HoJo Looks Back in Disbelief on the Mets’ Not-So-Amazing Season

It’s all looking back now, like lying in bed at night and seeing the pitch he should have hit, or feeling his body slump when nobody could get him home from third base. Except that Howard Johnson is seeing the ghosts of the whole season.

It was his season that might have been. It was the season of his life -- the season of recognition and money and stardom. But mostly what he feels is that slump in his shoulders when he let out his breath and the anticipation with it.

“Going to the All-Star Game for the first time, getting to start it,” Johnson said. “Signing the contract. All in the same week.” Whatever he did was the highlight of the season for the whole team. “I loved the recognition for the first time,” he said. “I fed off it.”

But, he says, it was more fun when the Mets were hated around the league. “They hated us this year,” Johnson said. “But not as much.” More likely, they enjoyed rubbing it into the image of the old Mets.

These Mets didn’t walk through the season with that arrogant swagger that used to make other guys gnash their teeth. They could swagger, but it doesn’t mean as much when you’re not doing well. If they had won, Johnson would have been no worse than third in the voting for Most Valuable Player voting.

What he has in his locker now is the 40th base he stole. He’s not going to make it to the fabled 40-40, but still, with five games to go, he has hit 35 home runs, scored 100 runs, has 97 runs batted-in and a .288 batting average.

I would have traded him 15 minutes after his 1987 season, but I would have been wrong. He has proved himself. If the attempted trades of last spring had come off, good grief!

His 41st double Tuesday night gave him the team record for total bases. But with six more hits over the season, one a month, he would be hitting .300. He would have made six fewer outs; maybe he would have driven in a few more runs. And maybe they would have won a few more games.

“I just look at it as a lot of opportunities when I wish I had come through,” he said. “I know you can’t come through every time, but as a player you want to. Knowing I had a good season, I just wish I could have done more.”

What he recalls is standing on third base with none out in the 10th inning against Pittsburgh. He had tied the score with a two-run homer in the eighth inning. It was Sept. 9, and the Mets were as close as they’d ever been. “We had to win to stay 2 1/2 behind,” he said. “We didn’t score. The rest is history.

“You know,” he said, “I never remember walking off the field, getting beat by a home run to end the game. It happened a lot this year. It must have been five or six times.”

The landmark -- or tombstone -- of the season may be the home run by Willie Randolph that beat them in the ninth inning in August. Or maybe it was the West Coast trip that followed. “We had battled back after getting swept in San Diego,” Johnson said. “We swept the Dodgers to get back in it. We had three games in San Francisco before we came home and got a chance to play Chicago.

“We got swept in San Francisco.”

There was that futility and the sense that too often the clubhouse was silent, sometimes suggesting apathy. “The players were different, but we were playing for different things,” he said. “Emotionally we were different.”

Johnson was the only Met who was hitting, and he had to catch himself when he was trying to do too much. He had to persuade himself to take a walk when his impulse was to try to hit a home run.

He saw what he called “just a lot of lack of anger,” but what he was looking for was the spirit of another time. “A couple of guys playing hard, getting dirty,” he said. “It does get contageous.”

He saw it when Dwight Gooden pitched. “I want to play behind Doc,” Johnson said. “You know he’s battling his butt off.” He recalled Wally Backman, Lenny Dykstra and Ray Knight, what they once did and the vacuum that wasn’t refilled when they left. “That’s emotion,” he said. Keith Hernandez and Gary Carter, the backbone of earlier winners, were on the bench. “It’s hard to lead from the bench,” Johnson said.

He says he doesn’t understand how the season could have happened to Darryl Strawberry. “No question he lost confidence in himself,” Johnson said. “We all lose it at times and there’s nobody there to help you. He’s got more ability in his finger than the rest of us have in our whole body -- myself included. You just got to want to use it.

“There’s no chance they’ll trade him.”

Johnson noted the development of Kevin Elster at shortstop so Johnson could stay at third base and thrive there. He watched as Gregg Jefferies failed to hit and field early in the season and failed to make friends consistently all season. “Everybody knows he’s going to be a good player,” Johnson said. “He’s missed the boat on what will give him popularity here. He thinks if he plays well, it will come. That’s not the case. He has to step aside and be more low-key on the things he says.”

Some of the speculation now has Johnson being moved to first base for next season. “The only thing that would accomplish is to get Jefferies off second base. He’s going to be all right.” Another rumor has Johnson moving to center field. Juan Samuel doesn’t have a grip on the job. “I have a great arm and I can run,” Johnson said.

And there is the matter of Davey Johnson, the manager. “I hope he’s back; he deserves to be back,” HoJo said. “He may have lots of guys mad at him and some guys don’t respect him. But we did lose it, not him.”

HoJo got his first look at managers who win when he was with Detroit in 1984 and the Tigers won everything. “If you polled 100 New Yorkers, 99 would say Sparky Anderson was the greatest manager in baseball,” HoJo said. “We all thought Sparky was an idiot. But we knew we were going to win every day.”

Howard Johnson lived no such thing this season. “I’d look at the Cubs and think, ‘How are they winning?’ I’d look at this team and think, ‘How is this team losing?’ ”