Gregg Jefferies complicated Mets’ failure looks different now

All these years later, Gregg Jefferies’ tormentors are apologetic. Time not only heals wounds but changes acceptable traits. How silly it all seems now to care about how someone handled his bats or trained. “He was revolutionary in what he did,” Ron Darling says now, with Jefferies three decades removed from a Mets tenure that …

All these years later, Gregg Jefferies’ tormentors are apologetic. Time not only heals wounds but changes acceptable traits. How silly it all seems now to care about how someone handled his bats or trained.

“He was revolutionary in what he did,” Ron Darling says now, with Jefferies three decades removed from a Mets tenure that began with such promise and devolved into poison. “The archaic, Neanderthal part of baseball was not ready to accept that. A lot of animosity from that Mets team came from players not willing to grow and change. … He was not allowed to thrive in the way he should have. In retrospect it is a black mark on the team.”

When what is said these days by Darling, Keith Hernandez, David Cone and Roger McDowell is relayed to Jefferies, 52 now and living in Las Vegas, he returns to his prevailing theme from a conversation that climbs beyond an hour and is more a cleansing of the past than a remembrance.

“I really like those guys,” Jefferies said. “I know it sounds weird. I will listen to Keith and Ron [on TV broadcasts]. I look at them as, they were my teammates. I like them. I hope that message gets across. I felt I did more wrong than them. There is no ill will. I hope they know it. If you could, please tell them that.”

If the term did not exist, then Jefferies could pioneer the concept of “wrong place, wrong time.”

Wrong place? In 1988 where would be the worst location to send a 19-year-old who was lacking in self-awareness, who was bathed in self-interest, who was insular yet familial and a bit aw-shucks and was hailed as the next great player at a time when the sport did not love the concept of who is next as much as it was threatened by it?

Sending Gregg Jefferies to the 1988 New York Mets was like sending a choirboy to Sing Sing. The team had mainly been together for five years, played hard, lived harder, fought among each other but fought outsiders with more ferocity. The infighting, if anything, strangely strengthened the internal loyalty.

That unity made the group particularly savage turf protectors — both of the core outfit and of the way the game was played then, when caring a bit too much about your bats was viewed as more problematic within the group than, say, infidelity or snorting coke. Those Mets were elevated by a 1986 championship, the celebrity of New York, the excesses of the 1980s and a tabloid war that emboldened them into anonymous character assassination — including of each other. No one more than Jefferies, who all but had bus tire marks on his body.

“It was the roughest group to break in with, the Mets of that era — tough as they come,” Cone said. “We self-policed and we ran rookies hard. It was a different generation of players. … The veterans were hard on him. Once you were on the wrong side with that group it was impossible to recover.”

So what if instead of lasting to the 20th pick of the loaded 1985 draft (Will Clark, Barry Larkin, Barry Bonds), Jefferies had gone 17th to the Royals, where he was ultimately traded after the 1991 season and began to revive his career? Or if he went 18th to the Cardinals, where he was traded before the 1993 campaign and would have the best years of his career? Or if he was selected 19th by the Angels and stayed close to his Southern California roots?

“I think different time, different place, he could have made a run at the Hall,” said Mark Carreon, an outfielder who played with Jefferies at Triple-A and the majors. “He was that kind of hitter.”

Different time?

Bring Jefferies up to the majors 30 years later, 2018 rather than 1988. By then, promoted 19-year-old supernovas such as Ronald Acuna Jr. and Juan Soto are not resented like in the late 1980s; rather, they are anticipated and embraced by fans and teammates. Jefferies would not have been a threat to a second baseman like Wally Backman or third baseman like Howard Johnson. Instead, he would have been a lesser-defense version of Ben Zobrist — perhaps getting 100 plate appearances at four positions, plus 50 more in the 10 interleague games in which the NL plays with a DH.

Modern media training would have better prepared Jefferies and trained the group not to badmouth a teammate — when was the last time you heard something akin to what Bob Ojeda actually said on the record about his teammate Jefferies in 1990: “We’re not going to stand for his antics this year.” Now, we are in the age of the vanilla, say-nothing statements.

These days a good deal of American-born drafted players have been on elite travel teams since youth and have their own bats and their own bags and their own hitting and/or throwing gurus and their own training regimen. Or as Cone said, “What was thought of as spoiled then is commonplace now.”

Even Jefferies’ skill set — his ability to generate more walks than strikeouts, hit the ball hard, run, hit equally well from both sides of the plate, have a strong OPS-plus even when his batting average might be a bit down — would be appreciated way more today. Heck, he likely would have learned a launch swing and turned his doubles into homers.

“Gregg had talent,” McDowell said. “Looking back, especially after coaching 13 years, if you have a talented player, it is up to us to figure out what can we do to help you to become part of the club and to teach how things went. Looking back, there were conversations and unfortunately they didn’t go further.”

Jefferies appreciates the wrong-place, wrong-time theory, sees some truths in it. But also said it is not how he thinks — then or now. That was his place, that was his time, those were his teammates, those were the rules (mostly unwritten).

“That was the era,” Jefferies said. “It is not their job to coddle me. They had enough on their plate. You don’t think Keith Hernandez and [Darryl] Strawberry and Gary [Carter] had pressure? They were the face of New York. They had their own issues. I needed to take care of me. I had to learn as I was playing.”

Still, that education could have gone so differently.

Joe McIlvaine saw thousands and thousands of amateur players through the years and knows as well as anyone the unsure world of evaluation. But after a life in baseball, he remembers being certain of just five amateurs he felt would hit in the majors. There was Ken Griffey Jr. and Alex Rodriguez. There was Manny Ramirez and Gary Sheffield. And there was Jefferies.

Usually there are variations in what a switch hitter looks like from one side of the plate to the other. But in McIlvaine’s view, Jefferies had a “mirror swing from both sides of the plate.” Plus, he was short to the ball, he had otherworldly contact skills, he found the delicate dance of hitting aggressively yet knowing the strike zone well, and he could enhance it all by running.

“His father did a wonderful job with him,” said McIlvaine, the Mets’ scouting director when Jefferies was drafted.

So much begins with Rich Jefferies. He was the baseball coach at Parkside High School in San Bruno, Calif., and the mastermind of The Workout — 17 elements, eight hours a day, six days a week — designed to maximize Jefferies’ performance and immortalized in a Sports Illustrated story in March 1988. Most famously, Rich had Gregg swing a bat underwater in a pool.

There are those, even now, who saw Rich as part of Gregg’s problems, overbearing and akin to Marv Marinovich to his son, Todd — putting a youngster essentially in a sports lab to be groomed to playing greatness. But that led to the child missing out on learning the social cues that come with a more standard upbringing while being immersed in pressure to justify all the hours of training.

A few Mets from the era say Rich was domineering and critical of Gregg when he failed in the majors, and that Gregg ignored advice from Mets teammates and coaches and relied solely on his father (by the way, it is common now for hitters to have outside hitting sherpas, including parents, and this is one dynamic from which tension is still often created).

Jefferies said the drills were designed to be fun, that his relationship with his father then and now has always been strong and loving.

“If you knew my dad, he is definitely not a stage dad,” he said. “I could have gone to my dad, my third or fourth year, and said I didn’t want to play any more and he would have said, ‘OK, what do you want to do next?’ He never hovered. He never would call me, ‘I watched your swing.’ My dad was old school. But my dad also was my best friend. A lot of times we talked about everything besides baseball. I had a very close relationship with my parents, and that might have rubbed people the wrong way.”

That kind of Sports Illustrated story then — also with details that Jefferies’ parents often would live in a trailer in his minor league town and that his license plates on his blue Camaro read “4 FOR 4 GJ” — was the kind of stuff that would vex the old guard.

Jefferies was among the first players championed by Baseball America, the first ever anointed by that magazine as a consecutive Minor League Player of the Year (1986-87), so good in those two seasons (.360 batting average, 83 steals) that opposing managers at times would confiscate his bats assuming they were doctored.

And as much as Rich Jefferies is central to Gregg’s story, so are those bats. At first, it was for wizardry. Jefferies had a six at-bat Mets cameo in 1987 but arrived for real in late August 1988 — hitting .321 in 29 games, helping the Mets go an MLB-best 24-7 after his arrival and soar to the NL’s most wins (100). Jefferies hit .333 with four walks and no strikeouts in the Dodgers’ seven-game upset in the NLCS.

You know what would have been impossible to believe at the end of that series?

That neither that group of Mets nor Jefferies, just 21 at that time, would ever get to the playoffs again — and that the good days for Jefferies as a Met were over.

Oh yeah, back to the bats. Jefferies had his own custom-made black SSK bats. He wanted them in his own bag. He didn’t want them dropped in the large pile to mix with all those others. He would take rubbing alcohol to clean the bats after each game.

Then-GM Frank Cashen had positioned Jefferies’ locker next to the team captain, Hernandez, to be schooled. And Hernandez — traditional defender of the way things were done — would say, you might not want to rub the hits out of those bats and why not wait until tomorrow? And if you must do it right after the game, stop doing it with your back to the rest of the clubhouse. Turn around. Face your teammates. This was baseball in 1988.

And the bats became fingernails on the chalkboard for those Mets. There was other stuff they didn’t like. Jefferies slammed helmets and bats too often when he made outs. Then-manager Davey Johnson criticized him for walking too slowly back to the dugout after outs. Hernandez said Jefferies acted like he had won three batting titles already.

Jefferies didn’t follow the code that rookies -— and he was still technically a rookie in 1989 — should be seen, not heard. He seemed to have just two facial expressions: pout and whine. He appeared upset when teammates did not score on his hits to tick up his RBI total.

“He was just difficult to reach,” Herandez remembers. “He gave off a vibe that the world revolved around him. The way he comported himself. He was having a hard time fitting in. I don’t know if that was our ballclub or his life.”

All of it might have been forgiven, but those bats went empty at the start of 1989. Jefferies was terrible the first two months, hitting sub-.200 with no homers. Yet, Johnson kept sending him to second base. Johnson, once a star second baseman, kept personally tutoring Jefferies, who was angering his pitchers by not hanging in on the second base pivot.

The core of the team was furious, in part because the popular Backman had been traded in the offseason to open second for Jefferies. And because it seemed there were separate rules for the golden child. And because on Father’s Day 1989, McDowell and Lenny Dykstra were shipped to Philadelphia for second baseman Juan Samuel — except Samuel was being moved awkwardly to center field to keep second for Jefferies.

So there was the day that Strawberry emptied all of Jefferies’ bats in the middle of the clubhouse, where Jefferies found them. And the day when he discovered his game bat sawed in half. And the day Randy Myers wrote in marker on a lineup card, “Are we trying?’’ because Jefferies was being kept in the order despite trouble on both sides of the ball.

It culminated in the final Shea series of 1989 with McDowell, now a Phillie, breaking Jefferies’ bat on a grounder to second in the opener and cursing at Jefferies as he ran to first about “how did he like his bats now?” Then, two nights later, in what would be the final home plate appearance of the season, Jefferies again grounded to second, got into it verbally with McDowell as he ran to first and then charged the mound, initiating a benches-clearing melee. Afterward, Phillies personnel would talk about how badly so many Mets wanted an opposing team to beat the heck out of Jefferies.

“What stands out most, looking back, is I probably should have taken a different attitude,” McDowell said. “It was Gary and Keith’s last home game as Mets. My actions stepped on an important moment for those guys.”

Jefferies said: “I regret it. I should have stepped on first and gone to the clubhouse. My temper got the best of me.”

It is a theme Jefferies returns to often, that he rues not being able to control his emotions and making himself an easier target by looking immature and that he only cared about his at-bats. Yet, when he sums it up, Jefferies insists, “It was never as bad as you heard. Some bad stories sell a lot better.”

Except one of the guys selling it in real time was Jefferies. In May 1991 with the on-the-record and non-attributed needles still coming frequently, Jefferies said, “I really am tired of being butchered.” And this was in conjunction with his most infamous moment with the team.

A nine-paragraph letter from Jefferies addressed to Mets fans and read on WFAN detailed his frustration over the cold war with his own teammates that had led to Jefferies “consistently taking it on the chin for the last three years.” Jefferies detailed his qualms and said he was doing it because, “I believe it is only fair and right that the fans of New York know my side of the story.”

Except this is what Jefferies says now, “Here’s the truth. It is finally coming out. Back then I kept quiet. I didn’t write that letter. That was written by some people I was very close to, not my family, that thought it was a good idea. At that point, I was lost. I never sat down and wrote that letter. I couldn’t tell you one line in that letter what was said. I cannot tell you what was in that letter. Thirty years later I could say I never wrote that letter. The people that did it only had good intentions. They only were trying to help.”

Jefferies would not identify who authored the letter. All these years later, he still didn’t see the point of that. But the letter was written, it was seemingly from him at the time, and though it was May, that was really the end. Jefferies was traded after that season.

Even with all of that, however, he still did not want to go.

“It is not my personality. I never wanted to give up on New York,” Jefferies said.

There would be a good season in Kansas City, followed by two All-Star appearances for St. Louis, but his knees in particular were starting to bother him with the Phillies in the mid-1990s. There was a pit stop with the Angels, two years with Detroit then a blown out hamstring and a career done by 2000 at just 32. That bothers Jefferies. He wishes he could have gone to age 40.

There was a good career there — a .289 average, the same 107 OPS-plus as Ian Kinsler, Kenny Lofton and Dante Bichette. But it was not the career he projected.

In retirement, he helped run a hitting school near his hometown before moving to Vegas, where he is still tutoring hitters who want his expertise — by the way, Jefferies hates launch angle and strikeouts even now. He has two older children from a first marriage and two children, 11 and 13 years old, from a second. Jefferies talks about contentment and not just with his life but his Mets life.

He says whenever he runs into old teammates it is not awkward. He happened to be at a church in California a few years back when Strawberry was preaching, for example, and tears welled up as his old teammate talked. Rich Jefferies convinced him to go speak to Strawberry after, and Jefferies wasn’t sure, but — as always — he listened to his old man.

“And Darryl gave me the greatest hug in the world,” he said. “I can’t tell you what it meant to me.”

Those old teammates look back now, and Cone sums it up that it was probably 80 percent the generation/team and 20 percent Jefferies that caused the problems. Yet they all agree that the biggest issue was the team that had been so close-knit and successful was fraying through trades or free agency or age hitting Carter and Hernandez. Into that Jefferies was elevated as a savior, a bridge who would get the Mets from the rowdy successful late-1980s into a more buttoned-up yet still thriving early-1990s.

“People say he upended the apple cart and I would argue the apple cart already was upended,” Darling said. “He had a lot of forward thinking that the Neanderthals of our ballclub — and I include myself in that — did not tolerate. In today’s game, if an older player didn’t like Gregg Jefferies, the front office would come down, say knock it off, he is our star, we have invested money and time in this guy, and he is worth more than you.”

Jefferies is informed what is being said these days. He has a “told-you-so” opening to explain what happened with the Mets. His one-time persecutors are now his alibi. They are no longer one-Met-said tormentors. They are on the record. They are on his side.

Instead, Jefferies offers, “It wasn’t their fault. They were veterans. … I can’t look back at New York as a negative. Let [those players] know they made me into a man. They don’t need my stamp of approval. I appreciate the tough love. It made me tougher and a better player. Maybe I didn’t show my appreciation to them.”

All these years later, Gregg Jefferies keeps insisting he is fine with how it turned out. However he got here, he finds himself comfortable with the road, at ease in this place, at this time.

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