IT’S a well-known fact that if you get a group of monkeys together and allow them to pound away at typewriters for long enough, eventually one will write “Ulysses.”
It’s also true, although not as widely known, that if you throw a bunch of bargain-priced, no-name ballplayers onto a baseball field, eventually that bunch will play like a major league team.
Or at least, like the Mets on a good day.
Yesterday was that day at Shea Stadium when, appearing in place of the regular Mets, was a team of barely recognizable but remarkably economical players who put on a show frighteningly better than the one put on by the real Mets most days.
Fielding $16 million worth of ballplayers plus Al Leiter, the near-Mets beat the Brewers, 4-3, yesterday, before an announced crowd of 27,989, at least 10,000 of whom must have melted and evaporated in the 102-degree heat.
That $16 million represents a savings of some $34 million on the regular Met starting lineup – the absence of Mike Piazza saves you $13.5 million in itself – and believe me, whoever was in Shea Stadium yesterday couldn’t tell the difference.
In terms of production and results, it was impossible to tell the cut-rate Mets from the real Mets.
“I like to watch these guys play,” Bobby Valentine said. “That’s a good team we put out there today. A couple of .300 hitters and one .400 hitter. Ain’t bad.”
The .400 hitter, Vance Wilson, tied the game at 3-3 with a scorching single to center in the sixth inning, and one of the .300 hitters, Joe McEwing, won it with a home run in the seventh.
On an oppresively steamy day, it was baseball of the most refreshing variety. And to think, if a comparable lineup of understudies had been sent out to do “The Producers” last night, people would have stormed the box office for refunds.
That option, of course, is not available to baseball fans, especially those who attend a day game after a night game in the kind of weather that would drive Satan to the seashore.
Baseball fans, even those who pay up to $45 a seat, have to live with what the manager gives them.
Yesterday, Valentine gave them Al Leiter ($9.75 million), Robin Ventura ($8.5 million) and a bunch of guys who wouldn’t be out of place in a picnic softball game.
“Sometimes, I kinda like to play with those guys,” Leiter said. “The bomb squad, we call ’em. They’re every bit as good as the regulars.”
Then why, you may ask, do the Mets and the rest of the league bother to spend millions , on ballplayers when clearly, thousands will do?
The answer, of course, is that in Major League Baseball, the thousandaire of today is the mega-millionaire of tomorrow, once they achieve those coveted milestones known as arbitration and free agency.
For now, however, there is just one word to describe players like Wilson and McEwing and Mark Johnson and Desi Relaford: Bargains.
McEwing, known as Super Joe because of his God-given versatility and self-instilled work ethic, started the game at shortstop in place of Rey ($4 million) Ordonez.
In cost-cutting alone, that is a savings of $3.748 million. In the field, McEwing handled five chances flawlessly and drove in the Mets’ first run with a fifth-inning single in addition to his game-winning bomb.
In addition to McEwing and Wilson, who caught all of Leiter’s 124 pitches plus an inning and two-thirds of Rick White, there was Johnson, who doubled home the Mets’ second run and played an energetic, if not always savvy, leftfield in place of Benny Agbayani.
Johnson ran a long way to catch one ball he probably should have let drop, a foul fly by Henry Blanco that scored the Brewers’ first run in the fourth, and ran even longer to miss one that he should have had, another foul by Angel Echeverria in the sixth. Didn’t matter, because Leiter struck him out.
And when Valentine inserted Tsuyoshi Shinjo into the game in the seventh, Johnson moved to first, where he cost the Mets $6.5 million less than Todd Zeile.
Factor in the $5.1 million the Mets saved by playing Desi (.299) Relaford at second in place of Edgardo (.225) Alfonzo and it is clear that things can not only be done a lot more cheaply around here, but just as well.
Anybody got an idea how much it would cost to field a team of monkeys?