108 Stitches

by Ron Darling

  One of the things I loved about this season ticket setup was that the Garden was right across town from my apartment. I could just head directly west from our front door and be in my seat twenty minutes later—to me, just then, this was the coolest thing in the world, to be able to walk to a game and not worry about traffic or parking. It’s like I’d died and gone to heaven, if I could forget for a moment that I was now root, root, rooting for my adopted hometown teams.

  One of the other things I loved was the way New York fans seemed to embrace the same type of gritty, hard-nosed player. For these Knicks, that player was Ernie Grunfeld—a kid from Queens who got by on determination. He didn’t get a whole lot of minutes, but whenever the Knicks were down big at the end of the game, the crowd started chanting Ernie’s name. He’d come in, make a big play, and the place would just go nuts.

  Nick Fotiu filled the same kind of role for the Rangers—a kid from Staten Island, the Rangers’ first homegrown player, who was usually called on to act as the team’s enforcer. Whenever he dropped his gloves and started mixing it up with an opposing player, Ranger fans would lose their shit.

  These games were such an education for me, because they helped me to appreciate the mind-set of the New York sports fan. Yeah, the fans expected to you to win, but even more than that they expected you to bust your butt. To dive for a loose ball. To take a punch and give two in return. And as the character of our 1986 championship team was taking shape, I remember wondering how our scrappy, feisty, gritty teammates would be received by the Garden crowd. We had our share of fighters on that team, so I’m pretty sure we would have gotten a hero’s welcome.

  Those season tickets were a little above my pay grade, just then, but looking back I believe they were a great investment in my card-carrying New Yorker status. I was making the major league minimum salary—$30,000—and my rent back then was $700, so I supplemented my income by filling my off-season weekends with personal appearances. Some of these came through the Mets front office, and some came through guys like Tony Ferrara. After a while, they found me on their own. Bar mitzvahs, Little League banquets … whatever the cultural equivalent was for the rubber chicken circuit as it applied to first-year ballplayers, that’s what I was on. The going rate in those days was $500, so on a good weekend I could cover my rent and make a dent in those season ticket prices—a win-win, all around.

  Once, I shared a limo to the Catskill mountain region north of the city with New York Giants quarterback Phil Simms. Phil was a little more established in his career than I was in mine, and yet I found it reassuring to know that I wasn’t the only local athlete looking to supplement his income in this way. We were headed to one of the classic Borsch Belt hotels for one of the most over-the-top bar mitzvah celebrations I’d ever seen—because, by this time, I was something of an authority on over-the-top bar mitzvah celebrations. The only thing we knew headed up to the hotel was that the bar mitzvah boy we’d been hired to help celebrate was a major Mets fan and Giants fan, and that he loved the zoo. Clearly, Phil and I had the Mets and Giants part covered, but it was unclear to both of us how the zoo piece would fit into the picture. Well, when we arrived at the hotel, we found out soon enough. In fact, our noses gave the scene away before we could see it for ourselves. There in the grand ballroom of this grand hotel was a menagerie of animals: elephants, giraffes, monkeys. It was the most incongruous thing, to see (and smell!) these beasts in the middle of all this splendor and excess. It was surreal—like a scene from a Fellini movie.

  Phil and I flashed each other these what the hell are we into? looks.

  I said, “You ever see anything like this before?”

  He laughed and said, “Rookie.” Like he was waving me off. Like such as this was the most natural thing in the world … which, in the rarefied air we were now breathing as fledgling New York sports heroes, I suppose it was.

  * * *

  Perhaps the most rarefied air I got a chance to breathe as a young professional athlete was in the company of the legendary Lauren Bacall—a baseball fan, it turned out. The meeting stemmed from a friendship Keith Hernandez had struck with Bobby Zarem, the New York press agent who was widely credited with coming up with the city’s famous “I Love New York” campaign.

  Bobby was in the habit early on in my career of arranging lunches and dinners with some of New York’s movers and shakers—and Keith, who was in the habit of enjoying a fine meal and the company of interesting and influential people away from the game, would often participate. Keith would ask me to join him from time to time, but this wasn’t really my thing. I tended to hang back when I was out of my element, and the thought of having to make conversation with these variously successful individuals was a little intimidating … that is, until the prospect of dining with Lauren Bacall was on the table.

  I’d been a big fan of old movies for as long as I could remember, and of course I knew the special place Bogie and Bacall occupied in the history of American cinema. But I’d never had the chance to meet a Hollywood legend, so of course I jumped at it.

  Oh. My. Goodness. Lauren Bacall was such a delightful, captivating presence. A singular beauty, a brassy spirit. The room seemed to tilt on her axis. The first time she spoke, in that deep, gravelly voice, I just about melted. I mumbled something stupid—like, “It’s such an honor to meet you, Ms. Bacall.”

  She responded with something charming and self-effacing—like, “My friends call me Betty.”

  And I was left to wonder for the next couple beats if this was my invitation to do the same.

  Betty knew the game, wanted nothing more than to talk about the Mets’ chances and some of the old ballplayers she used to know, but I wanted to pepper her with questions about Bogie and Hollywood.

  And so one of the great nights of my early career unfolded in this back-and-forth way—a night that had almost nothing to do with baseball and at the same time almost everything to do with baseball.

  We were joined at dinner by my first wife, Toni, and by Keith’s girlfriend, Sherri, and there’s a picture from that evening that remains one of my most treasured mementos. In fact, I’ve probably kept just four or five pictures from my playing days, and this is one of them, and what’s remarkable about this photo is the sheer star power on display. Think of it: Keith was a good-looking guy, maybe thirty years old, in peak physical condition, looking as good as he would ever look. I was maybe twenty-five, looking as good as I would ever look. Toni and Sherri were both models at the top of their game, looking as good as they would ever look. And yet the only person you can really see in that picture is Betty Bacall.

  It’s the strangest, most wonderful thing, the way your eyes are drawn to her. It was that way in the restaurant, the night we met, and it’s that way all these years later, when I take out the picture and remember what it was like to begin to move about New York City like I belonged no place else.

  Cool-Down

  The State of the Game

  The more things change, the more they stay the same.

  That’s a tired old saw that doesn’t seem to have a whole lot of teeth in baseball these days, and as I reach back for these stories from my time in the game I can’t help but think where the game itself is headed.

  I’m a purist at heart. I’ve never warmed to the idea of the designated hitter, or to interleague play, or even to the instant replay review system implemented in 2014 that granted managers the right to challenge a ruling on the field. Each of these tweaks and modifications seemed to me to take a little bit of the shine off our national pastime, to subtract the human element in favor of a more predictable outcome or a possible bump in attendance, but none of them threatened the very fabric of the sport.

  Ah, but that’s no longer the case …

  The increasing reliance on analytics and sabermetrics is fundamentally changing the way the game is played on the field. The nine-figure contracts we dole out to our top-tier players and the mere eight-figure contracts awarded to our second-tier veterans ha
ve altered the landscape to where management must coddle the arms of young pitchers, nurture the health of position players, and micromanage their rosters and strategies like never before. Ballplayers are now perceived as bottom-line assets to be preserved and protected, instead of as weapons to be consistently deployed. Today’s game—Baseball 2.0—doesn’t even look like the game I used to play, at times. I’ve talked about this in the booth at length, but it feels appropriate to close this collection of anecdotes about the players and personalities who’ve crossed my path with a look at some of the ways the game has evolved … and at the ways today’s players and personalities are made to adapt to what has essentially been a front-office evolution.

  Consider the way the stolen base has fallen out of favor in recent years—in part because of the desire to prolong the careers of star players who might run themselves down over time (you know, with all that sliding), but mostly because the numbers now tell us that the stolen base is only effective if you’re able to succeed 80 percent of the time. This may, in fact, be so, but it doesn’t account for the fact that even the game’s greatest base stealers had to struggle early on before figuring out how to run on major league pitchers. It’s like anything else—you learn your craft by learning from your mistakes. You have to get thrown out a time or two, take some chances, before you find your way, but there doesn’t seem to be any room in today’s game for a manager to allow his fleet-footed base runners to take their lumps.

  Consider the way teams try to manage their pitchers by babying their arms and squeezing their pitch counts. Sure, I understand that when you sign a pitcher to a big contract you want to protect your investment—but what are you protecting him for, exactly? His Age 32 season? There was a stretch of games early in the 2018 season that helped to put this approach into perspective. Jacob deGrom, the Mets’ All-Star pitcher, in the first weeks of an historic Cy Young–winning season, left a scoreless game against the Braves in the fourth inning with a hyperextended elbow. (He’d thrown just 46 pitches, by the way.) The Mets, not wanting to take any chances with such an important arm, put deGrom on the disabled list as a precaution, allowing him to miss his next start. When he returned to the rotation ten days later in Philadelphia, he struggled to get through the first inning, throwing 45 pitches while still managing to keep the Phillies off the scoreboard. (Such a competitor!) As a further precaution, the Mets took him out of the game. What that meant was that the team was essentially shelving their ace for three consecutive starts—roughly 10 percent of his projected workload for the season. And for what? Yes, deGrom came back from these precautions and was absolutely untouchable, pitching to a 1.23 ERA over his next seven starts, even though the anemic Mets offense could only help him to win two of those ball games, but as I watched this drama unfold I couldn’t shake thinking that something was off in the way the team was using one of the game’s best pitchers.

  Let’s not forget, the decision on how and when, and at what capacity to use a player, is never made in a vacuum. It’s made by a many-headed team that includes the organization, the player, the player’s agent, and the Player’s Association, with some second-guessing thrown in by the fans and beat writers. To my mind, when you’re blessed with a twenty-nine-year-old ace like deGrom, the thing to do is pitch him. A lot. I don’t care what the analytics say. History tells us that you have to play your guys ragged until age catches up to them. After that, whatever you get out of them is a bonus. Before that, whatever you get out of him is what you’re paying for—and what the Mets were paying for in deGrom was a season of sustained brilliance. Would those three squandered starts have changed the team’s fortunes for the season? Hardly, but that’s not the point. It's kind of like digging deep to invest in a classic car, and then leaving it to gather dust in the garage. Take the thing out for a spin and see what it can do.

  Consider, too, the way managers now routinely deploy the defensive shift throughout the game, on a situational basis. When I was a kid, you only saw the shift against guys like Boog Powell or Willie McCovey—and even then, you wouldn’t see it every time those guys stepped to the plate. It was an outlier-type move, dismissed by a lot of traditional baseball minds back then as little more than a stunt. When I was a player, you’d put on the shift only on rare occasions—against certain players, in certain situations. Here again this was the exception, not the rule.

  Nowadays, though, you might see the shift a couple times each half-inning, which can sometimes mean more often than not, and what’s interesting to me is that nobody really talks about the impact this type of maneuvering can have on a pitcher’s effectiveness, and his ability to execute to his strengths. Let’s forget for a moment how a guy who’s spent his entire career at third might have a difficult time adjusting to a ground ball hit to the right side of the infield. I understand that if the numbers say this is where the guy hits the ball the majority of time, that’s where you have to put your gloves. But I don’t understand how organizations consistently take the ball out of their best pitchers’ hands and force them to adhere to this newfangled playbook—because, let’s face it, in order to be successful against the shift, you’re asking your pitchers to make pitches that allow the ball to be hit into the shift, a construct that might be antithetical to the skill set that earned those pitchers a spot on a major league roster in the first place.

  Here, let me break it down:

  I was a guy who liked to sink the ball away from a left-handed hitter, forcing him to hit the ball on the ground. If you look at the numbers over my career, in these righty-lefty matchups, that meant way more ground balls than fly balls. It didn’t mean no fly balls, but the dominant outcome, if the batter put the ball in play, was on the ground, and most of those balls were grounded weakly to our shortstop or third baseman. In today’s game, if we’re playing the shift against a dangerous left-hander, you’ve taken away my most important pitch. A sinking fastball away is the easiest ball for a left-handed hitter to hit to the left side of the infield—so just like that, my strength becomes a weakness, because four of my infield gloves will have been aligned on the right side of the infield.

  The problem is there are very few pitchers in today’s game who have the gravitas or the résumé to push back against such as this. Sure, if you’re Justin Verlander your manager and your pitching coach will listen to you if you point out that you’ve had success against this or that left-handed hitter who mostly hits the ball to short. But if you’re a young pitcher, there’s no arguing with organizational strategy. You can either go with the flow or step off the mound.

  Relatedly, as the game leans more and more toward limited pitch counts for young starters, we’re seeing more and more five- or six-inning pitchers. It becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy, because once you start shutting down these pitchers after the second time through the order, you never condition their arms to go any deeper in a game.

  What this means, over time, is that the game is starting to produce a generation of pitchers who are able to pitch to the analytics, and that’s it. When they pitch to the analytics and get a positive result, that means a win. It means the process has been considered and dealt with. It means they get to keep their jobs as major league pitchers, and the generous paychecks that attach to those jobs. It means they’ve been given a blueprint for success, and if they stick to the plan they’ll be rewarded for it, even if the opposing team manages to scratch out a couple hits, or bunt against the shift, or offer up some kind of counterpunch strategy of their own. As long as they pitch to the process, they’ve covered their asses.

  But it’s not really about covering your ass, is it?

  I’m thinking back to a left-handed hitter like Will Clark, who for comparison purposes will stand in here as the Bryce Harper of my day. Remember Will’s picture-perfect, loping swing? It was a thing of beauty, but you could pitch to him. In my case, that meant my sinker down and away. If I was facing him with a shift behind me, however, I’d have to throw him a cutter or a breaking ball that he could pull
. He’d be more likely to be out in front of that pitch, particularly if he knew I couldn’t throw my sinker, so my only hope would be to induce him to hit the ball into the teeth of my defense. That would give me the best chance.

  Of course, analytics of this type are nothing new. Corner infielders have always guarded the lines late in the game; outfielders have always played deep against power hitters, and shallow against spray hitters, and shaded left or right against the pull; infielders would hang back at double-play depth or draw in for a potential play at the plate, depending on the situation. Even as kids scrambling to get a pickup game together, we knew when we were short-sided and didn’t have enough players to field two full teams to set it up so that a ball hit to right field by a right-handed hitter would be an automatic out. A ball hit to left field by a left-handed hitter, same thing. And we’d position our players accordingly. But by making the opposite field out of bounds, we were somehow able to preserve the integrity of the game, because there was no room in our ground rules for a soft liner the other way to fall for a cheap hit. You had to beat the other team, not outsmart them. That’s no longer the case at the big league level, where it sometimes seems our overreliance on analytics has perverted the integrity of the game, to where it’s now possible to beat the other team by going against time-honored baseball culture. It used to be that you weren’t supposed to bunt against the shift, or late in the game if you were down by more than three runs, but all of that is out the window in today’s game.

  That cheap hit, for those players smart enough to grab at it, has become a game-changer.

  Case in point: as I write this, the Mets are coming off a game where their veteran shortstop-turned-second-baseman Asdrubal Cabrera came to the plate with the score tied, late, runner on second, nobody out. The opposing team put on a full infield shift, leaving one defender on the left side of the infield at the traditional shortstop position, shaded toward second. The way baseball has always been played, Asdrubal would have given himself up in that spot and attempted to lay down a sacrifice bunt, which would have likely advanced the runner to third. The way the game is now played, however, Asdrubal was able to smartly push the ball to the left side for an infield hit, leaving the Mets with runners on first and third, still with nobody out. The next batter, Wilmer Flores, drove the ball to right field for a sacrifice fly, bringing the runner home and leaving me to scratch my head in the booth and wonder at what the game has become.