What would wind you up more? Buck Showalter as manager of the Toronto Blue Jays ... or Buck Showalter as general manager of the Blue Jays?
Showalter, bête noire to a generation of Blue Jays fans, is among a group of candidates given second interviews this week for the New York Mets manager job – and is in fact considered the frontrunner, with a follow-up scheduled for Friday, per Jon Heyman. So I asked Paul Godfrey, former Blue Jays president and chief executive officer, to tell me about the time Showalter interviewed for the Blue Jays general manager's job in 2001.
Then as now, Showalter was a TV analyst in between jobs after being fired by the Arizona Diamondbacks following three years as manager. The Blue Jays had fired Gord Ash, and although the job would eventually go to J.P. Ricciardi, Godfrey and long-time advisor Herb Solway remember fondly the five hours of their time that were taken up by Showalter.
“He was so knowledgeable about every team in baseball, and the interview went on for four, five hours,” Godfrey said this week. “But as the interview went on, I jumped in and said: ‘Buck, wait a minute. Are you interviewing for the general manager's job or the manager's job? Because we’re looking for a G.M. ... and you sure sound like you want to manage. If we offered you the G.M.’s job, would it make you happy?’ He thought about it and said: ‘You’re right. I’d be taking the second-best job.’
“There was no doubt in our mind that his heart was in managing. But it was four or five hours of real entertainment.”
Showalter went on to manage the Texas Rangers from 2003-06, and in 2010 he took over the Baltimore Orioles, where he became one of the faces of a rivalry with the ascendant Blue Jays – picking fights with Blue Jays players while at the same time perfecting an oddly passive-aggressive personae both in word and deed whenever the teams met. Showalter was fired after the 2018 season, and if he gets the Mets job he will hook up with a team that couldn’t get out of its way in 2021, owned by a guy (Steve Cohen) who is a couple of tweets away from going from mercurial to maniacal.
It’s a perfect match. Showalter is no stranger to New York, managing the Yankees from 1992-95. He has newly signed Max Scherzer lobbying for him (make no mistake: Scherzer will run that clubhouse), and he knows about managing upward and communicating. He’ll bring maturity and a steady hand.
What he doesn’t bring is a track record of post-season success. Or a sense of timing. Showalter left the Yankees the year before they won the first of four World Series titles in five years under Joe Torre – he resigned when owner George Steinbrenner demanded he fire hitting coach Rick Down. That Yankees run of success ended in 2001 when Bob Brenly’s Arizona Diamondbacks beat them ... a year after Showalter had been fired as D-backs manager.
Jays fans look back with glee on Showalter’s decision to call on Ubaldo Jimenez and leave Zach Britton in the bullpen in the American League wild-card loss at the Rogers Centre in 2016, but that wasn’t the first time Showalter’s playoff decision-making raised eyebrows. In 1995, he called on veteran starter Jack McDowell in relief in Game 5 of the American League Division Series against the Seattle Mariners, leaving John Wetteland – who’d had 31 saves but been roasted by the Mariners for eight hits and seven earned runs in 4 1/3 innings – in the bullpen. McDowell gave up a walk-off double to Edgar Martinez as the Mariners eliminated the Yankees.
You say McDowell; I say Ubaldo.
In fact, until Showalter’s Orioles beat the Detroit Tigers to advance to the 2014 AL Championship Series, he had never won a playoff series. In his first 15 years as a big league manager, he’d gone 0-for-3 in the ALDS, his only win coming in the 2012 wild-card game.
Showalter, who is 9-14 (.391) in the post-season, rankled slightly when he was congratulated in his post-game news conference.
“I got one in Albany,” said Showalter, referring to the Eastern League title he won in 1989 with the Double-A Albany-Colonie Yankees.
I know you want to panic, but trust me: It’s no surprise that Major League owners and the Major League Baseball Players Association are waiting until the new year to talk about core economic issues, focussing instead on boring stuff at the margins that nonetheless needs to get done and on which there might be some agreement.
The only thing I’m even remotely concerned about coming out of the labour talks that will eventually end this lockout is the possibility that, as a result of the sausage making that will go into this, we find out that Bo Bichette and Vladimir Guerrero Jr., will hit free agency a year earlier.
Once ownership stopped talking about a salary cap, salary arbitration and free agency became no-go zones for the Major League Baseball Players Association. Under the last collective bargaining agreement, Guerrero was eligible for free agency after 2025 and Bichette after 2026. There is a sense that arbitration will certainly look different in the new deal and, by extension, so, too will free agency.
But it’s the journey that could be tough. Players will be playing various degrees of attention to a lot of stuff in these talks. But as former player agent Barry Axelrod told Kevin Barker and me on our podcast:
“If you start minimizing arbitration and free-agent rights, players feel that directly. That’s when they stand up and fight,” said Axelrod, who represented Craig Biggio and Jeff Bagwell, among other players.
“Historically, there’s only been once that free agency or arbitration rights have been limited in any way. In (1985), arbitration went from two to three years, and that was a war. Agents were not happy.”
Axelrod is referring to negotiations during the 1985 CBA, which saw the season interrupted by a two-day strike. As part of the settlement, players agreed to move salary arbitration eligibility from two years to three years. Owners had also asked for a cap on salary awards to 100 per cent over the previous year's salary, but dropped that request in return for the added year. Twelve years later, the sides agreed to the "Super Two" concept that allowed the top 17 per cent of players with between two and three years service time to qualify for arbitration.
Again, only the owners know what their end-game is here. I asked one industry source involved in talks this year whether baseball may move toward restricted and unrestricted free agency. He was quick to shoot that down. He was less inclined to wave off some form of hybrid system where a player's age and service time is used to determine free-agent eligibility.
But its salary arbitration would seem to be the toughest nut to crack, even though both sides seem in tacit agreement on the concept of getting more money into the hands of younger players sooner. As the excellent Travis Sawchik details in this article the MLB minimum salary in 2021 was $570,500, the lowest of the four major North American sports, and that might be a good starting point when the core issues get to the table, depending on the ability of players union chief Tony Clark to get players at the top end of the salary scale to care about it.
It was 2011, the year that Pat Gillick and Roberto Alomar went into the Baseball Hall of Fame – a day of days back then for Toronto Blue Jays fans – but it was a conversation with the wonderful Roland Hemond that always stuck with me. Hemond was also being feted that weekend, as the second recipient of the Buck O’Neill Lifetime Achievement Award, given every three years to an individual whose character and integrity had a significant impact on broadening the games appeal.
We were discussing Alomar and Hemond, small, bespectacled, then 81 and crackling smart, laughed. He told me a story about sitting around in 2009 with members of the Hall's Veterans Committee, when it was discussing the candidacy of Joe Gordon, a second baseman on the New York Yankees teams of the late 1930s and mid-1940s. As a young boy and teenager, Hemond had seen Gordon play. Once he started working full-time in the game, he was around contemporaries of Gordon.
“I told the committee: you’ve all seen Robbie (Alomar) play,” said Hemond. “I told them, well, Joe Gordon was as athletic as Robbie. In fact, he was a gymnast in college.”
Hemond, who passed away Sunday at the age of 92, was born in Rhode Island to French-Canadian parents – his mother was from Montreal – and spoke fluent French. In fact, during the 1984 winter meetings when he was general manager of the Chicago White Sox, Hemond convinced Montreal Expos GM John McHale to allow him to announce in French the trade of Vance Law and Bert Roberge to the Expos in return for Bob James and Bryan Little.
Hemond was a two-time executive of the year, serving a 15-year stint as GM of the White Sox and an eight-year stint as GM of the Baltimore Orioles. He worked for three other organizations, stepping down in 2017 from his last job as an advisor with the Arizona Diamondbacks, and was a mentor to many, possessed with immense intellectual curiosity, an oversized heart and an openness to ideas and people.
I’ve been lucky enough over the years to talk to people with profound institutional knowledge of the game. But two conversations have stood out: Having Vin Scully, the long-time voice of the Los Angeles Dodgers, walk me through the lineage of Dodgers catchers he’d seen personally for an article I was doing on Russell Martin, and that discussion with Hemond on that summer day in Cooperstown. As beloved as he was respected, we surely won’t see his like again.
THE CLOSER: We know that during the lockout Major League Baseball is prohibiting club executives from communicating with players who are on 40-man rosters, which makes me wonder what holiday dinner will be like in the Bichette household with Jays shortstop Bo and Jays special advisor Dante. “You need to use your lower half a little more passing the potatoes, son.” Or “get the head out on that drumstick.” Or: “Let’s play some video games: Oh, look, there’s all your two-strike swings broken down. How’d that get there?” I kid, I kid ...
Jeff Blair hosts Blair & Barker with former MLBer Kevin Barker on Sportsnet 590/The Fan. New episodes of the Blair & Barker podcast drop every Thursday during the off-season wherever you get your favorite podcasts.
