Bill Madden: Never mind analytics, Buck Showalter has what it takes to get most out of Mets

NEW YORK — On the first official day of his fifth and likely last voyage as a major league manager, it was inevitable that the bulk of the questions asked of Buck Showalter on Tuesday revolved around analytics and his adaptability, at age 65, to the rapid changes baseball has undergone even in the last three years, while he was in the broadcast both.

“It’s not like I’ve been out 10 years,” Showalter said at one point. And for the most part he sounded as if he would welcome all the data being fed to him from the Mets’ analytics department (which numbered 24 as of last week).

But make no mistake: There’s going to be a very different kind of baseball playing out in Queens next summer from what Mets fans came to witness under the two previous managers, Luis Rojas and Mickey Callaway.

At one point in his introductory Zoom conference, Showalter was asked his feeling about one of the primary tenets of analytics — not allowing the starting pitcher to face a lineup a third time around. “There are so many factors that go into that,” he said, “the total number of pitches, your bullpen situation …” while adding the most important might just be the heart of the pitcher.

In other words, Showalter, as he always has, will manage by what he sees and what his gut tells him and not by what he’s told.

It is perhaps for this reason why it took so long for him to get another job in this new age of baseball in which managers, like starting pitchers, have been emasculated — at the mercy of the analytics departments. When he said frequently on Tuesday that he was going to be open to all the analytical data presented him, he meant it, because Showalter, much like one of his mentors, Tony La Russa, has always been relentless in pursuit of information, be it statistical, analytical, personal or whatever, that will help give him an edge. At the same time, however, he subtly made the point that the analytics department should be prepared for him to challenge their data on occasion.

Even though for the first time in his 20-year managerial career he’s been presented with a team that, at least on paper, is capable of winning the division, and an owner in Steve Cohen with unlimited resources, Showalter is not naïve about how difficult it’s still going to be for him to get to his first World Series; how so many things have to come together both on and off the field.

His job, he said, “is to find out what these players need from me and to create an environment that brings them to the apex of their game.”

He did that especially in Baltimore, his last stop, where he managed to keep the under-financed Orioles competitive in the American League East against the Yankees and Red Sox and their payrolls of upwards of $50 million more than his team almost every year. That is until the end, when the owners couldn’t afford to keep their best players, Manny Machado and Adam Jones, and embarked on a tanking plan that is still going on.

“Those last two years in Baltimore were very painful,” Showalter said.

But as Jones said last week: “Folks don’t have any idea of the real impact (Showalter) can have. And I’m not just talking players. The whole franchise. He made everyone better and accountable.”

What Jones, Machado and so many other players who played for him — and what the Mets players are about to find out — is that nobody is more prepared than Showalter, something else he learned from talking to and observing La Russa. If there is one common trait with a Showalter or La Russa team, it’s that they are sound fundamentally. They don’t get beaten because somebody missed the cutoff man, or was out of place in the outfield, or was caught celebrating at home plate on a home run that wasn’t a home run.

Showalter knows that this is it for him. As painful as those last two years in Baltimore were, these past three years of turn-down after turn-down for managerial openings had to be extremely disheartening. There is no consolation in being regarded along with Gene Mauch as the smartest managers in history never to win a pennant.

It wouldn’t have been this way if George Steinbrenner hadn’t forced him to walk away from the Yankees in 1995 by firing his two top coaches, Rick Down and Brian Butterfield, and turning a ready-to-win dynasty-in-waiting over to Joe Torre. So Buck missed out on that but now he has come full cycle, back in New York.

There couldn’t be a more fitting place for him to fulfill his lifelong goal of managing, as he said Tuesday, “the last team standing.”