EVERY time I hear the name Tom Robson, an old Joni Mitchell tune plays in my head. She is belting: “They paved paradise and put up a parking lot.”
None of us really knew what the Mets had until the hitting coach Bobby Valentine always has said knows more about hitting than anyone on the planet was gone from the major league club.
The Mets made the World Series with Robson as the hitting instructor last season. And then they demoted him for the second time in less than two years. His first demotion came on that infamous Sunday, bloody Sunday at Yankee Stadium, when Steve Phillips revamped the coaching staff on June 6, 1999 and watched the Mets storm all the way back from a losing record into the playoffs.
Robson was replaced by Mickey Brantley for the remainder of the 1999 season and then was brought back for the 2000 season.
Robson was replaced by Dave Engle before this season and now serves the Mets as a special-assignment scout and a roving hitting instructor.
Nearly everyone in the Mets’ lineup is having a worse season at the plate. Might there be a connection there?
“No, I don’t think so,” Phillips said. “I think it’s awfully hard to say that. That [Edgardo] Alfonzo’s hitting 100 points less and [Robin Ventura’s] hitting what Robin’s hitting, [Todd] Zeile, Benny [Agbayani], [Jay] Payton, I think that’s more of a contagious disease than it is necessarily a coaching-change problem.”
Instructors are nothing if not medicine men for baseball diseases.
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Rick Ankiel’s Steve Blass Disease is in remission and he is dominating hitters in the rookie Appalachian League. Ankiel also is dominating pitchers with his bat.
In his first 82 innings, Ankiel walked 15, struck out 148 and allowed 34 hits. He was 5-2 with a 0.99 ERA and had 10 home runs and 33 RBIs in 90 at-bats. He often is the team’s designated hitter.
If Ankiel’s SBD resurfaces, the Cardinals might want to consider giving him another way to get back to the major leagues on a permanent basis. As a pitcher, he needed to cut down on walks. As a hitter, Ankiel, 22, needs to cut down on strikeouts (24 in 90 at-bats).
If he ever made the conversion, he wouldn’t be the most famous lefty in Cardinals history to do so.
After turning down a basketball scholarship to Pitt, Stan Musial signed with the Cardinals as a pitcher. He had a 33-13 record in the minor leagues. After his “spikes gave way” Musial fell on his left shoulder and injured it. His velocity never returned.
Musial’s simple hitting philosophy served him well: “You wait for a strike, then you knock the [bleep] out of it.”
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Valentine is in favor of using a specially designed baseball that doesn’t carry as well for all games played at Coors Field. Valentine also advocates moving the fences in.
Both moves would help normalize Coors and both would be insufficient in keeping it from still qualifying as a pitcher’s nightmare. Pitchers still would overexert themselves trying to make their breaking balls snap in the thin air. They still would be 10 times as sore the next day and would still be beaten down by the place the way even tough guy Mike Hampton has been.
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Little League World Series participants are creating memories they will cherish for the rest of their lives. Nobody knows that better than Yankees minor league pitching maharishi Billy Connors, who pitched for Schenectady in the Little League World Series two years in a row. His team finished second in 1953, first the next year.
“It was a great feeling being a World Champion,’ Connors said. We were in parades all over the state of New York. The Yankees honored us and the Giants honored us. We were in the stands for Willie Mays’ great Vic Wertz catch.”
Connors keeps his Little League World Series uniform and bat in a glass enclosed case at his house, not far from the pictures of his old flame Seka, the former adult film star. Connors would be the first to agree it is better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all.
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A TALE OF TWO SEASON
2000/2001 – 2000/2001 – 2000/2001
PLAYER BA OBP SLG
Benny Agbayani: .289 / .278 – .391 / .362 – .480 / .388
Edgardo Alfonzo: .324 / .232 – .425 / .312 – .542 /.402
Jay Payton: .291 / .232 – .331 / .271 – .447 / .328
Mike Piazza: .324 / .294 – .398 / .377 – .614 / .570
Robin Ventura: .232 / .229 – .338 / .357 – .439 / .410
Todd Zeile: .268 / .259 – .356 / .349 – .467 / .356
TOTAL DECLINE 209 pts. – 219 pts. – 435 pts.