Mets confirm entire ’09 season was fault of Tony Bernazard

Hyperbolic headline aside, John Harper writes in the NY Daily News today that The Mets dip in power last year was not down to the hitters struggling in the pitcher-friendly confines of their new ballpark – it was all the fault of evil shirtless puppeteer and scourge of Binghamton, Tony Bernazard.

Amusing baseball story aficionados will recall easily Bernazard’s firing last year for challenging players on the Binghamton Mets to a fight after removing his shirt, Sleuth Omar’s subsequent ‘investigation’, and the whole nasty shitstorm that followed when Minaya accused a journalist of “lobby for player development position”.

Harper’s story is, basically, that Bernazard became a man obsessed. Men obsessed can be driven to crazy things, we know this, literature is piled deep with examples. Who can forget Jay Gatsby’s obsession with Daisy Buchanan? The characters of Gravity’s Rainbow‘s obsession with the bomb? (OK, I’ll stop now). Turns out Bernazard’s obsession was a little more leftfield (zing!) than the literary creations of Fitzgerald and Pynchon, it was hitting the ball to the opposite field.

“Sources say Bernazard, who oversaw minor-league development, was so insistent on players hitting the ball to the opposite field that minor leaguers were scolded for pulling the ball, sometimes even when they got a hit.”

If Harper’s “sources” are to be believed, Bernazard put the entire impressionable Mets front office and coaching staff under his bizarre spell and his Luddite approach to hitting was soon adopted as an organisation-wide philosophy. The Mets entered Spring Training in 2009 conducting drills whereby hitters were required to hit 80 straight curveballs the other way, the only problem being that major league pitchers don’t often throw you 80 straight curves (I know for a fact that Dontrelle Willis can mix in a low-90s heater off the plate, for example). Then lots of Mets got injured and they had to play guys who weren’t very adept at pulling the ball, hitting the ball straight or doing much involving putting bat on ball (although Jerry Manuel did seem keen to use their bunting abilities plenty of times), never mind hitting it to the opposite field and the whole season was abandoned as a bad joke sometime after the All-Star break. Damn you, Bernazard!

In all seriousness, though, when I read this article my initial reaction was ‘what a load of shit’. Typical Mets, I thought, blaming last season’s shambolic endeavours on a man who already is a villain in the New York media, and is no longer in camp to defend himself. The whole thing stank of fairly poor spring training propaganda – the bad guy’s gone now, we’re gonna start hitting home runs this year and not follow his stinking hitting philosophy.

So sure was I that I was right, it didn’t even occur to me to check the numbers and see if the Mets really were hitting the ball the other way a lot last year. Thankfully, the internet is a wonderful place and amongst it’s many pages resides The Hardball Times and John Walsh. Walsh did the numbers work and found the Mets sat 26th out of 30 major league teams in pulling the ball. He then looked at the five players who hit 150 or more balls in play in ’08 and ’09 (Tatis, Castillo, Beltran, Church and Wright) and discovered:

4 out of 5 saw a significant decrease in the fraction of balls pulled. And the other guy (Castillo) rarely pulls the ball anyway. So, maybe the Mets really were drinking Bernazard’s Kool Aid. Weird.

Weird is one way of looking at it, certainly. One would be almost tempted to label it downright shambolic that the Mets accepted the word of Tony Bernazard as gospel and set about his patently ridiculous methods of hitting and received the all-too-predictable results. The more I think about this the more crazy it is – it may well be Bernazard’s flawed approach to hitting that hampered the Mets last year and we can all rejoice once more that he’s gone, but the same idiots who not only listened to Bernazard but set about implementing his madcap ideas are still there today. I almost want to remove my shirt and fight some teenagers in exasperation.

Tags: New York Mets, Omar Minaya, Painful attempt at 'high-brow' literary references, Tony Bernazard