End of an Era

Unfortunate news from Cincinnati, as Jonah Tong had to be recalled from Cooperstown and will have go through the formality of an actual career before his Hall of Fame induction.

Tong surrendered three homers (including the first big-league shot for fellow rookie Sal Stewart) and walked four, though oddly, he gave up no other variety of hit. He also finished impressively, navigating the fifth and the sixth without further harm and ending his night by fanning Gavin Lux. You find out more about young pitchers when they struggle than when they put it in cruise control with a big lead; I’ll be interested to see what lessons Tong brings to the mound his next time out.

This time, there was no barrage of friendly runs to get Tong over the rough spots: The Mets looked strangely out of sync all game, leaving 11 runners on base and grinding their offensive gears every time they had a chance to get back in the game. Throw in some less than stellar relief pitching from Ryne Stanek, who got mauled, and you had a 6-3 verdict that didn’t feel that close.

(Before we move on, a salute to the Reds for their stubborn belief that the black drop shadow will come back into vogue any day now. The Reds’ C is iconic but everything else is a big mess: I don’t know whether Friday night’s black City Connects were worse than Saturday night’s big doofy tailed drop shadow’ed white Reds script, but I do know this franchise — the eldest in the National League, for Pete’s sake — deserves to look a lot better.)

The Reds seemed to be on Tong’s fastball — all three homers came off of it — to the point that I wonder if he was tipping the pitch. That got me musing that today there are no surprises about a new pitcher unless a team is unprepared: Scouting reports have never been more detailed, with endless video to scrutinize, and every team has an army of in-house boffins tasked with finding the slightest scrap of advantageous information. If Tong had pitched in, say, Ron Darling‘s generation, he would have been able to make a full trip through the league before hitters could adjust and force him to adjust in turn.

That thought got me, in turn, mourning anew the death of Davey Johnson. You should re-read Greg’s words, to which I’ll add that Johnson was the perfect man for his moment, as smart and cocky and blunt as the Mets team he shaped and reflected, helmed and survived. He’s one of the stars of Nick Davis’ sublime Once Upon a Time in Queens, recalling the Mets’ tribulations and triumphs with an architect’s satisfaction and the glee of a man beyond the reach of further baseball drama or front-office recriminations. My favorite moment of many? His outlaw’s grin at recalling telling his players that they weren’t going to have to pay for the damage to that infamous plane back from Houston because “it had to be your wives.”

Whether it’s scouting reports of pitchers or managers’ fortunes, each baseball era is its own entity, and smudging the lines between them tends to lead to a lot of boring “back in my day” harrumphing. But I can never stop myself from imagining Johnson’s legacy if there’d been wild cards during his Queens tenure.

There were only two divisions back then, of course, and if you didn’t win one of them you went home — as the ’84 Mets did despite winning 90, the ’85 Mets did despite winning 98, the ’87 Mets did despite winning 92, the ’89 Mets did despite winning 87, and the ’90 Johnson-Harrelson Mets did despite winning 91.

(Ninety-eight wins! Only four Mets teams have ever won more — and two of them were managed by Davey Johnson.)

Give Johnson a wild card, and he has the Mets in the playoffs for all five years. Which maybe means another title or two, and probably means there’s no way he’s sent packing in May of 1990, which means … well, we’ll never know how those dominoes would have fallen. Except here’s one I like to think about: David Wright still gets a 2025 summer ceremony at Citi Field, with his number unveiled up in the rafters, except the number revealed isn’t 5, because every Mets fan knows that No. 5 belongs to Davey Johnson.