As if this season could not get any more dreary for the Mets, Darryl Strawberry is disowning them.
Strawberry ripped the organization he started his baseball career with while fondly remembering his time with George Steinbrenner and the Yankees.
“[Steinbrenner] is probably the greatest owner there ever will be in sports. He loved people and he loved his players. Anyone that puts on a Yankees uniform is family to him,” Strawberry said in an interview with Sid Rosenberg and Bernie McGuirk on WABC 770 AM, before filleting the Mets.
“He doesn’t turn his back on his players, like the other organization across town. It’s just the reality, it’s real. The players on the ’86 championship team, we don’t even deal with the Mets. It’s not Fred Wilpon, it’s the new thing.”
That “new thing” is likely in reference to the Sandy Alderson regime and their awkward relationship with the franchise’s most famous title squad. Former Alderson lieutenant Paul DePodesta famously said in 2011, “I’m tired of hearing about the ’86 Mets.” Those comments helped cause a rift between the Mets’ alumni and the current team, though Strawberry & company have shown up to various events, like last season’s 30-year anniversary of the squad.
“We’ve never been back. I never want to go back, I’d rather stay with the Yankees than deal with the Mets,” Strawberry said. “It hurts us. It hurts what they’ve done to the players I’ve seen. What they did to Ray Knight, what they did to Gary Carter. Those were key players that gave so much. They laid their life on the line those years.”
It’s a conflicting message from Strawberry, given Knight’s anger and self-imposed exile from the team started after that championship season, when they low-balled him on a free-agent offer. Knight had not returned to the Mets until last season, for the anniversary. Carter, who passed away of cancer in 2012, was never given a chance to manage the big-league team, despite success in the 2000s at the minor-league level.
Strawberry, though, worked with Mets-owned SNY as an analyst from 2007 to 2009. He’s not alone. Keith Hernandez and Ron Darling have been part of the network since its inception. Tim Teufel, Howard Johnson, Mookie Wilson, Lenny Dykstra, Wally Backman, Bob Ojeda and Randy Niemann have had different roles in the major and minor leagues since retiring.
Strawberry left the Mets for the Dodgers in free agency following the 1990 season, and after struggling with injuries and drug issues off the field, he landed with the Yankees in 1996.
“He was a father, a father to the hopeless,” Strawberry, who won three World Series with the Yankees, said of Steinbrenner.
“He would go get players no one else would touch. There was a few of us, and he just loved us. He was different than anyone I’ve ever experienced.”