As a Mets fan, it’s rare we confidently come into a new season with legitimate hope. With the start of spring training games just days away, I ventured back and rewatched a cinema classic - Major League.
The perfect parallel for Mets’ management in 2023.
Sports fans across the world suffer the same fate - in the end, we’re just rooting for laundry. Regardless of who's filling out the infield this year or next, I’ll be rooting for the Mets.
Major League projects this in real time as fans from the bar, on the construction worksite and the two groundcrew workers at Cleveland Municipal Stadium, portrayed in the film by Milwaukee County Stadium, provide similar opinions about the team they’ll still root for despite their reservations.
Any fan of sports laundry is known for their faith; having complete trust in something they have little to no control over. With no control, a fan can only hope - an expectation and desire for something positive to happen.
The ‘something’ that happened in 1986 started a few years earlier. Documented in Once Upon A Time In Queens, “the club rose from a struggling franchise in the late 1970s to a National League power.” But struggling is an understatement.
With the surprise exceptions of the Miracle Mets in 1969 & Ya Gotta Believe in 1973, the team strung together seasons of ineptitude before trading for SNY broadcaster Keith Hernandez.
I label Mex as such since the last regime might have found financial reasoning to run away from the award-winning three-man booth we all love. But now we have an owner who suffered through that ineptitude like us.
Originally from Great Neck in Long Island, Steve Cohen is the absolute opposite of fictional Indians’ owner Rachel Phelps. He didn’t inherit the team when someone died. He’s a fan who died inside, just like me, when Carlos Beltrán froze as the nastiest curve ever fell in the zone. He regretted trading Kevin Mitchell and releasing Justin Turner and every other promising prospect or missed superstar that was lost over money.
In The Last Boy Scout, referenced in last week’s pitching preview, Jimmy Dix and Joe Hallenbeck are in a police parking lot when a complete stranger screams, "Free agency ruined the goddamn game!" at the former fictional quarterback.
That cry can be heard in various forms across the country for every professional sports league; but the ability to make it heard by other like-minded fans 24 hours a day started July 1, 1987 with a Suzyn Waldman sports update on WFAN; the first sports talk radio station and home of the Amazins’ till 2014.
Is this the origins of arguments on Twitter and attempts to decipher what was meant by someone’s latest Instagram post? Possibly. And if so, here’s a line to get the old-school phone board lit up like a Christmas tree - If any franchise deserves a rich owner willing to spend whatever it takes to produce a winner, it’s the New York Metropolitans.
Cohen has compared this year’s team to the 2015 Dodgers. That West Coast incarnation had a record payroll of $297.9 million, surpassed this offseason by Cohen's command. The Dodgers were 57.6% above the base salary threshold; this Mets team is roughly 60% above the same threshold.
The only difference is no one was saying the Dodgers were ruining the sport in 2015.
In that same year, Terry Collins guided the Mets to their first division title since 2006, then defeated the Dodgers in the NL Division Series. Led by a homegrown pitching staff, they swept a Chicago Cubs team that returned the following season and ended a 70-year long drought.
It won’t be the same if Buck Showalter leads the Mets to the World Series this year, but we’ll take it. We’ve taken a lot over the years; similar to Lou Brown. Maybe that’s why the Tire World employee hesitated when offered the Indians’ manager job.
"Let me get back to you…I got a guy on the other line asking about some white walls."
I’m almost certain Showalter wasn’t working with automobiles when Mets general manager Billy Eppler called and hired the 24th manager in Mets’ history. But Buck has brought a comfortable calm within the daily storm that is playing and performing in the largest media market in the country. It’s a calm created by getting a head start on the craziness, arriving in Port St. Lucie on February 2.
“The longer you’re at this, the earlier it gets. But I’m ready to get after it. We all are. Trust me when I tell you there’s going to be a lot of want-to in our team this season,” said the four-time Manager of the Year, earning his first in the National League last year. “That want-to I spoke of, it starts with the manager.”
Charlie Sheen was already the stereotypical Hollywood star by the time he reached the set of 'Major League'. In a Sports Illustrated interview years after, he spoke about how on the set of Young Guns, Sheen would have his latest female friend pass one another on the highway to the set. But even this steroid-taking, pill-popping philanderer viewed the real-life Lou Brown in awe.
“You want to talk about a Viking? This guy shows up one morning, and he's so hung over that he has the bar still attached to his head.”
There’s more about the froggy-voiced character actor who appeared in television westerns like Bonanza and Gunsmoke, true cinema classics like Cool Hand Luke and Urban Cowboy and was the co-founder of the MET Theatre in Los Angeles.
Gannon received a Tony nomination for the 1996 Broadway revival of Buried Child, but is still best remembered for leading the Indians to a 91-win season, a one-game playoff with the Yankees and voicing lines that have been recited by players and fans of baseball for over a quarter-century.
It’s difficult to find the right place for “Nice velocity. Sounded like it”.; but something as simple as “All we need is something to bring it all together” can easily be adapted into any life circumstance. What’s lost in the insanity is that Brown takes a team that was constructed by the owner to finish dead last.
It’s what Brian Daboll did with the New York Giants; starting guys in the playoffs that were released mid-season. Lou Brown would have received a similar Coach of the Year honor, if the film didn’t end with a group shot that includes Jake Taylor’s estranged wife making her motion picture debut.
Showalter’s debut was with the Yankees in 1992. Two years later, they won 70 games in a strike-shortened season. The .619 winning percentage was his best as a manager before last year’s .623 (101-61). Last year was a pleasant surprise, one that continued all year. This year, expectations started before Mr. and Mrs. Met got on the bus and I’m only thinking of one thing.
It’s starting to come together, Pepper. It’s starting to come together.
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