Born and raised in Brooklyn, New York, and attending St. John’s University in Queens, John Franco embodied a New Yorker. It was only apt that Franco would ultimately pitch for his beloved childhood team, the New York Mets.

Franco, 64, was a four-time All-Star and a reliable arm in the backend of the bullpen. During his 21-year Major League career, Franco made at least 50 appearances 14 times, recorded 30+ saves eight times, and rose to the occasion in the postseason, posting a 1.88 ERA with a 0.977 WHIP over 15 career games.

The left-hander was drafted by the Los Angeles Dodgers in the fifth round of the 1981 Draft. It was with the Dodgers organization that Franco started to develop his bread-and-butter pitch: the changeup.

Two years later, Franco was on the move to Cincinnati, where the Reds fully transitioned Franco from the starting rotation to the bullpen.

Over his first six big league seasons (all with the Reds), Franco appeared in 393 games and posted a 2.49 ERA with 148 saves. Only two pitchers recorded more appearances during that span (Craig Lefferts, 416; Kent Tekulve, 403). Since the earned run became an official stat in both leagues in 1913, only four pitchers have appeared in 350+ games while posting a sub-2.50 ERA in their first six seasons: Tim Burke, Brad Ziegler, Craig Kimbrel and Franco.

During the 1989 Winter Meetings, the Reds matched up with the New York Mets in a trade that sent Kip Gross and Randy Myers to the Reds, with minor league outfielder Don Brown and Franco heading to the Mets.

Franco was coming home.

In his fourteen seasons with the Mets, Franco appeared in 695 regular season games and saved 276 games (both franchise records). In 2001, Franco became the third captain in team history, joining Keith Hernandez and Gary Carter.

Franco provided the Mets with many memorable moments, from striking out Barry Bonds with a 3-2 changeup in Game 2 of the 2000 National League Division Series to being the winning pitcher in the first game back after the September 11 terrorist attacks to a memorable commercial appearance for the defunct retailer The Wiz.

Among all-time pitchers, Franco ranks third in games pitched (1,119), seventh in saves (424) and in a three-way tie for 22nd in ERA+ (138). Franco and Billy Wagner are the only left-handed pitchers with more than 400 saves.

I had the privilege of speaking to Franco, where he discussed developing his signature changeup, striking out Barry Bonds in Game 2 of the 2000 National League Division Series, and the role Franco’s father played in his development.

MMO: Who were some of your favorite players growing up?

Franco: My favorite players were Tom Seaver, Tug McGraw, Tommie Agee and that whole ’69 Mets team.

I loved Ron Guidry because he was a little left-handed pitcher like me.

MMO: At what point during your development did you start focusing on pitching?

Franco: I played shortstop up until 13, and then played center field and first base. Mostly around 13-14 [is when] I started pitching a lot.

MMO: What do you remember from your summer playing in the Cape Cod League?

Franco: That Ron Darling was my roommate and Dan Marino was our shortstop, but he left right before I got there. I think he made a good choice to go play football.

Playing in the Cape was a great experience. Not every college player gets the opportunity, and back then it was the highest level of college baseball.

MMO: What are your memories from the 1981 MLB Draft? Were the Los Angeles Dodgers on your radar?

Franco: I can tell you that the Dodgers were always a team that invited me to their tryouts. They always had their local tryouts at Poly Prep High School; that’s where my two older children went to school. The Dodgers were always there and they would invite me, along with the Baltimore Orioles’ scout named Al Goldis. The Dodgers’ scouts were Steve Lembo and Gil Bassetti. Those were the guys who gave me an opportunity and invited me to the tryouts.

I didn’t know I was going to get drafted by them, but I was happy that I did.

MMO: At what point did you start tinkering with your changeup? And is it true that Hall of Famer Sandy Koufax played a role?

Franco: Absolutely. When I was in the Instructional League with the Dodgers, Sandy Koufax, Dave Wallace – who’s my favorite pitching coach of all time – and Larry Sherry, our minor league coordinator, helped me develop that changeup.

When I got traded to Cincinnati, there was a left-handed relief pitcher named Freddy Norman, who had a circle change. I picked his brain a little bit. And then I picked the brain of Mario Soto, who had probably the best changeup in baseball back in the eighties.

One of the guys I sat and learned so much about pitching and how to act was Tom Hume. He was one of my favorite teammates in Cincinnati. He was one of the veterans who took me under his wing. I still keep in contact with him to this day.

MMO: You mentioned Dave Wallace. In previous interviews, you’ve heaped a ton of praise on him for your development. What specifically did Wallace do to help you?

Franco: I can tell you when I was pitching with the Dodgers in a couple of minor league games, and in one particular game, I was getting ahead in the count but wasn’t striking guys out. Dave called time, came to the mound, and had a lot of choice words for me which I can’t say. [Laughs.] That kind of put a lightbulb on, and I thought, you know, this isn’t college anymore. He kind of straightened me out and made me realize to stop acting like a fool and just concentrate on pitching.

I owe him a lot of credit for my maturity and development. Fast forward, and he became the pitching coach with the Mets, so it was great coming full circle.

MMO: At what point did they ask you to transition to the pen?

Franco: I was a starter in the minor leagues with the Dodgers. In ’81, I got drafted, and then in ’82 I went from A-ball to Triple-A because one of their pitchers got hurt. I later went down to Double-A and then the following year I went to Triple-A Albuquerque, and they moved me to the bullpen there.

I got traded to Cincinnati and I went back to starting. They had a number one draft pick named Ron Robinson, who eventually became one of my best friends and roommate with Cincinnati. He was a starter and and they moved me to the bullpen.

My initial thoughts were it sucked because I always thought I’d make it as a starter, but [relieving] was the quickest way to get to the big leagues. I had the type of arm that could throw almost every day. As a starter, I wasn’t a big guy, but I was a full-energy guy, and by the sixth I used to get tired. Career-wise, I think it was probably the best move. Whoever thought of that in the Reds organization, I owe them a lot of credit!

MMO: What were your initial reactions when you heard you were being traded to the Mets in December 1989?

Franco: I was kind of shocked. That winter, the Cincinnati general manager called me because they wanted to give me a three year extension, and asked what I’d be looking for. I said, ‘I haven’t talked to my agent.’ I saw some stuff in the papers back home saying the Yankees were really interested in me.

A week later, the GM for the Reds called me again and said Lou Piniella, who became the new manager, wanted to meet and have lunch. That was about a week before the winter meetings.

The winter meetings came, and I got a phone call saying I was traded to New York. I just assumed it was the Yankees. About ten minutes later, I got a call from Joe McIlvaine, who was the GM of the Mets, so I knew it was them.

I was very, very happy. I mean, I would’ve been happy for the Yankees, too, because it would still mean pitching back home. But the Mets were the team I grew up rooting for.

MMO: I’m sure you received a ton of ticket requests once you came back home to pitch.

Franco: I had a lot of cousins that I didn’t know I had! [Laughs.]

I had two phone lines at my house: one for family and one for friends. My wife, Rose, did a great job in handling the ticket situation. I always told everyone we’re home for 81 games, everybody can’t come to the same games, but pick and choose the ones you want to go to.

MMO: Can you share the reason why you wore the orange undershirt underneath your jersey?

Franco: I wore the shirt in honor of my father, who was a sanitation worker. My dad was my buddy, my best friend.

My dad didn’t like to fly. When I was attending St. John’s, we went to the World Series in Omaha. My brother, Jerry, and my dad were driving and the car broke down in Pennsylvania, so they had to turn back and miss it. But all through the minor leagues, he drove to Florida, Texas, etc.

When I had bad games, I’d call him up, and he would just make me feel good. He would tell me to put things in perspective, that I still have an opportunity, and turn the page on this one and focus on the next game. He never got mad, never yelled. Even when I was playing in high school and college, he was always away from the other parents. He stayed down the line and kept to himself. People would ask him, “Don’t you talk about your son?” He’d say, “No, I let my son do the talking between the lines.” That’s how he was.

He always demanded respect for the game; don’t disrespect baseball. He didn’t believe in booing players. My brother and I would go to games with him and even if the team was playing badly, you didn’t boo the guys. He loved baseball and he was a very important part of my life and development.

MMO: I assume your father was the person who introduced you to baseball.

Franco: He was. I also had an older brother; he passed away about a year and a half ago, and he was five years older than me. I owe him a lot of credit because we used to play games against each other and he’d beat my butt! But it made me more of a competitor, and as I got bigger and stronger, I started beating him. I owe him a lot of credit for my competitiveness, that’s for sure.

MMO: As a reliever, you need to have a short memory and be able to bounce-back after a tough game. How would you specifically handle those situations? Were you someone who utilized any visualization techniques?

Franco: There were a couple of visualization techniques that I used. Mentally, you had to be tough; you had to have a short-term memory. I used to compare a closer to a field goal kicker; if you save 15 in a row, everyone knows you. But the one you blow is the one they remember. A field goal kicker can make ten in a row, and when he misses, that’s the one they’ll remember.

It used to bother me more because I blew the saves of guys like Al Leiter, Tom Glavine, Mike Hampton or Bobby Jones, and they pitched their tails off and I come in for one inning and blow it for them. Those guys worked their tails off for seven-eight innings. That’s what bothered me most about blowing a save.

It would stick with me for a night. I used to watch the replays on ESPN and look to see where the pitch location was. I would try to visualize and do better next time. The good thing about being a relief pitcher was you could get in there the next day and save a game instead of blowing it.

MMO: You pitched both out of the windup and from the stretch at various points throughout your career. Was that more of a feel-thing for you, or were the specific reasons behind those choices?

Franco: When I first came up, it was mostly out of the windup because I was a middle relief/setup man with Cincinnati until I took over [the closer role]. And then my first year or two with the Mets, I was out of the windup. I realized coming into the game there’s less margin of error, and it’s more compact for me being in the stretch rather than the windup.

MMO: One of the lasting memories Mets fans have of you is when you struck out Barry Bonds looking on a 3-2 changeup in the bottom of the tenth in Game 2 of the 2000 N.L.D.S. For your career, you held Bonds to a .229 batting average and a .568 OPS over 39 regular-season plate appearances (and 0-for-2 with two strikeouts in the postseason). Did you have a specific game plan and pitch selection when facing Bonds?

Franco: Barry and I had the same agent, so I knew Barry for a while. I used to tell him, ‘You’re the greatest hitter, I don’t know how I get you out.’ He would always tell me that if he hit a home run against me he’d run around the bases backwards. [Laughs.]

We had some friendly competition, and he came close one time; he hit one off the wall. I really liked the challenge, and Barry was very challenging. You’d throw him fastballs and sliders; I never threw him a changeup until that playoff game.

I talked to John Olerud, who was our first baseman and a great left-handed hitter, and I asked him what the toughest pitch to hit off a lefty was. He said a changeup, so I put that in the back of my mind.

In that particular game against the Giants, I threw a 3-1 fastball that Barry fouled straight back. If he would’ve hit it, that would’ve landed in Oakland. [Mike] Piazza kept putting the fastball sign down, and I kept shaking him off. I had a base open and I decided if I walk him, fine; if not, I’ll take a chance with it. Just so happens, I threw a 3-2 changeup for a strike and got him out.

I think the next time I faced him in that series, he was looking for it (changeup), but I got him with a high fastball. We had some good battles.

MMO: Who are some hitters who gave you the most trouble during your career?

Franco: At the top of the list, and I think he gave everyone trouble, was Tony Gwynn. Then there were hitters like Mariano Duncan and Bob Dernier, who were more contact hitters.

I really didn’t have too much of an issue with the big home run hitters, it was the contact guys. Gwynn was just amazing, no matter what you threw him he hit it. I got to the point where I’d just throw it down the middle and hope he hit a line drive at somebody.

MMO: What did it mean to be named the third captain in Mets history? Were there any additional responsibilities you took on?

Franco: Not really. It was a great honor to be shown the respect from my teammates and the organization.

As a captain, if guys had a bad day, you’d go up to them and talk. Some might’ve had off-the-field problems that you might be able to help them with. When the team was going bad, you’d call team meetings. If we needed guys to relax and there was too much media in the locker room, I’d say, ‘We’re having a meeting,’ and Jay [Horwitz] would clear them out.

Jay would ask me, “What time’s the meeting?” I’d say, ‘There’s no meeting. I just want guys to relax.’ I tried to be a leader and lead by example on and off the field.

MMO: You’re third all-time in regular season pitching appearances with 1,119 games. Do you take pride in your place on that leaderboard?

Franco: It means a lot. I love the game and I love to play. Being a reliever is almost like being an everyday player. I had a great opportunity to do what I did for a long time.

MMO: Playing 21 years in the majors, and racking up the number of games that you did surely took a toll on your body. What would you do stay in shape?

Franco: The difference, I think, between players now and when I played is once the season’s over, guys today seem to take a week off and then they go right into throwing. I think that puts strain on their arms. I did a lot of weight training, and when I got closer to spring training, I cut my training in half in terms of weight and always did cardio and core. I ate well and my wife is in great shape too, and she made sure I ate well. I think there are too many gadgets now and gurus with these instructions and workouts. I think that adds a lot to these injuries.

I used to play basketball and throw the football around, and that was part of my workout. I’ll tell you a funny story: When I played for Cincinnati, I used to play in a touch football league in the offseason. I was a quarterback with the YMCA league. I used to have to sneak out because my dad would say I was crazy for playing, but that kept my arm in shape all winter. Once I got traded to the Mets, that was it. My career in touch football was over.

MMO: What have you been up to post playing career?

Franco: I’ve been retired since 2005 and still work with the organization periodically. I’ll go to spring training when I’m invited down. I’ve been one of the ambassadors and I do alumni work with Jay and the organization. I represent the team in various functions if they need me to do certain things.

I would love to get back into the game in some capacity. We’ll see what happens but I’m enjoying life. I took up golf a bit more seriously; I’m still not good at it, but I enjoy it. Hopefully one day, with the Era Committee, I get elected to the Hall of Fame.

MMO: Your candidacy is certainly an interesting one. Relievers haven’t been given the same attention as other positions for the Hall. If Billy Wagner makes it in his last year of eligibility, perhaps that will help your case.

Franco: My numbers are just as good as most of the guys in there, except for probably Mariano Rivera and Trevor Hoffman. If Billy gets in, that might open the door for me. I still think I belong in there, but things don’t always work out that way. Maybe the Era Committee and the former players and executives who are around the game will realize that.

MMO: When you look back on your career, John, what are you most proud of?

Franco: I’m most proud of being able to take the ball every day, being a good leader and respected on and off the field.

The post MMO Exclusive: Franchise Saves Leader, John Franco appeared first on Metsmerized Online.

In fact, stickball brought refuge to a young Kranepool. As his stickball reputation grew, local gangs treated Kranepool well and insisted he not hang around with them after dark as they didn’t want him to get into trouble and not be able to play on their teams.

Growing up in a single-parent household, Kranepool was drawn to athletics, mainly basketball and baseball. With the guidance and support of his next-door neighbor, Jimmy Schiafo, who acted as a father figure, the left-handed hitter was developing and drawing interest from Major League teams.

The team that showed the most interest in Kranepool’s services was that of the recently-formed New York Mets.

Sixty-one years after a then-17-year-old Kranepool signed a contract with the Mets, the Bronx-native has recently penned an autobiography on his life and playing career called “The Last Miracle: My 18-Year Journey with Amazin’ New York Mets.”

The memoir, published by Triumph Books, focuses on Kranepool’s development as a player, memories of the club’s first World Series championship in 1969, organizational miscues and his life-saving kidney transplant.

Triumph Books

Kranepool, 78, offers frank and transparent views on a myriad of topics, including his displeasure of Yogi Berra’s managerial decisions, resentment toward Gene Mauch for not playing him in his only All-Star Game appearance in 1965 and frustration with many of the Mets’ front office moves in the mid-to-late 1970s.

Over his eighteen-year career, Kranepool played for just one organization, a rarity in today’s game. Kranepool is the franchise leader in games played (1,853), and owns the third-most hits (1,418) and fifth-most RBIs (614). ‘The Krane’ also owns the eighth-most home runs by a player under the age of 20 in Major League Baseball history with 12.

In the latter part of Kranepool’s career, he developed into a dependable bat off the bench. In 1974, Kranepool went 17-for-35 (.486) in pinch-hitting opportunities, setting a single-season record for highest batting average by a pinch hitter.

I had the privilege of speaking with Kranepool over the phone, where he discussed his early development in the Bronx, spending nearly two decades with the Mets and his kidney transplant.

MMO: What prompted you to write the memoir?

Kranepool: I just figured I had a lot of stories to tell. Ralph Kiner is not around, so why not let the fans enjoy them? I participated in all of them since 1962, and there’s nobody here to talk about that stuff.

MMO: A prominent figure throughout your youth was your neighbor, Jimmy Schiafo. You write in the book that he acted as a father figure. How important was his presence in your life and early development as an athlete?

Kranepool: I was brought up without a dad; I lost my father in the war. I needed a replacement and he was my next-door neighbor and took a liking to me.

He had two boys and they were involved in baseball, and one was on my team. He worked us all out, kept us in shape and taught us the fundamentals of baseball. That’s really where I got my start.

MMO: You write that your reputation for baseball started by playing stickball in the Bronx. What memories do you have from playing stickball?

Kranepool: Stickball was the game to play in the Bronx because you had a lot of playgrounds with concrete fields; you didn’t have a lot of playing fields that were being taken care of. We played every day.

Being a guy from the Bronx, we didn’t have a lot of money in our pockets, so we were going out to camps and stuff like that in the summer. We all got together at the playgrounds and worked out every day. We ran there after breakfast and stayed there until lunch. We then ran home to grab a sandwich and came back and played basketball or baseball or whatever you could do on the playground.

It was cheap, inexpensive and a lot of fun for all of us.

MMO: Your first significant injury was when you fractured your elbow on your throwing arm in your second year of Little League. You write that your elbow never healed and you never had surgery to repair it. Did that injury ever bother you later in your career? And do you think you would’ve kept pitching?

Kranepool: I think I could have pitched. I was an outstanding pitcher in Little League and set all kinds of records. I was never the same afterwards, and nobody really knew about it. That’s something you don’t brag about with any type of deficiency you might have. So I played with it.

Did it affect me? It probably did; it probably affected my swing. I was a better player, I think, before that [injury]. But you still play and overcome and enjoy the game of baseball. I played every day and was able to perform, and we enjoyed ourselves.

To this day, it’s not right and never will be.

MMO: Is it true that you taught yourself to throw right handed after that injury?

Kranepool: I did! I caught for a year and a half and I can throw right handed. I’m not as good right handed as I am left handed because I never continued it. But I could throw because I wanted to hit. Certain things you can’t do so you just overcome them and keep trying.

MMO: That reminds me of Billy Wagner learning to throw left handed after breaking his right arm when he was a kid.

Kranepool: Well, that’s what it is. You use the other one and compensate for that. If you keep throwing with the opposite arm you’re going to overcome everything.

I did it for a year and a half, and I had fun doing it. I liked catching because you’re in the action.

MMO: Can you talk about the interest that the New York Mets showed in you throughout your high school career, and the relationship you developed with scout Bubber Jonnard?

Kranepool: Bubber was the scout in the tri-state area, and he followed all the players as they were growing up. When I was in sandlot baseball, I attracted a lot of attention because I was a pretty good hitter, and pitched a little bit but could never throw the same [after injury].

I really attracted the Mets because of my hitting. They followed me during high school and went to all my games.

When I signed, I graduated high school, and two days later the Mets came to my door, sat on my doorsteps, and wanted to talk a contract because you can’t sign until your graduating class is out. They were the first ones in my house, and they sat there all night, and we finally signed a contract.

MMO: I still can’t wrap my head around the fact that you graduated high school, signed a major league contract and then took a plane to the West Coast to meet the Mets just a few days later. Do you remember what was going through your mind at the time as a 17-year-old?

Kranepool: It was excitement for myself signing a contract. It was my goal as a Little Leaguer to start and play in the major leagues and perform. I didn’t expect to go out to the National League and to Los Angeles straight away, but I did.

They packed me up and put me on a plane; the first time I ever flew. Little did I know that opening night out there was Sandy Koufax. He pitched a no-hitter and struck out 13. I told Casey [Stengel], ‘I’m ready for college.’ [Laughs.]

MMO: You sat next to Casey Stengel during games to observe what was happening and get a feel for the major leagues when you arrived. What were some of your early takeaways from sitting next to Stengel?

Kranepool: He was having a good time with himself. He was 71, enjoying baseball, loving life and always discussing the game. He was the first one at the ballpark and the last one to leave.

He put a lot of time in on the team, but we just didn’t have the talent. We had a lot of older guys who were past their prime. Back in those days, 35 was more than your prime, and he knew that he really didn’t have the talent to really perform against the other teams.

Stengel took a lot of pressure off of guys because he kept the press busy writing stories about the Mets, talking about the old Yankees, all kinds of things. It made it easier for the players to perform because losing 100 games was not easy for any team. It’s tough to lose 100 games, and we did it for several years.

MMO: Obviously, the first seven years of the club’s existence were disappointing and underwhelming. And then came 1969. When did you start to notice that things were changing for the better in the organization?

Kranepool: We made a lot of changes in the front office, and of course, we acquired Gil Hodges in 1968. He was a young manager coming over from Washington, and he taught us how to play the game and how to win.

We were better in ’68. I think it was the second time we hadn’t lost 100 games and we thought it was a big improvement. In spring training, he discussed it with us and told us to set some goals for ourselves and taught us how to win, how to play the game and how you should play. A win here or there makes a big difference at the end of a season. So we did perform better.

By the summer of ’69, we started to get to .500. When we got to .500, it was at the stage of the season where we had never been that high in the season.

We started to play really good baseball, and in the second half of the season, we won 60-to-70 percent of our games. We beat every club that we had to and went on to win the pennant. We beat the Cubs by eight or nine games, and they were up eight or nine games most of the year.

MMO: Something you write about in the book is that you wish the club gave you more time to develop, especially when it came to the mental preparation of the game. Looking back, how would you have handled a young Ed Kranepool?

Kranepool: You can’t handle that any differently; they’re in control of your outcome. I would have been better off playing in the minor leagues for a year or two, developing with guys my own age; this way you can perform up to what your ability is.

Every time I went to the minors, I hit over .300 and was one of the outstanding players in the league. I just never developed.

You don’t improve facing Koufax, [Bob] Gibson, [Don] Drysdale, [Juan] Marichal and all of these Hall of Famers. There were so many of them in the National League in the sixties, and if you look at the records, most of those guys made the Hall of Fame. Guys don’t really perform and improve against those types of pitchers.

MMO: Did you feel pressure to succeed right away given all the hype and publicity surrounding your signing?

Kranepool: I did because everyone expected a whole lot more from you. They wanted you to do more because they wanted you to lead them to the pennant. And that’s why they were frustrated: they wanted to win. I don’t blame them, I wanted to win!

Until they surrounded me in the lineup, they could always pitch against you. I was an aggressive hitter, and I wanted to swing. I wasn’t going to walk my way to the major leagues. I would swing at pitches that were out of my strike zone, out of my hitting zone, and I didn’t perform with it.

As I matured and got older and caught up with the league, I started to produce some numbers that the Mets were expecting. But I’d been around so long that the organization said, “Maybe he’s over the hill.”

I was in the league for 17 years and performing. I could have done a lot better late in my career; I hit .300, .320, .290, .280. Those are competitive numbers for the better players in the league. But people still remember that you struggled when you were 17-18 [years old] in the league.

MMO: You were a terrific pinch hitter, as you posted a career .277 batting average in those situations. Can you talk about some of the challenges of pinch-hitting, and the preparation it takes in order to come up late in a game?

Kranepool: Mentally, I wanted to prove the manager wrong. When I wasn’t playing, I should have been playing. They should have had me in the lineup so I would get four at-bats instead of one.

Once I had that job, I prepared myself, and in the middle innings took some extra swings down below in the dugout and got myself ready and had my bat prepared. I knew when I was going to pinch hit; I didn’t pinch hit when the game was not on the line. It was always in a crucial situation where the game was on the line and I knew who was going to pitch, so I was physically ready to pinch hit.

As I got older, I did it so well that I was efficient in it. A team like the Mets, when they’re not playing well, you don’t have that many opportunities for game situations. You’re not going to pinch hit when you’re down 6-0 and you have a couple other options to choose. They’re going to use them, and I never got a chance to play in a lot of games.

It was a situation where I was doing it to show up the manager and work my way back into the lineup. But I did it pretty well.

MMO: From reading your book, you can tell how much respect and appreciation you had for Gil Hodges. From everything I’ve read about Hodges, he really seemed like a manager who was ahead of his time with his methods and how he managed a ball club. In your view, what did Hodges do well as a manager?

Kranepool: Gil learned how to use everybody and had one set of rules. He was a very tough disciplinarian. I had trouble with Gil in the early years, I had some disagreements with him, and we didn’t get along for two or three years. But I fought through it, and he did also.

He worked with me and sent me out to show me that he was in charge, and I went down to the minor leagues and hit over .300 and worked my way back to the majors. M. Donald Grant gave his word that he would get me back to the majors and wouldn’t just strand me in the minors. When I performed, he lived up to his promise and I got along very well with Mr. Grant.

MMO: I loved the anecdote you shared about winning a Kobe bull while barnstorming with the Mets in Japan in 1974. Can you talk about that event, and how you ended up with a bull as a prize?

Kranepool: I won a bull in Japan because I was the best hitter on the ball club. I led the team in home runs and average and played well over there and got an award.

It was quite funny how I ended it in the last game of the year. It was either myself or the first baseman the Giants had, Sadaharu Oh. We had a couple of home runs apiece, and then I hit a home run in the first inning. They moved the bull to one side of the field, and it looked like I was going to get it. Then Oh hit a home run, and they moved the bull back to the third base-side. Towards the seventh or eighth inning, I hit another home run, so I won the bull. I hit about eight home runs in 18 games.

They gave me the award, and it was fun. I didn’t bring it home because it was too expensive; you had to leave it in quarantine for a while. I traded him for a couple of first-class tickets to New York and left the ballclub with a week to go. We had a full week left, but I didn’t choose to stay in Japan.

MMO: You’re very honest and transparent throughout the book, especially with certain individuals like Gene Mauch, Yogi Berra, Joe McDonald and Joe Torre. Can you talk about your openness with some of the displeasure you had for certain individuals?

Kranepool: Whoever’s in charge, if they don’t treat you right, you’re going to treat them the same way they treated you. They didn’t make considerations and didn’t keep their promises, so there’s no way you’re going to like them.

Gene Mauch was a tough manager to play against. He always wanted to win and do anything to win for his ball club, had nothing to do with me, but he was tough on us. You wanted to beat him, and every time we played, you performed a little bit better.

Some of our people were incompetent in our organization. They made deals and trades and got rid of players who should’ve been playing, and other guys they kept. I wanted to win as a young player coming up; I was tired of losing. When they kept making bad moves, I critiqued them and let them know that I didn’t like it.

The only thing I wanted to do was win and win a World Series, and win a couple of them. We should’ve won two, we only won one. We lost the second one, and that was incompetence on the manager’s part. We should’ve been a better ball club then we were. If Gil was alive, we win more pennants, and become better for it.

MMO: One of the many things I learned while reading your book was that you were offered the opportunity to work with Robert Redford for “The Natural.” Can you talk about that?

Kranepool: We did. A lot of guys got opportunities when they were performing there. You had to play and do it in Buffalo. I didn’t choose to go up there because I didn’t know how long I was going to be at minimal pay.

Robert Redford was the star, and we had to teach him how to play baseball, and we worked a little bit with him in New York. But we weren’t going up to Buffalo. I wasn’t going to spend time up there without my family.

MMO: You write about your desire to work in the front office for the Mets after your playing career was through. Was that something you had given a lot of thought to?

Kranepool: I always did. I never wanted to manage, I didn’t want to confront the players on a daily basis; let them perform and do it on the field. I can work from above and around them, and that’s what I wanted to do.

I probably would have done it if Mrs. Payson stayed alive and didn’t give the club to her daughter and pick Joe McDonald to be the general manager. He killed off some minor league teams, traded those players, and then he traded from the major league club, and the Mets went from first to last.

MMO: You write about the process it took for you to find a kidney donor, and the help that Jay Horwitz provided to spread the word. Several years removed from surgery, how are you feeling?

Kranepool: I’m doing great! It’s four years since the surgery and it’s acting well. It did take me a couple of years to do it, and then we finally got one (kidney donor).

We were very lucky to be able to put together a structure, a deal that helped two guys; myself and another gentleman who was a firefighter. He actually got my donor and I got his wife as a donor; she was a perfect match. It worked out well for both.

MMO: When you look back on your career, Ed, what are you most proud of? 

Kranepool: I’m proud of staying long enough in the organization to finally see us win a World Series. That’s the one goal when you start, and I finished with a World Series. Like I said, the biggest disappointment of my career was losing the ’73 World Series in seven games.

The post MMO Exclusive: 1969 World Champion Ed Kranepool appeared first on Metsmerized Online.

The New York Mets made several shrewd moves in the early-to-mid eighties that aided the club in winning their second World Series championship in franchise history.

From their trade with the St. Louis Cardinals for Keith Hernandez and adding southpaw Sid Fernandez from the Los Angeles Dodgers in 1983 to trading for Ray Knight from the Houston Astros and acquiring Gary Carter from the Montreal Expos in 1984, the team supplemented its young, talented roster with star players and veteran leadership.

But another deal was made in November 1985 that involved eight players between the Mets and Boston Red Sox that would pay huge dividends in the club winning a franchise-best 108 regular season games and being the last team standing at the end of the 1986 season.

Left-handed pitcher Bob Ojeda was the main piece in this mega trade and played a vital role in both the regular season and postseason in his first year in Queens.

Ojeda, 64, signed with the Red Sox as an undrafted free agent in 1978 and pitched as both a starter and reliever for the major league club from 1980 through 1985.

The Mets were looking to add another left-handed pitcher to their staff for the ’86 season, and the front office zeroed in on Ojeda, whose experience both as a starter and out of the pen made for an attractive option.

What the Mets received from Ojeda in their championship season was more than they could have ever dreamed.

Among Mets pitchers, Ojeda led the staff in wins (18) and WHIP (1.090), while second in ERA (2.57) and fWAR (4.2). He finished fourth in the National League Cy Young voting and tossed a career-high 217.1 innings and an additional 27 in the postseason.

Ojeda came up big when it counted the most, making four postseason starts and posting a combined 2.33 ERA.

After Mike Scott’s brilliant 14-strikeout performance in the Houston Astros’ 1-0 win in Game 1 of the NLCS, Ojeda toed the rubber for Game 2 and tossed a complete game in the Mets’ 5-1 win on the road.

He became the third Mets pitcher in franchise history to toss a complete game in the postseason while allowing no more than one run, joining Tom Seaver (1969) and Jon Matlack (1973).

The lefty was also the starting pitcher in the Mets’ miraculous comeback victory in Game 6 of the World Series against his former club. He tossed six innings of two-run ball and didn’t allow the Red Sox to score after the second inning.

What’s incredible to remember is that Ojeda was this effective while dealing with a severely injured elbow. Ever the gamer, Ojeda had to navigate pitching through pain and whether that would ultimately lead to ineffectiveness and potential long-term injury.

In total, Ojeda spent five seasons in Queens, posting a 51-40 record with a 3.12 ERA in 140 games (109 starts). Among 42 pitchers with a minimum 500 innings pitched with the Mets, Ojeda ranks 9th in ERA and WHIP (1.182).

Following his playing career, Ojeda rejoined the Mets as a minor league pitching coach for several seasons and later joined SNY as a studio analyst and spent six seasons in that role.

I had the privilege of speaking with Ojeda where he discussed going undrafted, how he dealt with injuries and the championship season of 1986.

MMO: Who were some of your favorite players growing up?

Ojeda: I was born in L.A. and grew up there, and Sandy Koufax was my guy.

As a kid, I didn’t watch a lot of sports; I was too active and hyper. I could watch a couple of innings of a baseball game or a few minutes of a football game, and then I was out the door to go play.

MMO: At what point during your development did you start focusing primarily on pitching?

Ojeda: I didn’t really grow up honing in on pitching, and that’s an honest and straightforward question.

What happened to me was I didn’t get drafted. I only went to junior college and was good, but I did not get drafted. I signed after the draft for $500, which wasn’t a lot of money then either. [Laughs.]

I went all in. I was like, I got an opportunity, and I’m going to try my best. I showed up at Elmira, and my first manager was Dick Berardino, and this is a message to all these kids out here who hone in on pitching when they’re four years old, and that is, do not do that. Mom and dad, don’t do that to your children.

I showed up at the field and introduced myself to Dick. He said, “What do you do?” I said, ‘Skip, what’s the quickest way to the big leagues?’ He said, “Pitching.” I said, ‘Well, I’m a pitcher.’

Up until then I hit and pitched, and most guys that sign are very athletic and very talented, not only in different sports but different positions. And I was the same. But I did not zero in on pitching until after I signed.

MMO: You mentioned signing as an undrafted free agent with the Red Sox. How did that come about?

Ojeda: A good friend of my father’s, a fellow from the little town I was from, was this classic old dude. He always had a cigar in his mouth. He became a bird dog scout, and that’s a scout who is not really affiliated, but he knew people with the Red Sox.

Once I didn’t get drafted, he came up to me and my dad at my dad’s shop and said, “Look, I can get you $500, and you can sign with the Red Sox. That’s the best I can do.”

Even then, I was a little nervy, and I said, ‘How about $750?’ He said, “Nope, $500, that’s it. Take it or leave it.”

I took it, and that’s how my time with the Red Sox began. He was just a bird dog in town, real nice old man and he’s since passed away. But he’s the one that got me started in professional baseball.

MMO: In a New York Times article you wrote back in 2012, you described how you essentially always pitched in pain, even as a kid. Even through all the pain, you put together a quality career. How were you able to navigate and circumvent the pain throughout the course of your career?

Ojeda: A lot of these guys that we watch on television and are fans of, you don’t know what they go through to get on and stay on the field. A lot of people do that, and that’s the type of thing that I didn’t admit to myself when I was going through it, as with guys today. There are guys who play with pain, I am not the lone ranger by any stretch.

The crux of it is when pain transfers over to glaring injury. That’s the fine line, and how far do you want to push yourself in your particular circumstance to push through.

A lot of guys pitch in pain, but when you’ve already been diagnosed with an injury, and yet, continue to go through it, that’s the part I think is very individualistic. And there’s no right or wrong. It’s just what you can live with.

Now I sit around and am older, and I still do things in the game, but I look back and I would not have missed the ’86 playoffs or World Series for anything in the world. Sitting here today, had I chosen to sit out, would’ve been very difficult to live with.

You get one chance if you’re fortunate, and if you’re really fortunate, you get several chances to go all the way in any particular sport. To sit on the sidelines with something where it’s like, can I actually do this? Potentially hurt myself long-term but I don’t want to miss it, and I’m still effective; that’s an individual choice. That’s something that each guy has to navigate.

MMO: It’s interesting how you mentioned how so many players are dealing with nagging pains and sorenesses, and how fans don’t know what goes on behind the scenes. When I interviewed Trevor May while he was on the IL, he talked about toeing the line between playing through soreness and taking a needed rest when it was something more than that.

Ojeda: In my particular case, I had already been diagnosed with a severely injured elbow. The diagnosis was in and there was no more question about if it’s this or that. I was diagnosed with a frayed ulnar nerve and chips underneath the ulnar nerve and in the groove that was causing my arm to literally lock in place while I’d be warming up for a game.

That just becomes, I’m a rock head, but I don’t want to miss this. I have no regrets.

MMO: When were you diagnosed with a frayed ulnar nerve?

Ojeda: In ’86. The second half of the season, I was struggling pretty much most of the season, but it was like, okay, we all pitch in pain. Nobody plays 100%.

But it kept deteriorating, and I reached a point where I was taking anti-inflammatories and getting shots to get through it. I had the x-rays that confirmed there was an injury; it was a drastic elbow injury. I chose to continue because I was still effective.

My doctor, he’s passed away, Dr. Parkes, allowed me to do that. I told him, ‘Doc, if you say this happened, this conversation, I’m going to tell everybody that it never happened. And that you’re not telling the truth.’ [Laughs.] And for some reason, he believed me.

My trainer, Steve Garland, knew the truth, and yet, allowed me to continue. Why? Because it was my choice and my responsibility to accept the consequences of going forward with an injury, not pain, an injury.

I thank them every time I think about it that they let me do it.

MMO: In that same New York Times piece, two names that stuck out to me in terms of your development were Mike Roarke and Johnny Podres. Can you talk about what each of them meant for you?

Ojeda: I met the Pod in fall ball in 1978 with the Red Sox. He was awesome and a legend. He was this big, old boiler and was chain-smoking like a maniac. I loved the guy. He was just no-nonsense and would give it to you straight. He taught me my changeup and curve.

That was instrumental in me moving forward because I had just come off a 1-6 [season] in Elmira, and then I went down after the season to Sarasota. I learned the changeup and learned the curve, came back the following year, and then I was 15-7 with a 2.43 [ERA], and that was largely because of Johnny Podres.

Mike Roarke, I had him in the big leagues. Mike was the kindest gentleman you ever met. The kindest guys are usually the toughest ones, and Mike was a tough guy. But he was so kind.

My father pretty much taught me everything, but Mike Roarke taught me the professional angle of pitching. I learned immensely the difference between the minor leagues, college and professional [level], when it’s a job.  Mike was instrumental in that.

He was one of the finest gentlemen I ever met and very knowledgeable in the game.

MMO: Did you already have a changeup and curveball in your arsenal and Podres tinkered with your grips, or did he introduce those pitches to you?

Ojeda: Good question, he messed with my grip a little bit. My father did not let me throw a curveball until I was seventeen. My father was ahead of his time, I don’t know how he did it.

He was a big man at six-four, pitched in the army and knew the dangers of pitching because his shoulder blew out and that pretty much ended his career.

He did not allow me to throw a curveball, so I had no idea how to throw a curve. The Pod got a hold of me, and I think I just turned 20 when I went down, and he showed me the grip of the curve and a different grip on the changeup.

I had messed around with a changeup in high school and junior college, but I didn’t need it because I threw really hard. I was a one-trick pony.

MMO: What were your initial reactions on getting traded to the Mets in November 1985?

Ojeda: I was thrilled because Boston, at the time, was a train wreck. Ownership was in turmoil; the organization was turning over from veterans to bringing up younger guys, and there was a lot of animosity in that locker room. That’s one of the most important things that I did as a coach is that you don’t have to love everybody, but there was a lot of animosity and a lot of anger that the old guys were getting pushed out and the young guys were coming in.

To get out of that environment with kind of a bunch of stale, old, crusty guys and come over to New York, well, I sat there for two weeks in spring training and didn’t say anything, I just watched these guys. I felt like I was in a room full of puppies!

At that time, I was a five-year veteran, so I’d been around a little bit. I was a little jaded because I was around all these grumpy, old dudes. I just embraced it. I embraced their youthful exuberance and sort of their blind excitedness of what’s possible. When you’re young, you’re invincible, and I was like, Yeah, this is what I’m talking about.

Did everybody love each other? No. But there was a common goal, and that was to win every day starting at 7:05. And that was so refreshing to come into, especially as a veteran.

MMO: Did you have any idea of how special this ’86 club could be when you arrived?

Ojeda: Not a clue. I’m in my own world, and especially back in the day, I paid attention to what I was doing and what was happening in the American League; I could care less what was going on in the other league. I had my hands full doing my job, so I did not know one thing about the Mets.

I probably did a little reading once I was traded over, but you don’t really know exactly what it is until you get there. You’re reading stories that are interpreted from people who do their best to project a picture. But once I got in that locker room and sat there, honest to goodness, for two weeks and didn’t say a word and was just looking around and taking it in, I was like, Okay, I get it now. These guys are fired up.

Davey [Johnson] certainly sent the message out that we’re winning it all this year. That goal of winning it all was so important; that’s the only time I ever felt that. The only time in my entire career that I ever felt that.

It wasn’t like we were going to win the first ten or have the best pitching staff, the best defense, hit the most triples; none of that nonsense. You know what boys? We’re going to win the most games, and we’re going to win the World Series. Not our division; not this or that. We’re going to win the World Series. Anything short of that is a bust, and I think that helped propel our mentality.

That’s why we were like we were. They say we had a little panache, if you will, and we did and that’s because you have to. But you also have to have the horses, and this ball club was pretty good in ’85, and we just took it over the top in ’86.

MMO: Was there any pressure on not only joining a new team, but a new league when you came to New York?

Ojeda: No. I always put pressure on myself but I didn’t add to it.

I didn’t get to start the year in the rotation, I started in the bullpen. Early in the season, they scheduled a lot of off days, and Davey said, “You’re a starter, and you’re starting for me. We need you and that left side, especially going against St. Louis. But I have to start you in the bullpen.” I told him that was fine, and it’s not about me; it’s about my team, my new team.

I actually started four or five less games than everybody else, but I wasn’t complaining. I was just glad to be in the big leagues, glad to be with an exciting team and winning ballgames like we were eating potato chips; it was nuts!

MMO: What are your memories from your Game 2 start in the NLCS against the Houston Astros?

Ojeda: The season doesn’t start until the playoffs. I know it’s cliché, but it’s true. As you’re playing a season, early in the season there’s a degree of pressure; the middle of the season there’s a degree of pressure; and the end of season until you clinch the playoffs there’s a degree of pressure. You take a nice breath after you clinch, but then it starts all over. Then, all of a sudden, it’s intense.

If you go to the playoffs, the season does not start until you’ve reached the playoffs. That’s the goal and mindset you need to have. I don’t care how good of an April or August or September we had; until you get to the postseason, it becomes real.

When I started that game, it’s a sense of all or nothing. There’s no tomorrow. Each individual game is in and of itself a standalone. I’m not thinking about tomorrow; I’m not thinking about yesterday; I’m not thinking about last week; I’m thinking about today.

The pressure in your head and the pressure of the game is vital to have that attitude that it’s just a game, a huge game, but it’s one game. It’s one out at a time. I know these are clichés, but they’re very, very true and that’s what I drew on when I got to go through it.

MMO: So, you would use those mantras to help keep your mental game in check?

Ojeda: Yes, absolutely. You have to put yourself in a mental place where you can function. And that’s individual.

I was one of those people that liked to play for keeps when we used to pitch quarters and play marbles and all these old people games. We were doing it for fun, but I wanted to win. As soon as the bell rang, okay, this is for keeps. I tended to embrace that.

I always did embrace pressure; I embraced it and liked it. I used the pressure to help me rather than defeat me. But you have to manage it, and you have to manage it to where you can function. It’s not something that happens by accident, and there are people who, no question, fold under pressure.

You’re either a pressure folder or a pressure player. You do it 100 times, and you will be a folder each one of those times, and if you’re a pressure player, you’re going to come through in the time in large part.

There are existential reasons why failure and success happen, but there are people who are chokers and who do not like pressure. And that’s life. I’m not slamming them, that’s just life.

Pitching is individualistic, too, because I’m the guy on the bump; I’m in charge of everything. I promise you there are guys who will pitch a beautiful game and will lose 1-0, 2-1, 2-0. They’ll pitch a beautiful game and afterwards talk about how it was tough luck and know they threw a great game. There are guys who embrace that.

I wanted to be the guy and thrived on being the guy who wins 1-0; who wins 2-1. And it does not feel the same. I promise you, when you’re on the mound, it is not the same because people get exposed when they get a lead. There are guys, you can check with stats, who get a lead, and they’ll give it right back and then settle in. They’re comfortable being good enough to lose. Those are the guys you have to weed out to be a championship club.

MMO: You then started Game 6 of the NLCS, and after giving up three runs in the first inning, you buckled down and threw four scoreless innings after. Even though you guys had a 3-2 lead in the series, it seemed like that game was treated as a must-win, given that Mike Scott was looming for a Game 7. What stands out to you about that game and start?

Ojeda: That was the game where I just had three shots in my elbow two days before. No one knew. Dr. Parkes did it for me; I flew down to Washington and got the shots and flew back. He was awesome.

When I was warming up for that game, I felt like I had sandbags in my elbow. I just could not get loose.

I remember the great Mel Stottlemyre was looking at me like, wow, this really doesn’t look good. He didn’t want to say that, so he said, “How are you feeling? You feeling okay?” I told him, ‘No, I’m good, Mel. [I] just have a little trouble getting loose, but I’m good. I’ll be all right.’ [Laughs.]

I went out there for the first inning and was like, Oh, my god, how the hell am I going to get through this thing?

Fortunately, I got through that first inning and things loosened up, and I was able to give them a few more innings to help us get that win. That was all shot related because it helped with the pain, but it clogged up the elbow a little bit.

MMO: Was there pain pitching in your two World Series starts?

Ojeda: You couldn’t focus on it. The pain was still there, and like I said, I’m not the lone ranger. But I had an injury, and I chose to go forward with it. When you make that decision, you can’t start crying about it; you have to roll with it.

That game in Houston was the most uncomfortable game I had thrown. Game six was pretty uncomfortable as well, but at that point, once we got to the World Series, there are no more shots, no more anything. I just loaded up on pills and was going to do the best I could. I didn’t want to quit on my teammates.

I was still effective even with the injury, but I didn’t want to give up on my teammates, and I said let’s just go with this thing. If it ends your career, so what? I got to the World Series because inside me was a 12-year-old little boy who dreamed about this day. I wasn’t going to miss it.

MMO: Following your playing career, you took some time off before returning as a minor league pitching coach in the organization, and then took some more time before signing on as a commentator for SNY in 2009. What prompted you to come back to the game in a broadcasting capacity?

Ojeda: Very simply, they asked me. I know the Wilpons draw emotion from the fans, which is fine. But they treated me fantastic. They really did. I can’t speak for anyone else, but they treated me great. They actually came to me and said, “We want you back in the organization.”

I coached for those three years, and I told myself I was going to take a break. And then I went back to Shea Stadium for Shea Goodbye, as a matter of fact, and they told me they liked to have me back. They asked me what I’d like to do, would I want to coach again, do this, that or the other. I said, ‘I’m thankful you’re having me back because I do love the Mets and I do love baseball. So whatever you think.’

The great Curt Gowdy Jr. called me up and said, “Look, I’m not giving up this job. You have to audition.” I auditioned for Curt, and they liked what they saw, and then I rolled into that. But I never, ever had any ambitions to do television work because it wasn’t my thing or ambition or goal.

I loved every second of it. They were great to me. They let me be honest, and I always tried to be fair. It wasn’t just getting the microphone and talk smack. I didn’t want to do that because I grew up with that as a player. I’d be like, that ain’t cool, I wish that guy would say that to my face. They get on TV, and all of a sudden they’re talking all of this smack, so I said no.

I always did it like I was talking to a guy when I was doing a show. I’m looking at the camera, and if I’m saying something about a particular guy, I’m saying it to his face, because that helps govern what you say. All of a sudden, you’re not such a big shot when you’re talking to the guy.

I was on the backside of that, where I’m watching an interview on TV or listening on the radio, and I’m thinking, boy, this guy sounds like a different guy when he’s in the locker room. I didn’t want to be that guy, and that helped me do my job, which I loved doing.

MMO: I loved the work you did on SNY. I think many Met fans respected you for your frank and honest analysis, and the fact that you always came prepared during good times and bad.

Ojeda: Thank you very much, that is a great compliment. I didn’t want to phone it in for you guys because I’m a Met fan myself. I just wanted to be honest. And the one thing with you guys is you’re so well-informed. I’m not going to sit there on television and tell you 1+1=7, where you guys will say, wait, 1+1=2. What’s this guy talking about?

I wanted to come at you honestly and show that I did my research, did my homework, and I didn’t just throw out numbers. I used to be with the guys at the studio, and they were such a huge help, and we’d spend hours researching making sure that something I was going to say was true, honest and backed up by numbers.

I was very emotional, and still am, because I have feelings and it matters to me, but it’s based in truth and reality that someone can check. I may have gotten a little hot because it’s an emotional game and I’m an emotional person, but it was always honest, and I loved doing it. I wouldn’t mind doing it again.

MMO: I was going to ask you if you had any desire to get back in the game in a broadcasting/coaching/front office advisory role?

Ojeda: Yes. I had to take a breather because that’s the way I am. So, I’ve taken a breather and recharged my batteries. I’ve never liked doing anything half-way. If I’m going to be a baseball player, I’m going to be a baseball player. If I’m going to be a coach, I’m going to be a coach. If I’m going to be on TV and be an analyst, I’m going to give it my all.

I’m at a point now where I feel great. So, to come back in one of those capacities would be great for two reasons. One, I love baseball, I always have, and most of us do. And two, I really enjoy the Mets, and I enjoy the Met fan.

What’s amazing to me is the Mets are the organization, the players come and go, that’s just life. The players come and go, but you stay a Met fan. As a Met fan, I can’t be traded to the Dodgers; I’m a Met fan, that’s it, that’s my team!

I have that affiliation, and to do any of those above things with another organization is not that appealing, and I probably wouldn’t do it. But to do it for the Mets. Like I said, we don’t have the luxury of being traded; our feelings and allegiance are sort of locked in. And that’s what I admire about Met fans.

The vast majority of Met fans are true and blue and do not give up on their team. Sure, they take a lot of stuff for not winning much in the recent years, but they never quit on you. And that’s the way I feel. I don’t quit on myself, Met fans don’t quit on their team, and we’re in it together. It’s a great feeling to have that connection, and it can’t be broken.

MMO: What was it like coming back for Old Timers’ Day this year?

Ojeda: Fantastic! I have been around the ballpark a lot as a player, coach and on TV, but they treated 65 guys as if we were going in the lineup that night. It was incredible.

They just made us feel so welcome, I can’t say enough about the new ownership. It’s coming from the top down too; I will tell you that right now. That’s coming from the top. He (Steve Cohen) set a tone and a precedent, and it was evident like I have never seen since I last put on the uniform as a player there.

Like I said, they treated me great for years, and I have no axe to grind. I’ve been very, very fortunate with the organization. But everybody who was in that uniform and had some gray hair and a little limp, and even some of these younger guys who aren’t that far removed from playing, were made to feel so warmly welcome. It’s like, you are part of this, it’s like the cliché of a family, I’m not going to go that far but we were made to feel incredibly welcome.

It was so refreshing, and that breath of fresh air that breathed life into that stadium and the stadium even felt alive, it was beautiful. There was a beautiful moment that I thoroughly enjoyed, and I know a lot of my teammates and guys I just met loved it.

They all walked out of there feeling ten feet tall. It was amazingly done for these old guys. It was awesome.

Follow Bobby Ojeda on Twitter, @BobOjeda19

The post MMO Exclusive: ’86 Champ, Bobby Ojeda appeared first on Metsmerized Online.

The departure of the Brooklyn Dodgers was a contributing factor towards the birth of the Mets (and the blue in their uniforms). But the connections don’t end there. Gil Hodges, whose number will be retired by the Dodgers this weekend, played in Brooklyn and Los Angeles before finishing his playing career with the Mets and later performing miracles as manager. Steve Cohen even put in a bid to purchase the Dodgers in 2012.

New York’s current National League team has been met with some resistance when it came to dealings against one of the National League’s history-rich franchises, especially in October.

June 30, 1962

The expansion Mets’ National League-worst offense was ripe to be dominated, and the emerging Sandy Koufax did just that. Tossing the first of his four no-hitters and the first no-no in the history of the Los Angeles Dodgers, Koufax struck out 13 and walked five in a 5-0 victory at Dodger Stadium.

It would be the first of four consecutive seasons in which Koufax would pitch a no-hitter. The other no-hit victims were the 1963 Giants, the 1964 Phillies, and the 1965 Cubs.

Mets third-base coach Solly Hemus, in an attempt to psych out Koufax, yelled: “It isn’t really that easy, is it?” Koufax could be heard responding, “No, it surely isn’t,” even if his actions showed otherwise.

June 4, 1969

Manager Gil Hodges, unafraid to offer an honest evaluation of his team, said the Mets (when finishing with a winning record was a pipe dream), could not be considered contenders until they reached .500. They did so, for the first time in team history, on May 21. Then gave it back by dropping five in a row.

But in early June, in the midst of a franchise-long winning streak, Jerry Koosman and Tom Seaver—posting back-to-back gems—confirmed that losing records were a thing of the past.

Then Jack DiLauro followed those standout starts with an even better one. The left-handed Triple-A call-up christened his big-league career by baffling Los Angeles for nine innings—shutting them out on two hits and two walks. DiLauro did everything but get the win. It took a Willie Davis error, made on a Wayne Garrett single, to break a fifteen-inning stalemate.

1988 NLCS

The Mets had beaten LA in ten of 11 regular-season meetings. There was no reason why this trend shouldn’t have continued in the playoffs—except for Orel Hershiser.

That year’s Cy Young Award winner was coming off a 59-inning scoreless streak and his fingerprints were on four of the seven games—two of which the Mets found a way to win with late rallies.

Gary Carter‘s two-out ninth-inning hit against reliever Jay Howell was the decider in the series opener. New York used ingenuity (namely finding Howell to have pine tar in his glove) and eighth-inning offense to take Game 3.

Game 4 was a near lock with Dwight Gooden cruising and the Mets holding a 4-2 lead in the ninth. Then came Mike Scioscia with no outs and a runner on. Doc’s first pitch to the contact-hitting catcher (with three homers on the year) was down the middle. Scioscia sent it into the right-field bullpen. Arguably the most devastating moment to the Mets’ hopes for a late 80’s dynasty, it tied the contest and sent it to extras—which LA won in 12 and was saved by Hershiser.

Orel came back three nights later stunningly knock the Mets out of the postseason with a 6-0 shutout in Game 7. For eleven years, they never returned.

May 7, 1991

Darryl Strawberry‘s Mets career was filled with drama. The dramatics didn’t end when he left, either. His first game in New York since signing a five-year, $20.25 million contract to play in his hometown had all the expected hype. Each at-bat prompted strong reactions from the 47,700-plus in attendance, several of whom gave the “Darr-yl, Darr-yl” chant that became famous in Boston during the 1986 World Series.

Los Angeles was being shut out by Frank Viola when Strawberry added to his record number of Shea Stadium home runs. Darryl sent one over the left-center field fence for a two-run sixth-inning blast. He had a chance to complete an LA comeback in the ninth, but grounded out against John Franco with two down and the tying run at third base.

2006 NLDS

The best Mets season since ’88 also began with a postseason encounter versus Los Angeles. This one went far better. New York swept aside the Dodgers despite losing two veteran starting pitchers just prior to the series. Injuries to Pedro Martinez and Orlando Hernandez necessitated young John Maine to start the opener at Shea.

With the help of a crazy baserunning gaffe, the Mets got two outs on one throw home to catcher Paul Lo Duca.

Carlos Delgado went 4-for-5 with a home run and a key seventh-inning hit that keyed a 6-5 win. Tom Glavine pitched brilliantly in Game 2 and a late comeback at Dodger Stadium ensured that the series would go the minimum.

2015 NLDS

If ’88 had drama and anguish while ’06 had a positive end result, consider 2015 a mixture of both. Arguably the biggest win on the Mets’ road to the World Series came in the winner-take-call contest on the West Coast.

Perhaps the most impressive performance in the career of Jacob deGrom came in the deciding contest at Dodger Stadium. Clearly without his best stuff, deGrom battled through six innings and kept his team in the game long enough for Daniel Murphy to win it. “Murph-tober” was in full effect when he went deep to break a 2-2 tie and the bullpen held it from there.

What preceded it was Chase Utley‘s non-slide which took down Rueben Tejada as well as Yoenis Céspedes helping to christen the first postseason game at Citi Field in a 13-6 blowout in Game 3 with a monstrous home run.

May 27, 2016

On a Memorial Day weekend series that included a 1986 reunion and the attempted Chase Utley retaliation, the Mets got the better of the Dodgers after it appeared the New York bullpen was way too generous in giving it away.

Sporting the racing stripe unis from the last World Series champion, the Mets jumped out with three first inning runs and had a 5-1 lead into the ninth. Utley added to his villain legacy with a tying three-run double (part of a four-run inning), but the good guy prevailed. Curtis Granderson led off the bottom half with a homer that snuck beyond the right-field wall.

The post Forever Linked, Mets and Dodgers Have Their Classics appeared first on Metsmerized Online.

On January 5, 2004, Frank Edwin “Tug” McGraw, one of the most colorful players in Mets’ history, passed away from brain cancer at 59 years of age.

McGraw is most famous for coining the term ‘Ya Gotta Believe!” in 1973, during an M. Donald Grant address to the team when the Mets were mired in last place in the National League’s eastern division, and then made their unlikely ascent to a division title.

McGraw began his career with the Mets in 1965, after less than one full season in the minor leagues. He never pitched in Double A or Triple A, making the jump from Class A to the major leagues in spring training of 1965. McGraw was both a starter and reliever in the minor leagues, and served both roles in his early career with the Mets.

In 1965, McGraw posted a record of 2-7 with a respectable ERA of 3.32. His most notable achievement in 1965 was tossing a complete game win against Sandy Koufax and the Dodgers, giving the Mets their first victory against the Brooklyn native and future Hall of Fame pitcher.

After struggling primarily as a starter in both 1966 and part of 1967, McGraw was sent to the minor leagues, where he pitched for part of the 1967 season and all of the 1968 season. When McGraw returned to the Mets for the 1969 season, he began his journey as one of the best relief pitchers in the game.

Tug had a record of 9-3 in 1969, with an ERA of 2.24 and 12 saves. He went on to use his famous screwball, a pitch that, as a left-handed pitcher, faded away from right-handed hitters and in on left-handed hitters, to record 27 saves in 1972 and 25 saves in 1973. McGraw was outstanding down the stretch of the 1973 season. From September 1st through the end of the regular season, he went 3-0 with 10 saves and an ERA of 0.57.

Tug continued his fine pitching into the post season in 1973, throwing five scoreless innings against the mighty Cincinnati Reds in the NLCS, and tossing three scoreless innings in relief to win game two of the World Series against Oakland, after he had blown the save in the ninth inning. McGraw appeared in five of the seven games of the 1973 World Series, allowing just eight hits over 13.2 innings pitched.

After the 1974 season, McGraw was traded along with Don Hahn and Dave Schneck, to the Phillies for Del Unser, John Stearns, and Mac Scarce. As a Met over nine seasons, Tug had a record of 47-55 with 86 saves. He pitched a total of 792.2 innings, striking out 618 hitters and allowing 685 hits.

McGraw was on the mound when the Phillies won the 1980 World Series. As a Phillie, McGraw recorded 94 saves over 10 seasons. He ended his career with a total of 180 saves and a record of 96-92, to go with a 3.14 ERA. He was a two-time all star, in 1972 and 1975.

When thinking about Tug McGraw, in addition to “Ya Gotta Believe!”, I recall his trademark pounding of his glove against his knee when walking off the mound after an inning. He said it was his way of saluting the fans, whom he really liked, and the sentiment was equally returned. You can see the glove pound in the video below from the 1973 World Series.

Tug McGraw is singer Tim McGraw’s father. The two did not have a relationship until the singer was a teenager, but from that point had a strong relationship, as Tug wrote in his book “Ya Gotta Believe”.

Showing his unique character, McGraw was once asked if he preferred the new Astro Turf from Houston’s Astrodome, or grass. McGraw’s response was classic. “I don’t know, I’ve never smoked Astro Turf”.

Rest In Peace, Tug McGraw. Baseball needs more personalities like yours.

The post OTD 2004, Tug McGraw Passes Away From Brain Cancer appeared first on Metsmerized Online.

Mandatory Credit: Jayne Kamin-Oncea-USA TODAY Sports

In front of a sold out crowd sans the presence of super fan Mary Hart, and Gavin Lux in the lineup, the Dodgers dusted off their humiliating loss to stave off elimination.

Chris Taylor, the guy responsible for his teammates donning uniforms late into October, launched a postseason record three home runs in a win or go home, showing Braves offensive man of the hour, Eddie Rosario, whatever you can do, I an do better.

It was an ominous start when Joe Kelly, the first of many bullpen bodies to take the mound, left the game with bicep tightness after surrendering a sneaky Ozzie Alibies single, followed by a two-run homer to Freddie Freeman, one batter shy of completing the inning.

Former Atlanta reliever Evan Phillips came to the rescue earlier than expected, striking out Adam Duvall, preventing any further damage.

Braves ace Max Fried, who looks like an older version of the boy who took me to the sixth grade prom, surrendered a lone single to Trea Turner in the bottom frame, hopefully a sign of good things to come for the slumping second baseman.

Evans returned for seconds in the top of the second, getting Joc Pederson on a pop up to center, fanning Dansby Swanson and Travis d’Arnaud looking and swinging at a series of nasty sliders – prompting Ron Darling to share through Braves skipper Brian Snitker, that the righty didn’t have that stuff when pitching for Atlanta.

In the bottom half leadoff batter A.J. Pollock took Fried’s 94 mph four-seamer into the left field seats. Albert Pujols proving he’s still got game, delivered a sharp single to left, and Taylor, hammered a first pitch fastball, much further in the same direction, 406 ft. to be exact, putting LA ahead, 3-2.

Alex Vesia and his porn mustache, reminiscent of Charlie Finley’s Oakland A’s, replaced Phillips. As Will Smith flashed a sequence of signs, my husband complained that he was getting mixed signals. Max Fried, a good hitting pitcher, was punched out on a called strike three. Rosario singled to center, Albies flied out to left and with Freddie Freeman and his scorched bat at the plate, Smith nailed Rosario trying to swipe second.

In the bottom of the third, we learned that Sandy Koufax was Fried’s favorite player, sharing not only their Jewish heritage, but also his number 32, that he wore in high school. Unable to channel his hero, the lanky lefty lost Pollock on a base hit to left, followed by Pujol’s single to right center, and Taylor’s RBI single up the middle.

With a 4-2 lead, Dodger reliever Brusdar Graterol, always appearing hopped up on Adderall, retired the side in order in the fourth, striking out Duvall on a 90 mph slider after three servings of 100 mph heat.

Fried answered back with his first 1,2,3 inning on milder in comparison pitches in the mid-90’s.

In the top of the fifth, Graterol used eight pitches to erase the side in order, getting Pederson swinging and looking at a cutter, sinker and slider.

Leading off the bottom frame, Smith drew a walk and was eliminated along with Pollock on a 643 double play. Pujols free pass on seven pitches ended Fried’s outing, bringing Chris Martin to the mound. On his third pitch, Taylor took his namesakes 95 mph four-seam fastball into the center field seats for two more ribbies, extending the Dodger lead 6-2, receiving another hug at the plate from Pujols.

Blake Treinen, a calmer version of Graterol, took care of business in the top of the sixth keeping the hot-hitting Rosario from cashing in on his double by getting Albies and Freeman to fly out to left.

Braves brought in Dylan Lee to stop the bleeding in bottom half, which he succeeded, allowing a sole single to the surging Turner, who for the first time in the NLCS, was sitting at 2-3.

It took Treinen six pitches to retire the Braves in order in the seventh. And in the bottom of the inning, it took Taylor the same amount to drive in his sixth run, with a solo blast to left center, his third, living up to his moniker, CT3.

Corey Knebel struck out the side in the top of the eighth after surrendering a lead off single to Swanson. Jacob Webb had the dubious honor of pitching to the Dodgers in the bottom half, and didn’t fare better than those who preceded. Betts was back to playing like Betts, singling and stealing second. Turner brought him home on his first RBI base hit of the NLCS. Seager singled to center and Pollock, playing second fiddle to Taylor, knocked in three more runs with his second homer on a 94 mph four-seamer.

Kenley Jansen closed it out, retiring the Braves heart of the order, in order, with his signature hip twitching pitching.

So, for the Dodgers it’s now on to Atlanta with a hopeful, let’s win there.

The post Dodgers Say, ‘Not So fast,’ Beating the Braves to Survive Another Day appeared first on Metsmerized Online.

On January 5, 2004, Frank Edwin “Tug” McGraw, one of the most colorful players in Mets’ history, passed away from brain cancer at 59 years of age.

McGraw is most famous for coining the term ‘Ya Gotta Believe!” in 1973, during an M. Donald Grant address to the team when the Mets were mired in last place in the National League’s eastern division, and then made their unlikely ascent to a division title.

McGraw began his career with the Mets in 1965, after less than one full season in the minor leagues. He never pitched in Double A or Triple A, making the jump from Class A to the major leagues in spring training of 1965. McGraw was both a starter and reliever in the minor leagues, and served both roles in his early career with the Mets.

In 1965, McGraw posted a record of 2-7 with a respectable ERA of 3.32. His most notable achievement in 1965 was tossing a complete game win against Sandy Koufax and the Dodgers, giving the Mets their first victory against the Brooklyn native and future Hall of Fame pitcher.

After struggling primarily as a starter in both 1966 and part of 1967, McGraw was sent to the minor leagues, where he pitched for part of the 1967 season and all of the 1968 season. When McGraw returned to the Mets for the 1969 season, he began his journey as one of the best relief pitchers in the game.

Tug had a record of 9-3 in 1969, with an ERA of 2.24 and 12 saves. He went on to use his famous screwball, a pitch that, as a left-handed pitcher, faded away from right-handed hitters and in on left-handed hitters, to record 27 saves in 1972 and 25 saves in 1973. McGraw was outstanding down the stretch of the 1973 season. From September 1st through the end of the regular season, he went 3-0 with 10 saves and an ERA of 0.57.

Tug continued his fine pitching into the post season in 1973, throwing five scoreless innings against the mighty Cincinnati Reds in the NLCS, and tossing three scoreless innings in relief to win game two of the World Series against Oakland, after he had blown the save in the ninth inning. McGraw appeared in five of the seven games of the 1973 World Series, allowing just eight hits over 13.2 innings pitched.

After the 1974 season, McGraw was traded along with Don Hahn and Dave Schneck, to the Phillies for Del Unser, John Stearns, and Mac Scarce. As a Met over nine seasons, Tug had a record of 47-55 with 86 saves. He pitched a total of 792.2 innings, striking out 618 hitters and allowing 685 hits.

McGraw was on the mound when the Phillies won the 1980 World Series. As a Phillie, McGraw recorded 94 saves over 10 seasons. He ended his career with a total of 180 saves and a record of 96-92, to go with a 3.14 ERA. He was a two-time all star, in 1972 and 1975.

When thinking about Tug McGraw, in addition to “Ya Gotta Believe!”, I recall his trademark pounding of his glove against his knee when walking off the mound after an inning. He said it was his way of saluting the fans, whom he really liked, and the sentiment was equally returned. You can see the glove pound in the video below from the 1973 World Series.

Tug McGraw is singer Tim McGraw’s father. The two did not have a relationship until the singer was a teenager, but from that point had a strong relationship, as Tug wrote in his book “Ya Gotta Believe”.

Showing his unique character, McGraw was once asked if he preferred the new Astro Turf from Houston’s Astrodome, or grass. McGraw’s response was classic. “I don’t know, I’ve never smoked Astro Turf”.

Rest In Peace, Tug McGraw. Baseball needs more personalities like yours.

The post OTD in 2004: Tug McGraw Passes Away At Age 59 appeared first on Metsmerized Online.

Good Morning, Mets fans! 

After another tough loss last night against the Blue Jays. Rick Porcello (1-4, 6.07 ERA) is set to start against the Phillies with their pitcher yet to be announced. 

In his last outing, Porcello struggled more than he had in a while allowing five runs and on ten hits with five errors in only four innings. 

Hopefully, the 31-year old’s performance will be improved as time is ticking for the Mets season with only 13 games left. 

The game is set to begin at 7:05 PM EST, will be televised on SNY and can be heard on WCBS 880 AM.

Let’s see what’s been going on around the league.

Latest Mets News

The Mets lost yesterday’s game against the Blue Jays 7-3, as David Peterson struggled with his control.

Jeff McNeil left last yesterday afternoon’s game with “gastrointestinal discomfort,” per an announcement from the Mets.

The Mets have activated Steven Matz from the injured list, who will continue to pitch out of the bullpen.

Michael Wacha, after several tough starts, will be pitching out of the bullpen at least for the time being. 

The team is right there only being three games behind the wild card spot but time is running out in this shortened season. 

Latest MLB News

After losing Matt Chapman to a season-ending hip injury, the Oakland A’s plan to sign All-Star third baseman Jake Lamb to fill the position, according to Shayna Rubin of Mercury News.

The Yankees observed a moment of silence for Tom Seaver, “a true New York legend.” 

Cubs pitcher Alec Mills pitched a no-hitter yesterday, now with both Chicago teams accomplishing the feat this season. Mills was never recruited for college baseball; instead he walked by practice and told the coach he was good enough to pitch on the team. 

Albert Pujols hit his 660th home run tying Willie Mays for the fifth spot on the all-time list. 

Latest NL East News

The Marlins finished a seven-game series against the Phillies, passing them in the standings yet again. 

Phillies players J.T. Realmuto and Rhys Hoskins are set to get MRIs to analyze injuries occurring in yesterday’s games, with Spencer Howard being placed on the injured list due to right shoulder stiffness. 

Max Scherzer has his 98th 10 strikeout game passing Hall of Famer Sandy Koufax’s record. 

Latest on MMO

Michelle Ioannou continued her “How the Mets Saved Me” series.

Michael Mayer asked some Mets reporters about their view of the state the team is in currently.

Violeta Pietronico gave an update on the standings of the team in regards to the postseason.

On This Day in Mets History

On September 14, 2008, Jose Reyes became the first player to have four straight seasons of 50 or more stolen bases playing for a New York area team, which also includes the Yankees, Dodgers, and Giants.

Birthdays: Chad Bradford (46), Mike Draper (54), Harry Parker (73), Dave Hillman (93)

Let’s go Mets!

The post Morning Briefing: Can Porcello Regain Consistency? appeared first on Metsmerized Online.

If the Mets hadn’t converted all their disbelievers by now– those who were still convinced the Orioles superiority would overcome New York’s combination of pitching, timely hitting, and spectacular plays in the field — would be given even more of a reason to believe in miracles after game 4.

Of no miracle was the performance by Tom Seaver on this afternoon. Following a shaky opening game loss in Baltimore, Seaver was vintage at Shea Stadium as he even carried the Mets into extra innings. But the game probably would never have gotten to that point, and the Mets wouldn’t have taken a 3-1 series lead, if not for the heroics of a most unlikely defensive star. On the heels of Tommie Agee‘s exhibition in center field one day earlier, Ron Swoboda garnered the spotlight with one incredible catch that still ranks among the best ever in a World Series.

Here are some highlights to look for:

• Enjoy the pregame show plus commercials. Sandy Koufax and Mickey Mantle were among the many who predicted a Baltimore series victory, and provided analysis from a room that must have been used for a darts tournament.
• Original Mets manager Casey Stengel tosses out the first pitch around the 29:00 mark.
• Donn Clendenon, the eventual series MVP, continues to feast on the Orioles’ left-hand pitching at 59:00. It would be his second of three homers (each off southpaws) in the five-game set.
• Orioles skipper Earl Weaver proceeds to get tossed by home plate umpire Shag Crawford beginning at 1:05:31, becoming the first manager to be ejected from a World Series game since 1935.
• At 2:22:10, the play of the game — and maybe of the Mets’ franchise: Ron Swoboda’s sensational, diving play with runners on first and third and one out in the top of the ninth robs Brooks Robinson. Frank Robinson manages to tag up and score the tying run, but Swoboda’s heroics limit the damage.
• The Mets win it in the tenth as J.C. Martin “drives” in the winning run. His sacrifice bunt attempt is fielded by Baltimore reliever Pete Richert, whose throw to first base strikes Martin in the wrist and allows pinch-runner Rod Gaspar to come in from second base. The Orioles contest afterward that Martin interfered with the throw, but to no avail. Everything was coming up Mets.

The post Mets Video Vault: 1969 World Series Game 4 appeared first on Metsmerized Online.

Babe Ruth has been dead for over seventy years, but he’s been haunting Jane Leavy’s mind for over two decades.

Leavy, the New York Times best-selling author whose works include heavily researched biographies on Hall of Famers Sandy Koufax and Mickey Mantle, had been planning to write a then-novel on the most celebrated and, by most standards, greatest Major League Baseball player of all-time back in 1995.

Due to the voluminous works that were written on Ruth, Leavy felt it necessary to go the fictional route in order to better “inhabit the caricature that he had become,” as she says. She did not want to recycle the same information that had appeared in endless pages dedicated to Ruth in years past.

Sidetracked with her aforementioned works on Koufax and Mantle, Leavy returned to her Ruth project in 2011, when she met with his daughter, Julia Ruth Stevens, who is now 102-years-old. It was during a sit-down with Julia that her initial idea of writing a novel shifted.

Julia informed Leavy that Ruth’s father, George Sr., and mother, Kate, were separated, information that was not privy in previous works on Ruth.

While Leavy didn’t have the opportunity to speak with former contemporaries of Ruth, as other notable writers had, what she did have was the digitization of archived resources at her disposal. It was through a simple Google search that she further researched Julia’s claim of Ruth’s parents being separated. What she found was that not only were they separated, but George Sr. had filed for divorce from his wife after he found her in a compromising position with his bartender at the saloon he owned in Baltimore.

With reams of information at her fingertips – literally – Leavy was able to compile a profusion of information pertaining to Ruth’s childhood, which up until this point was filled with many myths and just plain falsities.

This amounted to her penning a six-hundred-plus-page biography titled “The Big Fella: Babe Ruth and the World He Created.” In it, Leavy dispels several decades-long myths, including the real reason Ruth was sent to St. Mary’s Industrial School for boys at the age of seven.

The book revolves around Ruth and Lou Gehrig’s 1927 barnstorming tour, after a season in which Ruth hit 60 home runs – a total that would not be exceeded until Roger Maris in 1961 – and Gehrig fresh off his first M.V.P. season. The book traces the superstars’ tour in fantastic detail while eschewing every career highlight. Instead, Leavy focuses on how Ruth transcended the game not only on the field but off it.

With the help of Christy Walsh, who pioneered the sports agent role, Ruth became a cultural phenomenon who made appearances in films, advertisements, and ghostwritten columns. With help from Walsh, Ruth ultimately became the model for the modern celebrity athlete.

Beyond the adulation Ruth was constantly met with was a man who needed the spotlight and people who loved him around. Being brought up in St. Mary’s, where they were overcrowded with young boys, Ruth knew and was used to being around large crowds, and felt at his best in those situations.

Understanding that notion, what the book does a superb job of is retracing young Ruth’s childhood in detailed form, to illustrate what made Little George – as his parents called him – into the Big Fella.

I had the pleasure of speaking with Leavy in late December, where we discussed how long she had thought about writing a book on Ruth, who Christy Walsh was and how important he was in Ruth’s life and debunking some decades-long myths.

MMO: How long had you been thinking of writing a book on Babe Ruth, and what was the process like?

Leavy: It was basically a nightmare. I’ve been thinking about it probably since 1995. That was when I took my then-seven-year-old son to the Babe Ruth Birthplace and Museum in Baltimore. At that point, the trip was for me to introduce him to the Babe, but also for me to research into what I thought would be a novel about Babe Ruth.

I somehow got sidetracked doing Sandy Koufax, and then Mickey Mantle. When they were done, where do you go? Where do you go after Koufax? You go to Mantle. Where do you go after Mantle? You go to Babe Ruth. And don’t ask me where I go next because I have no clue. [Laughs.]

MMO: I read in an interview you gave with another outlet that you took a full year just to read all the biographies already written about Ruth for your research.

Leavy: Yeah, I had to persuade myself before I could persuade anybody else that there was a new way to tell the story about Babe Ruth and a new story to tell. After [Abraham] Lincoln, Muhammad Ali and a couple of other people, he is one of the most written-about guys of the twentieth century.

He [Ruth] was written about repeatedly, and repeatedly well, starting with Bob Creamer in 1974. I had to be sure that there was something that I could add to what they had already done. I was very skeptical that I would find new material about him; my friends will tell you I was a bore for months!

There was nobody who was presently alive who I wanted to speak to who I could speak to because most of them are dead. I was able to get to some family members and to some elderly gentlemen who had seen him play. I knew that I wouldn’t have access to the teammates, opponents, managers, general managers, and Yankee officials that some of the other biographers had been able to speak with.

The only place that I was going to find stuff that was new was in archives. Those archives weren’t available in 1974, not in any way that you could easily access. As it turned out, there was plenty for me to write that was new.

Just as I didn’t have access to the living voices, Bob et al. didn’t have access to the voices that emerge out of legal documents that I was able to find at the Maryland State Archives and to newspaper articles. While they would’ve been in microfilm, you would’ve had to spend your whole life going through reams of tape in order to find what I could find with a click of the mouse.

Player’s Tribune

MMO:  I loved what you wrote in the introduction of your book about how Cal Ripken Jr. wanted to hold Ruth’s bowling ball at the Hall of Fame, so he could stick his fingers in the holes to see how wide his hand and spread were. Can you talk about that story a little bit, including what you found out about the diameter of his thumb?

Leavy: In June 2014, as a celebration of the 100^th anniversary of Ruth’s debut in the major leagues for the Boston Red Sox, the Hall of Fame opened a new Babe Ruth exhibit, which was the first new one in thirty years. I made sure to be there, and I was remembering what I had seen of him when I was a child and remembering his big red locker from Yankee Stadium standing sort of by itself, like a totem. Its doors were flung open so you could see the stenciled white letters “Ruth,” and the number three.

I get to this redone thing, which was upstairs on the second floor, and museums have changed a lot in the way they present things. It’s in a dim room with black ceilings, and Tom Shieber, the curator who is a very good friend and helped me a lot, had organized it sort of like a scrapbook if you were walking through his life.

By the time you get to the locker, it’s sort of subsumed in dark museum cabinetry, and it’s filled up with a bat of his, a picture of him sitting by the locker on his last visit to Yankee Stadium, silver loving cup that had been given to him, and all sorts of stuff. It’s become sort of an exhibit case more than an object.

While I’m standing there looking at it, I’m feeling claustrophobic on his behalf because I’m thinking, This is not big enough for the Babe. This is too dark for the Babe. He needs green grass; he needs wide expanses to gallop after fly balls.

As I’m trying to make myself stay there, Cal Ripken Jr. – who I covered as a young reporter for The Washington Post – in fact, I covered him in his rookie year, comes over to me and says, “Come here, I’ve got to show you something!”

He dragged me over to, I think, the last display cabinet where they had Babe Ruth’s blue and black paisley custom drilled bowling ball. After Babe retired in June 1935 and baseball couldn’t find anything or any place for him in the game, he spent a lot of time bowling, mainly by himself. And so this is the ball that he had used, and Cal says to me, in that very Cal way of his, “Gee, I wish I could stick my fingers in Babe’s ball.” [Laughs.]

I looked at him like, ‘Oh, come on, Cal. You realize what you just said?’

He really wanted to feel the spread of his hand. As silly as the initial statement sounded, what he was saying was, Here’s a great athlete of the late twentieth century, trying to get a grip and literally feel what was the greatness of Babe Ruth. He wanted to do that by feeling how large his hands were because he can’t get a tactile feel for the Babe any other way. So I said, ‘No problem, Cal. We can do that. I know there’s another ball downstairs.’

I went off to get Tom Shieber, and we were all set to go downstairs, but by that time, Cal had disappeared. What I did was, I got a bowling ball expert from Oneonta to come in with his bowling ball measuring tools, and he measured the distances between the thumb hole and the middle finger, the thumb hole and the pointer finger, which were ample; four inches, and the other one was about a quarter-inch shy of that.

The guy figured that the spread of his hand must’ve been about ten inches, which is plenty big but not overwhelming for big guys today. What blew him away was the diameter of the thumb hole. He measured that Babe Ruth’s knuckle on his left hand would’ve been exactly 1 3/32 inches wide; that’s approximately the size of an unshelled walnut.

If you want to know what made Babe Ruth, Babe Ruth, why he could equally handle a 54-ounce bat and make a baseball dance from the pitcher’s mound, that’s the reason.

MMO: That anecdote very early on stuck with me, especially in relation to how he could handle such a big bat for his career.

Leavy: You know what’s funny? When I started writing about Sandy Koufax back when, people would say to me, “Have you shook his hand?”

I said, ‘No, not yet.’

Well, then I did, and I’m not a big person, but my hand splayed out and sits in the palm of his hand. When he shook my hand, it reached all the way up past my elbow.

They were trying to say to me very much the same thing about Ruth. Look at what he was physiologically able to do in the way he held a ball and could make it do what he wanted to at his behest.

MMO: One of the myths you debunk in the book was the fact that young George was not an orphan or an incorrigible. Can you touch on what you found out about why he was sent to St. Mary’s?

Leavy: We live in such a different time than the one he grew up in. Today, if you have family woes and a tough growing-up story, somebody pitches it to an online magazine or a cable show, and you get sympathy votes for that. In Babe Ruth’s era, when he was coming up, this was nothing to brag about and nothing to talk about.

In the absence of fact, two colliding myths grew up. One was, why did he get sent to St. Mary’s Industrial School? Why did he spend his childhood there?

Many people assumed, and some still do, that he was an orphan because people thought St. Mary’s was an orphanage. It was not. It was a reform school that also took in some orphans, some wayward boys, and some incorrigibles, which was a legal term for boys who were sent by the courts because they had gotten in trouble with the law.

The other myth about Babe was that he was one of those incorrigibles, that he had been a roustabout kid, running amok on the waterfront of Baltimore, and that his parents had gotten a friendly justice to send him to St. Mary’s. And this is where those documents and archives we were speaking about turn up.

I went to interview Babe Ruth’s daughter, Julie -who’s still alive at age 102 – back in 2011, that’s when I started working on this. And she said to me, out of absolutely nowhere from nothing I was smart enough to ask, “Well, you know, George Sr. [Babe’s father] and his mother Katie were separated.”

I did a double-take and said, ‘No, I didn’t know that!’ And Babe Ruth certainly never said that in the thousands of interviews.

All I had to do was go to my computer and type in George Herman Ruth Sr. v. Katie Ruth, adding the legal versus, and guess what pops up? What pops up in the archives is the entire case file for not a separation, but a divorce. The reason Babe Ruth was sent to St. Mary’s was that his parent’s marriage was stormy, tempestuous and fraught with loss after loss after loss of children. By the time Babe Ruth was seven and was sent to St. Mary’s, he had seen the deaths of four siblings; two from malnutrition that I found in death certificates in the archives.

In March 1906, George Sr. found his wife in a compromising position with the bartender at George’s saloon, and he threw her out. Had she and the bartender arrested and immediately filed for divorce, which was granted two months later in May 1906. She never came back to the family home, as far as I could tell, except to pick up her clothing and the depositions in the divorce are ugly and tawdry and sad beyond belief. Once that marriage was completely dissolved, George Sr. didn’t have any time or interest in raising his son.

MMO: While your book is on Babe Ruth, another huge component of Ruth’s adult life, and who you write extensively about, is Christy Walsh. Talk about the role Walsh played in Ruth’s growing fame.

Leavy: Christy Walsh was, in fact, the model for Jerry Maguire. And while he didn’t stick out his hand and say, “Show me the money,” that’s basically what he was doing. He was the first guy to do that for a baseball player in a very systematic way.

Their relationship started in February 1921. Everybody wanted a piece of the Babe, and Christy was out of work and was fired from yet another job. [He] found out where he was staying, climbed up a fire escape, and found a window to Ruth’s hotel room open; this is according to Christy’s nephew, Richard. [He] climbed through the window, slapped him on the butt, and said, “I want to represent you.”

This resulted in a one-year deal to allow Walsh to syndicate ghostwritten byline columns under Ruth’s name. Ghostwritten columns, at that point, before radio and before pre-game shows and before reporters went down to get locker-room quotes routinely, those were the ways that a player allegedly could speak to his fans. Everybody sort of knew that they weren’t really true or real, but it didn’t really matter; people ate them up.

By the middle of the twenties, Christy Walsh – who was trained as a lawyer but never practiced – had legal rights to manage all of his money and basically saved him from himself, because absent Christy Walsh, he [Ruth] would’ve spent every cent that he had and ended up in the poor house.

MMO: Talk a bit about the relationship between Ruth and Lou Gehrig.

Leavy: The book, as you know, recreates their 1927 barnstorming tour. I wanted to let readers feel what it was like to be Babe Ruth at the absolute apex of his fame. To feel what it was like to be around him. I specifically chose not to do the conventional biographical beginning, middle, end, because I had figured that had been done pretty well already.

In 1927, Lou Gehrig is what my grandmother would’ve called a pisher; he was a young guy, he was 24 and had won the Most Valuable Player Award because Babe Ruth wasn’t allowed to win it a second time; he had won it in ’23. And he was in awe of Ruth.

What comes across in the articles I was able to access through the Library of Congress and newspapers dot com and all those local stories was it was such a big deal that they came through their town. The local writers wrote the byplay between them and what the relationship was like between them. It was at that point affectionate, and it was maybe brotherly. Christy Walsh used that to promote Ruth as the wise elder, which was kind of hilarious in retrospect.

Gehrig had never been west of St. Louis, and in Ogden, Utah, where they changed trains on the route to California on this barnstorming tour, they went for a ride through the canyon. Gehrig was so naive that he was disappointed that there were no cowboys and Indians, and he said something like, “Well, it sure was an education to go around with the Babe.” [Laughs.] I bet it was!

I think the relationship was good then and not exactly equal; that would change later, will become fraught later. But at this point and time, it was quite a good relationship.

MMO: The inside cover of your book features a picture of hundreds of boys trying to cram themselves in to take a picture with Ruth after an exhibition game in 1925. Ruth looks completely unfazed, in fact, he’s smiling and looks to be genuinely enjoying the attention.

After reading your book and piecing his life together, I came away thinking that Ruth enjoyed the spotlight and adoration so much because of his tragic upbringing. Losing at least four siblings and still being placed in a reform school and having a feeling of being unwanted, did you get the sense that Ruth was at his best when he was around others?

Leavy: Yes. One thing that Julia told me, I asked her what he said about St. Mary’s, and she said, “He only said one thing ever. That he never felt full.” Which I think is a statement of actual hunger, because the Xaverian brothers had a lot of boys they had to care for, and not that much money, and they had meat once a week, and guess what? It was hot dogs. Is it any wonder that he’d gorge himself on them later?

Those kids lived head to toe in long rows of metal cots that were separated just wide enough apart that they could get down and say their prayers at night. There was nothing personal to distinguish one child’s bed or place from another. They slept together, bathed together, went through puberty together and they played baseball together.

And what Babe Ruth learned at St. Mary’s – in addition to how to make a shirt collar or how to throw a baseball and how to hit one – was how to be public. That’s what was comfortable for him. That’s where he felt most at home in his skin. What he couldn’t do, and what was so hard for him, his second wife Claire would say later, was being alone.

At the end of his career in June 1935, when baseball could find no useful place for him in the entire game and the institution that he had made and thought of as a family turned their back on him, it was a replication of the abandonment in his childhood, and I think it was excruciating for him.

MMO: After you compiled all your research and finished the book, did your perception of Ruth change for the better or worse?

Leavy: What I wanted to do when I was first going to write a novel, I wanted to write a novel because I wanted to inhabit the caricature that he had become. I thought there was no other way to do it other than fictionally. I was wrong as it turned out. I couldn’t understand or anticipate what history and the digital revolution was going to give me, so I was able to do it with actual fact instead of with gut reaction.

I came to admire him even more than I did when I started out because his parents abandoned him. Imagine how he felt; he was seven-years-old and they had lost four children and there were only two left. They may have lost six, but I could only find documentation for four, and they still didn’t want him. That’s got to feel pretty awful, and he was left at St. Mary’s to make a self and to make a life, and he did it. That it was flawed, that he didn’t know how to be a parent or a husband when he came out of St. Mary’s is hardly surprising, and he’s certainly not the only major leaguer about whom you could say that.

And he did change over time, and he was quite frustrated as I read in a 1963 story by a young guy named Jhan Robbins, who had visited him as a high school reporter in the Yankee locker room in 1934. Jhan had asked about not being asked to be the Yankees manager, which was, of course, the talk of all the tabloids and all the papers in New York. And Ruth went nuts on him! “That’s what’s wrong with all of you newspaper guys,” to a fourteen-year-old kid. “You never give a guy a chance to change. Wasn’t I good to you? Didn’t I always give you things to write about? Can’t you see that I’ve changed? Sure, I ran around in my time, but I’m different now.”

Babe Ruth learned the lesson that so many celebrities have learned since. Since he was the model for celebrity, which is if you create a persona – and he certainly colluded in the creation of the persona of the guy that ate too much, drank too much, stayed out late too much – you’re going to get trapped in it. And it’s going to be very hard for people to accept that you’re not necessarily that person anymore if you were that person ever.

MMO: Thanks very much for your time today, Jane. The book was a terrific read and I wish you all the best with it.

Leavy: Thanks so very much.

Follow Jane Leavy on Twitter, @janeleavy1

Visit Jane’s website here.

You can purchase “The Big Fella: Babe Ruth and the World He Created” here.

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