#John Smoltz on everything MLB, nearly joining Yankees, World Series gut punch

Baseball season has, at long last, arrived. As it kicks into high gear on Friday, former Braves great and current broadcaster John Smoltz takes some pitches from The Post’s Steve Serby:

Q: Your evaluation of Gerrit Cole?

A: I go all the way back to the evolution of where Gerrit was when all these people talked about what he couldn’t do. Analytics is a big part of the game, I get it, but it can be a little misleading based on the system you’re in, right? So he was in the Pirate system, and he was taught an unusual way of pitching. And he could thrive in that. He’s talented beyond belief and he was throwing power sinkers. They were complaining he didn’t strike out enough batters. Well, when you’re taught to try to get the ball on the ground and use your defense, you’re not gonna strike out as many batters. I remember being on a show saying, ‘Just wait, watch and see, he’ll end up being a strikeout machine, he’s got what it takes.” And so he switches gears and goes over to a four-seam, different philosophy with the Astros. And he’s a wipeout starter. He’s learned how to pitch to quadrants and spin the baseball. That’s the No. 1 thing to do with the style of hitting that exists today and the reward system for the style of hitting.

Q: Aaron Judge?

A: He’s probably my favorite player to watch. I just like everything about what he goes about and does. I’m intrigued to see what he can do if he stays healthy. He’s already in a short period of his career been exposed and hurt, and had tremendous success, and that’s a good combination for a long career. You don’t see him waver in his personality. Down inside he might go home and have a punching bag, who knows? But on the field, you don’t see anything that deviates from him being a great teammate and a superstar player for a long time.

Q: Gleyber Torres?

A: I think he’s a clutch, winning player that thrives in the bigger moments in a lineup filled with stars. Aggressive to the ball early and finds a way to get hits with two strikes, that’s a rare commodity with power, and when runners are in scoring position.

Q: What makes Jacob deGrom Jacob deGrom?

A: He’s become the full evolution of himself. I remember doing his first game, nobody knew anything about him. He commanded the inside part of the plate to a right-hander better than I’ve ever seen, like it was just exploding on the hitter. I was foaming, wishing I had that ability to throw that pitch, my ball cut. So right away I went, “This guy’s got a special arm.” Not very big, skinny, athletic. And he went from trying to power the ball almost always on one side of the plate, now he can command both sides and he’s not addicted to velocity. And he’s learned how to have that touch, and he’s learned how to pitch on both sides of the plate, which I argue we don’t give enough young pitchers time to do. He’s a complete pitcher. I’ve never seen a season in my entire life maybe even going back to Nolan Ryan where you can be that dominant and not win any games. Just unbelievable how he handled that year. I’m totally amazed in this era what he’s been able to do when there’s so much focus on velocity and spin. He’s a great athlete, so he learned how to adapt his big body mechanics, so when he gets off kilter, he knows how to get back. You have to learn how to become your pitching coach, if you don’t, you don’t last.

Q: Can we see a .400 hitter?

A: I think it’s possible, but there’s so many things that have to go on. There’s a general mindset that the pitchers would be ahead of the hitters, but I don’t know if that’s gonna work this time, meaning the gaps between spring trainings. The pressure now is gonna be early on to not have those slow starts, and it’s gonna be kinda magnified if they do. The biggest adjustment mentally is gonna be if players that necessarily would never have to deal with kind of like, “Ohmigosh, the first 10 days, you’re hitting .120, what’s wrong?” Well 162, no one cares any, you know it’s gonna work out, based on the baseball card. Now you’re gonna be pressed to want to get off to a good start in some cases. Will somebody hit .400? I’d probably say the chances are greater, but I would say no, just because there’s very few hitters in the game that hit for high average anymore. The guy that comes to mind right now, but he’s had some interruptions, a guy like (DJ) LeMahieu, whose got such command of the barrel of his bat. If you ask me, if Tony Gwynn played in a 60-game season, I’d say he’s gonna hit .400.

Q: Pete Alonso?

A: I saw the home run hitting competition, and I’ve never seen anybody do what he did on pitches that were so nasty. He grinds. I’ve been so impressed with how strong he is, and the ability for him to hit balls that as a pitcher I would be going, “Oh shoot, you’re not supposed to hit that ball.” I don’t think we’re gonna see much of a slide, I think he’s one of those grinders, rare-breed young player that wants to get better in everything that he does, and if he’s not too hard on himself, then I think the ebbs and flows of the season will be fine.

Q: Jeff McNeil?

A: He’s got power, but he’s a bat-to-ball guy, and he knows how to command the strike zone. I think he’s a hit machine. I see a guy that knows how to play the game — a little more advanced maybe than when Joe Panik came out with the Giants.

Q: The NL and AL East?

A: The National League East unfortunately has the toughest schedule, not only because they have the toughest competitive division, they gotta go against the American League East too. I think the Yankees obviously and the Rays are the two teams over there that are gonna be battling it out. Who knows what the Red Sox are gonna do based on what they lost? But man, it’s gonna be fun to watch. If you asked me if somebody can hit .400, it ain’t coming out of the East (laugh). Not when you gotta face all those pitchers.

I thought the Braves did a great job in the offseason basically fixing a lot of holes. The Nationals, of course, have the top three starters. You can make an argument for every team, and you wouldn’t be too wrong making your case based on 60 games. The big unknown is what’s gonna hit each team, not the injury standpoint, but maybe this COVID thing. The Mets have always been, the one question mark is can they stay healthy with their pitchers? If they do, they’re as good as anybody. The Phillies have made enough adjustments to where you feel like their offense is gonna be better. The pitching still has some areas. But again, 60 games, you can hide those areas. I think the team that has the balance to not be carried away with a 3-7 start will be fine.




Q: Your World Series pick?

A: I think that you’re gonna see a surprise. The favorites obviously are the Dodgers and the Yankees. But I just can’t help but think that there’s going to be a team that causes a problem for other teams. The pressure on the good teams is gonna be greater but their roster is gonna allow them to be great. The teams that I think that are going to be thorns in people’s sides for 60 games are the teams that maybe over 162 didn’t have enough.

My contention is that the team with the best starting pitching is going to win. Look at the strategies that teams use in the end of the season when their starters are already tapped out. They use their starters in unconventional ways. We’re in this era of bullpening, but it’s been the starters that have been able to win the World Series all the way back to the Astros, to the Red Sox, and now to the Nationals. Think about starters only having to make 12 starts. Teams are gonna be fresher to have opportunities to utilize their starters in ways that you would never do in the regular season. If you’re Max Scherzer, and you’re healthy, and you’re Gerrit Cole, and you’re healthy, you don’t have to pitch every five days. There might be opportunities to pitch on a three days’ rest situation because you’re not asking the starters to go deep into the year. … If I’m the Kansas City Royals, and I didn’t really have a chance over 162, I’m gonna make it miserable on anybody that plays us. Maybe four or five teams you can eliminate in theory because they just don’t have enough depth in their roster. But I’ll use another team for example — the San Diego Padres. Young, talented, but they didn’t have enough pitching for 162. I think they have enough for 60.

Q: Did you come close to being a Yankee (2002)?

A: Oh, I was definitely a Yankee. I was a phone call, two minutes, five minutes away from accepting the deal. Stick (former GM and executive Gene Michael) used to have me come and see him, he’s like, “I think we had you,” I said, “You did.” I had a negotiation that wasn’t going well with the Braves, I came back from Tommy John and then ended up closing for a month just to help the team down the stretch. And the Yankees wanted me as a starter for like four, five years. And the Braves were talking about a two-year deal as a closer. We were far apart. I remember telling my agent if anything went awry — I made some kind of demands with the Braves, they changed some stuff around — I said, “Call the Yankees, I’m going.” He promised them (the Braves) one more phone call and we ended up working it out. At that point where I was in my career, as bad as I wanted to play for Bobby Cox, this scenario and negotiations didn’t go the right way. It wasn’t like using the Yankees, I was going. … I asked everybody that I could ask about New York, what it was like, where to live.

Q: You stayed in Atlanta with a four-year deal as closer.

A: We got to a point where it made more sense. I wanted to start, but I also wanted to play for Bobby, and to do that, I was gonna be a closer.

Q: Your mound mentality when you switched from starter to closer?

A: I never grunted, and never overthrew a pitch when I was a starter. And the adrenaline rush is a controlled adrenaline ’cause you’re trying to make 120 decisions a night as a starter, and you’re trying to make the right ones. And as a closer, you’re basically going by the seat of your pants and adrenaline rush, and there’s no tomorrow, you don’t prepare for tomorrow, although I tried to pitch as many games in a week as I could. I could never have pitched 15 games as a starter like I did as a closer. It’s night and day.

Q: You were a legendary competitor as a starter.

A: I was never gonna give in to anybody. When you’re coming out of the pen, people are only gonna fear you if you’re gonna get the job done, and if you’re not, then you become a little more normal and people think there’s cracks. My competitiveness never changed in either role, it’s just the pressure and the intensity of a closing role every day brought about a different mental approach than when I was kicking back four days and grinding for one day to start, and saved all my energy for nine innings. As a closer, you’re preparing to pitch three times a week, 60, 70, 75 games a year. I think there are times in the game today where people are trying to strike out the side every time, they don’t get a chance as much because they want to look dominant. I just wanted to get outs, and I could be pitching again.

Q: Greg Maddux?

A: Master. I’ve never seen mechanics like his.

Q: Tom Glavine?

A: He’s a grinder. He never gave in. He just was stubborn, and that stubbornness got him in the Hall of Fame.

Q: Chipper Jones?

A: So talented. His ability to do what he did, it was like he was born to do that.

Q: Bobby Cox?

A: The best. Best manager, leader. … He had an ability to lead men like I’ve never seen.

Q: David Cone in Game 3 of the 1996 World Series?

A: Coney was gutsy, imaginative. … He was the ultimate competitor. I didn’t want to see him.

Q: Did you think after winning the first two games in New York you would win that series?

A: Oh yeah. For me, it almost was the perfect year. I won 24 games, I had given up basically no runs in the postseason, I’m 4-0 going into Game 5. The biggest gut punch of my career to this point from a team accomplishment. It still to this day haunts me that had we been back-to-back world champs, no doubt in my mind we’d gone four out of five like the Yankees did ’cause we wouldn’t have changed our roster like we did. The umpire didn’t get out of the way for the foul ball that wasn’t caught, and they scored that unearned run and we had Andy Pettitte on the ropes, first and second nobody out (in the sixth inning), and he made that play (getting a force at third) on a (Mark Lemke) bunt. I still can’t believe we didn’t win that World Series. That is a tough one for me to let go.

Q: Mariano Rivera receiving 100 percent of the Hall of Fame vote?

A: The Yankees and all their success, without him would it have happened? One will never know but he’s the best I’ve ever seen at the highest level. … He was virtually unhittable at the most important time of the year.

Q: Derek Jeter was one HOF vote short of unanimous.

A: There’s very few guys, when you try to define clutch genes, I think people have ’em, and I think he had the intangibles that it took to do and be in the right time at the right place all the time. I don’t think that’s luck. Everybody kinda loved him, he played the game the right way, he carried himself the right way.




Q: Your memorable pitching duel with Jack Morris?

A: I imagined those games as a kid. I imagined pitching in World Series Game 7s. I grew up watching Jack Morris. But once you get to that level and you get to that Game 7, I didn’t really think about Jack Morris as much as I knew how tough he was gonna be. … I just never felt like I was gonna give up a run. I felt like it was gonna be a trifecta, he (catcher Greg Olson) was gonna jump in my arms for the third time, and we were gonna win the World Series.

Q: Before your reconstructive elbow surgery, did you think it was over?

A: I go back to Yankee Stadium when I ripped the jersey off my back in 2001, I had come back as a starter, and I felt like every start was getting worse and my elbow was killing me, and I said, “That’s it, I’m done. I can’t do this anymore.” That was an emotional decision, I ripped the jersey, buttons went flying. I put the jersey away. … I went to Birmingham, I had some bad tendinitis. I never gave in to an emotional feeling. They were real, and I did think about not pushing through anymore, but over my career, I pitched through so much different pain and discomfort that it became kind of a running joke for me that people didn’t think I was as hurt as I was ’cause I was having success in the middle of it. I tried everything known humanly possible to get on the field, and I did it all the right way. The only hiccup I had is when I went to the closer’s role, I was used at such a high rate that I developed another bout of tendinitis. My first year I end up saving 55 games. That very next year at the All-Star break, I had 34 saves. That is mind-boggling, the amount of games that I pitched in a short period of time. That second half I went on the DL for quite some time. I was convinced something was wrong. It wasn’t the ligament, my nerve was pinched. It took two hours to fix that and clean it up and I never had an elbow problem the rest of my career after that.

Q: What might have been the biggest adjustment you would have had to make in a season like this?

A: Probably as an older player, I think I would have been able to handle everything a little bit more because of experience. I think the biggest adjustment I would have to make is. … I thrived off intensity and crowd and all that kinda stuff and the big games. … Now you’ve gotta create all of that for yourself and based on certain personalities, that may be a little bit more difficult than people realize. Throw in the fact that the games are much more important, you can’t have too many throwaways. As a pitcher, we had to survive 35, 36 starts and then you were hoping to get to postseason and do your thing. Now you’ve got a mini-version of that where it’s now revving up the engines.

Q: How does your mentality on the golf course compare to your mentality on the mound?

A: On the mound, you get the ball and you go. In golf, that doesn’t work. You gotta wait. So I need a different personality on the golf course than my pitching personality ’cause the two don’t work together. If I had to wait three minutes between every pitch, and the bases are loaded, I would have been a horrible pitcher. You might be able to throw a little pitch a little harder if you get frustrated, but you can’t do those kinda things on the golf course, you have to release what just happened and slow everything down, and that’s been a little bit of a challenge.

Q: Broadcasters you admire?

A: Ernie Harwell was my man on radio. I really like Troy Aikman and Joe Buck. I’ve always liked the way that Troy Aikman spoke to the fans in a way that he didn’t have to tell everybody everything he knew, but he could speak in verbiage that only football people knew, and he doesn’t really do that.

Q: What do you hope the FOX viewers say about John Smoltz the broadcaster?

A: I hope they say that “I learned something.” And I think that’s been the biggest compliment that I’ve gotten over the years is that, “Hey, I really enjoy your broadcast ’cause you taught me something, you didn’t speak to me like I was 5.” This is a huge challenge for me coming up because I’m not gonna be on site, and this is all brand new to me too to how I’m gonna be able to do a game based on the environment we’re in today.

Q: Without fans, do you think the Astros dodged a bullet?

A: Yeah no doubt. That is a huge difference from where it was going to be and to where it was headed with all the attention that was given. Now, people are glad baseball’s just being played.

Q: Three dinner guests?

A: Jackie Robinson; Martin Luther King; Babe Ruth.

Q: Favorite movie?

A: Dumb and Dumber.

Q: Favorite actors?

A: Harrison Ford; Tom Hanks; Tommy Lee Jones; Denzel Washington.

Q: Favorite singer/entertainer?

A: Michael Jackson.

Q: Favorite meal?

A: Anything Italian.

Q: Your legacy?

A: That I competed. I competed to the day I couldn’t throw a baseball no more. I gave every ounce of what this body had. And I probably squeezed out five more years than you should have. But I had the time of my life, and did it the right way.