This is inarguable. This is a matter of record. If you have a hurting baseball team and you want that team to begin acting professionally and winning accordingly, there is no one better at the task than Buck Showalter.
Again: all of it is in the books. Yankees. Diamondbacks. Rangers. Orioles. Mets. They all were losers (or, in the case of Arizona, merely a figment of the imagination). They all hired Showalter. They all began to win, in remarkably short order. It’s what Buck is. It’s what Buck does. He’s like the Harvey Keitel fixer character in “Pulp Fiction.” He’s The Wolf.
This, too, is inarguable, and this, too, is a matter of record: Showalter has never been able to maintain that pace, for any number of reasons. With the Yankees, he had the misfortune of being George Steinbrenner’s last stand as a manager killer. With the D-backs and Rangers, the message became muted. The Orioles were victimized by a talent exodus.
Also: all in the books. All of it is on Showalter’s permanent record. The inability to sustain what he built means he’s still only won one playoff series. It means he’s never managed a game in the World Series. And that was why this opportunity with the Mets — almost certainly his last managing gig — was so compelling.
For once, he would have all he could have ever wanted before. He had an owner with deep pockets — unlike Peter Angelos — and one that wasn’t an all-time bully with his managers, like Steinbrenner. He had a city, New York, with which he was familiar, working for fans who’d long ago silently envied the job he’d done with the other team in town. Judging by the 101-win joyride last year, he’d been planted amid players who bought in total what he was selling. It seemed a perfect marriage.
Which is why this year, so far, is so troubling.
As has been evident the last two weeks, it isn’t just that the Mets lose, though they’ve lost nine of their last 11 games; it’s how they lose. Four of those losses came after they led by three or more runs. They led in seven of those games. And, well, some of the brain cramps and missteps have been beyond alarming. They beat the Yankees on Wednesday and still it felt like something of a loss because of all the self-sabotage.
Showalter was asked about all the slapstick and all the baseball malaprops.
“You’d like to see them not happen,” he said, stone-faced.
The season is still salvageable, but what’s become clear is that it is the Mets’ manager who will have to do much of the salvaging. Yes, as he’s said repeatedly, more than a few players have yet to be the equal of the backs of their baseball cards. But this really isn’t about the vagaries of OPS and WHIP and all the other abbreviations that define winning teams and losing teams. It’s simpler than that.
Right now, the Mets just look like a poorly managed team. A year ago, barely a day went by when the Mets didn’t just play well on the field, but played smartly. They always threw to the right base. They ran the bases extraordinarily well for a team lacking great overall speed.
No manager ever born can defend against a hanging slider that’s bombed 475 feet, or can by himself combat an opposing ace who hits the black and the knees at 98 mph for eight innings. But he can have a team capable of playing smart, playing crisp, like its entire focus is in the game. And anyone who’s seen the Mets can see they’re not there right now.
They are, in truth, not close to there right now.
That’s Showalter’s mission. This week they’ll get an uncomfortable look at a team that mirrors them in many ways. Both the Mets and Cardinals were stunned in the playoff miniseries last October and have carried steep hangovers into this season. This is where the climb back to relevance must start for the Mets. Play a clean game. Play a clean series. Build on that.
Because more than a season rides on this. In a lot of ways, Showalter’s legacy does, too. So far, in many ways, this season resembles Showalter’s last with the Yankees, 1995. The ’94 Yankees — like the ’22 Mets — spent a lot of time looking like the best team in baseball before they slammed into unfortunate brick walls — the strike in ’94, the Padres in ’22.
The ’95 Yankees essentially played the season’s first five months in a fog and were left for dead repeatedly, and looked almost nothing like the rollicking show they’d been a year earlier. As late as Aug. 29 they were 55-59, four games under .500, same as the 32-36 Mets find themselves on June 16. The Yankees needed to go 25-6 to rescue that season.
The Mets don’t need that kind of run, not yet. They just need to be what they were a year ago: smart, tough, aggressive and sharp, day after day, game after game. Showalter instilled that team with all of it. It needs to happen again, and soon. The season — and so much more — depends on it.