Infinite Inning Reissue 15 (055): A Baseball Conversation with Davey Johnson

We return to 2018 and a conversation with the late great manager Davey Johnson, with a cameo from his very excited dogs. This week’s new remarks expand on Johnson’s Hall of Fame case, though it’s now beside the point. We also have a brief story in which Babe Ruth gets hurt, but someone else suffers a worse injury.

The Infinite Inning is a journey to the past to understand the present using baseball as our time machine. Baseball, America's brighter mirror, often reflects, anticipates, and even mocks the stories we tell ourselves about our world today. Baseball Prospectus's Steven Goldman discusses the game’s present, past, and future with forays outside the foul lines to the culture at large. Expect history, politics, stats, and frequent Casey Stengel quotations. Along the way, we'll try to solve the puzzle that is the Infinite Inning: How do you find the joy in life when you can’t get anybody out?

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:26):
Well, hello there, and thank you for joining me for
this reissue episode of The Infinite Inning. Whereas heretofore, I
had not included the guest segments in these reissues because,
whereas I do believe and hope that many of them
are still fun, I'm also sure that many are dated. However,

(00:48):
and this is a bit sad, very sad my discussion
with Davey Johnson, which took place back in twenty eighteen,
cannot date, both because it was focused on the reminiscence
of a man who had already retired, and sadly because
he passed away on September fifth, at the age of
eighty two. He was kind enough to talk to me

(01:09):
back then, and now we get to hear from him
one more time. At the risk of repeating some thoughts
that I probably gave back then, I have no idea
why Davey Johnson isn't in the Hall of Fame as
a manager. He had exactly as many championships as jim
Leyland and Whitey Herzog. And yes, there are other factors
at work there, particularly with Herzog. And I am not

(01:30):
putting or pitting his resume against the white Rats. I'm
just saying that only one championship is not disqualifying. Backtrack
for a sec though, and add in his playing career,
in which he was a four time All Star, three
time Gold Glover at second base, and an important part
of four Pennant winning Orioles teams, including the championship nineteen

(01:50):
sixty six and nineteen seventy clubs. It seems to me
that if you consider his overall career a little short,
you could look at the preponderance of his achievements in
the same way that the Hall did for Red Shaneean's
and put him in on that basis. If Joe Torre
had won just the championship, the one in nineteen ninety six,

(02:11):
I imagine that that would have been enough to put
him over the top, given how good a hitter he
was during his playing career. Johnson had some injury problems
early back problems, if I recall correctly, so his career
value was not as high as Shane deanster tories. But
who's to say. You almost certainly don't need me to

(02:32):
retell you Davey Johnson's Mets story. But he won one
hundred games twice and over ninety and three other seasons.
He also won ninety eight games with the Orioles and
the Nationals once a piece, and ask yourself how often
those clubs have done that well. His Mets teams were
loaded with young talent, but as he and I discussed,

(02:53):
not every manager would have been as a droit in
mixing all the parts he had at his disposal, and
not every man would have looked at a teenage Dwight
Gooden in nineteen eighty four and said, yes, I'll take
that guy. Some of them as overpowering and obviously talented
as young Doc Gooden was would have said, hmm, he

(03:14):
hasked to mature a bit more. Let's send him to
Triple A for more seasoning, a bit of peprika perhaps.
You know the one thing that the nineteen eighty six
Mets rotation did not have anyone older than twenty eight
years old in seasonal terms. Bruce Berrenni, who was thirty one,
made seven starts in May and June when Rick Aguilero

(03:36):
was out. Rick Aguilero was always out, but otherwise Bobby
Oheeda was the grizzled old man of the staff. At
twenty eight, they had easily the youngest staff in the
major leagues, because all the primary relievers were under thirty
as well. Now we have to acknowledge that there was
a price to some of them, not in the short term,

(03:56):
but in the long term. I have no doubt that
Dwight Godden's career trajectory was only partially determined by his
substance abuse issues. Johnson also wrote him hard at a
young age. The medical wisdom hadn't caught up with baseball
thinking at that point, so Johnson wasn't asking Doc to
do anything that he hadn't seen Jim Palmer do. Palmer

(04:17):
came up as a team as well. Now Palmer also
had all kinds of arm problems as a result of
how hard he was worked. In retrospect, it's amazing that
no one made that connection in say, the prior one
hundred years. I don't mean between Palmer and good And specifically,
but rather among all pitchers in the epidemiological sense. They
treated every arm as an individual case, rather than saying, well,

(04:42):
what do all these guys have in common? The ones
who piled up innings while still young? Now they do,
but they didn't then and for a long time after,
in the lively ball era, nineteen twenty and up. Only
six pitchers through more innings than good and by age
twenty five for bly Don Drysdale, Larry Derker, Hal Newhuser, Catfish, Hunter,

(05:04):
and Fernando Valezuela bly Levin more or less survived it.
The rest of them weren't half what they had been
in their twenties once they hit thirty. Derker was finished
at thirty. Hunter was very close to that. When I
was a kid, they looked at Hunter's decline and they said, well,
he has diabetes. It wasn't that, or not solely that.

(05:25):
I'm not saying that diabetes was not a burden to
him as it is to most people who have to
manage that condition. The contrast between yesterday's and today's pitcher
handling to almost borrow an American Beatles album title makes
for an interesting contrast with how later pitching prospects were handled.

(05:45):
There's a tension between letting pitchers learn in the miners
and the reality that they have a limited number of
throws in their arms every second of every day. Pictures
are aging. I mean, so is everybody else, but we're
talking about a very specific set of shelf unstable, packaged
cookies here simultaneously. Most every day they're exerting that arm.

(06:08):
Think of a later Mets prospect like Gooden one out
of Florida. In nineteen ninety four, the Mets made Florida
state right e Paul Wilson the first overall pick in
the draft. Instead of giving him a rest, which is
often the case today, they sent him to rookie and
Hya ball, where he made eleven starts and was hit hard.
Though the peripherals don't seem terrible, he must have been tired.

(06:31):
In nineteen ninety five, he was great. He climbed three levels,
posting a two forty one era in one hundred and
eighty six and two thirds innings, struck out one hundred
and ninety four and walked only forty four. He threw
eight complete games and three shutouts along the way, And
I'm sure that those were a ton of fun for
Binghamton and Norfolk fans. And you know what, that's a

(06:53):
legitimate value that is too often lost. And that argument
goes all the way back to Judge Landis versus his
brand tricky and the foundations of the farm system. Simultaneously, Well,
Ricky won that argument, and those games did nothing to
help the Major League Mets. In fact, it hurt them
because Wilson soon went down with a torn labrum, and

(07:14):
while he was recovering from that, and that is much
worse than an elbow problem, his elbow also required surgery.
He didn't pitch in the majors for three years, and
what we saw after he finally got back wasn't a
fraction of what had been portended for him. He had
a forty and fifty nine record, a four to eighty

(07:35):
six era worse than the now, with a mere five
point nine strikeouts per nine innings. Does anyone use the
word mirror in regular conversation? I just did, but I'm
not comfortable with it. And he had several further injuries, including,
if I recall correctly, a second torn labram, which finally
ended things. So my question is, of the many pitches,

(07:58):
the too many pitches that Paul Wilson threw in the
minor leagues, how many could have been thrown in the
majors without any harm to his learning curve? And I
wonder the same thing about quarterbacks. Now that it's football season.
You draft a tackle or a running back and that
fellow goes right onto the field, but a quarterback has

(08:19):
to sit on the bench with a clipboard for a
couple of years, and that time is not fungible in
the life of an athlete. It's not fungible in the
life of anyone, but particularly when the cosmic egg timer
ticks so heavily where athletes are concerned, it's hard to
believe that this same practice indoors to the present day.

(08:40):
There's a line in one of the Beatles alternative versions
of My Guitar Gently Weeps a verse that didn't make
the final cut, where George Harrison sings, I look from
the wings at the play you are staging because I'm
sitting here doing nothing but aging. And I feel like
that's true of all athletes who aren't playing, But it
might be or who are being spent in the wrong

(09:03):
places at the wrong time, on the wrong fields. To
return to Davy Johnson for a moment before we get
in our time machine and go back to twenty eighteen,
he took ten years away between his two thousand Dodgers
team and his twenty eleven Nationals team. He had health
and some family issues, including the tragic loss of his

(09:23):
daughter in two thousand and five that kept his raw
game totals down a bit, but of course, in the
context of that kind of loss, who gives a damn
about totals. His teams were three hundred games above five hundred,
which is comparable with Tory and Dusty Baker. Of the
fourteen clubs he managed for a full season, eight exceeded

(09:43):
their Pythagorean records. As I've said repeatedly here on the program,
the Hall of Fame is just a career service award.
It doesn't matter who gets it and who doesn't accept
to the people involved in their families. And Davy Johnson
is gone now, so if it means something to the
he left behind, great, But otherwise I consider it a
moot point. You say, yes, but the museum but history,

(10:07):
and I will reply as I always do, that the
gallery is not the museum. And in any case, if
you think the Louver or the Metropolitan Museum of Art
or the Prado has one example each from every great
artist in history, think again. No one says they're incomplete
or they don't accurately represent the history of art. They
just accept that they represent what they are capable of

(10:29):
representing in the amount of space available with the resources
that they have, and they accept that all of history
can't be encompassed or represented on a one to one
basis in a single building or even several buildings on
a campus. Still to the extent that it matters now
that Johnson is gone, I think baseball or the voters

(10:50):
did him a disservice, and like I said, it's too
late for it to do any good. That's all for
me for this reissue episode. However, you will hear from
me again from time to time time as I rearranged
the breaks that initially marked this episode, and I hope
you'll get to hear from me at the end because
I couldn't do that last reissue episode. The durned program

(11:11):
tried to throw me like some kind of bucking bronco.
I hope that's a one time thing. So here's what
I have planned. We're going to start good Old episode
fifty five from the top. You'll get the first story,
which happened to be about an occasion in which Babe
Ruth got hurt but someone else suffered disproportionately. It doesn't
really have anything to do with anything, but I thought

(11:33):
i'd give it to you anyway, since it's all part
of the whole. I will then spare you that episode
second story. We'll get around to it another time, just
in the interest of conserving length on this reissue program.
Thus we will proceed directly from that story. However, awkwardly,
I have to patch it together to the discussion with
the late Davy Johnson, which again I'm very happy that

(11:56):
I got a chance to do, and I am pleased
to share it with you once again, said comfortably. Strap in,
and I'll see you on the other side. Here in

(12:29):
the infinite inning. We try to make the best of
an impossibly bad situation, a situation that, by definition can
really never be good. I suppose some people will argue that,
given the situation that I'm referring to, Woody Allen, this
is back when he was an auteur rather than a
controversial pervert, said it's not that I fear death. I

(12:51):
just don't want to be there when it happens. I
feel the same way. I can think of a lot
of bad ways to go and not so many good ones.
One example that comes to mind in sixteen seventy six,
Virginia Bacon's Rebellion fell apart when Nathaniel Bacon was basically
devoured from within his jockey shorts by his own bodily vermin.

(13:13):
That doesn't seem too pleasant, But in that situation what
is pleasant there isn't really anything. Now. Having said that,
I submit the following means of egress of departure for
your examination. On July eighteenth, nineteen thirty four, the Yankees
were in Cleveland to play the Indians for what turned

(13:35):
out to be a really wild game. It was started
by future Hall of Famer Red Roughing for the Yankees
and by a pitcher who was nearly that good, at
least at his peak, Mel Harder for the Indians. Neither
was a round for the finish, though, because neither had anything.
Both were chased in the fifth inning and the game
went to the bullpens, or what passed for bullpens in

(13:57):
nineteen thirty four, And in the end the Yankees took
a fourteen to twelve lead to the bottom of the
ninth inning and they blew the game. Lefty Gomez, a
future Hall of Fame starter himself, was in there to
close it out. That often happened with starters in the thirties.
Gomez came in with a man already on second, allowed

(14:20):
a triple, a double, and then a walk off single
to another future Hall of Famer, Earl Avril, and the
Yankees went down to a loss, and it was an
important loss. I guess they were a very good team
in nineteen thirty four. They went ninety four and sixty,
which in a lot of years might be good enough
to win you a Pennant in those days or a
division title today. But the loss dropped them to two

(14:42):
and a half games behind a Tigers team that I
guess was even better. They won one hundred and one
and went to the World Series, So as far as
the final record is concerned, they were better. But if
you stare at the two rosters on paper, at least
they seem very evenly matched. All of that is just
background for what I want to tell you about this game.
This is something that I noticed while writing about this

(15:05):
in The Hardball Times this week in a piece about
Babe Ruth's tortured struggles with retirement in nineteen thirty four
to nineteen thirty five. He was hurt in this game.
He started it, but he wasn't around after the third.
In the third inning, Earl Coombs and Jack Saltzgraver the
first and second hitters in the Yankees lineup were on
base when Ruth came up, and he hit a single

(15:28):
to reach loading the bases that brought up Blue Garig,
and Garreg pulled a hot smash into the hole between
first and second. The ball took one hard hop and
apparently still moving with a great deal of force, smashed
into Ruth's right ankle. The newspapers say he went down
as if he were shot and was wreathing on the
ground in agony. Everyone assumed that his leg was broken.

(15:51):
Coach Art Fletcher, the same Art Fletcher by the buy
who I mentioned as being shoved by Hal Chase in
last week's show. Outfielders Sammy Byrd, who appropriately comes down
to us in history as Babe Ruth's legs for acting
as Ruth's defensive substitute in these years, and the trainer
had to carry Ruth off with his arms around their shoulders,

(16:13):
and as he waited in the clubhouse for an ambulance,
he said, I'm getting out of this game before I'm
carried out. If I don't quit now, I may get
an injury that will prove permanent. I thought my leg
was broken when that ball hit me. Gosh, how it
hit and how this leg pains. I had no business
being on first, all things being even that hit I

(16:33):
made was good for two bases instead of being a single,
but for the fact that Coombs and Salsgraver were on
ahead of me and there was a possibility of a catch.
It looks like fate, doesn't it. The doctors initially said
that Ruth would need to be hospitalized and would be
out for ten days. It didn't turn out to be
that bad. He refused the hospitalization and was back out
there in four days, although he needed another three days

(16:56):
off after that, so I guess the return was premature.
But on the whole, he didn't miss a great deal
of time. So from our perspective, the whole thing looks
like much ado about nothing, except that Ruth saying I'm
getting out of this game before I'm carried out tends
to pomp up in biographies as evidence that he was
ready to wind the whole thing down at thirty nine,

(17:16):
and that soon happened less than a year later. But
if you were there, maybe it was a bit more
stressful than that. Ruth himself said, it looks like fate,
doesn't it. Unintentionally invoking the three women of Greek myth
the fates plural, who spun the thread of your life,
measured it, and when your time was up, cut the thread.

(17:39):
And so I will read to you in whole. This
very brief item from a newspaper of the day, dateline, Cleveland,
July eighteen. A heart attack during the excitement as Babe
Ruth was injured in today's New York Cleveland baseball game
caused the death of co Livingstone, sixty six, kent, Ohio merchant,
a resident of CA for forty five years. Livingstone was

(18:02):
attending the game with his son, Charles thirty eight. Now
I don't mean to make light of a son witnessing
the demise of his father, and that this event took
place nearly eighty four years ago makes it no less tragic.
But it seems to me that for at least some
subset of those of us who love the game, that

(18:23):
that might be how they choose to go. You know,
I have a dear friend who is something of an
expert on popular music, and of all bands in the universe,
I think she dislikes the nineteen nineties folk rock act
Poy Dog Condering more than any I don't necessarily endorse
this view, but she is so emphatic in her way
of stating it that I feel a little uncomfortable quoting

(18:45):
them here. They had a song from back in nineteen
ninety that contains the couplet if I should die in
a car wreck, may I have Van Morrison on my
tape deck. It's not anything deep, but for some baseball fans,
collapsing along with Babe Ruth might be kind of the
same thing as I said at the outset. No exit
is a good exit. But you could do worse than

(19:07):
to look at Babe Ruth going down and saying, well,
if Ruth goes, then I go. That's poetic, but poetry
will only take you so far. I'd rather stay. Ruth
felt the same way. I could be remembering this wrong.
But he passed away in August of nineteen forty eight,
and his old teammates Joe Dugan and Waite Hoyit were
the pallbearers. It was a hot day and they were

(19:30):
sweating underneath the weight of the casket, and Dugan said
I could sure use a beer, and Hoyt said, Joe,
so could the babe. I'm Steven Goldman, and this is
the Infinite Inning Baseball podcast. Well, hell over there. Strange

(20:24):
noises had been overheard coming from the long abandoned Grympner mansion,
and shadows were observed at play beneath flickering lights. The Airs,
wanting very badly to get the place and turn it
into a dozen or so condominiums, sent a pleading invitation
to doctor Herbert Arbuthnot, the world's leading parapsychologist and the

(20:45):
Bancroft Chair of the Strange at Harvard University, asking him
to examine the premises. He readily, too readily agreed that
doctor Arbuthnot had been on a bit of a losing
streak of late did not seem to trouble the grim
Airs as much as it did doctor Arbuthnot. He gathered
his team Vivian, the sexually conflicted actress with empathic telepathy, Junior,

(21:10):
the now middle aged former chess prodigy hosting a low
rent ghostbusting show on a third tier cable network, Doreen,
the expert on the history of the grimners In, a
skeptic who happened to have wicked knife skills, and Arbuthnot's
own wife, Tabitha, who screamed at the slightest provocation. They
entered the house. It was in strangely good condition. There

(21:31):
was a new microwave in the kitchen. The refrigerator held
platter after platter of fresh cut vegetables and ranch deep
There was nothing eerie about the place at all. They
all milled about aimlessly for days, with nothing whatsoever to investigate.
Junior watched sports on television. At one point, Vivian startled

(21:54):
she had felt phantom fingers at play about her ankles
beneath her long skirt. The other's tents at last, ready
for the confrontation, Oh, she said, chuckling embarrassedly. It's only
mister Mimples. The gripner cat Arbuthnot was near his breaking point.
Damn this house, he shouted. I need this place to
be possessed. My publisher wants to cancel my contract. The

(22:16):
National Geographic Channel won't finance any more documentary since the
buried bowling Alley of Lucky Luciano laid an egg. This
house is less frightening than a home economics class. Do
you hear that house?

Speaker 2 (22:29):
Do you?

Speaker 1 (22:29):
I mock you, I scoff at the horrifying edifice of
the grippiners, I taunt you. He broke down and wept quietly.
All at once, the lights went out, the microwave beaped
to life and cooked something that screamed pathetically. Doors and
windows slammed, the voices of the damn screamed, and the
walls bled. Something is very angry. Vivian said, we've got

(22:52):
to run. We'll be safe. In episode fifty five, the
laughter was nearby. They all looked up to see miss
Miimples leering from atop of gargo at the foot of
the grand staircase. The gargo hadn't been there a moment before.
Too late, he cackled, Episode fifty five will protect you?
No one escapes from the taunted house. Yes, I went

(23:17):
all that way just for that pun. Welcome back to
the show today. It is my great pleasure to be
joined by former major league manager Davey Johnson, who has
a new book out co authored with Eric Sherman. It's
called Davy Johnson, My Wild Ride in Baseball and Beyond.
As you'd expect, in our conversation, we touched on many

(23:38):
aspects of his career, both as a key player on
the Great Orioles teams of the late sixties and early seventies,
as well as his time with the Mets and Reds. Principally,
in addition to Davy's many accomplishments, he was truly an
ubiquitous figure in baseball. For almost fifty years, he managed
both Dwight Gooden and Brace Harper. He was a teammate

(24:00):
of Brooks Robinson when Robinson won the nineteen seventy World
Series MVP with a defensive showcase that may never have
been equalled. And he was there in the hole, not
quite on deck, but in the hole when Hank Aaron
broke Babe Ruth's record, And of course there was that
little matter of the nineteen eighty six Mets. I will

(24:21):
gladly admit to you that I was a little nervous
about this one going in. I had gotten the sense
over the years that Davy was somebody who did not
suffer fools gladly, and I suppose I think of myself
as a fool. But as you'll hear, he was as
friendly as could be. I will warn you that there's
one unexpected interruption. Our time was limited to begin with,

(24:42):
and then there was a visitor, someone who was lost
in his neighborhood, and the doorbell rang. The dogs started barking.
I didn't leave all of that in the transcript, but
you'll hear a good deal of it. There was just
no escaping it. So about I don't know, twenty eight
twenty nine minutes into the discussion, you'll hear things break
down and me start to ask Davy if he needs

(25:02):
to take a break, and he took me up on that,
so I called a quick commercial interruption and then we
started over. He handled that with good humor too. One
other detail I just want to get out front here,
although it does come up during the conversation. Proceeds for
the book go to Davey's wife's charity, Support our Scholars.
I enjoyed the book. It's a quick read. Davey is

(25:23):
very assertive in taking credit for what Davey thinks should
be to his credit. You can agree or disagree with
some of those things. No doubt other participants in some
of these stories will have different opinions or will want
a chunk of the credit. I think most of it
is fair, and I also think his record speaks for
itself in a lot of those regards. Pardon me for

(25:43):
interrupting myself. This is Steve, just seven years older at
this point in the show. The original show, I told
another story, but here it's actually a good time to
take a break. We'll get back to that segment in
a future reissue, but for now, stir around in your
seat a little, get comfortable on the other side. Well,
remember Davy Johnson, my next guest, was a four time

(26:13):
All Star, a three time Goal Glove winner, and a
two time Manager of the Year award, and he should
have had at least a couple of more of those.
He has three winning World Series rings too as a player,
one as a manager, and if I can throw in
just one neat extra qualification, he's one of the few
players I can think of whoever pinch hit a walk
off Grand Slam, which he did against Terry Forster and

(26:34):
the Dodgers on June third, nineteen seventy eight. His new
book is Davy Johnson, My Wild Ride in Baseball and Beyond.
It's my honor to welcome him. How are you, Davy,
I'm doing great, Steven.

Speaker 2 (26:44):
Thanks for having me.

Speaker 1 (26:45):
It's my pleasure and thanks for taking the time. I'd
like to start with one of my favorite tactics of
yours that made me so excited to watch the games
that you managed. Going back to the nineteen eighties, you
had Howardjohnson, who was a third baseman who and you
can testify to this firsthand from being a teammate of Brooks.

(27:06):
Robinson was not exactly Brooks on defense. And yet on
certain days, say when Sid Fernandez, who would go whole
games without a ground er, would pitch, you would list
him at shortstop. And I guess you just figured on
days like that infield defense didn't matter quite as.

Speaker 3 (27:22):
Much now, and when Sid pitched, it was usually a
strikeout or a fly ball. Ye had this funny delivery,
kind of hit. The delivery came out of his shirt
and it kind of rose, and there weren't a lot
of ground balls that I'll said.

Speaker 1 (27:34):
Ever, you know, some managers seem to be very worried
about what will happen. And I realized this is part
of a manager's job to think two innings ahead, three
innings ahead. But it's kind of like that situation where
you don't want to pinch hit for the starting catcher
if you only have one backup on the roster, because
what if lightning strikes the second guy and you suddenly
don't have a catcher. So you were able to overlook

(27:56):
in moments like that, Well what if I have to
yank sid early? What if suddenly Roger mcdowells in the
game and he gets three grounders for every fly ball?
You were willing to chance that risk.

Speaker 3 (28:06):
Well, there's no question about it. And you have to
have confidence in your players. And you know, I always
tried to put the best lineup up there that had
a chance to score the most runs, and a great
bunch of guys, and they understood it. You know, everybody
has a role, and when you can use them in
a lot of different roles. I think they've gone overboard
today because I mean a lot of right fielders come

(28:29):
in to play second base and they don't know the
footwork and they get taken out. Of course, the rule
changed because of Chase Sedley. Now they have to slide
straight in. But it's a little different game right now.

Speaker 1 (28:41):
It's funny as you were talking, I was just thinking
about what I said about running out of catchers, and
I don't know if you ever did, but one of
your managers, actually your first major league manager, Hank Bauer,
who was a right fielder, ended up having to catch
for the Yankees a couple of times because Casey Snengle
ran out of catchers and they lost those games. But
at the end of the day, it's just one loss.

(29:02):
And I guess the gamble that he took strategically to
pinch hit for his catcher seemed worth it at the time.

Speaker 3 (29:07):
You don't ever want to waken your defense, though, and
also you run the risk of a guy getting injured,
you know. But you know Hank Bau he managed me,
and he was a dandy. He was a tough ex marine,
and he'd got to fight and figure out strategy. But
I enjoyed playing for him.

Speaker 1 (29:25):
I wanted to ask you about him. I got to
talk to him a few times before he passed away,
and as you said, he was quite a character. He
had this high, weedy voice, and I don't know if
that was from a lifetime of smoking cigarettes or or
just the way that he was even then. But he
told me about a deal that maybe this was really

(29:47):
Hank Peters, but he said that he had negotiated to
swap Mike Epstein, who was a first base prospect for
the Baltimore Orioles at that time. This is in sixty
six sixty seven, to the Cubs for Billy Williams, and
that someone in Orioles ownership or management turned that down.
I can't quite figure out why, because they dealt Epstein
not long after that, anyway, But what he said to

(30:09):
me was he uttered kind of a curse and said,
and I'd still be there. And just from reading your book,
I imagine that you'd say that wouldn't have been the
best outcome for the franchise.

Speaker 2 (30:20):
No doubt about it. You know.

Speaker 3 (30:21):
Of course, I had a real weaver, and I thought
he was a genius and handle pitching staff and the
way he set it up the bullpen, and the way
he used the bench in the bullpen, which is the
key to being a successful manager. Hank had no clue
on those issues, and it was unfortunate. I did like Hank,
but he's a tough guy. We butted heads occasionally, to

(30:44):
say the least.

Speaker 1 (30:46):
You know, you told a story in the book in
which he was talking to you about hitting, and it
didn't sound, from the way you described it, like a
particularly heated conversation, and yet he ended up punching an
airplane bulkhead and breaking his hand just talking about the
way you looked at pitches during.

Speaker 3 (31:00):
A bad yeah, he said. He asked me, are you
a guest hitter, And I said, no, I'm not a
guest hitter. I set my I looked for a fastball
every pitch because that's the fastest one they throw, and
I just off it. And that's when he said, just
when I said, you're a guest hitter, and he hit.

Speaker 2 (31:17):
The bull kid.

Speaker 3 (31:18):
I mean, you know, guess hitting, you would sometimes look
for a curveball and slider or a change up. That's
guess hitting. When you set your time in on the fastball,
that's not guess hitting.

Speaker 2 (31:30):
He was just a little bit different. You know.

Speaker 3 (31:33):
He was known as a first ball, fastball hitter, and
I'm sure he got off of that at times and
guests breaking ball. And he had a lot of great
hits in his career, but you know, he didn't like
the thought that you know, somebody would when he'd say,
you're a guess hitter. I said, no, I just looked
for a fastball. That against what he was thinking.

Speaker 1 (31:56):
Girl Weaver comes along after that, and he was somebody
that you knew going back to the minor leagues. And
one of the things that you brought up in the book,
and I really appreciated this. You were an early proponent
of a rational approach to baseball what we would call
sabermetrics now, but of course it wasn't called that then.
And the fortunate thing about that was that computer technology

(32:20):
was evolving at roughly the same time that you were
studying this. So whereas somebody like I mentioned Casey before,
he had a good grasp of the stats, but they
were all in his head, and Earle had note cards,
I guess, and you were able to do stuff with
computer programs and optimized lineups. And you talk about giving
Earle a study in which this must have been about

(32:41):
sixty late sixty seven sixty eight, where you advocated for
yourself batting second. And I have to be honest, you said,
and maybe this was the result that you got back then,
that optimizing the lineup would have added eighty runs to
the season. And I think, I said to me, I
actually looked up my wife, and I said, that's a

(33:01):
lot bigger of a jump than most studies say that
an optimized lineup. But maybe if Earl had been batting
Bilander second, then it would make sense. So I looked
it up, and indeed, he was batting Bilander second all season.
And I know, you know, for those who don't know,
Bilander was the defensive shortstop from say the mid sixties
to the late seventies, but really didn't hit very much.

(33:25):
So I'm curious how much of an influence you were
on Earl in this regard, because we remember him as
the walks and three run homers guy. But at the
beginning of his major league career, there he was batting
someone with a two eighty on base percentage up in
the second spot.

Speaker 3 (33:39):
Well, you know, I had it when I was in there.
I did the computer stuff on big O IBM three sixty,
and you had to use key punch cards to program it.
But I also had lunch with a guy named Ernshaw
Cook who wrote Percentage Baseball, and in the early sixties
or late sixties, he used on base percentage with walks

(33:59):
and hits. They last didn't even use that. They didn't
use the on base percentage back then, and I thought
that was great because the optimum lineup was to have
on base guys, high on base percentage guys batting one
and two, and then you run producers extra basic guys
throughout the lineup, and the worst on base percentage hit last,

(34:20):
and if you did, if you always did that way,
you'd have more guys to come to plate and more
chances to score runs. I used to take them in
the weaver and he'd use five bats for a hitter
to decide if he was going to play or not
against the pitcher. And I said early to be able
to predict with the plus or.

Speaker 2 (34:37):
Minus five percent, you need five hundred chances.

Speaker 3 (34:40):
And of course he didn't understand all that told variable
chance deviation. It was waved of his said, but I
know he listened, and even though he chased me out
of his office.

Speaker 1 (34:55):
So does it drive you nets today if you're watching
a game or a postgame and after the game, and
I realized, look, you've been in the position of being
second guest a million times, and I'm not trying to
be that guy. I understand that when you're sitting in
the dugout, the game is moving a lot faster than
it is in the stands or at home on television.

(35:15):
But when a manager say you know, is asked, well,
why did you bring in that picture to face that guy?
And he says, well, I didn't like the matchup. He
was two for five against him, and That's when I
get really frustrated, because, as you just pointed out, two
for five doesn't really mean anything unless you're seeing something
really obvious about the pictures selection and the hitter's abilities.
Two for five could just be two bleeding grounders. It's

(35:37):
almost totally random.

Speaker 3 (35:38):
Well, there's no question about it. And you know, I
always say, you know a lot of times, anytime you
put garbage in the computer, you're going to get garbage out.
And I mean this launch angle and this losty off
the bat doesn't mean a whole lot because it all
it does is confuse the situation. Logic will dictate, you know, percentages, and.

Speaker 2 (36:00):
You go with them.

Speaker 3 (36:01):
And you know, one thing, even Ernshaw Cook he came
out and said, well, you know, the guy's a two
fifty hitter when he gets two balls in those strikes.
He wrote in the book, the guy should never swing
because the percentages, or he'll walk more than you'll get
a hit. I said, Inshaw, you can't do that, because
we're dealing with human beings and they have emotions, and
what you're saying to him is nothing but negativity.

Speaker 1 (36:23):
Well, and also I would assume that you're kind of
turning off whatever the interaction of muscle memory and reflexes
and everything. You're you're trying to defeat a whole system
that a player has been learning in many cases since
he was maybe five or six years old.

Speaker 3 (36:37):
No question about it. I used to get on a
Weaver two on Baylor. Baylor was a definite street hitter.
He go into what I call a favorable chance deviation
and he could hit anybody, it didn't matter who was
out there. But Earle still went back with these stats.
You know, I remember one day in Milwaukee he went
three for four, he's a tripling, a home run. Next day,

(36:58):
one in the lineup said, you crazy, this guy's a
straight kitterer. He said that he didn't hit this guy.
I said, no, he's in a favorable chance deviationer. I'll
figure it out. Of course, he chased me out then too.

Speaker 2 (37:12):
You know.

Speaker 1 (37:13):
Bauer had a similar story about Stengel that he went
and as Power told the story, over the years, the
number of hits and extra base hits increased, but he
had a four for four or a three for three
again it changed, but it was a double and two
home runs and he got pinch hit for in his
last at bat, and he asked Dangle why, and Stangele said,
I felt you had reached your quotas.

Speaker 2 (37:33):
That's that's funny.

Speaker 3 (37:34):
You know that stuff is going around even today.

Speaker 2 (37:37):
It's funny.

Speaker 1 (37:38):
So I want to ask you a question. And I
was fortunate enough to ask Paul Blair, your late teammate,
this many years ago, and he had I don't know
if you called the fortune or misfortune. He played his
entire career for or just about his whole career for
Earl Weaver and then Billy Martin, and I was very
curious how it was that didn't shake himself to death
some days with distress about of around such high pressure guys.

(38:02):
And he just shook his head and laughed, and he said,
you know, you could never tell what the Weaver was
going to do, and you had to be alert. But
I wondered when Weaver and in the book, you portray
yourself as not being faced by too much. And I
note by the way that in managerial ejections all time
you trail Earl by like ninety five to thirty seven,
so you were comparatively low key. But as a player,

(38:27):
when the manager is going to go out and have
those kinds of theatrics as often as he did and
be so dramatic. Is that a distraction to you? Does
it help you? Was? Did it make you feel more tense?
What was the overall effect of his behaving that way?

Speaker 3 (38:42):
Well, I think what he was trying to do is
take the heat off the players, you know, and put
it on their umpire, and he was very good at that.
I remember, you know, the first time I went and
argued with an umpire, I kicked her on home plate
like he did all the time, and he threw me
out of games of that Earl Weaver craping, you know.
But I like playing against guys like Billie Martin. I mean,

(39:04):
he was on me all the time, and he would
be yelling at me and custom me, and then I
would send him, you know, while I was on first base,
I'd send him little hand signals about what I thought
of him. We always had it out. But I loved
the competitive nature of another manager like that, and to me,
it was great. It was stimulated players, not only your team,

(39:28):
but also opposing players.

Speaker 1 (39:30):
You know, along the lines of Earl and Billy and
even yourself. I noted, I kept as I was reading
the book, the front cover is a picture of you
and your Mets uniform in the eighties and the back
cover is you now, and obviously thirty years have gone by,
but you look a lot more relaxed now than you
did then. And I was thinking back to Billy, and

(39:52):
obviously he had other stuff going on, But whenever Steinbrenner
would have a press conference where he called Billy back
from whatever exile he was in, Billy would look tanned
and rested and for Billy healthy, and then not too
long into the season, he looked like he was about
to die. And you know, I used to watch you
on the Mets game and I don't I don't mean

(40:13):
to and and other games too, and I don't mean
to make this overly personal, but I could see your
your eyes retired, that you were fidgeting in the in
the dugout, the tension was palpable. And looking at you
now again, you look you look a lot more relaxed.
So I mean, do we not appreciated just how much
stress major league managers are under?

Speaker 3 (40:35):
Well? You know, uh, I never really felt like it
was much stress. It was totally involved in the game,
totally immersed in every situation. And you're actually thinking, not
only this at that, but you know a couple of
innings ahead, and you get so involved in your thought
process that it probably causes you to look like you're

(40:56):
having stress, but you're not. You're just figuring things out
how you want it to play out, and how you
anticipate things to play out. The biggest stress in the
Bigger Hees wasn't dealing with the writers or the players
to me, was the constant travel and living in another
hotel room away from home. And that was the most

(41:16):
difficult part. And once you don't have to do that,
I mean, I've loved being home, you know. I mean
for fifty one years, I was never home. You know,
I have a nice house, and I've always had a
nice house on the water, and I always have a
nice dog. But as a manager, you don't get to
experience that. And so now that I'm getting experiences, my

(41:37):
wife's giving me a hard time. She wants me to
go take her to New Zealand, to go fishing, to
Bora Bora, to Tahiti, to Alaska, you name it. She
still likes to travel, but not this cracker boy.

Speaker 1 (41:49):
You did that. You did all the traveling, albeit you
know you were going to Cleveland four times a year
or something. It's maybe not quite the same as New Zealand.

Speaker 3 (41:57):
No, but I enjoy I enjoyed it. And and you know,
I took my wife with him on most trips, and
because I felt like that that was the easy way
to keep your marriage together by being together all the time.
And she's she's a tough lady. She's she's got this
big charity now that of course sos for our scholars
all these underage girls. She's given him mentors and providing

(42:22):
financial assistant through college. And uh, that's why I did
this book, Steve and Iam, she and her son wanted
me to do it, and I said, okay, it's.

Speaker 2 (42:32):
A good idea.

Speaker 3 (42:32):
You know, I guess you can use the money for
your scholarships for your girls.

Speaker 2 (42:36):
So here we are.

Speaker 1 (42:37):
And she had been involved in this kind of thing
for for a long time. And you talk about, and
this is some of the heavier material in the book,
that you suffered a couple of losses, in your case,
your your daughter, and in her case really both of you,
because he became a big part of your life too,

(43:00):
her son and before her son passed, he had been
rebella measles baby excuse me, and had been born severely handicapped,
and she had set up organizations to help care for
people like that.

Speaker 2 (43:13):
Yeah. Yeah, she had to raise a million dollars a year.

Speaker 3 (43:16):
She wanted to give these kids an education, teach them
about the calendar and how to sign, and she was
great about that. You know another thing she did she
didn't never get any credit for. She organized the wives
on every team and then took it nationally, organized all
the major league wives to do good works in their communities.

(43:37):
And you know it's still going today. The wives and
major league players are doing great, great charity work.

Speaker 1 (43:45):
I guess this is the place to mention. And this
always stuns me that when you were manager of the
Cincinnati Reds, Marge Shott, who on one hand is saying
Nazi Germany wasn't so bad, is on the other hand saying,
do you have to make an honest woman of that
girlfriend of yours or you can't manage this team.

Speaker 3 (44:04):
Well, that's true, and you know I love her for that.
You know, I was going to get married, you know first,
you know, she stayed with me all one year and
travel with me and whatever, and because I wanted to
see if she could deal with that, you know, having
kids in that kind of life. And Mars said, if
you don't marry or make an honest woman out her,
you can't manage the small club. And so I said,

(44:26):
well fine, I was going to do it anyway, and
instead of getting married in Cincinnati where Marge Mighty have
an attendant, get married in the Keys. But it didn't
last very long.

Speaker 2 (44:37):
She fired me for Ray Knight. You know that was
another part of the story.

Speaker 1 (44:42):
Well, she was erratic in a lot of different ways,
and I was relieved reading the book that you had
one advantage over Lou Panella in that you only had
to have the dog hair in your pocket. Lupanella actually
had to take his shirt off and have the dog
hair rubbed on his chest.

Speaker 3 (45:00):
I know, it was.

Speaker 2 (45:02):
It was weird.

Speaker 3 (45:02):
I mean, you know, you know, I enjoyed it there
because my wife is from Cincinnati and so her whole
family used to come to ball games and it was
it was a great time.

Speaker 1 (45:14):
Lou did win a World Series, so you know, maybe
there was something.

Speaker 3 (45:17):
To it, maybe it helped. Maybe I messed up a
big mistake.

Speaker 1 (45:22):
So let me ask you, just more broadly speaking, I
think the one way that your voice in the book
comes through really, really clearly. And I alluded to this
before is you just expressed this relentless self confidence and
the phrase okay it was another challenge. I was looking
for another challenge. I was ready to move on to
the next thing. It comes up again and again, and

(45:45):
I'll tell you, David, you don't know me, but sort
of insecurity is a big part of my brand here.
That doesn't seem to be part of your makeup. And
I wonder if that's something that you always had or
it was something that you learned over the course of
your life.

Speaker 3 (45:59):
Well always felt that if you did the right thing
and for all the right reasons, and everywhere I went
as a manager, I wanted to make sure that the
ball players established lived up to their potential. And if
you did all the things that would increase the asset
value that the players in the organization and you didn't
hinder their development, I think that you could always be

(46:22):
thankful for that. You know, it's very difficult the relationship
between the general manager and the manager, and then there's
another relationship between the ownership and the general manager, and
a lot of their decisions will go against what the
field manager knows best for the organization, but he can't
control that. But I never felt bad because whatever they

(46:45):
wanted to do, I would try to support, even though
I was against it. And then when they took it
out on me and fired me, I would have loved
to been just stayed in one place my whole life.
And I thought it was going to be the New
York that didn't work out, and so that I kept
getting more challenges boom boom boom.

Speaker 1 (47:04):
And there was never a moment at any time of
I mean, you do. I don't want to make it
sound like you don't ever express any regrets in the book,
because you do. But there was never a moment where
you fell down about these things or I mean frustrated. Sure,
but you didn't feel defeated at any point by some
of this opposition that you went through.

Speaker 3 (47:25):
No, I never really did. I mean, I have you know,
I think number one, I don't have a big ego,
number one, So I don't need everybody telling me how
great I am or something, because I think if you
do and you feel in your own mind that you've
done the best you possibly could do in every situation,
what's to look back on it for? I? Mean, it

(47:46):
doesn't make any sense. And I have a lot of
confidence in my abilities, not only in baseball but in
the real estate field and life in general, that you'll
put all the data in the computer or your brain
and you would come out with the best decisions possible.

Speaker 1 (48:04):
You know, you mentioned the real estate business, and I
wondered if that helped you with that confidence in the sense.
I don't mean to keep going back to Casey Stengel.
He's somebody who comes up for me a lot, but
he had investments outside of baseball. He got into oil
and pharmaceuticals and banks, and so after a certain point
he didn't need the job. He did it for the
love of the game and for the challenge of winning

(48:27):
World Series, which obviously he did a lot. But he
had the ability to walk away from jobs and to
turn some down, both of which he did in the
majors and minors. And I wondered, if you're having the
off field success in real estate and having that kind
of a backstop allowed you to be pickier about what
you were doing and to not feel as dependent as

(48:48):
other managers might who might not have that same financial backing.

Speaker 3 (48:54):
Well, even as that's true, but I think the first
thing I ever did whatever any money, I always felt
like I had to make let that money work for
me and not make bad decisions on how I invested money. Uh,
you know, my grandfather, you know, died penniless and left
my grandmother nothing. My father was the same way, and

(49:16):
I always felt the responsibility to do the right thing
when you're making some money, invested invested in something that's
going to grow. And I didn't know anything about the
stock market, but I knew something about real estate. And
the first to treat investors I made when I got
a bonus to sign with the Oils were buy a car.

(49:38):
I Penny had convertible set of golf clubs, Hey Ultras
and Boom a lot for my family's at the State
for seven thousand dollars.

Speaker 2 (49:48):
On the water.

Speaker 3 (49:50):
I mean, I wanted to do the right thing, and
I would also do some frivolous things like the car.

Speaker 1 (49:56):
One of the areas where you had confidence where I
felt like you differed for from a lot of managers.
And this is from opposite ends of your career really,
at the beginning with the Mets and and the end
with the Nationals, in that you brought along teenage players
to the major leagues Dwight Gooden on the one hand,
in Bryce Harper on the other, and in retrospect, obviously,

(50:16):
it's really easy for us to say, oh, these were special,
unique talents and it all worked out in the end.
But a lot of managers and organizations are reluctant to
do that. And there seems to be the sense that
even if this kid has dominated in the minor leagues,
if he comes up to the major somehow and doesn't
succeed instantly, he's going to be ruined for all time.
But you had the confidence in your judgment to take

(50:38):
these really young players up, And I wonder how hard
you had to push for that, and how it is
that you didn't have that same mindset about they're having
such fragility.

Speaker 3 (50:49):
Well, you know one thing about it when you know
as a baseball player and you know it was a lifer,
and you you appreciate good talent, you know, I mean
broke in with the oils and my roommate was a
gunny Matt Brees show. I mean he taught me how
to throw. I mean Brooks Swabson taught me how to
feel and how to go about the work. Ethic, and

(51:11):
when you see other players that are at that same
level and their work ethic and everything, and it's really
about makeup. You know, if the makeup is there, I
always take a makeup guy over talent, and uh sure,
I'd fight for him because they deserve to be at
that level at that time, you know, and I just
wanted them to be, you know, not overlywhelmed. It's successful

(51:36):
in the whole thing and the whole process, and it
was fun. It was never any doubt in my mind.

Speaker 2 (51:41):
Those guys were ready, were ready.

Speaker 3 (51:44):
You know. The bad thing is along the way sometimes
they may get off track, and and that's where I
think a manager and his parents all come into play.

Speaker 1 (51:53):
I wanted to ask you about that one thing that
always has been a little opaque to me about managers
and their role in the clubhouse. And I'll give you
an example in that. A couple of weeks ago, I
had Greg Pryor on here. You might remember Greg played
for the Worlds quite a bit in the eighties, and
we were talking about Dick Hauser and Dick Hauser's illness,

(52:16):
and he said that one of the reasons that he
knew that Hawser was sick was that Hawser was coming
into the clubhouse and talking to them, which he didn't
normally do, and that even though Hawser had a good
relationship with the players, that it's not baseball etiquette that
you pop into the clubhouse before a game and say, Hi, coach,
let's have a great game. That kind of thing. You
talk to the manager when the manager wants to talk

(52:36):
to you, and otherwise there can be a certain amount
of distance there. And I feel like even you to
a certain extent you talk about in the book about
delegating it with the Mets clubhouse matters to Keith Hernandez
and Gary Carter. So does it vary from player to
player or from team to team in terms of just
how much actual interfacing you do with layers outside of

(52:57):
the game.

Speaker 3 (52:58):
No. I think the manager meet I was never a
big big team meetings. I always felt like that they
were unnecessary. I think if you've set up you know,
I always had owners and general managers saying, we got
to make the club house smaller because the two everybody's apart, well,
and we don't have the chemistry.

Speaker 2 (53:17):
Well, you have chemistry when.

Speaker 3 (53:18):
Everybody knows their role and the way everybody knows their
role is not only do you put them in the
right situation and give them an opportunity to improve that
situation by their performance, but all the conversations mostly that
are the most important are individual conversations. My wife was

(53:40):
be having delivered some more books book siting today, and
my dogs greet everybody that way. I understand, but but
you understand what I'm saying. I do the conversations with
your players and your team, if they're on an individual basis,
they're more heartfelt because they know that nobody else has listened,

(54:02):
and they know exactly what you're saying and what they're
saying or hers.

Speaker 1 (54:06):
You know, just to go back to the ols for
a second. I don't know if this is a correct
perception on my part, but I have to imagine that
even if one were tempted to dog it on a
given day, it must have been scary to look up
at Frank Robinson and realize that he was going to
get on you after that.

Speaker 3 (54:22):
You know, Frank, you know everybody on the chair lot
for me, and he was the reason we went to
another level because he had great talent and he played
with a chip on his shoulder, and you know, nobody
wanted to cross him, you know, of his best.

Speaker 1 (54:42):
To go back to the Mets for a second. One
of the things that has been I think tremendously unfair
in terms of your legacy, there is that, for almost
thirty years now you've been made to take a lot
of heat for the Lenny Dykstra Roger McDowell trade that
acquired Wan sam Well, and that strikes me. The reason

(55:04):
that I characterize it as unfair is that it was
a really first guessable move right at the very beginning.

Speaker 3 (55:10):
I was against that the whole time. I mean, I
love both those guys, and I one of the things
that I'm sorry, I'm on the phone, never mind, I
can't talk to you sometimes say my dog's no, that's okay.
Do you need to my life now? This is my
life now?

Speaker 1 (55:31):
You know reissue Steve here in twenty twenty five. I
prize different things for each show, but somehow Davy Johnson's Dogs.
That's the thing I remember most about this one. So

(55:51):
we're talking about the Wan Samuel trade.

Speaker 2 (55:54):
Terrible trade.

Speaker 3 (55:55):
I mean, it wasn't a good second basement and the
whole thing started this way. I told Frank Cashing that,
you know when we traded Mookie. I said, Lenny, the
first year I play him every day, he's going to
probably hit two twenty and but he'll still be on

(56:16):
base about, you know, over three hundred and But then
he's going to be fine because I've been patuning him
to keep mooking in the lina. And so he said, well,
we can't take a step back like that. I said,
this is the best thing. And then they go ahead
and do the trade. And then what was even worse,

(56:38):
you know, I said, okay, I'll support it. Then they
said that I forced the trade, you know, which was
even worse. You know, But that's the way it works,
you know.

Speaker 1 (56:50):
I guess the story supposedly was. I'm not saying that
this was actually your point of view, but what seemed
to get out in the papers was that you had
found Dykstra on coach ball and two home run obsessed,
and you wanted somebody who was more content to be
a traditional leadof I.

Speaker 2 (57:06):
Mean he was.

Speaker 3 (57:06):
He was a great leadoff hitter. I mean that he
I did have to get on him occasionally because he
wanted the game more weight, he wanted to get bigger,
he did want to hit home runs, and I would,
but that's just part of you know, explain to a
player that he doesn't need that, you know. And he
came into camp when when you you know, when you overweight,

(57:29):
because he'd been trying to bulke up. I said, your
deal is speed, and you can't hit the ball on
the ballpark, but it's your tough to you know, pitch too,
because you are a threat. I mean, he'd take pitches
all the time and set him up because he and.

Speaker 2 (57:44):
Then they throw him right down the middle and he'd
be swinging. But he just was you know.

Speaker 3 (57:49):
I used to play golf with him too, and he
I could beat him. I could give him eight shots
and beat him. He decides he wants to play me even,
so now I play you fifty dollars even, I said, okay,
and he'd be down about four or five hundred bucks.
He said, okay, I'm not going to play this next
sold bill okay, And then he'd say, I mean this

(58:10):
whole I'm gonna play for a hundred. He was just
a bad He had a lot of confidence, which I loved,
but he made some bad decisions. And when he was
making all that money and sold his told me he
sold his car washes for fifty five million dollars. I said,
great for you. I said, you know, you should have

(58:30):
just kept him because you were spending all the money
he was making, right and then he was making money
in the stock market, and guys will call me, he said,
you want to invest with what he's doing. I said,
no pomfortable way, no possible way, because I know he's
going to try to make it into a billion and
he's going to lose it. And that's what he did.

Speaker 1 (58:49):
And in the meantime, you were stuck with a center
fielder who wasn't really a center fielder, and that seems
like kind of a problem.

Speaker 3 (58:56):
Yeah, that was a problem, you know, but he had
to try and make it work and it was difficult.

Speaker 1 (59:02):
You know. One of the takeaways that that I had
from that and from some of the other situations that
you were in. You know, the Mets front office was
supposed to be so smart as they built up that team,
and I don't think that Frank cash and everybody got
dumb necessarily, But it seems like everybody, every team you
could just extends throughout baseball history. I think in that

(59:23):
everybody knows how to build up and you know, you lose,
especially in the draft era, you get some high draft picks.
So you come up with a good and a strawberry.
You make some smart editions of veterans. I don't have
to tell you who you guys added, and then what
nobody really knows is how you maintain it. And that's
where the Mets struggled.

Speaker 3 (59:42):
Yeah, you know, the I think the one of the
toughest things is, you know, from the field point of view,
is you don't know what the constraints are on the
ownership and say, well, we can't afford to pay this guy,
keep paying this guy, so we've got to get rid
of him, you know. But I think the growing up
in the or organization and also first got to the

(01:00:02):
Met organization, and I'm starting the minor leagues. The minor
league talent is the most important develop the talent, and
the guys that managed them in those minor league cities
and towns, they were the most important people as far
as I was concerning the whole organization, because they were
going to develop talent to feed the big league club

(01:00:24):
and the clubs. If you look today, they've gone back.
The clubs that are really being successful have developed a
really good minor league system Yankees Braves, and I think
it's great.

Speaker 1 (01:00:37):
One other thing that came up in the book that
I really want to ask you about, because I don't
know if this will surprise you or not, but for
a person who has expressed as much confidence in his
judgments as you did, I thought you were actually unfair
to yourself in this one regard. And it's that you
said that one of the big regrets of your managerial

(01:00:58):
career was that you not able to do more to
deflect Dwight Goodin and Darryl Strawberry from whatever off the
field problems they were having. And the question that I
asked myself at that point was how, because you know
you're not you weren't John McGraw with with private detectives
trailing the players after hours, And in fact, you made

(01:01:19):
a point of saying that if the players come to
the ballpark prepared, you didn't necessarily care what they were
doing in terms of after hours and setting curfews and
all of that old fashioned stuff. But I don't think
maybe this is less a question than my trying to
say that it's a noble dream, maybe a great dream.
I don't think that any manager in baseball history, and

(01:01:42):
whether it's Casey and Mickey or Joe McCarthy and Hack Wilson,
that if a player was going to do something self destructive,
I don't think that any manager, however well meaning, ever
saved that person.

Speaker 3 (01:01:54):
Yeah, well, you know, I always you know, Dwight Gooden
was such a great young man. I mean, first when
the ball park, he was switching to all these good things.
I mean, he loved the game. He was always cheerful
and whatever. And but you know, if I hadn't know
him that he just didn't know how to say no
to his homies. If I'd have known that he meant
no but he didn't know how to follow it up,

(01:02:16):
I could maybe have helped him say no. And I
thought Kevin Mitchell would have been a good guy to
help him say no. But they felt like he was
going to be a bad influence. But that was not
the case. He's going to be a good influence. And
the same way with Strawberry. You know, but now Strawberry
is on the right path, and I'm still worried about Doc.

Speaker 2 (01:02:36):
You know, that's the big news.

Speaker 1 (01:02:37):
That's that's one of the great ironies. Kevin Mitchell never
got in trouble that way.

Speaker 2 (01:02:42):
No.

Speaker 3 (01:02:42):
I mean, he came from the toughest area in San Diego,
and I knew it. I knew and he was the
best looking young right hand hitter I've ever seen. And
I got him three hundred and fifty bats the year
before they traded him, and I was going to play
him every day the next year, and you know, they
just wanted to trade him because it felt like he

(01:03:02):
was going to be a bad influence on Doc and Straw.
And I said he's the best, but they didn't believe it,
you know. So that was one of my regrets.

Speaker 1 (01:03:11):
And you were using him like ben Zobrist. You were
using him everywhere, and he didn't look like a shortstop.
But as we talked about it earlier, it didn't matter.
Sometimes didn't matter.

Speaker 3 (01:03:21):
I mean, if he didn't play shortstop against the Cardinals
when Tutor pitched.

Speaker 2 (01:03:25):
We'd never won.

Speaker 3 (01:03:27):
He was the only guy who had the lineup could
even hit Tutor, and he killed him.

Speaker 2 (01:03:33):
But I love the guy.

Speaker 3 (01:03:34):
I mean, I knew he was tough.

Speaker 2 (01:03:36):
And I mean he and I even ran into each.

Speaker 3 (01:03:40):
Other later on, but I still respected that in him.
He was he fought for what he believed in and
he was good.

Speaker 1 (01:03:49):
It struck me that you never would have handled Darryl
the way that Tommy Losorda later did, and that when
Daryl's problems finally came out, Tommy really jumped on him
in the press and just slaughtered him. And you know,
somebody asked him to strabery dog it and Lasorda said,
he's not a dog. Dogs are loyal and chase after balls,
which is a funny line, but not something you should
say about one of your players.

Speaker 2 (01:04:12):
No.

Speaker 3 (01:04:12):
I mean, I loved Jim and I felt like they
didn't have much father growing up, and I felt like,
you know, I needed to be his father image, and
you know I would find him and I would be
tough on him, and he would donate the money to
the orphanage there in Queens. He was you know, he

(01:04:34):
was a good guy at heart. You know, just got
off on the long track with the same thing with
some homies, Davy.

Speaker 1 (01:04:40):
Before we go, is there a way that anyone who
wants to help your wife and her support our scholars
can contribute, or is buying the book just the best
way to do it?

Speaker 3 (01:04:53):
Probably buying the book because she's getting all the money
comes my way. You know, she's got me doing a
book show tonight and one tomorrow here in Orlando, and
I think Triumph Books has got me doing some stuff
up in New York and Washington and whatever. But it's
a great you know, you can check it out along

(01:05:14):
sols support our scholars and there's a lot of great
young underprivileged girls that have really made success live in
our life because of my wife.

Speaker 1 (01:05:23):
I really appreciate the fact that you did do the
book for a good cause and for taking the time
with me. It's a really great to read about your
life story and you don't pull any punches. I just
want to say that ninety six men have managed the
majors for ten years or more going back to nineteen hundred.
Your career winning percentage five sixty two is in the

(01:05:43):
top ten, and it's higher than Bobby Cox and Joe
Torre and Tony LaRussa, anybody that we could name. Basically
outside of a handful of guys, you should be in
the Hall of Fame in my opinion, and it's really
an honor and a pleasure for me to have the
time with you today.

Speaker 3 (01:05:57):
Well, Steve, thank you for all those nush words, but
I'm very happy in my little little house with my
two little dog. They staying close to me because I
got to take him to the doggy park. That's my
job in the day, and that's the only thing in
my box that I have to do today other than
another radio show and sign a bunch of books.

Speaker 1 (01:06:19):
It's nice work if you can get it, Davey, I
have a great day.

Speaker 2 (01:06:22):
It is same to you, Stephen. You take care of them.

Speaker 1 (01:06:27):
By Earl Weaver's last Lucky Strike, we have reached the
end of another show. This makes me feel well, kind
of bad because Davy Johnson used to be on Twitter
and normally on these reissue episodes, I explained that this
is where I used to give out those addresses, but
I don't anymore because I'm no longer on Twitter, and

(01:06:47):
neither of you. He's not either, for well, the worst
reason of all, he didn't have a choice in the matter.
I really am glad though, that we of the Infinite
Inning that is you and I have this souvenir of
one of the managerial greats. Rest in peace, Davie. You
can also write us, by which I mean me, at

(01:07:08):
Infinite Inning at gmail dot com and feel free to
join the Infinite Inning discussion group at Facebook and please
rate us, rate us, rate us at the podcatterer of
your choice, Apple iTunes, what have you. If it allows
that kind of thing, it is greatly appreciated. We have
a sponsor now, but nevertheless, this episode is brought to

(01:07:29):
you by the Number five. Our producer is Juan Samuel
Davis Junior. Our theme song, which you have been hearing
throughout the episode and in fact are listening to right now,
was a co composition of myself and doctor Rick Mooring.
Back in elementary school, Rick used to pound around with
this kid who used to take his cafeteria issued baked beans,
put them on a plastic spoon and fling them to

(01:07:50):
the ceiling where they would just stick. I was back
recently and they're still there. That was nineteen seventy nine
or so. Well, if Frank cash And doesn't package me
with Sean Abner Stan Jefferson hasn't happened yet, which means
I'll be back in just a few days with a
new episode of The Infinite Inning, number three forty four
in an ongoing series, Collect Them, Trade Them, and I

(01:08:11):
look forward to seeing you then.