Video gold from our Mets archivist pal LarryDC:
Right away you get Keith Hernandez’s final Mets plate appearance. At 2:24, Gary Carter catches for the final time at Shea. And seconds later, Kid is swinging in Flushing for the last time. Watch the at-bat and listen to how Steve Zabriskie describes him. Pretty much sums him up.
And so this doesn’t leave you as blue as all those classic Starter jackets crammed into the Mets dugout, stay tuned for how the game ends. Ah, Jefferies, we hardly knew ye, apparently. In any event, fantastic 1989 Shea Stadium time capsule. Many thanks to Larry for tipping us off.
Certainly an amazing clip…that game in a nutshell literally and figuratively ended the Mets 1980′s ____________ (fill in word meaning a bit less than a Dynasty). Their heart and soul would be taken out…and guys like McDowell and Dykstra were now enemies and guys like Juan Samuel and Jefferies were in their place. The Mets still owned New York back then…and today they are as far away from owning New York as they have even been in their 50 years.
Brilliant. Great footage. Decent dust up at the end as well!!
I have to admit that I was never sad to see McDowell go – I always thought he was a punk, and everything he has done since has only cemented that initial feeling
From the sublime to the ridiculous. I had forgotten about the Jefferies-McDowell feud.
But Steve D, you’re absolutely right. Right there, it’s the end of an era. Hernandez and Carter (later, Strawberry) riding off into the sunset, only to be replaced with the ugliest Mets team ever. Not so much Jefferies, who could be excused for snapping after taking years of abuse from McDowell, going back to when they were teammates. More the guys who were soon to come – Bonilla, Coleman, Saberhagen, Murray, et al, coupled with the decline and fall of Dwight Gooden. Storm clouds on the horizon. And how.
But it was good to see Gary Carter leave us with a well-struck double. And Carter and Hernandez embracing in the dugout put a lump in my throat. Well done indeed.
Twenty-three years later, do the Mets and other teams have the safety nets in place to offer guidance/counseling for the bullies (McDowell, Myers, et. al.), bullied (Jefferies) or substance abusers (Straw, Gooden)? One could say that because of the off-the-field garbage, none of these guys met their full potential, and at our expense.
This is a really good point. If any team ever needed counseling and an intervention it was those Mets.
Great, great clip. Thanks Greg.
Brought a tear to my eyes, Greg.
Thought I noticed the frustration on Kid’s face after getting that double, probably due to having to deal with his skills having diminished and accepting the fact that Kid was getting too old for the game he didn’t want to stop playing. But even with that, he managed to produce a humble smile of thanks to the fans who were cheering him on despite what seemed to be an unhappy moment for him personally with his Met career now just about at it’s end.
I saw the same thing. I was thinking Kid was annoyed he didn’t hit it over the wall.
Such a shame that team only won one WS. All the off-field shenanigans were more to blame than injuries or on-field stuff. In retrospect, Davey should have had a better handle on things.
Wow, thanks for that! I do remember watching. It packs about as much emotion into the final innings of a meaningless Met Loss as there ever has been. I remember watching the Franco/Zeile game in 2004 and thinking back to this one, it’s the only comparable game. Sans The Fight of course, which makes it no comparison whatsoever.
Oh come on. The fight was great. It wasn’t Jefferies’ fault that he was overhyped and, from all I’ve read about it, the older guys on that team really treated him badly.
The clip made me sad because this team was great once, it was fun once, it was dramatic once, and now we’re all just grasping at reasons other than habit– and blind hope– that we keep watching and caring.
Sturock, thanks for the compliment above.
Some fights between guys who were/are/would become Mets have entertainment value (Ryan-Ventura; Zimmer-Martinez come to mind). This McDowell-Jefferies bout, however, was the tiny wormhole in the apple that was a most unfortunate sign of the rot within that would continue to grow for years.
BTW, Kid had 40 more at bats at Shea after that one and actually hit a HR…does anybody remember it? I don’t…did he get a curtain call? I was there when Piazza came back as a Padre and hit 2 HRs.
As for the 1986 Mets, perhaps the off-field nonsense was just the negative part of the persona that made them so great that one year…maybe we could never get that one year without accepting all the bad too. For some reason, I only get real upset thinking about what Doc should have been.
Post-Met ABs at Shea implicitly denied to exist for the purposes of this video.
Me too…against Pedro, I believe.
Great clip. But Steve Zabriske…ugh.
Steve Zabriskie mars all thoughts I have of the last out to clinch the division in 1986. That was the worst call ever of an event that was inevitable.