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Davey Johnson, RIP: “Forward thinker with old-school soul”

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Davey Johnson

Davey Johnson at a 2016 reunion of his 1986 Mets. L to R: Keith Hernandez (1B), Jesse Orosco (RP), Ray Knight (3B), Lee Mazzilli (OF-PH), Johnson. They made the Deltas of Animal House resemble monks.

In 2012, on the threshold of managing the Nationals to their first National League East title after they moved from Montreal, Davey Johnson had mortality very much on his mind, after his one-time Mets player and lifelong friend Gary Carter lost a battle with brain cancer.

Johnson had seen Carter the previous winter and played golf with him at Carter’s charity event for needy children. When The Kid died, Johnson couldn’t bring himself to attend the funeral. “He would want me to be doing what I loved and not crying over him,” Washington Post writer Adam Kilgore remembers Johnson saying. “I don’t want nobody crying over me, either. It’s that simple. It may be callous, but I don’t look at it that way.”

The man who bookended both Mets World Series championships—he flied out to Cleon Jones to finish the 1969 Miracle Mets triumph, and managed the (shall we say) swashbuckling 1986 Mets to a World Series title—died Friday at 82.

Perhaps former Nats general manager Mike Rizzo described him best, in a Saturday text message to Kilgore: “Davey was a tough guy with a caring heart. One of the great baseball minds of all-time. A forward thinker with an old-school soul.”

During his playing days, Johnson took computer courses as a Johns Hopkins University graduate student and used what he learned to develop best possible baseball lineups. Offering one to his irascible manager Earl Weaver, who spurned it, Johnson said, “I don’t know whether to tell Earl, but the sixth-worst lineup was the one we used most of the time [in 1968].”

When he became a manager in the Mets’ system and then for the Mets themselves, Johnson brought such thinking plus his computer into his clubhouse and dugout. It’s entirely likely that he pushed the door open to sabermetrics as an active game tool and not just a postmortem analysis. He looked for the matchups and took the concurrent measure of his players at once.

But he wouldn’t let you call him one of the smartest of the game’s Smart Guys. “I never thought I was smart,” he said in 2017. “But I love to figure out problems. Through my stubbornness and relentlessness, I get to the end.” Bless him, he had to learn the hard way that the end had more than the meaning he had in mind.

“I treated my players like men,” he once said of his Mets, whom he led out of a dark age through a pair of hard pennant races and second-place finishes before they went the 1986 distance. “As long as they won for me on the field, I didn’t give a flying [fornicate] what they did otherwise.”

Not even when they celebrated a too-hard-won 1986 National League Championship Series by trashing their United Airlines charter DC-10 with partying that made the Gas House Gang and Animal House’s Deltas resemble conclaves of monks.

Maybe Johnson really was a forward thinker with an old-school heart. He treated like men a team with too many players behaving off the field as though their second adolescence came or their first hadn’t ended yet. Such straighter arrows as Hall of Fame catcher Carter plus infielders Howard Johnson, Ray Knight, and Tim Teufel, and outfielder Mookie Wilson, were the exceptions.

“He was just a player’s manager,” said Wilson upon Johnson’s passing. “He made it fun to go to the field. He laid down the law when needed, but other times he just let us play.” Then, and right to the end of his tenure on the Nationals’s bridge, Johnson liked to tell his players, “You win games. I lose them.”

Little by little, general manager Frank Cashen got less enchanted with his team and his laissez-faire manager. No two more opposite minds could ever have come through the Oriole system to bring the Mets to the Promised Land. And almost as swiftly as they got there, Cashen began letting his most characteristic players escape.

“Maybe we’ve made too many trades for guys who are used to getting their asses kicked,” said Dwight Gooden, the pitching star first made human by ill-advised work to fix what wasn’t broken in spring training 1986 and then a long war with substance abuse, to Jeff Pearlman for The Bad Guys Won. The guys who used to snap . . . they’re gone.”

Some also thought Cashen’s gradual dismantling of the team that should have ruled the earth or at least the National League for the rest of the decade took a toll on and the edge off Johnson’s once-formidable in-game cleverness. (He was known to be less than enthusiastic about several trades instigated by either Cashen or his then right-hand man Joe McIlvane.)

Once a second base star with the Orioles who also set a record for home runs in a season by a second baseman as a Brave, Johnson faced the proverbial firing squad in early 1990. It wouldn’t be the last time he brought a team to the Promised Land or its threshold only to be shoved to one side.

He took the Reds to the first-ever National League Central title after the post-1994 strike realignment—despite being told early that season it would be his last on that bridge. Capricious owner Marge Schott apparently didn’t like that he’d lived with his wife before she became his wife.

Then the Orioles made a dream come true and hired Johnson to manage them. Season one: 1996 American League wild card. Season two: The 1997 AL East. Neither brought him a World Series title. The wild card led to an American League Championship Series loss. (The outstanding memory: Jeffrey Maier making sure Derek Jeter’s long drive wouldn’t be caught for a homer-robbing out.) The division title led to another ALCS loss (to the Indians).

Johnson and Orioles owner Peter Angelos weren’t exactly soul mates. Angelos steamed all 1997 when Johnson fined Hall of Fame second baseman Roberto Alomar for missing a team function and ordered the fine to be paid to the charity for which Mrs. Johnson worked as a fundraiser. Johnson admitted soon enough that that was a mistake. (Alomar paid the fine to another charity.) Angelos wanted Johnson to say publicly he’d been “reckless.”

The manager declined, politely but firmly. Then, after the Orioles postseason ended, Johnson waited for Angelos to tell him, ok, you won the division again, that’s enough to let bygones be bygones. “Last week, Johnson called the Oriole owner,” wrote the Washington Post‘s Thomas Boswell, on 6 November 1997.

They talked. And yelled at each other some, too. Aired their differences. Johnson hoped it would help. That’s how it works in the clubhouse. You got a problem with me? Spit it out. Then work it out.

Johnson took a chance on Angelos. When challenged, maybe he’d respond like a big leaguer. Sometimes, after the venting is finished, a friendship develops—even a strong one. Sometimes you just agree to disagree and keep on fussing, like Earl Weaver and Jim Palmer. Either way, you respect each other and pull in the same direction.

Instead, all Johnson heard from Baltimore was silence. So, Johnson had his answer. Angelos wanted Johnson to resign as manager. If the Orioles fired him, they’d have to pay Johnson $750,000 next season . . .

. . . Nobody wants to be where they are not wanted. Especially if they are wanted almost everywhere else. “I’ll make it easy for him,” Johnson said. He wrote to Angelos: “I offer my resignation.”

On the same day Johnson was named American League manager of the year by the baseball writers, his resignation was accepted by Angelos.

Taking the high road helped make sure Angelos wouldn’t try to renege on the $750,000 he still owed Johnson for 1998. You think Angelos appreciated that high road? Not a chance. As with departed Orioles broadcast mainstay Jon Miller, Johnson “asked to be treated with the respect—in contractual terms—that his performance merited.”

In response, Angelos orchestrated the exodus of each. After Miller left, Angelos claimed Miller wanted to leave, contrary to appearances and Miller’s amazed protestations. Yesterday, Angelos said of Johnson, “It seems to me he wanted to move on.” By way of comment, let it be noted that Angelos has one of the rare law firms in which there are no partners. It’s just his name on the door.

Davey Johnson

Once a star second baseman in Baltimore, Johnson presses a point as a successful Orioles manager—who ran afoul of owner Peter Angelos, as Angelos made sure only too many did.

Johnson didn’t remain unemployed for long. (Neither, of course, did Jon Miller.) The Dodgers brought him to the bridge for 1999. He had his first losing season as a manager (though he won his 1,000th game in the job), then turned the Dodgers around in 2000 but fell short of the division title. Back to the firing squad. Again.

He then managed American and (one year) Netherlands teams in international competition before being hired into the Nationals front office. When manager Jim Riggleman decided to quit in June 2011, Johnson was named his eventual successor. He took them to a third-place NL East finish, their best since moving to Washington from Montreal, then led them to the NL East title in 2012 but a division series loss to the defending world champion Cardinals.

That didn’t keep his players from respecting him. Johnson must have come a very long way from the years when a laissez-faire approach to managing men eventually blew up in his face. I could be wrong, but I don’t remember any of his Cincinnati, Baltimore, Los Angeles, or Washington teams accused of trashing jumbo jets, for openers.

“If you come out here and you play hard and really work your tail off,” said his Rookie of the Year winner Bryce Harper during that season, “he’s going to like that. He plays it hard and he plays it right. That’s the type of manager you want.”

“Davey was an unbelievable baseball man but an ever better person,” said longtime Nats mainstay Ryan Zimmerman in a text to Kilgore. “I learned so much from him about how to carry myself on and off the field. No chance my career would have been the same without his guidance. He will be deeply missed by so many.”

On and off the field. Make note.

Johnson did win his second Manager of the Year award guiding the 2012 Nats. He’s one of seven to win it in each league; his distinguished company: Tony La Russa, Lou Piniella,  Buck Showalter, Jim Leyland, Bob Melvin, and Joe Maddon. After a second-place 2013—made slightly worse than it looked when he opened the season saying it looked like a World Series-or-bust year to be—Johnson elected to retire.

“In one respect,” Boswell wrote after his Oriole departure, “he’s different than almost every other manager of his generation. He doesn’t come to ownership with hat in hand. He doesn’t act like he’s lucky to be a big league manager and could never get any other job half so grand. He’s an educated, broadly accomplished man. And he carries himself that way. It has cost him.”

Johnson learned compromise as he aged, both in the game and away from it. So did a few of his former players who once butted heads with him or otherwise made him resemble Emperor Nero fiddling while Flushing flushed. (Darryl Strawberry, with whom Johnson had a relationship often described as “testy,” came to believe Johnson was the greatest manager he ever played for.)

Maybe tragedy had something to do with it, too. Johnson’s daughter, Andrea, once a nationally-ranked surfer but a diagnosed schizophrenic, died of septic shock in 2005; his stepson, Jake, died of pneumonia in 2011. (He also has a stepdaughter, Ellie.) Even the most impregnable man can be wounded. Even men who win two World Series as an Orioles second baseman and one managing the wildest and craziest Mets team of the 1980s.

May the forward-looking old-schooler be escorted to a happy reunion with his daughter, stepson, host of teammates, and Kid Carter in the Elysian Fields.

The continuing ballad of Billy the Kid

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Billy Wagner

Billy Wagner stood 5’10” . . . but to the hitters facing him, he must have looked and felt 10’5″.

When Billy Wagner called it a career after a short tour with the Braves, he spoke like a man who wasn’t worried about whether he’d make or endure on a Hall of Fame ballot. “I’m not going to change anyone’s mind about whether I’m a Hall of Famer,” the longtime relief pitcher said. “People are either going to like me or hate me, and I can’t change their minds. Besides, life is about a lot more than this game.”

That was fifteen years ago. Tomorrow should reveal that enough voting members of the Baseball Writers Association of America have changed their minds. Wagner’s first Hall ballot showed him with 10.5 percent of the vote. At this writing, his final appearance on the BBWAA ballot should usher him into Cooperstown with at least 85 percent of the vote, well above the minimum needed.

Thus would Billy the Kid stand on the induction stage with outfielder Ichiro Suzuki (bank on it: he’ll become the first unanimous election among position players on their first Hall ballot), CC Sabathia (another first ballot lock, though a hair over seven points less than Ichiro), and Carlos Beltrán. (80.3 percent.*)

Almost a week ago, Wagner wasn’t sounding as sanguine as he did upon his retirement from the mound. “You’re sitting here and you can’t control [the outcome],” he told The Athletic‘s Tyler Kepner by phone. “It’s tough. I hate it. It’s just not been a very fun experience, especially when it comes down to your tenth and final ballot. It’s not going to be pleasant. It’s a grind, but in a couple of days, this will be over—one way or the other, good or bad.”

That wouldn’t necessarily be true. Wagner could and likely would make an appearance on a future ballot of the Hall’s Contemporary Baseball Era (Players) Committee, perhaps as soon as next December. But it looks as though nobody has to worry about that anymore. Wagner, especially.

Last week you’d have had to go the extra hundred miles to convince him. Last year, he waited and waited only to fall short by five votes. When Kepner asked Wagner if that compared to being spurned for a prom date with his buddies watching live and millions more watching on television, he couldn’t resist laughing. Then, he calmed down again and answered soberly.

“My gosh. You’ve got thirty kids looking at you,” he began.

I’m emotional, I don’t want to be emotional, so I’m fighting it back like, “Well, you know, it’s great.” You’re saying all the things you need to say, but it was awful. So the ballot comes out, they take all their stuff and leave—and you’re still going through practice. There’s no, “Hey guys, we’re going to take a five-minute break here.” You couldn’t do anything. That was rough. I was so embarrassed.

If the current indicators hold, and I’m not sure how you can tumble from 85 percent of the vote to falling beneath the 73 percent line without some very suspect eleventh-hour activity, the man who stood 5’10” as a human being but about 10’5″ to the batters he faced pitching for the Astros, the Phillies, the Mets, the Red Sox, and the Braves, is about to become anything but embarrassed.

Which is more than you can say for those batters over the sixteen-year career that ended in 2010. You might wish to become the proverbial fly on the wall if those batters could round up for a seminar called, “How Not to Hit Billy Wagner—Because You Can’t.” The beginning of Wagner’s Hall of Fame case, and possibly the end, too, is this: Opposing hitters could only hit .187 against him.

.187.

Not even The Mariano himself kept hitters that sharply out of luck. Wagner’s .187 batting average against him will become the lowest BAA of any Hall of Fame relief pitcher. Lower than Rivera and Trevor Hoffman (.211 each), lower than Hoyt Wilhelm (.213), lower than Dennis Eckersley (.225), lower than Goose Gossage (.228), lower than Bruce Sutter (.230), lower than Rollie Fingers (.232), lower than Lee Smith (.235).

Among that group, too, are a mere four who pitched in the most hitter friendly of times: Smith (in the final third of his career), Hoffman, Rivera, and Billy the Kid. That, I’ve written before and don’t mind repeating, should make you wonder what the record would have been if Wagner could have avoided assorted injuries including a late-career Tommy John surgery.

And before you take up carping yet again over his comparatively small number of innings pitched, try to keep these in mind: 1) It wasn’t his idea to finish with 903 innings pitched. 2)  His lifetime walks/hits per inning pitchd (WHIP) rate, as Kepner pointed out, is lower than any pitcher with 900+ innings in the century between the final game of Hall of Famer Addie Joss and Hall of Famer-to-be Wagner. Including The Mariano and Trevor Time.

If it’s numbers you still wish, how about these: The best strikeouts per nine rate (11.92) in baseball history. The best ERA (2.31) by any lefthander in the live ball era (1920 forward). The lowest opposition OPS (.558) in that same century between Joss’s and Wagner’s final games.

All of which are rather surrrealistic for a fellow whose hardscrabble childhood (and “hardscrabble” is phrasing things politely about a kid for whom peanut butter on a cracker was dinner often enough when he was growing up) including driving himself to throw lefthanded because two right elbow fractures made throwing his natural righthanded impossible.

That’s about as close to a self-made Hall of Famer as you can get.

“You’re not supposed to get too high or too low,” Wagner told Kepner about The Wait, “but you just sit with a big pit in your stomach right now, wondering where this thing’s going to go. You’re constantly fighting the buildup to that moment.” Finally, it looks as though Billy the Kid’s going to win his final fight.

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* Seemingly, Beltrán is about to be told about his Astrogate co-masterminding, “All is forgiven.” As if the writers didn’t hear, didn’t see, or chose to ignore, how Astrogate co-exposer Evan Drellich (in Winning Fixes Everything) zinged Beltrán for his post-suspension apology, the one in which he said he wished he’d asked more questions about what the 2017 Astro Intelligence Agency was doing.

Beltrán was as powerful a clubhouse presence as there was on the 2017 Astros, begging the question, what was stopping him from asking those questions? (Emphasis added.)

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This essay was first published at Sports Central.

NLCS Game Five: A Mets blowout and a Dodgers gambit

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Jack Flaherty

On a day he didn’t have it, Dodgers righthander Jack Flaherty had to take eight (runs in three innings) for the team while the Mets blew them out in NLCS Game Five, so as not to compromise manager Dave Roberts’ Game Six bullpen game plan.

If the Mets deliver what some still think is near impossible, and snatch the National League pennant right out from under the Dodgers, don’t be terribly shocked if the number one question on the lips of Dodger fans and others will be, “Why did Dave Roberts leave Jack Flaherty in to take a three-inning, eight-run beating in Game Five?”

The most likely answer—considering the Mets would go on to finish what they started and blow the Dodgers out 12-6, thus sparing their elimination for another day—is Game Six.

In a National League Championship Series during which each team has won its games by blowout, Game Five may yet secure a place among the least conscionably allowed pitcher abuse by any manager. Ever. Abuse nobody could have seen coming. Could they?

Hadn’t Flaherty, a comeback kid of sorts starting with the Tigers before his trade to the Dodgers at this year’s deadline, pinned the Mets with seven shutout innings in Game One en route the Dodgers finishing with a 9-0 opening thrashing?

Yes, he had. But in Game Five he didn’t have it. His fastball wasn’t terribly fast, his breaking balls could have been court-martialed for insubordination, and the Mets were only too willing to wait him out, wait for the balls coming into the meat of the strike zone or close enough, and pounce.

Now the 29-year-old righthander went from virtuoso extension of Dodger pitching’s consecutive scoreless inning streak this postseason to a piñata in five days. But Roberts didn’t want to reach into his bullpen unless he absolutely had to with a likely bullpen game looming for the Dodgers in Game Six.

Their starting pitching has been so compromised that bullpen games became necessary survival for them. Roberts is counting on his Game Six bullpen game to win the pennant for him. He knows these Mets aren’t quite pushovers, but he has to take the chance that, somehow, his bullpen bulls can help him win a pennant and save Walker Buehler to open a World Series.

The manager had better be right, because what the Mets did to Flaherty Friday could have been called human rights violations. They only began with surrendering a one-out, three-run homer to Pete Alonso in the bottom of the first.

Flaherty shook a leadoff double by Starling Marte off to get three straight second inning outs. But then came the third. Then came back-to-back walks (Alonso, Jesse Winker) to open. Then came Marte doubling into left field to send them both home. Two outs later, Marte came home on Francsco Alvarez’s single, Francisco Lindor tripled Alvarez home, and Brandon Nimmo singled Lindor home.

Leaving things 8-1 Mets—Kiké Hernandez scoring on David Peterson’s wild pitch in the top of the inning seemed almost an excuse-us run for a good while—and leaving Flaherty the fourth pitcher in postseason history to get himself torn for eight or more runs in a game  that would have meant a series clinch for his team. (The others: Hall of Famers Walter Johnson [Game Seven, 1925 World Series] and Tom Glavine [Game Six, 1992 NLCS], and Charles Nagy [Game Five, 1999 American League division series].)

On a day Dodgers center fielder Andy Pages homered twice (solo in the fourth, three-run bomb in the fifth), you could remove Flaherty’s eight-run bequest and the Dodgers would have won the game and clinched the pennant with a 6-4 tally. Flaherty didn’t look like his best self early enough, but this was as unconscionable as it could get.

Roberts even hinted postgame that Flaherty was dealing with a health issue. He didn’t specify what, and Flaherty hadn’t discussed it at this writing. He’s dealt with injuries enough in his career—repeated shoulder injuries, an oblique injury—which helped reduce him from a Cardinals super pitcher to a kind of journeyman who shows flashes of his old mound brio and pitches as much on heart as stuff.

That the Dodgers don’t need. Not after everything else bedeviling their starting pitchers this year.

The Mets, of course, are showing how easy it isn’t to kill them this time around. Even if their bullpen isn’t as strong or consistent as the Dodgers. Blow them out one day, get blown out by them the next. With the set returning to Los Angeles, the Mets face yet another arduous test, even if they do find ways to pick, peck, pounce, and pound the Dodgers’ Game Six bullpen parade.

That test, if they make it, is called Game Seven, in hostile territory.

But wouldn’t it be nice to see one or two NLCS games that won’t become blowouts? They’re fun when the team for whom you root does the blowing out, but a good hair raiser has its place as well. Just so long as the hair isn’t raised because of sloppy or shaky play.

NLCS Game Two: Knuke the Knack

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Landon Knack, Mark Vientos

The wrestle between a Dodger reliever and a Met batter insulted by a bases-loading intentional walk ahead of him ends with Mark Vientos knuking the (Landon) Knack . . .

Let’s see. The Mets built a postseason rep for deploying serious weaponry when the games got late. But after a 9-0 blowout loss to the Dodgers in Game One of their National League Championship Series, the Mets struck early enough in Game Two. And, as things turned out, often enough, for a 7-3 series-evening Game Two win.

They struck first with one of their usual late-game demolition experts. This time, Mets shortstop Francisco Lindor wrestled Dodgers opener Ryan Brasier to an eighth pitch on a 2-2 count before sending that pitch into the right field bleachers to open the game. One inning later, with second and third, two outs, a second Met run home (RBI double), and rookie Landon Knack working the second for the Dodgers, they elected to put Lindor on to try their luck with Mark Vientos.

Said a broadcast announcer of Vientos: “As good as he’s been this year, nobody’s Lindor.” Said Vientos to himself, probably, knowing that he’s done damage enough for the Mets cause—he had a measly 1.674 with two home runs against the Phillies in the NLDS—Sure, he’s Francisco Freaking Lindor, but you’re gonna put him on thinking I’m a pushover for a third out? Boy, have I got a surprise for you, gentlemen.

It took Vientos a ninth pitch on a full count, but just like that he knuked the Knack.

Just like that, too, his blast over the center field fence had the Mets up 6-0, and they’d never really look back despite a Dodger run in the fifth and two in the sixth. Not on a night Mets starter Sean Manaea had the Dodgers stone frozen until Max Muncy punctured him for a fifth-inning solo bomb before he ran out of fuel in the sixth.

Two walks to open, a bases-loading fielding error at second base, and Manaea’s night was over. Mets manager Carlos Mendoza brought Phil Maton in to pitch. He got an almost immediate pop out from Will Smith. But he surrendered a two-run single to Tommy Edman, before getting Kiké Hernandez to dial Area Code 5-4-3 for the side and before any further Dodger damage.

The Mets tacked another insurance run on in the ninth with Starling Marte’s RBI single. But their bullpen held the Dodgers off admirably from the seventh forward. Even if Edwin Díaz had to channel his inner Craig Kimbrel in the Dodger ninth with a leadoff single (Andy Pages) and a walk (Shohei Ohtani) before striking the side out swinging to secure it.

All most of the Mets seemed to want to talk up, other than sending the NLCS to New York even-up, was Vientos leaving Dodger manager Dave Roberts with an omelette on his face.

“There’s one thing that Mark doesn’t lack,” chuckled Lindor himself, “and that’s confidence. That’s who he is. I’m glad he took it personal.”

“I didn’t think he was going to give me a fastball,” Vientos said of Knack, who’d fed him a diet of sliders four straight, two of which he let go and two of which he fouled off. “My approach was to see a heater up, but I wasn’t expecting heater. I thought I was going to get a slider and I was just going to poke it in the hole.” But he got the fastball at last. “Yeah, I wasn’t going to miss it,” he said.

The Dodgers did win a bullpen game in their division series conquest of the Padres. But that was before one of their key high leverage men, Alex Vesia, was lost for the rest of the postseason thanks to a side injury. And, before one of their others, veteran Daniel Hudson, let Roberts know he was still sore from a twenty-pitch eighth inning in Game One, available only if a dire emergency presented itself.

Roberts got three innings’ shutout relief from Brent Honeywell, Jr. and two innings’ one-run relief from Edgardo Henríquez Monday night. Second guessers might wonder why he didn’t turn to either of those instead of toward Knack, a 27-year-old rookie with a 3.83 strikeout-to-walk ratio on the regular season but a tendency toward surrendering the long ball, as in fourteen bombs in 69 innings.

Still, Roberts did manage to spare some of his other medium-to-high leverage for the New York leg, where the Mets and the Dodgers pick up after a day’s travel and rest. And, with three of those higher-leverage men, Blake Trienen, Michael Kopech, and Evan Phillips, all on four days rest. Considering the Dodgers’ starting rotation took such big hits this year they that have to think of bullpen games now, they may face another one in a Game Six if the game’s needed.

And, by then, the Mets may have figured enough out about working, hitting, pitching, and sneaking their ways around these Dodgers to make it irrelevant. May. They know the series isn’t won just yet. But they also have the home-field advantage now.

Maybe the Mets won’t get a shot at knuking the Knack again too soon, but don’t dismiss their home audience from their chances, either. Citi Field can make Dodger Stadium resemble a crypt when need be.

Ed Kranepool, RIP: “Wouldn’t it be great?”

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Ed Kranepool, Casey Stengel

Teenage Met Ed Kranepool listens to Professor Stengel, 1962.

As a teenage prospect out of New York’s James Monroe High School, Ed Kranepool landed an $80,000 bonus plus incentives to sign with the original Mets. He spent what the government let him keep of the bonus partly on a Thunderbird convertible and mostly on a split-level home for his widowed mother in White Plains.

Then he caught his first airplane flight ever to join the Mets in Los Angeles. Lucky him. He landed in time to join the team on the June 1962 day Hall of Famer Sandy Koufax no-hit them. The seventeen-year-old missed getting into the game; manager Casey Stengel wanted a pinch hitter late but decided on his old Yankee platoon hand Gene Woodling instead.

“Thank God,” Kranepool was recorded as saying. He’d have to settle for playing on the losing side of three no-hitters including Hall of Famer Jim Bunning’s Father’s Day 1964 perfect game.

A kid who begins his major league life as a 1962 Met surely had something to say about this year’s Blight Sox who threaten those Mets’ record for season-long futility. “I’ve gotten calls lately about the White Sox, but there’s not much to say,” said Kranepool, who died at 79 Sunday.

I don’t care if they lose more games than that original Mets team. It was a bad baseball team with a bad mix of young guys and some great older stars whose best years were behind them. In a clubhouse like that, when you’re young like I was, all you want is to learn and get better and have the season end. But whether the White Sox finish with more losses than that team—what does it matter to me?

Kranepool didn’t just have that season end. Before the decade ended, he’d go as he once phrased it, “from the outhouse to the penthouse,” as a member of the 1969 Miracle Mets. The outhouse years were rarely pretty for a kid upon whom wild expectations were piled. On the other hand, Kranepool developed a Metsian sense of humour about it.

He was one of only two licensed stock brokers playing in the National League at the time; Bunning was the other. He took to discussing Mets life in stock market terminology.

“During the World Series,” he told New York Times sportswriter Joseph Durso in 1967, “the Dow-Jones wire carries the score every inning, plus the home runs and pitchers. Wouldn’t it be great if the Mets got into the Series and I hit a home run that was flashed over the ticker along with the quotations? Boy, the office would go wild.”

A few million offices and residences in New York, when it actually did happen to both the Mets and Kranepool two years later. The Mets shook off a Game One loss to demolish the Orioles in four straight . . . and Kranepool smashed a one-out homer off Oriole reliever Dave Leonhard, sending a slightly hanging breaking ball over the center field fence with one out in the bottom of the Game Three eighth.

He had an up and down relationship with his teammate-turned-manager Gil Hodges, though. Both men headstrong but one the boss who’d survived World War II and the other a young man whose father was killed in that wae before he was born. They butted heads often as not until 1971, when Kranepool had a fine if not spectacular season.

“[T]hings seemed to get a little better between us, Gil and me,” he told Maury Allen for After the Miracle: The Amazin’ Mets Twenty Years Later.

I think we were beginning to understand each other. I had matured and was becoming a more productive player. Then he got his fatal heart attack in West Palm Beach that next spring of 1972, and Yogi [Berra] took over. Maybe I never appreciated Gil. I don’t know. He was a hard man to get to know. He was very tough, very strong. But he was smart. I think he was the first to know in 1969 how good we were.

Just like any other manager asked after a miracle Series triumph to explain how it came to be and answering by spreading his palms apart, grinning, and saying, “Can’t be done.” Kranepool thought otherwise. “Gil was a great manager, a very smart baseball man,” he told Allen. “I’m sure I would have learned a lot more about the game if he had lived.”

When Wayne Coffey wrote They Said It Couldn’t Be Done a few years ago, for the 50th anniversary of the 1969 Mets, Kranepool was even more concilatory, even if it could only be with Hodges’s ghost. “We really were a team,” he began.

Sometimes you win in spite of your manager, but not with this club. Gil did everything right. He made every possible move to help our club. He never tricked you. He was so consistent . . . You never showed up at the ballpark not ready. Once he said he was going to do something, he stuck to it. You were prepared when you went to the park. You got your rest. You were ready. You worked hard to stay in shape because you knew you would be called on. He kept everybody sharp.

Kranepool never became a bona fide superstar, but he remained iconic in New York, especially when he enjoyed a late career second life as a successful pinch hitter. Three years ago, studying pinch hitters with over 300 plate appearances since the heyday of their patron saint Smoky Burgess, I ranked Kranepool number sixteen according to my Real Batting Average metric. (TB + BB + IBB + SF + HBP / PA. Kranepool: .484 RBA.) Shea Stadium rocked with “Ed-die! Ed-die!” chants every time he loomed as a pinch hitter.

As content as he became with his Mets career as it was, as embittered as he became over the team’s mal-administration following the death of their beloved original owner Joan Payson (“Joan Payson was like a grandmother to me and to everybody else,” he once said), Kranepool came to take a realistic view of his Mets life. (His eighteen-season tenure remains a Mets record.) Including the ill effect of rushing a seventeen-year-old to the Show and not exactly letting him develop in short minor league stints in the seasons to follow.

“They shoulda left me in the minor leagues to develop, and they woulda got a better player out of it,” Kranepool was once quoted as saying. “A kid of seventeen isn’t equipped to handle that pressure. They said, ‘Ed’s going to lead them from a bad ballclub to the pennant.’ One player, even a Hall of Famer, can’t do that.”

1969 Mets

Ed Kranepool (at the podium) addresses a Citi Field crowd on the 50th anniversary of the 1969 Mets. Listening, left to right: Jerry Grote (C), Jerry Koosman (LHP), Cleon Jones (LF), Ron Swoboda (RF), Duffy Dyer (C). (Bergen Record photo.)

Nobody questioned his fortitude. After one such brief minor league turn in 1964, Kranepool was recalled to the Mets in time to play a doubleheader . . . all 32 innings of it at first base. He went 4-for-14 on the day/night with two runs scored, plus a double and a triple among the four hits. His mother went the distance with him in the Shea Stadium stands . . . because she was holding onto his car keys and house keys.

After his playing career ended. Kranepool took up life as a businessman, made peace with future Mets administrations, and became a happy presence at assorted Mets functions and commemorations as well as spring training. He also dealt with diabetes and kidney disease, receiving a transplant in 2019 after a two-year wait that was frequent news in New York. (A then-59 year old Met fan–whose own husband had received such a transplant—turned up as the donor.)

“I knew Krane for 56 years,” said Miracle Mets outfielder/first baseman Art Shamsky. “We did so many appearances together. We had lunch last week and I told him I would be there next week to see him again. I’m really at a loss for words. I can’t believe he’s the fourth guy from our 1969 team to pass this year.”

“We knew each other so well,” said pitcher Jerry Koosman, “and I could tell by his eyes if a runner was going or not. He saved me a lot of stolen bases.”

Kranepool’s death of cardiac arrest followed the 2024 deaths of shortstop (and eventual Mets coach and manager) Bud Harrelson, catching anchor Jerry Grote, and pitcher Jim McAndrew. As Mets together, those plus others listened attentively whenever Kranepool told them of those early Met seasons as lovable losers.

“We used to celebrate rainouts,” the man the fabled Shea Stadium Sign Man, Karl Ehrhardt, once called the Killer Krane would say.

In time Kranepool would be respected by teammates for baseball smarts as well as his straight, no chaser personality. A personality that compelled his teammates to name him their player representative as the Major League Baseball Players Association began finding its wings after hiring Marvin Miller to run the union.

“I wasn’t afraid to protect the players and attend the meetings and the associations,” he once told a reporter. “And the players, themselves, that doesn’t bode well for you, sometimes, when you’re speaking on behalf of the group, owners can take it as a bone of contention. I wasn’t afraid of getting traded, nor was I afraid of speaking out against others’ interests.”

Kranepool and his first wife, Carole, raised a son who was athletic but far more interested in music and electronics and ultimately raised two sons and a daughter himself. Kranepool remarried happily a Sotheby’s realtor named Monica whom he met during his stock brokering days. (She has four grandchildren of her own.)

“I’ve been lucky to have a great team at home—my wife and family. And also the Met organization,” he said after his transplant. “I’ve been with them since 1962. Those are the only two teams I knew up until that time. Now I have an extended team.”

He didn’t just mean his medical team, either. Kranepool was also one of several Mets who set up Zoom calls with residents of assorted elder care facilities, during the original COVID-19 pan-damn-ic, as a way to pay forward his kidney transplant. “This is a summer that none of us will forget,” he told northjersey.com writer Justin Toscano. “You’re always looking to talk to somebody to brighten their day, and hopefully they can brighten mine.”

He needn’t have worried. He had an immediate and extended family to brighten his days. He now has an even more extended one welcoming home to the Elysian Fields. Led, perhaps, by the skipper whom he didn’t always understand but who probably greeted him with, “We’re ok, Eddie. You got the point, after all.”