I was a ten year old kid in thrall to baseball during the Impossible Dream year. Ah, to be that young again! As for 1986 - I feel directly responsible for the debacle. I was watching the sixth game and feeling confident that Red Sox would soon be triumphant. Then a college buddy who was working in New York called me to let me know he had secured tickets for him and me to see Game 7, if such an eventuality were necessary. At that moment, the kharma was broken - my Red Sox loyalties were compromised by the thought that a loss would let me see the ultimate game. And of course that ball got past Bill Buckner and I knew we had no chance. Game 7 was foreordained before it began.
I recall that winter, and the agony felt by the unfortunate Mr. Buckner. I recall the tale that, despondent at his buzzard's luck, he had jumped in front of a subway train. Of course, it went through his legs.
@Jazzhead Whether or not Game Seven of the 1986 World Series was foreordained, the fact that there
was a seventh game should have been in the Red Sox's favour---particularly with the rainout pushing the game back a day and allowing Red Sox manager John McNamara to start his best postseason pitcher, Bruce Hurst, who'd been hamstringing the Mets' largely lefthanded front-line lineups. Until the Mets tied the game in the sixth, no one could have expected Hurst to run out of fuel; or, that Calvin Schiraldi, the Red Sox closer brought in to relieve Hurst for the seventh inning, would turn out to be a nervous wreck. (He'd had a couple of looks with the Mets before being dealt to the Red Sox in the Bob Ojeda trade, and the Mets proved to have had deep questions about Schiraldi's makeup: he was thought to be a lazy worker between pitching appearances despite having good stuff. The Red Sox sent him to Pawtucket and brought him up in August and turned to him as their closer, which he did well until the postseason proved too big for him too soon.)
One thing that ended up hurting the Red Sox: their one viable lefthanded relief pitcher, Sammy Stewart, got into McNamara's doghouse unfairly, when he was late for the team bus months earlier---because he'd been delayed from the hospital where he was visiting his sick son (cystic fibrosis, from which the boy eventually died in 1991) and argued with the team traveling secretary over it: the bus pulled away while Stewart was parking his car. Stewart never got a postseason look that year and it cost the Red Sox dearly when they had no solid lefthanded relief options (Al Nipper proved to be dead meat to the Mets) to stop the Mets.
The real X-factor in the game: Mets lefthander Sid Fernandez, moved to the bullpen for the World Series and shutting the Red Sox offense down for two and a third including four strikeouts, giving the Mets room to tie the game while the score was still low. And once the Mets were into the Red Sox bullpen---which lacked depth, consistency, and lefthanded pitching---it was no contest.
Buckner also knew something much forgotten when Mookie Wilson rapped the ill-fated grounder: Wilson had the play beaten at first base, with Buckner having been playing toward the outfield grass and Red Sox reliever Bob Stanley not being swift enough off the mound to cover first in time to get the out. The best-case scenario for the Red Sox on that play would have been first and third and two out---with Howard Johnson on deck for the Mets and about to come into his own as one of the National League's premier power hitters. (He had his breakout season in 1987.)
