Kevin Mitchell “All In”
A few major opportunities, clearly recognizable as such, will usually come to one who continuously searches and waits, with a curious mind, loving diagnosis involving multiple variables. And then all that is required is a willingness to bet heavily when the odds are extremely favorable, using resources available as a result of prudence and patience in the past. — Charlie Munger
When San Francisco Giant slugger Kevin Mitchell strode to the plate during the 1989 All-Star Game in Anaheim, he had already hit 31 home runs. To me, as an eleven-year-old, the math was so pristine as to foretell the future. All Kevin Mitchell had to do was keep his pace for the second half of the season and he would eclipse Roger Maris’s record by a single home run. Mitchell’s teammate Will Clark, when describing the Mitchell’s torrid first half, gushed, “I’ve never seen a power hitter stay in a groove so long.” Well, frankly, neither had I. And I was all-in.
Other than my certainty that I was witnessing history, I knew very little about Kevin Mitchell. That would have been a common sentiment in the summer of 1989. Mitchell was a raw natural talent from an extremely rough part of San Diego that the Mets took a flier on after he hit two home runs off of Bud Black in an open tryout. Other than a key pinch-hit in the 1986 World Series (and a persistent rumor spread by Doc Gooden that Mitchell decapitated his girlfriend’s cat during a domestic squabble), Mitchell’s time with the Mets was unremarkable. After the 1986 season, he was traded to his hometown Padres, where he so underperformed that the Friars nearly immediately flipped Mitchell to the Giants a few months into 1987 season. When the 1989 season kicked off, Mitchell had hit a total of 53 career home runs over three major league seasons.
But, of course, past performance does not guarantee future performance. Everything clicked for Mitchell during the spring of 1989. “The ball looked as big as a grapefruit and I was going to the plate with a lot of confidence,” Mitchell told reporters. “I really didn’t think the pitchers could get me out.” He had never hit more than twenty-two home runs in a season previously. In the first 60 games of the 1989 season, Mitchell hit 23 home runs. Mitchell even dazzled in the outfield, contorting his body in full sprint to snag an Ozzie Smith flyball barehanded. Mitchell’s manager, Roger Craig, after watching Mitchell’s start, said, "I've been in baseball 40 years and I've never seen what I'm seeing so far.”
I had seen enough. The only question for me — a rising fifth-grader three thousand miles away — was how to capitalize on my certainty that Kevin Mitchell was about to cement himself in baseball history. I doubt I had $100 to my name, nor did I have access to any money. The only assets I had were my amateur baseball card collection and categorical certainty that Kevin Mitchell was a few months away from baseball immortality.
My father — who had no interest in baseball — spent the next several weeks driving me to highway Sheratons and North Jersey conference centers to attend baseball card conventions. My mission there was clear: take my two loose-leaf binders of baseball cards and flip as many of them as I could into Kevin Mitchell cards. When approaching various tables and booths, I made no effort to hide my plan from the middle-aged men about to negotiate with an over-eager fifth graders. I wanted their Kevin Mitchell cards. All of them. And soon enough, my pages of Gwynns, Graces, and Murrays became rows and rows of Mitchells. There was an outside chance that if you wanted a Kevin Mitchell card in Bergen County, New Jersey, you now needed to go through me.
Now, all I had to do is watch Mitchell’s second half of the season, track my investment in the monthly issue of Beckett’s Baseball Card Price Guide and watch my nascent fortune grow.
Mitchell would only hit another 16 home runs over the course of the year. His 47 homeruns were, of course, enough to power the Giants to the World Series that year and to earn him the National League MVP. But, it was not enough make Kevin Mitchell a baseball immortal or, frankly, anything more than a one-hit wonder. He was the baseball equivalent of Dexy’s Midnight Runners and I had bought in the moment after “Come On Eileen” was released. And like Dexy’s Midnight Runners, there’s not much to say about his career after the 1980s. Declining production led the Giants to trade him to the Mariners (where he showed up to camp thirty pounds overweight and only hit nine home runs) and then the Mariners let him leave for the Reds before he tried his luck for a season in Japan (sumo culture?). He then circled the drain in the mid-90s bouncing around from Boston back to Cincinnati to Cleveland to Oakland before washing out.
It turns out stockpiling Kevin Mitchell cards was not the optimal strategy. A near mint Kevin Mitchell rookie card is now trading at roughly 26 cents.
When Kevin Mitchell strode to the plate at the 1989 All Start game, he had 31 home runs. I thought I had never seen anything like it. However, I actually had seen it before. Mark McGwire (pre-chemically enhanced) had 33 home runs at the All-Star break just two years prior. And with any sense of historical perspective, I would have known that several players had been on pace to break Maris’s 61 home run mark. Frank Howard, for instance, had 34 home runs at the All-Star break for the Senators in 1969 and Mike Schmidt had 31 in 1979. There wasn’t really all that much unique about Kevin Mitchell’s torrid power streak during the the spring of 1989, unless your frame of reference was the spring of 1989. And then it was magical. Perhaps that’s the gift of childhood: the feeling you are seeing something completely new.
There’s a wonderful Cicero quotation that “[t]hose who don’t know history will forever remain children.” Living without perspective renders one less than fully adult. But perhaps there’s an unintentionally bittersweet element to that quotation, because without either lived or learned historical context, there’s capacity for magic and magical thinking. Since the 1989 season, I’ve seen twenty six different players hit more than 30 home runs before the all-star break. Some of them faltered in the second half of the season and others obliterated the home run record. And none of it excited me the way Kevin Mitchell did. None of it made me feel like I was living in important times. Now, part of that, of course, is steroids and the fact that hitting home runs isn’t actually important. But, perhaps more than that, it wasn’t exciting simply because it wasn’t new to me any longer. Middle age makes it awfully difficult to go all-in because it’s hard to have that same mixture of certainty and wonder.
For most things now, I have actually seen it before.
by Kevin Blake