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Article focusing on Whitey's NY days, quotes Kiner, Kranepool, Hernandez... and me...
Congrats to Whitey, even if he's off by 16 or 17 games. Can you imagine?
[url]http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/24/sports/baseball/24herzog.html?_r=1&ref=sports
July 23, 2010
Leaving Mets Put Herzog on a Path to the Hall
By RICHARD SANDOMIR
When Whitey Herzog’s baseball Hall of Fame plaque is unveiled Sunday, his bronze likeness will be topped with a St. Louis Cardinals cap, emblematic of the team he managed to the 1982 World Series championship. But if history had played out differently, that likeness of Herzog might have sported a Mets cap.
After playing for Washington, Kansas City, Baltimore and Detroit, Herzog spent seven seasons with the Mets, as the third-base coach under Manager Wes Westrum and as a scout and director of player development.
“He was an excellent third-base coach, maybe the best I ever saw,” said Ralph Kiner, the last of the Mets’ original broadcasters. “He knows more about baseball than anybody I’ve been around, except maybe Al Lopez.”
In a 1966 New York Times article about Herzog, accompanied by a photograph of him flat on the ground exhorting a player to slide, he explained his style. “A good third-base coach can win 16 or 17 games a season for his club,” he said. “When a base runner has a chance to score, you’ve got to remember that the percentage is with him. It’s like being a gambler — you’ll force the other side to make either a perfect play or a damaging mistake.”
He was using the lessons he learned as a minor leaguer in the Yankees’ farm system. “I’ll bet Casey Stengel walked me down the third-base line 75 times a day teaching me that good base running boils down to anticipation and knowledge of the defense,” he said. Those teachings added up to one thing, he said: “You can steal a lot of runs.”
Herzog’s subsequent six years in player development helped stock the Mets for their 1969 World Series run and a little bit beyond. Jon Springer, who runs the Mets by the Numbers blog, said that Herzog brought along Jon Matlack, Ken Singleton, Gary Gentry, Amos Otis, John Milner and Wayne Garrett, “about as strong a group of minor league talent the Mets would develop until the Strawberry-Gooden 1980s.”
Ed Kranepool, the Mets’ longtime first baseman, said, “He had a crystal ball; he could look at players to see how good they’d be later on, especially with 17- or 18-year-old kids.”
But Herzog disliked M. Donald Grant, the Mets’ imperious chairman, and was perturbed when Grant did not hire him as the manager after Gil Hodges died in 1972. Yogi Berra got the job instead.
“Whitey was a very logical choice to manage the Mets,” Kiner said. “He had earned the job.”
Peter Golenbock’s book “Amazin’: The Miraculous History of New York’s Most Beloved Baseball Team” quotes Herzog as saying: “Grant’s people even ordered me to stay away from Gil’s funeral just so there wouldn’t be speculation that I’d be hired as the new manager. I’ve never forgiven them for that.”
Kranepool said: “He should have stayed in the organization. We would have been a lot better for it.”
There are no Mets artifacts in Herzog’s Hall of Fame display case.
Herzog left the Mets to manage the Texas Rangers, who fired him 138 games into the 1973 season. He ran the California Angels for four games on an interim basis in 1974, and was hired the next year to manage the Kansas City Royals, whom he managed until 1979. The next season, he began 11 years with the Cardinals, some of them as both field manager and general manager, building them for speed, not power, in no small part to capitalize on artificial turf.
“He’s the best manager I ever played for as a field manager and a tactician,” said Keith Hernandez, a first baseman and the National League most valuable player in 1979. “He made me more cognizant of doing the little things to win a game: getting a runner over, which he always emphasized; if you didn’t score a runner from second, you got him to third. Defensively, he always had a new wrinkle, like a bunt play I loved.”
Jim Kaat, a Cardinals reliever under Herzog, said, “From the fifth or sixth inning on, when he got into his little cocoon, he was the best at putting pitchers in the position where they had an advantage.”
Herzog sent Hernandez to the Mets during the 1983 season (“I deserved it,” he said, explaining that he “didn’t have the best of attitudes”), igniting a potent rivalry with the Cardinals that might have reached its zenith in a three-game series in St. Louis in October 1985.
The Mets needed to sweep to tie the Cardinals for first place in the N.L. East. They won the first game, 1-0, on a monumental 11th-inning home run by Darryl Strawberry off the Busch Stadium scoreboard clock; they followed with a 5-2 victory, Dwight Gooden’s 24th of the season; but they lost the finale, 4-3, despite five hits by Hernandez.
“That was the greatest series I ever played in, right up there with the ’86 Houston playoffs,” said Hernandez, who thrived after Herzog sent him to Flushing and is a Mets game analyst for SNY.
The Cardinals won the division and the pennant but lost the World Series in seven games to the Royals.
Kiner said that Herzog did not seem to be dealing with repressed anti-Grant demons during that era’s many intense Mets-Cardinals confrontations. “No, Whitey was just full throttle all the way,” he said.
Herzog said recently that he would have enjoyed managing the Yankees for George Steinbrenner, partly because of his “sweet spot” for his youthful roots with the franchise but also because of the Boss’s desire to win.
In a conference call, he said Steinbrenner sent him telegrams after the Royals and the Cardinals won division titles, pennants or World Series. In one memorable missive, Steinbrenner wrote, “How in the world can you win a pennant with Joe Oquendo” — actually Jose — “in right field and I can’t win it with Dave Winfield?” |
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