With Nationals, Davey Johnson ready to win again
ANAHEIM, Calif. -- Last time Davey Johnson filled out a lineup, Jack McKeon hadn't even managed Florida for the first time, and Twitter hadn't even been invented.
Last time Davey Johnson managed, the Dodgers fired him (after the 2000 season), and the time before that, he resigned by fax in Baltimore after feuding with Orioles owner Peter Angelos. He has been fired in Cincinnati when Marge Schott disapproved of his live-in girlfriend (whom he later married), and in New York, where the Mets pegged him as too easygoing less than four years after he led them to a World Series title.
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Crazy stuff has happened with Johnson.
But talk about a match made in baseball heaven.
Crazy stuff has been happening with the Washington Nationals, too.
"Strange stuff," infielder Jerry Hairston Jr. said before Johnson conducted his first clubhouse meeting here Monday.
"The strangest," pinch-hitter Matt Stairs corrected. "I've been on teams where the manager resigned for personal reasons during the year, or was fired. But I've never had a manager resign that way.
"He might think it's right. Everyone else thinks it's wrong."
Echoes of Jim Riggleman's Last Stand are still howling.
But first impressions of Davey Johnson's Latest Stand rapidly are overshadowing them.
Row by row, the Nationals' new manager made his way through the team's charter flight from Chicago on Sunday, stopping for a conversation here, re-introducing himself there, slowly bringing the team out of its shock and him out of his semi-retirement as a consultant to Washington general manager Mike Rizzo.
"When I was putting my staff together two years ago, I wanted guys like him around me for a situation like this," Rizzo said Monday. "Guys with baseball acumen."
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| Johnson has managed six different ballclubs past 90 victories during his 14 years in the dugout. (US Presswire) |
Look at his smile, his renewed enthusiasm and his know-how, and talk about soft landings.
The Nationals, winners of 13 of their past 16 games, have upgraded themselves.
Johnson is a renowned master at handling pitching. He knows players. He realizes, as he said, that "sometimes players try too hard, sometimes they're not trying hard enough, everybody has a different button to push."
His baseball judgment is proven: In 14 years managing the Mets, Reds, Orioles and Dodgers, he's a career 259 games over .500 (1,148-889). It's the clashes with his bosses that have tripped him up.
The big question is, after a decade away and closing in on 70, will Johnson's reflexes be as quick? Will his energy level remain this high? When the Dodgers informed him during the 2000 season that they were not going to bring him back at season's end, there were days when he seemed to have checked out early.
"The only difficult thing in major-league life is, there is a lot of travel, a ton of travel," Johnson said. "After I retired, my wife was going to drag me all over the world. So I was going to travel.
"She had trips to Alaska and Paris planned. So I said, 'How about D.C.?' She was for it."
Besides, it isn't as if he was in full-blown retirement. During the past decade, he has suffered tragedy (daughter Andrea died of septic shock at 32 in 2005) and a health scare (a ruptured appendix nearly killed him in '05). He has managed in the world baseball championships (the Netherlands in '03), the Olympics (Team USA in '08, when one of his pitchers was Stephen Strasburg) and in a Florida collegiate wood bat league (each of the past two summers) near his home in Winter Park.
In some ways, this Nationals situation is comparable to Johnson's first managing gig, with the Mets in 1984. Like the current Nats organization (Stephen Strasburg, Jordan Zimmermann, Drew Storen, Ryan Zimmerman, Danny Espinosa), those Mets had some wildly talented youngsters (Dwight Gooden, Darryl Strawberry, Ron Darling, Wally Backman).
And where Johnson had a working knowledge of New York's farm system back then, likewise in Washington. He has been in uniform in each of Washington's past two spring camps as Rizzo's special assistant.
He thinks the Nationals can win now, talked of the talent on the club and spoke highly of the Lerner family, the club's owners.
"You can always tell a lot about an organization from the people in the front office," he said.
Like, in Cincinnati, when he was forced to endure Marge Schott's hound on the field during batting practice to the point where he sometimes wound up cleaning up the dog's messes so infield dirt would be the only thing caking his players' cleats, if you get the drift.
The Lerners have no dogs. At least, none that visit Nationals Park.
"It was not a tough decision for me to step into," Johnson said.
While there might be no Cal Ripkens or Roberto Alomars, Brady Anderson did give Johnson rave reviews when Hairston spoke with him Monday.
Johnson's style?
"When I came into Baltimore, it was kind of like a used car lot," Johnson said. "We didn't have a lot of speed. We homered a lot. It took me a long time to get that figured out. In Cincinnati, they had race horses. You manage that differently.
"This club is intriguing. There is a lot of speed. They're very good at stealing bases. Every guy in the lineup can go deep. I don't like to give up outs. We'll hit and run when I feel like it."
In some corners of the Nationals clubhouse, resentment remains toward Riggleman.
"The last thing I want to hear about is a manager complaining he's on a one-year deal," Stairs said. "I've been on a one-year deal for the past nine years.
"If you're not happy, you shouldn't have signed it to start with. He must have thought it was the right decision.
"Whatever."
From Johnson's perspective, well, as he shifts his travel plans, the Nationals have the chance to become the Paris of the NL East.
"I'm excited," Johnson said. "There's a lot of talent on this club. And the makeup is off the chart."
