I Love You, You're Perfect, Now Change

If you can’t start one season without restarting a previous season, then, it must be Flashback Friday at Faith and Fear in Flushing.

The consensus this winter — an entity at its ignominious end this morning no matter what the blasted thermometer says — has been that the Mets haven’t done quite enough. We started with a reasonable bang, Moises Alou, but then the activity quieted from a scream to a whisper. No Zito, no Dice, nobody you hold a press conference for. It was a Scott Schoeneweis kind of winter. It may turn out to be the best kind for where we’re starting from. Unlike so many other offseasons, we’re not constructing from the ground up. The foundation’s in place, certainly for ’07: lots of new arms; strategically added legs; defending National League East champs otherwise reasonably intact — today we’re as much in first place as anybody. We’ll see where we are for real soon enough.

I diverge into the present only because we’re coming off a title, if not the title, and I don’t think you can look at the year ahead after a year on top the same way you do others. If you’re coming off disappointment, go out and trade and spend and promote from the minors. Do something for crying out loud. We can’t have another year like last year.

If it ain’t broke? Stay the fuck away from it. Don’t paint mustaches on Mona Lisas. And don’t replace Mitchells with McReynoldses.

So I say with twenty years’ hindsight. But to have lived through it, I can’t say for sure. ‘Cause it all kind of made sense at the time.

Legend has it that the 1986 Mets were a perfect blend of hitting, pitching and personality. Come 1987, one-third of the equation would go to hell and so would we, never managing to completely climb out, at least not to where we were when the dream season ended.

Right around this time two decades ago, Mets pitchers and Mets catchers were filing back to St. Petersburg (their last spring on the west coast of Florida). I assumed we’d repeat. You assumed we’d repeat. Every glossy baseball magazine to fill the racks at your local newsstand agreed we’d repeat. I saved one, The Sporting News 1987 Baseball Yearbook. On the cover is a marvelous photo of Lee Mazzilli jumping on Tim Teufel jumping on Gary Carter jumping on Jesse Orosco. Joining the pile from the right are various clubhouse personnel. From the left, eyes closed (and probably thinking deep down he’s as lucky as Charlie Samuels to be in the middle of this) is Kevin Elster. The cover line:

NEW YORK NEW YORK
A Double Dose of Mets Mania

For the past 10 or so springs, these regionally zoned publications often said NEW YORK NEW YORK on the cover, but with an oversized photo of some undesirable taking up 80% of the field and a little inset of Mike Piazza sharing space with the UPC, obscured by a snipe of “SOX TAKE AIM AT YANKS” or words to that effect. It was a comedown from the spring of 1987, when two New Yorks equaled two features on the Mets the Mets…so nice we were going to win it twice.

The spring of ’87 was just a continuation of the fall of ’86 as far as the sentient world could tell. The Sporting News picked the Mets to finish first in the N.L. East again. So did, if memory serves (and I’m confident it does), Street & Smith’s, Bill Mazeroski’s Baseball, Sports Illustrated, Sport, Inside Sports and almost every writer on every paper in town. The only dissenter I can recall was a troll who worked for the Post, Lyle Spencer. He was the Wally Matthews of his day, inventing preposterous trade rumors and doing the contrarian, hey-look-at-me! thing to obnoxious excess. Smartass Spencer picked the Cardinals, who had finished 28-1/2 back in ’86, to beat out the Mets in 1987. His reasoning? It was a new season — the Cardinals had just picked up 28-1/2 games.

That kind of lunatic talk aside, the firm feeling among those in the know was Mets in first, nobody else even close. Jack Lang, moonlighting for The Sporting News Yearbook, asked two very simple, almost rhetorical questions under the headline “Pitching-rich Mets set their sights on repeating 1986 success story”:

Can anybody prevent the New York Mets from steamrolling their way through the National League East again? Is anyone even trying?

The Phillies preview suggests Mike Schmidt’s team might stay close. The Cardinals preview mentions all kinds of uncertainty in River City. The Cubs will be young, the Expos will finally have that roof and the Pirates won’t be as dead as in previous seasons. But the Mets, our Mets, our defending World Champion Mets?

We’re in, because not only did we not touch our glorious stockpile of pitching (despite entreaties by other organizations to trade them Rick Aguilera or Randy Myers) but because, as Lang analyzed, we “refused to stand pat”.

Our management wouldn’t hear of such a strategy. Pat was not for standing and laurels required plastic seat covers because you don’t sit on them. Perhaps Messrs. Cashen, McIlvaine and Harazin remembered the last Mets champs, the ’73 pennantistas, making nothing resembling a substantive trade in advance of 1974 and 1974 careening to fifth place. Perhaps the Bowtie was haunted by his Baltimore experience when, following the Orioles’ 1970 triumph, the ’71 previews — the one I remember anyway — insisted the only “need” Cashen’s team had was “a new supply of champagne”. Those O’s fell short of a World Series repeat by one game and it was enough to get Cashen on the phone and Frank Robinson sent to Los Angeles. Perhaps, it was a matter of the Mets’ modern, corporate, go-go 1980s thinking, that you keep moving your chess pieces, that you don’t get attached to your assets, that you only look ahead and never look back.

So when you have a prospect like Dave Magadan and a youngish slugger like Howard Johnson, you don’t cave into Ray Knight’s fairly insignificant salary demands even if he won the World Series MVP award. When someone dangles a talent like Kevin McReynolds (along with a death-on-lefties southpaw like Gene Walter), you take the tangibles of his 26-96.-288 ’86 over the intangibles of the heart & soul attributes ascribed to part-time leftfielder Kevin Mitchell (he’s a bad influence on certain players anyway, or hadn’t you heard?). You go to Spring Training having smartly upgraded here and there and you haven’t touched your starting pitching except to add to it toward the end of March when you swapped Gary Carter’s caddy Ed Hearn for gem-in-waiting David Cone. You do all that and you’re a lock to maintain Baseball Like It Oughta Be clear into Nineteen Oughta Seven.

So it seemed then.

Honestly, what’s not to like about these new, improved Mets? The Knight parting was unnecessarily acrimonious, but we’ve heard and seen good things from Magadan. He’ll platoon with HoJo or maybe take the job outright. The kid can hit. Too bad he’s got that lymph node problem in his right armpit. ‘Til then, HoJo will take third and we won’t even miss Ray. Mitchell was in the middle of that rally in Game Six, but McReynolds is sound and then some. It’s a nice middle of the order: Hernandez, Carter, Strawberry, now this guy. Elster will start the year on the farm after coming from Double-A last August, but he’ll be back soon enough to push Santana. We’ve always got Al Pedrique to fill in though I can’t say I know much about him. Ed Hearn, Danny Heep, Randy Niemann…they were all right, I suppose, but so were Barry Lyons, Clint Hurdle, Terry Leach and Randy Myers. They weren’t on the Series roster, but they’ve been here before and they’re here now. Hell, Walter couldn’t be any worse than Niemann. Cone’s supposed to be really good, too. He’s super insurance to have in the pen since Roger went out with a hernia.

Plus our sterling starting pitching was indeed untouched. The gang is going to be even better as they mature. Our starting five posed in a poster like they were all motorcycle toughs. Then they did something even cuter. They changed all their numbers to teens. El Sid’s going from 50 to 10, Aggie from 38 to 15. Ronnie’s already 12 and Bobby O is 19. Doc, of course, is 16 and Doc, of course — all of 21 with 58 wins to his credit — will be on the mound Opening Day as we raise the flag and commence to kicking ass again, just like last year.

When the Mets flew from St. Pete to New York to start the 1987 season on April 7, they did so with a 24-man roster one-third comprised of players who weren’t involved in the 1986 postseason. Elster was in Tidewater, Heep with the Dodgers, Niemann in Minnesota, Mitchell a Padre, Knight a reluctant Oriole, Hearn in K.C., McDowell on the DL, Gooden briefly detoured to the Smithers Center for Alcohol and Drug Treatment.

We could count on three of those guys (not to mention Magadan) being at Shea again before we would know it, right?

We still had Mex and Kid and Straw and Wally and Lenny and Mookie and Teuf and Mazz and Jesse and Sisk and HoJo and Ralphie and four of the aforementioned five starters, right?

Them plus the new and newish guys — McReynolds, Walter, Cone, Leach, Lyons, Pedrique, Myers, Hurdle — that’s still championship material, right?

The Phillies signed Lance Parrish late in the collusion game and the Cardinals may have made that deal for Tony Peña (which Lyle Spencer crowed over), but after 108 wins, a scintillating pennant and an amazing World Series last year, there was no way anybody could prevent our ever stronger New York Mets from steamrolling their way through the National League East again, right?
Right?

Next Friday: The sweetest of devotion to the No. 9 song of all-time.