Dallas Green [1], who managed the Mets through a lean period of fizzled prospects and bad uniforms, died yesterday at 82.
It’s funny paying tribute to someone whose baseball resume lists more accomplishments for other franchises. Green was most definitely “ours,” a Mets pitcher in the summer of 1966 (albeit for five undistinguished innings) and then a manager for nearly four seasons from May 1993 through August 1996. Yet he’ll be primarily remembered for his work on the field for the Phillies and off the field for the Cubs.
[2]Green managed 512 games for the Mets, which is more than I would have guessed without a peek at the stats. That’s more than he managed for the Phils and Yankees combined. But he won a World Series title in Philadelphia — the first for that perennially bedraggled franchise — using his booming voice, outsized personality and well-practiced whip hand to drive a team with a reputation for summer lassitude past the Astros and then the Royals. The Phillies variously feared, resented and detested him, but they won … with old friend Tug McGraw [3] on the mound for the final out. And so they became immortal together.
The joy wasn’t to last. Green was gone after 1981 and moved on to the Cubs, where he acquired Ryne Sandberg [4] from his old team, built the club that would hold off the Mets in ’84, and drafted Greg Maddux [5], Mark Grace [6] and Rafael Palmeiro [7]. After he tired of fighting newspaper executives in Chicago he was hired by George Steinbrenner. That proved a match made somewhere south of Heaven, and Green wound up summoned to the other side of New York to clean up the mess left by Jeff Torborg [8].
If I close my eyes, I can summon up a few things from Dallas’s tenure in Queens. There was that voice, of course — so big that the parabolic mikes behind home plate at Shea could pick up exactly what he was saying to umpires, often to the consternation of squeamish TV viewers. Which wasn’t the fault of the guys in the truck — when Dallas Green was pissed in Queens you could lean out your window in Brooklyn and hear a distant rumble. And at full boil he was a one-man Krakatoa, a challenge to even the most distant of sound barriers.
There was also his habit of staring out of the dugout in open-mouthed astonishment when Mets who should still have been in Tidewater did something particularly stupid on the field, as happened depressingly often during that era. No matter how disgusted I was with those hapless Mets, the sight of hulking, voluble Dallas Green rendered speechless by them would reduce me to helpless laughter. He’d gape at the proceedings until he reluctantly accepted that what had just happened was real, then mount the dugout steps trailed by a cloud of can’t-believe-this-shitness and do … well, most of the time it wasn’t clear what if anything could be done, but by the time Dallas reached the mound or home plate he’d think of something.
By the end of his Mets tenure it was pretty clear that Dallas was a man from another era. He took heat for a domestic-violence crack that would have had a clubhouse full of (all male) reporters laughing in 1973 but wasn’t so funny in 1993. He chafed at having to teach young Mets things they should have learned before earning a big-league diploma. He scowled at suggestions that he keep such thoughts to himself. After leaving the Mets he never managed again, returning to the Phillies as an adviser.
In 2011, his 9-year-old granddaughter was killed in Arizona by the gunman who targeted Gabby Giffords. Christina-Taylor Green had been born on 9/11 and loved baseball; her grandfather liked to imagine her growing up to become the first woman to play in the big leagues. Green was heartbroken and sought solace in baseball, but he also spoke out about gun control, deftly balancing his love of hunting and support for the Second Amendment with his belief that our gun laws had careened out of balance. But that was no surprise; Green rarely left an opinion unstated, whatever tumult that opinion might cause. His managerial tenure wasn’t much to remember, but the man sure was.
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As a mournful coda to the above, this morning I went through the New York papers looking for the best columns about Green — and found next to nothing.
No memories of one of the four men to manage both the Mets and Yankees? Really? Of the guy who had to deal with an Augean stables of bleach throwers and explosive hurlers? Really?
Really. Even a couple of years ago, Dallas Green’s death would have meant a column in every paper at the very least. But it isn’t a couple of years ago in the newspaper business, which has been stripped of reporting muscle and institutional memory — and there’s no end in sight to the downsizing. Nor are digital outlets immune — the powers that be at ESPN New York have opted to replace Adam Rubin with indifference.
It’s enough to make this former reporter feel like a man from another era himself.