Stephen Hanks, Author at Metsmerized Online

On This Date: Tom Seaver Strikes Out 10 Straight!

Stephen Hanks — Thu, 22 Apr 2021 22:00:36 +0000

On this day in Mets history, 51 years ago, Hall of Famer Tom Seaver tossed his 19-strikeout gem against the San Diego Padres and set the major league record with 10 straight strikeouts to end the game. It happened on April 22, 1970 and our own Stephen Hanks was there. Here is the article he wrote back in 2010 to commemorate the 40th Anniversary of one of the greatest moments in Mets history. Please enjoy.

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There is a mantle above an unused fireplace in my home office that I’ve turned into a little shrine to my sports idol Tom Seaver. It’s nothing crazy, just a bunch of old action photos, vintage baseball cards, magazine covers, bobble head dolls, figurines depicting that classic Seaver right-knee scraping the mound motion, even an empty bottle of Tom Seaver recent vintage wine.

But among all these treasures, there is one that bears special significance today: the scorecard I recorded at Shea Stadium on April 22, 1970, the day the man I consider the greatest right-handed pitcher of all time (Roger Clemens forfeited that title the day he picked up a syringe) struck out 19 San Diego Padres, including the LAST 10 IN A ROW.

Here are both pages of my original scorecard. (click to enlarge)

It’s hard to believe it’s been 40 years since that glorious afternoon, but not hard to believe how I ended up being an eyewitness to baseball history. Tom Seaver had been my baseball hero from the day he started his first game for the Mets in 1967, although I became aware of him during his one season pitching for the Jacksonville Suns in 1966. At that point, I was a 10 1/2-year old Mets fanatic desperate for a young star and baseball role model to cling to.

I attended my first Mets’ game at the Polo Grounds in 1963, watched the entire 10-hour epic double-header, including the 23-inning second game, against the Giants in 1964, and spent my early childhood thinking my favorite team would never get out of last place. By mid-1966, my burgeoning adolescent hormones were contributing to take my Mets obsession to a fever pitch. And like all Mets fans who didn’t think the losing was cute anymore, I was hoping for a savior to finally change our fortunes.

So I started checking The Sporting News, which in those days was considered the “Bible of Baseball” and printed every major league and Triple A box score from the proceeding week, in addition to all the league stats. I started noticing there was a 21-year-old named Tom Seaver on the Jacksonville pitching staff who was actually winning as many games as he lost.

Even more impressively, he was striking out an average of eight per game, wasn’t walking a lot of guys, and had a great hits-to-innings pitched ratio.

At that point, very few Mets fans knew about the bizarre circumstances that made Seaver a Met–the voiding of his contract with the Braves while he was still at USC, and the Mets subsequently being selected out of a hat in a lottery staged by Commissioner William Eckert. All I cared about was that we might finally be developing some semblance of a major league pitcher and I followed Seaver’s minor-league starts religiously throughout the summer.

Although it was clear that Seaver was the Mets’ best pitcher going into the 1967 season, he started Game 2 against the Pirates, struck out 8 in 5.1 innings and got a no-decision. By his next start, a 6-1 win over the Cubs, this hard-throwing righthander with the picture-perfect delivery was my favorite player and probably the favorite of every other Mets fan.

For me, Tom cemented his hero status on May 17, 1967. That year and until 1971, the Mets games on radio were carried on WJRZ-AM with a pre and postgame show hosted by an intelligent and very congenial man named Bob Brown, who staged various fan contests.

I sent in a bunch of postcards hoping to get selected for a call and before the game against the Braves that May night, my phone rang. It was Bob Brown offering me a chance to win a baseball glove if I could pick three Mets to get a total of four hits in the game at Fulton County Stadium. So naturally I picked the Mets’ three hottest hitters at that point–Tommy Davis, Ed Kranepool and Jerry Buchek.

Going into the ninth inning, Davis and Kranepool had combined for three hits (Buchek was shutout) but Davis came through for me with a single and I won a Bobby Shantz glove.

You may think this whole story has been a digression, but the kicker is this: Tom Seaver went three for three that night, with two RBI, a walk and a stolen base. The best athlete on the team was a rookie pitcher.

After celebrating my team’s improbable World Championship, which I watched from my home in the South Bronx not far from Yankee Stadium, my family moved that December to the spanking new Co-Op City middle class housing project in the Northeast Bronx. Now 14, I was old enough to get a job delivering the Daily News in my 33-story building and the gig earned me about $30 to $40 a week, a fortune for a kid that age at that time. My plan for spending my new-found wealth? Go to as many games of the defending champs as possible, especially considering you could sit in the upper deck behind home plate for a buck and a half.

But I didn’t want to attend just any games. I wanted to see EVERY game Tom Seaver pitched at Shea Stadium (that wasn’t on a school night, of course) and the Mets’ five-man rotation made it pretty easy to figure out when Tom Terrific was going to be on the hill. Seaver was on a five-day cycle even when there were off days. So I knew that after opening day on April 7, Tom would pitch on the 12th, 17th and 22nd, the latter a Wednesday afternoon game I could attend because it would be the second day of Passover and public schools would be closed. I really splurged for that one and for six bucks got tickets for me and my brother in the first row of the loge (second deck) behind home plate.

,Ken Boswell‘s double off some guy named Mike Corkins drove in Bud Harrelson (who had singled), giving the Mets a first-inning lead. But the Pods’ cleanup hitter and leftfielder Al Ferrara led off the second inning with a home run to tie it (I think it scraped the back of the fence on the way down) until we got the lead back in the third on a Bud Harrelson triple that just missed going out.

Given the Mets’ offense, which could disappear for innings or days at a time, I figured that run would have to hold up if Tom was to get a W. (I can’t tell you how many times during Seaver’s Mets career I sweated out a game because of lack of run support. My mother once threatened to start giving me sedatives whenever Tom pitched because I’d pace around the TV room and scream at the set imploring the Mets to score a freaking run.)

I don’t think I was aware of it at the time–and I could be corrected if I’m wrong–but by the top of the 7th, afternoon shadows were starting to creep over home plate while the sun was still shining over the rest of Shea. This would not be good for a Padres lineup that was already flailing at Seaver’s fastball, which that day looked and sounded like it was in the upper 90s–and we didn’t need a radar gun to tell us that.

At this point in the game, I was totally transfixed on the man on the hill, picking up every nuance of that motion on the mound. As a Babe Ruth League pitcher, I was already mimicking Seaver’s delivery, which was never better described than by Roger Angell in The New Yorker after Tom was traded on June 15, 1977 (still one of the worst days of my life):

“One of the images I have before me now is that of Tom Seaver pitching; the motionless assessing pause on the hill while the signal is delivered, the easy, rocking shift of weight onto the back leg, the upraised arms, and then the left shoulder coming forward as the whole body drives forward and drops suddenly downward–down so low that the right knee scrapes the sloping dirt of the mound–in an immense thrusting stride, and the right arm coming over blurrily and still flailing, even as the ball, the famous fastball, flashes across the pate, chest-high on the batter and already past his low, late swing.”

In the top of the 7th, Seaver struck out Nate Colbert, Dave Campbell and Jerry Morales, the latter two looking. While that was impressive, none of the 14,000 of us cheering madly at every strike thought it out of the ordinary for our Tom and when he led off the bottom of the 7th, he got the obligatory polite ovation.

Of course if this game had been played in 2010 instead of 1970, Gary Matthews, Jr. would have been pinch-hitting because, hey, you need to get another run and our ace might be hitting his pitch count to boot. Thankfully, Gil Hodges wouldn’t think of pulling his best arm and when Bob Barton, and pinch hitters Ramon Webster and Ivan Murrell all K’d in the 8th (the latter two swinging), there wasn’t a soul in Shea who thought we weren’t watching history, let alone believe the Padres would actually hit another pitch.

As Tom took the mound for the top of the 9th, the buzz in the park was palpable and my heart was palpitating. Van Kelly led off the ninth and when he struck out swinging for the 8th strikeout in a row, the crowd sounded more like 40,000.

With every strike that whizzed by a Padre hitter I felt as if I was being levitated out of my seat. I don’t have a pitch chart of the game (don’t know if there is one available), but it seemed as if every pitch in those last two innings were strikes and the crowd roared louder with every one. Cito Gaston struck out looking for nine in a row and 18 for the game. One more strikeout and Tom Seaver would set a new record of 10 Ks in a row and match Steve Carlton‘s 19-strikeout game (which he lost thanks to those two Ron Swoboda home runs) against us the year before.

With the entire park on it’s feet and screaming itself hoarse, Tom fittingly blew away Ferrara for the record-breaking K. By this point I was jumping up and down so wildly I almost fell over the loge railing. I carried that emotional high all the way to 7 train and for the entire trip back to the Bronx. It is still the greatest pitching performance I’ve ever seen live (and I saw a couple of Seaver one-hitters and his 300th win at Yankee Stadium). Again, the Terrific One didn’t just strike out 10 in a row, he mowed down the LAST 10 IN A ROW.

As you can see above, I dutifully saved my scorecard of that game (and I wasn’t a kid who kept score much, so I must have had a premonition) and all of my handwritten annotations (including the note about Jerry Grote setting a new putout record-20) were added that day. There is one additional scribbling on the Mets side of the scorecard.

As I was leaving my house that morning, I thought, “Damn, I’ve got to ask Tom to sign the 19 K-game scorecard” and found it in a huge pile of Seaver memorabilia I had been collecting for years. After assuming my best professional editor’s air during the photo session (even pressuring my hero to smile once in a while), I reverted to sheepish fan mode and asked Tom to autograph the scorecard. As he turned my prized possession into even more of a collector’s item, he looked down at the card and said, “Hmmm, that was a pretty good outing.” Indeed.

There’s one more postscript. In 1996-97, I was editing a elementary school classroom newspaper and decided to do a feature on the Baseball Hall of Fame. The executives at the Hall took me to lunch at a quaint Cooperstown bistro and we spent a pleasant hour or so talking baseball history. Naturally, Tom Seaver came up in the conversation and I told my story of attending the 1970 pitching masterpiece, mentioning that I still had the scorecard. The Hall curator perked up. “Wow, would you be willing to donate that to the Hall of Fame?” he asked wide-eyed. “Well, what would I get for it,” I responded. “Well, we could give you a lifetime pass to the Hall of Fame.”

I’ve been to the Baseball Hall of Fame a few times since that lunch meeting. The scorecard still resides in my own personal Tom Seaver Museum. Happy Anniversary, Tom!

The post On This Date: Tom Seaver Strikes Out 10 Straight! appeared first on Metsmerized Online.

The Case for Tom Seaver As the Most Terrific Righthanded Pitcher Ever

Stephen Hanks — Thu, 17 Sep 2020 05:36:07 +0000

Until the breaking news alert flashed on my cell phone in the early evening of Wednesday, September 2, 2020, I hadn’t cried over Tom Seaver for 43 years. That time was also on a Wednesday—June 15, 1977 to be exact—when the New York Mets inexplicably and unconscionably traded my ultimate idol and the best pitcher in baseball to the Cincinnati Reds. It was aptly called the “Midnight Massacre,” and it was a dagger through my 21-year-old heart. Perhaps at that age, I should have handled the news in a more mature fashion, but I wasn’t ashamed over being distraught and almost inconsolable for days. This was TOM SEAVER we were talking about—THE FRANCHISE—and frankly, I’m about to turn 65 and I still haven’t completely gotten over it.

While I shed many quiet tears watching the TV tributes and reading the newspaper retrospectives in the wake of Seaver’s passing, this tragic news was much less of a shock than the ’77 trade. I knew my hero had been diagnosed with Lyme Disease in 1991, a condition that reoccurred in 2012 and led to Tom suffering from Bell’s Palsy and memory loss. Then in March 2019, it was reported that Seaver was dealing with dementia, and when the Mets created “Tom Seaver Way” at CitiField last June 27, Tom’s daughters celebrated the day with the fans, but without their Dad.

During the last two weeks of this year’s pandemic-ravaged August, I noticed Tom’s daughter Anne posting more photos of her Dad than usual on Facebook and I had a premonition. On August 26, the Mets current “Franchise” pitcher Jacob deGrom was facing the Miami Marlins and, as usual, the SNY telecast was throwing up those numbers comparing deGrom to other iconic Mets pitchers. As I gazed at those Seaver stats that are burned into my brain, I turned to my wife and blurted out, “Honey, I don’t think Tom is gonna be around much longer.”

On the Monday, August 31 night that Tom Seaver died (reportedly from complications of Covid-19—his passing wasn’t announced until two days later), deGrom was again pitching against the Marlins. Five nights later, after beating the Philadelphia Phillies, the ace who this season could match Seaver with three Cy Young Awards, was asked about being compared to the iconic Tom Terrific.

“I really would have liked to have met him and talked to him some,” deGrom said, “But I think he’s the all-time great here [with the Mets]. You look at his numbers, the complete games [231], I don’t think I’m ever reaching that. It’s an honor to be compared to somebody like Tom Seaver.”

The day after deGrom pitched his typical gem against the Phillies, an adult fan who should know better posted this on Twitter: “Jacob deGrom is the best pitcher in baseball—maybe the best pitcher ever!”

As much as I adore Jake, I couldn’t let that stand and tweeted back, “Hey, calm down there, kemosabe. He isn’t even the best ever in Mets history.” I’ll address the current Tom Terrific vs. Jake the Great comparisons later in this essay, but that Twitter exchange provides the ideal segue into the case that I’m about to make that (and yes, I realize I’m not completely objective here):

TOM SEAVER IS THE GREATEST RIGHTHANDED PITCHER IN BASEBALL HISTORY.

The first time I presented this thesis was in July 1988, in the late, great alternative New York newspaper The Village Voice the week the Mets retired Seaver’s #41 at Shea Stadium.

Writing a revised version 32 years later, my opinion hasn’t changed, even considering that recent Hall of Famers Greg Maddux, Pedro Martinez, and Roy Halladay, and faux Hall of Famer Roger Clemens are new variables in the “Greatest Righty Ever” debate mix.

Frankly, I could end this discussion right now by just quoting Bill James, the Godfather of Sabermetrics. In the 2001 revised edition of his Historical Baseball Abstract, perhaps the greatest baseball book and ranking of players ever written, James ranked Seaver as the sixth greatest pitcher of all-time behind Walter Johnson, Lefty Grove, Grover Cleveland Alexander, Cy Young, and Warren Spahn. James also ranked Seaver third on his “career value” list of the 30 greatest righthanded starters, behind Johnson (416 wins) and Young (511), and ahead of Alexander and Christy Mathewson (373 wins each).

Cue the comparison of baseball players from different eras. I don’t see how any pitcher who threw in the first two decades of the 20th century–the dead ball, pre-slugger, pre-black era– could be considered superior to someone who compiled Seaver’s statistics pitching to the bigger, stronger, faster, and more skilled National Leaguers of the late-1960s to mid-1980s, an era which boasted many of the most prolific sluggers, hitters, and base stealers in baseball history. In fact, here’s what James wrote about Seaver in his 2001 Abstract:

“There is actually a good argument that Tom Seaver should be regarded as the greatest pitcher of all time. Of the five pitchers rated ahead of him, four pitched before World War II, the other just after World War II. Three of those four had their best years before World War I, at a time when big pitchers dominated the game much more than they do now.”

“Since no one can say with any confidence how much tougher the game has become, it is certainly reasonable to argue that the accomplishments of early pitchers should have been marked off by more than I have discounted them, and thus that Seaver’s record, in context, is more impressive than Walter Johnson’s.”

But the baseball player comparison game is almost as much fun as watching old footage of Tom Seaver pitching so let’s play, shall we?

The true measure of Number 41’s greatness lies in how the pitcher with the picture perfect delivery and who won 311 games (18th all-time), struck out 3,640 (sixth), threw 61 shutouts (seventh), and is the only pitcher to debut after 1920 to notch 300 wins and a sub-3.00 era, stacks up against his contemporaries who are or will be in the Baseball Hall of Fame and even active righthanded pitchers who are on a Hall of Fame track.

You can scratch Don Drysdale (209 wins), Catfish Hunter (224 wins), Juan Marichal (243 wins), and Ferguson Jenkins (284 wins, but 226 losses and a 3.34 ERA). The same goes for Don Sutton, Phil Niekro, and Gaylord Perry. Each of those three won a few more games than Seaver, but none had better winning percentages or surpass Tom in any other major category.

And as opposed to Sutton and Niekro, who never won a Cy Young Award, and Perry, who won two, Seaver nailed down three Cy’s himself and arguably deserved one more. I’m still pissed about 1971 when, despite Seaver’s 1.76 ERA and 20 wins, the award went to Jenkins (2.77 ERA, 24 wins) because the voting baseball writers wanted to reward Fergie’s cumulative achievements and pitching wins were valued much more than they are today (more on that later).

Then you have Nolan Ryan, Bob Gibson, and Jim Palmer. Without question, Ryan possessed the best righthanded arm of all time, but his lifetime winning percentage was only slightly above .500. He never won the Cy Young, won 20 just twice, and beats his buddy Tom in only three categories: no-hitters (seven to one), hits-to-innings pitched ratio, and of course, strikeouts.

But it’s Seaver, not Ryan, who holds the record for the most consecutive seasons of striking out 200 or more hitters (nine). And if the odds against pitching a no-hitter are high, how about the odds against striking out the last 10 hitters in a row in a 19-strikeout game, as Seaver did on April 22, 1970 against the San Diego Padres.

Bob Gibson won 251 games and for the eight years between 1963 and 1970 he may have been the most dominant righty ever (his 1.12 ERA in ‘68 is still THE single-season record).

One fascinating Seaver/Gibson stat finds that each threw 35 shutouts on the road, tied for the most by any pitcher since 1920. Jim Palmer (268 wins) won 20 games eight times (more than any hurler of the era), won three Cy Young Awards, matched Seaver’s lifetime 2.86 ERA, and compiled a better winning percentage (.638 to .603).

But one statistic that clearly establishes Seaver’s superiority over all his contemporaries is the difference between the pitcher’s winning percentage and his team’s. Tom’s lifetime winning percentage was approximately 120 points higher than his team’s.

Palmer never pitched for an under .500 team. Gibson’s clubs played under .500 when he didn’t pitch just five times. Nolan Ryan didn’t exactly pitch on powerhouses, but he was rarely able to overcome his team’s weaknesses.

If Tom Terrific had pitched for run-scoring teams most of his career or if he’d pitched on a team with a DH, he might have flirted with Christy Mathewson’s and Pete Alexander’s 373 wins. As Bill James pointed out, “Seaver pitched for eight losing teams, several of them really terrible, and four teams which had losing records except when Seaver was on the mound . . . Seaver was dragging his teammates to victory to a larger extent than any of his contemporary stars.”

As much as any pitcher ever, Tom Seaver was the hurler you’d want to go to WAR with, literally and figuratively. The pun was intended. As most baseball sabermetric aficionados know, WAR or “Wins Above Replacement [Player]” has become the gold standard stat with which to value players and attempt to calculate a player’s total contributions to their team in one statistic. WAR basically examines a player and determines how much value would the team be losing if that player got injured and their team had to replace them with a minor leaguer or someone from their bench.

The night Tom Seaver’s passing was announced, MLB.com baseball writer Andrew Simon revealed that since baseball’s “integration” of Black players in 1947, Seaver is one of only seven pitchers to have multiple 10-WAR seasons (1971 and ’73) and only two of those were righthanded pitchers (Gibson and Roger Clemens). In modern baseball history (since 1900), 58 different pitchers have had at least one 5-WAR season at age 22 or younger and 11 have done it at age 40 or older. Tom Seaver is the only pitcher ever to do both.

Simon also reminded his readers that Seaver holds another record that is one of my favorites and one that likely will never be broken. Tom’s 16 Opening Day starts are two more than Steve Carlton, Randy Johnson, Walter Johnson, and Jack Morris. That run included a 12-year streak of Opening Day starts—tied for the second longest ever for a pitcher—which began in Seaver’s second season in 1968. The Terrific One made his final Opening Day start for the Chicago White Sox in 1986—when he was 41.

Now we come to the five righthanded pitchers who have been inducted into the Hall of Fame during this century—Greg Maddux, John Smoltz, Pedro Martinez, Mike Mussina, and the late Roy Halladay—and the one who hasn’t been, namely Roger Clemens.

When James’ 2001 Abstract was published those hurlers were still in mid-career. James had ranked Clemens 11th, Maddux 14th, Martinez 29th, and Smoltz 87th. Mussina hadn’t made James’ Top 100 pitchers list, but was on his radar given he’d already had 132 wins by his age 31 season.

I’m betting that if James published a 2020 edition of the Historical Abstract, both Smoltz (one Cy Young Award, two strikeout titles, and a stellar career as both a starter and a reliever) and Mussina (who never won a Cy Young Award, but compiled 270 career wins and an 18-year career of consistent excellence) would rank somewhere between 20th-30th all-time.

By 2001, Roy Halladay had only pitched for three years and didn’t have his breakout season until 2002, the year before he won the first of his two Cy Young Awards (one in each league). Given Halladay’s 203 wins, .659 winning percentage, and four innings pitched titles, and that he led his league in complete games seven times in a nine-year span (between 2003-2011, when CGs were starting to become extinct), he’d also probably rank somewhere between the 25th-40th best ever. Needless to say, while those three righties were wonderful, none of them were close to Seaver-esque.

That leaves Maddux, Martinez, and Clemens. Let’s deal with the elephant in the room on steroids first and get him out of the way. It’s ironic that when Clemens started his career with the Boston Red Sox in 1984, he was already being compared to a young Tom Seaver.

It’s also ironic that when Clemens won his first Cy Young Award and the MVP with the Red Sox in 1986, Seaver was his teammate in what would be the final year of Tom’s career.

By the time Bill James published his 2001 tome, Clemens had won five Cy Young Awards (he won his 6th that year), six ERA titles, five strikeout titles, and twice had a WAR of over 10 (1990 and 1997). While ranking Clemens 11th all-time, James wrote: “Like Seaver, there is actually a very good argument that Clemens is the greatest pitcher who ever lived.”

But a scanning of the index in James’ book will not show any reference to “steroids” or “performance enhancing drugs.” After compiling Hall of Fame-track statistics and winning three Cy Young Awards during his first 13 years, Clemens struggled through four mediocre (for him), injury-plagued seasons between 1993-96, the last year being his free-agent season.

Then suddenly, at age 34, Clemens was a superstar again and won four more Cy Young Awards, the last one in 2004 at age 41. Isn’t it a coincidence that Clemens’ use of PEDs reportedly began in 1997-98 and continued through the early 2000s.

Even had steroids been in use during the latter part of Seaver’s career, he’d probably cut off his right arm before he’d inject himself with the juice.

As writer Saul Wisnia pointed out in a 2012 article for BleacherReport.com, if you assume a “clean” Clemens from age 34-41 and replace his statistics with Seaver’s over the same period, “the Rocket’s record drops from 354-184 to a less glittering 279-112, and he winds up with three, rather than seven, Cy Young Awards.”

According to Wisnia, those numbers would still make Clemens a Hall of Famer, but perhaps not on the first ballot. Hence, Roger Clemens is eliminated from consideration as the greatest righthanded pitcher ever.

Although there’s no evidence he ever used PEDs, Pedro Martinez was considered baseball’s best pitcher during “The Steroid Era.” During the seven years between 1997-2003, Pedro won three Cy Young Awards over four years (and was 2nd when he “lost”), won the AL ERA title five times, led the league in strikeouts three times, and in WHIP (walks and hits to innings pitched) five times (six times over all). He won the pitching “Triple Crown” (wins, strikeouts, and ERA leader) in 1999, and is 7th all-time in winning percentage. During his prime, Martinez dominated his league like a righthanded Sandy Koufax. Definitely Hall of Fame worthy, but not quite the greatest righty ever on a Seaver level.

If there is one Hall of Fame hurler of the modern era who could challenge Tom Terrific as the Greatest Righthanded Pitcher of All Time, it would have to be Greg Maddux, who although not a power pitcher like Seaver, was also an artist on the mound. Also, like Seaver, Maddux avoided any major arm injuries during the long prime of his career, which helped him compile those 355 wins in 23 seasons (against Tom’s 311 in 20 years).

Maddux managed one more Cy Young Award than Seaver, but “Tom Terrific” beats “Mad Dog” in almost every other significant pitching measure, including lifetime ERA (2.86 to 3.16), WHIP (1.121 to 1.143), Complete Games (231 to 109), Shutouts (61 to 35), Strikeouts Per Season Avg. (190 to 154), 20-win seasons (5 to 2), All-Star Games (12 to 8), and WAR (109.9 to 106.6). I don’t think Maddux’s 18 Gold Glove Awards, while incredible and historic, puts him over the top.

That brings us back, Mets fans, to Jacob deGrom, who along with fellow righthanders Justin Verlander (two Cy Youngs), Max Scherzer (three Cy Youngs), and perhaps Zack Greinke (one Cy Young), have the best shots at future Hall of Fame consideration. That deGrom could be in the Hall mix given that he only has 70 lifetime wins at the age of 32 tells you all you need to know about how much how pitchers are judged has changed in just the past few years. By the end of this season, deGrom could have won a third Cy Young Award and not even won 30 games total to do it.

Of course, Jake should already have more than 100 lifetime wins. In just six plus years, deGrom already has 60 no-decisions. You want some perspective on that? Tom Seaver pitched on Mets teams with brutal offenses and in 12 years had 73 no-decisions. Believe me, I identify with any young fan who idolizes Jacob deGrom and has had to suffer watching him pitch his heart out without finding Ws on Jake’s ledger. I remember countless, agonizing games when my hero would enter the late innings with the game tied 1-1 or he was losing by one run in a low-scoring game. I sweated and paced in front of my TV, praying for the Mets to score, only to see Seaver yanked for a pinch-hitter in the eighth or ninth inning. Yes, I know, thanks to pitch counts, you don’t even get to see deGrom get that far.

But you do get to see deGrom during his prime when he is pitching very Tom Seaver-like, in some cases even better. I never thought I’d see another Mets pitcher dominate other teams during a season or for a string of seasons as Seaver (or Dwight Gooden) did between 1969-1975. While deGrom would have to pitch at an All-Star level for the next five to seven years to come close to some of Seaver’s Mets career numbers (not counting complete games, shutouts, or strikeouts, which are beyond reach), he has been equally as impressive as Tom in some significant ways.

As WFAN/CBSsports.com writer Jason Keidel recently observed, as Mets they both have almost identical career ERAs and WHIPs. deGrom has 10.3 strikeouts per nine innings to Seaver’s 7.5, deGrom currently boasts a better strikeout to walk ratio, and has thrown fewer walks per nine innings.

“There’s no doubt it’s harder for starters to dominate these days,” wrote Keidel. “deGrom has also faced hulking [if not juicing] hitters. He pitches in comically small ballparks. And he’s hurled baseballs that many believe were tweaked to turn fly balls into long balls. Despite these modern hurdles, deGrom tied Bob Gibson for the most consecutive quality starts in MLB history, with 26. Not even No. 41 did that.”

Well, how about that? Someone finally found a flaw in Tom Seaver, the Greatest Righthanded Pitcher in Baseball History.

The post The Case for Tom Seaver As the Most Terrific Righthanded Pitcher Ever appeared first on Metsmerized Online.

Mets Flashback: A Pitch For Seaver

Stephen Hanks — Sat, 09 Mar 2019 22:22:59 +0000

Note: With the tragic news that Mets icon Tom Seaver is suffering from dementia, I wanted to share an article I wrote for The Village Voice on July 26, 1988, right before the Mets retired his number. I make the case for Seaver being the greatest right-handed pitcher of all time. Enjoy.

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I’ve never been rational about Tom Seaver, a hero to me of such mythic proportions that it would take a conference on the mound between Bob Costas, Tim McCarver, and Sigmund Freud to analyze it. So go ahead and accuse me of being completely non-objective, but I don’t believe it’s irrational to make the following statement:

TOM SEAVER IS THE GREATEST RIGHT-HANDED PITCHER IN BASEBALL HISTORY.

I realize the Hall of Fame Veteran’s Committee would scream “Holy Gil Hodges!” at hearing Tom Seaver mentioned in the same breath as Walter Johnson, Cy Young, and other statistical marvels of early 20th century baseball, and I’ll address that argument later.

The true measure of number 41’s greatness lies in how the man who won 311 games (18th all-time) struck out 3,640 (sixth), threw 61 shutouts (seventh), and compiled the second best ERA (2.74) in National League history (among pitchers with over 200 wins), stacks up against contemporaries who are or will be in the Hall of Fame.

You can scratch Don Drysdale (209 wins), Catfish Hunter (224), Juan Marichal (243), and Ferguson Jenkins (284 wins, but 226 losses and a 3.34 ERA). The same goes for Don Sutton, Phil Niekro, and Gaylord Perry. Those three won a few more games than Seaver, but none surpasses Tom in any other major category.

And as opposed to Sutton and Niekro, who never won a Cy Young Award, and Perry, who won two, Seaver nailed down three of these awards himself and arguably deserved two more:

I’m still pissed about 1971 when, despite Seaver’s 1.76 ERA and 20 wins, the award went to Jenkins (2.77 ERA, 24 wins) because the writers wanted to reward Fergie’s cumulative achievements. Tom also should have won the Cy Young in the strike shortened season of 1981, when he went 14-2, but the writers gave into Fernando Valenzuela mania.

Photo by Stephen Hanks. My personal Tom Seaver bobble head collection.

Then you have Nolan Ryan, Bob Gibson and Jim Palmer. Without question, Ryan possesses the best right-handed arm of all time, but his lifetime winning percentage was only slightly above .500. He never won the Cy, won 20 just twice, and beats his buddy Tom in only three categories: no-hitters (seven to one), hits-to-innings pitched ratio, and of course, strikeouts.

[Current Writer’s Note: Since this piece was first published, I realize that both Greg Maddux and Roger Clemens fashioned careers with more than 350 wins. While I revere Maddux, he accumulated most of those wins pitching for the great Atlanta Braves teams of the 1990s and had a higher career ERA than Seaver. As for Clemens, all I’ll say is that Tom Seaver never had to pitch or hang on for years using PEDs. Case closed.]

But it’s Seaver, not Ryan, who holds the record for the most consecutive seasons of striking out 200 or more hitters (nine). And if the odds against pitching a no-hitter are high, what are the odds against the last 10 straight hitters not even putting a ball in play?

If those who witnessed Seaver set that consecutive strikeout record at Shea on April 22, 1970, didn’t feel, as I did, as if they were being levitated from their seats, they must have been cricket fans just in town for the week.

Bob Gibson won only 251 games, but for the eight years between 1963 and 1970 he may have been the most dominant righty ever (his 1.12 ERA in ‘68 is still THE single-season record). And Jim Palmer (268 Ws) won 20 games eight times (more than any hurler of the era), took three Cys, matched Seaver’s lifetime 2.86 ERA, and compiled a better winning percentage (.638 to .603).

But the stat that clearly establishes Seaver’s superiority over all his contemporaries is the difference between the pitcher’s winning percentage and the rest of his team’s.

In only seven of his 20 seasons did Seaver pitch for a team that played over .500 when he wasn’t on the mound. His lifetime percentage was approximately 120 points higher than his team’s. Palmer never pitched for an under .500 team. Gibson’s clubs played under .500 when he didn’t pitch just five times. Nolan Ryan hasn’t exactly pitched on powerhouses, but he’s rarely been able to overcome his team’s weaknesses.

Seaver managed to win even with the no-hit Mets of the ‘70s. But I still remember countless, agonizing games when Tom would enter the late innings with the game tied 1-1, or he was losing 1-0 or 2-1 or 3-2. I sweated, paced and prayed in front of the TV for the Mets to score, only to see Seaver yanked for a pinch-hitter in the seventh, eighth or ninth.

If Terrific had pitched for the Orioles or the Reds of that period, or if he’d had a DH, he might have flirted with Christy Mathewson and Grover Alexander (373 Ws each) on the all-time wins list.

Which brings us back to the Veterans Committee and Walter Johnson, Cy Young, et al. In his Historical Abstract, writer Bill James ranks Seaver third on his “career value” list of the 30 greatest right-handed starters, behind Johnson (416 wins) and Young (511), and ahead of Mathewson and Alexander.

Now I know most Jamesians would cut their hearts out before comparing players of different eras, but I don’t see how any pitcher who threw in the first two decades of this century–the dead ball, pre-slugger, pre-black era– could be considered superior to someone who compiled Seaver’s stats pitching to the National Leaguers of the late ‘60s to early ‘80s, an era which boasts many of the most prolific hitters and base stealers in baseball history.

One more point: I’m sure we’d agree that baseball players rely more on finely honed skills than do football and basketball players, but if athletes in the latter two sports are bigger, stronger, faster, and more skilled than their counterparts of 20 years ago, wouldn’t the same hold true for baseball pitchers separated by a half a century?

Twenty or thirty years from now, when most pitchers are the size of NBA small forwards and NFL middle linebackers, some wise-ass can cavalierly dismiss Seaver as the best of all time, with my blessing. But until then, Tom “Terrific” Seaver is the greatest!

The post Mets Flashback: A Pitch For Seaver appeared first on Metsmerized Online.

Unburied Treasure: Rusty Staub, The Mets’ Hittin’ Magician

Stephen Hanks — Sun, 13 May 2018 21:00:47 +0000

Editor’s Note: MMO contributor Stephen Hanks was nice enough to allow me to share this truly amazing article from June of 1984, when he was the owner and editor in chief of New York Sports magazine. It was written by Ross Wetzsteon who does a fascinating job of presenting Rusty unplugged. I loved this piece when I first read it, and I know you will too. – Joe D.

Rusty Staub: The Mets’ Hittin’ Magician

New York Sports, June 1984

Spring Training, 1982: It’s only an exhibition game, but it’s one of the toughest at-bats in Rusty Staub‘s career. Mark Fidrych is pitching for the Red Sox, and Rusty Staub is as fond of the Bird as anyone in baseball. “There are great guys on every team,” he says, “but there’s always someone who doesn’t like them. The only exception I ever knew was Mark. Everybody loved the Bird. He was the greatest thing that happened to baseball in my 22 years.”

But this is the injury-plagued Fidrych’s last shot at returning to the majors; one more bad outing and his career is over. “I knew what he was feeling,” Staub says, “and I was pulling for him harder than anybody.” Then a shrug. “But he wasn’t wearing my uniform, so I went up there trying to hit a rope. That’s my job.” And as he stood on first base, after hitting that rope, it was the first time in his life he’d ever felt bad about getting a hit. “Well, I never feel bad about getting a hit,” Staub corrects himself with a laugh, “but it was the only time I ever felt mixed emotions.”

Mid-Season, 1983: Shrewdly pin-pointing the Mets’ biggest hole, General Manager Frank Cashen trades for a catch … er, first baseman (Keith Hernandez), putting two guys out of a job. Now Rusty Staub has been saying for a couple of years he’s a better first baseman than Dave Kingman and he’s been saying it to Kingman, too. (“I’m not ashamed to tell people what I believe.”) But Kingman, unlike Fidyrich, is wearing Rusty Staub’s uniform. Rusty knows how Kingman feels about being shunted to the bench. So even though Kingman becomes even more inaccessible to the press, even more aloof from his teammates, Rusty goes out of his way to get closer to him.

“David is a complex person and that makes it tough to be his friend,” he says. “But we had lunch several times, and I talked to him more on the bench. I’d been living with the same problems myself, the least I could do was offer him advice on how to survive mentally.”

“I told him the things that’d helped me most: to always keep in mind that your team-mates come first; to work even harder to stay in shape so you’re ready when they need you; to not get so down on yourself you can’t come through; to ask the good Lord for strength. David and I had never really been close before his time of duress.”

Rusty Staub has as many friends as any player in baseball, but with a game on the line, even in spring training, he’s the consummate, ice-veined competitor. He’s one of the most cooperative interviews in the clubhouse, but cross him once and he’ll never forget it. (A Daily News writer misquoted him in 1975 and still angrily remembering it today, he says, “If that guy’d ever come back to the clubhouse, there would have been an altercation.”) And he’s stubborn about what he believes, sometimes even truculent, but if things aren’t going your way, and you’re wearing his uniform, he’s the first guy there to help you out.

Probably the biggest paradox about Rusty Staub is that although he’s been one of the most popular players wherever he’s gone, he’s also been one of the game’s most unknown personalities. When he starred for the Expos from 1969 to 1971, “Le Grand Orange” was even more beloved than Canadian hockey great Jean Beliveau, but as a Montreal sportswriter recalls, “you could only get to know Rusty up to a point. Beyond that no one had a clue what he was really like.”

And winding down his career with the Mets, he’s become the most idolized pinch-hitter in baseball history [last June tying major-league records for successive pinch hits (8) and total pinch-hit RBIs in a season (25)], and probably the most respected player in the Met clubhouse, yet none of the writers on the Mets beat, or any of his teammates, can say they really know him.

“He’ll answer anything you ask him about baseball,” says one writer—”well, not anything, I’ve seen guys ask him a stupid question, and he either won’t answer or says straight out ‘that’s a stupid question’—but as far as his life outside baseball goes, he’s a complete mystery.” Says a teammate: “We all look up to Rusty, but he’s more of a leader by example than a buddy. I mean he doesn’t hang out with the guys much, not even on the road. Everybody likes Rusty, he’s a class guy, but no one knows him very well. You get back to the clubhouse after a game and he’s gone.”

This is no Steve Carlton or George Hendrick, third fingering the world. This is no Dave Kingman, more temperamentally suited for lighthouse duty in Nova Scotia. This is a likable, outgoing guy, a born restauranteur. Part of the problem is that Rusty Staub has been a kind of elder statesman since he reached the majors at age 19, one of those people who, by virtue of their innate professionalism, always seem much more mature than their peers.

“You’ve got to remember,” says a former teammate from Staub’s early years (1963-1968) on the Houston Astros, “Rusty came up heralded by Ted Williams himself as the best natural hitter he’d ever seen. He was still in his teens, but no one thought of him as a kid. Hell, he seemed like an old pro half way through his rookie year. It created a kind of distance.”

Part of the problem is that Rusty Staub uses phrases like “mixed emotions” and “time of duress” as naturally as other ballplayers use phrases like “he can pick it” or “he took me downtown,” and he can actually say things like “I feel I owe an obligation to the youth of this great country of ours” without sounding like he’s running for office against Steve Garvey.

Part of the problem is that, as one sportswriter relates, “he draws a firm line, no questions about anything but baseball, and anyone who tries to cross it gets a ton of silence.” And part of the problem is simply that he hasn’t settled down in one place. Even playing for the Mets and owning an Upper East Side restaurant that bears his name, he spends over half his time in Houston, Washington and New Orleans.

Whatever the reason, when Rusty Staub takes off his chef’s hat and replaces it with his Mets cap in that familiar American Express commercial and asks, “Do you know me?” most people would answer “no.”

Rusty Staub thought he still had a shot at the sacred 3,000-hit mark when he was signed as a free agent by the Mets in December ’80, only 453 short. But the Mets made another deal for a first baseman later that winter, picking up Dave Kingman from the Cubs.

“That was the most difficult time of my career,” Rusty Staub says, “feeling deep down in my heart that I was the best player at my position and not being given the opportunity to play. When I agreed to come here, I told Frank Cashen I could still play regularly for a lot of teams—the money was going to be the same wherever I went—and I thought we saw eye to eye. But then they made the decision not to use me as a regular. It was the toughest adjustment I’ve ever made in my life.”

Rusty Staub has a way of stopping abruptly when he’s said what he has to say. There’s no hint of hostility, or defensiveness, or caution, just the sense that you’re talking to someone with a professional’s knowledge of the ground rules. You’re asking the questions, I’m answering them, this isn’t a conversation, he seems to be saying. He is open, friendly and straightforward, but always with that firm line.

Staub’s studio apartment is just around the corner from his 73rd Street and Third Avenue restaurant. Inside there is a semi-circular bar with four bar stools, a U-shaped sitting area with green couches, a slightly raised sleeping platform to one side, western paintings on the walls, and a couple of trophies on the shelves. It’s the kind of place a well-off bachelor would use as a crash pad, the kind of place the maid who comes in once a week knows better than the occupant.

Next question. So how did you make that adjustment?

Rusty Staub shrugs his shoulders, extends both arms across the top of the couch. “I talked with myself,” he says. “I asked myself, ‘What’s the most important thing in my life? Should get-ting 3,000 hits be my predominant goal?’ I probably could have made it in the American League but it won’t happen now.”

“Or should being part of the Mets, part of the community, be more important? I needed an outside view, an analytic rather than an emotional view, so I talked to my closest friends about it. I finally decided that the best thing for my life would be to stay here.”

Again that abrupt stop. The professional owes his public an answer, and he’s given the answer. But this time Rusty Staub seems to feel he owes something else. “Another thing,” he goes on, “few people know about this, but Frank Cashen and I had a good meeting in 1982 about my playing situation, and he gave me permission to make a deal for myself, to talk to clubs in the American League about being a DH. I called Ralph Houk, whom I’d played for in Detroit.

But he was the only one I talked to because I started thinking, ‘How many people would do what Frank did for me? If he’d allow me to do this, maybe I’m not judging him right. So that’s why I decided to stay with the Mets. Sure I wanted 3,000 hits, sure I have moments of aggravation about not playing more, but I’m telling you from the bottom of my heart that personal loyalty is more important in my life than those things.”

Next question.

Rusty Staub is no pious phony. You don’t doubt his sincerity for a moment. He’s as straight as . . . well, he’s as straight as a priest. And maybe that’s a clue to discovering what he’s all about, for Rusty Staub is a committed Catholic (he’s not embarrassed to admit that he was once an altar boy and isn’t afraid of seeming corny when he says that his family was “wealthy in love”). He sometimes seems, like many priests, to have so completely immersed himself in his religious values that they’ve become almost inseparable from his personality.

There may be inner conflicts, or “moments of aggravation,” but that’s not who you really are, who you really are is your convictions. (One of the reasons the Astros traded him to Montreal, in fact, was his refusal to play on the national day of mourning after Bobby Kennedy’s assassination—a stand that didn’t go down well in Texas in 1968. “When the President of the United States says there’s a day of mourning,” he still firmly insists, “that means what it says.”) So, like a priest, the distinction between public presence and an inviolable private personality becomes meaningless—and even though you’re a beloved figure, constantly in the public eye, no one feels they really know you.

Everybody knows what Rusty Staub is like as a hitter, though. A reporter once asked Lefty O’Doul how he thought the old-timers would do in modern day baseball. For instance, did O’Doul think Ty Cobb could hit .367 with the advent of night games, the slider, relief pitchers? “Nah,” O’Doul said, “these days Ty’d probably hit .310, .320, something like that.” “So there’s that big a difference?” the reporter asked. “Well, you’ve got to remember,” O’Doul answered, “Ty’s 75 years old now.”

Rusty Staub’s that kind of hitter, a guy who is still nudging .300 at 40 and could probably slap the outside pitch to left while collecting Social Security. In addition to that sweet left-handed swing even Ted Williams envied, he’s a thinking man’s hitter. Not a guess hitter, that’s not what thinking means. Einstein didn’t guess E=mc2, he had a pretty good idea he was right.

A situation hitter, that’s the way Rusty Staub prefers to think of himself, especially since he’s been coming off the bench. Staub thinks score, inning, outs, count, men on base, park, defensive alignment, pitcher. He thinks about his own strengths and limitations (“the most important part of hitting”), how he’s hit this pitcher before (“he has the best memory in the game,” says a Met coach), how he’s been swinging lately, even how to compensate for injuries (this is the guy who hit .423 in the ’73 World Series with a partially separated shoulder).

Statisticians like Bill James have proven beyond a doubt the importance of the first pitch—a strike can lower batting averages from 50 to 100 points—but pros have known it since the Cincinnati Reds were called the “Red Stockings.” “After the first strike,” Rusty Staub says, “you have to con-cede a little, and after the second, I don’t care how great your mechanics are, you have to concede a lot.” That’s where knowing the pitchers comes in—knowing about his stuff in general, his stuff today, his stuff the last inning (“sitting on the bench, I don’t always watch the other team’s at-bats,” Staub admits, “but when we’re up I’m always paying close attention”), what he can get over, what he likes to go with when he’s ahead in the count, when he’s behind, how he tries to get the batter to go for his out pitch. It’s two pros trying to set each other up.

When Rusty Staub talks about setting up a pitcher, after nearly 11,000 major league at-bats, he’s not talking about just one pitch he prefers, or one location—sitting on a fastball on a 3-1 count, for instance, is something you and I and Jose Oquendo can do—it’s knowing the situation, knowing, for instance, he’s going to get a 1-2 curve on the outside corner, and dumping a hit over the shortstop’s head.

Of course Rusty Staub isn’t about to reveal how he reads any of the pitchers in the National League, either their delivery or their pattern. With the instability of major league rosters, and the chance that someone on your team will soon be that pitcher’s teammate, he’s even reluctant to tell any of the Mets. “I have shared some of my knowledge in the past, but to my detriment,” Staub admits.

“Word almost always gets out, and then no one benefits. And the majority of players on the Mets—you won’t believe this—they don’t want to know what pitch is coming next, even if I’m positive. It’s beyond my comprehension.”

An example from the past, though, is Tony Cloninger. Had great stuff, 113 lifetime wins. “Tony always wore a long sweat shirt, even when it was 90 degrees,” remembers Staub, who never wears an undershirt. “After I’d hit against him a couple of times, I could tell what he was going to throw by how far his hand went into his glove at the top of his delivery. If he showed a lot of hand, it was a fastball, a little hand was slider, and no hand was curve—that long-sleeved sweat shirt made it easier to pick up.”

Does he ever see pitchers on the Mets tipping off their pitches? Rusty Staub grins. “Yearly,” he says, and won’t be more specific than that. What does he do about it? “I tell the pitching coach or the manager. I don’t think it’s my prerogative to tell the player personally.”

Most of history’s great hitters say they saw more fastballs in their last couple of years than in their first 15 years combined. “Those guys have learned to hit the hook,” Leo Durocher used to moan, “but they can’t get around on heat anymore.” But Rusty Staub, who just says “different pitchers try different things,” is still making a living with his bat, so he doesn’t want to talk too specifically about his hitting. After all, even pitchers can read. He’ll talk theories of hitting—lateral weight shift vs. bat head speed, etc.—with other players and coaches, but not for publication.

“There’s no one way, anyway,” says Staub, who once played for Harry Walker, the Charlie Lau of his day. “You can have the worst mechanics in the world and still be a good hitter. The most important thing is to under-stand yourself,” he repeats, “to learn what you can and can not do, to be able to adjust and compensate.” (In the Houston dome, not a power hitter’s paradise, he choked up on the bat, but dropped to the end when he was trad-ed to Montreal and hit half as many home runs in his first season there as in his six seasons with the Astros.)

“And so much of hitting is in your mind,” he goes on, “the way you visualize yourself, and you can’t teach that. Ted Williams always said he hit with a slight uppercut, but actually he had one of the great down strokes of all time. Sure he came up a little at the end of his swing, but in his mind that was the way he hit. In his mind,” Rusty Staub repeats, tapping his forehead with his forefinger.

Ask him about bats, though, and the vagueness vanishes. “Thirty-four inches for 22 years, 31 to 36 ounces, depending on the situation. I’ve been using a heavier bat lately. There’s a better chance of getting good wood.” Don’t get him started on wood—he’ll talk for hours about the decline in the quality of the wood. “Adirondack sent me good bats for 12, 13 years, but something went wrong. I use Worth bats now.” And just so you won’t misunderstand, “I’m not under contract to them,” he laughs, “I can say what I believe.”

Or ask him about being a batting coach, one of ex-manager George Bamberger‘s “inspirations” in 1982, and you get the quickest answer of all. “No.” Not a second’s hesitation. “No. I give advice very sparingly,” he says. “Some of the young players come to me, but ‘guys,’ I say, am not the hitting instructor.’ That one year as a player-coach didn’t work for me. The two things always interfered with one another.”

“Last year, if I saw something, I might go to Jimmy Frey, [hitting coach, who’s now manager of the Cubs] and say ‘you might watch so and so,’ or ‘what do you think about trying such and such?’ But talking to the players about mechanics? No, that’s not my job, that was Jimmy’s job, I wasn’t going to interfere.”

What about managing, though? Rusty Staub speaks carefully, making sure this comes out right. “I’d like to play for another two or three years, but then I can see myself managing under certain circumstances.” Such as? “I’d have to be convinced the organization really wanted to win,” he says vaguely. “I’d have to be convinced I had a viable position in the organization.”

This is not a guy who acts on whims. How about the current Mets? Darryl Strawberry? “He has as much talent as anyone I’ve ever seen come up. I don’t like to compare players, but he reminds me of Richie Allen. He has all the ability—how much of it he taps is up to him.” Keith Hernandez? “A bundle of energy—I really like him.” How about Mookie Wilson, an undisciplined hitter if there ever was one? “The most explosive player the Mets have had in a long time. He’s got a lot of big years ahead of him.”

Is he reading from a Mets press release? OK, Jose Oquendo? “I was surprised,” Rusty Staub says, “by how well he handled the bat last year.” Jose Oquendo? How well he handled the bat? A .213 hitter? Rusty Staub obviously isn’t going to say anything bad about anybody. But after you’ve talked for several hours with Rusty Staub, you realize he isn’t bullshitting you, he really believes everything he says. This isn’t a guy who lets “personal loyalty” cloud his judgment, this is a guy for whom “personal loyalty” is his judgment.

Still, sometimes it gets a little .. . aggravating. “I do as much charity as anyone, but certain people just push too hard. I can’t go to every Little League banquet I’m invited to,” he says in exasperation, and you can guess he’s taken flack from people who think he’s obnoxious for turning down their invitation, not knowing he’s already accepted four that week. “And it’s difficult being nice to fans in certain ballparks,” he goes on. “They don’t represent the majority, of course, but some of them pull your shirt or tear your clothes or spit on you. And I don’t even want to talk about the things that happen walking from the clubhouse to the bus.”

He’s more than willing to talk about the media, though. Sitting in his restaurant, looking over vouchers, signing autographs, getting up to take half a dozen phone calls, he explains why he’s so wary of the press. “Say I read in the papers that Davey Johnson said something or other. Now I don’t know if he really said it or not, if you get my drift. Some of the reporters in this town, they see a… ”

He’s getting frustrated just thinking about it. Looking for the right word, he suddenly slaps the table. “They see a table top and they call it a venetian blind. Sports writers wonder why it’s so difficult to get interviews these days—well, it’s because the players have been burned so many times.”

“One of the things that really riles me is when a reporter goes up to one of our young guys who doesn’t know the ropes and says, ‘did you hear what so-and-so said about you?’, completely fabricating some quote just to get a reaction. When I see that happening in the clubhouse”—just talking about it has him at the edge of his temper—”I go over and say, ‘excuse me, I’d like to talk to this gentleman in private for a moment, and I take the player aside and tell him, ‘keep your cool, don’t let him aggravate you into making a statement.’ Too many writers don’t want to tell the truth, they just want to sell papers. It’s intolerable.”

Rusty Staub is too much of a pro to decline interviews, but now you can see more clearly why he draws the line at his personal life. (And that of other players, too—keeping a teammate’s name off the record, he tells how that player’s family situation dramatically affected his play last year, “but the public doesn’t have any right to know anything about that.”) “I’m in the public eye in both my careers,” he says flatly, “and I’ll talk to anybody, anytime, anywhere about either one of them. But there are only 24 hours in a day, I’ve only got a couple left over for myself. I’ll fight to keep that private.” And when a 6-foot-2, 240-pound red-head looks you straight in the eye and uses the word “fight” in italics, you decide, well, not to pursue that line of questioning too vigorously.

There’s more to it than that, of course, because if Rusty Staub is simultaneously one of the most accessible and yet most mysterious players in baseball, simultaneously one of the most popular and most unknown, it doesn’t necessarily follow that there’s a huge discrepancy between his public image and his private personality. You can’t spend a lot of time with him, in fact, without suspecting that, no matter what he does in private, they are virtually identical.

He does let down the mask occasionally. Talking about the way he stood up to the Astro front office in that “day of mourning” incident, he says that some of his friends started calling him “The White Knight.” He seems instantly sorry he let that slip. “It’s no big deal, it’s just a nickname,” he blushes and quickly changes the subject. But what’s fascinating is that even a nickname given in private should so neatly parallel his public persona.

An even more revealing glimpse. Dave Kingman wasn’t the only Met player the fans and the press were down on last year. George Foster may have quietly slipped into the league’s top ten in homers and RBIs, but he was the runaway league-leader in disenchantment. You’d think Rusty Staub wouldn’t know that much about ups and downs—he never really had to struggle in his career, practically going from high school to the All-Star game—but Rusty Staub does know what’s important in his life. It’s not 3,000 hits but personal loyalty, not top ten stats but Christian virtues, not public cheers but private decencies.

“I’ve had all the accolades,” he says with a shrug. “That shit wears off.” So he got to know George Foster better, he got to like him better, exactly like Dave Kingman, precisely during his “time of duress.” It’s easy to be a great guy when everyone’s pouring champagne over everyone’s head. It’s a lot tougher when one of your teammates is going through a year of withdrawal and despondency. A couple of visitors to the Met locker room last summer may have noticed a small sign hanging on the wall of George Foster’s cubicle: “Life Is Fragile: Handle With Prayer.” What few people knew was that Rusty Staub gave it to him.

Ross Wetzsteon is a senior editor at the Village Voice and a star hitter for the paper’s softball team. He has also written on the arts for New York Magazine and Rolling Stone.

The post Unburied Treasure: Rusty Staub, The Mets’ Hittin’ Magician appeared first on Metsmerized Online.

On This Date: Tom Seaver Fires Record-Breaking 19 Strikeout Gem!

Stephen Hanks — Thu, 03 May 2018 00:07:53 +0000

On this day in Mets history, 48 years ago, Hall of Famer Tom Seaver tossed his 19-strikeout gem against the San Diego Padres and set the major league record with 10 straight strikeouts to end the game. It happened on April 22, 1970 and our own Stephen Hanks was there. Here is the article he wrote back in 2010 to commemorate the 40th Anniversary of one of the greatest moments in Mets history. Please enjoy…

* * * * * * * * *

Here are both pages of my original scorecard. (click to enlarge)

Even more impressively, he was striking out an average of eight per game, wasn’t walking a lot of guys, and had a great hits-to-innings pitched ratio. At that point, very few Mets fans knew about the bizarre circumstances that made Seaver a Met–the voiding of his contract with the Braves while he was still at USC, and the Mets subsequently being selected out of a hat in a lottery staged by Commissioner William Eckert. All I cared about was that we might finally be developing some semblance of a major league pitcher and I followed Seaver’s minor-league starts religiously throughout the summer.

For me, Tom cemented his hero status on May 17, 1967. That year and until 1971, the Mets games on radio were carried on WJRZ-AM with a pre- and post-game show hosted by an intelligent and very congenial man named Bob Brown, who staged various fan contests. I sent in a bunch of postcards hoping to get selected for a call and before the game against the Braves that May night, my phone rang. It was Bob Brown offering me a chance to win a baseball glove if I could pick three Mets to get a total of four hits in the game at Fulton County Stadium. So naturally I picked the Mets’ three hottest hitters at that point–Tommy Davis, Ed Kranepool and Jerry Buchek.

Going into the ninth inning, Davis and Kranepool had combined for three hits (Buchek was shutout) but Davis came through for me with a single and I won a Bobby Shantz glove. You may think this whole story has been a digression, but the kicker is this: Tom Seaver went three for three that night, with two RBI, a walk and a stolen base. The best athlete on the team was a rookie pitcher.

Anyway, you know what happened over the next couple of years. Seaver wins 16 games in both ’67 and ’68 (with 32 complete games combined) and then leads the Mets to the promised land in 1969 with 25 victories, including the near-perfect game against the Cubs. After celebrating my team’s improbable World Championship, which I watched from my home in the South Bronx not far from Yankee Stadium, my family moved that December to the spanking new Co-Op City middle class housing project in the Northeast Bronx. Now 14, I was old enough to get a job delivering the Daily News in my 33-story building and the gig earned me about $30 to $40 a week, a fortune for a kid that age at that time. My plan for spending my new-found wealth? Go to as many games of the defending champs as possible, especially considering you could sit in the upper deck behind home plate for a buck and a half.

After settling into our seats on a beautiful spring day (I don’t recall it being chilly), Tom proceeded to strike out two in the first inning. The way the sound of the Seaver fastball was reverberating after hitting Jerry Grote‘s mitt only confirmed it was going to a long day for the Padres. Ken Boswell‘s double off some guy named Mike Corkins drove in Bud Harrelson (who had singled), giving the Mets a first-inning lead. But the Pods’ cleanup hitter and leftfielder Al Ferrara led off the second inning with a home run to tie it (I think it scraped the back of the fence on the way down) until we got the lead back in the third on a Bud Harrelson triple that just missed going out. Given the Mets’ offense, which could disappear for innings or days at a time, I figured that run would have to hold up if Tom was to get a W. (I can’t tell you how many times during Seaver’s Mets career I sweated out a game because of lack of run support. My mother once threatened to start giving me sedatives whenever Tom pitched because I’d pace around the TV room and scream at the set imploring the Mets to score a freaking run.)

By the top of the 6th inning, Tom had yielded just one other hit and had nine strikeouts. Of course the score was still 2-1 so the ace would really have to bear down. After a popup and a fly out, Tom struck out Ferrara for his 10th K of the game. I don’t think I was aware of it at the time–and I could be corrected if I’m wrong–but by the top of the 7th, afternoon shadows were starting to creep over home plate while the sun was still shining over the rest of Shea. This would not be good for a Padres lineup that was already flailing at Seaver’s fastball, which that day looked and sounded like it was in the upper 90s–and we didn’t need a radar gun to tell us that.

I’ve been to the Baseball Hall of Fame a few times since that lunch meeting. The scorecard still resides in my own personal Tom Seaver Museum. Happy Anniversary, Tom!

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MMO Flashback: The Keith Hernandez Trade and Me

Stephen Hanks — Mon, 21 Dec 2015 18:55:41 +0000

In the spirit of the Holiday Season, I’m resurrecting some of our favorite articles from 11 years of writing about the New York Mets on MMO. That’s the wonderful thing about all the original articles we post on Metsmerized Online… that we can go back from time to time and enjoy so many of these wonderful stories again.

Here’s something that hasn’t seen the light of day since Christmas Day on December 25, 2009. It’s a wonderful tale by Stephen Hanks and how he set the stage for one of the greatest trades in Mets history when he was the owner and editor in chief of NEW YORK SPORTS Magazine. Enjoy… JD

It all began the fall of 1982, just after my 27th birthday. Since my early teenage years I had dreamed of starting my own magazine about professional sports in New York. I remembered a short-lived magazine called “JOCK NEW YORK,” which published for one year in 1969, long enough to celebrate the Miracle Mets on its cover. It boasted writers like Dick Schaap and Jimmy Breslin, and even Howard Cosell penned pieces for JOCK.

I was already a magazine fanatic and when JOCK folded, I remember saying to myself, “I’m going to do this magazine one day, only better.” After starting my career at the late, great SPORT Magazine (1978-80), and then spending a year editing a magazine for the National Hockey League, I felt it was time to make the leap and start NEW YORK SPORTS Magazine. I guess I was the Joe DeCaro or Matt Cerrone of my time.

With my wife Bea as the publisher and business mind, we decided we would launch our bi-monthly magazine with a May/June issue in April 1983. That would give us about four months to raise some money, plan the first issue, assign stories and photographs, sell ads, and all that wonderful and stressful stuff that goes into launching a publication. Then in mid-December, I received a gift from the magazine gods. The Mets made a trade with Cincinnati and brought back my hero Tom Seaver. It didn’t take a lot of soul-searching to decide who would be on the magazine’s first cover.

But while the first issue would carry a romantic tribute to Tom Terrific, we had already planned another Mets-related feature for that launch issue, a profile on probably the best player on that awful Mets team of the early 1980s–25-year-old reliever Neil Allen. The young closer had managed to save 59 games from 1980-82 and had more than a little Tug McGraw in him. He was cocky, fun, opinionated and accessible. He even lived in Lee Mazzilli‘s former house on Long Island. Going into the 1983 season, Allen was on the last year of his contract, had an option year and had his eye on big free-agent bucks.

A few weeks before spring training, I contacted Mets PR director Jay Horwitz and told him we wanted to feature Allen with a positive profile in our first issue and he agreed to give us access. I assigned one of my writer friends from the SPORT days, Mark Ribowsky, to visit Allen at his LI home, and the writer and the reliever spent a Saturday afternoon drinking beer and watching college basketball.

On Monday morning, I got a call from Ribowsky saying he had a story that would put NEW YORK SPORTS on the map. Allen didn’t just give him the standard “these are my goals for me and the team this season” stuff; he threw high hard ones at his teammates and the organization. Ribowsky, who had a great talent for getting athletes to spill their guts, probably knew he could hit pay dirt when Allen started the interview with this nugget:

“Who wouldn’t want to live in New York? Love those bright lights of Broadway and any time I can hit those East Side bars, man, I jump.”

At the time, nobody knew Allen had a drinking problem, something that would emerge in May that season when he entered a rehab clinic. For now, Ribowsky just kept his tape recorder running and Allen supplied the rest. You can just imagine what the organization’s reaction must have been when they read these Allen quotes in a magazine:

“Look, they didn’t do a damn thing in the off-season. I don’t want to sound bitter and the team’s been good to me, but they don’t show me no interest in improving the club. The only thing I see getting Tom Seaver for is attendance. He’s 38. I don’t see him coming back and winning 15 or 20 games . . . This team here ain’t gonna score him four or five runs a game. With this team two runs might be the highlight of the game.”

Or this breathless diatribe. Nuke LaLoosh after lessons from Crash Davis, Allen was not:

“We’ve finished next to last or last place six years in a row and who wants to play for a loser. Look at this year’s [1983] team. Dave Kingman will hit .230 tops, and strike out every time he doesn’t hit a homer… I get along well with Kong, but other guys, especially the young guys, are just scared of him.”

“Brian Giles and Ron Gardenhire are unproven in the middle of the infield… John Stearns isn’t a superstar — he can’t hit a homer out of my front yard — yet he’s constantly burning the club in public right after games. You don’t do that . . . Stearns may not be able to throw the whole year and that leaves Ron Hodges at catcher, a guy people think died because they confuse him with Gil Hodges.”

“George Foster was making $2 million and wasn’t producing and came to the park in a long silver limo. The fans threw batteries at it, ripped the antennas off, pulverized it. By the end of the season, it looked like a German war tank. The pitching? I don’t understand the Mike Torrez trade. Why not get a fresh face like Floyd Bannister [who was a free agent]? Here’s a guy that throws hard like Ron Guidry, but we get guys 36, 38 years old. We trade a young arm like Jeff Reardon [to Montreal in 1981] for Ellis Valentine, who was a real head case… Our rotation? Seaver, Craig Swan, Torrez, Scott Holman and Rick Ownbey, who throws smoke, but walks six guys a game… It seems the front office accepts losing.”

Then a passage that would be sure to endear him to his General Manager:

“Me and Frank Cashen just clash. He thinks I’m young and just out for the glory. He wants me to be Tom Seaver, a conformist. Hell, I’m the clown of the ballclub, the ball buster in the locker room. Tug McGraw taught me to have a good time. No sense playing in the big leagues if you’re not having fun. I don’t care how much you make. But Cashen, he don’t like that attitude. Last year, before a game, I was on the bench with an old man’s mask on and a cigarette hanging out of my mouth. So they put a shot of me on the Diamond Vision screen. Right away, Cashen sent a message down asking, ‘Who was it, was it Allen?’ — because he assumes anything like that would be me — ‘Tell him I want to see him.’ I said, ‘Aw, screw him. I don’t wanna see him.”

There was more, but you get the idea. During the call with Ribowsky, I had three conflicting feelings. As a Mets fan, I was completely bummed by Allen’s comments. I almost didn’t want to know that the Mets were this dysfunctional. But as the editor of a new magazine, I was ecstatic. These type of comments from a star player might get us the back cover of the tabloids, and that was before Rupert Murdoch owned the New York Post. But I also knew I had to be cautious. If these quotes weren’t real; if they were taken out of context or said off the record and we printed them, my new magazine would be dead on arrival. I couldn’t take any chances. I pressed Ribowsky. “They’re all on the record,” he assured me. “It’s not on us that he was drinking and said these things. Listen to the tape.”

And so I did and the tape passed the journalism smell test. I was sitting on magazine publishing gold.

The premier issue of New York Sports would hit the newsstands all over the metro area on Tuesday, April 19. A few days before on-sale, I prepared a press release and sent it off with a copy of the magazine to all the Mets beat writers, hoping to create some publicity that would generate newsstand sales. On Wednesday the 20th, after a couple of days of rain, the Mets were playing a doubleheader against the Pirates at Shea and I was home watching the first game (we didn’t have enough of a budget for an office) when the phone rang. It was Jay Horwitz . . . at least I thought it was Jay . . . it was hard to tell at first given how he was screaming and cursing at me.

“You told me you were doing a positive profile and you screwed me and the team,” Jay shouted, seasoning his comments with a heavy helping of the F-word. “Jay, what do you want from me?” I squeezed in. “The guy said all that stuff on the record and I had to print it,”

“I don’t care,” he said, or something to that effect. “You and your magazine are banned from Shea Stadium! Don’t ask for a press credential and don’t have any of your writers ask. You’re banned!”

The next day, the Neil Allen story in NEW YORK SPORTS became a full-fledged controversy. Although we didn’t get back page headlines, there were articles in the sports sections and prominent columnists like the Post’s Dick Young (public enemy number one because he was responsible for the Tom Seaver trade) and the New York Times’ Dave Anderson wrote pieces in support of the magazine’s story. In Anderson’s case, I actually played the tape of the Allen interview for him over the phone so he knew we were legit. Allen, of course, denied he said any of it.

We also offered to play the tape for Frank Cashen in the hopes of getting our Shea ban rescinded. My wife managed to get the GM on the phone. He listened, sighed and told us to “just go away.” End of conversation.

Cashen had taken over as the Mets GM in 1980 after Nelson Doubleday and Fred Wilpon purchased the team from the Payson family. He was an accomplished baseball executive and a conservative man who always wore a bow tie. Cashen was in the process of methodically resurrecting the Mets franchise and there was no way he was going to allow a disrespectful, loud-mouth young reliever to create chaos and undermine the cause. Once our story broke Neil Allen was as good as gone from the Mets. The admission of the alcohol problem and the rehab visit in May had to seal the deal. Now Cashen just had to find a team who wanted to unload a similar problem child.

On June 15, the day of the trade deadline, Frank Cashen made what is still probably the greatest trade in New York Mets history: Neil Allen and Rick Ownbey to the St. Louis Cardinals for Keith Hernandez.

Okay, I won’t take ALL the credit for helping create a situation in which the Mets wanted to unload Neil Allen. But I don’t think we could have obtained a player of Keith Hernandez’s caliber–even if Whitey Herzog did consider Keith “a cancer” on the Cardinals–if Allen wasn’t included in the deal. At that time the Mets didn’t have much else to trade and Darryl Strawberry and Mookie Wilson weren’t going anywhere.

Fellow Mets fans, you’re welcome. Sweet dreams.

Postscript: The 1983 premier issue of NEW YORK SPORTS outsold Sports Illustrated on the newsstands in the metro area. After a one-year hiatus to raise funds, the magazine began regular bi-monthly publication in May 1984 (the Shea Stadium ban had been rescinded that winter) and published six issues before suspending operations after the May/June 1985 issue due to lack of capital.

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MMO Feature: Tom Seaver’s 19 Strikeout Classic Turns 45

Stephen Hanks — Thu, 23 Apr 2015 00:06:24 +0000

On this day in Mets history, 45 years ago, Hall of Famer Tom Seaver tossed his 19-strikeout gem against the San Diego Padres and set the major league record with 10 straight strikeouts to end the game.

It happened on April 22, 1970 and our own Stephen Hanks was there. Here is an article he wrote back in 2010 to commemorate the 40th Anniversary of one of the greatest moments in Mets history. Please enjoy…

There is a mantle above an unused fireplace in my home office that I’ve turned into a little shrine to my sports idol Tom Seaver. It’s nothing crazy, just a bunch of old action photos, vintage baseball cards, magazine covers, bobble head dolls, figurines depicting that classic Seaver right-knee scraping the mound motion, even an empty bottle of Tom Seaver recent vintage wine. But among all these treasures, there is one that bears special significance today: the scorecard I recorded at Shea Stadium on April 22, 1970, the day the man I consider the greatest right-handed pitcher of all time (Roger Clemens forfeited that title the day he picked up a syringe) struck out 19 San Diego Padres, including the LAST 10 IN A ROW.

Here are both pages of my original scorecard.
(click to enlarge them)

In early 1983 I was about to launch my own magazine called NEW YORK SPORTS and the Mets gave me the best launch present I could imagine by bringing Seaver back from the Cincinnati Reds that winter. Putting my idol on the cover of my magazine’s premiere issue was a no-brainer and before spring training I hiked out to Shea with a camera crew to shoot Tom Terrific. As I was leaving my house that morning, I thought, “Damn, I’ve got to ask Tom to sign the 19K-game scorecard” and found it in a huge pile of Seaver memorabilia I had been collecting for years. After assuming my best professional editor’s air during the photo session (even pressuring my hero to smile once in a while), I reverted to sheepish fan mode and asked Tom to autograph the scorecard. As he turned my prized possession into even more of a collector’s item, he looked down at the card and said, “Hmmm, that was a pretty good outing.” Indeed.

I’ve been to the Baseball Hall of Fame a few times since that lunch meeting. The scorecard still resides in my own personal Tom Seaver Museum. Happy Anniversary, Tom!

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The Johan Santana Injury Farce and Why This is S.O.M. (Same Old Mets)

Stephen Hanks — Sun, 22 Jul 2012 21:23:25 +0000

As I read Terry Collins’ and Sandy Alderson’s quotes in the paper this morning regarding Johan Santana going on the disabled list, my nostrils began to flair, my face was turning red, I almost scalded myself with the cup of hot coffee that was shaking in my hand, and I finally ran to get some blood pressure medication. I’m not angry that Johan Santana is being placed on the DL. That’s just incredibly sad and disappointing. What has me totally infuriated is WHEN they decided to put Johan on the shelf due to his barking ankle.

It was during the July 6 game against the Cubs when Reed Johnson stepped on Santana’s right ankle while Johan was stepping on the first base bag. When I saw the initial play and then watched it again on the slo-mo replay, I was amazed the ankle wasn’t severely sprained or even broken. At the very least, I was sure swelling would have developed within innings and Johan would have to leave the game for a bigger ice pack than the one for his shoulder after a game. But Johan soldered on–as is his wont–and used the All-Star break to rest the ankle, not really missing a turn. But it’s been clear since the break that something has gone very wrong with Santana’s velocity and command and the Mets have NOW decided the problem stems from the injured ankle.

“We determined the ankle issue is bigger than anybody had realized,” manager Terry Collins said. “Ever since the injury, his command hasn’t been there. He can’t land properly, he’s using all his arm to pitch with, causing some fatigue in his shoulder . . . ” Added Alderson: “We think the ankle injury may have led to some general fatigue in his shoulder specifically . . . we’ve probably gotten to the point where we need to get that ankle right.” YA THINK?

So let me get this straight: Terry Collins was in agony to the point of tears when he struggled with deciding whether to let Johan throw 130-plus pitches during his no-hitter, but had NO problem with letting him pitch three games through an injured ankle on his landing leg, just because the medical staff didn’t see the urgency of the injury and because the pitcher wanted to gamely keep taking the mound? Collins thought the pitch count would jeopardize Santana’s fragile post-surgery shoulder, but didn’t think having him pitch with a bad ankle which would make him overcompensate with his arm would be just as dangerous, if not more? We experienced this craziness regarding injuries with the Omar Minaya regime. I really expected better out of Sandy and company and that’s why I’m furious; not the least of which is because had Santana continued to pitch well we might have been able to deal him to a contender before the trade deadline. Now that option is out the window.

Let me tell you a little story about pitching with a bad ankle and how dangerous it can be. At the beginning of my senior year in college, I threw a one-hitter (would have been a no-no had my shortstop had any range) and was on the radar of a couple of scouts after that game. I was also my team’s backup catcher and when the starter came down sick the day after my near no-no, I had to go behind the plate. I reached base in the first inning and took off for second on a hit and run play. The batter missed the ball and when I slid into second my spike caught under the bag and I turned my left ankle. I walked it off for a bit, just like Johan did, and stayed in the game. By the fourth inning, it was started to swell up but my coach would have had to shoot me to come out of a game. There was a pop-up straight over home plate and just before the ball was about to settle in my glove, my leg just collapsed out from under me.

I iced the ankle all that night but by the next day it was swollen and very painful. My brother took me to the emergency room for x-rays and the doctor told me I had a small fracture and that I’d have to be in a cast for at least a month. I knew that would basically end my season so when the doctor wasn’t looking, I told my bro to get me the hell out of there. I spent the next two weeks on crutches, icing the ankle, getting ultrasound treatments, whatever I could do to get it healed on it’s own. I finally felt at least good enough to pitch, but I hadn’t been able to run and I had to avoid putting too much pressure on the left foot on the follow through. My first start after the layoff I had a great game as my arm was rested from the layoff. I won my next start but was a bit more erratic with my control. In my third start I got hit hard and in my fourth start I got racked because my velocity was way down and my arm felt fatigued. I knew what the problem was–I always used my legs in my follow through, like my idol Tom Seaver did, and now I was basically just using my arm because I couldn’t put much pressure on that landing foot.

I’m almost sure that’s what is going on with Johan. Once you overcompensate for a leg or ankle injury by changing your mechanics and overthrowing, your arm gets fatigued and it effects velocity and command. The Mets should have known this might happen and they should have put him on the DL immediately after that July 6 start and he would have been back and presumably healthy yesterday’s start. Now it’s too late. This awful decision has basically cost the team six of Santana’s starts–the three bad ones and the three he’ll now miss–and by the time he’s back any chance the Mets had of competing for a wild card will be over. The local sports media should be all over this.

Did anyone say “buyers and sellers.”

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Unburied Treasure: The Ed Kranepool Story

Stephen Hanks — Mon, 25 Jun 2012 22:30:25 +0000

Introduction by Stephen Hanks

When the New York Mets announced their All-Time Team last week in honor of the franchise’s 50^th Anniversary (Davey Johnson as manager over Gil Hodges? No freakin’ way!), it was no surprise that the first baseman was Keith Hernandez. But for Mets fans who go all the way back to the first days of the club (my first live game was at age 8 at the Polo Grounds in 1963), it was nice to see Ed Kranepool make the list of nominees at the position. Although he will eventually be overtaken by David Wright if the third baseman signs another long-term deal with the Mets, Kranepool still leads the organization all-time in games played, at bats and hits. In 1990, after years of seemingly being forgotten, the Mets honored Krane’s accomplishments by inducting him into the team’s Hall of Fame.

Back in 1984, when I was editing my newly-launched magazine, New York Sports, the former 17-year-old wunderkind from James Monroe HS in the Bronx had turned 40 and yet had never been recognized by the team in any kind of ceremony or “day.” At the time, the comedian Red Buttons was known for his hysterical routine on the Dean Martin Comedy Roasts, one liners that began with . . . “So and so never got a dinner!” Since Ed Kranepool had never gotten a “day” from the Mets, let alone a dinner, New York Sports decided to profile him in our story called, “Ed Kranepool Never Got a Day,” wonderfully written by freelancer Len Albin (who I had worked with at SPORT Magazine in the late ’70s). We thought an appropriate image for the story would be to have Krane, in uniform, stand in front of a microphone at home plate at Shea Stadium—but with nobody in the stands. Kranepool signed on to the idea and the Mets’ PR department graciously allowed us to set up the shot (below). We hope you enjoy this vintage mini-biography of the legendary Met, Ed Kranepool.

He was a major-leaguer at 17, “over the hill” at 19, and never became
“The Pride of the Mets.”
Yet he played 17 years in New York and did become a Metsian legend.
Now that he’s 40, it seems an injustice that . . .

ED KRANEPOOL NEVER GOT A DAY

New York Sports Magazine, November/December 1984, by Len Albin

METS SIGN SCHOOLBOY FOR $75,000, blares the 1962 headline in the New York Times . . . METS SHELL OUT 90 GRAND, NAB 17-YEAR-OLD PHENOM, announces The Sporting News

Mets Sign Schoolboy For $75,000, blares the 1962 headline in the New York Times…

In the World-Telegram and Sun, manager Casey Stengel says Kranepool has “a lovely future” and compares his “kid genius” to another teenager who played in the Polo Grounds: “Now don’t get me saying that in one National League game I have spotted a new [Mel] Ott. But who can tell?” In the Journal-American, Kranepool says he looks forward to “playing 20 years in the major leagues.” And in the New York Post, James Monroe High’s Ed Kranepool is compared to Commerce High’s Lou Gehrig, another Bronx native who made it big playing for the hometown team. “As legend would have it,” wrote Post columnist Maury Allen in ‘64, “the Mets’ regular first baseman Tim Harkness would get sick; Kranepool [would] start a game and play 2,129 more.”

Two decades later, these bits of crumbling newsprint, some held together by decomposing scotch tape, give off the pungent aroma of nostalgia. For this November, Ed Kranepool, who never quite became the “Pride of the Mets,” turns 40.

Kranepool is probably best known to a more recent generation of baseball fans as the pre-Rusty Staub-era pinch-hitting specialist. From ‘74 through ‘77, he batted .477 off the bench, and his .486 average in ‘74 (17 for 35) still stands as the best pinch-hitting mark in major-league history (though, like Staub, he preferred a full-time role). But most of us remember Ed Kranepool fondly as that eager, oversized teenager who joined the Mets just after breaking Hank Greenberg’s 32-year-old home run record at Monroe High, back in the days when people followed Moon Mullins and Ed Sullivan in the Daily News. We also remember the Mets of the early ‘60s, when they summed up broken dreams and disappointment for everybody. In those days, Kranepool was a marginal Met, but he ultimately became as much “Mr. Met” as Stengel or Seaver. He somehow managed to last 17 years in the majors, yet he disappeared with less fanfare than the Daily Mirror. Though he eventually set seven all-time Mets career batting records, including most RBI’s, total bases, hits—he was banished from the Mets scene in 1979 like a horse way past his appointment at the glue factory. While Mets promotion director Tim Hamilton admits, “he was a fan favorite,” Kranepool never got the kind of festive kiss-off that the Yankees gave this year to Lou Piniella—who wasn’t even a career Yankee. In fact, during Kranepool’s last season, the Mets feted an outsider—the Cardinals’ retiring Lou Brock. But as Red Button’s might kvetch on the “Dean Martin Celebrity Roasts, “Ed Kranepool never got a dinner.”

“They didn’t even say goodbye to me,” says Ed Kranepool in 1984.

These days, Ed Kranepool has a regular job. He’s a salesman (and a minor partner) with the Lesjay Corporation of Long Island City, which sits on the waterfront of the East River. The firm occupies about 180,000-square feet of warehouse space in a musty, century-old building (that used to house a hamper factory) across the street from a clutch of low-income housing projects. Ed drives his beige Oldsmobile in each weekday from his condominium in Old Westbury. On this particular summer afternoon, local black kids greet their hero by rapping on the car as he pulls up. Kranepool rolls down the window to see about a truck blocking the Lesjay driveway.

“What’s this guy doing?” Kranepool asks. “Is he making a delivery?”

“What’s your problem, slick?” one of the kids says. “Just squeeze in. You know how you get into some tight pants, don’t you?” Kranepool eases the car around the truck and points with pride to having a new generation of fans. “When I first came here,” he says with a smile, “They couldn’t believe it was me.”

Kranepool with his mom Ethel after he signed his “bonus baby” contract with the Mets in ’62.

Ed Kranepool doesn’t seem much different from his playing days—just older. The deep creases at the corners of his eyes are well carved from years of squinting into the sunlight from the dugout shade. He’s developing a bald spot and a set of jowls that remind one of a mature Duke Snider. He’s also 10 pounds over his playing weight (205) and has diabetes, for which he takes daily insulin shots. Otherwise, he’s like many men his age: Divorced once, married twice, with three teenage kids (including two step-children) and a steady income. But he never jogs. For recreation, he likes skiing, boating, and working around the house. (Last year, he constructed a tri-level outdoor deck in his backyard; this year, he built a 1,200 square-foot basement.) But he rarely visits the ballpark. “I haven’t watched nine innings since I retired,” Kranepool admits. “The last time I did that I was playing.”

Kranepool’s company manufactures “point-of-purchase” displays, one of the growing specialty areas in consumer marketing. “It’s a tremendous field,” Kranepool crows. “Some of these companies have tremendous budgets.”

Among the products on exhibit in Lesjay’s makeshift lobby (really a finished basement decorated with a plastic azalea bush) were the plastic storage bins that hold “Danskin” pantyhose, a “Redken Skin Care” cosmetics display, and the plastic beer signs with the “moving” twinkly lights seen in liquor stores. In a word, they’re in plastics. Kranepool pulls out one of the tiny plastic components of another stocking display and animatedly explains that it’s made through the process of “injection-molding.”

“See, you have the tools and you make trays and stuff like that,” he says, slipping the plastic drawer back into place. “That comes out of molds and stuff like that.”

The point-of-purchase display biz is just one subsidiary of the Kranepool business and investment “empire.” For a guy who didn’t attend college, he’s doing very well. He’s putting up a hotel in the Catskills near a ski resort called “Deer Run,” and he owns a vacation home in the Poconos. On the side, Kranepool is a partner in a sports-marketing company called “Sports Plus.” The angle here is packaging business junkets for executives-coordinating hotel and airline reservations, and events—with a theme in mind. For example, when Xerox introduced its new “l0K” model copier, Sports Plus arranged 10K mini-marathon races in the Caribbean for the corporation.

“It worked well for Xerox because they got their name out—the 10K—through the race,” Kranepool says. “These are the ideas you gotta come up with.” He’s also got $50,000 sunk in the Tri-Cities Single A ball club in the Northwest League. “It’s in the state of Washington,” he relates. “Pasco, Kennewick, and something else. I don’t know. Three cities. I bought the Walla Walla franchise two years ago and moved it to Tri-Cities the same day I bought it. They didn’t know what was going on, I move so fast.”

Being involved in deal making and investments is nothing new for Ed Kranepool. Since his pro career began, he’s seized moneymaking opportunities the way Pete Rose goes after hits. While a player, he co-owned with teammate Ron Swoboda a restaurant in Amityville, New York called “The Dugout.” In the off-seasons of ‘63 to ‘68, Kranepool worked as a licensed stockbroker with the Manhattan firm of Brand, Grumet, and Siegel, where he traded securities for over 150 clients, including Met teammates Dennis Ribant and Hawk Taylor, and met first wife Carol, a secretary of one of his bosses. In ‘71, he did a guest shot on Sesame Street, helping teach kids how to count to 10. And he would spend much of the fall and winter on the banquet circuit, making, as he admits, “thousands” of paid personal appearances. The Sporting News noticed this in early ‘67:

“In his pre-camp training, Kranepool takes sauna baths, works with weights and plays paddle ball. He needs those workouts to counteract all that good eating he does at the many dinners he attends to promote good will for the Mets . . . Kranepool had no fewer than 13 January banquet dates and 10 in February.” On another occasion, Kranepool took a USC-sponsored 10-day trip to Thule Air Force base in Greenland. This year, when the Mets asked him to “computer manage” the 1969 Mets for the August 31st Computerland promotion, he insisted it couldn’t be just for fun.

“It was a commercial venture and somebody was gaining from it,” Ed reasons, “And I wanted Ed Kranepool to gain from it. I’m gonna take time away from myself and my family. I wanna get remunerated for it.”

So Kranepool’s fat baseball pension probably doesn’t make much difference. Though he isn’t making a 1984 ballplayer’s bucks, he says he’s comfortable and happy. His flair for the dollar has ensured him another “lovely future.” In fact, shrewd planning for the future has always been one of Kranepool’s prime concerns. Reporter Jack Lang once remarked in The Sporting News that Kranepool was “an extremely security-conscious” player. But, as Kranepool is quick to point out, owners weren’t exactly throwing around million-dollar contracts, as they do today.

“When a guy gets two, three, four million dollars,” he observes, “You don’t have to be very smart to prepare for your future. If you have that much cash, you just put it in the bank and you’re in pretty good shape, living off the interest.” But why does he have a seeming preoccupation with the almighty buck? “Hey, nobody gives you anything in this world,” he philosophizes. “So you gotta hustle.”

Kranepool didn’t exactly become Casey’s “new Mel Ott.”

Some in the Met organization felt that had Kranepool hustled as much on the field as he did off it, he just might have become Casey Stengel’s new Mel Ott. But baseball stardom wasn’t his only career goal. “He was consumed by baseball,” recalls his ex-wife Carole, “but he also had a drive within him to make money. Coming out of the Bronx, he had nothing. He was very poor. And he had this tremendous desire to be successful. And it was through baseball that he would achieve that success.”

Before Ed Kranepool’s smooth left-handed stroke convinced scouts that he was going to be “the gentile Hank Greenberg,” he spent his Bronx boyhood obsessed with baseball. Since Ed’s father had been machine-gunned in France during World War II four months before Ed was born, his Little League coach and neighbor, Jim Schiaffo, taught him the game. When young Eddie got a baseball glove for Christmas of ‘55, he asked Schiaffo to come outside and hit him a few grounders. “My wife looked at me,” Schiaffo recalls. “I looked at him. What could you do? He had no father. We went out to the Whitestone Bridge and I hit ground balls to him on Christmas morning. It was as cold as a witch’s backtail. But I loved it, because this kid, he ate, drank and slept baseball.” Then there were the off-season “skull practices,” during which Eddie would stand with a bat over the home plate that Schiaffo had chalked under the Kranepool’s living room rug.

“I’d say, ‘Eddie! An outside pitch coming!’” Schiaffo remembers, ‘“What do you do with it? Left field! . . . Inside pitch! What are you gonna do with it, Eddie? Remember! Bail out! Right field! . . . And keep the head straight! The head’s gotta be straight! The arms take the body around. The body don’t take the arms around.’ That’s what I used to tell him. And kept tellin’ him, and tellin’ him, and tellin’ him.”

By his mid-teens, Kranepool already has a star’s confidence. Throughout his sandlot days, he wore number 7, just like his Bronx idol, Mickey Mantle. In high school, he called himself “The King”—announcing, “The King’s home” to his mother when he swung open the front door. And with his $85,000 bonus money from the Mets—who were obviously counting on him to be their first home-grown hero to put fannies in the seats—he bought himself a fancy car: a white Thunderbird. (Actually, Eddie wanted a sportier Corvette or Jaguar, but he found he couldn’t squeeze his hulking 6-3, 205-pound inside them.) Then “The King” whisked his mom out of their apartment in a three-family house on Castle Hill Avenue in the Parkchester section, and bought an eight-room home in White Plains. He shelled out even more for new furniture, a set of dishes, and a Magnavox hi-fi that cost over $300. (In the Daily Mirror, a smiling Mrs. Ethel Kranepool is pictured sitting at her new sewing machine).

But within two years, astute observers could detect important clues about the young Kranepool’s baseball future. In ‘63 and ‘64, he had to be demoted briefly to the minors, while his beloved number 7 was taken, in succession, by Sammy Drake, Elio Chacon, and Amado Samuel (while Ed settled for number 21). When he pulled a leg muscle in spring training in ‘64, Casey Stengel complained, “You would think you could be 19 and in shape.” And on Opening Day at Shea that year a now immortal banner asked the ultimate question about this underachiever: IS ED KRANEPOOL OVER THE HILL?

“Some guys get their cheap fun going to the ballpark,” Kranepool says today, still annoyed after all these years. “I don’t like anybody who makes fun of anyone else’s inadequacies.” But he soon turned the jeers into cheers. In ‘65, Kranepool made the All-Star team as the token Met after a superb first-half of the season; he was a key player in the Met pennant-winning years of ‘69 and ‘73; in ‘74, he led the league in pinch-hits, and would step to the plate to chants of “Ed-die, Ed-die.” Kranepool now looks back on his career with some pride, insisting that during his last “seven or eight years” he was as tough an out as anybody in baseball. “Obviously I was productive,” he says. “Otherwise I couldn’t fool ‘em for 17 years.”

Family was always important to Eddie (with first wife Carol).

But he wasn’t that productive. His lifetime batting average was .261, and he averaged only about seven home runs per year. On the basepaths, he ran like a retired furrier chasing a mugger. And he wasn’t exactly Nureyev in the field, either. Once, when Kranepool made a diving catch in left field for the Mets’ Triple A team (where he’d been demoted in. 1970), the play was viewed as a supernatural event.

“If Ed Kranepool makes a catch like that,” said pitcher Bill Denehy, “I know I’m going to pitch a no-hitter.” In retrospect, Kranepool’s most spectacular achievements—aside from his longevity—may be two items already enshrined in the trivia archives. On the weekend of May 30-31, 1964, Kranepool played 50 innings within 33 and a half hours—the first 18 innings in a doubleheader in Buffalo (then the Mets’ Triple A team), and 32 more innings in a doubleheader at Shea against the Giants, which included the famous 23-inning nightcap. (Could Lou Gehrig do this?) Ten years later, Henry Aaron used a 33-ounce, 34 and a half-inch Ed Kranepool-model 220-A Adirondack bat to beat Sadaharu Oh in a home-run-hitting contest in Tokyo.

So, why didn’t Ed Kranepool do as well with the same bat? “They shoulda left me in the minor leagues to develop, and they woulda got a better player out of it,” he says, echoing the arguments that were raised then. “A young guy at 17 isn’t physically ready for the major leagues. Nor was a 17-year-old ready, in Kranepool’s opinion, for the Hall-of-Fame-caliber pitchers lurking in the National League in the mid-1960’s—like Sandy Koufax, Bob Gibson, Juan Marichal, and Don Drysdale. There was also knuckleballer Phil Niekro to contend with (Ed’s least favorite pitcher), and some “wild” fastball pitchers.

“Koufax could be a comfortable oh-for-four,” Kranepool recalls. “Bob Veale? You’d stand up there and check your drawers at the end of the night.”

That he didn’t get to develop in the minor leagues was partly Kranepool’s own fault. He wanted to be rushed to the majors. As he told Barney Kremenko of the Journal-American in ‘63, “I chose the Mets not only because they offered me enough money, they also presented an opportunity to make the big leagues in the shortest amount of time. For my career that was very important.”

By 1970, Mets general manager Bob Scheffing found himself paying a fat $35,000 a year to a player who, in Scheffing’s words, “has the unhappy knack of hitting a lot of fly balls on bad pitches.” But Kranepool blamed his own shoddy performance on manager Gil Hodges’ platoon system. He wanted the chance to prove he could be a productive everyday player, eight years into his career.

“He’s been to bat nearly 3,000 times in the majors,” Tom Seaver observed. “That’s not a chance?”

As owner Joan Payson’s favorite Met, Kranepool survived. And once he became an eight-year veteran in early ‘71, he couldn’t be demoted without his permission. The only threat was being released but Kranepool kept the vultures at bay by pinch-hitting so well. Kranepool eventually became part of the Mets “family.” When he got his final Mets contract, a three-year deal at $100,000 per year, he didn’t haggle with Board Chairman M. Donald Grant. Instead, he gave Grant a signed blank contract, and Grant—like a kindly godfather—filled in the numbers. The sweet, secure contract enabled Kranepool to observe first-hand what in his view was the “ruination” of the Mets. “Joe McDonald [then GM] got rid of Seaver, he got rid of Koosman, he got rid of Tug McGraw, he got rid of everybody on the ballclub,” Kranepool says bitterly. “There was nobody left when I retired. I was down to myself.”

When Ed’s three-year contract expired after the ‘79 season, the new Mets management rejected his demand for a two-year extension. But Kranepool still wasn’t going anywhere. Though he was a free agent, he privately told other clubs not to draft him—at least not if they wanted to pay a measly 100 grand.

“What’s the big deal?” Kranepool reasons. “If I’m going to make $100,000 in New York, or even $120,000 in, let’s say, Minnesota, what benefit am I going to gain? I’m not gonna see my family for three months. I have my own living expenses in Minnesota. My businesses that I have in New York go down the tube. Where do I gain? I lose money.” So Kranepool, with the timing of a hitter in a slump, left baseball just as the free-agent market exploded. “Had I known that the owners were going to be so free with their dollars, I’d still be playing today,” he says. “Because the salaries are tremendous. I didn’t have a crystal ball, so maybe I’m not as smart as I thought I was.

Another option in the Kranepool game plan had been taking an executive position with the Mets management. He had anticipated going into the front office under the Payson regime, but when it became apparent that kindly old stockbroker Grant wouldn’t stay around long enough to give him one, Kranepool—undeterred—made inquiries about buying the Mets.

With the money of Bob Abplanalp, the inventor of the aerosol spray device and a buddy of Richard Nixon, behind him, Kranepool approached the Mets at the end of ‘79. If the deal had gone through, Kranepool would have likely become general manager. But Mets owner Lorinda deRoulet (Payson’s daughter) never took them seriously. “It seemed like she wanted to sell to the Doubleday people all along,” Kranepool recalls. “Probably because they were from her social surroundings.” On the other hand, deRoulet might have been astounded by the chutzpa of that Kranepool, a mere employee, trying to buy the Mets. In fact, at the same time, he was still quibbling with management about his 1980 contract.

But if the Mets were to offer Kranepool a front office job today, he would definitely consider it, especially if it was the GM’s position. (“If you gotta start somewhere,” he says.) All Kranepool wants in a baseball job is one that won’t take him away from New York, and one that will pay decent money.

“I love baseball,” he says, “But I love it from a financial standpoint, too. I wanna get paid for my talents, and if I can’t get paid then I’ll do something else. And it doesn’t matter to me what I do to earn a living.” So, if George Steinbrenner asked Ed about joining the Yankees’ front office he’d consider that, too. “I don’t feel an allegiance to the Mets anymore,” Kranepool says. “Loyalty went out the window the day they didn’t sign me.”

When Ed Kranepool drives by his old Bronx sandlot stomping grounds, he notices that no longer are kids playing baseball there from morning ‘til night, as he did as a teenager. “I think kids are missing out,” he says, wistfully, “and I don’t understand it, ‘cause all they gotta do is read the paper and see the salary structure in sports. There’s gotta be more of an incentive to play. Because sports, I guess, is number two economically. Number one would have to be, I would imagine, the entertainment field.” Yes, times have changed.

And so have the Mets—but Kranepool never got too hysterical over this old team’s run at the pennant this summer. When he did tune in a Mets game, his mind tended to fill with memories of days gone by. “Your life flashes in front of you,” he says. “You remember the good old days and what you had.” Most of all he savors that ticker tape parade held on lower Broadway for the ’69 World Champions. Kranepool still gets calls from Art Shamsky, and keeps in touch with Tommie Agee, Ron Swoboda, and Tug McGraw. He’s even become “good friends” with Tom Seaver, even though Seaver was once one of his harshest critics.“Tom Seaver matured when he learned to accept adversity,” says Kranepool, who’s older than Seaver by nine days. All of a sudden he became a .500 pitcher with the Mets and he had to swallow a little crow. He wasn’t the darling of everybody, and he knew what it was like to suffer. He became a better person for it.”

Of course, after playing 17 years for the Mets, Ed Kranepool knows plenty about suffering; adversity was what the Mets were all about, so after a while, you develop a taste for crow. But now that this Metsian legend has hit 40, doesn’t nostalgia dictate that Kranepool have a taste of glory, or at the very least chicken, at a dinner in his honor.

“I don’t need them to give me a dinner,” Kranepool says simply, but not very convincingly. Jim Schiaffo, the man who once hit Eddie grounders at Christmas, feels differently. “I’m personally disappointed,” says Schiaffo about the Mets’ oversight. “Seventeen years with the team, and no recognition. They didn’t even buy this kid a sport jacket, for God’s sake.”

“I hope that someday they will give him a day,” says ex-wife Carole. “I think it would take away some of the bitterness he feels about leaving the team. He’s hurting.”

But whatever happens, we can still remember Ed Kranepool simply—and fondly—as the almost “Pride of the Mets.” Once, he was a promising young star who was going to replace Tim Harkness at first base and play 2,130 consecutive games like Lou Gehrig. Though they weren’t consecutive, he eventually came only 277 short.

The post Unburied Treasure: The Ed Kranepool Story appeared first on Metsmerized Online.

Unburied Treasure: When Keith Hernandez Was the Game’s Best First Baseman

Stephen Hanks — Tue, 20 Mar 2012 19:45:45 +0000

Introduction by Stephen Hanks

After Gary Carter’s tragic and untimely death last month, MMO posted a profile of the Hall of Fame catcher that was supposed to be part of the September/October 1985 issue of my magazine New York Sports, but which was never printed. The piece generated such a positive reaction, that MMO has asked me to unearth other Mets-related stories the magazine published between our launch in April 1983 and our last issue in 1985.

One of the magazine’s many popular departments was one we called “Clinic Time,” that wonderful expression Marv Albert came up with during the glory days of the New York Knicks to describe when the team was basically taking the opponent to school on the court. This department was where the magazine could feature New York sports athletes who excelled at a particular skill or explain a specific system or strategy employed by aNew Yorksports team manager or coach.

By his second year with the Mets in 1984, it was clear that Keith Hernandez was not only the best fielding first baseman in baseball, but perhaps one of the best to ever play the game. In this piece, award-winning journalist Billy Altman, who like myself was also writing sports for The Village Voice (Billy continues to write for various publications and websites and is a teacher at the School of Visual Arts in New York, and is sometimes an official scorer for Mets and Yankees games) talked with “Mex” himself, as well as teammates and opponents to learn why Hernandez was, as New York Sports called him, “the Baryshnikov of First Base.”

Clinic Time: Keith Hernandez — The Best at First

New York Sports Magazine, June/July 1984 issue. Edited by Stephen Hanks

By Billy Altman

Okay, Met maniacs, get out your standard box score from the April 18^th home game against the Montreal Expos (a game our guys won in the ninth, 7-6, on Wally Backman’s bases-loaded, two-out double). At a glance, the box score informs you that the Mets’ number-three hitter and first baseman, Keith Hernandez, went one for four, didn’t score a run, had one RBI, and made no errors. What it won’t tell you is information like this:

In the first inning, Hernandez is holding an Expos’ runner on. Before pitcher Walt Terrell comes out of his stretch, Hernandez moves quickly off the bag, causing the runner, who now thinks Terrell is going home, to lengthen his lead off first. Hernandez then darts back to the bag and takes a pickoff throw which catches the runner breaking for second. In the ensuing rundown, he dives to tag the runner out. Two innings later,Bryan Little, the National League’s best bunter, drags one between the pitcher’s mound and first. In one fluid motion, Hernandez races in, grabs the ball with his glove, and dives to his left, just nipping a speeding Little on the arm. (“I’m pretty good against the bunt,” Hernandez boasts.) Still later in the game, shortstop Jose Oquendo, hurrying a throw, makes Hernandez handle a difficult hop. But Keith’s soft hands scoop it up so effortlessly; he almost appears nonchalant as he cradles the ball in his glove. The play looms even larger when the next two Expo batters single. Had Hernandez not made these plays, especially the last one that prevented a big inning, the Mets would very likely have lost.

Ask Keith Hernandez about all his activities around first during this particular ballgame and he’ll just shrug his shoulders, smile, and tell you very matter-of-factly that he’s just doing his job, just playing first base as well as he can. And how well does he play the position? Since becoming a regular in ‘76, the 30-year-old Hernandez has been awarded six Golden Gloves as the finest fielding first sacker in the N.L. His grace, style, quickness and flawless execution make him seem like a ballpark Baryshnikov. Keith Hernandez, quite simply, performs all the moves of a major league first baseman better than almost anyone who’s ever played the position. Says Jose Oquendo, who‘s played with Hernandez since the Mets acquired Keith from St. Louis for pitcher Neil Allen last June: “I know that if I throw the ball anywhere near Keith, he’ll catch it, even if it’s in the ground or way off line. You never think that he won’t catch it; that’s how good we all know he is.”

Hernandez’s training as a first baseman began at age eight and his father, John, was the teacher. “As a lefthander,” Keith recalls, “my choice of positions was already limited to first or the outfield. My dad had played for six years as a first baseman in the Cardinals’ organization, so I guess it was natural that I’d wind up in the infield.”

While Hernandez says that he’s always had confidence in his defensive skills, he also acknowledges former Cardinal coach Preston Gomez as having a huge influence on his development as a fielder. “When I first got to St. Louis in ‘74 and ‘75,” recalls Keith, “I was riding the bench quite a bit, and Preston just took me under his wing. He made sure that I wasn’t getting lazy, that I got a good half hour of ground balls every day. Preston had this knack of hitting both hard and soft grounders that made you go that extra foot to snare them, and that really helped increase my range.”

But Hernandez feels that there’s more to being an accomplished fielder than just taking a bazillion ground balls. “A lot of it is instinctive—reacting to the ball, knowing the particulars of the situation, always asking yourself, ‘if the ball’s hit to me, where am I going with it?’” And, he adds, the maxim about wanting the baseball hit to you is one of the game’s authentic truisms. “The minute you’re hoping it’ll go to someone else—especially in important situations—is the time you’re most likely to make a costly error.”

Hernandez relies on his personal knowledge of hitters in determining where to position himself.” You know how some fielders need to know what the pitcher’s throwing?” he asks. “Well, I find that hitters have individual tendencies no matter where the ball is pitched.” But how does he seem to corral almost every ball hit in the hole between first and second? “You get beat in the hole much more than down the line, so I tend to play off the line quite a bit,” he explains. “I feel that I can get to a lot of those balls because I know I have good range and I anticipate well.” The only times Hernandez wants to know about a specific pitch is when an off-speed pitch is being thrown to a left-handed batter. “A lefty will usually pull the off-speed pitch, so since the second baseman can see the catcher’s signs and I can’t, he’ll signal me so I can make the adjustment.”

Even more adjustments are necessary in turning the difficult first-to-shortstop-to-first double play, a maneuver which demands that a first baseman field, throw accurately, return to the bag and receive any kind of throw, and all quicker than you can say “3-6-3.” On this play, Hernandez (who has led N.L. first basemen in DP’s five times), will almost never step on first before throwing to second which would negate the force play.

“Besides,” he explains, “the lead runner is always the one you want erased. I’ll go to the bag first only when the ball is hit down the line and I have to backhand it. When holding a runner on, you’ll get a ground ball quickly, which is very key because the throw will usually get to second before the runner can take out the shortstop.” But that throw has to be just right. “It has to be a true one, one that doesn’t sink or curve, so I always try to throw over the top rather than sidearm. That goes for whether the throw is to the inside of the bag when I’m playing up, or to the outside if I’m playing back. But it helps being a lefty. For a righty first baseman, turning the DP is almost impossible no matter what side of him the ball’s hit to because he must spin his body around to make the throw to second.”

In taking throws himself, Hernandez prefers a long hop if he must take a hop at all. “If the fielder is off balance and has to make a throw from deep in the hole, it’s sometimes better for him to bounce it to me on the long hop,” he explains. “Especially on Astroturf, where it‘ll bounce right to me. A guy like Davey Concepcion is great at that kind of throw; gives his first baseman a nice, easy, long hop to handle. [Garry] Templeton, Ozzie (Smith), Oquendo—all the guys with the great arms do that well.’’ And he’s not anti-Astroturf, either. “Except for when the ball hits a seam,” he admits. “There really aren’t any bad hops on the turf and that’s a plus. On dirt, you have to play the ball and the hop much more, and you must take infield very carefully before every game to get the feel of the field on that particular day.”

His yearly Golden Glove awards are a testament to Hernandez’s consistency, which he maintains whether he’s on a hitting tear or mired in a slump. “You can never let what’s happening with the offensive part of your game affect your play in the field,” he insists, echoing the conventional wisdom. “When you’re in a slump you really have to bear down, stay alert, and be more ready defensively than ever.” Such bad stretches don’t often happen to a lifetime .299 hitter, who has won a batting title and a Most Valuable Player award (both in 1979). And the rest of the National League is probably thankful for that. Just imagine Keith Hernandez playing an even tougher first base. A ball might never get through the right side of the diamond.

The post Unburied Treasure: When Keith Hernandez Was the Game’s Best First Baseman appeared first on Metsmerized Online.

Stephen Hanks, Author at Metsmerized Online

On This Date: Tom Seaver Strikes Out 10 Straight!

The Case for Tom Seaver As the Most Terrific Righthanded Pitcher Ever

Mets Flashback: A Pitch For Seaver

* * * * * * * * * *

Unburied Treasure: Rusty Staub, The Mets’ Hittin’ Magician

Rusty Staub: The Mets’ Hittin’ Magician

New York Sports, June 1984

On This Date: Tom Seaver Fires Record-Breaking 19 Strikeout Gem!

MMO Flashback: The Keith Hernandez Trade and Me

MMO Feature: Tom Seaver’s 19 Strikeout Classic Turns 45

The Johan Santana Injury Farce and Why This is S.O.M. (Same Old Mets)

Unburied Treasure: The Ed Kranepool Story

He was a major-leaguer at 17, “over the hill” at 19, and never became “The Pride of the Mets.” Yet he played 17 years in New York and did become a Metsian legend. Now that he’s 40, it seems an injustice that . . .

ED KRANEPOOL NEVER GOT A DAY

Unburied Treasure: When Keith Hernandez Was the Game’s Best First Baseman

Clinic Time: Keith Hernandez — The Best at First

He was a major-leaguer at 17, “over the hill” at 19, and never became
“The Pride of the Mets.”
Yet he played 17 years in New York and did become a Metsian legend.
Now that he’s 40, it seems an injustice that . . .