Words: Russ Bengston
Sports? In Mass Appeal? You damn right. Because this is New York, people. And as the current Mets blaze through the National League, it’s a good as time as any to remember their illest predecessors. The World Champion 1986 Mets were bad. Not bad meaning bad, as another famous group from Queens once said, but bad meaning good. Kings from Queens who were raising hell. They played hard and partied harder, demolishing their opponents—and sometimes themselves. They were undoubtedly the best Mets team ever, and arguably the best New York baseball team of the modern era. They were one of a kind. Hard to believe it’s been 20 years.
And I was there. Not for the final celebration, unfortunately, when lefty reliever Jesse Orosco struck out Red Sox shortstop Marty Barrett for the final out of Game 7 of the World Series and launched his glove into orbit (if you watch the television replays, you never see it come back down), but I was at games that summer. And the summer before, and the summer before that, and so on, and so on. I only saw the finale on TV, but it was enough. More than enough. I’d waited a long time for this.
I was born in April of 1971, two years after the Miracle Mets won the championship in ’69. And make no mistake, I was born a Mets fan. My parents were Brooklyn Dodgers fans who adopted the Mets when they were established in ’62. And while I don’t remember the first Mets game I attended (although it was probably batting helmet day), I do have vivid memories of closely reading Newsday box scores, staying awake for Kiner’s Korner (announcer Ralph Kiner’s postgame interview show on WOR 9), and collecting the entire 1977 Topps team set—Bob Apodaca, John Stearns, Felix Millan, Dave Kingman. Household names. Well, at least in my house.
Here’s the thing. The Mets may have been great when I was born, but by the time I was old enough to pay attention, they sucked. Bad. And to make matters worse, most of my friends were Yankee fans. They had the names—Guidry, Nettles, Reg-gie—and the success, winning the World Series in 1977 and 1978 after losing to the Big Red Machine in 1976. Meanwhile, in 1977, the Mets traded Tom Seaver, their best pitcher in history, to the Cincinnati Reds for Pat Zachry, Joel Youngblood, Doug Flynn and Dan Norman. This was not a good move.
Time passed. The Mets continued to lose 90-plus games a year like clockwork, topping out at 99 in 1979. The names changed, but the results stayed pretty much the same. Erratic (in every sense of the word) slugger Dave Kingman was replaced by George Foster, who wielded a sinister black bat, wore even more sinister sideburns, and hit 52 homers in 1977 for the Cincinnati Reds. In New York he was known more for the size of his then-outlandish $2 million a year contract—at one game my parents and I sat near a drunk who kept yelling “Show ’em your wallet, George!” Not to say they were a bad team to support. Guys signed autographs before and after games, and when I mailed a baseball card to Shea to get signed by pitcher Terry Leach, he sent back three.
But then things started to change. General manager Frank Cashen brought up scrappy minor leaguers like Lenny Dykstra and Wally Backman, drafted can’t miss prospects like Dwight Gooden and Darryl Strawberry, and traded for All-Star veterans like Gary Carter and Keith Hernandez. It was the ’80s, the age of excess. Gordon Gekko and Run-D.M.C., satin jackets and mustaches, gold teeth, gold chains and cocaine. And the Mets—the lowly fucking Mets—they fit right in.
And they started to win. In ’83, the Mets lost 94 games. In ’84, Gooden’s rookie year, they won 90. In ’85, they barely missed the playoffs, just losing out to the St. Louis Cardinals. And at the start of the ’86 season, they were out for blood. Manager Davey Johnson laid it right out on the first day of spring training. “We’re not just going to win, we’re going to win big,” he said. “We’re going to dominate.”
In a sense, they were already the kings of New York, despite the Giants Super Bowl victory and the emergence of a young heavyweight champion from Brooklyn by the name of Mike Tyson. After being outdrawn by the Yankees from ’76 to ’83, the Mets had taken back the attendance crown in ’84 (and wouldn’t relinquish it until ’93). Straw and Doc had been back-to-back Rookie of the Year winners and were on their way to being perennial All-Stars. Hernandez and Carter already were. It was their turn. My turn.
Baseball was different then. Forget steroids and HGH, players were fueled by cigarettes and beer, amphetamines and pussy. The team’s most hardcore partiers dubbed themselves “The Scum Bunch,” and occasionally arrived hungover for games like a batch of modern-day Mickey Mantles. And the Mets were at the forefront on all counts.
At the plate, it all started with Mookie Wilson, Backman and Dykstra, a trio of jittery undersized speedsters who got on base by any means necessary—walks, bunts, slap hits. Once on, they were terrors on the basepaths, paving the way for the potent bats of Hernandez, Carter, Strawberry and Ray Knight. (Foster wasn’t around for the entire season—hitting 50 points below his career average, he was released in August). Wilson actually missed the first half of the season with an eye injury, so it was mostly Backman and Dykstra, the sliding, diving, dirty-uniformed demons. Then again, as great as the hitting was, it was the pitching that really stood out. The 21-year-old gold-toothed Gooden led a staff of young arms—Ron Darling, Sid Fernandez, Bobby Ojeda, Rick Aguilera, Roger McDowell and Jesse Orosco—who all got the job done. With 108 regular-season wins (a percentage of .6667, appropriately enough), there was plenty to go around.
And as much as the Mets were loved in the Metropolitan area, they were hated everywhere else. It wasn’t just that they ran away with the Eastern Division, winning by 21 1/2 games and clinching a playoff spot by the middle of September. It was the way they won. They came from behind 39 times, scored four or more runs in an inning 36 times. And they did it at home or on the road. They were the New York fucking Mets. Arrogant to a fault. They’d beat you in your own park, close down your bar, and go home with your girls. (Four of them managed to get arrested in Houston for the basic crime of being the Mets.) They even made a damn music video. And they won at everything, even brawls. Benches cleared four times that season—the most memorable when Eric Davis of the Reds slid hard into third, popping up directly into Knight’s face. Knight, a former Golden Gloves boxer, took offense, drilling Davis with a hard right to the chin. The fight was over before it started. Make no mistake, the Mets were bad motherfuckers—from hard-drinking manager Davey Johnson all the way to jheri-curled rookie Kevin Mitchell, a seven-position player nicknamed “World” who came with a bullet in his back (courtesy of an upbringing in gang-infested San Diego) and an attitude to match. “The thing about that club in ’86,” Dykstra once said, “was that everybody contributed.”
Still, making the Series wasn’t exactly a given. They had to get past the Houston Astros in the LCS, led by former Met pitchers Nolan Ryan and Mike Scott. The Mets didn’t exactly dominate—in fact, they hit an anemic .189 for the series (Scott proving particularly unhittable)—but they still managed to win in six games, winning three of the four in their final at-bat. The gritty Backman set up two of those situations, once with a bunt single and a stolen base, then with a hard single off the third baseman’s glove and a wild pitch. They were in the World Series.
The thing is, teams like the ’86 Mets aren’t supposed to win. They were the 2000 Portland Trail Blazers, the Oakland Raiders of the early ’70s. Bad guys rarely finish first. And the way things started against the Red Sox, it didn’t look like they were going to this time, either. The Mets lost the first two games at home, immediately putting themselves in a hole. But they always came back. Always fought. They won the next two at Fenway, evening the series.
But after losing in Game 5, they found themselves down to their last strike in Game 6, trailing the Sox by two. Keith Hernandez, who had made the second out of the inning, retired to Johnson’s office with a cold Bud to watch the end on TV. He couldn’t bear to see the Sox celebrate at Shea. Sox pitcher Bruce Hurst had been already named MVP, champagne was on ice in the visiting clubhouse—the scoreboard even flashed the message “Congratulations Red Sox.”
But it didn’t end. Carter ripped a single, and Mitchell—who had to be pulled from the phone where he was arranging a flight back to San Diego—smacked a pinch-hit single of his own. Knight drove in Carter with another single, and a wild pitch to Mookie Wilson—who already had two strikes—allowed Mitch to score the tying run. Knight advanced to second.
Then, the play. Wilson hacked a grounder up the first-base line. Sox first baseman Bill Buckner, playing deep on bad knees and ankles, came over to make the play and watched helplessly as the ball rolled past his glove and through his legs. Knight scored the winning run, and there was a Game 7.
After a one-day rain delay, would-be MVP Hurst got a third start, but it wasn’t to be. The Sox took a 3-0 lead in the second, but lost it in the sixth. Hurst was pulled, and that was all. The Mets added three more in the seventh, and Strawberry—who’d had a lousy postseason—capped it with a monster home run in the eighth. Jesse Orosco, who’d ended the LCS by striking out Kevin Bass, ended the World Series by striking out Marty Barrett. Glove launched, series over, championship won. Cue the champagne, trophy presentation, all that. “We deserved it,” said Johnson. “We had the best record in baseball, we should be the World Champs. The good guys got it.”
Back in suburban Long Island, ecstasy. My team had won the World Series! The ultimate bragging rights were finally mine—and I felt like I had really earned them. Like I was a part of the team. After all, I’d been there every excruciating step of the way. And this was only the beginning.
Yeah, right. The beginning of the end. Gooden missed the following day’s tickertape parade, the first overt sign of the cocaine habit that would cause him to miss a good portion of the ’87 season (and derail his entire career). Knight, a free-agent-to-be who was named MVP of the World Series, wasn’t re-signed, and he joined the Orioles. And Mitchell, the versatile young slugger, was traded to the Padres before the start of the ’87 season. The Mets would-be dynasty was already over. They wouldn’t win another World Series, and none of the ’86 team would retire as Mets. To this day, none of their numbers have been retired. And baseball would never mean the same thing to me, either.
August 19th, 2006. A rainy day at Shea, and the first day since October 27th, 1986, that the World Champion Mets would be celebrated. Despite the lousy weather, the stands are full, the reception warm. Time has given new perspective, and after the near-misses in ’88 and ’00, the ’86 team has become bigger than they ever were. One after one, the players are introduced—older, fatter and greyer, but the same at heart. Mookie Wilson, who spent the most time in a Mets uniform before ’86, is greeted by lusty “Mooooooo”s, and the cheering increases as the final players are introduced. Carter. Hernandez. And finally Strawberry, who emerges from the stands to the chants of “Daaaaa-ryl!” He hugs Hernandez, acknowledges the crowd with tears in his eyes. Knight isn’t there. Neither is Johnson, who’s off managing some team or another. And no Gooden either. He’s in jail.
Mets announcer Gary Cohen sums it up. “This was a team that not only won, they won in dominating fashion, they won in your face, they made a lot of enemies in the National League.”
“A team, a time and a town have never been more perfectly matched.”
