Inside Baseball: The Best of Tom Verducci (3 page)

Scioscia had hit three home runs all year, only one since June. Mets catcher Gary Carter, knowing Scioscia liked to take a pitch or two with a runner on first, flashed his index finger to Gooden. After walking Shelby, the pitcher knew exactly what was needed: just a good get-ahead fastball squarely over the plate. It was 11:02 p.m. when Gooden threw the pitch. It arrived slightly above belt high. It would have been strike one, absolutely.

But then Scioscia swung.

THERE IS a line of demarcation that runs roughly along the crest of the Rocky Mountains through North America. Water on one side of the line flows toward the Pacific. On the other it flows in the opposite direction. The moment Scioscia hit that two-run home run, the Mets had reached their Continental Divide. “If we had won that game, we would have won that series,” says Joe McIlvaine, then the Mets vice president of baseball operations and now an executive vice president with the team. “There’s no doubt in my mind. It was a flash point.”

The Mets lost that night in 12 innings and again the next afternoon. They lost the series in seven games, and they have not played another postseason game since. The course of the franchise’s fortunes began flowing the wrong way, first in a trickle and then in a rush.

Two second-place finishes followed, though those turbulent years were more corrosive than anyone knew. It was the end to the dynasty that never was. The Mets were one of eight teams to finish first or second for seven consecutive seasons, but the only one of that group to not emerge from such a run with more than one pennant. Then came three losing seasons, each worse than the last. No team in baseball has been worse over those past three years, especially the most recent, a 103-loss horror in which the Mets, with conduct even more odious than their play, were reduced to being the pathetic objects of late-night television humor. So offensive was the 1993 team that on Aug. 26 an angered and pained Fred Wilpon met with his players for the first time in his 14 years of what had been his laissez-faire co-ownership with Nelson Doubleday. He scolded them for embarrassing the franchise and the city in which he had grown up. “You should feel privileged to be able to play baseball in New York,” he told them. “If you don’t feel that way and you want out, let us know. We’ll get you the hell out of here.”

Then came the landmark moment of the descent. Wilpon marched to a podium at a news conference and fired one of his players on the spot, essentially for acting like a jerk for the better part of three years. Wilpon simply blurted out that outfielder Vince Coleman, who had come to represent all that was wrong with the team, would never wear a Mets uniform again. The club still owed Coleman a 1994 salary of $3 million, but Wilpon would worry about that later.

“Businesswise,” he says, “it wasn’t a very smart thing to say. I didn’t plan on saying it. Certainly I knew it in my mind. But, yes, I reached a point where I had to say enough is enough.”

In the past three years three teams have gone from worst to first in successive seasons. Another, Oakland, took the reverse route last year. “A lot has changed since 1988,” Wilpon says. “It’s a much more volatile business now.” The crash of the Mets, though, took on historic proportions. They became only the fourth team in history to lose 100 games within five seasons of winning 100. But unlike Oakland last season, the Mets collapsed without the excuse of fiscal restraint. They are a monument not so much to the vagaries of modern baseball as to the destructive forces of mismanagement.

The most ruinous of their mistakes took three basic forms: miscalculation or outright ignorance of the intangibles winning players need, particularly in New York; quick-fix trades that recklessly disregarded long-term effects; and the disastrous breakup of what was supposed to be a seamless passing of the front-office command from chief operating officer and general manager Frank Cashen to his lieutenants, McIlvaine and Harazin. Wilpon is positively penitential in acknowledging all three elements. “Not enough emphasis was placed on the mix of people and the chemistry that are essential to winning,” Wilpon says. “It was almost like Rotisserie baseball.”

LESS THAN two months after winning the 1986 World Series, the Mets traded outfielder Kevin Mitchell, who finished third in the Rookie of the Year balloting, to the Padres in a deal for outfielder Kevin McReynolds. It established the pattern for a series of errors in which the Mets progressively spoiled the chemistry of the team. Too often they overlooked players’ mental toughness, approach to the game and suitability to the pressures in New York.

Mitchell was a kid from the San Diego ghetto who liked to tell stories of various escapades involving bullets and knives that had scarred his flesh. “Some people here thought Mitchell was a time bomb ready to explode,” one Mets official says. Well, there was something of a detonation in 1989. Mitchell hit 47 home runs that year, won the Most Valuable Player award and led the San Francisco Giants to the pennant.

McIlvaine had coveted McReynolds since he scouted him as a collegian at Arkansas. But McReynolds’s skills and production diminished annually after 1988. He never lost a step, though, in his haste to leave the clubhouse after games. McReynolds was more interested in beating traffic than in sharing with his teammates the joy of big victories or the crush of difficult defeats. So miscast was McReynolds in New York that he once said of its fans, “It’s almost like people are miserable, and they want to bring you down to their level.”

“Yes, I am disappointed with how McReynolds turned out,” McIlvaine says. “He should have been a superstar. I can’t tell you in all my years of scouting if I ever saw a player with tools like that. He didn’t use that talent as much as he should have. Darryl Strawberry was the same way. They’ve both been good players. But they should have been excellent. They had Hall of Fame tools.”

The Mets were wrong so many times about the makeup of their players that by 1992 they had a paranoid, distracted club. They put the likes of first baseman Eddie Murray and Coleman in the same clubhouse, where people like outfielder Bobby Bonilla and pitcher Bret Saberhagen quickly caught their contagious contempt for the media. “If there is one place in the entire world where that attitude can’t work, it’s New York City,” Wilpon says. “It’s the media capital of the world.”

The Mets signed free agent Bonilla after the 1991 season. They invested $29 million in him to be their cornerstone player when baseball insiders knew he was nothing more than a good, complementary player given to self-absorption. Once, while with the Pirates, Bonilla was batting in the bottom of the ninth inning of a tie game when the winning run scored on a wild pitch. Despite the victory Bonilla was angry that he had lost a chance to pad his RBI total. “Why does it always happen to me?” he said.

New York has exposed the worst in him. He has threatened a reporter, worn earplugs at home games, called the press box with his team down 7–0 to complain about the scoreboard display of an error call against him, and whined so much that the New York
Daily News
ran a cartoon of Baby Bo in diapers on its back page. On top of all that he has batted .257—26 points lower than his lifetime average before going to New York. Last season his agent, Dennis Gilbert, wondered aloud to Harazin if maybe both the Mets and Bonilla might be better off if they traded him. Bonilla was not the leader or impact player the Mets had paid for.

“I think there are very few people in the game you can ask to do that,” Harazin says. “Against the backdrop of success the Mets had for so many years, asking him to come in and do that was probably asking too much.”

So sensitive was his rightfielder that former manager Jeff Torborg feared Bonilla would only be a worse wreck if he dared criticize him. “I tried to protect him as much as I could,” Torborg says, “to the point where I got myself in trouble.” Both Bonilla and Torborg were caught in lies trying to cover up the 1992 press box phone call.

It was Harazin who negotiated the free-agent contracts of Bonilla, Coleman and Murray, prompting former Mets pitcher Frank Viola to say in retrospect, “Money doesn’t make a winning team. Al knows money, but he doesn’t know baseball.”

In three seasons Coleman missed more than half the team’s games, cursed out a coach, was suspended for shoving his manager, caused Gooden to miss a start when he accidentally whacked him with a golf club, was a target of a rape investigation (no charges were brought), prepared for games by throwing dice in the clubhouse and, on July 24 this year, threw an M-100 firecracker out of a car window as he was leaving Dodger Stadium with some other players. The explosion injured three people, including a two-year-old girl who suffered corneal damage. Coleman originally was charged with a felony; in November his attorney negotiated a plea bargain in which Coleman pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor charge of possession of an explosive device.

“Vince Coleman was a total mistake by this organization,” says Wilpon.

Murray produced admirable statistics for the Mets, but his hatred for the media poisoned the clubhouse. Although he was on his way to batting .285 with 27 home runs and 100 RBIs last season, and though the Mets would gladly and easily have parted with him, his venomous attitude had become so notorious that not a single team called to express interest in acquiring his bat down the stretch.

“Guys like Vince and Eddie copped this attitude that reporters were there only to screw up the team,” says Magadan, who now plays for the Marlins. “I don’t think there’s any question that their attitudes affected the clubhouse. I realize reporters have a job to do, but believe me, you notice when you’re talking to reporters and Eddie Murray walks by and says, ‘Why are you talking to
them
?’ Some guys would say, ‘I don’t want Eddie getting on me,’ and they’d change their opinions about the press.”

Saberhagen, with no history of such behavior, became a boor. On July 7 he tossed a lighted firecracker near reporters, and later he brashly admitted doing it, saying, “What are they going to do? Fine me?” Just three days after Coleman exploded his M-100 in Los Angeles, Saberhagen squirted bleach at reporters.

The Mets were wrong about their choice of managers too. After Davey Johnson was fired 42 games into the 1990 season, his seventh with the club, neither of his successors, Bud Harrelson or Torborg, made it through two seasons. Harrelson lost respect in the clubhouse when he quit his radio show because he thought the questions were too pointed and when he admitted sending coach Mel Stottlemyre to make a pitching change out of fear of being booed.

“That had an effect on the team,” Magadan says. “The thing that hurt Buddy was when he showed vulnerability. Jeff wanted to control the media. We had so many meetings with Torborg and Buddy that were about the press, especially with Torborg. Those were just about the only team meetings we ever had with him.”

At one meeting Torborg tried so hard to convince his players that they should not be distracted by the media that pitcher Pete Schourek finally piped up, “If we’re not supposed to be worried about the media, why are we having all these meetings about the media?” Torborg was so preoccupied with covering up the slightest controversies that pitcher David Cone called him Oliver North.

“Jeff was put into a situation so different from Chicago,” Harazin says, referring to Torborg’s three years as manager of the White Sox, including a 94–68 season in 1990. “There he had a young, scrappy club with a college-style eagerness to succeed that suited him. I put him in a very different situation here. I didn’t give as much thought to that as I should have.”

When the Mets traded Cone to Toronto, on Aug. 27, 1992, he called it “the end of the arrogant Mets. The end of the mid-’80s, flourishing Mets.” When Cone was asked that day if he knew how that end came about, he replied, “Well, yeah, the heart and soul was bred out of it. Numbers and production have taken a front seat while what a guy’s intangibles are, what personality he brings to the Mets, is left on the backseat. You need people who are fixtures, with personality and guts. When things are down, those are the type of guys who fight back.”

There is no more damning statistic indicative of how soft the Mets turned than this: They have a losing record in one-run games every year after 1988. They have been bullies in games decided by three or more runs in that time, with a .539 percentage in such games (215–184). In one- and two-run games, though, they have played .417 baseball (171–239). Trying to explain the disparity, Cone once attributed it to the Mets’ “tight booty.”

Of the 23 players to appear in the 1988 National League Championship Series for the Mets, 10 were gone by the end of the next year. Today only one of them is left: Gooden.

Cashen and Johnson now admit they acted rashly in trying to fuel the Mets’ run at the top of the National League East and fulfill the pervasive and enormous expectations. “We traded so many good young players to try to keep the thing going,” Cashen says. “We got caught up in it. I probably should have been more forceful in not letting that happen. I should have stopped a couple of trades.” It is the temporary-insanity defense. Says Johnson, “Nobody was willing to take a step back and say, ‘Wait a minute. What are we doing? Let’s not panic.’ We lost sight of what got us there.”

Within a 44-day span of the 1989 season, the Mets traded centerfielders Lenny Dykstra and Mookie Wilson plus pitchers Rick Aguilera, Roger McDowell, Kevin Tapani and David West for three players who, as it turned out, would be gone from the club in little more than two years.

Late on the night of June 17, 1989, as the Mets rode their team bus back to their hotel after a game in Philadelphia, McIlvaine whispered to Johnson that he had a chance to obtain outfielder Juan Samuel from the Phillies for Dykstra and McDowell. “Think about it,” McIlvaine told him. The manager shot back, “I don’t have to think about it. I want you to make it if you can. It’s that simple.”

Why would Johnson be so eager to move the 26-year-old Dykstra? Because Johnson was no longer concerned about developing players. He had become a different manager ever since Cashen nearly fired him after the 1987 season—the two had clashed over personnel moves—even though the Mets won 92 games while their pitchers spent a combined 457 days on the disabled list.