COMMENTARY : IT’S LIKE LIVING IN THE WORLD OF A DOG

The last time he was fired, they told him to get out of the clubhouse unseen. They wanted Davey Johnson gone, and now. The New York Mets fired him one day on the road and told him it would be better if he didn’t say anything to his players. Not thank you, not good luck, not goodbye. They told Davey Johnson to get lost and we’ll try to forget you ever helped us win a world championship. As Johnson remembers that pain: “They thought the transition would be smoother that way.”

Though the Mets’ firing of the manager who helped create their greatest years was an act of cruelty, now comes an even more bittersweet ending for baseball lifer.

Now he’s finished with the Cincinnati Reds. Now he’s finished with a team whose owner confers with a dead dog and believes the dead dog’s hair is such good luck that she carries it in baggies so as to be ready to rub it on her hitters and pitchers. Now Davey Johnson is finished with the dog woman, and what does a guy do, laugh or cry?

Maybe both. Reliever Mike Jackson had been shelled by the Atlanta Braves in the last game of the National League Championship Series. The pitcher embraced the manager in the clubhouse and said, “Thanks for everything.” Then, laughing: “I just didn’t have it today, but thanks, it’s been great.”

And Davey Johnson smiled even as tears came to his eyes, his emotions a jumble of contradictions, the man likely glad to be rid of the woman with the dead dog and yet sad to be done with his baseball team.

He had said it would take three or four years to get done what he wanted to do with the Reds. One of the many curiosities of Johnson’s tenure was that the team moved toward a World Series more quickly than even he envisioned. The Reds may have been the National League’s best team in the strike season of ‘94--Johnson’s second year--and this time around they were so confident that every personnel move was dictated by one ambition: victory over Atlanta.

In the winter of ‘94, though, the woman with the dead dog decided she didn’t like Johnson. She liked Ray Knight, who had been a broadcaster until his friend, Johnson, hired him as a hitting coach. In a series of maneuvers that defy logic, the owner allowed Johnson to seek other jobs--and when he couldn’t find one, she told him he could manage the Reds one more season on this condition: Johnson would teach Knight how to manage.

After the Mets fired him in 1990, Johnson was out of baseball nearly three years. He didn’t want that to happen again. So rather than tell the woman with the dead dog that the didn’t want her job, he decided that winning with the Reds was his best advertisement for future work.

Win, he did. Get to the World Series, he didn’t. “The last couple days have been hard on us,” he said when it was over. “We weren’t playing the way we’re capable of. I had a few words to say to the guys after the game, but I couldn’t say a whole lot.” His voice broke even as he said those few words. “I’s been a great year for the Reds. It was just too much Atlanta Braves.”

This much Atlanta: Its heroes were second-stringers, a catcher named Charlie O’Brien and an outfielder named Mike Devereaux, each with a three-run homer to break open Games 3 and 4. This much Atlanta: It used four starting pitchers in the sweep, each one masterful, and its bullpen allowed one run in the four games while Cincinnati’s allowed a dozen. This much Atlanta: Of the last four World Series, the Braves have made it to three.

Even before the last game, Davey Johnson felt defeat coming. He told reporters during batting practice that his guys were nervous and pressing. “I’m surprised,” he said. “I’m shocked. I’m disappointed.”

Good pitching does that to good hitting, and the Braves’ pitching was better than good. The swift and might Reds scored only five runs in the four games. They grounded into eight double plays. They broke at least a half-dozen bats, so confused were they. Power hitter Reggie Sanders seemed to invent new ways to strike out. Ron Gant, released a year ago by the Braves as much for his perennial October failings as for his broken leg, failed for the Reds this October, at one point reduced to trying a bunt with a bunt with a man in scoring position. (“No, No,” said manager-trainee Ray Knight.)

And when it was over, Davey Johnson stood by the manager’s room and said his only plan right now is “get a bucket of balls, go to the far end of the driving range and beat on ‘em.” He has another year on his bizarre deal with the woman who owns the REds; a year as a consultant. He wants nothing to do with that; he’s a manager. “Lord willing, I’ll be back in uniform.”

So a journalist from New York, a friend from Johnson’s days with the Mets, asks the inevitable question: When the Yankees fire Buck Showalter, would Johnson work for that owner?

“I’ve never felt I couldn’t work for anybody,” said the man out of work, looking for work, even that kind of work. “I’ve never had any trouble being a good employee.”

As for Johnson being hardheaded, stubborn and opinionated--a critique heard more than once--he said, “It’s different being hard-headed with the general manager than with the owner. The field manager can differ with the general manager, can argue with him, express his opinion. But when the owner wants something done, it’s cut and dried.”

Well, the New York man said, “What if the owner also acts as the general manager?”

Davey Johnson let that question go unanswered, though the answer seems to have been suggested by his good work in this curious Reds season. Anyone who can work for the Reds’ owner can work for the Yankees’ owner. For that matter, working for the Reds’ owner may be the best way to get ready to work for the Yankees’ owner.