DBWI: Mario Cuomo the politician?

[glenn67]

Mario Cuomo, former baseball player and manager with the New York Yankees, died yesterday.

Cuomo made his Major League debut with the New York Yankees in 1956 and spent his entire playing career there (mostly at first base) until he retired after the 1970 season. He returned to baseball as a coach with the Mets in 1972 and stayed there during Yogi Berra's tenure as manager.

Cuomo returned to the Yankees in 1976 as a first base coach and hitting coach. After the Yankees lost that year's World Series, Cuomo replaced Billy Martin as manager and led the Bronx Bombers to the World Series championship in 1977. Cuomo's Yankees repeated as Series champs in 1979, 1980 and 1981. The Yankees won five more World Series titles before Cuomo retired after the 1994 season. He entered the Hall of Fame in 1999.

Cuomo was very outspoken in support of batting helmets after the beaning of Tony Conigliaro which was probably the closest to a "political" opinion.

What if Cuomo did not play baseball and chose a career in law and/or politics? Would he have been as successful? (I just cannot envision him being mayor or Governor of New York)

And would the Yankees have been successful if Cuomo did not play baseball?

 

[Emperor Julian]

Well, we all know how his son Andrew Cuomo turned out. Maybe Mario was privately libertarian as well. Or maybe not, it's possible that Andrew just absorbed his views from his Koch friends. Maybe if Mario was more political, he could be liberal and convince his businessman son to donate his tens of millions to Democrats rather than Republicans instead?

 

[NickCT]

Another interesting POD perhaps is if he had agreed to come on as Baseball Commissioner in 1992, when rumors were high that he would.

Anyways, if he had - for some reason - gotten involved in politics, I wonder if this would have affected Chris Cuomo's own baseball career? Maybe he would have pursued law? the medical field? anything besides baseball?

I also don't see Cuomo as the governor type. He strikes me as more of a Senator because he seemed to take a more passive role in management of the team and was more focused on working one-on-one with players, etc.

 

[fb111a]

Cuomo might have been the only person who could have beaten Jack Kemp - the former Bills quarterback who later represented that area in Congress, and who won the 1982 and 1986 gubernatorial elections on the way to winning the 1988 presidential election, following two terms of Ronald Reagan.

Hmmm... baseball vs. football in the 1982 gubernatorial election. How would that have played out?

 

[CoffeeDragon]

According to some research, many people believed he would be an excellent Baseball Commissioner, and it was dissapointing that he never gave it a go.

So it's possible that if he became a politican, he may have similarly been viewed as a presidential candidate, only for that speculation to come to nothing.

But he could have still have stood in the Democratic primaries one year. Him making it to the White House, though, is I think, quite a long shot.