Bill Lajoie was one of the most remarkable men I ever encountered in Major League Baseball. One reason for that status was he was one of the most honest men I ever met in Major League Baseball.

I don’t mean he fell short of being 100 percent honest while others didn’t. With Lajoie it was the other way around. He just didn’t seem capable of lying, or even telling a little fib.

Lajoie died Tuesday at the age of 76. Cause of death wasn’t immediately known, but he died in his sleep at his home in Osprey, Fla., said a statement from the Pittsburgh Pirates, the last of six organizations he worked for.

Lajoie was general manager of only one of those teams, but it was his choice not to take the job with another team after he left Detroit in 1990. He would have been welcomed in many different front offices.

“I did interview for four other jobs and I was offered three of the jobs but I turned them down,” Lajoie said in a telephone interview last month. “So I obviously didn’t want to be a general manager. My wife had died the year before and my kids were in school. There was a lot of stress in that job.”

Instead Lajoie had a succession of jobs as special assistant or senior adviser to other general managers in Atlanta, Milwaukee, Boston, Los Angeles and Pittsburgh. It was in Detroit, though, that Lajoie achieved his finest moment.

I don’t refer to the Tigers’ World Series championship in 1984, Lajoie’s first season as general manager. Rather I’m talking about 1988 and the Fred Lynn episode.

Lajoie made a deal with Baltimore for Lynn Aug. 31, hoping the left-hand hitting outfielder could help the Tigers maintain the two-game division lead they had over Boston at the time of the trade.

For Lynn to be eligible to play in the post-season should the Tigers make it, he had to be in Detroit by midnight that night. The Players Association later challenged the rule, but in the end the matter became moot because the Tigers finished a game behind the Red Sox.

But in the immediate aftermath of the trade, when the Tigers were still in first place, Lajoie had a decision to make.

He knew that Lynn technically had not arrived in Chicago on his chartered jet from Anaheim, where the Orioles were playing, by midnight.

He knew that the plane had not entered Chicago air space until 10 minutes after midnight.

Lajoie could have said that Lynn had beaten the deadline and, an official in the commissioner’s office said, the office would have accepted his word. But Lajoie chose to be honest.

“He didn’t get there,” Lajoie admitted the next day. “They were over the city limits about 10 after 12.” Asked why he didn’t fudge the time, Lajoie said, “I just felt a rule’s a rule. There’s no sense playing with it. That’s the rule and we’ll live by it.”

I doubt that any other baseball executive would have acted in a similar manner. His act of honesty was so impressive that I wrote about it, and the story appeared on the front page of The New York Times.

Joseph Mehan read the story. He was chief of public information for Unesco (United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization) in this country. Viewing Lajoie’s action as ”a very unusual gesture” and ”an extraordinary act of honesty,” Mehan sent the story to Unesco’s headquarters in Paris, recommending Lajoie for an award.

In August 1989 the International Committee for Fair Play, a part of Unesco, selected Lajoie to receive an honorary diploma and, for some reason, notified him through the United States Olympic Committee.

”When I saw the letterhead,” Lajoie said at the time, ”I thought they wanted me to make a big donation to the Olympic committee.”

Lajoie was scheduled to receive the award the following Oct. 30 at a ceremony in Paris, but he didn’t get there. The Tigers refused to pay for the trip.

A year later Lajoie ended his seven-year tenure as the Tigers’ general manager.

“I didn’t want to be the Detroit general manager,” Lajoie said when I spoke with him last month, explaining that he gave up the job because “I couldn’t get along with Jim Campbell anymore.”

Campbell was the Tigers’ president whom Lajoie had replaced as general manager on the decision of the owner, John Fetzer.

Two veteran general managers, Pat Gillick and Andy MacPhail, kept recommending him for general manager vacancies, Lajoie said, but he asked them to stop.

Lajoie said he was prepared to take the San Francisco job when Peter Magowan was in the process of becoming the Giants’ principal owner before the 1993 season.

“I had my stuff ready to go,” he recalled, “and then Magowan told me three things I had to do. I told him you don’t have to pay me $400,000 to answer the phone.”

That was another way in which Lajoie was different from other general managers. Most others would have grabbed the job just to be employed and earning a salary.

“He had a lot of integrity,” Jim Leyland said on the telephone Wednesday. Leyland, the Tigers’ manager, shared a barracks suite with Lajoie in the mid-1970s when Lajoie was the club’s scouting director and Leyland was a minor league manager. “He was a great teacher for me. He was my teacher as well as my boss. He saw things I didn’t. He knew how to fill out a team. He knew how to get pieces that fit the puzzle.”

How about this piece? Ten days before the end of spring training in 1984 Lajoie acquired Willie Hernandez from Philadelphia to be the Tigers’ closer. Hernandez converted all 32 save opportunities he had and won the Cy Young and most valuable player awards. The Tigers won 35 of their first 40 games and didn’t stop winning until the World Series was over.

That team was also filled with players Lajoie, as scouting director, had been responsible for finding and drafting: Jack Morris and Dan Petry, who between them won 37 games; Lance Parrish, Alan Trammell, Lou Whitaker and Kirk Gibson, whom he stole from the National Football League.

As general manager, Lajoie made his last brilliant move the signing of a player who had been playing in Japan. In his first season, 1990, Cecil Fielder hit 51 home runs.

While Lajoie received credit for the Hernandez trade, he also was foolishly criticized in retrospect for a trade he made in 1987. On Aug. 12 of that season, Lajoie traded for Doyle Alexander. He sent Atlanta a minor leaguer named John Smoltz. But Alexander compiled a 9-0 record and was instrumental in Detroit’s division championship.

Lajoie acknowledged that he was asked about the trade but said, “It’s just one of those things that has come up from time to time. But it doesn’t bother me.”

A minor league player, Lajoie was considered a great evaluator of talent. No statistical analyst was he. In fact, the title of his book, written with Anup Sinha and published earlier this year, sums up his philosophy: Character Is Not a Statistic: The Legacy and Wisdom of Baseball’s Godfather Scout Bill Lajoie.

Each news article that appears on the mlb.com Web site carries this tag line: “This story was not subject to the approval of Major League Baseball or its clubs.” That disclaimer is supposed to assure readers that mlb.com has not censored the article or made changes other than routine editing changes.

But what about an article that doesn’t appear? Has that article been “subject to the approval of Major League Baseball or its clubs?”

Last week the Yankees’ page on mlb.com carried an article about the late owner George Steinbrenner. “Steinbrenner to be honored at B.A.T. event,” the headline read, referring to the Baseball Assistance Team, which helps former players in need.

That same day another article about Steinbrenner appeared in many, if not all, newspapers and on other Web sites. “Watergate Prosecutor Urged an Investigation of Steinbrenner,” read the headline on the Associated Press story in The New York Times.

The A.P. article was the result of a request made by the A.P. and other news organizations under the Freedom of Information Act after Steinbrenner’s death last July. The information came from Federal Bureau of Investigation files on the Yankees’ owner.

The article, however, did not appear, nor was there any mention of it, on mlb.com. So much for the censorship-free Web site of Major League Baseball.

When you talk about the absence of censorship on mlb.com, though, you have to do it with a wink. The articles that appear on the Web site might themselves have not been censored, but mlb.com reporters censor themselves, avoiding subjects they know they cannot write about. They learn what those subjects are either from mlb.com or the clubs they cover, and they adhere to the “rules” because they like their jobs, especially in today’s shrinking job market.

I know that Christmas day is probably the most difficult day to get people to respond to questions, but that was the day I was writing this column, and I understandably did not get an immediate response from a spokesman for mlb.com.

Returning to Steinbrenner, he was a target of an F.B. I. investigation in what would turn into his conviction for making illegal contributions to the Presidential re-election campaign of Richard (“I am not a crook”) Nixon.

The owner avoided prison time by pleading guilty, but baseball Commissioner Bowie Kuhn suspended him for two years in 1974, later lifting the suspension after 15 months. His involvement in Watergate was long a sore subject for Steinbrenner, probably more painful than his suspension by Commissioner Fay Vincent in 1990 for consorting with a two-bit gambler, Howard Spira, to get damaging information on Dave Winfield.

The two episodes also posed an interesting contrast in Steinbrenner’s view of law enforcement.

The F.B.I. files contained memos that reported that agents tried several times to interview Steinbrenner about his campaign contributions but never succeeded because, the memos said, agents were told he was traveling.

By the time of the Spira scandal, Steinbrenner had changed his view of law enforcement. The authorities, including the F.B.I., had become Steinbrenner’s allies, his best buddies. He became so close to them that he used them to his advantage.

As low life as Spira was, I believed that Steinbrenner used F.B.I. agents to put together the kind of evidence needed to convict him.

The owner also often hired former agents to work for him, On the eve of his Spira suspension, for example, Steinbrenner named a new club president and chief executive officer, Jack Lawn, who was head of the Drug Enforcement Agency in the administration of the first President Bush.

And as his liaison with Spira, Steinbrenner designated his security chief, Phil McNiff, former head of the F.B.I. bureau in Steinbrenner’s adopted hometown of Tampa, Fla.

EILAND KNOWS WHY HE WAS FIRED

Dave Eiland, who was the Yankees’ pitching coach the past three years, said in a radio interview last week that he was surprised that the Yankees fired him and didn’t know why they did.

The Yankees took exception to that view.

“What he says publicly and what he understands privately are two different things,” Brian Cashman, the Yankees’ general manager, said. “Privately he knows.”

The Yankees have declined to say why they fired Eiland, though it had nothing to do with the quality of his work. “Out of fairness to him I won’t say anything,” Cashman said. “He’s starting a new chapter with Tampa Bay. I wouldn’t say what it was.”

Eiland took a leave of absence in June to deal with problems of the most personal kind, then returned to his job, said a person with knowledge of the matter, without having fully resolved the problems. The person said Eiland was permitted to return and was told he could keep his job as long as he didn’t violate terms of his return.

However, the person said, Eiland violated the terms and was fired.

A STRIKING START FOR REYNOLDS

With only three full seasons in the major leagues, Mark Reynolds has already firmly established himself in the record book, but his trade to Baltimore earlier this month will deprive him of even greater notoriety.

When the Elias Book of Baseball Records, my record keeper of choice, is published before next season, Reynolds will have a second line. He was already in the book for most strikeouts in a season (223), and in the coming edition he will join Hack Wilson, Mike Schmidt and Adam Dunn as holders of the record for most consecutive seasons (3) leading the major leagues in strikeouts. He is a virtual lock to hold the record with 4 straight seasons a year from now.

When he breaks that record, he will tie another – most seasons leading the majors, a mark of 4 held by Babe Ruth and Rob Deer, a pair of players with different pedigrees.

Although he can start a new streak in the American League with the Orioles next season, the third baseman will have to wait to tie Wilson, Vince DiMaggio, Juan Samuel and Reggie Jackson for most successive seasons (4) leading the same league.

But none of these players, stars or otherwise, has done what Reynolds has done. In attaining their records or shares of records, none of those players struck out 200 times in a season. Reynolds struck out more than 200 times (204, 223, 211) in each of his first three full seasons with Arizona. He has a striking future ahead of him.

Reynolds’ fanning feats are phenomenal compared with his ancestral strikeout artists.

Ruth, for example, led the league in strikeouts in 1927 when he set the home run record with 60, but he struck out 89 times. In more modern times, Deer tied Ruth by leading the American League four different times, but 186 was his highest number.

In their streaks of three straight seasons leading the majors, Wilson (1928-30) had a high of 94, Schmidt (1974-76) 180 and Dunn (2004-06) 195. Dunn has come closest to 200, falling one short this year with Washington.

Having signed as a free agent with the Chicago White Sox, Dunn can resume his rivalry with Reynolds in the American League.

Reynolds, meanwhile, is only 1,829 strikeouts behind the career leader in strikeouts, Reggie Jackson, who in 21 seasons never struck out 200 times, struck out 150 times in only three seasons and struck out a career-high 171 times in his first full season, 1968.

DOCTOR PROVIDES RIGHT ANTIDOTE

What to do? An order of nuns, the School Sisters of Notre Dame in Baltimore, had their hearts in the right place when they put up for auction a valuable baseball card, but their hearts were jilted when the winner of the auction failed to come forward and actually pay for the card.

It was a rare Honus Wagner card, one of about 60 Wagner cards said to exist, and the winning bid was $220,000, a tidy sum for the nuns’ charities. And then the winning bidder disappeared. No bidder, no funds for charity.

(Digression: When I was a schoolboy in Pittsburgh, my sister worked for the Honus Wagner Sporting Goods Company, and one day she brought home two Honus Wagner autographs for her little brother. They would be quite valuable today – if I hadn’t misplaced them years ago.)

The nuns were more fortunate. Heritage Auctions of Dallas, which conducted the bidding, contacted an old customer, and Dr. Nicholas DePace agreed to buy the card for the amount that had been the winning bid.

The nuns had the card because they had inherited it from the brother of a dead nun when he died earlier this year.

Now I relate this story not because it’s a heart-warming tale. I have asked you to read this far so I can tell you the punch line. The punch line is the profession of the man who came forward and saved the sisters’ economic heart and soul. It was only fitting that Dr. DePace buy the card. He is, you see, a cardiologist

CLOSED FOR BUSINESS—WILL REOPEN APRIL 2012

That is the sign I see posted outside the main entrance to Citi Field, home of the Mets in the borough of Queens in the city of New York. It’s not really there, but in the interest of full disclosure and truth in advertising, it should be.

From everything the Mets have said and not done the past two months, they do not appear to be ready to conduct their baseball business next season. They are selling season tickets, but they probably haven’t notified prospective buyers about caveat emptor. That’s Latin for “we don’t plan to be very good and you buy tickets at your own risk.”

The Mets have been a huge disappointment in recent seasons, ever since they blew a 7-game lead with 17 games to play in 2007. Injuries have decimated them the past two seasons, especially in 2009, and the general manager, Omar Minaya, and the manager, Jerry Manuel, paid the price for the poor seasons.

The Mets have a new general manager, Sandy Alderson, and a new manager, Terry Collins, but the reality is they won’t get headed in the right direction until the owner, Fred Wilpon, fires the owner’s son, the chief operating officer, Jeff Wilpon.

Jeff Wilpon is typical of a wealthy owner’s son, in his position by birthright, not by merit. Unfortunately for the Mets and their fans, Jeff Wilpon is more like Peter Angelos’ sons in Baltimore than like Carl Pohlad’s sons in Minnesota.

The Wilpons say they don’t interfere with the Mets’ baseball operation, but they would be hard-pressed to find anyone in baseball who believes that claim. The man who knows best, Minaya, has repeatedly declined to discuss that aspect of the Mets’ operation. The Mets owe him more than $2 million, and he knows better than to jeopardize his financial future.

Fred Wilpon has often used the phrase “skill set,” which can’t be applied to Jeff and baseball operations. I recall that a year ago I criticized Minaya for not negotiating with free agents on parallel tracks, thereby putting himself in position to sign one free agent if he failed to get the other.

It’s a routine strategy in baseball in the competitive pursuit of free agents, but Minaya stuck to one free agent at a time, very likely losing out on one or two worthy free agents. I suspect it was not Minaya’s idea to work that way but Jeff Wilpon’s. As with other issues, Minaya has refused to address the Mets’ failed strategy.

Alderson, Minaya’s successor, apparently won’t be in position to discuss the team’s off-season strategy because the Mets don’t appear to have one. Don’t ask, don’t tell seems to apply more to the Mets now than it does to the United States military.

The magic phrase around the Mets this winter is “payroll flexibility.” The Mets, they say, don’t have it so they can’t sign any expensive players or even inexpensive players based on the market rate.

Mets’ officials use the phrase so routinely that beat reporters have adopted it and use it to justify why the Mets are making no attempt to improve the team.

“We don’t have a lot of payroll flexibility so we’ve had to be somewhat realistic this off-season,” Alderson said in a telephone interview this week.

That statement doesn’t require a talented translator. Put simply, don’t expect the Mets to spend any money this winter.

In turn, that means don’t expect much improvement from the Mets next season. If there is improvement, it will come from players having better years (Oliver Perez, Luis Castillo) or injured players returning to their previous levels of play when they were healthy (Carlos Beltran, Jason Bay, Francisco Rodriguez, Johan Santana).

The Mets will have no significant additions and will have virtually no chance of overtaking the Phillies or the Braves, their most significant division rivals. The Mets have already passed up the best players who were available as free agents, and Alderson’s comments indicated that he does not expect to sign anyone for a lot of money.

“We need pitching help, bullpen help,” Alderson said. “We have a pretty good everyday lineup, but we need to fill in with extra players, but there’s not a lot of payroll flexibility. We’ve tried to address these in a frugal way.”

The Mets needed a backup catcher and signed Ronny Paulino for $1.35 million. They needed bullpen help and signed D.J. Carrasco to a two-year, $2.4 million contract. They need starting pitching but haven’t signed any starters.

“We are cautiously exploring the market and watching it as it develops,” Alderson said.

The best of the market, though, has already evaporated: Cliff Lee, Zach Greinke, Jon Garland, Vicente Padilla, Jake Westbrook. Carl Pavano remains, but the Mets have shown no interest and wouldn’t pay the going rate anyway.

Asked if he saw any possibilities in the free-agent market, Alderson said, “Yes, there are some pitchers who can help us, some pitchers who can pitch innings looking to bounce back.”

“We’re looking for starting pitching and help in the bullpen,” he added. “Those are things we need to address. But we’re trying to do it carefully. That’s been our approach.”

The approach is not to spend any money. The Mets lost two serviceable relief pitchers, Hisanori Takahashi to the Angels and Pedro Feliciano to the Yankees, because they wouldn’t spend the established market rate. Each pitcher signed for 2 years and $8 million.

“We’d like to have kept Takahashi,” Alderson said. “”He wanted to explore the free-agent market. He got what we anticipated he would get. It was a similar situation with Feliciano. It was more than we wanted to pay.”

When observers talk about the Mets’ lack of payroll flexibility, they point to the team’s “bad contracts,” particularly the one that will pay Perez $12 million and the one that will pay Castillo $6 million next season.

Most competitive teams however, wind up with contracts they wish they hadn’t given players. It’s part of the price of doing business; it’s part of the price of competing. It should not be part of the excuse for not trying to improve the team.

Fred Wilpon has never liked spending the kind of money he has had to spend to compete with the Yankees in New York. When Nelson Doubleday was Wilpon’s partner in the Mets’ ownership, it was Doubleday who wanted to spend money on good players (see Mike Piazza).

Wilpon’s apparent reluctance to spend more money for next season raises a question that has been raised before. Did Wilpon lose so much investment money to his buddy Bernie Madoff in Madoff’s all-time great Ponzi scheme that it has undermined his ability to operate the Mets?

Wilpon has always denied it, and when Alderson was asked the question, he said, “From my standpoint nothing has really changed in my perception of where we are and what we have available payroll-wise from when I started talking to them.”

Alderson said he expected the payroll to be about $140 million, which will be about $7 million above last year’s opening-day payroll.

The Perez and Castillo contracts will be up next season. So will the contracts of Beltran ($18.5 million), Rodriguez ($11.5 million) and Jose Reyes ($11 million), and the Mets’ apologists point to the greater freedom the team will have to sign players to big contracts.

By then, however, another season will have been lost. In addition, the Mets will be asking their fans to pay to watch a team that they themselves don’t think enough of to spend to improve it.

Alderson, however, said, “We expect to be competitive. Our lineup compares with anyone in the division. Whether our pitching does is a question. We think we’re going to be competitive. If we don’t have injuries, if we get Santana back, who knows?”

That’s a good question to ask about the Mets’ winter operation: who knows what they’re doing?