The Worst Team Money Could Buy
Reviewed by Daniel R. Bronson, Montclair State University
MAY 15, 2005 archive
Exquisite Pain might be an alternate title chosen by long-suffering Mets fans who relive the disastrous 1992 season in this acute, lively, funny, infuriating and well-written book. And there is little solace in knowing the title may yet be appropriated by this year's version of the Mets' psychic and civic rivals, the Yankees.
Klapisch and Harper remind us in this reissue of their 1995 book that "The Mets' golden era began in 1984, and for seven years the baseball at Shea was terrific, full of energy, almost eliminating the Yankees from New York's consciousness"(7). Of course, they immediately qualify that statement by adding, "But by 1992 the Mets had become the dynasty that never was, having squandered an embarrassment of riches along the way."
The book opens with a cast of characters, descriptions of many of the players on that ill-fitted and ill-fated team. Lurking just offstage are the front office executives, including G.M. Frank Cashen, Joe McIlvaine, Al Harazin and part owner Fred Wilpon, whose collective bad judgment deep-sixed the solid team they had built in the early 1980s. Also waiting in the wings are the beat reporters, including Klapisch and Harper, who watched the circus act of the glory years turn into a freak show. In fact, the book reads like a badly plotted, worse acted play that refuses to end, even after the season's last out. Like Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, the authors depict themselves as petty players watching the palace machinations with a mixture of helplessness and disbelief.
The Mets had been an arrogant, renegade bunch in their glory days, but as some of them aged (Keith Hernandez and Gary Carter) or were injured (Doc Gooden), and others were deemed unnecessary or divisive (Ray Knight, Kevin Mitchell, Lenny Dykstra, Darryl Strawberry), management opted for players they thought more wholesome (Kevin McReynolds), more powerful (Bobby Bonilla, Eddie Murray) and more talented (Juan Samuel, Vince Coleman, Frank Viola). Having dumped manager Davey Johnson, whose easygoing camaraderie with the players helped keep the team together, Cashen and company selected Jeff Torborg, who represented "family and discipline and everything the Mets' management wanted in their ball club" (p. 9). Their choices proved disastrous.
The book's chapters follow the season's months, from the sex and drug rumors of February through the aftermath of October - "Players and writers both had been counting the days, as if September were its own jail term (p. 273) - and are written in a perhaps mock objective style that treats even the authors in the third person. This is offset by frequent sidebars, individually written, in which Klapisch and Harper take turns delving beneath the events to look at and list good players and bad, good interviewees and worse, Tim McCarver's troubles with Davey Johnson, Vince Coleman's inflated sense of his abilities, even their own peculiar relationships with the team. While the ongoing story of the team's collapse will be familiar to many, these sidebars provide an insight unavailable to anyone not a beat reporter. In one, titled "Sources, Friends and Enemies," Harper muses over what may be the thorniest difficulty of his job:
All reporters are influenced to some degree by relationships in the clubhouse, but if you let them dictate too much of what you do or don't write, you're a fraud. Klapisch and I argue about this all the time. He's more inclined to cultivate sources and write sympathetically when they make excuses for poor performance. Let the reader decide, he says: "My job is to report, not make judgments about what they say." My feeling is that the readers look to the beat writer for perspective as well as information, and if you're quoting some guy who complains about his "role" or whatever every time he goes 0-for-4 or gives up a critical hit, you've got to write it in the context it deserves. (p.199)
The authors do their best to give us the context. They bring the beat writers to life as much as the players and management, catching failings and foibles, humanizing the lot. The players, both good and bad, are also people, both good and bad, and so are the rest. That they are all on a sinking ship, and that the players came to feel every escaping rat had a pencil or a microphone makes for that much more compelling a read.
In their never-ending quest to keep ahead of George Steinbrenner's Yankees and in their later attempts to catch up to that monolithic team, Mets' management demonstrated a particular genius in trading for veteran players whose careers nose-dived almost before the ink had dried on their contracts. Vince Coleman, a creature of artificial surfaces, stands out as one of their prime mistakes. Recent history, including the unfortunate breakdowns of Mo Vaughan and Roberto Alomar, suggest that little had changed. Perhaps Pedro Martinez and the latest band of Mets can reverse the team's fortunes. Klapisch and Harper have moved to different papers since they first wrote The Worst Team Money Could Buy. In the Afterword to this reissue, they close by saying, "We try not to sit side by side in the press box, however, lest we return to a decade-old debate: whatever happened to the fun of covering baseball?" (p. 287). Readers of this book with a taste for gallows humor will find all the fun they might want.
Klapisch, Bob and Harper, John. The Worst Team Money Could Buy: The Collapse of the New York Mets. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2005. XVII, 287 pp. $16.95, ISBN 0-8032-7822-5.
Copyright © 2005 by Daniel R. Bronson.