Life In A Northern Town

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.

Interleague play in 1986 was limited to eight games and they involved the same two teams. It was Mets 5 Red Sox 3. Seven of those contests were in the World Series, one was a September warmup.

Whaaa…? There was a preliminary? Yes. The Mets and Red Sox played each other on September 4 at Fenway. It was a charity affair to benefit the Jimmy Fund. Consider it a Mayor’s Trophy Game as facilitated by the Delta Shuttle.

It kind of came out of nowhere. When it appeared on the pocket schedule, it mandated a double-take. But as the season went on and the Mets and Red Sox showed every sign of locking down their respective divisions, it was billed as a World Series preview. (Bet that went over big in Houston and Anaheim.)

As an exhibition, it wasn’t important. But it was significant. Here’s Joe Klein from New York magazine that September:

It was a meeting between two teams that have a shared heritage of frustration and romance over the past quarter-century, and a surprising number of mutual fans. “There is,” says Bill James, the baseball scholar, “a definite type of fan in the Northeast, the Mets-Red Sox rooter. They are your dyed-in-the-wool Yankee-haters.” They are intellectual sorts, by and large, New Yorkers who went to school in Boston and fell in love with the Sox and Fenway; Mets fans who sought a more direct way to root against the Yankees. The prospect of a World Series between these two long-suffering fellow travelers is, at once, enormously satisfying and an existential nightmare: It would be a Subway Series of the soul.

As that exhibition came and went and, more importantly, as the collision course between New York (N) and Boston (A) for real stakes appeared inevitable, Klein’s point was proven. At least for me.

I’m assuming that every Mets fan’s kneejerk answer to “who’s your favorite American League team?” at some juncture or another in their lives has been Red Sox. They were for me from the time I learned who the Red Sox’ primary rival was; enemy of my enemy and such. Though I had never been any closer to Boston than an hour in Albany, I carried my FauxSox pride to extremes as they battled the Yankees in the late ’70s. I still remember being thought of a Red Sox fan by a particularly obnoxious Yankees fan who worked in the East End Dairy in 1978 because it was the B-for-Boston cap I wore every day that summer.

That didn’t work out so well.

After ’78, I didn’t wear the Red Sox regalia very much, preferring to be known as a Mets fan and only a Mets fan. The Red Sox faded from perennial contention in the early ’80s. I rooted for the Royals, the Brewers, the Orioles, the Blue Jays…whoever was keeping the Yankees in their place. My first pilgrimage to Fenway Park came in 1985 with mixed emotions. Tom Seaver was pitching for the White Sox, gunning for his 299th win. After idealizing the joint from afar, I wore Boston’s cap and rooted for Boston’s opponents. Tom won. I was happy for him.

One year later, the Red Sox raced to the top of their division and I could watch them on their flagship TV station, WSBK, carried by Cablevision of Long Island. They had that guy Roger Clemens who struck out 20 Mariners and April and Wage Boggs the perennial batting champion and admirable old men like Dwight Evans and Jim Rice and Bill Buckner and colorful names like Oil Can Boyd. I was happy for them.

Then at the end of June, they got Tom Seaver and I was ecstatic. Tom Terrific — my idol — on my more or less favorite American League team. He could tutor Roger Clemens (seemed like a good kid). Tom joked that all he could tell Clemens was when the bus leaves and to be on time. Great line. With him pitching and being backed up by such a good lineup, Seaver might even get to another World Series.

Uh-oh.

In my spare baseball moments of 1986, I wondered how I’d react if the Mets and Red Sox did meet. Oh, I don’t mean the ultimate outcome. It wasn’t much of a Subway Series for my soul. Mets in four or less, as far as I was concerned. But to watch them bat against Tom Seaver and to actively root for the failure of Tom Seaver on the national stage, in his first World Series in thirteen years? Choosing, possibly, between Tom Seaver, my all-timer and Dwight Gooden, my right-now’er?

Never happened. Tom got hurt in Toronto on September 19. He didn’t make the World Series roster. One of my eternal grudges against NBC is they never showed the player introductions at Shea before Game One. I wanted to see Tom’s reception. I still don’t know if it was overwhelming or if he was viewed as just another stranger in a gray uniform scheming to take away what would be rightfully ours. It was one thing to cheer Tom Seaver the visiting Red when the Mets were brutal and wounds over his departure were still raw. It was another when he was part of a team getting in the way of the Holy Met Grail.

Hey! Seavuh! Don’t tell Clemens nothin’ he could use against us!

Without Seaver, there was nothing about the Red Sox that particularly engaged me by September, let alone October. I was annoyed that Clemens had taken over Gooden’s mantle as Best Young Pitcher in the game. Sure, he was probably a swell fellow, but he was also an obstacle. Boggs? Glad he was sticking it to Mattingly in the batting race, but that’s a bat I didn’t want to see. Evans? Rice? Buckner? No thanks. I hoped we’d see the Angels after the Astros. They had guys who had fallen short of the Series too often. The Red Sox had been absent since 1975, but I was already feeling Boston fatigue, Yankee-hating simpatico or not.

Apparently, I wasn’t alone. I offer an opposing viewpoint to Joe Klein’s, from another writer, a friend of mine named Sharon Chapman. She and her husband Kevin lived in Boston in ’86, completing legal studies that summer. Before decamping to the homeland in time for a Met October, she formed her impression of our potential enemy of ourselves:

We lived within walking distance of Fenway. Our first two years we lived so close to the park, and in such a crappy neighborhood, that we didn’t have any real lighting at night unless the Red Sox were playing a night game. That was a five-minute walk from Fenway. For our third year, we had closer to a ten-minute walk, although we were right off of Beacon Street, which was nicer and closer to school. We attended Opening Day at Fenway in 1986, in the bleachers, along with Kevin’s Law Review compadres (he’s the smart one). It was the first home game of the season. As the team was introduced for the first time that year, manager John McNamara was loudly booed. I distinctly remember thinking at the time that fans who would boo their manager on Opening Day did not deserve to win anything. So when the Fenway Faithful complain about how much they suffered that season, in my opinion they brought a lot of it upon themselves. I never warmed to the Red Sox, despite living so close and seeing a lot of games in their stadium. From the moment we pulled into town with our little rented U-Haul van, I took an instant dislike to that team. And Fenway is a dump.

Sharon and Kevin overcame their Lyric Little Bandbox misgivings to attend Tom Seaver’s first game as a Red Sock. “We couldn’t not go,” she says. “He was always my favorite when I was a kid. The only time in my life I ever cut classes in college was to see him pitch Opening Day 1983.” They missed out on another piece of Red Sox history, however:

The game we almost went to that season was Clemens’ 20-strikeout game. We were thinking of going and buying tix at the gate — that was never an issue in the mid-’80s — but we had to study for the bar exam so we passed on the game.

What a shame, missing a moment like that…or not.

“In retrospect,” Sharon’s decided, “I’m glad that I wasn’t there for that asshole’s moment of glory.”