CARLOS DANGER
Mendoza look like a winning hire, but in baseball, you just never know
PORT ST. LUCIE — You never know. That’s the thing. You can make all the right phone calls. You can do all the due diligence required to uncover old skeletons. You can ask all the right questions during the interview process and, once you make the call, you can sit back and beam with pride when your guy inevitably wins the press conference.
You still never know. It’s baseball. It’s managing. It’s rolling the dice. Every time.
“At the end of the day, it all comes down to a simple question: Did you do enough good things to put your players in the position to succeed, did you allow them to maximize their potential, or did you get out of the way?” Davey Johnson asks. “I’d like to think I never got in the way of winning.”
Forty years ago this spring, it was Johnson who was the guy getting his first crack at managing in the big leagues, and he led with his mouth. He’d always been a feisty pepper pot as a player, and on his first day on the job he proved he still was.
A lot of people had been in Frank Cashen’s ear, urging him to bring Billy Martin to Queens. Whatever you think about Martin, he was exactly what the Mets — six straight years of fifthand sixth-place finishes — craved, a team Martin could rebuild on the fly. He did that awfully well. Earl Weaver was another name that spent a lot of time on the back pages.
“We think,” Cashen said, “that we got our own guy who can do that.”
Johnson wasn’t going to argue.
“I want to thank Mr. Cashen for having the intelligence to hire me,” Johnson said, and he was off to the races. “I like to go with the percentages, like Earl Weaver. But I have a little better idea of what I’m doing.” This at a time when Weaver had 1,354 wins, four pennants and a World Series on his résumé, and Johnson three zeros on his. “The proof will be in the pudding with me.”
If you come to Clover Park 40 springs later and you come looking for Carlos Mendoza to borrow heavily from Davey Johnson’s playbook, you’re going to walk away with an empty notebook. Maybe Johnson proved a long time ago that you can back up your boasting by winning — which he did, more than any other Mets manager in history — but that’s not even close to Mendoza’s way.
“What I like is that I have a bunch of guys who want to be here, and a bunch of guys who want to play hard and play winning baseball every day,” Mendoza says. “We all know there’s a right way and a wrong way to play this game, and these guys here, they’re all about the right way.”
It’s a matter of record what Johnson did here: 90 wins right away, a title within three years, two first-place finishes, 606 wins (including postseason). With 40 years of hindsight it’s easy to see that Cashen was wise to go with Johnson over Martin or Weaver. It wasn’t so obvious in ’84, same as it wasn’t so evident that Mendoza would be the right call ahead of retaining Buck Showalter or making Craig Counsell an offer he couldn’t refuse.
It still isn’t, really. Only a couple of hundred games will tell that tale, the first 162 of which he’ll have to make due without the kind of endless financial backing Mets fans might’ve expected when Steve Cohen bought the team. Which is fine. Getting the right man for the job supersedes getting the most famous man for the job.
“I can’t wait to get to work,” Mendoza says.
Early indicators are that he’s a good find, and a good fit. Yankees players familiar with him from his time across town stood in line to hug him Tuesday when the teams played in Port. St. Lucie. He seemed comfortable with the daily give-and-take. Spend five minutes in his company, you’d be happy to take a turn in the old sliding pits if he asked you to.
Still, you never know. There should’ve been no greater pairing of manager and team than Joe Maddon and the Angels. That was a disaster. The Padres spent 1994 as the worst team in baseball, then scrambled to replace Jim Riggleman when the Cubs poached him by elevating the third-base coach the next day. He showed up for his press conference sweaty in a suit, and more than a little uneasy. He sure didn’t look like a future Hall of Famer.
“Looks can be deceiving,” Bruce Bochy said that day, and so they were.
Carlos Mendoza has the look. He has the same confidence as Davey Johnson did back in ’84, back before Johnson won his first big-league game; he just won’t be writing as many back-page headlines as Johnson did. The Mets will take that equation and run with it, if that’s the one they get. You just never
know.