Baseball : Fear and Loathing in the NL East as Mets Try to Write a Sequel

Maybe the New York Mets will win 108 games again. Maybe they will again have the National League’s Eastern Division title tucked away by June.

The two toughest obstacles the Mets will have to overcome are themselves and a world of hate.

Nothing new, really. The background has been chronicled. The first two weeks of the new season have served to confirm the impression, however.

Fear and loathing. Met first baseman Keith Hernandez experienced both in a St. Louis bar last weekend.

In a spring interview with The Times, Hernandez reflected on the Mets’ off-the-field problems and said that the club could profit by them, that he hoped the young players learned of the need to swallow pride and walk away from trouble.

Hernandez, a former Cardinal, did just that in the St. Louis bar, chased out by antagonistic Cardinal partisans.

There was no place to go, though, when the heat came at the Mets on the field, a belligerent accompaniment to the Cardinals’ three-game sweep.

The fans displayed such venom, Hernandez said, that “we were rattled, which surprised me a little. It’s going to be like that everywhere we go this season.”

Some of it comes with success and being from the Big Apple.

A lot of it is the Mets’ style. The curtain calls at home. The self-congratulations. An aura of arrogance.

Shortstop Ozzie Smith is said to be the leading Met hater among the Cardinals.

“Hate isn’t in my vocabulary,” he said the other day. “All I’m saying is that if a team outplays you, admit it. The Mets just need to mix in a little humility. If the Mets had a little of that, people wouldn’t hate them as much as they do.”

Hate may be easier to handle, however, than the possibility of internal combustion.

Less than two weeks into the season, Met Manager Davey Johnson had to have a team meeting in Philadelphia the other day “to clear the air.”

It reportedly became polluted when pitcher Ron Darling criticized his teammates’ defense, and pitcher Rick Aguilera second-guessed catcher Gary Carter’s pitch selection.

The vaunted Met staff is off to a humbling start.

The earned-run average through 14 games was 5.09, based on 70 earned runs in 123 innings. The opposition had collected 136 hits and 15 homers.

With Dwight Gooden still out for drug rehabilitation, Johnson has been using a rotation of Bob Ojeda, Sid Fernandez, Darling and Aguilera.

The pitchers haven’t complained, but Johnson plans to switch to a five-man rotation this week, adding David Cone, who was acquired from Kansas City in a late-spring deal for catcher Ed Hearn.

Gooden is scheduled to be released from the treatment center sometime this week. Commissioner Peter Ueberroth will decide this weekend when to lift Gooden’s suspension after meeting with Gooden’s doctors and Met executives. The Mets hope to have Gooden back in the rotation by mid-May.

“Our pitching has got to get better,” Johnson said before another weekend series with St. Louis, this one in New York.

“If it doesn’t, there won’t be enough Rolaids to hold me.”

The Met-Cardinal relationship wasn’t improved by the accident last weekend in which St. Louis southpaw John Tudor suffered a broken leg. Met catcher Barry Lyons barreled into Tudor while chasing a foul popup into the St. Louis dugout and Tudor is expected to be out at least three months. It seems likely that he will miss the entire season.

“I tried to catch him,” Tudor said of Lyons. “I don’t know what the hell he was thinking about. He never broke stride. I got up on the top step expecting him to slide, but he just kept coming. He kind of pinned me. He crushed my leg and hip against the bench. He just blew me out.”

The incident even disrupted relations between the publicity directors of the teams.

The Mets’ Jay Horwitz phoned the Cardinals’ Kip Ingle to ask for Tudor’s home phone number, saying Lyons wanted to make a courtesy call. Ingle said he couldn’t give it to Horwitz because he didn’t have it. An unbelieving Horwitz hung up in anger.

Ingle, as it turns out, was leveling. Tudor recently moved and hadn’t gotten a phone yet.

Attempting to shake a struggling start before the Mets put ‘em away early again, the Philadelphia Phillies held their third team meeting in a week before last Thursday’s game in Montreal.

It was a players-only meeting called by Mike Schmidt, reportedly concerned by lack of effort.

Said Manager John Felske: “Here’s a guy who just hit his 500th home run. If he’s busting his (rear) to be better, what’s (the other players’) rationale for not doing better?”

Charles Hudson was a promising 8-8 as a Philadelphia rookie in 1983. Then he went 9-11, 8-13 and 7-10 before joining the New York Yankees in a December trade for Mike Easler.

Now Hudson is 3-0 as a key member of a Yankee rotation that could lose its suspect label if he keeps it up.

Said Schmidt of Hudson, his former teammate: “A lot of young players come through Philadelphia and get their spirit broken. When they leave, they realize the game can be fun. I’d have found it hard to quit on him with all that talent he has. If we’d have gotten Charlie four runs a game, he’d still be here.”

The Pittsburgh Pirates are a little short in several areas, including size. They have four players--John Cangelosi, Rafael Belliard, Mike LaValliere and Onix Concepcion--who are less than 5 feet 8 inches.

Said coach Rich Donnelly: “Don’t worry about them. Those guys are all right. They have shoe contracts with Buster Brown.”

And in the quotebook department, Al Newman, the new Minnesota Twin shortstop who was acquired from Montreal, said: “I’m not into fishing or anything like that. When Al Campanis said blacks are not buoyant, I started to worry. With those 10,000 lakes they talk about having here, I better get myself a life jacket.”

Detroit Tigers Manager Sparky Anderson, an expert in exaggeration, outdid himself while in New York the other day. In fact, he almost outdid Campanis.

Anderson was saying that he loves the time spent teaching and talking to young Tiger players such as Darnell Coles, Matt Nokes, Eric King and Jeff Robinson.

Two Detroit reporters--Vern Plagenhoef of the Booth Newspapers and Tom Gage of the Detroit News--heard this:

“Say what you want about Hitler, but he trained killers. You train kids in their early years and you can do anything you want with that child.”

And you can’t work with veterans?

“Their brains have been salted,” Anderson said. “Habits have been formed. No, they don’t want to go through that.”

Still on the subject of youth, Anderson said of the Angels:

“They have 12 players who are 26 or under. That’s one of the greatest master mendings I’ve ever seen.”

And the Tigers?

“We’re old. We’re really going to have to step up our program.”

Having lost Lance Parrish to the Phillies, the Tigers had hoped to compensate with solid pitching.

The plan was for Placentia’s Dan Petry to return from elbow surgery and join Jack Morris as a consistent winner.

Petry, however, has been unable to regain the form and confidence he lost in mid-May of 1985.

He had a record of 86-53 before then. He is 12-23 since, having won only 1 of his last 13 starts.

“It doesn’t do any good thinking negatively, but that’s the hardest part,” he said. “The next time I go out I’ll wonder, ‘What will happen now.’

“I used to walk out there and say, ‘The game’s over. I won it.’ I know sooner or later I’m going to win, but I want it to happen yesterday.”

Notes and Numbers Third baseman George Brett is out of the Kansas City lineup with a chest muscle pull. It’s the 14th time since 1977 that Brett has suffered an injury requiring him to miss eight games or more. The Royals’ record during the previous 13: 107-121, a .469 pace. . . . The Yankees were 24-29 against left-handed pitching last year but were 7-1 through Thursday, an improvement that could be traced to the addition of right-handed designated hitter Gary Ward, who was 20 for 61 with 12 runs batted in after 15 games, and the fast starts of Rickey Henderson, who had 20 hits in his first 48 at bats, and Dave Winfield, who was 22 for 56.

Designated hitter Don Baylor of the Boston Red Sox went into a weekend series in Texas needing only two hits for 2,000. “I’ll have 2,000 hits and over 1,100 RBIs, one for every other hit,” Baylor said. “That’s what’s meaningful. It’s what you do with your hits that counts.” . . . A traditional absence of speed hurt the Red Sox in the World Series, and it’s no better now. Boston was 0 for 3 in steal attempts through 15 games. The Red Sox hold the American League record for fewest steals in a season--18 in 1964. Carl Yastrzemski and Dalton Jones led the club that year with six each.

The Pirates, with the first choice in last year’s amateur draft, finally selected Arkansas third baseman Jeff King over Texas pitcher Greg Swindell. Swindell, picked second, is already pitching for the Cleveland Indians. King is in the class A Sally League with 13 strikeouts and a .211 average in 11 games. . . . Former Dodger Candy Maldonado has 14 hits in 7 games against the Dodgers this year. He had a .327 average and 13 RBIs against them last year. . . . Dan Plesac, who became the Milwaukee relief ace as a rookie last year, saving 14 games and registering a 10-7 record, is laughing at the sophomore jinx. He was in 7 of the Brewers’ first 14 games, registering 5 saves. He pitched nine innings without allowing an earned run.

Catcher Terry Kennedy, counted on by the Baltimore Orioles to help improve a lamentable defense, had thrown out only two of the last 16 base stealers through Thursday. . . . Oddibe McDowell should have skipped the Texas Rangers’ welcome home luncheon last week. He cut the middle finger of his right hand with a bread knife, needed eight stitches and is expected to miss another week. . . . The Yankees are 18-3 against Kansas City at home since the Pine Tar Game in 1983.