At the start of the public part of his working day at Citi Field – the pregame press conference – Buck Showalter spoke about the changing forces of fate.
“I always say if you want to make the baseball gods laugh,” he said, “tell them your plans.”
Showalter brought up those same baseball gods soon after, without warning, which inspired this one-on-one question from the Mets manager: Do you think they owe you one for the 1994 season in the Bronx, and that 2022 season is thrilled in Queens? ? your way to settle the debt?
“No, I really owe them,” Showalter said. “I never had that feeling.”
Maybe he should have that feeling right now. At 66, after a full and distinguished life in the game, Showalter has been handed a team that gives him his best chance at a championship since his 1994 Yankees were denied their chance by a labor dispute that put end of the playoffs.
How to start a blog in 2022 and make money
These Yankees had the best record in the American League at 70-43, a 6 ½ game lead in the AL East and enough talent and chemistry to compete with the best in the National League – Felipe Alou’s Montreal Expos 74-40. Paul O’Neill was hitting .359, Wade Boggs was hitting .342, and Jimmy Key was the only big hitter with 17 wins.
“They were a great team,” Showalter recalled Tuesday, before his Mets beat Cincinnati 6-2 for their 14th win in their last 16 games. “All the parts match. Everything matched.
I reminded him that in an office building in Phoenix in February 1996, after being fired by George Steinbrenner and hired by the expanding Diamondbacks, he told me this: “We would have won everything.
Showalter paused for a second before responding, “Yeah, we had to go.”
At least until the Baseball Commissioner canceled the season and an annual October tradition that even World War II couldn’t end.
“That one really hurt,” Showalter said. “I remember like it was yesterday seeing Bud Selig’s face on my TV at home, saying they were canceling the season. And I was like, ‘They’re really going to do this. They really will. ”
Showalter got a call from its general manager, Gene “Stick” Michael, who had helped rebuild a club that had lost 273 games in the three years before Showalter joined the manager’s office in 1992.
“I remember there was a long silence on the phone between the two of us,” the manager recalled. “Stick and I feel the same. We both knew that a lot can change from year to year and that we might not have another opportunity.
Showalter was fired the following year after losing a classic five-game playoff series to Seattle. He would lead Arizona to the playoffs once and the Orioles to the playoffs three times, but he would never make the World Series.
Pages: 1 2