UP, UP AND CALL AWAY
It's early, but so far, so good for Amazin's new skipper
WASHINGTON — It has only been six games, so it would be foolish to jump to any conclusions just yet. Every man who has ever managed the Mets — even Casey Stengel — has gone 5-1 over a six-game stretch. Six games doesn’t allow for anything resembling a definitive conclusion. But six games can give you a sense. Six games can give you a feel. The single most important manager the Mets ever hired was Gil Hodges. By the time he came aboard in time for the 1968 season, Mets fans had officially grown tired of the “loveable losers” line that had been slapped on them under Stengel. Casey could get away with that; Wes Westrum, his successor, could not.
So Hodges was hired to stop the slapstick. And after six games, you really could already tell he had done that: the ’ 68 Mets were 3-3 after six (and one of the losses was a fairly famous 1-0 loss to the Astros in Houston in 24 innings, still the longest 1-0 game ever played).
Absurd as it seems, the Mets had never been at .500 that late in a season. They had started seasons 0-6, 0-6, 1-5 and 2-4 (under Stengel) and 2-4 and 2-4 under Westrum. Writers covering the Mets’ 3-0 win in the home opener in front of 52,079 fans on April 17, 1968 couldn’t wait to have fun with Hodges for turning the Mets, at long last, into a break-even operation.
They didn’t get what they were looking for.
“If you think I’m going to throw a party for being 3-3,” Hodges said grimly, “then you’ve got another thing coming.”
And the message had already spread to the troops.
“We don’t want to be celebrated for doing out jobs,” Jerry Koosman, the rookie pitcher who had shut out the Giants on seven hits in his second career start, said. “This is what we expect to be.”
Now, the culture Mickey Callaway inherited doesn’t exactly match the one that Hodges took over. These Mets, after all,
did appear in the World Series three years ago, and have a fair amount of that core intact. Still, there was a sense the Mets had stopped listening to Terry Collins, for better or worse. There was a feeling, as much as anything, the Mets had slowly come to accept the woe-is-me narrative that enveloped them last year.
Was that the manager’s fault? Impossible to say. But the truth is, it helps a manager to make a quick impression, as Callaway has, as Hodges did. Whatever message a new skipper hopes to impart, it comes across louder and clearer when it’s backed by success. And success generally breeds success.
That was the case for Hodges. It was the case for Davey Johnson 16 years later, when he took over a Mets team that had totally bottomed out and had all but given up the ghost as a competitive franchise. But those 1984 Mets, starting the season on the road, rolled to a 5-1 start on the way to 90 wins and a fresh era of franchise prosperity, including a championship two years later.
It was even the case for Yogi Berra, who took over in 1972 when Hodges died of a heart attack on Easter Sunday, that team starting 4-2 on the way to a franchise-record 30-11 at the quarter pole (matched by the ’86 team).
“As a team we really could have gone in an entirely different direction after Gil died,” Tom Seaver said years later, reflecting on Yogi’s first few years with the Mets as manager. “But Yogi tried to remind us all the time, ‘You can have fun playing this game.’ I think it was the right message that group needed after the ’69 miracle stuff. In a lot of ways Yogi had a perfect touch.”
It probably isn’t a surprise to note that hiring the wrong guy can show itself early, too. Jeff Torborg lost four of his first six games as Mets manager in 1992 and cracks in that foundation had already begun to form on the way to 90 losses. Although Art Howe — despite absorbing a 15-2 drubbing by the Cubs on Opening Day 2003 that served as the real harbinger of that 69-93 club — managed to go 3-3 over his first six, it was the next 156 that proved challenging for him.
And, despite the hot start, it’s the next 156 that will tell us a lot more about Mickey Callaway, too. So far, so good. But still so early.