“When I was a little boy, I wanted to be a baseball player and join a circus. With the Yankees I’ve accomplished both.”—Third baseman Graig Nettles, on playing for two-time World Series champion New York Yankees in the late 1970s, quoted in Kenneth McMillan, Tales From the Yankee Dugout: A Collection of the Greatest Yankee Stories Ever Told (2001)
Though Reggie Jackson usually grabbed the headlines with something he said, it was two other Yankees early in the Steinbrenner Era, I think, who better deserved a place in Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations. One was Mickey Rivers, who responded thus to a slumping Jackson, who had just scoffed at his teammate’s near-total lack of interest in reading: “You best stop reading and start hitting.” The other player, smooth-fielding Graig Nettles, might be better known for his capsule description of reliever Sparky Lyle (“From Cy Young to sayonara”).
I suspect that many Yankee fans of my age and older chuckled when they recalled the tumultuous events that sparked the above “circus” quote (at least three-quarters of these incidents, I think, involved some combination of Steinbrenner, Jackson, or Billy Martin, with the latter two, of course, appearing in the accompanying image). But over the last few days, as I read about Johan Santana and Francisco Rodriguez, I thought that substituting “Mets” for “Yankees” felt perfectly appropriate.
The Seventies Yankees were throwbacks to the likes of the early Seventies Oakland A’s (which, not so coincidentally, also had Jackson) and the St. Louis Cardinals “Gas House Gang” of the 1930s. Somehow, those groups of rambunctious bad boys converted their energy from pummeling each other into beating opponents.
Today’s Mets follow a more familiar pattern: Losing increases frustration, which leads to friction, which leads to bad behavior. Like Notre Dame fans, New York fans feel entitled, and they’re going to take names and call for the guillotine like so many little Robespierres.
If, God help you, you take sportswriters seriously, when a manager today wins, he’s like Connie Mack of the late 1920s Philadelphia A’s: a master molder of men, destined not merely for the World Series but for Cooperstown. When he loses, he’s like Mack in the last two decades of his life: out of touch, ready for the scrap heap.
The Mets’ up-and-down fortunes this season have created the circus-like atmosphere that Nettles observed about his own team. I’m a Yankee fan, but I don’t like seeing how their Gotham rivals have become media mincemeat.
This is a team that has had an unbelievable amount of bad breaks, particularly in the form of injuries. With one or two players enjoying career years, they could very easily have been leading their division right now.
Last weekend, I heard ESPN sportscasters note that for all their injuries, the Boston Red Sox still could not be counted out of the playoff race. Here’s the odd thing: Until this past weekend, the Mets were roughly the same distance back, but you didn’t hear that said about them.
Sportswriter-vultures are circling Jerry Manuel now, trading the Bronx Zoo for Citi Asunder. It would be comical to watch, except that I have enough of a sense of history to remember prior managerial death watches for Willie Randolph, Art Howe, Bobby Valentine, Jeff Torborg, Bud Harrelson, and Davey Johnson. “They’re losers,” the refrain went. “Anyone else would do better.”
Well, they kept getting “anyone else,” and the Mets still kept losing. Now, there’s also talk of bringing back one of the old “losers,” Valentine.
Baseball managers are a bit like U.S. Presidents, receiving far more credit than they deserve when winning and far less when they’re losing. So you won’t find me claiming that Jerry Manuel is some kind of genius. But you also won’t find me peddling the ridiculous notion that the walks on the wild side taken by K-Rod, Santana and Co. are somehow all his fault, as at least one sportswriter I read this weekend claimed.
The best thing that could happen to today’s Mets would be a more extreme version of what occurred with the Yankees in 1978. That team’s ascent, as I recall, began with a newspaper strike. The sudden disappearance of those screaming backpage headlines about George, Reggie and Billy allowed a team that had suffered a rash of injuries to heal, to re-discover their strengths, to regroup, and to begin the ascent that led to the Yanks’ one-game playoff against the Red Sox.
Nowadays, of course, a simple newspaper strike won’t be enough to ensure a blackout on bed news. (Heck, the digital revolution is silencing more newspapers than a raft of strikes ever could!) You’d also need the disappearance of the sports-radio-and-TV jocks.
But anything can happen in baseball—and with the addition of the wild card, that possibility increases. In any case, here’s hoping that the Mets reinvent the same tired old narrative of the past few years, that they show that history can be a progression rather than a closed loop of savagely dashed expectations, that it’s still possible to say, “You gotta believe.”
Though Reggie Jackson usually grabbed the headlines with something he said, it was two other Yankees early in the Steinbrenner Era, I think, who better deserved a place in Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations. One was Mickey Rivers, who responded thus to a slumping Jackson, who had just scoffed at his teammate’s near-total lack of interest in reading: “You best stop reading and start hitting.” The other player, smooth-fielding Graig Nettles, might be better known for his capsule description of reliever Sparky Lyle (“From Cy Young to sayonara”).
I suspect that many Yankee fans of my age and older chuckled when they recalled the tumultuous events that sparked the above “circus” quote (at least three-quarters of these incidents, I think, involved some combination of Steinbrenner, Jackson, or Billy Martin, with the latter two, of course, appearing in the accompanying image). But over the last few days, as I read about Johan Santana and Francisco Rodriguez, I thought that substituting “Mets” for “Yankees” felt perfectly appropriate.
The Seventies Yankees were throwbacks to the likes of the early Seventies Oakland A’s (which, not so coincidentally, also had Jackson) and the St. Louis Cardinals “Gas House Gang” of the 1930s. Somehow, those groups of rambunctious bad boys converted their energy from pummeling each other into beating opponents.
Today’s Mets follow a more familiar pattern: Losing increases frustration, which leads to friction, which leads to bad behavior. Like Notre Dame fans, New York fans feel entitled, and they’re going to take names and call for the guillotine like so many little Robespierres.
If, God help you, you take sportswriters seriously, when a manager today wins, he’s like Connie Mack of the late 1920s Philadelphia A’s: a master molder of men, destined not merely for the World Series but for Cooperstown. When he loses, he’s like Mack in the last two decades of his life: out of touch, ready for the scrap heap.
The Mets’ up-and-down fortunes this season have created the circus-like atmosphere that Nettles observed about his own team. I’m a Yankee fan, but I don’t like seeing how their Gotham rivals have become media mincemeat.
This is a team that has had an unbelievable amount of bad breaks, particularly in the form of injuries. With one or two players enjoying career years, they could very easily have been leading their division right now.
Last weekend, I heard ESPN sportscasters note that for all their injuries, the Boston Red Sox still could not be counted out of the playoff race. Here’s the odd thing: Until this past weekend, the Mets were roughly the same distance back, but you didn’t hear that said about them.
Sportswriter-vultures are circling Jerry Manuel now, trading the Bronx Zoo for Citi Asunder. It would be comical to watch, except that I have enough of a sense of history to remember prior managerial death watches for Willie Randolph, Art Howe, Bobby Valentine, Jeff Torborg, Bud Harrelson, and Davey Johnson. “They’re losers,” the refrain went. “Anyone else would do better.”
Well, they kept getting “anyone else,” and the Mets still kept losing. Now, there’s also talk of bringing back one of the old “losers,” Valentine.
Baseball managers are a bit like U.S. Presidents, receiving far more credit than they deserve when winning and far less when they’re losing. So you won’t find me claiming that Jerry Manuel is some kind of genius. But you also won’t find me peddling the ridiculous notion that the walks on the wild side taken by K-Rod, Santana and Co. are somehow all his fault, as at least one sportswriter I read this weekend claimed.
The best thing that could happen to today’s Mets would be a more extreme version of what occurred with the Yankees in 1978. That team’s ascent, as I recall, began with a newspaper strike. The sudden disappearance of those screaming backpage headlines about George, Reggie and Billy allowed a team that had suffered a rash of injuries to heal, to re-discover their strengths, to regroup, and to begin the ascent that led to the Yanks’ one-game playoff against the Red Sox.
Nowadays, of course, a simple newspaper strike won’t be enough to ensure a blackout on bed news. (Heck, the digital revolution is silencing more newspapers than a raft of strikes ever could!) You’d also need the disappearance of the sports-radio-and-TV jocks.
But anything can happen in baseball—and with the addition of the wild card, that possibility increases. In any case, here’s hoping that the Mets reinvent the same tired old narrative of the past few years, that they show that history can be a progression rather than a closed loop of savagely dashed expectations, that it’s still possible to say, “You gotta believe.”
"If, God help you, you take sportswriters seriously, "
ReplyDeleteStop picking on Ron Blum. ;-)
"Last weekend, I heard ESPN sportscasters note that for all their injuries, the Boston Red Sox still could not be counted out of the playoff race. Here’s the odd thing: Until this past weekend, the Mets were roughly the same distance back, but you didn’t hear that said about them."
The Red Sox are four games behind the two teams with the best record in the league--that is, by definition, four games out of the Wild Card.
The Mets are a .500 team; ven catching the Phillies or Braves for second in the East still means they also have to pass the Reds/Cards and two or three teams in the NL West. (For example, if the Phils put "a Mets" and lose their next fifteen games, there are five other teams that are still playing and winning.)
The interesting comparative is the Team of Scum that was the 1986 Mets and the Bronx Zoo teams of the late 1970s and early 1980s.
(All of which ignores that the Mets issue is not the manager, but the GM, of course.)