REMEMBERING THE YEAR BOB GIBSON WAS THE METS' ATTITUDE COACH Perhaps his official title was assistant pitching coach, but when Bob Gibson was hired by the Mets for the 1981 season by Joe Torre, the manager had a distinct role in mind. “He's my attitude coach,” Torre told reporters that spring. “That's his job here: to teach the Mets' pitchers to be intimidating.” “That was perfect,” former Mets starter Ed Lynch said last week on the phone. “Because he never talked about mechanics or anything like that — ever. It was all about your attitude on the mound.” Gibson's death two weeks ago at 84 was another blow to a baseball community that's seen too many of them in 2020. His legacy as a player with the Cardinals is obvious, but when Gibson wanted back into the sport a half-decade after retiring, it came in Queens and not St. Louis. Gibson initially worked back in Omaha following his 1975 retirement, for a bank and an eponymous restaurant. It didn't take long for those everyday rigors to leave him itching for a return to baseball. “I don't miss playing,” he said in late 1980. “I've missed the life — the traveling, the talking baseball with people who know baseball.” (Gibson continued: “People come into my restaurant here and talk baseball, but they really don't know what the hell they're talking about. Just now a new customer came in and starting joking with me about the 1968 World Series and Denny McLain, but he was not funny worth a damn.”) Although the Cardinals more or less ignored Gibson's discussions about a job, his former teammate, Torre, jumped at the chance to bring him to New York. The Mets had lost 90 or more games in four straight seasons, and their pitching staff figured to be led by up-and-comers like Pat Zachry and Lynch, who'd had a cup of coffee in 1980. Gibson was added to assist longtime pitching coach Rube Walker, with an emphasis on the mental approach to the mound. “Gibby wouldn't be in the bullpens, hardly ever. He might stand around and watch, but he never really conveyed messages. Rube always took the lead if we were working on something,” said reliever Neil Allen. “Gibby took the mentality part of it: Why'd you throw that pitch there? And we'd talk about it. He'd explain his side, I'd explain my side, we'd come to a happy medium — well, I wouldn't say happy medium, because he usually won.” (Editor's note: This story has been updated to include quotes from Allen.) “A lot of people say he was a competitor — ‘He would beat his child at checkers, ha ha ha,'” Lynch said. “But Bob Gibson was the ultimate competitor. He really was. And I'm not just talking about when he was on the mound. It was 24/7/365. It wasn't an act, at all.” “I had the utmost respect for him because of who he was and what his career was,” Allen said. “You don't become who he was if you don't know exactly what you're doing.” Gibson's arrival to the coaching staff in '81 didn't change things for New York. The 1981 Mets were not a particularly good or memorable team. They finished fifth out of six in the NL East during the first half of the strike-split season, and they threatened to farcically slip into the playoffs with another sub-.500 record until the final week of the second half of the season. Their 41-62 record suggested only the strike prevented them from losing 90-plus games again. Torre and his entire coaching staff, Gibson included, were let go at the end of the season — promptly landing in Atlanta, where they'd win a division title in '82 — and there are few clear lines between the development of players on the '81 Mets and the contending teams that followed in Queens by the middle of the decade. But for a pitcher like Lynch, a rookie in '81 and a valuable contributor to second-place finishers in '84 and '85, spending a year with Gibson was invaluable. “I didn't really recognize how valuable the time I had with him was until later,” he said. “The message that I took from Bob Gibson was that every time you went on that mound it was like war, it was like a fistfight. It was almost a certain level of disdain for your opponent.” Lynch remembered the stern lectures he and other pitchers would get if they fraternized with the opposition or didn't protect one of their own players getting hit. “You've got to put one under somebody's hat,” Gibson would say. For a rookie, those conversations were intimidating, even scary. ADVERTISEMENT “It wasn't a pleasant experience,” Lynch said. Allen pinpointed a lifelong lesson he learned during the first month of the regular season. “I remember one night giving up an 0-2 hit, and I came into the dugout and he gave me a look. If you knew Gibby, you knew it wasn't a friendly look. It was a we-need-to-talk look,” Allen recalled. “A lot of time coaches would wait and take you the next day off to the side to talk about last night's game. Well, Gibby and me went up the tunnel at Shea Stadium right then and there. He said to me, ‘There's no excuse for that, that's lack of concentration, I never want to see that again. You've worked too hard to get two strikes.' You don't give him something down the middle of the plate like that.' “I don't think I gave up an 0-2 hit the rest of the year because of that talk we had in the tunnel. There would be times as my career went on many years down the road where I'd get a guy 0-2 and it would pop up to me. ‘You got 0-2, what would Gibby say?'” What stuck with Lynch the most was Gibson's approach to afternoon bunting practice for the pitchers. Gibson would be on the mound. “He was trying to embarrass you — literally. To him it was the seventh game of the '64 World Series during pitcher bunting practice at 2:30 in the afternoon, and that's the attitude he brought every day,” Lynch said. “I needed that. I didn't have the stuff of some of these other guys. “It got to the point where if I was pitching the ninth inning of a 10-0 game, the attitude I brought to the mound was that it's the seventh game of the World Series. And I think that's a great attitude to have. It's all business, all the time.” Both Allen and Lynch had arguably the best seasons of their careers in '81. Allen saved 18 games with a 2.97 ERA, and Lynch posted a 2.91 ERA in more than 80 innings. “Gibby wanted to see who you were when you weren't going good. That's where I learned a lot from him,” said Allen. “The life of a major-league pitcher is ups and downs and peaks and valleys; it's really peaks and valleys for a closer. He would always make sure that my attitude was the same day-in and day-out.” “That was an eye-opening experience for me,” Lynch said, admitting he'd been intimidated at the start of his major-league career. “Everybody's out there to kill you, to knock you off the mound and out of the big leagues and ruin your career. It sounds drastic, but that's the attitude he gave me, and it helped me. I was fighting for my life every time I went out on that mound. It made me a better pitcher. Bob made me a better pitcher.”
