Mets Improved, But Check Back in ’99

They have brought together a team from the corners of the world. Armando Benitez from the right coast, Bobby Bonilla from the left coast and Robin Ventura from the middle. The others were already here.

And Rickey Henderson--if they get him, too; nobody is quite sure where he’s from, which is why people came to say a long time ago, “Rickey’s Rickey.”

Which brings the New York Mets back to something Casey Stengel used to say: “You usually know who you’re married to.”

Everything gets back to Casey Stengel.

Will it work? “I don’t know,” Bobby Valentine said Thursday night.

When the Mets do something ambitious--several things, actually--after years of evading the opportunity of New York, it’s no time to be negative. But I was profoundly influenced as a child by reading the Classic Comics version of “Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde,” in which the good doctor took a knife and carved up the face on a coin. That means, for every front side on a baseball deal, there is a backside.

We should remember a circumstance like this in 1992 when it plunged the Mets into the most foul abyss of their history. Not just one season, but two of firing of managers and general managers and banishment of players. Fred Wilpon told Al Harazin, the general manager, that he didn’t ever want to see 1991 again and his wish was Harazin’s command.

“It’s the nature of the game that everybody thinks he’s smarter than the next guy,” Harazin reflected Thursday night. “You think you can catch lightning in your bottle.”

At the outset the outlook was brilliant. “People thought I had an iota of sense,” Harazin said.

He added Bonilla, Eddie Murray, and Bret Saberhagen to Vince Coleman, who already was festering, and finished 72-90 in 1992 and then 59-103--the most losses ever by an established team in an expansion year. Think of that.

That team never came from behind. Kind and gentle people can point to a May injury to Saberhagen and injuries in August, but they were already five games under .500 and sinking. Kind people can say the rape investigation in spring training left a terrible burden. “If we had started the season playing as bad as we are now, I’d have no choice but to think it was a factor,” Harazin said that June. “To blame the malaise we’ve had in June on that doesn’t quite fit.”

I hope the shippers and movers of this operation remember history.

It’s too bad Todd Hundley didn’t spend six weeks of spring training in leftfield learning to judge a fly ball. Now there isn’t a real homegrown star among them. No Bernie Williams, no Derek Jeter, no Andy Pettitte. And this was the team that congratulated itself on the return of Joe McIlvaine, since departed as general manager, because “he can look at a seed and see a flower.”

But they had to make some kind of move before all their fans were blinded by the glare of the Yankees. Just had to. They won 88 games the last two seasons and in this one, 89 might have got them to the playoffs. Forget the Atlanta Braves, the Mets had to do something.

It looks like a pretty good lineup they’ve put together, doesn’t it? Brian McRae--or Henderson, if they get him--in front of Edgardo Alfonzo, John Olerud, Mike Piazza, Ventura, Bonilla. That’s six places, plus one more before the outs of Rey Ordonez and the pitcher. That’s quite a good infield with the Gold Gloves of Ventura and Ordonez on the left side, and Alfonzo at second and Olerud at first.

So the outfield is makeshift, and even with Henderson they won’t manufacture a game here or there with speed. Henderson might help on those days he’s into it.

Benitez can overpower a hitter like nobody they’ve had since Randy Myers in 1989. Maybe he can set up John Franco, share the role with Franco or eventually replace Franco.

But how do Omar Minaya, Steve Phillips, Nelson Doubleday and Fred Wilpon know it will work? They have socked $52.7 million into their 14 signed players, plus enormous contracts into the millennium. It’s Valentine’s responsibility to manage what Dr. Seuss identified as the hybrid Chirkenduse.

“The wonderful thing about baseball,” Valentine said, “is that you never know in advance how one guy is going to affect the group and how the group is going to affect one guy.”

Remember how Wilpon said “no one can accuse us of cheaping out, nor will we.” That was on the day in 1993 Harazin was fired for mixing the chemicals that blew up in his face. We saw how the chemistry equation of the Yankees produced one of the great seasons of all time. The chemistry of the ‘92-93 Mets was unforgivably bad.

I’m told Ventura is a terrific guy in the clubhouse. We know that last year he was recovering from a terrible ankle injury and that his best part of the season was September, which could mean that he killed dead teams, or that his ankle was coming alive. Benitez is volatile but still learning. Bonilla, we should assume, has grown since his last time around, and this time he isn’t expected to be the star.

Bonilla was then seen as a bright personality with a good Pittsburgh team, but people around the Pirates knew better, just as people around the St. Louis Cardinals knew that Coleman was a problem. Murray still had some of a wonderful hitting career left, but had been a baleful glare for a dozen years. Saberhagen went with the flow.

The media was part of the problem because it’s always a major presence in New York like the “given” of a geometry problem. The first I saw of Murray in the spring of ‘92, he snarled “food’s upstairs.” Younger players saw his hostility toward the media and it set a poisoned example.

When Frank Tanana, a wise veteran pitcher, joined the Mets the next spring, he noticed the players’ focus on the media. “It needed to be on playing ball,” Tanana said. “When the media was an issue, it was pretty apparent we could be in a lot of trouble.”

Coleman first showed himself in a vile tirade against a coach in 1991 and effectively ended his career when he threw the firecracker that injured a little girl in Los Angeles. Note that one of the players in the car with Coleman at the time was Bonilla.

It was a terrible time on the Mets. Coleman distinguished himself as the least likely to drive in a runner from scoring position in 17 years.

In looking at clips, I came across Harazin’s explanation for not getting Gary Sheffield from the San Diego Padres in 1993: “Would you give up Jeromy Burnitz, Butch Huskey and Ryan Thompson?”

So it goes. The Mets have earned a look from New York. Closing the gap on the Braves very much is another issue. Now, if they could get Roger Clemens. . .