108 Stitches

by Ron Darling

  That same week, the Mets were up 1–0 against the Marlins. Top of the sixth, two outs. The Marlins’ Starlin Castro singled to center off Mets reliever Paul Sewald, who then walked Brian Anderson, putting runners on first and second. The Mets brought on their left-handed specialist Jerry Blevens to face the Marlins’ slugging first baseman Justin Bour, a left-handed hitter, so the Mets of course put on the shift. (It’s become a knee-jerk reaction!) With only one defender on the left side of the infield, in the shortstop position, Castro was able to walk to third for one of the most maddening stolen bases I’d ever seen at the major league level. I couldn’t understand it. For the Mets to be so confident in their one-run lead, and in their numbers, to practically invite the runner on second to cross over to third, where he would now be in a position to score on a passed ball … it made no sense to me, from a by-the-book baseball perspective.

  And yet, here we were. Here we are.

  Just to finish out the inning, Bour walked to load the bases, and Blevens was pulled from the game after throwing just six pitches. A. J. Ramos then came on to strike out pinch hitter Derek Dietrich to end the inning—meaning, I guess, that the Mets had kept the Marlins off the board, so the analytics had somehow won out.

  As we went to commercial, I said something to Gary about how the powers that be in today’s game were certainly smart, and allowed that their constant maneuvering and manipulating of the usual baseball tactics might often produce the desired outcome, but they were making the game unwatchable.

  The game has changed off the field as well. In my day, if you didn’t speak to the manager or the general manager all year, you had a good season. Today’s player needs an open line of communication with his manager at all times. Sometimes, that open line of communication is intensely scrutinized, with the way we’ve got our cameras poised to capture every conceivable moment, from every conceivable angle, and with the way fans and sportswriters are so quick to weigh in with note and comment on social media.

  Remember that clash of wills between Mets ace Matt Harvey and manager Terry Collins that played out in the dugout during Game 5 of the 2015 World Series? That would have played out a little differently in my day, when ballplayers had a different sense of self-importance. Here’s how it played out in this one: the Mets were down 3–1 in the Series. Harvey was the alpha dog of the staff, coming off of Tommy John surgery. The organization had pinned its hopes on this young man’s reconstituted arm, with a season-long cap on his innings, and now the Series rode on his arm as well. He was the face of the franchise, with the swagger to match. And he was fairly dominant on this night at Citi Field, taking a 2–0 lead into the top of the eighth, whereupon he dispatched Paulo Orlando, Alcides Escobar, and Ben Zobrist on just nine pitches.

  This was where the clash of wills came in. (And those cameras!) As the fans stood and cheered and Harvey stepped back into the dugout, Mets pitching coach Dan Warthen crossed to shake his hand, congratulate him on his fine outing, and tell him he was done for the night. Harvey bristled, as alpha dogs with swagger are wont to do, and the television crews picked up on the exchange. Viewers at home could see Harvey mouth the words “No way!” The CitiField fans on the third base side of the stadium could see their star pitcher become heated, animated as hell, and march over to his manager.

  It didn’t take a veteran analyst or color commentator or lip reader to see what was going on. Any seasoned fan could tell that Harvey was pleading his case, pushing every button he could to get his manager to leave him in the game.

  What you had here was a kind of perfect storm of moment and emotion. You had a young, cocky pitcher who’d been through a lot, who’d battled back from an incredible injury and was pushing himself to a place innings-wise and timetable-wise that no other pitcher ever had reached following Tommy John surgery. You had a baseball man who was old enough to remember a time when a manager looked into his players’ eyes and read the fire inside, instead of looking at spreadsheets that spoke to him only of trends and tendencies and percentages. And you had an era of intense media scrutiny—broadcast and social—that placed this back-and-forth in a harsh spotlight.

  “I want this game,” Harvey said. “I want it bad.”

  So Collins set aside the analytics, ignored Harvey’s pitch count (101), and ran his ace back to the mound for the ninth—later telling reporters that he let his heart get in the way of his gut.

  As Mets fans will never forget, the Royals’ Lorenzo Cain worked out a walk to lead off the ninth. Cain then stole second, and came home on a double off the bat of Eric Hosmer, and that was it for Harvey. Jeurys Familia came on to close things out, but he couldn’t quite get the job done, allowing Hosmer to cross to third on an infield grounder and then to score on what might have been the second out of a 5–3–2 double play.

  Harvey’s fine outing was effectively erased—and the Mets ended up losing the game, and the Series, when the Royals erupted for five runs in the top of the 12th inning.

  Collins and Harvey both came under fire for their roles in this drama—roles that were magnified because they were acted out on such a public stage. Collins was ripped by the fans and by the media for not following the script, and allowing his hotheaded pitcher to call the shots. Harvey was ripped for being that hotheaded pitcher, a little too full of himself to accept the decisions of his coaches and manager. And yet for generations, ballplayers and managers without the benefit of all those spreadsheets might have gone through these same motions in essentially the same way, without any blowback or fallout. I can’t tell you how many times a manager wanted to pull me from the game, and I was able to look him in the eye and say, “Skip, I got this one.” There was no disrespect, only confidence. I saw it from my teammates all the time—from opposing pitchers, too. It was the way of the game. And the manager would give you that rope, if he thought you could use it to climb your way out of whatever jam you were in; or, he wouldn’t, if he thought you’d hang yourself with it.

  It wasn’t that Terry Collins let his heart get in the way of his gut. It was that his heart and his gut got into his head. His pitcher got into his head. And the baseball world was watching, ready to second-guess him, no matter which way he turned.

  Look, I’m not a big fan of playing to the script managers tend to write out in their heads before each game, trying to anticipate every conceivable situation—and, in some cases, even some inconceivable situations.

  Here’s how that script might have gone:

  Harvey would have been pulled after the eighth for Familia, because the book said that would give the Mets the best chance to win.

  Collins would have stepped to his ace and shaken his hand and said, “Great game, Matt.”

  Harvey might have pushed back a little, competitor that he was, and said, “I’ve got to have this game.”

  Collins might have said, “I’d love you to have this game, but not tonight.”

  And that would have been that. Except it wasn’t.

  Now, Bill Walsh, the great head coach of the San Francisco 49ers, was famous for scripting the first twenty, twenty-five plays of every game, and there’s no arguing with his team’s success. The problem with scripting a baseball game, though, is that there are too many variables in play. There’s no room in the ebb and flow of the game to plan out which relievers will face which hitters in which situations. In football, if you go three and out on one possession, you’re gifted a new set of downs on the next possession—a clean slate. In baseball, there are no clean slates. What would have happened if Collins followed the script and Familia came on to face those three tough hitters to start the ninth and he ended up walking the first two? That kind of gets you off script, right? And yet today’s managers, more and more, are sticking to the plan. Why? Because they’re no different from the young pitchers who pitch to the analytics to cover their asses; they want to keep their jobs. Because today’s managers are more like middle managers. Their role is to act as a kind of field director for the general manager and his staff
, to execute an organization’s overall game plan, and to do so by whatever book that organization has chosen to follow. And, as such, they’re easily replaced.

  Of course, I’m generalizing here. Of course, there are exceptions to this line of thinking. There are outstanding managers like Mike Scioscia, Terry Francona, Joe Maddon, Bruce Bochy, and on and on who have a long history on the bench and the rope they need to call their own games, but if you look at the trend across the game in managerial hires you’ll see big league skippers getting younger and younger, with less and less coaching experience under their belts and more and more of an affinity for numbers and percentages. They’re as comfortable talking statistics with baseball wonks as they are teaching their players the benefits of playing the percentages. At some point, I’m afraid, all thirty teams will have the same manager. They’ll be young—mid-forties, able to communicate with their also-young players. They’ll have had a modest playing career, but an extensive résumé in analytics, and years of service as a kind of conduit between the general manager’s office and the clubhouse. The way things are going, I can even envision a scenario where we’ll see a manager with absolutely no playing experience—something that would have never seemed possible back in my day, and now seems not only likely but an inevitable extension of where the game is headed.

  (Hey, in this era of driverless cars, Google might even come up with a model for a manager-less team!)

  This very public Matt Harvey–Terry Collins exchange stands at a kind of midpoint for how these conversations have gone in the past, between players and management, and how they might go in the future. It puts me in mind of the one time I can remember from my own career when I got a little heated when a manager wanted to take me out of the game. It happened during the 1990 season, after the Mets fired Davey Johnson when the team got off to a 20–22 start. The feeling in the organization was that Davey had allowed the mood of our clubhouse to become a little too fast and loose for our own good, so Bud Harrelson was brought on to kind of keep his thumb on the free spirits among us and set things right. And it turned out to be the right move on the part of management, because we went 71–49 the rest of the way—good for a second-place finish in the NL East.

  Early on in Buddy’s tenure, I got myself into a rough spot during a game at Wrigley. The bases were loaded and Ryne Sandberg was due up. Buddy came out to the mound to take my temperature—which, as you’ll see, was pretty damn hot.

  Typically, you’d send out the pitching coach when the visit to the mound was to buy time for your bullpen to get ready or to settle a pitcher, but here Mel Stottlemyre had stayed on the bench, so at first I thought I was getting the hook. But Buddy just wanted to talk—he said, “I’m feeling like I got to take you out. You got anything left for me?”

  For whatever reason, the comment set me off. The whole scenario set me off. Buddy had brought the entire infield out to the mound with him, and he was up in my face, and it just wasn’t the way to play it with a veteran pitcher in the heat of competition. With this veteran pitcher in the heat of competition. So I lit into Buddy, for no good reason beyond the fact that I’d chosen to be offended by his approach. I said, “Buddy, what the fuck have you been watching the last ten years? Get the fuck off my mound.”

  Happily, mercifully, graciously … he did. He left me in the ball game, too, and I somehow managed to get out of the inning, and we never spoke of the incident again. Buddy had been a fixture with the Mets for over forty years, not counting brief stops in Philadelphia and Texas at the end of his playing career. I loved the guy, and it killed me that I went after him in this way, and it’s killed me over the years that I never said anything to him about it. I should have apologized, but despite my bluster on the mound I was too chickenshit to apologize, and our relationship became a little strained after that.

  It’s one of the great regrets of my career that I spoke to my manager in this way. That I spoke to my friend in this way. It was my own little Matt Harvey moment, and I offer it here as a reminder that there has always been a kind of tug-and-pull between players and management. What was different here in Game 5 of the 2015 World Series was that it played out in such a public way. What was different, too, was that Bud Harrelson and I had a relationship, a history. I respected who he was as a player, and understood what he meant to the organization and its fans. We were connected to each other by the stitches in the knitting of the Mets franchise, running all the way to those great Dodgers and Giants teams of the 1940s and ’50s, to those great Yankees teams up in the Bronx, to the hundreds of legends and characters and miscreants of the game who were connected even in a tenuous way to the game we were playing that day at Wrigley Field.

  In some ways, I’m afraid, those connections were not as keenly felt in the thick of tension that sprang up between Matt Harvey and Terry Collins on that November night at Citi Field. Oh, Terry was surely feeling them—he’d been bouncing around professional baseball since 1970, first as a player with the Pirates and Dodgers organizations, and eventually as a manager of the Dodgers’ Class A affiliate. But if I had to bet I’d say Matt Harvey wasn’t feeling them quite so much. This is not a knock on Harvey so much as it is another one of my sweeping generalizations made from on high, up in the broadcast booth. Today’s young players don’t seem to be connected to the game the way we were, the way players always were … until now. And that is a shame. I’d suggest here that it is a crying shame, but we’ve already covered that: there is no crying in baseball. And yet it is a shame nonetheless, for it is in the threads of the game that we take our measure as ballplayers. Pull on one thread and it will lead you to another … and to another one after that. Pull on enough of them, and your own game can begin to take shape.

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

  Maybe there’s a little more truth to that line than I thought at first. We go ’round and ’round in this game, after all. What’s in favor one season is out of favor the next. The stolen base waxes and wanes. The long ball is prized, until someone comes along and convinces us that the percentages have leaned in favor of a small ball approach. The shift, perhaps, will come and go.

  What remains will be the characters of the game … the character of the game … the game itself.

  Index

  The index that appeared in the print version of this title does not match the pages in your eBook. Please use the search function on your eReading device to search for terms of interest. For your reference, the terms that appear in the print index are listed below.

  Aardsma, David

  Aaron, Hank

  Aaron, Tommie

  Aase, Don

  addiction

  advice

  from coaches

  psychology of

  as stories

  from teammates

  Agee, Tommie

  agents

  Aker, Jack

  Albert, Marv

  alcohol

  Alfonzo, Edgardo

  Allen, Dick (“Richie”)

  Allen, Woody

  All-Stars

  closers

  for fans

  Gold Gloves for

  personality of

  psychology of

  Almon, Bill

  Amaral, Rich

  amateur draft

  amphetamines

  analytics. See statistics

  Anderson, Brian

  Anderson, Sparky

  Andujar, Joaquin

  Angell, Roger

  Ankiel, Rick

  Anson, Cap

  Aoki, Steve

  Arizona Diamondbacks

  Armour, Tommy

  Ashburn, Richie

  Ashford, Tucker

  assignments

  athletes

  attitude of

  contracts for

  routines for

  vulnerability for

  athleticism

  for fans

  psychology of

  talent and

  training for />
  Atlanta Braves

  attention

  attitude

  autographs

  Avery, Steve

  awards. See specific awards

  Bacall, Lauren

  back ups

  Backman, Wally

  Bailor, Bob

  Baines, Harold

  Ball Four (Bouton)

  Baltimore Orioles

  Bamberger, George

  Barkley, Charles

  baseball. See also specific aspects

  Baseball Encyclopedia

  Baseball Today (TV Show)

  broadcasting and

  for celebrities

  college baseball

  crying in

  defense in

  economics of

  equipment for

  golf compared to

  history of

  immigrants in

  nostalgia and

  physics of

  Rules Committee for

  scandals in

  statistics in

  stealing bases

  stories from

  Bash Brothers

  batters. See hitters

  batting practice

  Beane, Billy

  bench-jockeying

  Berman, Chris

  Berra, Yogi

  Bierbauer, Lou

  Bissinger, Buzz

  Bittiger, Jeff

  Blass, Steve

  Blevins, Jerry

  Blood on the Tracks (Dylan)

  Blour, Justin

  Bochy, Bruce