HARTFORD — Robinson Cancel had heard New York was a tough crowd, but booed upon entrance? After playing 15 games with the Brewers in 1999, he had gone back to the minors, grinding for nine years to make it back to the big leagues with the Mets, a feel-good story, one would think.
He emerged from the dugout at Shea Stadium on June 15, 2008 with two runners in scoring position.
“I hadn’t been in the big leagues in a long time, and when I got into the on-deck circle, people were booing,” Cancel said. “I said, ‘I’m getting booed already? My first at-bat in 10 years. In New York.”
Could they have been asking, “whoooooo?” No, they just saw someone other than Pedro Martinez, who’d been spinning a great game, swinging a bat. “And I found out they were mad because Pedro was coming out of the game,” Cancel said. “Then I ended up getting the hit and giving him the ‘W.’ So it was yes, yes, yes, then no, no, no, then yes, yes, yes, but it was fun.”
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Cancel’s single scored Carlos Beltran and Damien Easley and lifted the Mets to a 4-2 victory over Texas, a small, but memorable moment in the life of a baseball lifer. Cancel played 20 years, 1,651 professional games, but only 45 in the major leagues between 1994 and 2014. With that much catching experience, he was bound to be a manager, and he’s been working with Rockies prospects in the low minors for 10 years.
This summer, he will be managing the Double-A Hartford Yard Goats.
“As a catcher, you see the game from a different angle,” Cancel said. “You get to talk to the pitching coaches, the hitting coaches, the manager, everyone in a game as a catcher. So it helped me out a lot.”
In his brief stint with the Mets, Cancel caught Martinez and Billy Wagner, both Hall of Famers, and Johan Santana, who he thinks could end up in Cooperstown.
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“It was like playing X-box,” Cancel said. “You called for a ball outside, they threw it outside. You called for it inside, they threw it inside. You called for a curve ball in the dirt, they threw a curve ball in the dirt. You get the luxury to catch a Hall of Famer, it’s a dream come true. Those were fun years.”
The players he has worked with at Class-A Fresno and Spokane, where he won a league championship, and will be working with in Hartford are, of course, a long way from that. But the Rockies, coming off an historically bad season, 43-119, are an organization in transition. Cancel, 49, survived the turnover and was sent to Hartford by new GM Paul DePodesta.
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“The Yard Goats could be a mix of players who repeat (at Double A) and players who move up,” Cancel said. “The last few years, our minor league system has gotten better. We’ve got some guys that I believe are going to be good players in the big leagues. We’re resetting right now, we’ve got a brand new front office. We’re going to turn things around in this organization. We’re going in the right direction starting this year.”
Cancel, pronounced Can-sell, a native of Lajas, Puerto Rico, replaces Bobby Meacham, whose next role in the organization has yet to be announced. As a manager, Cancel favors a soft-spoken, more empathetic approach to developing players.
“You’ve got to teach them how to win and how to play the game,” Cancel said. “I’ll be teaching, I’ll be helping the guys out. I played the game of baseball, and I didn’t work well when people were yelling and screaming at me. I think there’s a lot of people who are that way. I don’t know why you’d need to scream at a guy to help him be a better player.”