The Class of ‘89: the Exit of Schmidt

That Mike Schmidt chose retirement before someone in higher authority suggested another career warrants no award. There will be no asterisk placed alongside his name in “The Baseball Encyclopedia,” no special commendation on his eventual plaque in the Hall of Fame. Perhaps the way he chose to leave the game would have received less attention, at least in New York, if it hadn’t occurred on the same day in which the Yankees asked Tommy John to conduct his business elsewhere.

Nor is this an indictment of John, who declined the offer of Dallas Green and club management to announce his farewell as an active player on Memorial Day at Yankee Stadium. After all, so many baseball people have been wrong so often concerning John’s ability to pitch in the major leagues that it’s understandable if he is among the last to be convinced the end is at hand. Still, despite his remarkable history and unquenchable spirit, it bears noting that John’s overall record since 1980 is 74-80 with an earned run average of 4.13. At 46, the man’s age wasn’t the only number held against him.

But John has decided to keep throwing and hope that another team will be interested in his services before the summer runs its course. It’s his life and he certainly has the right to select his personal conditions of surrender. Whether the player is diminished by holding on so long is in the eye of the beholder.

As for Schmidt, he added to his stature by accepting the inevitable. He did not orchestrate a heroic conclusion in the manner of Ted Williams homering in his final at-bat. He did not leave with a championship, as did Joe DiMaggio. But he departed with his dignity intact. When DiMaggio turned down a new contract from the Yankees after the 1951 season, he told a friend, “I don’t want (the fans) to remember me struggling.” Schmidt spoke of failing to live up to his own exacting standards.

More than anything, the announcement on Monday demonstrated Schmidt’s strong sense of self. While others may recall his home runs or outstanding plays at third base, I will choose to remember his perspective.

He was a rookie experiencing his share of tribulation when I made his acquaintance in 1973. The circumstances were extraordinary. Eight days earlier, in Philadelphia, he had crashed a grand slam against the Mets’ Harry Parker to stake the Phillies to a 6-1 victory.

On June 27, at Shea Stadium, the scenario unfolded again. In fact, the Mets contributed to it. Yogi Berra, the manager, ordered an intentional walk to Tommy Hutton, thereby loading the bases for Schmidt a second time. The pitcher was Phil Hennigan, in relief of Parker.

There was no way for lightning to strike twice, at least not according to Berra. “You’d think the law of averages would catch up,” he said.

Not that night. Schmidt, whose batting average was lingering below .200, a man whose strikeout ratio was alarming, responded with another grand slam in a 7-1 triumph. He thus tied a National League record of two slams in a month. That he victimized the same team was an unprecedented feat.

I expected the man to feel slighted, perhaps insulted, by Berra’s strategy. He was neither. “I don’t care who’s up there, who’s on deck,” he said. “You’ve got to set up the double play. That’s percentage baseball.”

Then he offered a refreshing confession of his own inadequacy. “The book on me,” Schmidt said with a smile, “is that I can’t hit breaking balls with an ironing board.”

And so he couldn’t that first season. He finished the year with a .196 batting average and 136 strikeouts. But he also managed 18 home runs, including those two grand slams that delayed the Mets’ division-clinching until the day after the end of the regular season.

He overcame his deficiencies as a hitter soon enough. In his second season, he led the National League in homers with 36, drove in 116 runs and earned his first appearance in the All-Star Game. Schmidt had taken his first steps toward Cooperstown.

It was no coincidence that the greatest season of his life and the season of the Phillies’ lone world championship were one and the same. In the first year of this decade, he won the first of three Most Valuable Player Awards with an output of 48 homers and 121 RBI. He topped that performance by hitting .381 with two homers and seven RBI in the World Series victory over Kansas City.

Once again, however, it was something he said rather than what he did that remains with me. That particular Series ended on a Tuesday night at Veterans Stadium in an atmosphere I found disturbing. Police dogs lined the field from the dug-outs to the foul poles as the Royals batted in the ninth. Cops on horseback filled the warning track as soon as Tug McGraw struck out an anxious Willie Wilson. Although the calendar said 1980, it felt more like 1984 in Frank Rizzo’s Philadelphia.

I wondered what the winning players thought of the show of force. The ’80 Phillies were a fractious team. They bridled at criticism from the Manager, Dallas Green, the media and the fans. Their star pitcher, Steve Carlton, had stopped interacting with the media a long time ago, and on this auspicious occasion, he retreated to the sanctity of the trainer’s room. In relative privacy, he opened a magnum of his own premier champagne and invited selected members of the team to partake with him. Very strange.

Some of the Phillies joked about the police presence in the stadium. Others couldn’t be bothered with addressing the question, preferring to spray each other as required by the rules of baseball celebrations. Only Schmidt offered a serious reply.

It hadn’t even occurred to me that he grew up in Ohio, that he attended Ohio University at the height of the Vietnam protest. It must have had an impact. Looking around at the assembled authority figures that night, Schmidt said, “I felt like I was at Kent State, 1970.”

I looked up the quote Wednesday just to double-check its accuracy. Sure enough, there it was on a page of a notebook that had been dampened by champagne. Schmidt gained an additional fan that night, one who was not surprised by the grace with which the man exited.