One thing to keep in mind about Buck Showalter is that he knew, from the start, the value of winning baseball games. All of them. You know how your father spent endless lectures trying to instill in you the value of a dollar? If you managed in the Yankees farm system in the 1980s, George Steinbrenner was dad. He was paying attention to every nickel.
“You knew the job description,” Showalter said Tuesday at his Mets introductory press conference. “You had to develop players and win baseball games. Not necessarily in that order.”
Unlike now where the prime job of a minor-league manager is to keep players healthy and churn them up the ladder, Steinbrenner’s skippers, all of them, had a higher authority to answer to. So it was that at age 29 Showalter led the short-season Class A Oneonta Yankees to a 55-23 record (they’d been 29-45 the year before) and a year later to a 59-18 mark.
So it was that after moving to full-season Fort Lauderdale in ’87, those Yankees went 85-53 and won the Florida State League title.
When you cut your teeth under Steinbrenner’s watchful and exacting eye, you understood there was really no alternative.
“Sometimes,” Showalter said, “learning to win is part of player development.”
In those days as in these days, the goal of every Yankees season was unchanged: win championships, or answer for the failure to do so. So yes: Showalter is aware as anyone else that there is one glaring omission on his résumé as a major-league manager, which includes four franc hises revived from the dead (or raised from the dust) and three Manager of the Year awards.
“You want to be the last team standing,” Showalter said. “And not just once.”
That is the elephant in Showalter’s professional room, and he didn’t run Tuesday from how badly he wants to rectify that cavity in his career. The Yankees won a title a year after he was exiled to Phoenix, and the Diamondbacks won a year after he was fired in the desert, and the Rangers came as close as you can possibly come to winning a World Series without actually winning one after Ron Washington replaced him in Arlington.
It has earned him a reputation — fairly or not — as being a guy who can push you to the brink of the mountain but never to the summit. If there was a credible argument against his candidacy with the Mets, that was the one.
And there is little doubt this will be his final chance to get there. Showalter will turn 66 next May, and even in a sport that employs successful seniors such as Dusty Baker (72) and Tony La Russa (77), that’s a little long in the tooth. The Mets are his fifth team; only Dick Williams, Rogers Hornsby and Jimmy Dykes (all six) and John McNamara (seven) ever managed more, none of them after age 64.
The Mets have waited 35 years (and counting) for their third championship. Buck has waited almost twice as long for his first. Both are overdue. Both are eager.
“It’s not something that’s going to define my life,” Showalter said, “but it is something that wakes me up every day now.”
His best chance was never really a chance at all, the 1994 Yankees who probably would’ve had to tussle with that strike year’s other what-if darlings from Montreal had there been a World Series. His 1999 Diamondbacks won 100 games in their second year of existence, but ran into a Mets team fueled on pixie dust in the playoffs. And after finally winning a playoff series with the 2014 Orioles, his team collided with another club touched by destiny in the upstart Royals.
“It’s hard to do,” he said. “Every year you have the best 30 teams baseball has to offer.”
He has resources now, of a level that even the ‘90s-era Yankees didn’t have. He has a batch of intriguing players that ought to win more than they have the past few years, who crave proper leadership, and now he has Max Scherzer every five days, too. And he has an owner whose riches allow the Mets — in Showalter’s words — to “eliminate excuses.”
If it’s ever going to happen for Showalter, it’ll be with these Mets.
And if it’s ever going to happen for the Mets before their most recent champions celebrate their golden anniversary, it’ll be with Showalter at the helm.
It ought to be a brilliant marriage. Now all it needs is a happily-ever-after.