SWAY OF STAY
AARON Judge and Jose Ramirez have a lot in common when it comes to age and baseball impact. But the key question regarding whether Judge will accept an extension before Gerrit Cole throws the first pitch of the Yankees’ season is this:
Where on the Ramirez “desperation to stay in Cleveland” scale does Judge reside with the Yankees?
Because for the second time in his career, Ramirez so badly did not want to leave that he took a sweetheart deal to stay. The Guardians seemed to make it pretty clear to the Ramirez camp that if he did not accept an extension that will begin in 2024, they would trade him, probably to San Diego.
So Ramirez accepted a five-year, $124 million extension that will follow seasons in which he will make $12 million (2022) and $14 million (2023). It is a total of $150 million over seven years — which is tremendous money, but not reflective of Ramirez’s standing in the game.
Jose Altuve had two years at $12.5 million left on his sweetheart deal with the Astros when he signed a five-year, $155 million extension in March 2018. Altuve did not mean more to Houston than Ramirez does to Cleveland, and Altuve’s track record — while including an AL MVP the previous year — was similar to that of Ramirez, arguably a drop worse.
Ramirez has finished in the top six for AL MVP in four of the past five years, a period in which he has 26.7 wins above replacement. That is third in the sport behind Mookie Betts and Mike Trout.
It also is tied with one other player: Judge, who in his only two full healthy seasons out of five has finished second (to Altuve) and fourth (last year) in the AL MVP balloting. Ramirez has been healthier, is a switch hitter and plays a more critical position (third base) than Judge.
Yet what Ramirez accepted and what Judge would be willing to accept are not in the same galaxy, much less the same zip code. I would think that Judge wants at least double what Ramirez received in the extension ($248 million) over at least seven years, and probably more than that. Judge is going to com
pare himself to fellow outfielders Trout, who is signed with the Angels for 12 years at $426.25 million and through his age-38 season, and to Betts, who is signed for 12 years at $365 million with the Dodgers and through his age-39 season.
The Yankees are probably willing to go to the middle of Ramirez and Betts-Trout. They know it is New York, not Cleveland. Ramirez’s contract more than doubles the most the Cleveland organization has ever given a player, yet is exactly $200 million less than the Yankees gave Cole. The Yankees know Judge is their marketing darling, as opposed to the reserved Ramirez in Cleveland. Judge also is due to be a free agent after this season, Ramirez had two years left on that first sweetheart deal. In addition, there is no leveraging Judge with talk of trading him — the Yankees are trying to win the World Series this year, and he is their best player.
Hal Steinbrenner really wants to get this done. The Yankees’ owner can say he doesn’t care about the spotlight on Steve Cohen and his Mets or the persistent nattering that he is cheap. But he is sensitive to it. So letting his best, most popular homegrown player since Derek Jeter go unsigned is not on his bucket list. I expect his offer to Judge begins with a “2” (as in $200 million-plus) and is higher than he probably imagined when this process began.
So all that will matter is where on that Ramirez “desperation to stay” scale Judge is. Will he refuse any extension that does not put him, say, at least toward Betts and Trout?
Or is he using that as rhetoric to keep Steinbrenner bidding against himself and will take the last best offer before Judge’s imposed deadline of Opening Day, which has been moved to Friday?
Remember that both sides could hold tight to their current positions and if they don’t reach a deal, revisit this either during the season (Judge says he won’t do that) or after, when Judge will be a free agent. It would put the Yankees in the somewhat counterintuitive position of hoping Judge makes himself even more valuable because they need the healthy, elite Judge to maximize their title chances. It’s not all that different from the Mets having wanted Jacob deGrom to have a healthy Cy Young season that would mean he could comfortably opt out of his contract after the 2022 season.
DeGrom now has a bum shoulder and will be out at least two months. That is the risk for Judge, too — that he has another injury-touched campaign. But even if he does, he might not get what the Yankees are offering now. Short of the catastrophic, however, he will not get less than Ramirez — who was due to be a free agent after his age-30 season, the situation Judge is facing now.
Ramirez, for the second time in his career however, was willing to forego the chance to make much more by waiting for free agency because he so clearly wanted to stay in Cleveland.
How similarly does Judge feel toward the Yankees?
THIS was Aug. 9, 1994, and it is a day that will remain circled, in bright red ink, in both memory and mind’s eye, forever, for one important reason: It was the first major league baseball game I ever covered.
I arrived at Yankee Stadium early, of course: this was, quite literally, the only thing I’d ever wanted to do with my professional life and I was going to seize the day. At the appropriate moment, the writers were ushered into the manager’s office. It was different then: the pregame chat wasn’t a television show, but more a 20-minute chalk talk. Writers settled into chairs. I stood against a wall.
Buck Showalter smiled. “What do you have today?” he asked.
And for 20 unforgettable minutes it was … well, mesmerizing. It was pure, unfiltered, unadulterated baseball talk — strategy, situations, anything you could think of. The questions offered by the veteran writers were all smart — but the answers were even more so. I was smart enough (or intimidated enough) to keep my mouth shut and simply absorb all of it. It was like attending an abbreviated master class on baseball.
Afterward I asked one writer — it was Sherman, young guy at The Post — “Is it always like that?”
“Around here it is,” he told me. “But don’t look for that anywhere else.”
I have thought about that day often in the nearly four months since Buck Showalter was named manager of the Mets, his second tour of duty in New York City 27 years after his last one expired inside a weepy clubhouse in Seattle. Baseball went on strike three days after that initial encounter, but I spent a good deal of 1995 around the Yankees, and every minute spent inside the manager’s office was another minute when I learned something about baseball that I’d never known before — usually, something I’d never even thought of before.
It is one reason this Mets season — which will kick off, weather permitting, at Nationals Park in Washington late Thursday afternoon — promises to be such a fascinating daily experience. Look, the Mets are an expensive outfit, and a veteran one.
You aren’t going to find a lot of cuddly baseball tales in the clubhouse. Most of the players have been around the block a time or three.
But you are going to see a different kind of ball.
Now, that will not manifest itself in an obvious way. Showalter is not Billy Martin, or Earl Weaver. You will not know he’s in the room because he kicks dirt on an umpire, works over a water cooler or a postgame cold-cut spread, or goes after his players and his owner in the newspaper. It’s more subtle than that.
And it ought to be exactly what the Mets need.
It ought to be, to put it more precisely, exactly what the Mets have craved.
“Sometimes,” Showalter said on the day he was hired, “learning to win is part of player development.”
And also a part of a team’s development. The Mets these last few years have been a team begging for leadership, begging for gravitas. By the end, they had mostly tuned out Terry Collins. Mickey Callaway was a fiasco, a bizarre choice to be a field manager even before his off-field issues were alleged. And while Luis Rojas is a smart baseball man who will almost certainly be a successful manager someday, it was the wrong team and the wrong time for him. The Mets, too often, have seemed like a team looking for reasons not to lose. And that’s a hard path to success in this game.
Showalter’s presence doesn’t guarantee a championship. It is a well-trod part of his baseball résumé that Showalter has never made it to the World Series. The book on him? He’ll bring you to the doorstep. But then someone else has to open the door: Joe Torre, or Bob Brenly, or Ron Washington. It is a part of his record and Showalter does not shy away from it.
“You want to be the last team standing, and not just once,” he said. “It’s not something that’s going to define my life, but it is something that wakes me up every day now.”
If you are the Mets, though, you will look at how Showalter’s track record also included huge immediate improvements at all four of his stops — the Yankees, the Diamondbacks, the Rangers and the Orioles — and you will start there, for this is also a part of his permanent record:
In the space of two years, the Yankees went from 71 wins to 88 under Showalter. In the space of two years, the Diamondbacks went from zero wins to 100. In the space of two years, the Rangers went from 72 wins to 89. In the space of two years, the Orioles went from 66 wins to 93.
That doesn’t happen by accident. It doesn’t happen by whim. That is what Showalter does and the Mets have been yearning for it. Get them to the doorstep? Showalter can do that.
And one of these years — especially if he has Max Scherzer and Jacob deGrom to throw in a short series — maybe he finally will get to bust the door down, too, like Danny Reagan on “Blue Bloods.”
“You can’t guarantee a lot in this game, but I know we’re going to be prepared and I know we aren’t going to be scared. It’s a good scouting report on us.”
That was a quote in faded blue pen from an old notebook of mine, dated Aug. 9, 1994. But it could certainly have been said by the same man, in a similar circumstance, on April 7, 2022. Now, as then, a New York team is looking to shake off some losing cobwebs and get back to the business of winning baseball games. Now, as then, this is truth: You’d rather have Buck Showalter in your dugout than the other guy’s.
WASHINGTON — Tylor Megill isn’t the first accidental Opening Day starter in Mets history, but he might be the most unlikely.
The right-hander started spring training as rotation depth after a solid rookie year, but through a confluence of events will be the starting pitcher when the Mets begin their 2022 season Thursday against the Nationals, weather permitting.
“It just happened to fall in the right slot of where my throwing lines up with Opening Day,” Megill said Wednesday after a team workout at Nationals Park — during which manager Buck Showalter officially named him the starter for the opener. “They just happened to choose me.” The start belonged to Jacob deGrom until the two-time Cy Young award winner reported shoulder discomfort that was diagnosed as a stress reaction in his right scapula, which will keep him sidelined for an extended stretch. The rotation’s other top gun, Max Scherzer, was bothered recently by hamstring tightness and won’t pitch until Friday, at the earliest. Not wanting to rearrange his alignment of Chris Bassitt, Carlos Carrasco and Taijuan Walker later in the rotation, Showalter needed another option for Thursday.
And so, the unveiling of the 2022 Mets — a team that was rebuilt in the offseason largely on owner Steve Cohen’s cash — will come with the 26year-old Megill on the mound. Last season he pitched to a 4.52 ERA in 18 starts for the Mets after he was pressed into emergency service with key pitchers injured.
“Keep in mind that it’s a long season,” Showalter said. “It’s Opening Day and it’s early in the season, but I don’t think anybody is going to remember who pitched Opening Day in about a month.” The new Mets on display will include Starling Marte, Mark Canha and Eduardo Escobar, who arrived (as did Scherzer) in the offseason on freeagent contracts that helped push the Mets’ payroll to $285 million. And then there is the 65-year-old Showalter, about to begin his fifth major league managerial stint. When last seen managing a New York team, he took the Yankees to the postseason in 1995. “He’s really organized, he’s precise, he’s trying to be prepared,” Brandon Nimmo said. “I don’t think we’re going to lose a game because Buck wasn’t prepared, so I gather we’re going to be prepared for this season, we’re going to be very prepared for every situation and he’s going to expect a lot from us.”
General manager Billy Eppler likes the team that he has assembled, but stopped short of calling it complete.
“I always look at where things can be improved,” Eppler said. “You think about the mound, you think about position players, that is just a component of my job is to really look at those things in an objective way, with my staff. I can always point to something … if we can do something in a particular area to reinforce or add depth, those are going to be important aspects for us to do.”
For Eppler and Showalter, it has been a hectic week of trying to formulate a plan through the latest injuries, In addition to deGrom and Scherzer, the team has been monitoring Nimmo, who received a cortisone injection
Monday for a stiff neck. His status won’t be decided until before Thursday’s game.
“I’m surprised it took so long,” Showalter said, referring to the cascade of injuries. “When one happens, you always know something else is coming. It’s part of it. Everybody has been dealing with it in spring. Nobody wants to hear you complain about it — it’s part of the gig.”
Following a condensed spring training, Showalter was just happy to have arrived at this moment, the precipice of a new season.
“We have come a long way since the lockout,” he said. “Think of where we are, to hear gloves popping and guys, you can see they are getting a little different look on their faces.”