The Mouth That Roared (39 page)

Almost every team in the majors hit in 1996. What separated the winning teams from the losing ones was pitching.

A game against the Padres in Monterrey, Mexico, on August 16 summed up our season well. By the end of the sixth inning, we trailed Fernando Valenzuela and the Padres 15–0. Robert Person was the primary victim of the San Diego onslaught, but our bullpen took some licks, too. We rallied in the late innings to make the final score 15–10.

All season long, subpar starters were handing the ball to ineffective relievers. That’s not a recipe for success.

On a West Coast road trip, I saw my old minor league teammate, Jerry Kettle, behind the dugout before a game at Dodger Stadium. We chatted for a while. He was the pitching coach at the nearby University of La Verne. Before that, he worked for the Pasadena Police Department. It was good to see him. Suddenly, I had an idea.

“Hey, Jerry, how’d you like to be a bench coach for me?”

“That’s a good one, Big D,” he said, laughing.

All joking aside, I think Jerry knew enough about the Mets to realize that his current job offered more security.

Because of their potential, Izzy and Wilson had the most to lose from our team’s woes. And the front office risked hurting their confidence by insisting they continue pitching. As we fell further in the standings, I decided to make my complaint public.

“These guys don’t belong in the big leagues,” I told reporters during the West Coast road swing. “That might sound harsh and negative. But what have they done to get here?”

My comment about our pitchers didn’t sit well with McIlvaine. “I’m not sure how much that builds their confidence when you criticize them like that,” he fired back.

Joe should have known that a strong performance and winning are what really build confidence.

In the following days, I told the press that our current roster wasn’t good enough to compete.

That’s when McIlvaine and Wilpon decided the team wasn’t the problem. I was.

With our record at 59–72, I got fired, along with bench coach Bobby Wine and pitching coach Greg Pavlick. After the season, the rest of my coaching staff got pink slips.

“I’m not blaming Dallas,” McIlvaine said in announcing my dismissal. “You have to make choices at times and we’re making a choice.”

In response, Steve Jacobson of
Newsday
wrote, “Casey Stengel used to say, ‘I can make a living telling the truth.’ Dallas Green was fired for telling it.”

That’s kind of the way I saw it, too.

Bobby Valentine, who was managing at Triple-A Norfolk, got my job. Bobby’s always been a capable baseball man. He also thinks he knows more about the game than anyone else. I don’t know whether he lobbied for my job or not, but I wouldn’t have put it past him. He’s that kind of guy.

What was Bobby’s plan for turning the team around?

“We need a stronger foundation for this team to be good,” he said. “I don’t think it can all be done in-house.”

I couldn’t have agreed more.

“I think the wrong reasons were given for my being fired,” I told
The (Bergen) Record
a few days after returning home. “I came here at a very difficult time. I’ve gone through hell and back with strikes, firecrackers, bleaches, replacement players, injuries, lack of performance…I’m always irritated that people don’t think I can work with young people. I’ve done that all my life. I raised four children. I raised 150 players [a year] with the Phillies.”

Bobby’s 12–19 record at the end of the ’96 season showed he couldn’t win with the group of players the Mets had, either.

*

I don’t know if Fred Wilpon would have recognized a baseball player if one walked into the room. But as the team’s co-owner, he was certainly entitled to give any order he wanted to McIlvaine. I’m convinced Wilpon told him to let me go. To this day, I’m pissed off about that.

I’ve never worried about getting fired. In all my stops in baseball, I’ve focused on accomplishing self-imposed goals. Holding onto my job was always secondary. I got kicked out of Chicago, but I left knowing I had helped boost the Cubs organization. With the Yankees, George Steinbrenner pulled the carpet out from under me so quickly that I couldn’t really feel much disappointment.

The Mets situation was different. My coaching staff and I worked our asses off to change the culture of a team that had disgraced Wilpon in the early 1990s. He never gave us credit for our efforts. He didn’t seem to care that I was managing a different group of players every season.

After my firing, Isringhausen stated the obvious, telling
The New York Times
he had been one of the biggest disappointments of the year. But he took it a step further. “I feel bad for Dallas,” he said. “It’s really kind of my fault. I wish I could change it all, but there is nothing I can take back now. He took the fall for us. I’ll take everything he said about me into consideration and go home and take a long, good look in the mirror.”

Generation K never got off the ground. Izzy went on to have a long and successful career as a closer with Oakland and St. Louis. Wilson and Pulsipher battled injuries that kept them from ever reaching their potential.

I told McIlvaine he was going to be the next to go, and that turned out to be the case. In July 1997, Wilpon canned him. He later became an assistant to the general manager with the Twins and Mariners. I guess he didn’t always report to the office there, either.

Joe’s successor, Steve Phillips, came in and built a team that allowed Bobby Valentine to say he managed in a World Series.

*

After my firing, former Met Dwight Gooden, back in baseball with the Yankees, ripped into me in a single-source story in the
Daily News
: “When you did well, he was your best friend. When you struggled, he was against you. He pointed fingers all the time. When we won, it was us. When we lost, it was them guys.”

He went on to criticize me for not backing him during his struggles with substance abuse. According to Dwight, I drank to excess, so I should have had more understanding for someone in his predicament.

That was a cheap shot. Anybody who’s known me (or read this book) is aware I like my cocktails. But for Dwight to insinuate that I was an alcoholic hit below the belt.

Dwight’s legal troubles continued long after he berated me in the
Daily News
. It’s a shame. The guy had Hall of Fame talent, but he blew it. I’ve tried never to hold grudges against people, and I’m sorry Dwight held one against me. He was just another baseball player who wouldn’t look in the mirror. He tried to get by on what he once was, not on what he had become. And he expected the rest of us to do the same.

I was never contacted for that newspaper story. Dwight gave them more than enough material to fill a page. It took me a long time to realize it, but I came to understand that the media doesn’t always want both sides of the story. Sometimes they just want the most provocative side.

*

Through 1996, I had managed eight years in the big leagues. But only one time did I lead a team from the first day of spring training to the last day of a 162-game season. That was in 1980 when the Phillies won the World Series. The other seven seasons featured strikes or a midseason hiring or firing.

I’m one of a handful of people who have managed both the Yankees and Mets; both jobs provided me with a lot of exciting moments. In the Bronx, I got to put on a historic uniform and manage in a legendary stadium. In Queens, I got to lead a club that had briefly supplanted the Yankees as the best team in New York City. Despite how things worked out with both jobs, I loved my time in New York.

There was just one catch, however: in both situations, I came on board at the wrong time. In 1989, the Yankees were retrenching, and George Steinbrenner’s pockets were nowhere near as deep as they had been or would later become. The Mets, meanwhile, were in complete disarray and went from being one of the most to one of the least expensive teams in baseball while I managed them.

While both New York jobs had a prestige factor, neither really presented me with a chance to do the only thing I ever cared about: winning.

Out of the fishbowl, I returned to the open spaces of our farms in Pennsylvania and Maryland.

The time away from the game allowed me to spend time with Sylvia and our four kids. A lot had happened in our children’s lives while we were in New York. John had established himself as a major league scout, Doug started flying commercial jets, Dana became a food services manager, and Kim found work in the biotech industry. I couldn’t have been more proud of all of them. They all continue to excel in their chosen fields. Kim, the Little League pioneer, left her research job in the early 2000s to become an engineer and paramedic for the Oakland Fire Department. She also played on the women’s national rugby team.

Sylvia and I have worked hard to nurture a close-knit family feeling. Our children are always welcome at our home, and we continue to enjoy spending time with them and our grandkids. Dana had a home built on our Conowingo farm, and she and her husband, Mark, manage the property. Doug now flies for an air cargo company.

After leaving the Mets, I decided home was where I wanted to be.

When newly hired Phillies general manager Ed Wade, a first-time GM, offered me a special assistant’s job in 1998, I jumped at the chance. “I’ve had a good ride in the game,” I told Eddie. “All I want to do now is help in any way I can.”

I grew up in the Philadelphia area rooting for the Phillies, signed with the Phillies out of the University of Delaware, and spent most of my playing career in the organization. Take the 14 years I worked for the team and you can understand why the Phillies were in my blood.

At the age of 63, I was really excited to come back.

The Phillies also had Paul Owens as a special assistant. Lee Elia’s promotion from scout to director of minor league instruction made it start to feel a little like 1980 again.

But it wasn’t 1980.

In the four years since their last World Series appearance in 1993, the Phillies hadn’t come within 20 games of first place.

In the coming years, we’d lose more than just games. One by one, many of my closest friends in the organization passed away.

My first season back in Philadelphia was the first without Richie Ashburn in the broadcast booth. For 35 years, he called Phillies games on radio and television, first with Bill Campbell and Byrum Saam and then with Harry Kalas. Before his broadcasting career, he spent all but three seasons of his Hall of Fame playing career with the Phillies. Unfortunately, I never got to call Whitey a teammate. Richie died of a heart attack in September 1997. I joined his processional in Fairmount Park in Philadelphia. One fan left his transistor radio at a makeshift memorial for Whitey.

*

I looked forward to entering a new phase of my career outside the glare of the spotlight.

Leave it to Bobby Valentine to weigh in with his spin on why I took the position with the Phillies. Referencing a scouting job I took with the Mets a couple of years before becoming their manager, he said, “Was that the [same] job he had here when he got Jeff Torborg fired?”

Good for Bobby. It was a nice quip by a guy who specialized in rubbing people the wrong way. Two years later, he actually fooled people into thinking he was a great manager by leading the Mets to the National League pennant. To me, however, Bobby will always be the guy who dressed up in a Groucho Marx disguise and snuck back into the dugout after being ejected from a game in 1999. The guy has always been a phony.

His first year as Red Sox manager in 2012 further exposed the real Bobby V. He couldn’t handle the adversity of losing some players to injury. Hell, he couldn’t even show up to the ballpark on time, a tardiness habit I understand he developed while blowing smoke as a commentator at ESPN.

Back to his cheap shot: Bobby’s insinuation that I had designs on managing the Phillies again had no basis in reality. I knew in my heart that I didn’t want to be a general manager or field manager anymore. And I told Eddie and team president David Montgomery as much. I just wanted to work for the Phillies again. At the time I took the job, Terry Francona was in his second season managing the team. I never ended up replacing Francona or any of the other managers who followed him. Ironically, Bobby was the one who years later took Francona’s job in Boston. Valentine lasted just one season. After the Red Sox imploded, Bobby also got fired.

*

The 1998 season was an unforgettable, and ultimately, infamous one. According to
The New York Times
, eight of the 13 players who hit 40 or more home runs in 1998, including Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa, are now suspected of having taken performance-enhancing drugs.

That was hard for me to accept. I always trusted baseball players were above doing anything detrimental to their well-being and the integrity of the game.

In my playing days, we had greenies and red juice, the type of energy boosters you can find at gas stations and convenience stores these days. I never thought they had much of an effect on me. Would players of my era have been tempted to take steroids if they had been available? I can’t answer that question, but I’d like to think that most of us would have resisted the temptation.