OWN WORST ENEMY
Us-vs.-us approach rarely works out
MOST of the handwringing, when athletes decide to take on fans, happens in the expected way: A wildly successful (or wildly unpopular) athlete does something that damages the home team, and the home crowd lets him have it.
The Malice in the Palace, when the Indiana Pacers and the entire Palace of Auburn Hills squared off, is the most notorious example of this (and if you haven’t yet, check out the documentary on Netflix), but there are others. The Bruins famously climbed the boards at Madison Square Garden once. Reggie Smith, playing for the Dodgers, once took on a few unruly Giants fans at Candlestick Park. You can understand that. Us-versus-them is logical. Us-versus-us is less so. And look, the Mets probably did the best possible job of minimizing what, in the moment, seemed headed for a gruesome, ugly mess when Javy Baez revealed a week ago that he and his teammates — notably Kevin Pillar and Francisco Lindor — were doing that thumbsdown silliness as a way of “booing back” at booing Mets fans.
“When we don’t get success, we’re going to get booed,” Baez explained, “so they’re going to get booed when we’re a success.”
Then Baez and his buddies apologized, the Mets immediately swept a doubleheader, and Baez provided the most electrifying moment with a mad dash home from first base to cap an improbable comeback. All may not be forgiven, or ever forgotten, but it was a positive gesture.
Players don’t go after their own much. But when they do, it almost never ends well for them. Our pal Andrew Marchand was covering the Mets in 2002 when Rey Ordonez gave him this gem of a quote: “I don’t want to play here no more. The fans are too stupid. You have to play perfect every game. You can’t go 0-for-4. Are we like [bleeping] machines?”
(Ordonez got his wish, exiled to Tampa Bay in 2003, then to the Cubs in ’04, and then out of baseball by ’05. It does seem all is forgiven, though, as he was all smiles at Edgardo Alfonzo’s Mets Hall of Fame induction a few weeks ago.)
The Yankees, of course, featured one of the grandest us-versus-us moments back on July 18, 1995, when 21,188 fans at Yankee Stadium gave Jack McDowell the business when he walked off the mound after surrendering nine runs and 13 hits in 4 2/3 innings against his former team, the White Sox.
McDowell responded by thrusting his middle finger in the air, twirling it for all to see, and becoming an instant hero to headline writers (The Post’s classic take: “YANKEE FLIPPER”). The Yankees immediately fined him $5,000. He was publically crushed by both George Steinbrenner and Rudy Giuliani.
And though he expressed regret, McDowell never actually apologized.
“It’s not something I’m going to get used to,” he said of the booing, “but I’ve got to learn to handle it better. … Realistically, I don’t need to win anybody back. My job is to go out and win games, not necessarily to further my placement with the fans.”
(Interestingly, McDowell was terrific from that moment on in ’95, pitching to a 2.81 ERA, the Yankees going 9-4 in his 13 starts. Yankees fans still dislike McDowell, but it has more to do with him blowing Game 5 against the Mariners a few months later than his infamous middle-finger salute.)
Of course, the most famous example of us-versus-us came on April 29, 1983, when Cubs manager Lee Elia, fed up with hearing boos and cat-calls at Wrigley Field, unleashed this classic after a loss to the Dodgers (it went on a long time; these are the highlights):
“I’ll tell you one [bleepin’] thing: I hope we get [bleepin’] hotter than [bleep] just to stuff it up them three thousand [bleepin’] people that show up every [bleepin’] day. Because if they’re the real Chicago [bleepin’] fans, they can kiss my [bleepin’ bleep]. … What ... the [bleep] am I supposed to do, go out there and let my [bleepin’] players get destroyed every day, and be quiet about it? For the [bleepin’] nickel-dime people that show up? The [bleepers] don’t even work! That’s why they’re out at the [bleepin’] game! They ought to get a [bleepin’] job and find out what it’s like to go out and earn a [bleepin’] living. Eighty-five percent of the [bleepin’] world is working, the other 15 come out here!”
Amazingly, it took until August for Elia to get fired and join the other 15 percent.