Reese Kaplan -- A Tale of Unintentional Motivation

While I’m not a huge fan of westerns as a movie genre, one of the exceptions for me is “The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance.”  

For those of you who haven’t seen or don’t remember this classic directed by John Ford, it concerns the rise of a lawyer-turned-politician named Ranse Stoddard (Jimmy Stewart) whose ascension to prominence was the result of mistaken perception on the part of the townspeople who all thought he was the one to dispose of outlaw Liberty Valance (Lee Marvin) with a well-placed shot during a gunfight.  

In fact, it was cowboy Tom Doniphan (John Wayne) who shot Valance, but he let the deed go credited to Stoddard who eventually became a United States Senator.  

This week a lot of people were making veiled references to the infamous incident during the 1969 World Series year when Gil Hodges walked all the way out to left field to yank his star hitter Cleon Jones from the game for not hustling.  

It came up because not once but twice perennial All Star Robinson Cano was perceived to be loafing and not showing the hustle one would expect from top tier echelon player, particularly when the club has been doing so poorly of late.

Many people were asking why manager Mickey Callaway didn’t “pull a Hodges” and march out to remove Cano from the game to let the others on the club know that not hustling was unacceptable and no matter how big a star you are (nor the size of your paycheck is) will allow you to get a free pass when others are busting their butts to try to win games.  

Finally, on Monday Cano was given a seat on the bench and, coincidentally, the Mets beat the Nationals that night.

Unfortunately, the story that played out in the media about the whole Gil Hodges incident that has become the stuff of Mets legend is, in fact, apocryphal.  At the time of the incident Cleon Jones was hitting .350 on his way to a season-ending .340 batting average, a record for Mets hitters that stands to this day.  Jones was more of a contact hitter than slugger, never having hit more than 14 homers in a season, but during that magical 1969 campaign he struck out just 60 times while walking 64 times!  

Obviously you don’t want to take that kind of bat out of the lineup, but, as the story goes, Hodges wanted to send a message to the rest of the ballclub that Jones’ loafing on fielding Johnny Edwards’ line drive to left.  With the team having lost the first game of the doubleheader 16-3 and were in the process of losing the second 8-0, that gesture became a rallying cry for the team.

The truth of the matter is that Jones was suffering an ankle injury that he and Hodges decided he could play through rather than resting it.   

It had rained very heavily the previous night and the field was still full of water.  When Hodges came out he first asked Jones about his ankle and the outfielder told the manager to look down at the ground to see the condition of the field.  Hodges got the meaning and decided that he couldn’t risk further injury to his star player, so he lifted him from the game. 

Just like the movie, the crowds interpreted things entirely differently and even the other players were unaware of what really happened.  It became an accidental motivational ploy which was not the intention, yet the results were spectacular.

Now no one is saying that sitting Cano and having the Mets beat a much more formidable pitcher in Patrick Corbin and much better hitting team in the Washington Nationals was a result of A causing B.   

It may be that Callaway simply decided the aging second baseman simply needed a day off and against a formidable lefty it enabled him to get a right-handed bat in Todd Frazier into the lineup with Jeff McNeil shifting to 2^nd.  However, if it indeed motivated the team to do better, we as fans will surely take it.