Saturday, June 2, 2012

Mitch Williams: Interview w/ Wild Thing ...



Wild Thing: A B&C interview with MLB Network's Mitch Williams
Posted By Landon Evanson On May 30, 2012 (4:05 pm) In Landon Evanson
Mitch Williams did more than just surrender one of baseball’s all-time home runs, he was an All-Star closer and helped a pair of teams reach the promised land that is October.
Williams will be the first to tell you that he and his mates from the 1993 National League pennant-winning Phillies were not the most talented group in the game, but their knowledge of how to play the game the way it was meant to be played has been parlayed into Williams’ current gig as an analyst for MLB Network.
This afternoon, Williams took a few minutes to discuss why umpires have gone unchecked for too long and need to be held as accountable as players and managers, why even without the services of Roy Halladay, the Phillies are still top dog in the NL East until someone can knock them off and what he truly thinks about Curt Schilling.
To you, the loyal and learned B&C reader, we are proud to present Mitchell Steven Williams:
As a former player and a member of the media, you have a clear perspective from both sides, so what were your impressions ofJim Leyland’s tirade regarding umpires and writers having the “guts to say something”?
Number one, I didn’t view it as a tirade, I viewed it as common sense. It’s been something I’ve been saying for a long time, that if players and managers are going to be held accountable for their actions on the field, umpires absolutely should be held accountable for their actions on the field. There are antagonistic umpires that have gotten away with it for years, we finally saw in the last couple of weeks Bob Davidson get suspended for a day, that’s long overdue. I think anytime an umpire antagonizes a situation, number one, an umpire should be watching what’s going on on the field and hear nothing, that’s all there is to it. If he takes a step toward either dugout to say anything, he’s antagonizing the situation, if he just does his job, there’s always been a rule in the game, if you’re a hitter and you question a ball or a strike call, as long as you didn’t turn around and talk to the umpire you were fine, because you weren’t showing him up. Now you have umpires who are jumping in hitters’ faces who aren’t even looking at them, jumping in front of catchers and yelling at them, that’s the kind of stuff they need to be held accountable for. A good umpire, when the game is over, you didn’t even know they were there.
Joe West has been notorious for some of the types of behavior that you just spoke about, do you feel he’s someone in particular that should be dealt with on that front?
Absolutely. I think Joe, for years, has thought that people pay money to come watch him umpire a game, and that’s not the situation. I’ve been through some great umpires, like Jim Joyce, what he did after the (Armando) Galarraga missed call for the perfect game, might have been the first time I ever heard an umpire publicly admit that he blew a call. That’s all you want from a player or a manager’s standpoint, to diffuse a situation, admit you’re wrong, and the umpires today, there’s a lot of them that refuse to admit they missed a call. Ken Kaiser, a former umpire, would tell you flat out, “I missed it,” and as a player or manager, what do you say to that? OK, and the argument’s over. Now I am moving more and more towards instant replay because they say it’ll slow the games down, it’ll make everything take longer, and there’s no way in the world it will slow the games down, it will absolutely speed the game up because there won’t be any on-the-field arguments, there won’t be ten minutes of an umpire and a manager going at it on the field, it’ll be a guy in the booth, sees the play, wires down to the home plate umpire — you missed the call or you got it right.
And you can run it just like the NFL, only in baseball, it’s a long game, give the managers four challenges, so there would be a strategy to it because you won’t want to waste them, and if you challenge a call, the umpire wires upstairs, the umpire upstairs makes a decision in less then 30 seconds, that call is either held up or reversed. Done. Simple. If the umpire was right, that team loses one of its challenges and is now down to two, so there would be a strategy to it, it would speed the game up and it would keep a whole lot of this stuff that’s going on from happening. Umpires are not infallible, players are not infallible
Can you see the Orioles making the playoffs this season?
No. I only say that because I think there’s a time line on teams learning to win, and you get into the second half of the season and some of these young pitchers they have that are having success right now, you start getting into late July and early August and September, you have to learn to win at that time of year. And the cream rises to the top, always in this game. That’s why over 162 games, if you win, you earned it, you didn’t luck into it, you were the best team that year. I look at it, and I see Baltimore up near the top, I just don’t think depth-wise they have the depth the other teams have.
The Nats have been on the penalty kill all year, with the exception of Wilson Ramos (who is out for the season) what do you think they’re capable of at full strength?
I picked them to finish second in the (NL) East and picked them to be a wild card team, and I’m not backing off that. They have some depth in their rotation and Chien-Ming Wang coming back, they said in spring training that he was throwing just absolute filth before he got hurt, so if they can just keep him from running the bases or running to make any plays and just keep him on the mound? His rule should be — cannot leave the mound — because he has great stuff. You win 19 games two years in a row in the American League East, you’ve got good stuff. He’s back to being healthy, his sinker’s back, but the only think I worry about is the (Stephen) Strasburg innings limit, that’s going to be tough. It’s going to be tough for Davey Johnson to walk in and look at 24 guys in September and say, “Look, we’re two games out and Strasburg’s shut down.” That’s going to be tough to swallow, but I still think they’re talented enough in their bullpen, they should get (Drew) Storen back, if they get him back then their bullpen falls back in line, Lidge should be coming back, he’ll help, Henry Rodriguez, they can get him straightened out, I think that’s a complete mental thing, so right now, I look at them and they’re the best team in the East.
You touched on the innings limit for Strasburg, if they are on the verge of a postseason berth or in the playoffs themselves, do you think they stick with the plan to shut him down, or do they push on?
I think if I’m Stephen Strasburg, they’d have to shoot me. There’s no way, if I’m feeling good and they shut me down, there would be no end to how mad I would be. But I honestly think they’re going to stick to it, and it could really hurt them, it would be foolish of them to stick to it.
With Roy Halladay out for six-to-eight weeks, is Philadelphia’s reign of NL East supremacy officially over?
No, I’m not going to say it’s over, because they know what I was talking about earlier, they know how to win. For them to only be four games out right now shocks me. Yes, they’ve lost Halladay, but they’ve got (Cole) Hamels, they’re going to get (Vance) Worley back, you’ve got Kyle Kendrick, who over his last five starts has a sub-two ERA, Cliff Lee hasn’t won a game, these things are all going to change, you’re going to get (Ryan) Howard and (Chase) Utley back — this team knows how to win. So until someone else stands up and shows that they can beat them in September, I’m still picking the Phillies.
Everyone asks you about the Joe Carter home run, but we’d rather delve into what you said about how that Series played out: That the Phillies performed well enough offensively and with its starting pitching to win it, but when it came down to your time in the game, you didn’t get it done. Is that something that you ever get over?
Yeah, I got over it. The thing people didn’t understand about me, and I’ve said this, I don’t know, a thousand times since 1993, I never treated any game I ever pitched in any different, I don’t care if it was spring training, regular season, postseason, the World Series, every game that I ever pitched in meant the exact same to me. So I got over it just like I got over any other loss, the thing I didn’t get over was getting traded, that’s what I let affect me.
We have to ask, with the towel incidents in the postseason with Curt Schilling, was there ever a face-to-face resolution on that between the two of you or did you never have the opportunity after being traded?
No, I never talked to him about it. I had a phone conversation with him about three weeks after that World Series when he repeatedly wanted to go on the radio and rip me, but Curt is Curt, and the thing about that, he showed who he was. And you can talk to anybody who ever played with him, the team could go 20-142 and as long as Curt had the 20 wins, he wouldn’t care.
You once said the ’93 Phillies had a “freak from every walk of life” in the clubhouse, do you find humor or irony in the fact that John Kruk, Larry Andersen and yourself are all analysts now?
The one thing about it, when you look back on that team, we weren’t the most talented guys in the world by any stretch of the imagination, but we do know the game. We knew how to play the game right, we had to know how to play the game right with the talent we had, and the one thing I can honestly say I know really, really well is the sport of baseball. I have no problem voicing my opinion on it, the only thing I wanted to make sure of when I made this step into the broadcast side of the game was, the broadcasters who always got on my nerves and irritated me as a player were the ones that forgot they played and the game wasn’t that easy, and they would attack guys personally from the booth when they’re analyzing them. That’s one thing I’ve always reminded myself, when a pitcher makes a pitch and a guy hits a home run, I don’t say “How can you throw him that pitch?” Well, number one, he wasn’t trying to throw the pitch where it went, and understand that I might question his thought process, but I won’t ever question “How can you do that?” because I know, I gave up the biggest home run in the history of baseball, and it wasn’t where I wanted it, it was supposed to be a fastball up and away and I jerked it down and in, so I know how hard the game is.
So you’ve ventured into the food industry, what made you decide to go salsa?
That was just something my wife and I created in our kitchen. We couldn’t buy anything retail that we liked because we couldn’t stand chunk, so we started to make our own at home and I had it on the market for a couple of years, and now with the broadcasting I don’t have time to fool with it, so I’m looking to sell the formula and the name and get out of it.
The Hilton HHonors Little League World Series is something that, to me, is long overdue, and for a company the size of Hilton to be the sponsor of Little League baseball and Little League softball tells you how big Little League baseball and softball has gotten. You have a major business in Hilton sponsoring this, and what it is is a contest for parents to go to facebook.com/hiltonhhonors and you tell your story about your coach and how that coach has touched your child’s life, made your child’s life better on-the-field or off and the grand prize winner gets a two-night stay at any of the Hilton hotels in their chain, and that coach will be brought to Williamsport, Pennsylvania to throw out the ceremonial first pitch of the Little League World Series. It’s recognizing these people who give their time, they’re not compensated in any way, they probably get more grief than they do anything else from parents, so it’s an opportunity to recognize these people that do so much for our youth.
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