By Yours Truly
http://throneberryfields.com/2016/05/27/you-cant-and-shouldnt-forget-the-86-mets-no-matter-how-hard-you-try/Their 30th anniversary seems to be more sober than an awful lot of the team was. But Allen Barra
is right. Three
decades ago, the New York Mets steamrolled the National League on the regular season, then wrung their way
through to a World Series triumph the hard way, against a pair of tough enough teams from Houston and Boston.
There was and remains nothing wrong with that. There was nothing like a pair of hair-raising postseason sets to
remind people that even teams as good as those Mets have to work, good and hard, for their prizes.
Yet for many years it seemed as though even Met fans, often enough, saw the 1986 edition as the black sheep of
the family. They may or may not be the only World Series winner ever to sit in that questionable position.
With their randy on- and off-field styles alike those Mets did drive the rest of baseball nuts, and I admit that “randy”
may be the most polite way possible of phrasing it. What really drove New York nuts about the 1986 Mets, what
really left New York unable to know just how to commemorate them, wasn’t their wild, whacky, wicked ways. I think
it was because the Mets of the mid-1980s were the dynasty that never happened.
What a difference a little over two quarter centuries make. The Mets were born, so it seemed, as a comic
improvisational troupe who happened to play baseball (if that’s the word for it) while they were at it. At age eight
they won a miracle pennant and World Series and became national darlings. (From your ancient history: the
Baltimore Oriole who flied out to left to end that Series with New York going insane was Davey Johnson, future
Mets manager and ’86 World Series winner.)
Four years after that, they were still somewhat darling even as they were picking themselves up from the National
League East’s floorboards, dusting themselves off, rallying around a beloved mascot of a manager (Yogi Berra: “It
isn’t over until it’s over”) and flaky relief pitcher’s clubhouse sarcasm following a forlorn general manager’s rah-rah
speech. (“You gotta believe!!!”) In the final month they upended a weak NL East, upended the Big Red Machine in
the National League Championship Series, and got to within late in a seventh game of upending the Mustache Gang
Athletics, in the only World Series in which those A’s would
need a seventh game to prevail.
Ten years later, having been reduced to losers who were about as comic as open heart surgery, a new general
manager, Frank Cashen, who’d already planted a gigaprospect named Darryl Strawberry in the system, swung a
deal with the St. Louis Cardinals to acquire a multitalented but troubled first baseman who’d already been a batting
champion and co-Most Valuable Player. Keith Hernandez had to be brought kicking and screaming to New York.
Once he got there, however, he got a taste of the city and the team’s intend that he be their new foundation. Which
is exactly what he was.
The 1986 Mets played in the twenty-fifth year of the team’s existence. Even their worst enemies seemed to agree
that the dynasty launching in earnest in 1986 should have happened. It only began when Cardinals manager Whitey
Herzog, who ran Hernandez out of St. Louis over the first baseman’s cocaine use, and who wasn’t exactly a fan of
the Mets as that deal began to make them, dared to enunciate, early in 1986, “Nobody is going to beat the Mets.”
Well, now. The Astros got
thisclose to doing it in the National League Championship Series. The Boston Red Sox
got even closer in the World Series, a strike away from doing what the White Rat said nobody was going to do. Those
two clubs may—may—have been the only clubs in the Show that year capable of beating those Mets. The Mets ended
up beating them on the field. (Red Sox manager John McNamara, immortally:
We lost Game Six, but they won Game
Seven.) Unfortunately, the Mets ended up beating themselves in the aftermath. Dwight Gooden’s shocking absence
from the World Series victory parade—
he admitted in due course he was so wasted over from a long night’s partying
after Game Seven was in the bank that he didn’t want anyone to see humble, meek Dr. K. in that kind of shape—was
only the first self-inflicted blow.
Beginning in 1984, the Mets began a surge that included two straight close second-place finishes in the National League
East, and climaxed with a 108-54 regular-season 1986. From 1987-1991, five seasons in which the should-have-been
dynastic team was disassembled, little by little, the Mets won one more division title, finished second three times, and
then collapsed to fifth in the last of those seasons. They lost a 1988 National League Championship Series to a lesser
team of Los Angeles Dodgers after winning 100 games on the season. That was the second and final time they’d win
more than 92 games in the span. They finished 1991 with a 77-84 record, 20.5 games back of the division-winning
Pittsburgh Pirates . . . which was one game closer to the Pirates than the ’86 Mets finished ahead of the second-place
Philadelphia Phillies.
Twenty-five years after the 1986 conquest, even New York still wondered what happened to those Mets without
particularly showing much interest in commemorating their staggering triumph. Barra, in his splendid
Clearing the
Bases, made a particular point:
Try looking at the ’86 Mets as the 1955 Brooklyn Dodgers in reverse. The Dodgers of that era featured several
future Hall of Famers . . . and several near-misses. (Certainly Don Newcombe would have been a likely candidate
if not for two prime years lost to the Army, or several seasons lost later to a losing battle with alcoholism, and Gil
Hodges has his defenders and always will) but could never quite win the big one (that is, they couldn’t beat the
Yankees). When they finally did in 1955, the victory had an autumnal flavour to it, and not just because it was
October. In little more than a year, the team was broken up and in two the franchise would be forever relocated.
The Mets . . . also had numerous Hall of Fame candidates or players that looked as if they would be, and a fine,
proven manager in Davey Johnson to guide them. Unlike the Jackie Robinson Dodgers, though, the ’86 Mets
won it all relatively early in what should have been the prime years of their best players. Then they began, season
by season, to fall apart, until, by 1991, the dream was gone. They didn’t lose their best players to free agency,
either. They lost them to . . . life.
It may only have begun with Darryl Strawberry and Dwight Gooden, those two larger-than-life talents who turned
out to be larger-than-life troubled and self-destructive young men. But it was absolutely unfair for then-general
manager Frank Cashen to throw them under the proverbial bus, as he did when talking to Jeff Pearlman for
The
Bad Guys Won, the best single-volume study of the 1986 Mets, and blame them almost entirely for the team’s
undoing.
I built the goddamned team, and I built it around those guys . . . That club should have won for the next three or
four seasons without fail. Those two men let not only themselves down but the teams and the fans of New York.
That team was destined to be a dynasty. Maybe I take this too personally, but in my opinion those two men cost
us years of success.
Nobody says Strawberry’s and Gooden’s substance abuse didn’t have an impact on the team.
Nobody suggests
Strawberry’s concurrent personality issues didn’t, either.
Nobody would suggest the jolt of Gooden landing in the
Smithers Alcoholism and Drug Treatment Center a week before the 1987 season was to begin, or Strawberry’s
inability to handle his early and explosive fame, didn’t, either. (
It was just a huge setback. It just wasn’t the same
feeling in the clubhouse. We still had chances to win but the swagger was missing. Some of the magic was gone.—Gary Carter.)
But it was not Strawberry’s or Gooden’s fault that Gary Carter, the most obvious Hall of Famer in waiting when he
arrived in spring 1985 (in a deal with the Montreal Expos), turned out to have only three good seasons from there
left in his wearing-down body.
It was not their fault that Hernandez—who certainly did look like a Hall of Famer n the making, and was probably the
best defensive first baseman the game had seen in years, to the point where opposing managers even refused to
bunt against his teams; who’d cleaned up from his drug issues—would be shaved down in what still should have
been a few more prime seasons by back, knee, and hamstring issues, before he was allowed to leave via free agency
after 1989—the day before the Mets let Carter go.
Whose bright idea was it to tell Gooden in spring training 1986 that, in effect, his explosively riding fastball and
voluptuous curve (
Lord Charles, Mets announcers called it, which Gooden loved) were insufficient; that a pitcher
who already knew what he was doing on the mound needed more repertoire
after he’d just spent two seasons absolutely
burying the league, in the second of which he was the pitching triple crown winner and the National League’s overwhelming
Cy Young Award winner? Gooden became a mess of shot confidence who won seventeen and struck out 200 more on
reputation than repertoire in 1986. (Who’s to say whether that shot confidence didn’t send him from the seduction to
the complete vise-like grip of cocaine? Gooden would still be a
good pitcher for years enough, but he would never
solidify as the great pitcher he began as being, in the meantime picking up a passel of shoulder injuries that helped
keep him from returning to absolute greatness.
I don’t recall seeing where either Gooden or Strawberry caused Ron Darling—who lookedl ike a comer and pitched
like one until 1988—would lose his fastball while acquiring too much taste for the bright lights (so it was whispered),
not to mention battling his manager almost constantly over his tendency to overthink on the mound.
It wasn’t Gooden’s or Strawberry’s bright idea that Sid Fernandez—a lefthanded pitcher
nobody could hit (his lifetime
batting average against: .209—
.209!), who probably saved the 1986 Series for them (moved to the bullpen for the set,
he pitched lights out in his assignments, especially his complete shutdown of the Red Sox in Game Seven: four
punchouts in two and a third)—should compile a career in which he was just 114-96 and averaged barely six innings
pitched per game, traceable almost entirely to his terrible conditioning.
Neither did Gooden and/or Strawberry arrange for Bob Ojeda—who might have been their best 1986 pitcher (2.57 ERA;
league-leading .783 winning percentage; team-leading 18 wins)—to lose a fingertip in a horrid home gardening accident
after 1988 and never again be the same pitcher (good-to-borderline-great).
Gooden and Strawberry didn’t plan Jesse Orosco’s aftermath, either. Orosco looked like he’d become one of the greatest
relief pitchers the game ever knew. His ERAs in his first five seasons were never higher than 2.73, and he finished one of
those seasons with a 1.47 mark. He had 44 relief wins and 91 saves by 1986′s ends, and they weren’t all single-inning
jobs, either. He would have nine saves only once in any season to follow, and a mere 40-37 won-lost record from 1986-
2000. Orosco proved durable and useful, but he never again looked like a truly great reliever.
Never once did Lenny Dykstra credit or blame Gooden and/or Strawberry for any of his problems, and he had some
beauties. He’d follow 1986 bedeviled by a combination of injuries and inconsistency (including the damn fool idea that
he should become a power hitter, based on his bursts in the 1986 postseason), until the Mets traded him to the Phillies
(with Roger McDowell, the prankish co-closer on the ’86 Mets) for Juan Samuel. It turned out to be an ugly deal for the
Mets, until further injuries and recklessness finished Dykstra following a brief ascension (and a World Series appearance)
as a Phillie.
Howard Johnson—a spare part in 1986, who came into his own the following season and was one of the National
League’s most feared hitters from 1987-91—dropped out of sight completely at the plate after that. Neither he nor
anyone else around the team suggested Gooden and/or Strawberry had anything to do with that.
And I’m pretty sure Gooden and Strawberry never once suggested the front office should use their well-rebuilt minor
league system to develop more trading chips than staying Mets, while making what Gooden would call “too many trades
for guys who are used to getting their asses kicked. The guys who used to snap—Wally (Backman), Lenny, Ray (Knight),
Keith, (Kevin) Mitch(ell)—they’re gone.”
Gooden and Strawberry never even thought about unloading live-wire middle infielder Backman to open an infield
home for superprospect Gregg Jefferies—a superprospect who turned out ill-prepared for the majors despite his
staggering minor league papers. (
[A]n outcast because he was an arrogant kid who thought he was better than
everyone else—Roger McDowell.) Jefferies occasionally looked like the hitter he was projected to be but chafed under
bloated expectations (he’d admit in due course he was bothered by frequent comparisons to Mickey Mantle), refused
coaching from anyone other than his father, and became a mess. He had to leave the Mets in a trade, after he’d turned
the 1989-91 Met clubhouse into a mine field, in order to play serviceably, even competently, if nowhere near his promise
as the best minor league prospect of the 1980s.
Neither Gooden nor Strawberry would have unloaded talented 1986 rookie Kevin Mitchell—a future MVP and home
run champion, who wasn’t anywhere near the worst of the 1986 Mets—in favour of the talented but indifferent Kevin
McReynolds when the World Series triumph was still so fresh. (
McReynolds brought nothing to our club. He didn’t
want to be there, so it didn’t matter to him. And Mitch, for all his faults, always wanted to be there. He was an intense
ballplayer.—Bob Ojeda.) Mitchell’s hard, sometimes thuggish ghetto boyhood made the Mets’ brass a little too nervous
about his prospective influence, ignoring that he was actually one of the clean Mets, a rookie clubhouse favourite
known for giving competent haircuts to his teammates.
And they wouldn’t have cold-shouldered Ray Knight after the ’86 Series, despite a solid comeback season and
finishing as the World Series’ Most Valuable Player. (
You were the key. You killed us.—Bruce Hurst, Red Sox pitcher,
who had been voted the Series MVP award before Game Six's late disaster, to Knight after it was over; Knight broke a
3-all tie in Game Seven with a line homer into the left field bleachers off hapless ex-Met Calvin Schiraldi in relief of Hurst.)
At age 34, Knight was deemed obsolete with HoJo in the wings and Jefferies on the infield horizon. The Mets let Knight
walk to the Baltimore Orioles; his unhappiness married to his age may have help speed his final decline. (
Ray-Ray
was a leader. You can’t get rid of leadership and expect things to stay the same.—Roger McDowell.)
God rest his soul in peace but if Frank Cashen was willing to designate a pair of undeserving scapegoats, his
assistant general manager Al Harazin wasn’t. “If you give us credit for any of the success,” he told Pearlman,
“then you have to give us blame for the downfall. But it’s impossible to keep the exact personnel all the time.
Change in baseball is inevitable. You have no choice.” But you do have the choices as to just how the changes
could or should be made when necessary.
Wanting to cauterise the kind of wild and crazy atmosphere that seemed to dominate the 1986 Mets is one thing.
A season of brawling, boozing, bimbo-chasing, and championship baseball with . . . the rowdiest team ever to put
on a New York uniform—and maybe the best, read Pearlman’s subtitle.
When it is not necessary to change, it is
necessary not to change, said Edmund Burke, the immortal political philosopher. If they were that desperate to end
the wildness and craziness, Cashen, Harazin, and company were likewise blind to the law of unintended
consequences.
Darryl Strawberry’s story may be told best in
The Ticket Out: Darryl Strawberry and the Boys of Crenshaw, written
by Michael Sokolove (also known as Pete Rose’s most soberly relentless biographer, in
Hustle: The Myth, Life, and
Lies of Pete Rose). He seems to have come to understand his fatal flaw, which led him to drink, drugs, sexual excess,
dissipated talent. He even seems at peace with his baseball past, with the manner in which he destroyed his career,
because he could not accept his own importance while feeling as though any and every performance short of “the
black Ted Williams” (as he was called, so help me, as he ascended to the Mets and in his first year or two there)
equaled disaster.
It probably didn't help that a lot of sportswriters covering the 1986 Series called Strawberry's Game Seven home run
a "meaningless" one. Meaningless? Strawberry led off the bottom of the eighth against hapless Red Sox pen man
Al Nipper, with the Mets leading 6-5. They
sure could have used some insurance runs against that Red Sox
team no matter
how weak their relief corps really was. (
I wouldn't have said this going in, but we knew that
if we could get into their bullpen it would be no contest.---Wally Backman.) On 0-2, the heretofore-Series-slumping
Strawberry delivered, hitting one parabolically over the right center field fence.*
Dwight Gooden, a more composed soul than Strawberry (
how often did we hear Gooden was as polite and as
accommodating as Strawberry could be churlish and temperamental?), has told his own story too candidly. It is still
far enough from resolved, unfortunately, and Gooden knows it. Anguished nearly to the point of suicide by his fall and
his substance abuse battles, the man who once pitched a no-hitter in a Yankee uniform and dedicated it to his dying
father, who prompted Sandy Koufax himself to say in 1985 that he’d trade his past for Gooden’s future, continues that
struggle just as arduously.
I wasn’t ready for that kind of attention at nineteen. No teenager is. To be honest, I’m not sure I’m ready for it now.
–-Dwight Gooden, before the 1996 World Series.
We stole Dwight’s youth.—Davey Johnson, to Thomas Boswell of the Washington Post, when Gooden was admitted to
Smithers in 1987.
Strawberry and Gooden were only the most
visible elements that made and unmade the 1986 Mets. They weren’t
even close to the
only ones. It’s time to quit blaming them alone for the rise and collapse of the dynasty that never
came to be.
And it’s time to quit treating the 1986 Mets like the lepers of New York or any major league baseball. They weren’t
the first great baseball team to rise on wild and crazy times and fall on wilder and crazier times, and they won’t be the
last. They weren’t the first and won’t be the last great team to be dismantled almost before their staggering conquest
really sank in, because their upper management panicked over the wild contingent and lost their vision in trying to
neutralise it.
For all that they aggravated, annoyed, and infuriated the opposition during that stupefying 1986 ride (
Can you beat
these assholes? someone in the Phillies’ spring training 1987 complex scribbled across a team portrait of the 1986
Mets for incentive), there wasn’t one team in the league who would have said no way, Jose, if they’d been asked whether
they’d have let themselves become the same band of evil angels if it meant they’d have won it all. Just ask the 1993
Phillies, who almost
did win it all—and probably
were a similar band of evil angels. I probably had it worse than most
watching the 1986 Mets. I’d been (and still am) a Met fan since the day they were born,
and a Red Sox fan (and still am)
since the 1967 pennant race. Would you like to see my drug bills from October 1986?
So the 1986 Mets were their decade’s version of the Gas House Gang. You think the Gas House Gang were unofficially
blacklisted from the memories of St. Louis? You think Philadelphia has performed a memory dump on the ’93 Philthy
Phillies? You think the Bronx has kept the 1977 Yankees (the Bronx Zoo) in terminal Phantom Zone exile?
This year, fresh off a trip to the World Series, the Mets and New York are remembering 1986. It’s way past time. There’s
no reason for New York to ignore their triump in a town where there are more excuses for Yankee anniversaries than
there are protesters at Donald Trump rallies. (Let someone learn when any Yankee legend played his first Yankee game
with a hangover, and
some jerk would initiate an anniversary commemoration for it.)
Yes, the 1986 Mets were a great baseball team composed of flawed, sometimes self-destructive, sometimes tragic
men, sometimes spectacularly so. (Name one team who ever celebrated an arduous league championship triumph
by breaking an entire airplane.) But the key is in the first nine words of the preceding sentence. The one thing they
did harder than partying
was playing baseball. Warts and otherwise,
that is how the 1986 Mets deserve to be
remembered. And, commemorated. On their thirtieth anniversary and ever after.
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*
A couple of runners later, Jesse Orosco---of all people---foiled the Red Sox rotation play, corner infielders charging
the plate, middle infielders to the corner bases, pulled back his bat from the bunt position, and whacked a six-hop
RBI single up the pipe for the second insurance run. Then he rid himself of the Red Sox in order in the top of the ninth,
striking out Marty Barrett for the final out, and the celebration began.
