Mike Vaccaro

Mike Vaccaro

Sports

A magical homecoming, but will Cleveland be satisfied?

LeBron James says it will take a few years for the Cavaliers to become title contenders, and if Las Vegas doesn’t necessarily agree with him yet, logic does. Of course, at this point, Cleveland won’t be picky. The city is just happy to have the prodigal son home again. It has waited 50 years for a professional champion, forever for a basketball titleist. What’s another couple, three years?

So there will be time for James to do what Rickey Henderson did in 1989, when the Yankees traded him back to the Athletics (from whom he had been acquired four years earlier) and guided his hometown A’s to their first World Series since 1974 at a time when he was at the very peak of his skills, seemingly capable of doing as much on a baseball field as James can do on a basketball court.

(And while we’re here: Those old enough to remember that lost ’89 Yankees season — and the three that followed — might want to hold a moment of silence before lecturing their younger counterparts that being sellers isn’t always — or even often — all that it’s cracked up to be… )

Claude Lemieux didn’t exactly cause a mass depression when he left East Rutherford following the Devils’ Stanley Cup win in 1995, but he did leave a hole in New Jersey’s championship DNA that wasn’t close until he was reacquired in time for their push to the 2000 Cup. And the Yankees didn’t exactly go into witness protection during Andy Pettitte’s Houston sabbatical from 2004-07, but it is notable they didn’t return to the World Series until 2009, when Pettitte was in pinstripes again.

So you can go home again, or at least to your primary professional home. Still, if you are looking for an emotional tug to collar to the one Cleveland is now experiencing with James, you may need to go back 31 years, when the Mets tried a similar karmic trick by bringing Tom Seaver home.

Tom Seaver pitches in his return to the Mets, on Opening Day, 1983.AP

Seaver, like James, was a singular franchise icon (heck, his nickname was “The Franchise”) and his departure invited something as close as mutiny as the sporting world allows. Seaver left via trade, not free agency, although he had made his intentions clear that he wanted out, now, when the cozy relationship between the Mets and a Daily News columnist (funny how little things change over the years) ultimately caused Seaver to realize how toxic things had become for him in Flushing.

Fans blamed M. Donald Grant and Dick Young more than Seaver, but the resulting graveyard in Queens eerily resembled Cleveland, post-James: The Mets devolved into the worst team in the sport from 1977-82, and needed a talisman to help guide them out of the woods. So they dealt for Seaver. On Opening Day 1983 he brought 46,687 to Shea (by contrast, all of 5,730 attended the next game, to watch Craig Swan) and threw six shutout innings at the Phillies, who would win the pennant that year.

Now, those ’83 Mets were nobody’s example of a contender, losing 94 games. But help was on the way, Darryl Strawberry arriving from the minors in May and Keith Hernandez from the Cardinals in June, and Dwight Gooden electrifying the minor leagues all summer. The hope was Seaver could be a stabilizing veteran presence for a young gaggle of pitchers, not unlike the role James outlined for himself in his going-home essay.

Of course, the Mets never protected Seaver on the 40-man roster that offseason, a bit of transactional sleight-of-hand that blew up on them when the White Sox stole him. So sitting in Shea Stadium in 1986 on the night the Mets won the World Series was Tom Seaver — only in the visiting dugout, in a Red Sox uniform, inactive due to injury. So there’s that.

There’s little chance the Cavaliers will be that careless with James, not after getting a second chance. And there’s every reason to believe he will follow the Rickey Henderson plan and prove you really can go home again. And write a perfect final chapter.


Sarah Muhlbauer: Two trivia questions: 1. Who was the first GM in MLB history to field a $190 million-plus team with a losing record after 83 games? 2. Who was the second GM to do that? Answer: Brian Cashman in 2007 and 2014.
Vac: It might behoove the GM of the Yankees to know there are a lot of queries just like this floating around email inboxes these days. Just saying.

Wendell Ramey: If Rosie O’Donnell can go back to “The View,” then LeBron James should be able to return to Cleveland.
Vac: And there just HAS to be hope for Robin and Paula, right?

@JosephGentile: If Mark Teixeira wrote an apology like Masahiro Tanaka every time he were injured, the collected works would be longer than “War and Peace.”
@MikeVacc: “Tanaka,” clearly, translates to “Opposite in every single way from Pavano.”

Alec Arons: Let’s not forget Lou Pinella and Sparky Lyle if we are honoring “fan favorites” and warriors in Monument Park. There was no one more clutch than LOOOOOOOOOUUU and Sparky never gets the respect he deserves.
Vac: On the list of guys who would have won “Most Popular Yankee” (which he probably would have gotten from 1973-77), Sparky does seem to be about as invisible as any of them.


♦ The issue really isn’t that the Mets picked the right one between Ike Davis and Lucas Duda; the issue is that the correct answer was C) Jose Abreu.

♦ You have to believe that, at the end of the day, the Yankees could have done all of this and more for the low, low price of $188.99 million, right?

♦ Nobody likes to finish last, and maybe Geno Smith isn’t that bad, but let’s face it: If you don’t have a top-10 quarterback, is there that big a difference between being No. 12 or 22 or 32?

♦ Have to admit, I only have about a 38 percent knowledge of what’s going on at any given time with “The Leftovers,” but I keep watching. With a pad and pen at the ready, just in case.