HE HAS been a menace to us for damn near 30 years now, the thorn in our side, the cloud in our coffee, the bee in our bonnet, the fly in our ointment, the clouds on our sunny day. He has been our nemesis, our arch-enemy, our tormentor, our antagonist and our antagonizer. He inflicts misery for sport. He is a serial baseball sadist.
He is Mike Scioscia, from Upper Darby, Pa., by way of Hell.
And he will soon be back on our doorstep, back within our borders, back with a mission to continue his reign of terror. He is one of the nightmares that keep coming back. There is the one where you are falling, with no floor in sight. There is the one where you show up for a final exam in a class you haven’t once attended all semester. And there is the one where Mike Scioscia walks into a New York baseball October.
Make it stop! In the name of all that is holy . . . MAKE IT STOP!!”
“There are a lot of things I think about when I think of my time with the Mets, and most of them are good thoughts,” Ron Darling told me a few months ago, standing around a clubhouse at Citi Field when all of a sudden . . . he was on the television screen. “And that” — he pointed at the screen, where you could see the wheels in Mike Scioscia’s head spinning even from 3,000 miles away — “is not one of them.”
That was 1988, Game 4 of the National League Championship Series, Shea Stadium. The Mets were two runs up in the ninth inning, Doc Gooden at the peak of his powers firing BBs at the Dodgers, the Mets about to go up three games to one. Gooden walked John Shelby on a full count to lead off the inning. Up stepped Mike Scioscia, who had hit exactly three home runs in 452 plate appearances that year.
He promptly blasted No. 4 right into the Mets bullpen. The game was tied. An era died.
“We really were never the same after that,” Darling said.
Here’s the thing, though: it goes back even earlier than that. Scioscia was on the 1981 Dodgers team — just a kid, 22 years old, backup to Steve Yeager — that f ell behind the Yankees 2-0 in the World Series and then won four straight, just the third Dodgers team to ever beat the Yankees in the Series. And what happened after that? Reggie was exiled. Dave Winfield was labeled “Mr. May.” The Boss exchanged fisticuffs (so he said) with a mouthy Dodgers fan. And the Yankees wouldn’t play another October inning for 14 years.
Detecting a pattern here?
Well, you know what’s next. Scioscia traded in his Dodger blue for Anaheim/Los Angeles/California red, moved his office to the suburbs, took over the Angels in 2000, led them to the playoffs in 2002, squared off with the Yankees, who had won five of the past six American League pennants. The Yankees smoked the upstart Halos in Game 1, looked to be shifting into the cruising lane again. And then . . .
Whap! Crash! Blammo!
Before you knew it, the Angels had the Yankees on the run, they’d forced even Derek Jeter to the defensive when he was famously asked, with the Yankees on the brink of elimination, if the team could summon what it had always summoned, the ability to win whenever it needed to win.
“That,” Jeter said, “was a different team.”
Sure it was. It had been the greatest of all modern dynasties, winning at a clip thought to be impossible in the modern game. Except it had the misfortune of running into Mike Scioscia, which is where all good New York baseball things seem to go before they die. And to prove it wasn’t a fluke, Scioscia’s Angels did it all again three years later.
So here he comes again, with that calm demeanor and quiet swagger, his team playing as it always does, taking extra bases, playing smart and savvy, bursting with belief. And you’re not sure what to call him: a menace, a thief, a torturer, an executioner, or simply the best damned manager in baseball.