Long Shot (47 page)

Around that time, also, some of the players had been ribbing Roberto about the photo on his rookie baseball card fourteen years before, which was reprinted in the Mets’ yearbook. When he’d heard enough, he shouted back and knocked some dominoes off a table in the clubhouse. The next day, Cedeno cut out the picture and taped it onto Alomar’s locker. They had some words by the lockers, then a few more in the dugout, and then, by the rockets’ red glare, Mo Vaughn had to step between them, which was a good thing for Roberto. With his shirt off, Roger Cedeno was shredded wheat, packed with natural muscle like no other ballplayer I’ve ever seen. Later that year, David Weathers did something or other with one of Roger’s suits for a practical joke, the problem being that Roger had a bad game that night and wasn’t in a joking mood when he came into the clubhouse afterward. David Weathers is a big man, but Cedeno picked him up practically with one arm and put him against the locker. I said to Weathers, “Let me tell you something, dude. You’re lucky you still have a head.” Anyway, the little skirmish with Alomar didn’t amount to much; wasn’t a big deal, really. Except in New York. Valentine was absolutely right when he told Joel Sherman of the
Post
, “It’s a constant struggle to get everybody into a baseball mode.”

In that respect, baseball itself was setting a poor example. The commissioner’s office is forever talking about the integrity of the game, but what about the integrity of the
All-Star
Game?

It was held that year in Milwaukee, and I happened to drive in the first run with a ground ball in the second inning. We scored three more in the third, two of them on a home run by Bonds off Roy Halladay, at which point it looked as though we beleaguered National Leaguers would break our five-game losing streak. But the American League rallied in the seventh and eighth to tie the game, 7–7, and that’s where it stood after eleven innings, when the commissioner, Bud Selig, called it off because both teams were out of pitchers. Which was ridiculous. We had used up ten and the American League nine. You mean to tell me that a pitching staff of nine or ten can’t make it through
one game
?

Obviously, the All-Star Game is a different animal than all the rest, because pitchers work only an inning or two to save their arms and allow somebody else to make an appearance; but it wasn’t always that way. Not that long ago, starting pitchers would routinely throw three innings and the next two or three guys would go two or three more. The teams played to win. It had never been the most fiercely competitive day or night of the season, but there used to be some intensity and pride involved. Ask Ray Fosse, whose shoulder was separated by Pete Rose on the last play of the 1970 game. By the twenty-first century, however, because of the television spectacle and the movement to protect highly paid pitchers, among other things, the All-Star Game had become commercialized and distorted to the detriment of pure baseball. It had devolved into a much less serious, less meaningful event, and suffered significantly for that. The 2002 debacle was the tipping point. When the out-of-pitchers decision was ridiculed in the media—for once, I agreed with most of the writers and commentators—Selig answered by awarding home-field advantage in the World Series to the league that won the All-Star Game, starting in 2003. I thought that was silly, too, because nothing is proven by a single game in which the starting players are 1) elected and 2) then removed just on general principle. If the World Series schedule were determined by the winner of the overall interleague competition for that year, I could go along. As it stands, the home-field advantage merely adds to the all-star farce.

Back in real time, the Mets of 2002 just couldn’t seem to get our act together. We were actually a few games above .500 at the end of July, but August began with five straight losses. My left wrist was constantly sore and I didn’t know why. It was just a nagging kind of year. I took some anti-inflammatories, kept swinging, and on a winning night in Milwaukee—the one that stopped the five-game skid—managed to homer off Ben Sheets to tie Johnny Bench for second place all-time among catchers, trailing Carlton Fisk.

That caused me to take stock, for the first time, of what kind of company I was keeping. I mean, Johnny Bench! For my critics, however, the moment had a different effect: it seemed only to serve as a reminder of how much better Bench was defensively. (Amid all of that, Bobby was kind enough to point out that my catcher’s ERA—that is, the earned run average compiled by pitchers while I was catching them—was among the best in the league, which wasn’t unusual.) I suppose that losing tends to taint everything associated with it. And that month, we lost
a lot.

A few days after we snapped the five-game slump, we began a free fall of twelve straight defeats. Then came another five. Incredible as it sounds, we
never won a home game in the month of August. Zero and thirteen for Shea Stadium. Altogether, we lost fifteen straight in our own park, a National League record. Bobby was quoted saying that certain veteran players—he meant Leiter and Alfonzo, who were definitely
not
the problems on our ball club—were distracted by the new contracts they’d have to negotiate after the season. Whatever was at the core of our misery, at least we made Doubleday feel better about unloading his half of the franchise, whatever the price. By the time the sale went down, we were in last place, a humiliating twenty-three games behind the Braves.

In early September, Keith Hernandez, the great first baseman who was a color analyst for our games on Madison Square Garden Network, tore us apart in an article on the MSG website. He wrote, “The club has no heart; the Mets quit a long time ago. Bobby Valentine could’ve chewed this team out in June when this stuff started creeping in. He was quoted as saying, ‘We brought veteran players in here who I felt were professionals, and I can be more hands off and they can police themselves. Obviously, I was wrong.’ ” I took the “heart” reference as a personal affront and lashed back at Hernandez, calling him a voice from the grave. I also compared his remarks to farts in the wind, which goes to show how composed and dignified I remained through all of it. It was a tough time to be a Met. To his credit, Hernandez came into our clubhouse and apologized to the team. That was nice, but it was
still
a tough time to be a Met.

We actually won seven in a row right about then. Prosperity, however, was not for us. In late September,
Newsday
came out with a story charging that seven Mets had used marijuana during the season. One of the players implicated was a young relief pitcher, Grant Roberts, who was pictured smoking a bong back in 1998, when he was in the minor leagues. Roberts was devastated. Apparently, a scorned former girlfriend of his, a baseball groupie, was trying to extort money from him and had released the photo when he wouldn’t comply. There was also a report about players smoking pot in a limousine. I have to say, we were an easy target for the press and public both. At Shea, one fan held up a miniature Mr. Met toking on a joint, along with a sign that said, “2002 Mets. Up In Smoke.” Others called it the season that went to pot, which sounded about right to me.

Of course, the marijuana rumpus was another occasion for the media to descend upon our clubhouse—when you lose in New York, they’re like dogs after scraps—and Bobby, as usual, didn’t disappoint them. “I guarantee you no one was in uniform and smoking marijuana, unless they were running around with a whole lot of Visine in their eyes,” he said. “I grew up in
the sixties. I think I could tell by looking in a guy’s eyes if he was smoking dope.” Then he launched into an animated, hilarious pantomime depicting a player trying to hit a baseball while he’s high. He was staggering around, like he was spaced-out, flailing at something invisible. Bobby might have been feeling the pressure at that point. He also told reporters that he had been concerned about players using marijuana during spring training and had spoken to Grant Roberts about it, a statement he retracted the next day.

None of it helped Bobby’s cause. It was no secret that Phillips had wanted him gone for a long time. Fred Wilpon was the guy in Valentine’s corner, and the one, no doubt, who got him through the season. Toward the end of the year, when stories were circulating about players being unhappy with Bobby—and some certainly were—Fred called a meeting in the clubhouse and went apeshit on us. He was very emotional, telling us that, “If you don’t want to be here . . .” Then his voice cracked and he said something like “you can just . . . go swimming!” Nothing gets a ball club going like the prospect of chlorinated water.

But there was no mistaking Fred’s message. He assured us that Bobby would still be the manager at the end of the season, and the following season, as well. When Wilpon endorsed him that way, Bobby, who had been sitting at a locker off to the side, turned around theatrically and smiled at all of us with a very discernible smugness, like the cat who swallowed the canary.

Bobby took a lot of flak for our fucked-up season, but the failures were far from his alone. The high-priced veterans, in particular, came up short, and I include myself in that group. My power numbers were okay—I had thirty-three homers and ninety-eight RBIs (Vaughn was second on the club with twenty-six and seventy-two)—and I won my tenth straight Silver Slugger award as the best hitter at my position; but like everybody else, I got caught in the trap of being on a bad team.

When a season goes to shit the way ours did, the cohesion breaks down and players tend to fend for themselves. It’s only natural, in a way, because winning, in the big picture, is no longer an option. The drill becomes every man trying to show it wasn’t his fault. The 2002 season was the first time I’d felt that way. There was a point in the year—in
August
, specifically—when I said to myself that all bets were off and just went to hacking. My deal was, what’s the point of giving myself up to move a guy over? Nobody else was driving in runs, anyway. Might as well get mine. Like I said earlier, I embraced a certain level of selfishness on the field, because it’s closely related to doing the most you can do for your team; but in that ridiculous season, I, like most of the Mets, took it to another level.

If there’s a defense for my attitude—and I’m not saying there is—it has to do with being the so-called star. In that respect, my situation wasn’t much different than it had been in Los Angeles: I knew damn well that if I didn’t have the numbers to prove otherwise, I—this time, along with Bobby—would bear the brunt of the blame for our performance. The pressure I felt was concentrated mainly on hitting home runs, and I let that dictate my response, which was to screw everything else and swing for the fences. The trouble was, that doesn’t really work. It especially didn’t do anything for my batting average. I’d entered the season with the highest career average of any active player (Tony Gwynn had retired), but, at .280, I failed to reach .300 for the first time since my September call-up ten years before.

Part of the reason for the drop-off was that I was being pitched much differently than I had been earlier in my career. Because pitchers didn’t want me to extend my arms, they were pounding me on the inside part of the plate. I actually made a pretty good adjustment and developed a shorter swing, which enabled me to pull more home runs to straight left field than I ever had; but as a rule, pull hitters are not high-average hitters.

I had always placed a premium on base hits, whatever the length. Whether it was coincidence or not, for nine straight years I’d finished with at least a .300 average and my team had finished with at least a .500 record. The first time I fell under, so did the ball club.

• • •

The day after the season mercifully ended, I was called into the principal’s office. It was odd, because I had no particular rapport with Fred Wilpon or the front-office personnel in general. They never asked me how to run the ball club and I never offered any advice. Leiter and Franco were at ease talking about big-picture stuff—Johnny and Wilpon had a natural connection because they’d attended the same high school in Brooklyn (although obviously not at the same time)—but I was more of a see-the-ball-hit-the-ball kind of guy. Plus, after my experience in Los Angeles, I was inclined to keep management at a distance.

The invitation upstairs left me puzzled and wary. I got the idea that Fred had summoned me, but I couldn’t be certain. He was accompanied at the meeting by his son, Jeff; Steve Phillips; and Phillips’s assistant, Jim Duquette.

The topic, it turned out, was Bobby.

Right off the bat, Fred said, just as he had in the clubhouse, that Bobby would be the manager again in 2003. I sensed that he was fishing for a reaction. It was already out there that the likes of Leiter and Franco had issues
with Bobby—his handling of the marijuana story was a prime example—and my distinct impression was that the guys in the room wanted me to join the chorus. That way, as I figured it, they could fire him and more or less pin it on the players, which was the organization’s standard MO.

I wasn’t taking the bait. I said, “I don’t have a problem with Bobby if I play hard and do my job.” And that was that. End of meeting.

About ten minutes later, my father called. He told me that Bobby had phoned him and said, “Mike saved my job.”

The next day, the Mets fired Bobby Valentine.

Not surprisingly, the media suggested that Leiter and Franco had something to do with it. I disagree with that, and so do Al and Johnny. In the words of Franco, who to this day, in spite of all the idiosyncrasies that came along with the package, considers Bobby the best manager he ever played for, “That was so far from the truth. If we’d had that kind of power . . .”

Leiter saw the situation pretty much as I did. “[There was] a way in which the organization was trying to disperse blame,” he said. “Whether it was firing a manager or justification of a bad record, somebody had to get blamed and nobody in the highest seats wanted to blame themselves. It was a case of trying to defuse and divert the obvious. It was a franchise struggling, not going in the right direction, not really knowing what the plan is.”