Sledgehammer

Welcome to Flashback Friday, a weekly feature devoted to the 20th anniversary of the 1986 World Champion New York Mets.

Twenty years, 43 Fridays. This is one of them.

On the 17th day, they rested.

After sweeping three straight series, vanquishing their archrivals, taking command of their division by five games, overshadowing all of baseball, tying the franchise record of eleven consecutive wins and piling up a record of 13-3, the Mets did something on May 1 that they hadn’t done since April 14.

They lost.

It was the finale of a three-game set in Atlanta. They romped (10-5, 8-1) in the first two at Fulton County Stadium following their march through Missouri, but dang it if Rick Aguilera couldn’t maintain absolute invincibility. The Braves slapped him around for six runs in 3-1/3 innings. Zane Smith threw a complete game five-hitter. Hey! What’s this red stuff coming out of my skin from where it got cut?

Before I had a chance to digest the rumor that all good things must come to an end, the Mets indicated that they would never stop. Having dropped to an unsightly 13-4, they began a new streak. For anyone who thought the surge that pulled them out of the 2-3 doldrums was the aberration, the next week and change reinforced what the rest of us knew:

That this was the year.

Retellings of the 1986 regular season usually focus on the April 24-27 crush of the Cardinals and then pause briefly at a few bizarre games that contain novelty appeal — unorthodox double plays, rollicking brawls, pitchers playing right and catchers playing third — until the division is clinched and the playoffs roll around. As a storyline, it works for me, but it’s worth reliving what happened after the Mets actually l-l-l-l…lost a baseball game.

They won seven more. Just like that. I mean really just like that. (Snap your fingers to reinforce the point.) There was no doubt. They not only didn’t lose any of those seven games, they didn’t trail in any of them except for a span of nine outs in the middle of the sixth game. But they won that one too, so we’ll let it slide.

They won 8-7, 4-1 and 7-2 at Cincy, then came home to beat Houston 4-0 and 3-2 and the Reds 2-1 and 5-1. The starting pitcher collected the win in each game. The cumulative record of Gooden, Darling, Fernandez and Ojeda would reach 17-0. Orosco and McDowell had recorded nine saves already, five during Streak II. In those seven wins, Davey Johnson relied on only those six pitchers to face every batter the Reds and Astros sent up minus two (Randy Niemann gave up an RBI single to Dave Parker and walked Eddie Milner in Cincinnati).

Darryl had a two-homer, three-RBI day at Riverfront but otherwise, nobody drove in more than two runs in any one game. The team hit seven out in seven games — not bad, but not an onslaught. Keith had two three-hit games, Ray Knight had one and Wally Backman collected four hits in one of the Reds games, but no offensive stampede was necessary. The Mets were efficient-plus. They did enough to win and won enough to eliminate doubt and most of the National League East from contention.

The seventh win in the streak capped an 18-1 stretch. Before their next loss, they were 20-4 overall. Only Montreal’s mere-mortal record of 16-10 kept them within shouting distance of us in first place, five back. Nobody else was closer than nine out.

It was so over. We thought it would be our year and now we had proof. If it wasn’t the 35-5 Detroit start of 1984 that was still fresh in memory, it was convincing enough. Even when Pete Rose lined that unfortunate single off Tim Teufel’s glove on Mother’s Day and three runs scored and Doc began to morph into Dwight and we fell to 20-5, I didn’t panic. Even when that became the first of five losses in seven games, I didn’t fret. Even when the Expos beat the Giants on Saturday afternoon May 24 to pull within an uncomfortable 2-1/2 games of the lead, I didn’t worry. OK, maybe just a smidge. But the Mets beat the Padres that night in San Diego, kicking off a 19-5 span that culminated in a presumably impenetrable 44-16 mark.

After 60 games, we led the N.L. East by 11-1/2. After 55 games, the back page of Newsday captured the essence of the age, reporting June 11’s rather routine 5-3 conquest of the Phillies with a headline I cut out and taped to the back of an envelope I sent to my Met-hating friend Kathy in Florida:

Ho-Hum, Another Win

Talk about a sign of the times. It was a perfect prelude to Banner Day on June 15, a Father’s Day doubleheader against the Pirates which we entered with a 10-game lead — the first time any Mets team had led the field by double-digits. I remember watching the placard parade go on and on for what seemed like hours. One bedsheet after another proclaimed our supremacy and for once, none of them seemed delusional. Tim McCarver and Steve Zabriskie just kept chuckling at the championship sentiments, correcting none of them. We were as good as we painted we were. We won the first game of that Banner Day doubleheader. We won the second game. We won every game.

Then we went to Olympic Stadium on Monday June 16 for, at last, our first meeting with the second-place Expos. Surely we clinched the gold with a 4-1, 10-inning victory. That was the 60th game of the year, the one that lifted us to 44-16, 11-1/2 up. How good were we? Doug Sisk earned his first W since September 8, 1985. The Expos should have been administered last rites right then.

Shockingly, Montreal was not clinically dead yet. They won the next two against us and we slipped into another 2-5 rut, the last two losses coming to the Expos at Shea. That meant Montreal, still breathing, had our number, at least temporarily. They were eight behind, having picked up 3-1/2 games in a little over a week. Was it even possible that this could be a race? And if it was a race, was it even possible that it could tighten? And if it could tighten, might it be possible…

It didn’t seem practical or plausible to ask any further questions about what was possible, but when the Mets and Expos faced off on Wednesday afternoon June 25 at Shea, there was the slightest bit of tension in the air. Gary Thorne read a promotional message at the beginning of the broadcast reminding listeners that the 1986 Mets were Baseball Like It Oughta Be. Bob Murphy, the most optimistic man in America, joked that it was time for some baseball like it used to be, like back in April and May. Thorne laughed. I didn’t. Ohmigod, even Murph thinks the worst could happen.

As the Expos carried a 2-0 lead to the bottom of the fourth, I did something I’m certain I hadn’t done in earnest since the 2-3 start. I perspired. Fans of teams buried in fifth place sweat. Fans of teams with eight-game leads perspire. The heat wasn’t really on, but I was thinking that if we lost, the lead would be down to seven. Seven is close to five. If we win, the lead is back to nine. Nine is close to ten. Ten is better than five.

And with that unassailable calculation complete, the Mets scored four times in the fourth. That was that. The Mets won 5-2. “They were looking at picking up three games and they ended up picking up one,” Davey Johnson said. “That’s got to deflate them a little bit.” In the visitors clubhouse, Expos shortstop Hubie Brooks actually admitted that seven was close to five but nine was close to ten. Hubie, like me, had hung around the Mets for far too long. Now he, unlike me, hung his head in despair.

Business was taken care of. The top line of the division was 100% safe and secure. The daytime defeat of the Expos started us on an eight-game winning streak that ran through the Fourth of July. We saluted America by building a 12-1/2 game gap over our Canadian competitor. Except to linger in awe, there would be no reason to track the standings until September.