The Captain by David Wright & Anthony DiComo

Author:David Wright & Anthony DiComo [Wright, David & DiComo, Anthony]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2020-10-13T00:00:00+00:00

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As all this was happening, Wilpon sat down for a wide-ranging interview with Jeffrey Toobin of The New Yorker. Part of the story detailed Toobin’s experience watching a game with the Mets’ seventy-four-year-old owner, who talked about everything and everyone related to the team. That included some pointed criticisms of Reyes’s health and Carlos Beltrán’s $119 million contract, which caused the story to blow up. It also included a criticism of me: Wilpon noted that I was pressing at the plate.

“A really good kid,” he called me in the article. “A very good player. Not a superstar.”

As soon as the New Yorker piece ran, all the Mets writers came asking for my reaction. What could I say? Of course the comment hurt my feelings. There was no way around that. But it would have affected me a lot more if not for the relationship I had with the Wilpons.

A few years earlier, during spring training, my grandmother on my father’s side of the family had passed away. Mr. Wilpon came up and wrapped me in a big hug, asked me to come to his office, then sat me down and gave a long, grandfatherly talk. He preached that while baseball is fun, family is far more important. His words were deeply impactful.

As it turned out, Wilpon was heading back to New York the next day, so he offered to take me on his private plane and make a special stop in Norfolk so I could be with my family. That always stuck with me, solidifying my relationship with the Wilpons. That conversation, along with some of the family’s other gestures to me over the years, far exceeded a little blip quotation in a magazine. Fred Wilpon was frustrated, just like we all were frustrated. His comments didn’t sting more than a day or two.

It’s possible his words hit closer to home for Reyes, who was due to become a free agent after that season and who, in Wilpon’s opinion, wanted “Carl Crawford money”—i.e., the type of seven-year, $142 million contract Crawford signed with the Red Sox in 2010. Although Reyes battled injuries throughout his career, he still averaged 158 games per season from 2005 to ’08, playing in 80 percent of our games in 2010 and ’11. He was a legitimate superstar capable of doing things I could only dream about, like hitting 16 triples while winning the batting title in 2011, or stealing a Mets-record 78 bases in 2007.

Over the decade I’d known him, José had also developed into one of my better friends in baseball. One of the constants of my career was looking left and seeing him there, and as we grew into adults, our relationship matured as well. I felt like we could talk about anything, at any time.

Years later, when Reyes received a fifty-one-game suspension for violating MLB’s domestic violence policy, I criticized him harshly, calling his actions “awful and horrible.” I meant that, and he knew it. I had given José a

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