The Mouth That Roared

by Dallas Green

  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 11th 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.

  The replacement Mets probably wished they had never signed up in the first place, or at least wished they had been picked up by another team. When they reported for spring training, I put them through the same regimens and routines as the regular players. That included four-hour workouts with lots of running.

  Any major leaguer who wanted to cross the picket line was welcome to join us. That was their choice. I wouldn’t have called them scabs. They would have heard plenty of that from the union and its supporters, however.

  Hundreds of former major leaguers and a handful of minor leaguers chose to defy the union by signing on as replacements.

  Each replacement player got a $5,000 signing bonus and the chance to make up to $275,000 in salary. More importantly, I suppose, they got to chase a dream, even if that meant incurring the scorn of the real major leaguers whose objectives they were helping to undermine.

  We used tryout camps and our scouting department to find about half of the 28 fill-in players who reported to Mets camp in Port St. Lucie. Quite a few got contracts based on word of mouth, without anybody in the organization actually having seen them play.

  Even when the 1995 season was close to starting with replacement players, I maintained faith that common sense would prevent that from happening.

  “I think, if I’m allowed to think, that after six months they’ve banged it out as hard as they’re going to and they’ve come at last to recognize the resolve of each other,” I told the Daily News. “Now quit the bullshit and let’s get after it…The players, the owners, Congress, they’re all getting antsy.”

  Five bills aimed at ending the strike had been introduced on Capitol Hill. None of them passed.

  The bullshit continued for a few more days. We went to Cleveland for the final exhibition game before the games started to count. A loss in the snow against the Indians dropped our spring training record to 7–17. The next day, we were scheduled to play the major league opener against the Marlins in Joe Robbie Stadium. But shortly after we left the field against the Indians, the owners and players union announced they had reached an accord. Our regular players started reporting the next day for an abbreviated spring training.

  Baseball would pay a heavy price for canceling the 1994 World Series and coming to the brink of using replacement players for the 1995 regular season. It took the Mets and other teams years to achieve pre-strike attendance levels. I understand the reasoning of the fans who stayed away. Baseball had let everyone down. The whole ordeal confirmed that greed was badly damaging the game.

  24

  Team chemistry is a chicken-or-the-egg kind of deal. Does winning create chemistry? Or does chemistry help teams win? Either way, I’d been searching for the right mix of players on my ballclub since I took over the Mets.

  The team that took the field for a belated, post-strike season opener on April 26, 1995, looked a lot different than the team I inherited from Jeff Torborg two years earlier. Todd Hundley, Bobby Bonilla, and Jeff Kent were the only players in the Opening Day lineups in 1993 and 1995. Bret Saberhagen was the only pitcher in the starting rotation at the beginning of 1993 who was still in the rotation when we broke camp in 1995. And only two of those players would still be on the team in August.

  My goal of surrounding promising up-and-comers with hard-working veterans was impossible to realize without the help of the Mets front office. But as he went about overhauling the roster, general manager Joe McIlvaine only occasionally took my advice. I did manage to convince him to make an offer to free agent center fielder Brett Butler, who had helped teams in Atlanta, Cleveland, San Francisco, and Los Angeles during his 14-year career. Brett’s desire to stay on the West Coast made him reluctant to come to New York. But Sabes, John Franco, and I lobbied him. It cost the Mets about $2 million to sign Brett to a one-year deal, but I was convinced his talent and leadership made it a worthwhile investment.

  An important step was getting my younger players to buy into my program. It felt like that might be happening. After I criticized the team for its lackadaisical play at the start of the season, outfielder Ryan Thompson said, “I ain’t going to argue with the big guy. If he says we need to hustle more, we better do it.”

  I’m not really sure why we didn’t win more games in 1995. For a while, I blamed our slow start on young players not getting to experience a full spring training. But a couple of months into the season, that started to sound like a weak excuse.

  Our poor play prompted another round of housecleaning. It started with the release of relief pitcher Josias Manzanillo, whose ineffectiveness cost us several games early in the season. Bonilla groused that Manzanillo, who immediately got picked up by the Yankees, didn’t deserve to take the fall for the team.

  Unbeknownst to me, Manzanillo may have sought an artificial advantage while with the Mets. His apparent steroid use earned him a mention in the Mitchell Report, a 2007 report commissioned by Major League Baseball about players’ use of performance-enhancing drugs.

  * * *

  By late July, we were 20 games under .500 and stuck in the National League East cellar.

  McIlvaine’s next moves bypassed the margins of the team and hit right at its core. He traded Bonilla to the Orioles for Damon Buford and Alex Ochoa. A couple of days later, he dealt Saberhagen to the Rockies for Juan Acevedo and Arnold Gooch. Next to go was Brett Butler, who got traded back to the Dodgers for two minor leaguers.

  McIlvaine and co-owners Fred Wilpon and Nelson Doubleday didn’t share their thought processes with me, but the logic behind the trades was pretty obvious. Between them, Bonilla, Sabes, and Butler earned almost as much money as the rest of the team they left behind. What’s the point of paying that kind of money to players if you’re still going to end up in last place?

  In three short years, the Mets went from having one of the highest payrolls in baseball to one of the lowest.

  Our hopes now rested with what the front office hoped was a younger and hungrier bunch. Based on their inexperience, I didn’t have a real feel for a lot of my players. If one of the replacement guys from spring training had snuck into the clubhouse and suited up, I might not have noticed.

  The Mets needed to be dismantled, no question about it. It’s not hard to tear something down. But I questioned whether McIlvaine had a plan for building it back up.

  I let it be known that I didn’t think a team could be successful without any veterans in the lineup or pitching rotation. “Managers and coaches can’t do it all,” I told The New York Times. “You have to have help in the clubhouse.”

  But then something unexpected happened after the All-Star break: we played extremely well.

  The kids showed they were hungry. Pitchers Jason Isringhausen and Bill Pulsipher and position players Carl Everett, Edgardo Alfonzo, and Rico Brogna, none older than 25, helped carry us to a 44–31 record after the All-Star break.

  In the final week of the season, McIlvaine announced that my coaches and I would return for at least one more season.

  Our strong finish raised expectations going forward. That put a lot of pressure on young pitchers who, in my mind, still weren’t ready for the major league grind. These guys had been pleasant surprises in 1995, but I didn’t think they were ready to carry the hopes of
the organization on their shoulders. We needed to keep adding to the team.

  The front office disagreed. And that led to my downfall.

  * * *

  McIlvaine publicly acknowledged that my background as a front office guy was an asset to the team.

  Too bad he and Mets ownership didn’t take that a step further by valuing my input more.

  Maybe the timing of my tenure with the Mets was the problem. The relationship between Wilpon and Doubleday had started to deteriorate. Wilpon began asserting himself as the point man for every Mets decision, while Doubleday slowly faded into the background.

  Under adverse conditions, my staff and I had accomplished an awful lot. Now we wanted to take the next step. But Wilpon wouldn’t allow us to. Not only didn’t he add to the team, but he also allowed our public relations team to tout our three young starting pitchers, Isringhausen, Pulsipher, and Paul Wilson, as the next coming of Tom Seaver, Nolan Ryan, and Jerry Koosman. Behind “Generation K,” as the trio was called, fans were led to believe it was going to be 1969 all over again.

  That’s amazing pressure to put on a trio of pitchers who were barely over the legal drinking age.

  At least Isringhausen and Pulsipher paid their dues in the minors and showed initial signs of being successful major league pitchers. Both had been knocking around the team’s farm system since 1992. Pulsipher, a left-hander, posted four straight winning records in the minors before getting called up in 1995. Isringhausen, a 44th-round draft pick out of Lewis & Clark Community College in Illinois, came out of nowhere to establish himself as one of the top young prospects in the game.

  In 14 starts in 1995, Isringhausen went 9–2 with a 2.81 ERA. Pulsipher went 5–7 with a 3.98 ERA.

  Wilson, the first overall pick in the 1994 amateur draft out of Florida State, wasn’t even a proven minor leaguer yet. Pegged immediately as a future star, poor Paul went out and lost all seven of his decisions his first year in the lower minor leagues. In 1995, he improved by winning 11 games between Double-A Binghamton and Triple-A Norfolk. He had started to figure things out, the operative word being started. Who was the real Paul Wilson—the guy who couldn’t win a game in A-ball or the guy who showed promise in Binghamton and Norfolk?