Reese Kaplan -- Hated Mets Relievers Part 2 of 4

If you were going to script a baseball movie about a player who on paper should be a perfect fit for the NY Mets, then the mustachioed John Franco would seem to tick all of the boxes.  He was a tough-talking guy from Brooklyn, spoke with the kind of accent that made him sound just like one of the guys from the neighborhood, he was good at what he did and essentially overachieved as a diminutive framed pitcher called upon to enter the game when it was on the line, then expected to shut down the opposition.

Why then did so many Mets fans exhibit flagrant hostility towards Franco?  They derisively referred to him as the “Tomato Farmer” (an accurate description of one of his hobbies out there in the bullpen).  He joined the team not as some over-the-hill pitcher whose best days were behind him, but at the ripe old age of 29 and pitched for the Mets until age 43, before closing out his career in a last gasp with the Astros at 44.

The little lefty threw what he called a circle change.  Others termed it a screwball.  The fact is that the motion of the pitch varies as does the speed based upon how you drag your foot during delivery.  Franco’s circle change was designed to induce ground balls.  With the ball dropping down (usually out of the strike zone), players hit on top of it, hence pounding it into the ground, or they swung over it and missed entirely.  Franco was not a huge strikeout pitcher, relying mostly on motion and deception to get batters to make weak contact.

Perhaps it was for this very reason that fans just didn’t seem to take to Franco they way they did to other relievers in the past.  Most fans think of the shutdown reliever as someone who generates a ton of strikeouts and throws at very high velocity.  Although Franco threw in the 90s, his out pitch was an off-speed number and not the heat fans were craving.  When Armando Benitez arrived and pushed Franco into a setup role, fans were excited because Benitez threw gas.

I know whenever Franco entered a game a lot of people reached for the Rolaids, Tums or alcohol of their choice because he would walk a lot of folks who stubbornly refused to swing at his illusion of a strike.  Still, he managed to keep the runners from scoring and did yeoman’s work for 14 years for the NY Mets.

Some Mets fans became more accepting of Franco in the period immediately after the 9/11 attacks in which he led the fight to flout the rules of Major League Baseball by donning and having teammates also wear caps honoring the Fire Departments and Police Departments of New York City who were so brave and sacrificed so much during and immediately after the attacks. 

Just as Jack Morris and Don Sutton made it to the Hall of Fame by being “compilers” – very good if not great pitchers who hung around long enough to accumulate a very impressive body of work, John Franco is in very rare company indeed but he’s the Rodney Dangerfield of relievers.  If you asked the average fan, “What left handed reliever has more saves than anyone else in the history of the game?” very few would guess the correct answer to be John Franco.  And on the subject of saves in general, he had 424 of them to place 5^th on the all-time list behind folks like Mariano Rivera, Trevor Hoffman and the similarly underappreciated Lee Smith.  His career ERA of 2.89 is just a tick below Hoffman’s 2.87 and better than Smith’s 3.03. 

The Mets in 2012 finally gave the man his proper due and enshrined him in the NY Mets Hall of Fame.  It’s not like it was a stretch or anything, given his longevity, his multiple All-Star appearances and his two Fireman of the Year awards to go along with a HOF-worthy resume.  In 2019 they hired both he and his former teammate Al Leiter into operations advisory roles to work with pitchers in the organization.  Franco has openly campaigned to get a shot at a manager’s interview for the current vacancy, but to date no one in the front office is listening.