the air.

If we sputtered again in ’94, it wasn’t going to be due to lack of preparation. I put the players through a rigorous spring training program intended to get them in shape and reinforce the importance of fundamentals.

We started the season with three consecutive wins. Despite the small sample size, I sensed the team was more engaged mentally than it had been the year before. We were hardly world-beaters, however, and still quite capable of playing ugly baseball. Four errors in our home-opening loss to the Cubs proved that.

We remained competitive, which is all I could really ask for. A three-game sweep of the Reds in late May put us just a few games out of first place in the NL East. In June, however, we evoked memories of the season before with a 9–18 record that dropped us as many as 10 games under .500.

After a couple of losses in June, I threatened to demote everyone to Triple-A if we didn’t start playing better. “Some of you think you can sit on your fat asses and not do anything!” I screamed. “I’ll get rid of you, if you don’t want to grind it out once in a while. You’re not a bad ballclub, but if you let the other team come after you, they will every fucking time! We did that the whole fucking series here! You sat on your fat asses, and if you want to sit on your fat asses, you’re going to be on the way to Norfolk!”

Unlike in 1993, I had hope this team could actually be moved by my words.

*

I think Bret Saberhagen got my message.

In his first two years with the Mets, Sabes had battled injuries and won just 10 games.

But he still had it in him to be a top-flight pitcher. He just needed to exercise a little common sense, cut out the bullshit, and work at his craft.

Before the 1994 season, general manager Joe McIlvaine called out Bret on his shenanigans. “You can be a child all you want,” Joe said. “But there is a level of behavior that is expected by the public and by your employer. Bret lost a lot of fans last year by not living up to that level.”

The best way for Bret to win back those fans was to pitch well.

I felt Bret’s struggles were partly due to an overreliance on his fastball. I encouraged him to mix up his pitch selection by occasionally using a changeup as his “out pitch.”

Sabes stepped up to the challenge by pitching better than he had in years. His 10–4 record in the first half of the ’94 season earned him a trip to the All-Star Game. He went on to win all four of his decisions after the All-Star break.

Sabes and Bobby Jones, who went a combined 26–11, made my job a lot easier in 1994. By pitching deep into most games, they saved me from having to depend too much on our shaky bullpen.

Those two gave our rotation a real boost. Dwight Gooden did not.

In 1994, we witnessed the self-destruction of Doc. After he failed two drug tests, Major League Baseball suspended him for 60 days in June. Upon his release from the Betty Ford Center in Southern California, he failed two more tests.

“Doc has fallen by the wayside by his own choice—put that into perspective,” I told reporters after his first two positive drug tests. “The organization is hurt. Baseball is hurt, because he’s a big name. But his wife and kids have to be devastated. The kids are at an age where they understand what’s going on. I feel compassion for the family.”

Doc was due to become a free agent after the season, and I saw no point in trying to re-sign him. He had failed
four
drug tests, after all. Even if he straightened himself out, I believed his arm and shoulder problems would prevent him from ever again being a successful pitcher.

Doc, in his 11
^th
season with the team, meant a lot to the franchise. Our fans still loved him for his brilliance in the 1980s. His teammates gravitated toward him. Even our clubhouse attendants adored him, probably because he was the best tipper on the team.

But I found it difficult to give him a pass. If he had looked in the mirror, he would have seen his own worst enemy staring back at him. Doc was suspended for the entire 1995 season. In 1996, the Yankees decided to take a chance on him.

After we cut ties with him, our clubhouse guys wore a patch on their sleeves to honor him. I thought that was garbage.

*

I’ve worked in a lot of big cities, but I’m not a city kid. Sylvia and I grew up in modest homes in the suburbs of Wilmington, Delaware. Later in life, we purchased sprawling farms in Pennsylvania and Maryland.

Living in a congested housing development in Queens during the season was a big adjustment for us. But we enjoyed our time there. The neighborhood was close to Shea Stadium and LaGuardia Airport, which made it very convenient. And whenever Sylvia needed a little taste of nature, she’d head over to the New York Botanical Garden.

I didn’t venture out into the city too often while I managed the Mets. If Sylvia was out of town, bullpen coach Steve Swisher and I would sometimes go out for a few beers. But for the most part, you weren’t going to see the manager of the New York Mets wandering around Times Square. Sylvia and I really enjoyed the mom-and- pop restaurants in Queens and going to the movies and Broadway shows.

My life in the summertime revolved around baseball. It was comforting to know that the joys of farm life awaited after every season.

But thanks to Swisher, I was able to indulge my agrarian side at Shea Stadium, too.

Swish, a West Virginia guy, maintained a garden with tomatoes, beans, carrots, and a bunch of other vegetables out in the home bullpen. Before games, I’d find an excuse to go out there and talk to him. The real purpose of my visits, however, was to give him gardening tips.

Based on the amount of shade in the bullpen, I encouraged him to plant lettuce, which requires less direct sunlight. I also helped him get the right moisture level in his soil.

It likely surprised some fans to see me on my hands and knees working the land before Mets home games.

*

Though we made strides, we couldn’t pull it together on the field in 1994.

Pete Smith, a pitcher who came to us in an off-season trade with Atlanta, was a bust. Muscled out of the terrific Braves rotation, McIlvaine thought he would thrive in a situation where he knew he would get the ball every five days. He miscalculated. Battling tendinitis and a dead arm, Smith went 4–10 with a 5.55 ERA in 1994. He became so ineffective that I dropped him from the rotation in July.

The biggest disappointment of the season was Jeromy Burnitz, the team’s first-round pick in 1990, whom we all expected to help ignite the offense.

Jeromy’s problem was very simple: he thought he had enough talent to just go out and play the game. He didn’t like working, and that frustrated the hell out of me. His defense and base running were lousy. And his hitting wasn’t great, either. In about 400 at-bats over two seasons with us, he hit just .241 with 16 homes runs, 53 RBIs, and 111 strikeouts. Jeromy and I had a lot of screaming sessions during his brief time with the Mets. We ended up trading him in November to the Indians in return for some pitching help. He went on to hit 315 home runs during a 14-year career, but I think he could have been a star if he had been willing to work harder.

To a lot of people’s surprise, the Expos, the youngest team in the National League with the second-lowest payroll in the majors, held a slim lead over the Braves in the National League East going into the All-Star break.

I think the Mets would have continued to battle all year. And it would have been interesting to see if Montreal could have held on to win the division. But we’ll never know what would have happened, because the season came to sudden stop on August 11.

*

Like most baseball lifers, I’m fiercely protective of the sport.

That made 1994 awful for me. The strike that wiped out the final two months of the season and the entire postseason made me realize how much the game had changed since I started my professional career.

The 1994 strike disturbed me, but it didn’t surprise me. With each passing year, baseball became more about money. My tenure as GM of the Cubs from 1982 to 1987 really opened my eyes to the players association’s growing clout. But as a former player, I didn’t view the union’s activities in purely black-and-white terms. The union had done a lot of important work, like fighting to help former players gain money for pensions and medical needs. But it also pushed for changes that hurt the game. As GM of the Cubs, I never minded paying a player what he was worth as long as he helped us win and put asses in seats. The most disappointing outcome of the union’s increased power was that teams found themselves paying huge sums to mediocre players and non-performers.

In the face of skyrocketing payrolls, the owners attempted to institute a salary cap. That’s what led to the strike.

These issues are more relevant today than ever.

In a world of long-term, guaranteed contracts, it’s difficult to cut non-performers loose. The 2012 trade that brought Adrian Gonzalez, Carl Crawford, and Josh Beckett to the Dodgers was an exception. Stuck with underachieving players, the Red Sox were fortunate to find a team willing to take hundreds of millions of dollars in guaranteed contracts off their hands. The same goes for the Marlins, who traded several of their best players to the Blue Jays after the 2012 season.

*

We didn’t reach my goal of .500 in 1994, but we came pretty damn close, finishing at 55–58. Despite our losing record and third-place finish, I got some Manager of the Year votes.

In mid-September, the remainder of the season was officially canceled.

John Franco, the Mets’ player representative, reacted to the news with a well-scripted line in
The New York Times
: “Hitler couldn’t stop the World Series, Vietnam couldn’t stop the World Series, other disasters—the earthquake [in 1989]—couldn’t stop the World Series. But a couple of owners…they got together and they stopped the World Series.”

I didn’t have Johnny’s flair for the dramatic, but I shared his disgust for what transpired. Baseball took a big hit when greed wiped out the end of the ’94 season. Both sides could afford to hold the game hostage for a while. “I don’t anticipate many of [the players] going out and getting jobs,” I said at the time. “A few of them might have to fire their gardeners and chauffeurs.” The same could have been said for the owners.

The strike lingered into the off-season. As spring training neared, the owners announced that, if need be, they’d play the 1995 season with substitute players. I didn’t like the idea one bit. Nobody in an on-the-field leadership position did. Dressing up subpar players in major league uniforms would make a mockery of the game. But it wasn’t in my nature to give anything but my best effort, so I set out to make my replacement team the best in the league.