Sport

The Met inner circle believes that Finch’s problem may be that he cannot decide between baseball and a career as a horn player. In early March the club contacted Bob Johnson, who plays the horn and is the artistic director of the distinguished New York Philomusica ensemble, and asked him to come to St. Petersburg. Johnson was asked to make a clandestine assessment of Finch’s ability as a horn player and, even more important, to make contact with him. The idea was that, while praising him for the quality of his horn playing, Johnson should try to persuade him that the lot of a French-horn player (even a very fine one) was not an especially gainful one. Perhaps that would tip the scales in favor of baseball.

Johnson came down to St. Petersburg and hung around Florida Avenue for a week. He reported later to SI: “I was being paid for it, so it wasn’t bad. I spent a lot of time looking up, so I’d get a nice suntan. Every once in a while I saw Finch coming in and out of the rooming house, dressed to play baseball and carrying a funny-looking black glove. Then one night I heard the French horn. He was playing it in his room. I have heard many great horn players in my career—Bruno Jaenicke, who played for Toscanini; Dennis Brain, the great British virtuoso; Anton Horner of the Philadelphia Orchestra—and I would say Finch was on a par with them. He was playing Benjamin Britten’s Serenade, for tenor horn and strings—a haunting, tender piece that provides great space for the player—when suddenly he produced a big, evocative bwong sound that seemed to shiver the leaves of the trees. Then he shifted to the rondo theme from the trio for violin, piano and horn by Brahms—just sensational. It may have had something to do with the Florida evening and a mild wind coming in over Big Bayou and tree frogs, but it was remarkable. I told this to the Mets, and they immediately sent me home—presuming, I guess, that I was going to hire the guy. That’s not so farfetched. He can play for the Philomusica anytime.”

Meanwhile, the Mets are trying other ways to get Finch into a more positive frame of mind about baseball. Inquiries among American lamaseries (there are more than 100 Buddhist societies in the U.S.) have been quietly initiated in the hope of finding monks or priests who are serious baseball fans and who might persuade Finch that the two religions (Buddhism and baseball) are compatible. One plan is to get him into a movie theater to see The Natural, the mystical film about baseball, starring Robert Redford. Another film suggested is the baseball classic It Happens Every Spring, starring Ray Milland as a chemist who, by chance, discovers a compound that avoids wood; when applied to a baseball in the film, it makes Milland as effective a pitcher as Finch is in real life.

Conversations with Finch himself have apparently been exercises in futility. All conventional inducements—huge contracts, advertising tie-ins, the banquet circuit, ticker-tape parades, having his picture on a Topps bubble-gum card, chatting on Kiner’s Korner (the Mets’ postgame TV show) and so forth—mean little to him. As do the perks (“You are very kind to offer me a Suzuki motorcycle, but I cannot drive”). He has very politely declined whatever overtures the Mets have offered. The struggle is an absolutely internal one. He will resolve it. Last week he announced that he would let the management know what he was going to do on or around April 1.

“He’s like, ‘We have to get coffee for every single person in the org,’” Mayer recalled. “And I’m like, ‘What are you talking about?’ He shows me a list. There were 40 coffee orders already.”

Marcelo Mayer’s coffee run led to a big day at the plate. (Mike Watters / Imagn Images)
Like preparing for the next day’s opposing pitcher, they had to develop a game plan. They picked a Starbucks on Alico Road about 6 miles from JetBlue Park, and the night before, they drove there and asked for the manager.

“I’m like, ‘You better bring your A squad tomorrow morning at 5 a.m. because we’re ordering 76 coffees,’” Mayer said. “They weren’t just all black coffees, everyone had a separate order.”

Mayer and Anthony begrudgingly woke up at 4:30 a.m. to get to Starbucks right when it opened.

The four-person staff was well-prepared for the Thursday morning madness. But making the process more chaotic, Anthony had to read off each individual order and pay one at a time. That way each cup would have a player’s name on it and they could keep track of who had which coffee.

After about 20 orders, Anthony’s credit card was declined, with the company suspecting fraud due to the flood of successive coffee purchases. Mayer started paying.

Over roughly an hour, Mayer and Anthony watched as the Starbucks crew brewed, shook, pumped, steamed and stirred the coffees, organizing them into cardboard trays.

“They did a very good job of pumping them out,” Anthony said. “It was crazy.”

“You’d think they did that (large of an order) every morning,” Mayer said. “They were really good.”

A few unlucky customers came through the Starbucks drive-thru during the Red Sox coffee crush, but thankfully for the staff, no one else arrived in the store during the early morning madness.

When it was all said and done, the bill came to more than $600, which Mayer and Campbell split, making sure to leave the baristas a hefty cash tip for all their efforts.

In the chaos of their morning, Mayer didn’t think to use his Starbucks app to pay for the order, which would have earned him stars toward future purchases.

“I would have had free coffee for a month,” Mayer lamented.

Behind the theatrics, however, was a guy who viewed the game differently. While everyone else was obsessed with batting averages, Weaver cared more about on-base percentage and timely home runs. He came to despise the sacrifice bunt (why give away an out?). He turned shortstops into power hitters, moving 6’4″ Cal Ripken Jr. from third to short and paving the way for future MLB stars like Derek Jeter. He platooned players before it was cool, squeezing 36 homers and 98 RBIs out of a three-man rotation in left field in 1979. This is to say, he re-created star players “in the aggregate.” Billy Beane and the Moneyball crew should’ve sent him royalty checks.

Where did this knack for data and analytics come from? Miller suggests it came from his Uncle Bud, a bookie who helped raise him in St. Louis. Whatever the inspiration, Weaver was thinking in probabilities decades before the sabermetric crowd made it standard practice. And he wasn’t just a numbers guy. He was the first manager to use a radar gun. His ingenuity even extended to the field itself. He had the Orioles’ groundskeeper doctor the field—muddying the basepaths to slow fast opponents, and hardening the infield to create tricky hops for bad defenders. It was brilliant, it was petty, and it worked.

He even helped develop a baseball video game that eventually led to John Madden Football. Think about that: Earl Weaver is at least partially responsible for the most dominant sports video game of all time. Not bad for a guy who looked like he spent his afternoons drinking Pabst Blue Ribbons and screaming at neighborhood kids to stay off his lawn.