"By George, We've Got It!" Not. Looking back at the '82 blockbuster that didn't make the Mets contenders

HE WAS AN ALL-STAR, a perennial MVP candidate and he was available.

Thirty-five years ago this month, the New York Mets made what was then the biggest -- and costliest -- acquisition in their history: left fielder George Foster, a man with such impressive power that at his introductory press conference he audaciously warned La Guardia Airport jet traffic not to fly too close to Shea Stadium when he was up.

George Foster, with Mets owners Fred Wilpon and Nelson Doubleday, plus general manager Frank Cashen,
from the 1982 Mets yearbook.

Hyperbole? Sure. But not by much. In 1977, Foster walloped 52 round-trippers for the Cincinnati Reds -- a feat not accomplished since the legendary Willie Mays in 1965 -- hit .320 and drove in 149 runs, winning the National League Most Valuable Player award a year after finishing second to teammate Joe Morgan.

He finished sixth in MVP balloting in 1978, 12th in '79 and fell from consideration completely during a pedestrian 1980 when he still hit 25 homers and drove in 93 runs, but batted just .273.

Portrait in blue and orange

No matter.

In strike shortened 1981, Foster slammed 22 home runs, drove in 90 and hit .295 in 108 games for the shortchanged Reds, who had the misfortune to compile baseball's best record in a year when that didn't mean a guaranteed post-season playoff spot. He finished third in MVP voting behind future Hall of Famers Mike Schmidt and Andre Dawson. The 33-year-old seemed sure join them some day in Cooperstown.

If the '81 season was a cruel one for the Reds, the off-season was worse. The always bountiful New York Yankees acquired two thirds of Cincinnati's starting outfield, center fielder Ken Griffey and right fielder Dave Collins, and Foster was due for a raise. Two years earlier, they'd seen spark plug Pete Rose leave for a multi-year, multi-million dollar deal with the Philadelphia Phillies.

After being the NL's dominant team during the 1970s -- accruing two championships, four pennants and six division titles -- the Reds were in the unaccustomed position of being desperate.

Karmic payback is a bitch.

Five years earlier the Mets had maneuvered themselves into a corner with superstar pitcher Tom Seaver, who sought a three-year, $600,000 contract the team wasn't willing to offer. At an impasse, they dealt him to the Reds on June 15, 1977 for reigning rookie-of-the-year pitcher Pat Zachry, infielder Doug Flynn and outfield prospects Steve Henderson and Dan Norman.

Now it was Cincinnati's turn to beg for a fair return, albeit with a catch. The Mets also had to make a deal with Foster. He would not come cheaply.

Briefly happy new manager George Bamberger
with g.m. Cashen, from the '82 yearbook

The Seaver trade, plus another made the same day off-loading moody slugger Dave Kingman, had heralded the start of a string of last place and near last finishes and the end of the franchise's original ownership.

Upon acquiring the team in 1980, Nelson Doubleday and Fred Wilpon promised fans they'd make it a winning one. In exchange for relief pitcher Jim Kern (acquired for Flynn in an earlier off-season trade), catcher Alex Trevino and ambidextrous pitcher Greg Harris, the downtrodden Mets acquired in Foster a star player still in his prime, something they'd needed and lacked since Seaver left.

Wilpon and Doubleday agreed to pay him $10 million over five years.

Comic strip author-philosopher Charles M. Schulz once observed there was no greater burden than a great potential.

Foster was a man so burdened.

He would be the backbone of a batting order that was to include Kingman, reacquired a year earlier from the Chicago Cubs for Seaver-trade acquisition Steve Henderson, plus cannon-armed right-fielder Ellis Valentine, also acquired in 1981 for Seaver deal piece Dan Norman, and reliever Jeff Reardon. They'd bolster a lineup that included speedsters Mookie Wilson and Wally Backman, plus sophomore third-baseman Hubie Brooks, who hit .307 as a rookie.

The enigmatic Ellis Valentine.
From the Mets 1982 Team Photo Album

Veteran Craig Swan would lead a starting rotation that included a former Cy Young award winner Randy Jones, and a future winner, Mike Scott. Young relievers Neil Allen and Jesse Orosco would anchor the bullpen.

Their manager would be Staten Island native George Bamberger, a former Milwaukee Brewers manager coaxed out of retirement by General Manager Frank Cashen after suffering a heart attack.

In time, the Mets would make Bamberger suffer too.

Swan won 11 games and Allen saved 19, but the pitching staff suffered from a lack of the one thing the Mets looked to have in abundance: offensive support

Valentine, who never regained his form after a 1980 beaning, batted a punchless .288 with just 23 extra-base hits including eight homers and 48 rbis. Brooks trailed off to .249 while Kingman performed the rare feat of leading the NL in home runs with 37, while batting just .204, worse than NL Cy Young winner Steve Carlton of the Phillies, who hit .218. Kong also drove in 99 runs.

Foster, in his first season as the Mets main man, batted a paltry .247, with just 13 home runs, 25 more extra-base hits and only 70 runs batted in, making him the team's second-best power hitter behind Kingman. Valentine's eight round-trippers placed him third. No other Mets batter had more than five homers, though Wilson set a team record with 58 stolen bases.

As a team they won 65 games and lost 97, finishing dead last in the NL East, eight games behind the fifth-place Cubs.

Dave Kingman, aka Kong, aka Sky King,
from the Mets 1982 Team Photo Album

In perhaps the highlight of a lost season, utility man Joel Youngblood started in centerfield for the Mets' August 4 day game in Chicago, got one hit in two at bats before being pulled, mid-game, because he'd been traded to the Montreal Expos. The erstwhile outfielder jetted to Philadelphia in time to join that night's game where he had a pinch single, becoming the first player in big league history to have hits for two different teams in two different cities on the same day.

Foster's power numbers improved in '83, as he stroked 28 homers and drove in 90 runs, though his average fell to .241. Talent around him improved too as rookie right fielder Darryl Strawberry arrived from the minors and Allen was traded to the St. Louis Cardinals for first baseman Keith Hernandez. Seaver was reacquired from Cincinnati after a career-worst 5-13 season.

That help arrived too late for the other George, Bamberger, who stayed just 46 games -- long enough to pencil in a line-up that included Foster, Kingman and Strawberry, but not Hernandez -- before quitting with the team at 16-30 and again mired in last place. He told the press he'd had enough.

Foster lasted until mid-1986, the year the Mets finally fulfilled the Wilpon/Doubleday promise and won it all, by which time he'd become an unhappy spare part in an offensive machine. Batting .227 with 13 homers and 38 rbis, he was released on August 7. Signed by the Chicago White Sox, he appeared in 15 more games before his career ended that year at age 37.

In 1984, his most complete Mets season, Foster batted .269 with 24 home runs and 86 runs batted in, helping the team to win 90 games and lose just 72 for new skipper Davey Johnson, but he was never the menacing all-star offensive presence he'd been while with the Reds.

-- Follow me on twitter @paperboyarchive

The Year Baseball Screwed the Cincinnati Reds

IF YOU GOOGLE the phrase "best record in baseball 1981," then click the "images" tab, the first picture you're likely see is this one:

http://cincinnati.reds.mlb.com/cin/images/hof/y2011/1981_630x200.jpg

Still housed on the Cincinnati Reds' website, it depicts a dour, sour grapes celebration, and like all pictures it tells a story. It goes like this:

Major League Baseball doesn't recognize regular season champions in the manner of, say, the National Hockey League. There's no official trophy and no flag. So this one is atypical. The best-record reward is, rather, home field advantage for the league playoffs.  Once having secured said best record, said team is ordinarily permitted to participate in said playoffs.

The 19-%$#@!-81 Reds Yearbook

And there was the rub for the '81 Reds.

Their prize for compiling baseball's best record 35 years ago was the knowledge of a job well done and and that disconsolate D.I.Y. pennant. They got to watch the playoffs -- all three rounds of them that year -- at home.

All of this because of the Baseball Strike of 1981, a labor/management dispute over compensation for teams losing players to other teams through free agency. What in retrospect seems little more than an asterisk in the history of MLB/MLBPA relations was casus belli that summer and -- spanning June 12 to July 31 -- it wiped out more a third of the MLB schedule.

The Reds played just 108 games that year, 54 less than in a standard season, and won 66, compiling a .611 winning percentage. The next-best NL record belonged to the St. Louis Cardinals, who played just 102 games and won 59, good for a .578 winning percentage. There would be no playoffs for them either.

When play resumed, the lords of baseball decreed the season would be split in two, giving even those teams near or at the bottom of the standings when play stopped a chance at the playoffs.

It was not a decision worthy of Solomon.

The four teams first place when the strike began were declared first-half "winners." Won/lost records were re-set to 0-0, and the races started anew. Second-half "winners" would play their first-half counterparts in big league baseball's first-ever division series.

George Foster, 1977 NL MVP, 1982 Reds Alumn

When play paused in June, the defending World Champion Philadelphia Phillies led the NL East, while the Los Angeles Dodgers perched atop the NL West. 

When the second half ended, they'd been supplanted by the Montreal Expos and Houston Astros. Guaranteed entry to the playoffs, the Phillies had slipped to third, 25-27, while the Dodgers, at 27-26, fell to fourth.

The consistent and unlucky Cardinals and Reds finished second in each half and -- in this pre-Wild Card era -- out of the dance. Uninvited. Montreal toppled Philly in the division series for their first and last NL East title. The Dodgers out dueled the Astros in the West, then extinguished the Expos, capturing the flag on foreign soil.

Fate proved more kind in the American League where the Milwaukee Brewers and Oakland A's, who had the best combined AL records, each managed a first-place finish too. The Brewers fell to the first-half winner Yankees in the east while the A's deposed the Royals out west. The defending AL champs had earned their berth by winning the second half despite of an overall losing record, 50-53.

Los Angeles beat New York in the series, four games to two.

The Cardinals rebounded from their strike-year disappointment to win the 1982 World Series, beating the then AL champ Brewers in seven en route to becoming an NL power. St. Louis would return to the series again in 1985 and 87.

But for Cincinnati's mighty Big Red Machine, this was the end. The team that had finished first six times in the 70s, won four pennants and two world championships, vanished from the post-season for an entire decade.

Ken Griffey Sr. left the Reds for New York after 1981.
In 1988, he came back.

That winter their starting outfield left for New York: George Foster via trade to the Mets, while Ken Griffey Sr. and Dave Collins were acquired by the Yankees.

In 1982, the Reds finished last for the first time since 1937. They finished last again in '83.

The strike year also marked a turning point for Reds ace Tom Seaver, who posted a 14-2 record. Though his .875 winning percentage was baseball's best, the NL Cy Young Award went to Dodgers rookie phenom Fernando Valenzuela, who finished 13-7.

It was Seaver's last year as an elite pitcher. After slumping to 5-13 in '82, he was dealt to the Mets for whom he'd once starred. After just a single season there, in which he went 9-14, the man known to New York fans as "The Franchise" was left unprotected from the free-agent compensation pool fought over in 1981 and was claimed by the Chicago White Sox, who'd lost a pitcher to the Blue Jays.

After 1985, the use of Major League players as free agent compensation was scrapped in favor of amateur draft picks, the system still in use today.

-- Follow me on Twitter @paperboyarchive

The Other Other Griffey

MIKE PIAZZA teared up during his National Baseball Hall of Fame induction speech yesterday.

The 1994 Jacksonville Suns

Ken Griffey Jr., who followed him to the podium, cried early and often during his address. In the audience, Ken Griffey Sr. wept openly while his elder son talked about a lifetime lived among big league ballplayers, first surrounded by his father's teammates on the mid-1970s Cincinnati Reds team known as the Big Red Machine and later with the New York Yankees and Atlanta Braves, then in his own right.

One person who the camera did not catch crying, even as his more famous brother acknowledged him, was Craig Griffey, a 42nd round draft pick of the Seattle Mariners who never made it to the big leagues.

Genetics can be capricious and cruel. For every Joe, Dom and Vince DiMaggio, or Ken and Bob Forsch or Phil and Joe Niekro, baseball history is replete with would-be rival siblings, only one of whom was kissed by that biochemical fate that makes somebody a star.

Admission: $3

Think Tommie Aaron, younger brother of Hank, or pitcher Mike Maddux and his younger and 355-game-winning-brother, Greg,  or Larry Yount, who appeared in just a single game for the Houston Astros while little brother Robin had a Hall of Fame career with the Milwaukee Brewers.

If the question about Ken Griffey Jr. was ever nature or nurture, clearly nature has the edge as Craig Griffey -- less than two years the younger -- likely had many of the same experiences and exposures.

Craig rose no higher than AAA, having a cup of coffee at the end of his career with the Mariners' affiliate in Tacoma, the Rainiers. Three games, three at bats, one hit -- a triple. For the bulk of his career he played at the AA level, batting .212 with five homers, 108 runs batted in and 67 stolen bases, falling short of the show.

The numbers of late August

By happenstance I saw him play for the Jacksonville Suns at the end of August 1994, as the Major League Baseball strike consumed the balance of the big league season. Also watching from the stands that day, then-Mariners manager Lou Piniella. On a team that included future Seattle pitcher Derek Lowe, catcher Chris Widger and other prospects, Griffey-the-younger was hitting an inconspicuous .224.

Still, he was a professional ballplayer, which is more than most of us can say. It's certainly more than I could say.

-- Follow me on Twitter @paperboyarchive

You Bettor, You Bettor, You Bet

IT WAS A perfectly reasonable idea.

Take Major League Baseball's first 30-game winner since 1934, team him with the reigning National League batting champion, and have them author a handbook on the fundamentals of the game.

The result, published in 1969, was "How to Play Better Baseball," by Denny McLain and Pete Rose, a pocket-sized 64-page treatise on the art of pitching, hitting and fielding like a big leaguer.

The cover story

The pairing was serendipitous and star-crossed.

McLain, 25, was a bona fide star. In 1968, he'd gone a wondrous 31-6 in helping the Detroit Tigers to a championship while winning the American League Cy Young and Most Valuable Player awards. For an encore, he went 24-9 in 1969, sharing top AL pitching honors with the Baltimore Orioles' Mike Cuellar.

It was the third and last time McLain would top 20 victories in a season. He'd tally just 22 more over the next three years before arm problems and off-the-field troubles wrecked his career. He was out of baseball by age 29.

Rose, the NL's top rookie in 1963,  immediately blossomed into a perennial .300 hitter and all-star. The Cincinnati Reds' spark plug collected 218 hits in 1969 -- his second highest single-season total -- while winning the second of three batting titles he'd earn over his 24-year career.

They were, arguably, baseball's best pitcher and hitter: two players who would never be better. But, trouble had already found McLain, later it would come for Rose. Their shared demon: gambling.

Innocence Falls

Get a good grip...

In 1969, however, they were idols of a sepia-toned era: a time of day games and flannel uniforms. Divisional play was in its infancy. The New York Yankees' fallen star, Jim Bouton, was writing -- but had not yet published -- his tell-all memoir "Ball Four," in which he'd reveal ballplayers were ordinary beer drinking, skirt-chasing men, not gods.

The Rose/McLain handbook and its cocksure earnestness could only have happened before Bouton's best seller stripped away the sport's wholesome veneer.

The pitcher's portion was divided into four parts: Sizing Up the Batters; That Extra Pitch; Playing a Ball Game and Exercise and Equipment.

"There will be spots -- when you have a fat lead and everybody on your side is hitting -- when you may not need to bear down,'' McLain said. "I have even heard tell of a pitcher's feeding a fat pitch to Mickey Mantle once, when the game was not in danger. But you can never get careless."

"To succeed at pitching, you need the four C's: Control, Condition, Concentration and CONFIDENCE," he said.

... follow through, and...

Pete Rose radiated confidence and courted controversy while playing more games, 3,562, and accumulating more hits, 4,256, than anyone ever.

He ran over the Cleveland Indians' Ray Fosse, separating the catcher's shoulder to win the 1970 All Star game and slugged the New York Mets' Bud Harrelson in the middle of a 1973 playoff game to avenge a comment the shortstop made to the press.

In 1988, Rose was suspended for 30 days by National League President A. Bartlett Giamatti for shoving umpire Dave Pallone.

Foreshadowing.

"Learning to hit and developing your skill as a hitter is not just a lark," he wrote, telling those who aspired to greatness that it came only with "dreary" effort. "Actually, you will get more fun out of it if you can do it well. Where is the fun of hitting if you can't hit?"

Later chapters addressed fielding at all four infield positions and the outfield, oddly prescient for a player who began as a second-baseman,  but would go on to play right field, left field, third base and finally first.

Ballgame Over

McLain was already in trouble by the winter of 1970 when Sports Illustrated published an expose titled "Baseball's Big Scandal: Denny McLain and the Mob." According to the magazine, the Tigers' ace was involved in bookmaking.

He would later file for bankruptcy and be suspended for half the season by then-Commissioner Bowie Kuhn, who'd absolve the McLain of being a bookie but found him the victim of "a confidence game," according to a SABR.org article. By year's end he'd be traded to the Washington Senators, lead the AL in losses, be dealt to the Oakland A's, then to the Atlanta Braves and finally released.

... be ready for what comes at you.

The last big league batter he'd face: co-author Rose.

Subsequent years would see the hurler indicted, tried, convicted, imprisoned, acquitted and later tried, convicted and imprisoned again, according to SABR.

Rose returned to the Reds as player-manager in 1984, following his five-year sojourn in Philadelphia and Montreal. He'd retire as player two years later.

In 1989, the winter after the Pallone incident, Major League Baseball opened an investigation into allegations he'd been betting on the game -- MLB's capital crime -- with Sports Illustrated breaking the news in March 1989.

Though he'd initially deny the allegations, that summer Rose accepted a permanent ban from the baseball from Giamatti, now elevated to commissioner. The former Yale University and NL president died of a heart attack eight days later.

In 1991, Rose would be declared permanently ineligible for the Baseball Hall of Fame, record number of hits notwithstanding.

-- Follow me on Twitter @paperboyarchive