Off to the Races

In an unusually clever bit of scheduling, Major League Baseball has sent the St. Louis Cardinals to Queens this weekend to play the New York Mets, 40 years after a player the St. Louis Cardinals sent to Queens began to play for the New York Mets, albeit in Montreal. It was on June 15, 1983, that one of the top Cards in the entire St. Louis deck, Keith Hernandez, was traded to the Mets for Neil Allen and Rick Ownbey. The Mets were off on June 16, so Keith made his Met debut, versus the Expos, on June 17 at Olympic Stadium, going 2-for-4 in a 7-2 Met loss. Met losses were not uncommon in 1983.

After a while, though, they wouldn’t remain the rule.

On National League Town, the history-conscious podcast I do with my friend Jeff Hysen, we’re devoting a portion of the third episode of each month of the current campaign to a substantive segment on Met seasons and Met ballclubs that are reaching round-numbered anniversaries in 2023. It’s a feature we call IT HAPPENS IN THREES. This month’s three-sided salute is to 1983, and by way of wishing that deceptively successful last-place outfit a happy 40th anniversary, I thought I’d share a textual excerpt from the show, focusing specifically on the Sunday I’ve always considered the pivot point of not only that season, but the decade at large. For the generation of Mets fans who had muddled through the previous six years, the day in question — July 31, 1983 — was not only a blast in the moment, it lives on in memory as the beacon of light that directed us toward better times.

***The 1983 Mets upended their present in the Sunday Banner Day doubleheader that set off this stretch of crackling, competent baseball. Their opponents were the Pirates, in their last throes as a reliable NL East contender. The first inning of the first game was pure 1983 as we’d resigned ourselves to knowing it, with Walt Terrell giving up a single, a single, a walk and, with nowhere to put him, a grand slam to Jason Thompson. Frank Howard removed Terrell, brought in Scott Holman, and hoped for the best…not that the Mets nor their fans had any clue what that looked like. Holman held the Pirates at bay through the fifth, but Pittsburgh extended its lead to 6-1 by the sixth, and the banner parade was poised to be a march of forced frivolity.

Yet in the seventh inning, Mookie Wilson drove in a run, and in the eighth, Keith Hernandez and George Foster delivered back-to-back home runs, setting up a four-run inning that tied the game at six. Jesse Orosco, Neil Allen’s successor as closer and the Mets’ only All-Star earlier in the month, entered to start the ninth and kept pitching as if the banner-wavers weren’t getting antsy to display their works of art. Jesse pitched the ninth. And the tenth. And the eleventh. And the twelfth. And he gave up no runs. Neither did anybody on the Pirates until the bottom of the twelfth, which saw Darryl Strawberry single, second baseman Brian Giles single, utilityman Tucker Ashford walk, and SUPER utilityman Bob Bailor drive in Strawberry with the winning run. Remarkably, the Mets had won after trailing by four after four batters.

More remarkably? It wasn’t the best Met win of the doubleheader.

The Mets celebrated their opener, the fans marched jubilantly — the winning banner proclaimed the Mets “Take a Licking, Keep on Ticking” — and Game Two commenced with Mike Torrez on the mound. Perhaps as if to make up for the TEN walks he issued in Cincinnati a week-and-a-half before, Torrez threw ELEVEN shutout innings in the nightcap. That would indicate the Mets were in extras. Indeed, Torrez was matched inning for inning and zero for zero by Pirate starter Jose DeLeon, who was not only shutting out the Mets, he was no-hitting them. Not until Hubie Brooks singled with one out in the ninth had the Mets pierced the “H” column on the Shea scoreboard…though an instant later, Hernandez erased all that progress on a double play grounder.

Kent Tekulve took over for DeLeon in the tenth and the Mets continued to be stymied. After Torrez gave the last of his all — no Met starting pitcher would EVER again go eleven innings — Frank Howard turned to his Game One workhorse Orosco to keep Game Two going. Jesse shut down Pittsburgh in the top of the twelfth, setting the stage for the bottom of the twelfth, the signature half-inning of the season, and perhaps the overture for the era to come.

Facing Manny Sarmiento, Mookie Wilson singles. Hubie bunts Mookie to second. Chuck Tanner, manager of the Pirates, orders Sarmiento to intentionally walk Hernandez, setting up a double play possibility. It’s possible, but it’s also Mookie out there on second. Beware, Chuck Tanner! George Foster seems to cooperate, with a ground ball to second. Keith is forced, but the man we’ll soon be calling Mex slides hard into shortstop Dale Berra; Foster is running just as hard to first; and Mookie — with third base coach Bobby Valentine’s blessing — is flying toward home. Foster beats Berra’s Hernandez-compromised relay, while Mookie just keeps on comin’.

Wilson is a blur.

The 4-6-3 DP fails to materialize.

Mookie crosses the plate with the winning run in the SECOND twelve-inning win of the afternoon-turned-evening and present-turned-past. The Mets have done more than sweep the Pirates. They have, after being stuck in the same gloomy chapter of their lives since 1977, turned the page toward tomorrow.

The winning pitcher twice was Jesse Orosco, marking the first time a Met pitcher had won two games in one day since Willard Hunter in 1964. Jesse was so pumped that he declared in the postgame euphoria, “I’m ready to pitch a third.” Howard took him up on the offer as best he could. In the 14-game span that had just begun, Orosco would pitch nine times, every occasion a Met victory. Jesse earned five wins and four saves, propelling him toward a third-place finish in the NL Cy Young voting — pretty good for a relief pitcher from a last-place team.

The two weeks that were underway would be chock full of statistical and anecdotal delights. Mookie now had a signature play, and he trotted it out again, against Montreal, three days after the doubleheader. Same deal: Mookie scored from second on a potential double play grounder to win the game. Mookie on the run was already a familiar sight to Mets fans. The entire baseball-loving universe would see the difference Wilson’s wheels could make to a game’s outcome soon enough.

You can listen to the full 1983 segment and entire episode here or on your podcast platform of choice. You are also cordially invited catch up with National League Town’s previous IT HAPPENS IN THREES salutes to 1963 (from this April) and 1973 (from this May).