The New York Mets Need Buck Showalter To Be Like Another Big Apple Managerial Icon … Gil Hodges

The similarities between Buck Showalter and his predecessors were promptly noted Dec. 18, when Showalter was named the manager of the Mets and joined a select club by becoming the fifth man to skipper both current New York baseball teams.

Showalter is almost as wizened upon his arrival in Queens as Casey Stengel was (it’s true — Showalter, whom so many of us remember as the impossibly young first-time manager of the Yankees, will enter the 2022 season having managed just 215 fewer regular season games than Stengel managed before taking over the Mets), He’ll bring a Dallas Green-esque sense of order and discipline to an organization in desperate need of both traits.

While no one is likely to author a book of Buckisms, every Showalter press conference offers the promise of a full notebook and the better sense of the game so often delivered by Yogi Berra. And while Showalter will be a decade older in his first season as Mets manager than Joe Torre was in his first season with the Yankees, he takes a potential last-chance job still seeking an elusive, resume-capping World Series trip.

Yet for all the commonalities Showalter shares with Stengel, Berra, Green and Torre, none is the New York manager the Mets need Showalter to emulate over the next three or more seasons.

The Mets need Showalter to be their modern-day Gil Hodges.

The project ahead of Showalter isn’t nearly the uphill climb Hodges inherited following the 1967 season, when he was named the manager of a franchise that had never finished higher than ninth in the 10-team National League and was a combined 327 games under .500 in its first six seasons. By the end of his second season, of course, the Mets were World Series champions.

The Mets are two seasons removed from going 86-76, spent 114 days atop the NL East in 2021 and are going to open the 2022 season (whenever it begins) with a rotation headed by a pair of pitchers that have combined to win five Cy Young Awards.

Of course, that 86-76 finish in 2019 came after the Mets fell as many as 11 games under .500, and the 2021 season ended with the Mets setting a record for the most days spent in first place by a team that finished with a losing record. The signing of Max Scherzer was necessitated by the mysterious arm injuries that ended Jacob deGrom’s pursuit of a Bob Gibson-esque season. And as bold a move as it was to sign Scherzer, the Mets’ history with free agent signings is so spotty that a case could be made Curtis Granderson is their most successful import ever.

All of which is to say the default setting for the Mets always ends up being here they go again. But Showalter has taken vulnerable teams — or teams in their infancy — and turned them into winners almost immediately with the same sense of organization-wide purpose and no excuses accountability Hodges instilled in the Mets beginning upon his arrival.

As the Hodges quote on his mural in the basement of Citi Field reads: “Just do the best with what you have and soon you’ll be doing it better.” During his introductory Zoom call last week, Showalter noted multiple times the Orioles didn’t have much budget for an analytics department during his eight-plus seasons in the dugout, a span in which the Orioles went 669-684 — pretty good, considering they were a combined 80 games under .500 in his final two seasons — and made the playoffs three times. The Orioles endured 12 straight losing seasons prior to Showalter’s arrival and are 131-253 since his exit.

“It’s a 90-foot increment game,” Showalter said. “Obviously, 360 feet happen with a home run. But the people that can keep you from going 90 feet — whether that be pitching, defense, people in the right place. How do we gain 90 feet, whether it be a walk or whatever? It’s about trying to attack the 90 feet of the game.

“I think a lot of people lose sight sometimes that we haven’t had the luxury of analytics. And without trying to be negative towards places (he’s) been — so what do you do? You have to adapt. You have to figure out a way to do some other things better than the people you’re competing against.”

A lacking analytics department won’t be an issue for Showalter with the Mets — with Steve Cohen ramping up that part of the front office, Showalter said last week “…we have eliminated another excuse” — nor are the Mets in the early stages of a rebuild, a la the first four teams Showalter managed.

But mastering those 90-foot increments, all while getting teams to believe in themselves, each other and those for whom they play, and by never asking anyone for more than he is willing to deliver himself? Showalter will do that with a purpose and a precision that will seem familiar to those who played for Hodges, who was renowned for his utilization of platoons, ability to process information and commitment to detail.

“He was analytics — his brain,” former Mets outfielder Ron Swoboda told the New York Daily News last month. “Gil was our algorithm.”

Upon arriving in 1968, Hodges re-taught the Mets how to bunt and run the bases, telling players that it was easier to slide directly into second base instead of employing the hook slide he’d seen.

“You’ve got somebody who believes in one way at Double-A, another in Triple-A,” Jerry Koosman said at a celebration honoring the ’69 Mets in June 2019. “Big leagues, they probably believe a little differently. It’s got to be taught the same way throughout the organization.

“Practice doesn’t make perfect. Perfect practice makes perfect.”

Showalter isn’t going to expect perfection. But as someone who notices and remembers e-very-thing — as Orioles manager, Showalter would often riff on the frequency, or lack thereof, of paint jobs at road ballparks — he’s going to waste no time setting a high standard for the Mets to meet, on and off the field.

As a rookie manager with no big league playing experience in 1992, Showalter declared the Yankees could no longer employ Mel Hall, a veteran of 10 seasons who bullied bespectacled rookie outfielder Bernie Williams and wondered what the big deal was about Old-Timers Day.

“Not a lot of lip service — it’s kind of a show-me situation and I just want everybody to know that the Mets are going to be something that’s very precious to the people that we bring in,” Showalter said. “It’s a great responsibility that I and we will take very seriously everyday. There’s ebbs and flows to the season, but the consistency of how we go about our business and the people we surround ourselves with and how we treat each other’s going to be special.”

On the Zoom call last week, Showalter credited his wife Angela for helping him to design charts to identify where opposing players hit the ball while Showalter was managing the Fort Lauderdale Yankees in the late 1980s.

“I still got those charts,” Showalter said. “I can name the five starting pitchers. She can too. And what color pencils they all had.”

It wasn’t the first time Showalter showed an uncanny recall for tiny details from decades earlier. A day after Cecil Fielder sat next to the Orioles’ dugout at Yankee Stadium in 2014, Showalter not only recalled how Fielder hit his milestone 50th homer of the 1990 season at Yankee Stadium but also the pitcher who delivered the pitch (Steve Adkins), the pitch itself (in Showalter’s words, a “knuckle curve — it didn’t knuckle and it didn’t curve”) and the alma mater (Penn) of Adkins, whose big league career — consisting of five games — ended that night.

Showalter uttered the phrase “end game” no fewer than eight times during his Zoom — often expanding upon his idea of the ultimate goal for a baseball team by using the type of verbiage Hodges would have utilized more than half a century ago.

“If you can stay involved in the day-to-day operations (then) the end game is something that everybody’s success (is) a result of it,” Showalter said. “I understand the job description. The job description here isn’t to be competitive or to try to win more games than you lose. It’s to be the last team standing.

“And that’s the focus: How do we get better everyday, just grinding each day, to see where it takes you?”