Mets lucky Buck is their skipper
JUPITER, Fla. — Buck Showalter should have been a football coach, a truth that transcends his affection for the Alabama Crimson Tide and his belief that Bryce Young should be the No. 1 overall pick. Like a football coach, Showalter loves to control every detail of every drill of every day, and hates to talk about injuries.
He hates to talk about injuries because he can’t, you know, control them.
But one of his starting pitchers, Jose Quintana, appears gone for at least three months, as first reported by The Post’s Mike Puma, and as much as Showalter tap-danced around the questions before and after the Mets’ 9-3 road victory over the Marlins, he couldn’t run from this basic spring training truth:
Any day when a team learns it is losing a starter for an extended period of time qualifies as a really bad day.
And at the same time, a really good day to have Showalter as your manager.
Perhaps the leading candidate to replace Quintana, Tylor Megill looked good against the Marlins over four shutout innings, reminding everyone he was lightsout last April before his arm betrayed him. But if the expected shutdown of a significant free-agent acquisition imperils the Mets’ chances of matching or beating their 101-win season last year, Showalter is the right captain to navigate that turbulent sea.
In his 22nd season running a big-league club, the 66-year-old Showalter has no more time for excuses now than he did as a rookie manager with the Yankees in 1992. He has attacked a culture of dysfunction and defeat that had long consumed baseball’s second team in town.
So in January, when the actor and comedian Hank Azaria did his bit about the fatalistic realities of being a Mets fan at the baseball writers’ awards dinner, where Showalter was honored as a four-time Manager of the Year, veteran Buck watchers could see his face tighten into a fist.
Showalter appreciated Azaria’s talent and humor, to an extent.
“If I could have gotten back up there,” he said of the podium that night, “I would have said something. I don’t play that s---. We’re not the little brother of anyone.”
The newest Mets superstar, Justin Verlander, was asking someone the other day about the franchise’s Loserville image, and why the narrative even exists. Showalter is here to destroy that angle, and that’s why the Mets are lucky to have him. He will protect the franchise’s interests at all costs, even when the toll is as personal as it got after the Game 3 playoff loss to the Padres.
Showalter famously had the umpires check Joe Musgrove for the possible use of an illegal substance, and the check came up empty. Showalter didn’t want to say much about that one Monday, other than he couldn’t have cared less about the criticism he took.
“That’s what I’m charged to do,” he said. “What bothered me at the end of it was, should I have done it earlier?”
Should he have given the Mets a better chance to win?
The manager was sitting with a reporter in his Port St. Lucie office in the morning, swiveling his head right to survey his roster posted on this wall, then left to survey his team’s schedule on that wall. He had a few flowers in a jar on his desk left over from the 40 he gave his wife Angela for their 40th anniversary last week.
Showalter mentioned how much he enjoyed a two-hour meeting he had with the organization’s six minor-league managers. He wasn’t pontificating, but Showalter did tell them, “When a team from another organization is playing the New York Mets in the minor leagues, there should be an identity and a brand and it shouldn’t be in Brooklyn but not in Binghamton.”
He talked about the little things. Little things are his big things. Showalter has the names and faces of staffers, broadcasters and beat writers posted on a clubhouse wall so players know who they are interacting with. He has the flags of the 10 nations represented on the Mets roster hanging in the hallway, just like at Citi Field, where Steve Cohen renovated (on the fly) what his manager called the best family room in sports.
“Max [Scherzer] will tell you his kids will never see him pitch again because they love that room too much,” Showalter said.
The manager said that Cohen’s commitment to being “first in class” in every conspicuous and inconspicuous way tell him the owner wants to win as much as George Steinbrenner did in the old days. The Boss wouldn’t have approved of how last year’s Mets handed the division to the Braves, but that was hardly a Same Old Mets collapse, even if Showalter could handle that portrayal after winning more games than any Mets manager not named Davey Johnson (108, 1986) had ever won.
“I like the constant sense of urgency [in New York],” he said.
What Showalter doesn’t is like the notion of his team as some secondclass operation. The Mets are lucky he’s here to force the upgrade.