NL CHAMPIONSHIP SERIES : New York vs. Houston : It Took More Than Magic to Make ‘Em the Monster Mets

Away from the pleasant panic that strikes even the most efficient big league staff shortly before the postseason, baseball’s Thinker of the ‘80s was chuckling about himself as a player.

“Bad even in wartime baseball ... cp and nc ,” Frank Cashen said of his mid-’40s run as the pepperpot second baseman for Loyola College in his native Baltimore. In the lingo he hears most often, from his scouts, cp means “can’t play”; nc translates into “no chance.”

That’s almost exactly what was being muttered about the Mets when Cashen assumed control after the 1979 season: can’t play. They had lost more than 95 games for the third straight season. Four years later, after the Mets still had been losers 106 more times than winners, came: no chance. And one or two shorthand suggestions for Cashen, such as BGI (be gone immediately).

Silly then, it seems ludicrous now that the Mets have averaged nearly 99 victories the last three seasons, now that they have finished 28 1/2 games ahead of last year’s National League champions (the Cardinals) and 37 games ahead of the 1984 NL East winners (the Cubs).

“I kinda had faith in what I was doing,” he said.

Cashen, 60, is not an imposing man, short and with a girth that suggests he also has won, frequently and grandly, against the twin-tower forces of nutrition and exercise.

“I love beer and used to work for a brewery where I got free beer,” he has said. “I love books, and now I work for a publishing company (Doubleday) and get free books.”

His low-key and bow-tie presence is not what one would expect from the hardball general who has beaten the Steinbrenner Yankees in just about every way possible in the Battle of New York. In Cashen’s first year, 1980, the Mets were 67-95 and drew 1,178,659 fans to Shea Stadium; the Yankees were 103-59 that year, with a home attendance of 2,627,417.

This season, the Yankees were approaching 90 victories at about the same time as the Mets were passing 105. The Mets drew more than 400,000 more customers than the Yankees.

So if “Thinker of the ‘80s” seems a bit lofty for Cashen, the usual executive-of-the-year plaques surely are too hollow. He’s beyond them. The first test is building; the ultimate one is maintaining. With the Mets loaded at the minor league level, Cashen seems assured of two parts of the builder’s triple crown. All he needs now is the middle one -- a World Series championship.

Lest he get too comfortable with success, comes a slap of reality from Orioles manager Earl Weaver: “What I remember is ‘69, winning 109 (during the regular season) and three straight (in the AL playoffs), then losing four of five to the Mets and finding out what a (rotten) year we had.”

Because of the entertainment aspect, baseball building is the oddest form of construction. The idea, as Cashen showed with the Mets, is to slap together a flashy facade while also laying the foundation. You hope customers get excited enough by loud malarkey about elixirs and strongmen not to notice dangerous holes in the floor.

The Mets’ first slogan under Cashen was: “The Magic is Back.”

He knows there is no such thing as magic.

“The worst thing you can do in this business,” he said, “is delude yourself. If you think you’re better than you really are, the only person you’re kidding is yourself.”

With an open-wallet policy from ownership, Cashen fetched some sideshows his clever pitchmen could hawk. Among them were Dave Kingman (“Coming from Baltimore, I also believe in the three-run homer”) and George Foster (“I thought he’d be around when we were a winner, and the truth of the matter is he was”).

Quietly, the lousy pepperpot second baseman was hiring eyes who could spot wonderful players.

“The most important thing you can have with a baseball team is good scouts,” said Cashen. “Good scouts get you talent. If you put scouts aside, you could have the greatest instructors in the world, great minor league managers, everything. But unless they’ve got the talent to work with, they’re nothing. Really.”

This came from first-hand experience the likes of which no baseball executive ever received. In Cashen’s first year as general manager of the Orioles, 1966, they won the World Series. He volunteers to having ridden lots of orange-and-black feathers to glory.

“I didn’t build the Orioles,” he said. “They were a good club with a sound farm system. All I had to do was kind of come in (from new owner Jerold Hoffberger’s brewery) and steer the thing on an even course (until going back, at Hoffberger’s request, after the ’75 season). At least, I was smart enough not to screw it up.”

From Branch Rickey, Cashen got his cliches; from a brilliant man almost unknown outside baseball, Jim McLaughlin, Cashen got his appreciation for priorities.

“Lee MacPhail (whom Cashen replaced as the Orioles’ general manager) was the overall brightest man I’ve seen in the game,” Cashen said, “but the one guy I guess we all go back to was Jim McLaughlin, the foundation man for the Orioles, the farm director, the guy who brought in Harry Dalton and Lou Gorman and Earl Weaver and so many others.

“He had problems with (Paul) Richards, so he left and went to Cincinnati, where he drafted Johnny Bench and laid the foundation for the great Reds teams of the ‘70s. A lot of ideas we’re getting credit for were his.”

Retired now, McLaughlin was saying over the phone the other day what he started preaching to Cashen about 20 years ago: “I do not believe that from quantity comes quality. I believe in selective quality, that you determine who the best players are and go after ‘em. I don’t believe in scouting for a position. If you need a third baseman, say, I think you can use the excess at another position to make a trade.”

For illustration, Cashen uses 1966. That may have been the most vintage year any team ever had at shortstop. Playing it at the major league level for the Orioles was Luis Aparicio. At Class AAA, was Davey Johnson. Behind Johnson was Mark Belanger. Behind Belanger was Bobby Grich. Behind Grich was Bob Bailor. And behind Bailor, in the rookie league, was Kiko Garcia.

In ‘72, the Orioles needed a power-hitting catcher. So Cashen turned to his shortstop surplus and swapped the man he later would choose as his turnaround manager for the Mets, Johnson, to Atlanta.

“Tongue in cheek, he constantly reminds me it was the worst move I ever made,” Cashen said. “Of course, I accuse him of loafing (after being switched to second base in Baltimore) and showing me up (in Atlanta). He didn’t show any power to speak of, and goes down there and hits 43 home runs right off the bat.”

To the wise but sometimes cantankerous McLaughlin with the Orioles, Cashen was both boss and pupil. The kid’s done fine. And, recalling the Orioles with their shortstops, he’s got a stack of center fielders that might be broken for the right player to fill a Mets’ weakness.

“This is the first time you can sit back and judge him as a general manager and a baseball man, because with the Orioles he was just put in charge, period,” McLaughlin said. “But he seems to have a gift for selecting people who have qualities to succeed. And he’s patient, doesn’t panic. He sorta divorces himself from the media heat. If not physically, at least mentally for a while. And he has another quality I wish I had: a public-relations sense.”

Cashen fell in love with baseball watching games in Baltimore’s Clifton Park with his father, who had emigrated from Tipperary. He developed insights into sport through 17 years of fast-pitch softball games. His other part-time interest was the law, and he earned a degree from Maryland’s law school after years of night classes.

“All I ever wanted to be was a newspaperman,” said Cashen, who was one, with the News American, for 17 years, “until I started having lots of kids (seven in all). It got to the point where I no longer could afford the luxury of saying: ‘Hey, money doesn’t matter. I like what I’m doing.’ I was prepared to miss it so badly (after going to work for Hoffberger at a race track). I guess I never quite missed it as much as I thought I would.”

Or as Weaver put it: “Somewhere along the line, he got bit by the baseball bug.”

Cashen’s management skills caused Hoffberger to vault him over more skilled baseball men already with the Orioles. Growing up, Cashen never had considered sports management; his Orioles assignments for the News American had been brief and limited. Still, he credits reporting skills with helping him immensely as an executive.

“In the newspaper business, you look at a set of facts, pick out what’s most important and that’s the lead,” he said. “In law school, when you brief a case, you end up saying: ‘What are they trying to tell me with all the gobbledygook that is in these pages?’ You pick out what’s important, just like writing a story.”

Same with all of a sudden running a big league baseball team. You pick out what’s important. You decide how it can get done -- and by whom. And you listen. All very good newspaper people are very good listeners.

With Cashen steering, the Orioles won the World Series twice (once with Hank Bauer as manager) and got there two other times. Away from the office, in Weaver’s estimation, “Frank is as good a man at a piano bar as I’ve ever seen.”

Cashen chuckles:

“A name-that-tune kind of thing, which really got tough when you had to name the date and who wrote it. We’d take (superscout Jim) Russo along to arbitrate. Funny thing. Earl’s younger than I am (by about four years) but he kinda quits after the ‘40s and a little bit of the ‘50s. I can go through the Beatles, the Eagles and Chicago. With the hard rockers, that kind of business, I kind of lose interest.”

When he returned to the brewery, in November ‘75, Cashen figured he would lose his passion for baseball. Four years later, he in fact was the administrator of baseball for commissioner Bowie Kuhn. Came the call from the Mets; came an instant yes.

“I’m a competitive person by nature,” he said, “and I missed the winning and losing each day. I used to get up in the morning and say: ‘Gotta do this, gotta do that to improve the club.’ It’s really difficult to get that kind of feeling out of sales figures and things like that at a brewery.”

The foundation Cashen began laying for the Mets was solid by 1984. He had tried slogans and cosmetic patchwork, even juggled managers. He felt certain that the untried, cerebral Johnson would be as successful for him in the ‘80s as he and the Orioles were sure about the untried Weaver during the ’68 season.

“All the stuff he (Johnson) is doing with computers,” Cashen said, “Bobby Brown (the Orioles’ director of public relations) started doing -- in longhand -- years ago for Earl Weaver. What certain hitters did against certain pitchers, what pitchers did against certain clubs. Bob started that.”

Along with the obvious emergence of such players as Dwight Gooden and Darryl Strawberry, Cashen points to a trade in April 1982 as being pivotal: Lee Mazzilli to Texas for Walt Terrell and Ron Darling.

“A real foundation trade,” he said. “I knew I would have two major league pitchers a year from then. I’m a pitching guy. Always have been.”

When first baseman Keith Hernandez and catcher Gary Carter became available, ownership tossed more money Cashen’s way.

“I’ve always felt,” Cashen said, “that the leap to respectability is the hardest for a team. You win 11 of 20 games, say, which doesn’t seem like much. But it translates into 89 wins a year. With 89 wins, you’re in there knocking. After that, somebody from a higher league often steps in, decides who’s gonna get hurt and who’s gonna have a bad year or a career one.

“Also, I don’t think you can teach people to win at the major league level. If they’ve played with lackluster clubs, clubs that struggled in the minors, they don’t come to the majors and suddenly blossom. I think when a kid has to pick up a ground ball in a playoff situation in an A league, with first place on the line, and he has to do it at 19, that’s just as important toward how he’s gonna be three or four years later in Shea Stadium.”

Shea is bustling just now. The latest sign tacked prominently to its chest is one, finally, that conforms both to Cashen’s wishes and truth in advertising: “Baseball Like It Oughta Be.”

Still, with Cashen’s good work has come embarrassment. Not by the team but by the few thousand vandals who ripped out a good deal of Shea’s sod after the Mets clinched the NL East title. He wants a police department reluctant to get involved too deeply in private business to be more prominent if the Mets happen to win the playoffs and the World Series.

Cashen is too preoccupied to consider the irony, that having built a team to celebrate he now must worry about celebrations.