Our next potential savior is about to be questioned constantly no matter what he does. We might as well get to know him.

Photo: Twitter. It’s not Jon Bernthal.

The imperfect franchise picked the perfect man.

Is what I would be saying if Alex Cora were the next manager of the New York Mets. But Cora, as advertised, is smart, and flexed his brain muscles and chose the franchise with more money and top prospects coming down the pipeline.

Fair enough. But then the Mets did something unexpected and chose the one other candidate with no ties to the organization. The hiring of Mickey Callaway, Cleveland’s pitching coach since 2013, was not announced online with a corresponding hashtag of #LOLMets, which alone makes it one of the top three decisions the Mets must have made all year.

But seriously: Who is this guy? Will he help the Mets?

Who is this guy?

Mickey Callaway was born on May 13, 1975 in Memphis, Tennessee. He was named after Mickey Mantle. The best Christmas present he ever got as a kid was a Dallas Cowboys football helmet. He was able to dunk as a 5'10" high school freshman at Germantown High School. Mickey was a highly-touted senior on the high school baseball team, but he tried too hard to impress a scout at one of his games, “overthrew”, and hurt himself. The scout was there to watch an opposing pitcher named Kirk Presley, who was chosen 8th overall by the New York Mets and would never pitch above A ball.

Because Callaway wasn’t picked until the 16th round by the San Francisco Giants, he accepted a scholarship to the University of Mississippi. In 1996, the Tampa Bay Devil Rays chose him in the 7th round. For some reason, the expansion team’s Rookie level squad was in Butte, Montana. Callaway called Butte (pop. 33,858) a “toxic waste dump” one year later and two time zones away, and said “all the people did there was drink.” This seems to be the most controversial thing he has ever publicly said, by far.

Photo: Mark Guss. Tampa Tribune July 28, 1997

Pitching in St. Petersburg, Florida and Durham, North Carolina was easier for Mickey to deal with, and his numbers were always good enough to keep him moving up the Tampa Bay ladder. Callaway was the first player ever drafted by the Devil Rays to get promoted to Triple A, and the second to make the big leagues.

At 42 years young, Callaway is one of the youngest managers in baseball and two years younger than Bartolo Colon, but he’s also so ancient that his major league debut was against the Montreal Expos, as a Devil Ray. On that June 1999 night he went 2 for 3 with an RBI. Both of his hits were the result of baseballs that first made contact with his bat, then with home plate. (Those were the only hits of his major league career.) Callaway got the win as the starting pitcher, going six innings and giving up two earned runs.

He only lasted 10 pitches in his second start and was forced to go on the DL with a hamstring injury. The Tampa Bay Times’ headline was “Cycle of Horror Claims Callaway” because the team had terrible injury luck — Callaway was the 10th different starting pitcher they threw out there that season, and it was only mid June.

He was traded to the Angels and made six regular season starts for them during their 2002 championship season (a not bad 2–1 4.19 ERA 1.22 WHIP), so yes, Mickey Callaway has a World Series ring.

He was released in July 2003 before latching on to the Texas Rangers for another full season and two months before his MLB career ended (6.27 ERA, 4.87 FIP, and 1.71 WHIP in 130 2/3 innings). After that there were three seasons, two of which deemed All-Star good, with the Hyundai Unicorns in South Korea. In an eventful 2008, Callaway took an interim head coaching position at Texas A&M International University and found time to pitch in seven games for the independent United League Baseball’s Laredo Broncos. Mickey’s last year as a player was in 2009 for the Uni-President 7-Eleven Lions, a Taiwan based club in the Chinese Professional Baseball League. There is no proof of this swan song on Callaway’s Baseball Reference page, but he did. He knew that once you are not even on BRef’s map, it’s time to retire.

Texas A&M International University Media Guide, 2008. Callaway’s first coaching job.

Mickey was hired as a pitching coach in 2010 for Cleveland’s Class A Lake County Captains, who won the Midwest League championship. Callaway took the same role with the High-A Kinston Indians the following season and watched them lose the Carolina League championship series. In 2012 he was the minor league pitching coordinator for Cleveland. After that season the club brought on Terry Francona to manage, and Francona indicated he didn’t mind hiring someone he was unfamiliar with as his pitching coach. The team had already fired two pitching coaches the past two seasons. “We had a rigorous interview process — we didn’t want it to be easy because it’s such an important position,” Francona admitted later. Fewer than two months into his first year, the skipper was already pleased with the decision to hire Callaway. “Mickey completely has lived up to everything he said in his interview.” Francona also said, “He reminds me of a veteran, good major-league pitching coach.”

Will He Help the Mets?

It would be almost impressive if Mickey Callaway didn’t help the Mets pitching staff, no matter who his pitching coach will be. Cleveland had the worst ERA in the American League in 2012. The team’s combined ERA from 2013–2017 was 3.65, the best ERA in the American League during that time. Their FIP of 3.60 was also tops in the AL, and their Fangraphs WAR was 108.4, the best in all of baseball. They threw the fewest pitches per inning too (16.1). (And most strikeouts and fewest walks in 2017, but you’re already bored.) Callaway has said that Bud Black — his pitching coach for the Angels in 2002–2003 and the one manager Sandy Alderson hired during his tenure as CEO of the San Diego Padres — was an influence to his coaching style, which he once estimated was acting as a “sports psychologist” 80 percent of the time.

The biggest challenge is to get the guy to focus on the next pitch. To be present on the mound and not worry about external things. Be focused on what’s currently going on. Let go of what just happened and focus on the next pitch. We do a lot of talking about that. Very little are the mechanics being taught. Obviously we’ll make adjustments that need to be made, but they all have good mechanics. They all have electric arms, or they wouldn’t be here. They all have talent, or they wouldn’t be here. The one thing that is the separator is that ability to let go, block out external factors and focus on the next thing.

But there’s a lot of talk about mechanics in his job. “It’s the most fulfilling time of year,” Callaway said during the 2016 playoffs. “I’ve never looked at so many numbers in my life, and I have to make sure when we’re going through everything that I don’t overcomplicate it.” Callaway noticed that all of their potential postseason opponents particularly crushed fastballs and didn’t hit breaking balls. Cleveland threw more breaking balls than anyone in the playoffs (36% of the time) and their opponents hit .196 against those pitches. Some folks must have paid attention, since we very recently saw Lance McCullers throw 24 straight curuveballs to finish off the Yankees to give Houston the pennant. (In 2017, Cleveland lead the league in curveball usage, so I guess Seth Lugo is your Opening Day starter.)

While Callaway has had the opportunity to look after a bunch of really talented pitchers, it’s not like he’s just been sitting back, reading statistics, and letting amazing pitchers be amazing. Looking after Trevor Bauer seems to be a 24/7 job generally speaking, and specifically, when Bauer almost bled to death in his ALCS start in 2016 (to be fair, he still lasted 11 pitches longer than Callaway in his second career ML start), rookie Ryan Merritt was tasked to pitch Cleveland to the World Series and succeeded, even though Merritt had thrown 11 major league innings before his Game 5 start. Former All-Star Ubaldo Jimenez’s $5.75 million option getting picked up before the 2013 season was a questionable decision. Callaway visited Jimenez in the Dominican Republic twice in the offseason to get to know each other and to build up Jimenez’s confidence. Callaway instructed Jimenez not to throw so hard, focus more on accuracy, and make sure his front foot pointed directly at home plate. “When you have a pitching coach that is only telling you what to do and isn’t listening, it’s hard,” Jimenez said during the 2013 season, clearly not caring at that point if he was dragging all of his former pitching coaches. “Mickey has a lot of knowledge, but he also listens. He’s always trying to find out what you think and how you feel you need to improve.” Ubaldo went 13–9 with a 3.30 ERA (3.43 FIP, 115 ERA+) that year, improving heavily on his 5.40 ERA (5.06 FIP, 72 ERA+) effort in 2012. With the Baltimore Orioles the next four seasons, he was never as good.

Hey you guys remember Scott Kazmir right? Well Kazy was a pitcher for Callaway the year after spending 2012 pitching for the independent Sugar Land Skeeters. Kazmir made 29 starts for Cleveland, finishing 10–9 with a 4.04 ERA. Kazmir was appreciative and praised Callaway, albeit in a cold, mechanical language that kind of makes Mickey sound like a computer:

He learns you first. He sees what clicks for you, what kind of language you understand to be able to fix things here and there. He’s been a great tool for us to have.

So obviously, he was a great pitching coach. But I don’t know how he feels about shifts. Or bunts. He likes to golf and seems decent at it, but will beating Yoenis Cespedes at golf help or hurt Cespedes’ psyche? It figures that crunching the numbers for pitchers means you know a good amount of stuff about major league batters, but does he know how to pass that knowledge to batters? Will players listen and respect him? What’s his coaching staff going to look like? I don’t know the answer to those questions, and those last two are pretty important. I do like that you can’t throw a rock without hitting a local writer who has quotes from anonymous “admirers” and officials and GMs who love the guy, and a former New York pitcher flat out saying he’ll be good. I also like that* he seemed to practice trying to motivate a major league team on his own in 2014 when he presented a slideshow based off of Chief Tecumseh’s poem “Live Your Life” at a Community College’s baseball banquet. I definitely like that the Toni Basil memes will be plentiful, long after they’ve overstayed their welcome. By just researching the man, I’ve grown to trust him for now. Butte, Montana probably does suck.

*Pending its level of problematic. I haven’t seen it.

Sources:

Tampa Tribune June 21, 1997

Tampa Tribune July 28, 1997

Tampa Bay Times August 9, 1998

Tampa Bay Times June 13, 1999

Tampa Bay Times June 20, 1999