Davey Johnson thinks he knows why Keith Hernandez -- his intelligent all star first baseman with the Mets in the 1980's -- did not follow in his footsteps to become a major league manager.
"(Hernandez) loved life and he liked being happy," Johnson told Sporting News with a chuckle. "I'm sure that's why he didn't want to manage because he'd find out he couldn't be happy if four or five guys on his team were miserable or if the GM was on him. It's not easy to always be happy as a manager. Trust me."
Johnson certainly knows firsthand. He managed 2,445 games for five different teams after a solid big league career, primarily as an all star second baseman with the great Orioles teams of the '60's and early '70's. Yet despite posting a winning record for every team he piloted, and a lifetime .562 winning percentage, Johnson battled intrusive and often-jealous owners and front office executives and found himself shown the door in one fashion or another five times.
"It's not for everybody," Johnson continued, circling back to Hernandez, who was as much a pseudo-manager on the field of play as he was a clutch hitter and Gold Glove first baseman before becoming a Mets broadcaster. "That's why I always looked miserable when I was managing.
"Keith's a very smart guy. He knew what would be right for him."
Johnson shares the ups and downs, not only from his baseball career, but from his personal life, as well, in his recently-released page-turning autobiography Davey Johnson: My Wild Ride in Baseball and Beyond, co-written with baseball author Erik Sherman.
It's all there from the Army brat childhood to earning the sarcastic nickname of Dumb Dumb for his early study of analytical data in baseball while still a player in Baltimore to working for the bizarre Marge Schott as manager of the Reds to his fallout with Orioles owner Peter Angelos. There are also painful personal accounts of the deaths of his grown daughter and, later, stepson.
"I had so many good moments, but there were also some very troubling times I had to go relive," Johnson explained in a podcast interview with Sporting News. "I read the proofs when they came out, but I would never read the book again. I don’t want to go through it."
The jacket of the book features a photo of Johnson during his managerial tenure in New York with the Mets from 1984-1990. A large portion of his autobiography centers on his time in Queens, as does the podcast he recorded with Sporting News.
He recounts a difficult relationship with Mets GM Frank Cashen, the "worst moment" of his career when Dwight Gooden informed him in the spring of 1987 that he failed a drug test and was entering rehab and why he relished the anguish Red Sox manager John McNamara felt as the Mets rallied for their improbable Game 6 victory in the 1986 World Series.
"It took twenty years, but I finally got my payback," Johnson recalled of an incident from his minor league days.
A self-described introvert, Johnson uses the book and subsequent interviews "to set the record straight" on several issues, including why he exited through the back door of a hotel after being informed by Cashen he was being relieved of his managerial duties early in the 1990 season, and what went down in his acrimonious departure from Angelos' Orioles.
Though he emphasized to Sporting News that his life and career both are about looking ahead and moving forward -- and not looking back -- Johnson does an exemplary job recounting the key moments of his life in his autobiography. It just wasn't always particularly fun for him to do so.
Kind of like looking the part of the miserable manager, perhaps.