THE MANY QUIRKS OF TURK
Nearly 25 years after coming to Mets, Wendell recalls origins of his colorful personality
Nearly 25 years ago, the Mets made a late-season trade to shore up their bullpen. While that deal didn’t bring the team a postseason berth, it did bring them one of the most colorful characters in club history.
Turk Wendell arrived in August 1997 and was immediately useful. But Wendell quickly became known for everything but his pitching, earning the dreaded label of “distraction.” For years, the term had been used to describe players that drew extra attention for runins with the law or their inflammatory postgame comments.
For Wendell, it was because he was chewing black licorice on the mound, brushing his teeth in the dugout and wearing a necklace made from the teeth of animals that he had personally killed.
Calling in from the farm in Iowa where his life has gone largely unaffected by the pandemic, Wendell recalled the feelings he drew from other people.
“Players would always tell me, ‘Man I couldn’t stand you. I hated you,’ and then ‘But I’m so glad you’re on my team now.’ To me, that was a compliment,” Wendell said. “They also thought I was this loud, crazy party guy. I remember talking with Jerry Seinfeld after I retired. He just looked at me and goes, ‘God, you’re nothing like I thought you would be.’”
Wendell says he has never had a sip of alcohol in his life. Despite a life in baseball, he’s also never chewed tobacco.
“Ironically, when I got to the big leagues with the Cubs, there was no candy or soda in the clubhouse, but they had Old Style [beer] on tap,” Wendell said.
He says the cheek full of licorice started because he wanted to participate in some dugout hijinks.
“Guys in college would play this game where they’d chew tobacco and spit on your shoes,” he remembered. “I didn’t play the game because I didn’t chew tobacco, so I thought, I like black licorice, it looks cool, it looks like chew. Then I could play the game.”
The kid spraying licorice spittle at Quinnipiac University was also a pretty good pitcher. But between his collegiate career and later ascension with the Mets, there were certain people who both guided him toward self-fulfillment and asked him to kindly tone things down.
“[Cubs manager] Jim Riggleman pulled me aside in 1995, on the first day of spring training and said he didn’t want me doing any of that stuff anymore,” Wendell said of his eccentricities. “He wanted people to focus on my arm, and he thought I was a hell of a pitcher. That helped me a lot — not at first, because I thought this guy was raining on my parade — but that helped me mature as a player and person.”
It wasn’t just the excessive candy consumption and in-game devotion to dental hygiene, though. Wendell was also running five to eight miles before every game. Shockingly, some of the people whose jobs depended on him were less than thrilled with that part of Wendell’s routine. But living the life of a reliever taught Wendell important lessons in preparation, even if they perplexed general manager Steve Phillips.
“He pulled me aside and said, ‘Don’t you think you’re doing too much?’ Wendell told the Daily News. “I said to him, ‘Wow, Steve. Most of the time you’re kicking guys in the ass telling them they need to work harder. You’re telling me to do less?’ I knew my body and what I needed to do because let’s face it, if I got to play it was usually for about ten minutes. I had so much energy that I needed to tire myself out so I didn’t act like a total lunatic on the mound.”
This presented one of baseball’s most fascinating case studies in “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.” As Wendell was becoming famous for the licorice, toothbrush and other superstitions like bunny hopping over the foul line, he was also one of the better bullpen arms in the National League. From 1998 to 2000, the right-hander had a 3.20 ERA in 245 innings and held batters to a .220 average, teaming up with Armando Benitez and John Franco to give the Mets a three-headed monster at the end of games.
The Mets won a lot, too. They went 88-74 in 1998, made the National League Championship Series in 1999 and went to the World Series in 2000. Wendell was heavily involved, often throwing more than an inning at a time and pitching multiple days in a row. As the Mets made a run for a wild card spot in ‘98 that ultimately fell short, Wendell famously pitched nine games in a row during September. That will assuredly never happen again.
“During that span of nine straight games, Franco and Al Leiter were coming up to me going, ‘Dude, how do you feel today? You better tell them you can’t pitch or you’re going to blow out your arm,’” Wendell smiled. “I’d tell them, ‘Hey, I get paid to play when they tell me to play. I’m ready to go.’ And I did feel really good. The stats speak for themselves. Now if guys pitch three days in a row they take a week off.”
Besides his daily deployment, the other major difference between Wendell and modern relievers is velocity. He did not throw very hard or strike very many guys out. In his 11-year career, Wendell fanned 18.3% of the hitters he saw. In 2021, the league average for relievers was 24%. When asked for his thoughts on every pitcher throwing gas now, Wendell offered a theory.
“The key to that sentence is throw. They don’t teach guys to pitch anymore,” he asserted. “It’s like a lost art. Guys like (Greg) Maddux or (Tom) Glavine wouldn’t get looked at twice anymore just because of their physique. You know
what? I don’t care if you throw 125. They all get hit. You’ve gotta have some inclination of knowing how to pitch.”
Nowadays, Wendell still finds ways to stay up to date on baseball. He says he regularly tunes into Mets games, but he also has a son, Wyatt, who matriculated from a junior college in Iowa to Purdue’s baseball team. Even as he jokes about relievers today being heroes for merely pitching three days in a row, Wendell also knows that protecting his son’s arm is no laughing matter.
“I worry about his arm and protecting his arm,” Wendell admitted. “I always tell him, you need to make sure you watch out for you. If you’re sore or hurt or something you have to speak up.”
As for other connections to the Mets, the 54-year-old keeps in touch with Bobby Valentine and told the skipper that once he lost the mayoral election in Stamford, Conn., he should try to get his old managerial job back. Another one of Wendell’s quirks — being the first Met to wear no. 99 on his jersey — got resurfaced when Taijuan Walker chose the number in 2021. As a sign of goodwill, Wendell sent a care package, but Walker didn’t seem interested.
“Taijuan Walker didn’t even know who I was,” Wendell deadpanned. “I was probably done playing when he was in elementary school. I sent him a toothbrush and some licorice, made him a necklace. I don’t think he ever wore it.”
Wendell still has the necklace from his own playing days and is more than content with his life on the farm. If Wyatt — who is 6-5 and apparently pumping mid-90s fastballs — is lucky enough to hear his name called on draft day, highlights of his dad’s oddball rituals will get another spin.
That’s fine by Turk, a man who always understood who he was, even if the rest of the world struggled to.