One Ink-Stained Wretch Pays His Respects to Another

NEW YORK —  If you don’t think David Cone was angry and distraught last Wednesday night when he pitched so terribly against the Dodgers, you don’t understand this fact of a newspaper columnist’s life:

Nothing ruins your day like the desk messing with your copy.

I’m lucky in that respect. The editors at The Times never mess with my copy, except they sometimes take out my funny lines and put them in Jim Murray’s column. That Murray reminds me of a high school columnist.

I hope my facetious intent is clear here. I wrote that previous paragraph while in a mood of giddy celebration, after getting word that Friday night’s Dodgers-Mets game was rained out and I wouldn’t have to sit through nine innings of synchronized swimming at Shea Stadium.

Cone’s infamous column would be old news by now except that this young man is about to make history. If the Dodgers win three more games, Cone will be the first newspaper columnist ever voted MVP of a championship series.

It ain’t the Pulitzer, but the MVP award does come with a new car, which Cone can use to run over the clown who messed with his copy.

Cone will be MVP because if he doesn’t write that column putting down the Dodgers, they are not inspired to win Game 2. Demoralized, they become an easy sweep, a speed bump in the Mets’ highway to the World Series.

So the Cone column deserves careful study.

The amazing thing about that column was not that Cone wrote it, but that the Dodgers read it.

Baseball players, see, pride themselves in not reading the newspaper. It is an arrogance peculiar to this sport, the ballplayers’ insistance that they are above scanning the tripe dispensed in the daily fishwrap.

They need greater intellectual challenge, so you’re more likely to find ballplayers reading fan mail, the label on their baseball bats or magazines featuring artistic photographs.

But if you photocopy a newspaper column, highlight key passages with a colored pen and paste copies on their lockers, chances are that a few ballplayers will give it a glance, and tell their teammates what the column said.

That was the Mets’ downfall.

It’s too bad that Cone, the kid responsible for promoting literacy among the Dodgers, is taking the fall. He is, by all accounts, one of the nicest, least-offensive athletes you would ever want to meet.

If only he hadn’t been cursed with one of man’s basic urges, the desire to be an ink-stained wretch. All kids grow up wanting to become sports columnists, but when the reality sets in that they can’t hack it behind the keyboard, they drift into other pursuits. They become politicians or lawyers or major league baseball players.

Cone couldn’t shake the dream, though, and when he was given a great opportunity to break in, he jumped.

The plan: Cone would talk to a regular New York Daily News reporter for a minute or two after each game. He would offer a couple of insightful comments, like “Sax played a hell of a ballgame tonight,” or “The Dodgers are the kind of club we respect.”

The regular writer would take the ball and run with it.

This time, the Daily News ghostwriter took the ball and ran the Dodgers right back into the playoffs.

Was the Daily News embarrassed when Cone scrambled to refute the words under his byline? Don’t be stupid. The News was outraged that anyone would accuse their author of inspiring the enemy.

“If writers could influence the outcome of baseball games,” wrote Daily News baseball man Phil Pepe, “Hemingway would have broken Babe Ruth’s record before Hank Aaron did . . . “

The New York Post, a rival tabloid, jumped into the controversy cleats-first with this headline screamer: “Mets vow to avenge LA’s assault on Cone.”

“Sportsmanship is out,” said the lead story Friday.

Tom Lasorda and the Dodgers, according to this Post scoop, yelled crude and obscene things at Cone while he was on the mound Wednesday, and the Mets are steamed.

Lasorda was astounded.

“I would never get on an opposition player,” Lasorda told me Friday night, his eyes wide with innocence. “And to holler obscenities? That’s not in my book.”

And the Pope doesn’t pray.

What we’ve got here in New York, fans, is a festering blood feud between the misunderstood Mets and the vile and vulgar Dodgers.

We’ve got war, despite Cone’s attempts to make peace. In his Thursday column Cone tried to explain how he was only kidding, how his words had been twisted by his ghostwriter and given tragic meaning.

That column, too, was ghostwritten.

For Friday’s paper, Cone resorted to an old ploy of veteran columnists, and something startlingly new in the field of jock scribes:

He wrote his own column.

He penned his farewell to the newspaper business. The kid will be missed. He had real impact.

He did a Sandy Koufax, retiring at the peak of his craft, leaving the public clamoring for more. We should all go out like that.

It’s just as well for Cone. Rumor has it that the Mets players were starting to treat him like a newspaper writer. They wouldn’t allow him in the trainer’s room, and they would speak to him only in monotone sports cliches.

Now the Mets not only have their pitcher back full-time, they also have motivation to kick the Dodgers, to wreak vengeance on the team that actually cursed at their pitcher from the dugout.

I can’t wait to read the latest in this morning’s papers. I skip the New York Times because they don’t have any Mets writing for them. They have a Pulitzer Prize-winning sports columnist, but I seriously doubt that Dave Anderson could foul off a hanging slider.

And I won’t miss Cone’s column that much, because I prefer the more mature, seasoned writing of the Post’s star columnist, Wally Backman.

Personally, being a guy who can’t write and chew gum at the same time, I admire a man who can write a sports column and play second base.