Saturday Seasons: In 1996, Not-so-Special K and Turning On Green

The Mets began 1996 with great anticipation. They ended it with another year of disappointment.

               In-between saw one of their players hit for the cycle, another break the record for home runs by a catcher and a managerial change that probably came too late.

               “We expect to be there,” general manager Joe McIlvaine said when asked about the postseason, just as spring training was about to begin.

               “I’d be disappointed if we didn’t do well,” manager Dallas Green said. "We have expectations.”

               “Okay, so maybe the optimism ran a bit high in Port St. Lucie,” John Harper wrote in the Daily News. “The Mets are a long way from a lock as a bone fide contender, unless you believe Butch Huskey is going to hit the 80 home runs his spring training pace would indicate. But the talent is genuine, the attitude upbeat, and the karma feels right.”

The optimism was fueled by two key offseason acquisitions: signing free agent center fielder Lance Johnson, who would hit .333, lead the National League with 227 hits and steal 50 bases; and trading three minor leaguers for left fielder Bernard Gilkey, who hit .317 with 30 home runs and 117 RBI and led the league with 18 outfield assists. Adding to that offensive juggernaut was catcher Todd Hundley, who ended up with a .259 batting average, 112 RBI and a major league record 41 home runs from the catching position.

               The arrival of slick-fielding shortstop Rey Ordonez created what seemed at the time like pleasant problems: where to play Jose Vizcaino, perhaps the Mets’ best player in 1995, and Jeff Kent, a good-hitting but questionable-fielding second sacker. The Mets would move Vizcaino to second and Kent to third, moves that didn’t really work (even though Vizcaino hit .303 and Kent .290); on July 30, they were both traded to the Indians in a deal for Alvaro Espinoza and Carlos Baerga, a once all-star second baseman who was past his prime.

               (In fairness, it should be noted that at the time, the trade was viewed as somewhat of a coup for the Mets, jettisoning two players with attitude issues a couple of days after Hundley and John Franco had questioned the team’s focus.  In fact, some writers hailed the trade as addition by subtraction – ridding the team of a clubhouse cancer. As John Harper wrote of Kent in the Daily News: “He has been an outcast, in fact, in his own clubhouse, from that night in Montreal when he refused to go along with a team prank and wear some goofy clothes his teammates had put in his locker…Kent always seemed to speak a language that no one else understood, not even his teammates.”)

               And on another positive note, the trade also cleared the way for Edgardo Alfonzo to become the regular third baseman.

               Speaking of positive notes, another came on July 3, when Alex Ochoa – the key player in the 1995 deal that sent Bobby Bonilla to the Orioles – hit for the cycle against the last-place Philadelphia Phillies, the sixth time a Met had achieved that feat. It was only Ochoa’s 22nd major league game. The 10-6 win snapped a four-game losing streak and guaranteed Ochoa more time both on the roster and in the lineup. Ochoa would play in 82 games that year, batting .294 with four home runs and 33 RBI, sharing time in right field with Carl Everett, who batted only .240.

               But the team that was supposed to break out fast never hit its stride. The Mets went 11-13 in April and 11-17 in May and before finally having a winning month, 15-13 in both June and July.

               The culprit for the disappointment: The pitching.

               This was supposed to be the year of Generation K – the three young pitchers who would channel Seaver-Koosman-Matlack or Gooden-Darling-Fernandez. But from the start, it was clear this was a star-crossed year for the trio of Bill Pulsipher, Paul Wilson and Jason Isringhausen.

               It began in spring training, when Pulsipher, who ended the 1995 season complaining of elbow pain after a workload, combining AAA and Major League ball, far higher than he had been used to, still suffered from elbow issues. At the end of spring training, he was sent for Tommy John surgery, which was performed on April 17, ending his season.

               Wilson, heralded as perhaps the best prospect of the three (he was the first pick in the 1994 draft), started ineffectively and spent a good deal of the season on what was then called the disabled list. Amid rumblings that he had bad mechanics, he ended the season with a 5-12 record and a 5.38 ERA.

               “He was blindfolded and wandering around, looking for answers,” Bob Apodaca,  a late-season appointee as pitching coach, told Virginian-Pilot sportswriter Tom Robinson in a post-season article.

               And Isringhausen, who dominated the NL in 1995, going 9-2 with a 2.81 ERA? He went 6-14 with a 4.77 ERA and a near league-leading 14 wild pitches. After the season, Apodaca and Isringhausen agreed that the league had caught onto Isringhausen’s stuff and he was unable to make the necessary adjustments. “I was pretty bad on myself,” the pitcher told Robinson. “It was killing me. I think Paul and I went through the same thing, just worrying too much. I think we both were starting to doubt ourselves.” He added, “I have to learn about baseball. I have to learn how to pitch.” That aside, he also suffered a shoulder tear and bone chips in his elbow that required post-season surgery.

               The Mets’ front office, led by general manager Joe McIlvaine, had a different explanation: they planted the blame squarely at the feet of old-school, tough-love, drill-sergeant-like manager Dallas Green. On August 26, with the team well on its way to oblivion (59-72, 13 games behind division leader Atlanta with 31 games to go), McIlvaine fired Green and replaced him with Bobby Valentine, manager of AAA Norfolk, also promoting Apodaca. Valentine and Apodaca’s softer approach, the feeling was, would get through to the youngsters better than the stern taskmaster Green (who essentially was his own pitching coach).

“Baseball’s foremost proponent of tough love yesterday was replaced as manager of the Mets by a man familiar with stroking,” Newsday’s Marty Noble wrote, continuing, “His dismissal came a week after he said that two of the Mets’ high-profile young pitchers – Jason Isringhausen and Paul Wilson – were not yet suited for major league duty, a remark McIlvaine acknowledged was a factor in the change.”

Added Noble’s colleague, columnist Steve Jacobson: “Green’s insight, observation, experience, frustration, drill-instructor manner and acid wit prompted him to blurt that the wave of young pitching that was going to raise these Mets to the heights was a deception of modern times. He made that point last week. That’s not the way it’s done any more.”

“Today is a day of change,” Valentine said upon being announced as manager.

Some writers, however, were not going to let Green shoulder all the blame, putting some of the responsibility on the general manager. Mike Lupica – back at the Daily News after a stint at Newsday – said this about McIlvaine: “He never did a thing all season to improve a joke bullpen. He just kept on telling Green everything would get better with all those people named [Doug] Henry and [Jerry] DiPoto, and we all see how that came out. McIlvaine is a brilliant evaluator of young talent, but until he proves otherwise, remember this about him: He has never built a championship baseball team on his own. All he has done is take one apart.”

Alas, the team did not respond any better to gentility. The Mets went 12-18 under Valentine, a percentage slightly worse than under Green.  Baerga hit only .193.  And the pitching finished the year with a 4.22 ERA; the leading starters were Mark Clark (14-11, 3.43 ERA) and Bobby Jones (12-8, 4.42). The bullpen? Let’s just say that the 2025 Mets, with iffy relief trying to pave the way for Edwin Diaz, channeled 1996, when set up men had trouble getting the ball to Franco, who had 28 saves and a 1.83 ERA.

The end result: a 71-91 record. Fourth place, 25 games behind Atlanta and only a game ahead of the Phillies in the battle for last place.

But the next year? That was a different story. In 1997, Valentine, and the Mets, turned it all around. Tune in next week…