by Ron Darling
In another world, on another team, that might have been that … except it wasn’t, because the move left Jose Oquendo in tears. The poor kid was flattened, broken. I was sitting next to him on the bench when he was told he wasn’t hitting, and he just started sobbing—like, a full-body sob. And ballplayers not being known as the most sympathetic bunch, you might think a kid like that, crying openly like that, would be laughed out of the dugout. But that’s not what happened. What happened was that everyone on the bench that day, to a man, felt for this kid. It was unbelievable, unconscionable, the way Frank Howard managed this situation. I mean, I’d been a big league ballplayer for just a couple days—I’d yet to make my first start!—but even I could tell that this was not how things should go Really, it was the first time I’d seen something happen on a baseball field that I considered a tragedy, and in all my time as a player and now as a broadcaster and a lifelong follower of the game, nothing has come close.
And here’s the killing part: I don’t think Jose ever recovered from that moment. It shot his confidence all to hell. Somehow, he got it together after he was traded to St. Louis at the start of the ’85 season, and his beautiful skills were finally realized and appreciated. And yet whatever was in him that made him special at nineteen years old, whatever sweet admixture of magic and talent had cast him as a future star, it was all erased on that afternoon at Shea Stadium. For no good reason. By a manager who appeared to be more interested in holding on to his job than in holding the hands of his young players.
Now, ballplayers aren’t typically a demonstrative bunch. We show our support for a struggling teammate with a pat on the rump, a tap of a gloved hand against the leg—maybe, in extreme circumstances, a rub of the shoulder. We don’t usually say very much, because we’ve got no idea what to say, other than “hang in there” or “shake it off” or “you’ll get ’em next time.” In the language of the game, these are the gestures and empty phrases we use to convey sympathy, to let our brothers know we’re on their side, and here in the bottom of the third, at home, we took turns letting Jose Oquendo know we were with him.
And then, at the end of the third, after Rusty made the third out, we all kind of hung back and watched in silent sympathy as Jose shuffled to the end of the bench and ducked into the narrow passageway to the team clubhouse. It was a walk of shame like no other. The way the dugouts were set up at Shea, you had to walk down four or five concrete steps and then turn a sharp corner, where there was a shitter off to the right. Then you had to walk up another set of steps, and along a dark, cave-like corridor that ran beneath the stands to the clubhouse entrance. It’s a walk of shame most of us in that dugout would go on to make a couple dozen times in our careers, heads hung low, and then a couple dozen times more, and it would always suck. Always, always. And yet here, again to a man, I believe every one of us would have gladly traded places with Jose, if it would have chased the pain he was in over Frank Howard’s inexplicable, inexcusable treatment.
* * *
Who said there’s no crying in baseball?
I can still close my eyes and picture Wade Boggs sitting in the Red Sox dugout after the final out of the 1986 World Series, looking out at our celebratory scrum, tears running down his face like there’d been a death in his family.
Now, it’s possible I’m conflating the scene I took in with my own eyes that night on the field at Shea Stadium with the images I’ve collected on video highlight reels over the years, but I definitely looked over in that moment and saw Wade Boggs sitting dejectedly in the dugout, the very picture of disappointment and loss.
That had to be a tough one. The Sox had been up 2–0 in the Series. They’d had Game 6 in hand and could’ve won it all before the storybook rally that pushed Mookie Wilson’s dribbler through Bill Buckner’s legs. And they’d had their way with me in the opening frames of Game 7, jumping out to an early lead in the deciding game that eventually went our way. They’d been so close, in so many ways. And remember, this was long before the Red Sox organization went on that great winning run in the 2000s, erasing the “curse” that had haunted the team since the days of Babe Ruth, so they had the weight of their own history pressing down on them.
I felt for those guys in the Red Sox dugout, I really did. Maybe it’s because I was a kid from New England, so even as I was yukking it up with my Mets teammates, feeling on top of the world, my heart was breaking a little bit for the team of my growing up, and somehow that heartbreak came into focus for me in that image of a teary Wade Boggs.
We were world champions by only the thinnest of margins. We’d barely won the World Series. But I found time in that moment to recognize that as good as it felt to come out on the winning end of things, that’s how bad it felt to come up short. A guy like Boggs, who’d go on to become a world champion with the Yankees, had probably never experienced such a low moment as an athlete. He’d spent his life as a ballplayer on top of his game—that’s how you get to the bigs, right? Sure, as a kid, you cry all the time when you lose a big game. I used to tell the parents on my kids’ Little League teams that there were four certainties in youth baseball: one team wins, one team loses, one kid cries, and everyone wants to know where they’re gonna eat after the game.
Don’t know why, but every time I flash back to that wild rumpus on the mound after the game, where the weight of my piss-poor start was mercifully lifted and I was swept up in the joyful abandon of winning the World Series, I also see Wade Boggs, slumped over in the dugout, looking out at our celebration, biting back tears.
Those two images, in split-screen, are why we play the game—and why we keep coming back each spring to give it another go.
* * *
One of the most famous “crying in baseball” stories was also one of the most heartbreaking—and, heart-lifting. It happened during the 2015 season, as the trade deadline approached, and media outlets started reporting that Wilmer Flores and Zack Wheeler had been traded to the Milwaukee Brewers for center fielder Carlos Gomez.
Indeed, the reports started circulating during a game between the Mets and the San Diego Padres at Citi Field, a game that Wilmer Flores just happened to be playing. And, this being our electronic age, the trouble was compounded by the tweets and texts that quickly passed among fans-in-the-know like a contagion.
Soon, everyone in the ballpark seemed to know a trade was going down—everyone, that is, except for Wilmer Flores.
Typically, when a player is involved in a trade and a game is under way, the club will remove him from the game immediately. The big fear is a risk of injury, of course, but there are other compelling reasons for this—not least the prospect that once a player’s allegiance has been shipped out of town, his effort and professionalism might tag along.
Here on this night, though, Wilmer and the Mets were going through the motions like it was business as usual. Word of the pending trade had reached us in the booth by this point, but the club had yet to make an announcement, so it was business as usual for us as well. We held our broadcasting tongues and waited on official word, even as the ballpark was fairly buzzing with the news. And yet when Wilmer stepped to the plate in the bottom of the seventh, the fans gave him a standing ovation—a tip-of-the-cap for his years of service. It would have been a fine and fitting send-off, except that Wilmer had no idea why the fans were standing and cheering. Who knows, maybe he thought they were trying to get a rally going, but then when he grounded out he got another Standing O—probably confused the hell out of him.
The fans cheered again when he took the field in the top of the eighth, except by this time Wilmer had picked up on the buzz. Someone on the bench or one of the fans must have said something to him, so now he was crying. Openly, unabashedly. He kept wiping the tears from his face with his bare hand—never realizing, I don’t think, that our cameras were trained on him, highlighting his face-saving actions to viewers at home. There was even a shot of an intensely sad and nakedly vulnerable Wilmer, wiping at his tears, on the big screen out i
n center field, magnifying the weirdness and emotion and uncertainty of this scene way beyond the ways it might have played out in an earlier time.
Up in the booth, I was struck by the humanity of the moment. Yes, baseball is a business. Yes, players get traded all the time—often, out of a happy clubhouse into a miserable one. But what gets lost in the transaction is the fact that a player like Wilmer had been with the Mets organization since he was sixteen years old. This was the only team he’d ever known, the only uniform he’d ever worn—the players, the coaches, the fans, the front office … this was his American family. It would have been like me leaving home at sixteen, headed to make my mark in Venezuela, a place where I didn’t know the language, didn’t know a soul, and then having the rug pulled out beneath whatever place I’d managed to make for myself … just, because.
So I ached for this kid—I truly did.
Eventually, Ruben Tejada pinch hit for Wilmer in the bottom of the ninth, and by now we were talking about it in the booth—it had become the story of the game!—but for a couple innings in there Wilmer was in a kind of no-man’s-land, a dead man walking, while the Mets front office was only postponing the inevitable.
Mets manager Terry Collins, to his great credit, later told reporters that he’d never received word from the club that Wilmer had been traded, and he only removed him from the lineup when the speculation became a distraction.
The great kicker to this story came after the game. Actually, there were two great kickers. The first was that the trade fell apart, on concerns over Carlos Gomez’s back. Those fans-in-the-know didn’t know so much, it turned out, and neither did the trigger-happy reporters who’d been out in front on this story. Wilmer was returned to the fold. It was like the trade never happened—which, in fact, was the case. It was never announced through formal channels, just rumored and buzzed and tweeted about until Wilmer Flores was reduced to tears.
(The moral of the story? Always wait for the physical.)
The second kicker came two nights later, following an off day, in another home game, this one against the Washington Nationals. The score was tied 1–1. Wilmer stepped to the plate to lead off the 12th inning and drove a 1–1 pitch over the fence in left-center for a walk-off home run, and as he rounded the bases Met fans went a little bit crazy. Check that: they went a lot of bit crazy. As much as they had been pulling for Wilmer the night of the near-trade, that’s how hard they were cheering for him in these extra innings. And Wilmer drank it all in; he started pounding on the Mets lettering on his uniform as he jumped on home plate, becoming a kind of folk hero with that one swing of the bat—not because the game meant all that much on the long string of the season, although the Mets and the Nationals were kinda, sorta battling it out for the top spot in the division. No, the magic in that moment was redemptive. Wilmer had showed himself to be vulnerable, and human, and now that he’d bounced back from that low personal moment to hit a game-winning home run in the very next game … well, that gave the whole episode a storybook twist.
It was one of those rare times in my career as a broadcaster where I was at a loss for words. In fact, there have been just two other times where what was happening on the field left me standing and cheering and unable to say anything but “Fuck, yeah!”—hardly the expletive of choice for a professional broadcaster, but I’m a card-carrying fan at heart. That I might have played the game for a stretch, and won a World Series, and offered color commentary to a couple thousand games doesn’t shake me from who I am.
Those two other times? The first was Johan Santana’s 2012 no-hitter against the Cardinals—the first no-hitter in Mets history. As a former Mets pitcher, a member of a staff of aces that on any given night could have ended the team’s albatross string of no no-no’s, I knew as well as anyone in Citi Field that night what this meant to the team, to the city. A no-hitter is one of the game’s singular accomplishments, and here it was damn near heroic, in today’s terms, because Johan had thrown 122 pitches through eight, and there was all kinds of talk and speculation in our booth over whether or not manager Terry Collins would run him out to pitch the ninth. And so when Johan struck out David Freese on a 3–2 count to end the game and cement his place in New York Mets history, I stood in the booth and wanted to scream—“Fuck, yeah!”
Let the record show that Santana’s no-no was one of the great moments in Mets history, and I have to think it was because it meant something to have the team’s first no-hitter go to a standout pitcher. We’ve all seen memorable games thrown by forgettable pitchers, but Santana was anything but a no-name pitcher. He’d been one of the game’s elite starters for almost ten years, so it meant that much more. I actually sought him out after the game and collected him in a big hug—the only time I’ve ever done that in my role as a broadcaster!
The other Fuck, yeah! moment came after the Wilmer Flores drama, in an unlikely moment offered up by the ageless wonder Bartolo Colon, who himself had emerged as a kind of folk hero to Mets fans for the way he played the game with such joy. “Big Sexy” wasn’t known as much of a hitter, though, having played most of his career in the American League, and now that he was getting on in years, and carrying a few extra pounds from his peak playing days, his at-bats were often a comic adventure. And yet, during a game against the Padres at Petco Park in San Diego in May 2016, Bartolo Colon swung the bat like Babe Ruth and by some miracle drove a ball over the fence for his first career home run, at the grand old age of forty-two—and here again, I stood and cheered and thought, Fuck, yeah!
One of the things I love about calling baseball games are the moments where you find yourself in unchartered territory. When something happens on the field that I’ve never seen before, never even considered, it scares the plain shit out of me in the booth because I’ve got nothing to compare it to, no frame of reference for it. The language of the game doesn’t cover what I’m seeing. And yet at the same time, it’s also exciting as hell, because you’re not following a familiar script and you get a chance to improvise … to riff. And so to see a kid like Wilmer Flores battle back from what had to have been the worst night of his professional career to carry his team on his back and win a ball game with one mighty swing … well, it was a rare and beautiful thing, even as it left me speechless.
All I could do was stand and cheer, cry a couple tears of joy, and try not to lose my job by screaming “Fuck, yeah!” into the microphone.
* * *
The most emotional I ever was as a ballplayer? It would have to be when my buddy Ed Lynch was traded to the Cubs in 1986. He’d been my best friend on the team since the day I came up—and to this day, we remain close. Eddie’s gone on to do some big things with his life. He got his law degree from the University of Miami, became one of the game’s top scouts, and was the general manager of the Cubs for a stretch. He’s a very bright guy and we just seemed to click.
What a lot of Mets fans don’t remember was that Eddie had a solid 1985 season for the Mets, but he made only one appearance in 1986 before going on the DL with torn cartilage in his knee—and with the core of talented young pitchers on that team, you did not want to step away from the mound for too, too long. It was that old Wally Pipp scenario writ large, only here you had five or six Lou Gehrigs lined up in the bullpen ready to push you from your post.
I’m mixing my baseball metaphors here, comparing pitchers to position players, and far be it from me as one of those bullpen arms to compare myself to Larrupin’ Lou, but you get the idea. No, this was not that—but it was like that, a little, because while Eddie was out our starting rotation fell into place and the Mets decided he was no longer in their plans.
Frank Cashen, our general manager, called Eddie to his office to give him the news, and Eddie called me immediately after. He was shaken, and so was I. This was my third year in the bigs, so I’d seen teammates come and go, but this was really my first taste of how quickly things can change in baseball. It hit me on a professional level and on a personal level. The game can be cruel
, when you’re on the inside looking out. Sports in general can be cruel. Here it seemed especially harsh, because everyone in the organization believed we were on the cusp of something special. And maybe I’m biased, because Eddie and I were tight, but I really believed he could have helped our club. We needed his arm, his baseball smarts, his calming presence. We were a better team with Ed Lynch than we were without him.
Now, Eddie and I weren’t the type to hug it out or share any kind of tender moment over such as this. Ballplayers back then weren’t wired that way—they’re still not, in fact. A fist pump or a pat on the back was about all you could expect as a show of emotion. But that didn’t make Eddie’s departure any less emotional. We might have been a team of professional athletes, a team assembled to win ball games, put fans in the seats, and sell official team merchandise, but we were also a group of caring, feeling human beings. People around the game talk all the time about the character of a ball club, the makeup of a big league clubhouse, and what they’re really talking about are the personalities that come together to create a winning environment. You’d think, with all the emphasis on team chemistry and such, there’d be a little more weight assigned to the character of a ballplayer and the personal relationships that develop among players—but baseball is a business, at bottom, and I came out of this knowing that putting in any kind of effort or energy in forging personal relationships with my teammates was counterintuitive to the game itself.
The fact that the 1986 Mets would go on to win the World Series and become one of the most iconic teams in New York City sports history only made me feel Eddie’s departure more keenly. He felt it, too. He once told me it was like waking up on Christmas morning and finding out you were living with some other family.