Former relief ace Phil (The Vulture) Regan, who’s worked in the Mets organisation since 2009, is now their pitching coach.

To a lot of people, the Mets are the walking dead awaiting the vultures to feed. So when they canned pitching coach Dave Eiland and bullpen coach Chuck Hernandez Thursday, it must have delivered a truck load of laughs when they named a vulture as their new pitching coach.

As in, Phil (The Vulture) Regan. Former bird of prey out of the bullpen himself. Who’s alive and well, apparently, at 82. Who’s probably going to have a few people wondering just how he’s going to fix the Mets’ talented but struggling rotation and a bullpen that’s mostly full of bull.

And, who can’t do a thing to fix the Mets’ pitching’s top weakness—the unsound defense behind them, and the unsound baserunning that runs them out of scoring chances.

This Vulture isn’t worried about either dealing with today’s breed of player or his own age.

“I think kids today, they want you to be honest,” Regan told Syracuse.com. “I don’t ever lie to them. I try to come in and not change their whole delivery. I’m not a big believer in doing that, or taking pitches away from them. But there’s a lot of little fundamental things that you have to do as a pitcher. And sometimes a person can see that, maybe just one little thing. Try it, and if you like it stick with it.”

Where was he when the Mets really needed him?

Ask him about his octogenarian status, and Regan—who once pitched for the Syracuse minor league team during his years with the Tigers—doesn’t exactly sound like a man ready for assisted living.

“I’ve always kind of stayed in the game and done different things,” The Vulture continued. “I still go to the Dominican in the winter and coach down there. I spent twenty years in Venezuela managing and coaching there. So I’ve kept busy all year-round. And I think it’s kind of helped me keep going. I’m 82 years old now, but I don’t feel it.”

That means Regan feeling younger than a lot of Mets must feel more often than not this season. This may be the first time the dying were known to invite a vulture to try saving their lives instead of dining on their corpses.

But are the Mets going to start throwing sweat balls?

After life as a sort of swingman for the Tigers in 1960-65, the Dodgers traded Hall of Famer Sandy Koufax’s buddy and road roommate Dick Tracewski to get Regan away from the Tigers after the 1965 season. His too-obvious itch to get into games, not to mention an early 1966 spell of coming into tie games from which Koufax was lifted late, prompted Koufax himself to crack, “Regan, you’re a real vulture, getting my wins like that.”

“From there, the press picked it up,” The Vulture says. “I got hundreds of these rubber vultures from all over the country. People would send them in. The zoo wanted to put a vulture down in the bullpen, but they wouldn’t let them do it. We had a lot of fun with it.”

Regan thinks he kept Koufax from one final achievement in 1966, Koufax’s last season. “He could have been a 30-game winner his last year,” Regan told the New York Post, “but I vultured a few wins.”

And while having his own career year in 1966—a 1.62 ERA and a 2.33 fielding-independent pitching rate, with a 0.93 walks/hits per inning pitched rate, not to mention a 14-1 won-lost record—Regan began getting away with a pitch nobody could catch for a very good reason.

“I don’t use foreign substances,” George Frazier would crack much later when he was caught throwing funny pitches. “Everything I use is made in the U.S. of A.” Regan could see and raise that: he used part of his body to do it. Specifically, his sweat glands.

They knew why the caged Vulture sang: Phil Regan (facing camera) in the 1966 Dodgers’ bullpen.

“He had an awkward diving delivery,” wrote David Claerbaut in Durocher’s Cubs: The Greatest Team That Didn’t Win, “and his out pitch was a moist one that went with a tough slider. Because Regan threw what might be called a clean spitter, allowing the perspiration to run down his arms onto the ball, umpires were never able to bust him, despite their certainties that the ball coming in was less than arid.”

The Vulture got away with it long enough. “I can’t come right out and tell you that I now throw the spitter,” he once told a reporter, “but I’d say: I don’t use it nearly as much as everybody thinks.” Relief ace-to-be Al (The Mad Hungarian) Hrabosky later said Regan’s money pitch was “the slippery elm.”

Whatever it was, when the Dodgers traded him to the Cubs with outfielder Jim Hickman for outfielder Ted Savage and minor league pitcher Jim Ellis, Regan was almost damaged goods: he’d opened the ’68 season with swollen hands, knees, and legs, including one frightening morning when he couldn’t even lift his cup of coffee.

He got a just-as-frightening diganosis of rheumatoid arthritis but it turned out to be an odd temporary form of the affliction that lasted only a month. The arthritis might have cleared but nobody was clear about what Regan was throwing and just when he might throw it. As with the 1966 Dodgers, Regan became the Cubs’ bullpen anchor, and in too short order it proved to pull him to the bottom.

He was 32 years old by then. He gave the ’68 Cubs the second-best season of his career and it came with a price: Leo Durocher depended on him so voluminously that he burned the Vulture out almost as profoundly as he’d burned out the rest of the ’69 Cubs by the time the Miracle Mets re-heated for keeps down the stretch.

“We just flat wore Phil Regan out,” said catcher Randy Hundley to Rick Talley for The Cubs of ’69. Leo started going to him all the time. What did he pitch, 112 innings in 71 games? That’s a bunch for a short relief man. Now, if he pitches 80 or 90 innings in 71 games, he might survive. But Leo didn’t feel he could count on the other guys out there, so he kept calling on Regan.”

Durocher had a well-established pattern of not trusting his youth and over-trusting his veterans, when he wasn’t refusing to rest his regulars judiciously or making them feel like quitters if they spoke up about being injured.

Somehow, Regan remained Durocher’s favourite bullpen bull despite the toll, until the Cubs finally sold him to the White Sox in June 1972. After ten more games in which he continued to look anything but the bullpen terror he’d formerly been, the White Sox released Regan and the Vulture retired.

A 1966 All-Star, Regan knows only too well the differences between conditioning today and conditioning in his time. Those who think today’s pitchers are “babied” and lacking toughness should wonder how it was pitchers in Regan’s day survived at all.

“I think that the pitchers today are bigger and stronger and throw harder and are in better shape than we ever thought of being,” he says. “When I see the way that they train . . . when I was with the Dodgers they said the two things you don’t do, you don’t lift weights and you don’t swim. Well, those are two of the better things for you now. It’s an evolution a little bit of where we’ve come from where we were. But today the pitchers train year-round. Guys, in my era, used to go get a job during the winter because the money wasn’t there.

“It’s a different era in that in today’s society, in baseball, these are major investments,” the Vulture continued. “I could tell you I pitched . . . in Detroit and never made $20,000 a year. And that’s fine. But that was my era and that was a lot of money in those days. But today, when you have a guy that you’re making $10 million, you need to protect that investment. And that means take care of him, give him the best medical help, give him the best conditioning that we can give him. You protect him better because when you lose $10 million, that’s a major loss as opposed to $7,000.”

Pitch for Leo Durocher and you learn only too well about how not to handle pitchers. No two pitchers are quite alike physically; no two pitchers will have the same endurance or the same physical composition. Neglect that and you face disaster, whether you’re on the mound or shepherding men to the mound.

A near-inveterate storyteller, the one Regan likes most to remember involves the Dodgers’ 1966 pennant clinch, on the final day of the season, when Hall of Famer Don Drysdale’s faltering in game one of a doubleheader forced manager Walter Alston to send Koufax out to pitch and win the nightcap on two days’ rest, which also altered Alston’s pitching plan for the coming and ill-fated World Series.

As Regan and his fellow bulls ran out of the pen toward the clubhouse, a fan snatched Regan’s Dodgers cap right off his head. Twenty-nine years later, Regan received a package in the clubhouse while managing the Orioles. It was the same year Hall of Famer Cal Ripken, Jr. broke fellow Hall of Famer Lou Gehrig’s consecutive games played streak.

The package contained the cap lifted from Regan’s head that day in 1966. The fan who snatched it decided Regan should have it after all those years. Regan invited the fan to an Oriole game personally. “I still have the hat today,” he told the Post.

It isn’t every Vulture who gets his hat handed back to him.

Now the question becomes whether this Vulture can raise the Mets’ pitching staff from the dead before the real vultures make carrion of them. With or without breaking a sweat.

Eat right, exercise, and you, too, can throw shutout innings through a black eye and a face left swollen from a bunt richochet . . .

The following shutout was brought to you in living colour on Max TV. There really is someone who’ll pitch until and when he’s blue in the face.

A bunting accident during Tuesday batting practise left the Nationals’ righthander looking as though he’d been foolish enough to throw the old Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In catch phrase “Sock it to me!” at an inebriated hit man on a stool at the local tavern.

The ball Scherzer bunted ricocheted hard into his otherwise playful looking face, the face that looks like he’ll bust you on the corner one moment but have trouble holding back his snickering when the mouse he slipped into your pocket crawls into your uniform jersey and up your stomach and chest and around your neck.

I didn’t just pull that out of the floppy clown hat I don’t own. Hall of Famer Warren Spahn used to pull gags like that on his teammates during his pitching days. Spahn and his running mate Lew Burdette might also hire limousines to bring to the ballpark opposing hitters against whom they were having particular success of late. (Speculation has it that Joe Gariagiola may have cost the two a small fortune at one time.)

Wearing his flag-blue Nationals home alternate merely accented Scherzer’s battered appearance. That normally playful face is accented going in by individual eye colour, one blue and one brown. After the errant practice bunt smashed into him, leaving him a shiner that surrounded his right eye and left the upper right side of his face to look like someone planted a baseball into it, the wags said he’d be the first pitcher to take the mound with three eye colours.

“Trust me,” said Scherzer after Wednesday’s doubleheader against the Phillies, “this thing looks a lot worse than it actually is.”

By the time Scherzer and his mates finished what they’d started, a doubleheader sweep—winning the first game 6-2, before Scherzer’s handiwork fed a 2-0 nightcap win—the only ones looking like they’d taken a punch in the phiz were the Phillies themselves. Why, even the Nats’ infamously rickety bullpen didn’t lay Scherzer’s four-hit, ten-punchout jewel to waste, after all.

They’d better not have. Scherzer worked with deadly efficiency, getting twenty first pitch strikes, fourteen called strikes, 24 swinging strikes, and threw strikes 66 percent of the time Wednesday night. Between Scherzer, Wander Suero, and Sean Doolittle, the Nats kept the Phillies hitless five times with men on second or better, and the worst knock Scherzer had to shake off was a leadoff double to Phillies second baseman Cesar Hernandez in the top of the seventh.

“I felt zero pain,” Scherzer said after the Nats banked the nightcap. “There’s been plenty of other injuries where I felt a lot of pain and I’ve had to pitch through. I’ll hang my hat on those starts, but tonight I felt zero pain. This is part of what you have to do. You take the ball every fifth time. That’s my responsibility to the team, to make sure I always post, and I knew I could post tonight.”

Scherzer probably wasn’t that worried when Hernandez rammed that double. Striking out the side to follow immediately was proof enough, but this season Scherzer is one of the few pitchers who’s more effective when he begins to see a lineup the third time than when he sees it the first time.

The first time around this year, opposing teams so far have a .700 OPS against him despite his 15/1 strikeout-to-walk rate that first go-round. The third—.584 OPS. And he’s also one of the few pitchers who gets deadlier after he passes 100 pitches. Scherzer threw 117 pitches Wednesday night. Opposing batters already hit a measly .222 against him when he’s between pitches 76-100; after 100, they only hit .143.

He’s doing far better in those regards this season than he’s done for his entire stellar career to date: lifetime, the OPS against him when he faces a lineup the third time around is 51 points higher (.669) than when he faces it the first time around (.618); and, also lifetime, the other guys hit .242 against him between pitches 76-100 and .187 after pitch 100.

Philadelphia’s Jake Arrieta was the guy you felt a little sorry for against Scherzer. He wasn’t a Scherzer-like strikeout machine and he’s never really been that kind of strikeout machine, but he worked six solid innings blemished only by the full-count bomb Brian Dozier sent over the left field fence with two out in the bottom of the second.

“Going out there and throwing,” Scherzer went on to say, “the only thing I had to deal with was the swelling underneath the eye. It was kind of jiggling around, and so in warm-ups I just had to get used to knowing what it was feeling like to throw the ball and just have that swelling.”

Far as Arrieta was concerned, Scherzer could have taken the mound with his head re-attached by neck bolts and still proven a tough customer. “We have ran into him a couple of times. That’s just what he does,” the Phillies righthander said. “He is tough to square up, and he is throwing three or four pitches for strikes with electric stuff. Just a tough one.”

Phillies reliever Pat Neshek had the honour of surrendering a 1-0 bomb to Victor Robles in the bottom of the eighth. And he became the guy you really felt sorry for. Less than a week after returning from three weeks on the injured list with a shoulder strain, Neshek strained his left hamstring a couple of batters after Robles teed off and looks to be returning to the IL.

Legs are as important to pitching as arms. Faces? Well, Hall of Famer Yogi Berra once said all you had to do in this racket was hit the ball and he’d never seen anyone hit one with his face.

Scherzer, who inadvertently hit one with his face in a batting practice round, can say he’s got the proof that, in the pitching racket, all you have to do is throw the ball, and he’s never seen anyone throw one with his face.

Edwin Encarnacion, AL home run leader, due to arrive at Stadium Elsewhere Monday after a surprise trade . . .

Once upon a time, Edwin Encarnacion exposed a former Yankee manager as a shortsighted strategist. Now he’ll get to help reveal how clever the incumbent Yankee manager is as a juggler. Or, how clever the Yankee front office is at trade maneuvering.

As a Blue Jay, Encarnacion laid waste to then-Orioles manager Buck Showalter’s insistence, in the 2016 American League wild card game, that his then-stud closer Zach Britton had no business appearing any time other than the last inning with a lead to protect.

Not even if Ubaldo Jimenez—normally a starter who’d pitched very well down the stretch but who wasn’t the reliever who’d allowed only four earned runs all year, all of which scored in April—really was the best Blue Jays arm in that period. (And he wasn’t, quite.)

Showalter ignored the law that says when you need a stopper right now, you forget his customary assignment and bring him in if you want to live to play another inning, if not another postseason game. Encarnacion took Showalter’s ignorance plus Jimenez’s sudden inability to throw a potential double play pitch and turned a fastball down the pipe into the three-run homer that sent Rogers Centre nuclear and the Blue Jays to play another few postseason days.

Encarnacion went from there to a pair of somewhat productive seasons with the Indians in which he kept hitting the long ball but nothing much else; he has a cumulative 4.7 wins above replacement level for those two seasons, which averages him out to 2.4. Which is, according to Baseball Reference, just good enough to be in the starting lineup but not exactly even All-Star level.

But he could still do the monster mash after he went to the Mariners in a three-way December deal that made an Indian out of Jake Bauers (who belied his anemic bat and hit for the cycle during the week), a Ray out of Yandy Diaz, and a prodigal Indian of Carlos Santana. The Mariners have gone into the sewage treatment plant after that staggering 13-2 start and they’re all but pushing the plunger on the season.

They unloaded Jay Bruce, the traveling man, to the Phillies last week. Bruce has begun his Philadelphia life as a productive masher, so far. Now they’ve sent Encarnacion to the Yankees, and even those who love this year’s Empire Emeritus‘s ability to make their injuries seem like momentary disruptions to their power plant seem scratching their heads over this one.

Wasn’t the Yankees’ number one need right now a little reinforcement to their starting pitching? Shouldn’t they have been pondering what it would take to pry someone like Madison Bumgarner from the Giants, maybe Noah Syndergaard from the Mets, possibly Max Scherzer from the Nationals? (Never mind that their supremo Mike Rizzo insists he has no intention of letting Scherzer loose?)

Didn’t they still have thunder in the lumber with every current regular save Brett Gardner showing a 113+ or better OPS? And weren’t Aaron Judge (strained oblique) and Giancarlo Stanton (leg and shoulder trouble) due to finish their rehab assignments and return to Stadium Elsewhere beginning some time next weekend?

Isn’t Judge the regular right fielder when he isn’t injured? Hasn’t Luke (Into the) Voit put a vise grip on the first base job? Don’t Gardner, Aaron Hicks, and Clint Frazier have the outfield well enough set, with Gardner and Stanton rotating in and out between that and designated hitting when the need arises? And doesn’t Aaron Boone have enough in his hands trying to juggle Gleyber Torres, D.J. LaMahieu, Didi Gregorius, and Gio Urshela into infield playing time?

Sports Illustrated‘s Jon Tayler has one resolution floating before him:

The likeliest outcome post-Encarnacion is that he and Voit juggle first and DH between them, Judge takes over right, Stanton becomes the starting leftfielder, Gardner hits the bench and Frazier is either sent down to Triple A or traded to address the Yankees’ biggest extant issue: starting pitching. It’s an unfair outcome for Frazier, who’s hit well (.291/.340/.533 and a 128 OPS+), but as the only one of that group left with options, he’s the easy choice to be the odd man out, especially given his struggles with the glove. And as a 24-year-old with a first-round pedigree, he’s now a lock to show up in every Yankees trade rumor between now and July 31.*

Tayler also fears veteran Cameron Maybin may be seeing his last days in Yankee pinstripes when he was just getting used to wearing them: an April pickup when the injuries began to buffet the Yankees, Maybin may be a productive part-timer “but [he’s] a definite goner now.”

In other words, you might think, the Yankees needed the American League’s home run leader so far this season about as much as the Democratic Party needs yet another candidate jumping into the coming presidential contest. The Democrats may have an easier time winnowing out the excess players sooner than the Yankees may have integrating them.

Of course, there’s always the chance that there might be a madness to the Yankee method. The Empire Emeritus might (underline that) be building a stockpile for a little trade deadline season maneuvering that won’t cost them anything too much in the way of delicious farm prospects. Bumgarner, Syndergaard, and even Scherzer should still keep an eye on their cell phones. Their GMs may yet come a-calling with news out of New York.

* It turns out that Jon Tayler was right about the Clint Frazier option: the Yankees sent him to Wilkes-Barre (AAA) Sunday. The Yankees were diplomatic about it, but it wouldn’t be a surprise if they believed that, no matter Frazier’s bat, his defense (a second-worst-in-Show -10 defensive runs saved) can use the work in hand with keeping him playing instead of being caught in the Yankee logjam. Let’s keep an eye on where Frazier, a talented player otherwise, does or doesn’t go from here.