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.
Wednesday, January 1? Technically, maybe, but irrelevant.
The day in February when they reported? Heartening, but we’re talking mostly calisthenics at this point, and stretching is a stretch.
First exhibition game in early March? It didn’t count.
How about Tuesday, April 8? Opening Night. Can’t say it didn’t count, it did. Still does, but that’s not quite it either.
By my calculations, 1986 didn’t really become 1986, not the way we think of 1986, until Friday, April 18.
That was the night the Mets of 1986 turned into the 1986 Mets and made 1986 the year that stops us in our tracks when we hear it mentioned, regardless of context. That’s when 1986 became 1986 in the way that 1969 had always been 1969, the way 1973 was 1973, the way 1985 never quite made it to being 1985. That was the night everything we have come to associate with the greatest year in the history of the franchise began to coalesce into one beautiful, bulging parcel of baseball magnificence.
Friday, April 18 was the night the Mets beat the Phillies, 5-2. It was satisfying enough. It put Ron Darling in the win column for the first time all year. It saddled Steve Carlton with the 35th of 36 losses he’d absorb at the hands of the Mets on his otherwise illustrious dossier. It marked the Major League debut of the unfortunately named Philadelphia utility infielder Greg Legg (so glad I wasn’t in elementary school when this occurred). It was presumably a good time for the majority of the 26,906 who paid their way into Shea Stadium. Most importantly, it boosted our record to 3-3.
That’s right. For the first, last and only time in 1986, we climbed to .500. We stayed there just long enough to wipe our feet on its WELCOME mat.
Mets fans figured this moment, the great launch, was coming. Our entire offseason was based on it. Our tongues hung out in anticipation of it. But when it begins in earnest, we don’t necessarily know what we’ve got. It was just a 5-2 win that snapped a three-game losing streak, the first game we got to play in four days after a nasty spell of wet weather. Yet we can now say with the certainty of Agee-HoJo hindsight that April 18, 1986 was the date on which we departed the cusp of becoming the best team in all of baseball and actually started being it.
It was just one game, but then there was another, the very next day, Saturday, April 19. Greg Legg sat it out. Greg Gross pinch-hit and walked. Greg Prince was utterly delighted as he watched Doc Gooden strike out ten Phillies who didn’t share either of our first names. I wasn’t all that surprised and I’m guessing neither was he when, with the score knotted at two in the bottom of the eighth, Davey Johnson let his starter lead off. Doc could hit, and even if he couldn’t (and this time he didn’t), he could pitch. Why take him out? Gooden popped up, but Kevin Mitchell, batting first in the order for the first time in his career — and starting a big league game for the first time since his 1984 cup of Sanka (when he hit a weak .214 and spent all of ’85 on the farm) — singled. Tim Teufel didn’t do anything, but Keith Hernandez singled Mitchell to second. Steve Bedrosian replaced Shane Rawley. Gary Carter let out a big smile at John Felske’s maneuver, singling Mitch home. Doc came out for the ninth and, despite the walk to Gross, finished things off. Mets win 3-2. Now they’re over .500.
Sunday, April 20 saw Greg Legg and Greg Gross both get chances against Sid Fernandez. Sorry Gregs, you’re on your own. Four in the first (including three on a Danny Heep homer) was all El Sid needed.
An 8-0 win before the home folks.
A weekend sweep in Queens.
Three in a row with the Pirates coming in.
For all their advances, the Mets were only in third place. Recall, if you will, that we were scuffling when the week began, succumbing to St. Louis in the Home Opener, falling into (eek!) fifth place after five games. Then, as the rains wiped out the rest of that series, an unyielding front of naysaying drenched New York, pouring doubts that maybe these Mets, runners-up in ’84 and ’85, weren’t that good after all.
Could our season really be in ruins so soon? All based on the small sample provided by the unfortunate events Monday, April 14? It was six days later and the Mets had strung three wins together, yet had picked up but one length on the first-place Cardinals — just that Sunday, in fact. The Red Nemesis lost 2-0 in Montreal, as two Expos with impeccable pedigrees, Herm Winningham and Hubie Brooks, scored the only runs of the game in the home eighth. Now they, the Cardinals, were 7-2 and we, the Mets, were 5-3. The incoming Pirates, for the moment, stood between us at 6-2.
These were not yet the Pirates of Barry Bonds (brought up: May 30), Bobby Bonilla (traded for: July 23) or any of the battlin’ Buccos who would seize the East in the early ’90s. These were the Pirates of Lee Mazzilli and Bill Almon and Slammin’ Sammy Khalifa (how’d we miss him?). This was unknown manager Jim Leyland’s first opportunity to show his stuff. Maybe it was the night he took up smoking.
Monday night, April 21 was cold enough to hold attendance to Shea’s ’86-lowest, a little over 10,000 — or more than 30,000 fewer than had been in the house the beautiful Sunday before. Leyland’s Pirates, however, seemed prepared to give the Mets the kind of hot foot Chuck Tanner’s band of merry pranksters had lit the September before when they won several contests they had no logical business winning. Pittsburgh was as dreadful a reason as any that the Mets hadn’t caught the Cardinals in ’85: Pittsburgh won 57 of 161 games, yet eight of eighteen from the Mets. No great surprise, then, that the Pitts carried a 4-2 lead into the bottom of the eighth. We were used to their uncooperative, bottom-feeding ways.
But 1985, for all its charms, was over. This was 1986. This was the year the Mets didn’t screw around with last-place teams anymore. This was the year Ray Knight didn’t bat .218, didn’t look finished, didn’t get booed like his middle name was Siskdeñotsui. With two out, Cecilio Guante walked George Foster. “Big deal,” he must have thought. “I’m facing Ray Knight.”
But facing Ray Knight was becoming a very big deal in 1986. In the season’s ninth game, which he’d finish batting .391, the third baseman smacked his third home run of the season, or half as many as he had accumulated in all of ’85. The game was tied at four. Pirates being Pirates, they scratched out a run off of Roger McDowell to take back the lead (Joe Orsulak singling in Mazzilli in what now seems like a cosmic gag but then wasn’t terribly amusing). “Big deal,” the ’86 Mets must have thought. “We’re facing the Pirates.” Pat Clements came into pitch to no particular effect. Teufel would drive in Dykstra and Carter would plate Teufel and years before the term gained currency, the Mets would have celebrate their first walkoff win of the season.
We were now tied with Pittsburgh for second, one in back of the idle Cardinals.
The next night, Tuesday, April 22, it rained on Bob Ojeda, but having been beaten out of starts by precipitation in the preceding weeks, nothing but a man-eating (or Coleman-eating) tarpaulin was going to stop him from taking the ball for his new club. They played through the raindrops and Ojeda came out dry as a stone. We didn’t know this fellow very well, having been enamored of our young guns Gooden, Darling, Fernandez and Aguilera. Ojeda was a few years older. He’d been around with Boston; who knew what went on up there? But tentative fifth starter Bob Ojeda immediately became go-to guy Bobby O against the Bucs, throwing seven frames of four-hit ball. The Mets scored in each of the first five innings, ensuring the lefty a decision.
Score? Mets 7 Pirates 1.
Homestand? 5-1.
Winning streak? Five.
Cardinals? Lost in Chicago in the ninth on a walk, a passed ball, a sac bunt, a fielder’s choice gone awry, an intentional walk and a Ryne Sandberg sac fly. Whitey Herzog’s team was beaten in a walkoff in the kind of inning Whitey’s teams usually sprung on other poor suckers. Why, this sort of setback hadn’t befallen them since the ninth inning of the sixth game of the previous fall’s World Series in Kansas City when they were two tantalizing outs and one disputed call away from a championship that never came. The Cardinals lost Game Six and then lost Game Seven and now had lost two in a row for the first time since. The 3-2 Cubs’ win forged a two-way tie atop the National League East between us and our tormentors of record.
The next day, Wednesday, April 23, while the Mets traveled to meet them in St. Louis, the Cards were again kicked to the Waveland Avenue curb, 6-0, dropping their record to 7-4. Taking this third consecutive loss for the Redbirds was Rick Ownbey, making the second-to-last start of his career. Rick Ownbey’s first start had been four years earlier as a mildly touted Met. The next June he was traded with Neil Allen for Keith Hernandez. Ownbey’s lifetime record would wind up 3-11, which, if you glance at it quickly, looks a lot like Keith Hernandez’s batting average at any given Met moment in ’84, ’85 or ’86. That trade sure seemed like a long time ago.
Same could be said for the Home Opener that supposedly revealed some fatal flaw in the Mets…the same Mets who were now 7-3 and all alone in first place.
The Mets of 1986 had been written off prematurely and swept the Phillies.
The Mets of 1986 faced a painful Pittsburgh reminder of their 1985 shortcomings and dispatched it and Pitt with flair, then ease.
The Mets of 1986 were now the 1986 Mets. They were hot, they held a lead and they were headed for Busch Stadium.
This was gonna get good.
We may be the last Metsian blog to plug this thing, and judging by our in-box, where five thoughtful e-mails alerting us to it sit, everybody else in the world knows about it already. But if you’re still in the dark, check out what can only be called an unreal re-enactment of the greatest moment in all of human history.
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