R.I.P. Guy Conti : Everybody's Teacher
Baseball has a thousand titles for the men who run it — manager, coach, coordinator, advisor. Guy Conti collected most of them over five decades in the game. But the title that tells you everything about the man came from a skinny kid from the Dominican Republic who couldn't yet speak English, and it wasn't a title at all.
Pedro Martínez called him “my white daddy.”
Conti, the Mets' former bullpen coach and one of the most beloved teachers the game has produced, has passed away. He was 84.
I can't pretend I knew Guy the way Pedro did. But I was lucky enough to cross his path more than once over the years, and every single time, I walked away wishing the conversation could have run another hour. At Mets Fantasy Camp, he'd hold court like the campfire had been invented just for him. In spring training, there was always time for one more story — and with Guy, “one more story” was the best offer in Florida. I looked forward to those conversations the way you look forward to camp itself. They never disappointed. Guy never disappointed.
His playing career lasted about fifteen minutes — one season, 1961, catching in the low minors after signing with the Houston Colt .45s out of Clarion State, until a bad shoulder told him his future in baseball would be spent standing next to the players instead of being one. So he went home to Pennsylvania and became a teacher, which, when you think about it, is all he ever really did for the next fifty years. He just changed classrooms.
The first classrooms were actual classrooms. He taught and coached at Northwestern High School in Albion, then moved to Edinboro State, where he coached everything that had a ball involved — baseball, football, and basketball, where he won 140 games, took the 1975-76 team to nationals at 24-5, and was named the school's Coach of the Year in 1982. Edinboro put him in its Athletics Hall of Fame in 1997. Most men would have called that a career.
Conti called it a warm-up.
The Pirates gave him a part-time coaching and scouting gig in the early '80s, the Dodgers made it permanent, and that's where Guy Conti quietly helped shape a generation of pitching. He roved, he coordinated, he befriended Sandy Koufax — let that sit for a second — and in 1990, in Great Falls, Montana, the Dodgers handed him a 19-year-old right-hander with a fastball from heaven and no English whatsoever.
Conti taught Pedro Martínez how to throw a changeup. More than that, he taught him how to live in a strange country — the customs, the whole bewildering business of being young and far from home. The English lessons he literally delegated to family: his wife Jan, a former high school librarian, took Pedro on as a pupil, and the kid showed up every morning hungry for one more word — how to spell it, how to pronounce it, how to use it. When I had Guy on SPORTSTALKNY in 2015, he still lit up telling it, and he summed Pedro up better than any scout ever did: “Pedro was just an absolute maniac when it comes to working. I would tell Pedro to run five sets of stadium steps, and he'd run ten.” Pedro never forgot any of it. On the weekend he entered Cooperstown in 2015, with the whole baseball world listening, Martínez made sure to say that “Guy Conti was a guy responsible for changing the grip on my changeup” — the pitch that became his signature, the one that made Hall of Fame hitters look like they were swinging underwater.
I got to watch the teacher up close. When Guy came on my radio show, the talk always came back to the same place: keep the hitter off balance, repeat your delivery, and never, ever stop competing. He marveled that Pedro, all those years later, was still getting big leaguers out — “this guy can pitch,” he said, the way you'd talk about a son. And at Mets Fantasy Camp in 2014, I watched him teach the circle change — the same family of pitch he'd handed Pedro a quarter-century earlier — to a radio kid, with the patience of a man explaining it for the very first time: “You grip it like that's an egg in your hand. If you squeeze that egg, it's going to squash it all over the ground.” A loose grip, a loose wrist. Twenty-five years, two generations of pitchers, one lesson, taught exactly the same way.
The Mets brought Conti east in 1999 to manage at Kingsport, moved him through Binghamton and the field coordinator's job, and in the winter of 2004 Willie Randolph made him one of his first hires — bullpen coach. Which meant that in 2005, at Shea Stadium, the teacher and the student were reunited: Pedro, the ace, and Guy, down in the bullpen, right where he belonged.
And because baseball never lets a good man stay quietly in his assigned seat, it gave us one perfect Guy Conti story. During a Subway Series game at the old Yankee Stadium — 56,000 people, national TV — the Mets' coaching shuffle left them short, and the GM sent word: Guy, you're coaching first base. José Reyes led off with a hit off Randy Johnson. Now picture it: the bullpen coach, pressed into service, standing in the first-base box at Yankee Stadium, with the most terrifying pickoff move in baseball sixty feet away and the fastest man in the game taking his lead. Conti leaned in and gave Reyes the most honest piece of coaching he ever delivered:
“You better not get picked off, because I am scared to death.”
That's the man. No ego, no bluff, just the truth, delivered with a grin — and Reyes, you'd better believe, did not get picked off.
After 2008 he stepped out of the bullpen and into the rehab coordinator and senior advisor roles, which is corporate-speak for “the guy the organization calls when a pitcher's arm, or a pitcher's head, needs fixing.” Pitchers half his age sought him out. They always had. From Great Falls to Flushing, the line of young arms who owed Guy Conti some piece of their career stretches around the block — and the greatest of them all put him in his Hall of Fame speech.
Jay Horwitz, who knew him as well as anyone, said it best this week: no one told a story better than Guy. Those of us lucky enough to have him sit across a microphone — or to watch him teach an egg-grip changeup like it was the secret of the universe, because to the kid holding the ball, it was — know exactly what Jay means.
Some coaches teach mechanics. Guy Conti taught mechanics too — ask Pedro's changeup. But mostly he taught people how to belong in a game that can be very lonely when you're nineteen and an ocean from home. The bullpen will be a little quieter now, and a little less kind.
Rest easy, Coach.
Hear Guy Conti in his own words — our full 2015 SPORTSTALKNY conversation:
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