The Mets are finally scheduled to meet with MLB executives on Friday about their inordinate number of hit by pitches and concerns about baseball grip, that meeting coming off the heels of a series where the team’s HBP count jumped to 19 in 20 games and an up-and-in response led to a benches-clearing situation on Wednesday.
According to one former Met, though, the solution may be to make the pitcher pay physically?
“Come on, man, if they want to put a stop to their guys getting hit, somebody’s gotta charge the mound,” Darryl Strawberry said Thursday in an exclusive SNY interview with John Harper. “I know the game is different now but at some point you have to let teams know that if they throw at you, they’re going to pay a price.”
Strawberry and the ’86 Mets were fond of fighting, as older Mets fans may remember, so his stance may come as no surprise.
“That’s how we were. Teams didn’t like us because we were in New York and we were good and we took curtain calls, so they tried to test us by throwing at us and we put a stop to that real quick,” Straw told Harper. “We let them know we were going to fight them, all of us, and they were going to respect us.”
One thing Strawberry is right in intimating is that, in an era where there’s now a universal DH, there’s even less consequence for the actual pitchers; until this season, pitchers at least had to hit in NL games of interleague games in NL parks, so there was some chance for recourse.
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Now, the pitchers don’t have to face the chin music, as it were, so outside of a CC Sabathia-esque “that’s for you” response, there’s no other way to get the point across – and to Straw, the threat of a suspension shouldn’t be lurking in anyone’s head when the going gets tough.
“Who cares about a suspension? You throw all that out the window when teams are throwing at you. And it doesn’t matter if it’s not intentional. Pitchers obviously are trying to throw up and in on them. You have to let them know, ‘we’re not going to allow you to keep hitting us,’” Strawberry said. “You go out there and pop them in the face and it does a couple of things: it forces pitchers to back off from what they’re doing, and it becomes a bonding thing for a team. It did for us.”
Not that the Mets need a team bonding incident, per se, as they are in first place as of Friday – but Strawberry believes that enough has become enough, and as the Mets keep rolling, more teams are going to continue to test them until someone finally snaps.
“This team has beaten up on some teams early and I think they’re being tested. If you don’t make a statement, other teams are going to keep doing what they’re doing and think you’re a bunch of softies,” Strawberry told Harper. “You can’t have guys getting hit in the head and not do anything about it. So make your statement early: ‘You keep hitting us and we’re going to charge the mound and snap your neck.’”
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