Fasten your seatbelts…

GAME 160: October 1, 1982 — Mets 1 PHILLIES 0 (10)
(Mets All-Time Game 160 Record: 27-19; Mets 1982 Record: 65-95)

One-hitters are Mets fans’ no-hitters, more so than no-hitter flirtations that wind up being something less than one-hitters…though in the Mets fan mindset, they tend to blend into the same disappointment-tinged stew that’s been simmering on the back of the franchise stove over the course of fifty years.

Pitcher keep a no-hitter going into the seventh but then give up a hit? That’s a one-hitter, unless he gives up another hit. Unless the result of the game desperately matters, what seems to get remembered is a no-hitter appeared within some pitcher’s grasp. If it ends up as a two-, three- or whatever-hitter, the headline is it wasn’t a no-hitter.

But a lack of differentiation would be unfair to the 35 one-hitters in Mets history, even if not every one-hitter was a no-hitter flirtation. Sure, you might be the kind of Mets fan who starts thinking “this could be the night” if the first pitch of the game is called strike one, but generally speaking, there is a psychic Rubicon that needs to be crossed. Five innings seems serious. Maybe four if the starter really has something on the ball. Maybe three if there was a stupendous catch behind him.

Maybe called strike one.

Anyway, there is a distinction to be made between the one-hitter in which the one hit comes from the sixth inning forward versus the kind in which the one hit fell in when you weren’t necessarily paying attention to the “H” column on the scoreboard. For example, let’s say there’s an uninspiring matchup between a lousy Mets club and another team with nothing much on the line late in a season…and let’s assume you’re watching or listening to this final Friday night game at all under those circumstances. If the Mets starter was plugged in at the last minute — he hasn’t started all year — and he’s walked a couple of guys in the third, would you necessarily notice that the first hit he surrendered didn’t come until there was one out in the fifth?

In 1982, maybe not. In 1982, the Mets had only been no-hitter starved for just under 21 years. By the end of 1982, the desperation for a no-hitter was mostly trumped by desperation for 1983 and something better than the current, godforsaken season to come along.

So maybe it wasn’t a huge deal that Terry Leach went 4⅓ before allowing Luis Aguayo to plop an artificial turf triple onto the splotchy rug covering the Veterans Stadium outfield. Or maybe it was. Maybe there was every reason to believe it was kismet that Leach, a late replacement for blister-impaired Rick Ownbey and a generally overlooked middle-innings eater up from Tidewater twice since June, would be The One. That maybe the undistinguished Leach would succeed where the likes of Seaver, Koosman and Matlack never did.

But then Aguayo’s on third with one out in the fifth, and it hardly matters. The no-hitter’s gone. Yet Ivan de Jesus’s grounder to third means Aguayo has to hold. And opposing pitcher John Denny strikes out to end the fifth. Thus, after five, Terry Leach is pitching a one-hitter. Same as Denny, come to think of it. All he’s given up hitwise is a single to Dave Kingman (breaking an 0-for-23 schneid) in the second. Nobody’s scored, and both hurlers are tossing one-hitters.

They keep it up, too. The Mets can’t do a thing with Denny, who is previewing the form that will win him the National League Cy Young Award a year later. And the Phillies, a disappointment in terms of not winning the division, but a formidable foe with 87 wins and two seemingly surefire Hall of Famers in their lineup — they can’t do a thing with Leach. The great Pete Rose is 0-for-3 after striking out in the sixth. The great Mike Schmidt is 0-for-3 after grounding out to start the seventh. Leach runs into a bit of wildness after that, sandwiching an intentional walk with two bases on balls he didn’t mean to issue but escapes a sacks-full jam when he strikes out Denny again.

After seven, Leach, like Denny, still has his one-hitter. Denny has walked three and struck out five. Leach, working with an assortment of sinkers and sliders, has permitted five walks to match his five strikeouts in the longest outing of his major league career, though that’s not saying much. He pitched 20 of 21 games in relief during 1981’s second season and his 20 previous appearances in 1982 were out of the pen as well. Besides, the Mets of 1982 have begun placing their trust in younger arms to carry them to a brighter future. A little more than three months earlier, the Times suggested the Tide rotation of Ownbey (24), Scott Holman (23), Brent Gaff (23), Walt Terrell (24) and Ron Darling (21) could be on the verge of becoming the mid-’80s equivalent of “Seaver, Koosman, Ryan, Gentry and McAndrew”.

“It’s as good a Triple-A staff as I’ve ever seen,” gushed longtime Tidewater GM Dave Rosenfield, and indeed, the staff’s midseason ERA was almost a run better than anybody else’s in the International League. Four of the five starters mentioned — everybody but Darling — would make the Mets in 1982 and were supposed to make Mets fans salivate over 1983 and beyond.

Terry Leach, 28, drew no mention at all in the Times article. He had just been recalled to New York, where he was in the process of throwing eleven consecutive shutout innings of relief. He didn’t throw hard or conventionally. His submarine delivery made him stick out as much as his age made him fade into the background. But through eight appearances covering 18 innings, he was close to flawless. His next nine outings were less so: 17 earned runs in 12.2 innings pitched. Leach was sent back to Tidewater (helping the Tides win the IL pennant while the Mets set off on a 15-game losing streak in his absence). Terry returned to the Mets in mid-September, back in form. In three relief stints, he totaled five innings and allowed zero runs.

Under the Friday night lights in Philadelphia, Denny goes to the eighth having made no substantial mistakes. He could afford one, however. Though he’s finishing up a miserable year (6-13 between Cleveland and Philly), he’s been pitching in the majors since 1974. He’s established. Leach goes to the eighth having made no substantial mistakes, and it’s a damn good thing he hasn’t. He’s been pitching mostly in the minors since 1976, ignored in the Braves system until 1980, when the Mets picked him upon his release by Atlanta. He finished strong at Jackson, earned a post-strike shot a year later but then got squeezed off the roster as 1982 got underway.

If Terry Leach wants to be considered for a spot on the 1983 Mets, he’d be advised to not make any more mistakes in what’s left of 1982. So he doesn’t. Just as Denny is perfect in the eighth, so is Terry. Just as Denny is perfect in the ninth, so is Terry once more. We’re through regulation in a 0-0 game and both starters have just thrown nine innings of one-hit ball.

Phillies manager Pat Corrales blinks first. He removes Denny after nine: one hit, three walks, seven strikeouts. His replacement is Porfi Altamirano. The righthander walks Kingman to lead off the tenth. Rusty Tillman comes in to pinch-run. Gary Rajsich singles Tillman to third. Hubie Brooks drives a fly ball to Garry Maddox in center. Ralph Kiner has made Maddox — about to win his eighth Gold Glove — famous for his defense. “Two-thirds of the earth’s surface is covered by water,” Ralph likes to say. “The other third is covered by Garry Maddox.” Sure enough, Maddox covers enough of the planet to haul in Hubie’s fly, but he can’t stop the world from turning long enough to prevent Tillman from scoring the game’s first run.

The Mets leave Rajsich on first by making two quick outs. Leach returns to the Vet mound to pitch the tenth. He allows his sixth walk of the evening, to Aguayo, to start things badly, and rookie Julio Franco bunts Aguayo to second. Terry is facing trouble…but he stares it down by grounding George Vukovich to first and popping Maddox to second.

With Brian Giles’s grab of the 30th out, the Mets have won, 1-0, and Terry Leach has pitched the first and only ten-inning one-hitter in Mets history. It’s also the only one-hitter the Mets have won in which they themselves scraped together no more than two hits. And the pitcher who upheld their honor while John Denny was holding down their bats was someone making his second major league start.

Leach didn’t inject primary drama into his storyline. That would have required at least six innings of no-hit ball, maybe seven. His effort wasn’t a one-hitter of the emotional magnitude of Tom Seaver against the Cubs (one out in the ninth) in 1969 or the Padres (two out in the ninth) in 1972. There was little heartbreak associated with a fifth-inning triple, not even the hindsight heartbreak that the fifth-inning single in the next Met one-hitter — Dwight Gooden against the Cubs, 1984 — brought to mind once it became a one-hitter and the one hit could have very easily been ruled an error. But Leach’s one-hitter was indisputably the longest, definitely the least offensively supported and, save perhaps for Bobby Jones in the clinching game of the 2000 NLDS, the most surprising.

Considering all the variables, it surely ranks among the very most impressive one-hitters in Mets history.

That he won the game shouldn’t be taken as a given. Jim Maloney no-hit the Mets for ten innings in 1965 but then lost in the eleventh. Future Mets pitching coach Harvey Haddix perfect-gamed the Braves in 1959 but then lost in the thirteenth. Even Seaver, the master of the Met one-hitter, with five between 1969 and 1977, couldn’t keep a sixth going. Tom Terrific was locked in a scoreless duel against Rick Reuschel of the Cubs with two out in the bottom of the ninth on September 24, 1975, when Joe Wallis — a.k.a. the second coming of Jimmy Qualls — broke up his no-hit bid. Even if Seaver had retired Wallis and placed nine innings of hitless ball under his belt, he wouldn’t have been able to claim a no-hitter; the Mets forgot to get him a run. Seaver came out to pitch the tenth and gave up a couple more hits.

He lost the no-hitter in the ninth, the one-hitter in the tenth, and Skip Lockwood lost the game in the eleventh on a bases-loaded walk, proving yet again how difficult it is to match length with utter mastery. But Leach did it. Leach threw a ten-inning one-hitter in which he was provided virtually no cushion by his teammates. Rose wound up 0-for-4. Schmidt wound up 0-for-4. Every Phillie wound up 0-for-Something, except for Aguayo, whom Leach stranded at third.

And what did it get Terry Leach? Sent back to Tidewater for the entirety of 1983; traded to the Cubs ahead of 1984; traded from Chicago back to Atlanta soon thereafter; released by the Braves organization within two months; and re-signed by the Mets in May of ’84, less than twenty months after his Veterans Stadium star turn. A combined 11-4 Triple-A mark between Richmond and Tidewater earned him no callup during the Mets’ return to contention. Terry’s first appearance in a major league uniform after the night he shut out the Phillies on one hit over ten innings didn’t come until June 21, 1985.

“Whether I start or relieve doesn’t matter,” Leach said after his 1982 one-hitter, “as long as I have a job.” But who would have dreamed four seasons would have to pass following his masterpiece to achieve job security?

The 1987 Mets’ starting rotation — one that included Ron Darling, but none of the other ’82 Tides who had been so highly touted — had to be absolutely decimated by injuries to bring Terry Leach to the forefront of the Mets’ plans. On October 1, 1982, Rick Ownbey couldn’t pitch, so Leach was the emergency starter. In the summer of ’87, the defending world champs were bereft of Bobby Ojeda, Rick Aguilera, David Cone and Sid Fernandez, each of them missing time due to injury, so Leach was plucked out of the bullpen.

He started ten games from June 1 to August 11. The Mets won nine of them. His ERA in a dozen appearances overall in this time frame was 2.99. His own won-lost record was 7-0. He gave up less than a hit per inning and walked a batter only every five innings. No matter what unorthodox motion it took his submarining right arm to rise to the surface, it was clear it was Terry Leach who was keeping the Mets afloat.

The perennially disregarded Leach pitched for the Mets until 1989 and in the majors until 1993. He was a member of the Minnesota Twins bullpen in 1991, where he earned the World Series ring Mets management didn’t see fit to award him for his contributions to the 1986 club. Granted, he pitched only a half-dozen games that championship year, but Ed Lynch pitched in only one, and he got a ring.

Jewelry was apparently reserved for some players. For others, there were jibes. Somewhere amid the releases and demotions, GM Frank Cashen kidded Terry, “Don’t worry, Leachie. You’ll always keep showing back up around here. You’re like a bad penny.” Had Leach’s 1985 Tides teammate Billy Beane been taking notes for his eventual career as a general manager, he might have countered Cashen’s perception. In a more enlightened industry, Terry Leach wouldn’t have been seen as a bad penny.

He was a classic undervalued asset.

ALSO QUITE HAPPY: On October 1, 1999, the Mets began their Friday night almost dead and ended it in surprisingly vital fashion.

The light that flickered hopefully at Shea when the Mets clobbered Greg Maddux on Wednesday was nearly extinguished on Thursday in an eleven-inning nailbiter lost to the Braves, 4-3. The moment of sheer devastation occurred when right fielder Shawon Dunston failed to corral a Brian Jordan fly ball that became a leadoff triple and eventual winning run, yet the knockout blow was delivered by Chipper Jones after the game. With the Mets reeling and on the verge of elimination, he snottily shrugged that his critics in the Field Level seats could now “go home and put their Yankees stuff on”.

Mets fans were not amused and wished dearly to stuff that remark up Larry Jones’ Chip-hole, but to do so in 1999 would require a reversal of fortunes bordering on the miraculous. The odds were spelled out as the Mets approached their final weekend series of the year: Only one team, the 1962 San Francisco Giants, had been two out of a postseason berth with three to play and actually played in the postseason. That was relevant because the Braves’ defeat of the Mets left the Mets a pair behind both Cincinnati and Houston in the N.L. Wild Card race. One of those two teams would definitely be the Central Division champ. The other had a significant leg up on the Mets.

All the Mets had going for them was they were only almost dead. And as long as you’re still clinically alive, anything can happen…never mind that it’s rarely happened before.

Friday evening at Shea, the Mets welcomed the Pirates and surprisingly few others. After the big ballpark was packed for three consecutive nights against Atlanta, many Mets fans apparently needed a mental-health night. Attendance was less than 30,000 for the game that would determine if the 1999 Mets had any future left in them. Those who showed up were left to wonder how long the future would take to arrive. The present was awfully mysterious about revealing what it had in store for these Mets.

The first seven innings, as prosecuted by Kenny Rogers, trended favorably. Rogers allowed no runs, three hits and struck out nine while guarding a 2-0 lead that was built on solo homers by Robin Ventura and Mike Piazza off Jason Schmidt. On a pitching staff that was always strapped for length, Rogers — acquired from Oakland prior to the July 31 trade deadline — had been close to a godsend, certainly at Shea. Kenny pitched the Mets’ first home complete game of the season on Labor Day, and the Mets hadn’t lost a single game he started there in his six previous starts.

Trouble, however, arose in the top of the eighth when Rogers walked John Wehner to lead off the inning. He made Al Martin his tenth strikeout victim, but then gave up back-to-back singles to Pat Meares and Aramis Ramirez to cut the Mets’ lead to 2-1. Bobby Valentine pulled Kenny and brought in Turk Wendell. After striking out Kevin Young, he walked Chad Hermansen to load the bases. Out went Wendell. In came John Franco. And in came Meares to score when Warren Morris scratched out a single. It might have been worse, except Franco got a very generous borderline strike call on a 3-2 pitch with the bases loaded to retire Adrian Brown and slither out of the eighth.

The team that couldn’t afford to lose was now tied. Another bases-loaded situation materialized immediately, this time for the Mets. A Darryl Hamilton single, a Rey Ordoñez walk and a Meares error on Bobby Bonilla’s grounder to short set the Mets up to break the tie. But with two out, Melvin Mora, the .138 hitter who had replaced Rickey Henderson for defense when the Mets were up by two, forced Shane Halter (pinch-running for Bonilla) at second.

An hour behind, in the Central time zone, the news was mixed. The Dodgers had taken an early lead on the Astros, and rookie starter Eric Gagne was keeping Houston in check. But from Milwaukee, the out-of-town dispatches were less encouraging. Mike Cameron and Greg Vaughn had each homered and the Reds had taken a 3-0 lead into the sixth. A win by either Cincinnati or Houston combined with a Mets loss would take put that team beyond the Mets’ reach. Wins by both of them, combined with a New York defeat, would simply eliminate the Mets altogether.

All the Mets could do was concentrate on beating the Pirates, a team in the midst of a seven-year non-winning streak. Pittsburgh entered this game at 78-81, so they hadn’t clinched a losing 1999 yet. It may not have represented much motivation for the Bucs, but knocking out a contender certainly loomed as a consolation prize. Whatever was keeping them going, the Pirates weren’t going as quietly as the Mets needed them to.

Armando Benitez came on in the ninth and struck out Keith Osik, Dale Sveum and Martin in order. That could have provided a lift for the Mets, but given two chances to build a winning rally in the bottom of the ninth, the Mets wasted them both. Edgardo Alfonzo’s walk was erased when John Olerud grounded into a 4-6-3 double play, and the gift Piazza received when Meares booted yet another ground ball was revoked when Ventura struck out.

Extras beckoned. While Pat Mahomes went about keeping the Pirates at bay — working around a leadoff single by Meares — Central developments were tilting the Mets’ way. The Astros were indeed going down to defeat, 5-1. And the Brewers had tied the Reds: Jeff Cirillo had doubled in one run in the sixth and singled in two runs in the eighth. Events at the Astrodome had been kind to the Mets and County Stadium was potentially following suit. Mostly, though, their fate depended on what happened at Shea.

Hamilton, Jay Payton and Ordoñez each produced a groundout in the bottom of the tenth versus Scott Sauerbeck, a former Met farmhand who became a Buc in the 1998 Rule 5 draft. Mahomes then chilled the Pirates in the top of the eleventh, lining out Brown, flying out Osik and freezing Sauerbeck on a called strike three. Pittsburgh manager Gene Lamont so liked what he was seeing from his pitcher that he left him in to bat for himself.

Back on the mound, Sauerbeck dug a quick hole, surrendering a leadoff single to Dunston. Mora bunted Shawon to second. Fonzie was intentionally walked, leading to runners on first and second…who went to second and third, respectively, when Olerud grounded out to the right side. The open base was filled when Lamont ordered Piazza walked.

This brought up Robin Ventura with the bases loaded, which three times during the 1999 season was a surefire recipe for the finest cut of salami available. Grand slam threat aside (he had 13 in his career to date), Ventura was simply lethal that year with the bags juiced. He’d batted nineteen times with the bases loaded, going 8-for-16 and walking three times. Plus he’d hit the homer that put the Mets ahead in the fourth.

True, Piazza had gone deep in the sixth; and true, Piazza was Piazza; and just as true, Robin’s Mojo had been dipping of late (he’d batted .187 in his previous 21 games), but choosing to pitch to Robin Ventura with the bases loaded seemed like a helluva way to keep the Mets in the Wild Card hunt.

And so it was. Ventura lined a single into center, bringing home Dunston and giving the Mets a 3-2 win that was as crucial to their 1999 destiny as any. Not many minutes later, they won as bystanders, too. In the top of the tenth at Milwaukee, Marquis Grissom robbed Eddie Taubensee of a two-run extra base hit with a sensational diving catch…and in the bottom of the tenth, Ronnie Belliard singled home Mark Loretta to defeat Cincinnati, 4-3.

The Mets were one behind the Astros and the Reds with two to play. They were far more alive heading into Saturday than they had been when they came out of Thursday.

GAME 161: October 1, 1973 — Mets 6 CUBS 4
(Mets All-Time Game 161 Record: 26-19; Mets 1973 Record: 82-79)

For a pennant race that came along all at once, the lunge for the 1973 N.L. East flag sure got stubborn about getting over with. But by the time this unfathomable season was reaching its inevitable conclusion, even recalcitrance couldn’t stop the New York Mets.

First, the weather over Chicago, where the Mets were slated to play their final series, wouldn’t budge. After a scheduled off day Thursday, it poured Friday, knocking out one game. It poured Saturday, too, taking out a planned doubleheader. As of Sunday, they hadn’t played since Wednesday. The Mets left their last homestand with a record of 80-78 and a lead of a half-game over second-place Pittsburgh. Sitting inactive for three days hadn’t exactly damaged them. They were still 80-78, but their divisional lead had increased to a game-and-a-half, but it was now the Cardinals who were their closest competitor.

That’s indicative of the other element that wouldn’t get a move on in the Mets’ world: the race. Like the rain, it wouldn’t go away. Everybody who was ever a contender in 1973 remained a contender as the final scheduled day of the season commenced. Five teams — five! — were still mathematically alive that Sunday. Taking into account makeup dates that still loomed as playable for Monday, the following scenario was, at the very least, conceivable on September 30:

• The Mets could drop two doubleheaders to the Cubs and fall from 80-78 to 80-82; the Cubs, in turn, would correspondingly rise from 76-82 to 80-82.

• The Cardinals could lose to the Phillies and drop from 80-81 to 80-82.

• The Pirates (79-81) could lose to the Expos — who would complete their schedule at 80-82 — but then beat the Padres in a makeup game and move up to 80-82.

That would create the first five-way tie for first place in the history of baseball, and there weren’t enough coins in the Federal Reserve to toss to determine how a quintuple-tiebreaker might work. It wasn’t very likely the National League East would come down to that daffy a conclusion, but the fact that the possibility existed spoke to the unhinged nature of the 1973 stretch drive.

Which, in turn, spoke to how spectacularly the Mets had to play to drive the division into such glorious disarray. It’s fair to say that no 80-78 team has ever sat in first place on the final scheduled day of the season more deservedly.

From 61-71 and last place on August 30, the Mets ripped off 19 wins in their next 26 games to take over the top spot in the East. The theme of their charge was, of course “YOU GOTTA BELIEVE,” as authored by Tug McGraw, but the Tugger’s inspirational value shouldn’t overshadow all he did once he exited the bullpen buggy that fit his personality (and the times) to a tee. From September 5 to September 25, as the Mets took 15 of 19, McGraw made a dozen appearances. Every one of them was a personal and team success: he saved nine games and won three more. Eight of the outings were at least two innings long. The last of them in this stretch was typical in terms of performance and significance: two-and-a-third innings of shutout ball to nail down Jerry Koosman’s 2-1 win over the Expos on September 25th, the Mets’ season-high seventh consecutive victory.

Tug’s pitching that Tuesday night put the usual exclamation point on the Shea festivities, but nothing could have made more of a statement about the magical properties of this Met month than the way the evening began. Hours before Tug bid au revoir to the team from Canada, his most revered teammate was issuing a memorable signoff to a whole other nation.

It was Willie Mays Night, marking the end of a career surpassed by nobody for utter brilliance. Mays began it in 1951 in the same place where the Mets learned to crawl, at the Polo Grounds in Upper Manhattan. Six years and a slew of indelible images later, Willie and his team, the New York Giants, were whisked away to San Francisco. Their departure, along with the Brooklyn Dodgers’, facilitated the birth of the Mets, which was a good thing for the millions wrapped up in total Belief by September of 1973, but old-timers would tell you there was always a little something missing from the New York National League baseball scene as long as the quintessential New York National League baseball superstar was plying his trade on the West Coast.

Mrs. Joan Payson attempted to turn back time and make all right with the world in 1972 when she plied a trade of her own: Charlie Williams and cash to the Giants in exchange for Willie’s homecoming. It was a dramatic success from the Say Hey get-go…though after the euphoria of Willie Mays in a New York uniform settled down, it couldn’t help but be noticed that a season later, the Mets were left with a 42-year-old legend who had never been anything but a legend — but had never been 42 before.

Willie contributed a few timely hits in 1973, but after going 0-for-2 in Montreal on September 9, his batting average sank to a most unMayslike .211, accompanied by six homers, 25 RBIs and a mere 24 runs scored in 66 games (Willie had scored more than a hundred runs annually from 1954 through 1965). He was hurting physically after cracking two ribs on a metal rail at Jarry Park in pursuit of a foul ball, and mentally, not being the Willie Mays whom fans from coast-to-coast idolized and idealized finally caught up with him. Thus, he announced his retirement at a press conference in Shea’s Diamond Club on September 20.

Phil Pepe covered the SRO event for the Daily News, reminding any readers who were perhaps momentarily dismayed by Mays’s descent into cranky mortality — a couple of times as a Met, he hadn’t shown up when and where as expected, making Yogi Berra’s managerial tenure no easier — what Willie represented beyond his 660 home runs, 1,903 runs batted in, 2,062 runs scored, 3,283 base hits and .302 lifetime average. “[It] is not the records or the statistics or the awards that distinguish him,” Pepe wrote. “It is the memory of the way the man played the game, with a zest and a daring, with an excitement that is unmatched.”

“I’ve had a love affair with baseball,” Mays told the media, but acknowledged, “you just can’t play at 42 the way you did at 20.”

The Mets had already scheduled Willie Mays Night before his retirement went official. When they announced their intention to honor him, it was before there was any inkling that it would serve as a sidebar in a sizzling-hot pennant race…or that a pennant race might provide the backdrop to Willie Mays Night. Where No. 24 was concerned, it was unfathomable that he wouldn’t be the main attraction.

Sure enough, a full house of more than 53,000 showed up at Shea to bestow its appreciation on Mays. After a 45-minute tribute in which Willie was showered with all manner of gift and applauded by a veritable Hall of Fame cast of his Giant, Dodger and Yankee contemporaries from the golden age of New York baseball, it was the man of the hour’s turn to speak.

Those who heard what the Say Hey Kid had to say in his baseball twilight will never forget it. He thanked the crowd for remembering him for the player he had been rather than the player time forced him to become:  “If you knew how I felt in my heart to hear you cheer and know I can’t do anything about it…” He thanked the visiting Expos for enduring the delay, apologetically explaining to the Mets rivals du nuit, “This is my farewell. I thought I’d never quit.” He thanked the Mets for waiting patiently on such a big night in the course of their own journey: “I hope you go on to win the flag for the New York people. This is your night as well as mine.”

Actually, for as long as Willie spoke and for as long as Willie’s words resonated, it would always belong to him, especially given the sendoff he gave to his own sendoff:

“I see these kids over here, and I see how these kids are fighting for a pennant, and to me it says one thing: Willie, say goodbye to America.”

Was there any doubt after that that those kids — his Mets — would go out and win their seventh in a row? Was there any doubt, either, that Willie’s New York departure was every bit as fortuitous as his introduction? That came 22 years earlier, when the Giants were struggling, far removed from first place until August. Yet with rookie Willie Mays on board, those Giants caught fire, passed the Dodgers and  — after Bobby Thomson (in attendance at Shea this night) went deep off Ralph Branca (also there) — won the pennant.

“Look at it,” another Willie Mays Night guest, Brooklyn Dodger icon Joe Black, suggested. “It was Willie largely who brought the Giants out of the doldrums and now it’s Willie’s inspiration — in another way — that I think will carry the New York Mets to the National League championship and maybe to their second World Series title.”

What a great storyline for a great night. And what great resilience Willie’s Mets were showing throughout September, all seemingly regaining their health in unison, every one of them stepping up their game as the stakes grew higher. Consider Cleon Jones, who hit the homer to the put the Mets ahead on Willie’s night and made a backhanded catch worthy of Mays to help McGraw bid adieu to Montreal.

Jones’s injury-riddled season was one of the reasons the Mets stalled for so long in ’73. After playing no fewer than 129 games every season since 1966, Cleon was out for chunks of April and May and all of June. The disabled list also swallowed up significant portions of Bud Harrelson’s and Jerry Grote’s campaigns. George “The Stork” Theodore’s rookie year was derailed when he crashed into Don Hahn in July. John “The Hammer” Milner had hamstring issues. Rusty Staub’s hands were still aching from the year before. Jon Matlack absorbed a line drive to the forehead. Constructing a lineup of pain-free Mets was a challenge every night for Berra before September.

But in September, the Mets were well and benefited from running an almost set unit onto the field game after game. Leftfielder Jones was in the full bloom of health, regaining his power stroke down the stretch and slugged six homers over the final ten games. Garrett — having inherited the third base job full-time when the front office’s string of big-name bad ideas (Joe Foy, Bob Aspromonte, Jim Fregosi) finally played itself out — was suddenly Brooks Robinson on both sides of the ball…and a .422 hitter across the season’s last dozen games. Staub began a hitting streak on September 15 that, where 1973’s regular season was concerned, never ended. The rightfielder batted a Le Grand .387 in the Mets’ final fifteen contests. Hahn and Dave Schneck split time tracking fly balls in Mays’s old center field stomping grounds. Harrelson at short partnered with second baseman Felix Millan to restabilize the middle infield. Milner was at first to receive their throws. Grote was calling the shots from behind the plate.

The Mets finally had their team intact, and it was paying off.

And the pitching…always the pitching where the Mets were concerned. McGraw’s revival underscored everything, but the bullpen wasn’t just about Tug. It also featured Harry Parker coming out of nowhere and Ray Sadecki remaining rock-solid. The rotation’s least-known name, George Stone, rolled to a 12-3 record, making the trade that brought him and Millan to the Mets from Atlanta (for Gary Gentry and Danny Frisella) one of the best in franchise history.

But at the heart of the operation, just as in 1969, were three unstoppable starters. That’s what had to give Berra the core of his confidence when the clouds finally parted enough to play two in sodden Chicago that final Sunday, September 30. He tabbed Matlack for the opener, and the second-year lefty did not disappoint, firing a complete-game five-hitter, with nine strikeouts. The only problem was the Mets bats sat idle, perhaps not being notified that the rain, rain had gone away. The Mets scored nothing for Matlack. The Cubs scratched out a solitary run. It was enough to beat the Mets, 1-0. Paired with the last game the Mets had played, a loss to Montreal four days earlier, the hottest team in baseball was suddenly in the midst of its first losing streak of any length since August 26.

Not exactly the juncture a Mets fan would choose for his team to cool off, but another game remained that Sunday, and another stellar lefty, Koosman, was taking the mound. In the nightcap, Jerry was just about as good as Jon: nine innings, six hits, seven strikeouts, two runs allowed…and this time, the Mets’ bats got the memo that the game was on. Led by Cleon’s two-run homer and Rusty’s three RBIs, Kooz cruised to a 9-2 win. With the Cubs defeated, the five-team tie scenario disappeared. And with Pittsburgh topping Montreal, the Expos were eliminated. The Cardinals, however, won their game and stayed in the race, as did the Bucs.

So here’s where the recalcitrant 1973 pennant race stood at the end of the day when it was, on paper, supposed to end: three teams were still alive. The Cardinals, at 81-81, would sit back and monitor what would happen in Pittsburgh, where the Padres’ presence was kindly requested to make up a previously postponed game, and in Chicago, where the Mets and Cubs owed the senior circuit one more twinbill. If the Pirates, at 80-81, won, and the Mets, at 81-79, were swept, a three-way tie would occur. A Pirate loss would make Pittsburgh superfluous, but no Mets win in two games would pit New York and St. Louis in a tiebreaker.

A Mets win would make all the statistical potentialities blissfully academic. And if anybody was capable of erasing the National League East’s overcrowded blackboard once and for all, it was Berra’s starting pitcher for Monday’s opener, George Thomas Seaver.

There were worse options for a manager. There was none better.

Never mind that Tom Seaver was a tired ace pitcher, coming to the end of a season in which he surpassed 250 innings for the seventh time in his seven-year career. Never mind that two of his most recent outings went only three innings and two innings. Never mind that, at 18-10, his standard of 20 wins was out of reach. Tom Seaver, 19-Game Winner might not quite roll off the tongue after he’d won 25, 20 and 21 in three of his previous four seasons, but this was no ordinary nineteenth win sitting on the Wrigley Field table.

“When you get to where Tom Seaver is,” Larry Merchant wrote in the Post, “it doesn’t only matter how many you win, but which ones you win.”

He was Tom Seaver. He was the Franchise. He was going to lead the National League in strikeouts with 251, in ERA at 2.08, and in the as yet uncalculated category of walks and hits per innings pitched (0.976). He had the bona fides to match his reputation. And he was ready. “I’m not going to put intangible pressure to bear on myself,” Tom promised. He was just going to try to put his team in the postseason any way he could and then look forward to thus having “more work to do” five days hence at Riverfront Stadium.

After Seaver and Burt Hooton swapped zeroes in the first inning, Jones got the first big swing of the day in, belting one of the Cub starter’s knuckle-curves into the mostly deserted right-center field bleachers (paid attendance in Wrigleyville, where the Mets’ fortunes didn’t elicit much interest: 1,913). The score stayed 1-0 through three, with Seaver’s first brush with adversity — two on, one out in the third — cleared away by a Harrelson-Millan-Milner DP.

Hooton loaded the bases in the fourth on a single to Staub and walks to Milner and Jones. Perfectly set up, Grote lined a single to center to increase the Mets’ lead to 3-0. Seaver gave up two more hits in the fourth, bringing the Cubs’ total to five, but again emerged undamaged.

The top of the fifth appeared to bury the Cubs once and for all. Garrett led off with a double. Millan singled him to third. Cub skipper Whitey Lockman (a teammate of Mays’s on the Giants’ championship clubs of ’51 and ’54) pulled Hooton and inserted Mike Paul. He was greeted by a run-scoring single from Rusty and a sac fly off the bat of the Hammer. The Mets led 5-0, and the division title was so close the Mets could taste it…and the Pirates wanted to spit it out. At Three Rivers Stadium, the score from Chicago flashed as the national anthem was performed. Pittsburgh assumed its fate was sealed.

The only actor not reading from the script was Seaver. Instead of being buoyed by the relative surfeit of Met runs, he struggled. Four Cubs recorded base hits in the fourth, with the last two producing runs. It was 5-2 heading to the sixth. It stayed 5-2 until the seventh when a Ron Santo error allowed a sixth Met run to plate. Tom Seaver and a four-run lead were all anybody who bled orange and blue could dream of three innings shy of a divisional dream coming true.

Nevertheless, at the end of a season that had been so nightmarish for so long, sweet dreams were elusive. The home seventh began with Dave Rosello dunking a single into center. It was the Cubs’ tenth single of the day. Then Rick Monday, Seaver’s teammate almost a decade earlier on the semi-pro Alaska Goldpanners, mined Seaver’s exhaustion for a two-run homer. It was now 6-4. It was now getting dicey.

It was now time to take out one ace and call on another.

If Seaver had to be the pitcher to start the game that could put a cap on 1973, McGraw had to be the pitcher to end it. Like Seaver, he was ready to take the ball.

“I was pretty hot by now,” Tug wrote in Screwball, “all jacked up and believing like hell.”

Sure enough, Tug set down the Cubs 1-2-3 in the seventh…and 1-2-3 in the eighth. His streak was snapped when Ken Rudolph opened the ninth with a single, but he then struck out Rosello. Still leading 6-4, Tug faced pinch-hitter Glenn Beckert with Rudolph on first.

Which brings us, as all Happiest Recaps should, to Bob Murphy:

“Now the stretch by McGraw, the three-two delivery…the runner goes, and a little popup! Milner grabs it — he’ll run to first…double play! The Mets win the pennant! The Mets have just won the pennant in the Eastern Division! It’s all over, the Mets have won it with a magnificent stretch drive. They won nineteen and lost only eight in September, they’ve won their first October ballgame, and with it, they have won the pennant in the Eastern Division.”

The Mets were a 21-8 club dating back to the final day of August, the day they moved out of the cellar. They were an 82-79 team overall, which in every other season to that point in major league history would have meant a ticket home. Instead, in the wild and wacky year of 1973 — when “eternal optimist” Tom Seaver admitted the odds facing the Mets in summer “strained even my eternal optimism” — it was a ticket to the National League Championship Series against the Reds. They were division champs for the second time in five years, creating a miracle every bit as incomprehensible as the one from 1969. Stranger, probably.

In ’69, the Mets materialized as if from thin air, but they did it sooner and grabbed first place earlier. This team took it to the wire and then needed one more day besides. They had four teams on their tail on the supposed last day, two more still hanging around the day after. But now the Cards were done, the Pirates (losing to San Diego) were done and even they could finally take a breath. The makeup doubleheader’s second half was no longer needed, and the umpires didn’t need much of an excuse to defer to the endlessly gray skies that enveloped Chicago’s north side and call it off.

Geez, these Mets had, like McGraw, gotten so hot, that they didn’t even need an entire season to zoom from last on August 30 to first on October 1. They clinched in 161 games. The stubbornness of this season like no other may have been taking a nine-inning break, but now it insisted on continuing deep into October. Per Yogi’s summertime pronouncement, it really wasn’t going to be over until it was over…which was fine with all concerned, one Met maybe more than any other.

In September, when Willie Mays was announcing his retirement, he was already on the sidelines. He never played in another regular-season game after September 9. But he promised that if the Mets were successful in extending their fight for a pennant, he, like all the kids he called his teammates, would be prepared to play.

“If we get into the World Series,” Mays told the reporters, “I’ll be there.”

As it turned out, Willie became one of the reasons the 1973 Mets would get to the World Series, as the NLCS demonstrated he wasn’t done playing, and his hit in deciding Game Five showed he could still contribute. But before that showdown versus Cincinnati could take on its own legend, there was the matter of getting the Say Hey Kid on the plane out of Chicago.

“Where’s Willie?” Seaver asked amid the raucous clubhouse celebration at Wrigley.

“He took two sips of champagne,” Tom was told, “and he’s passed out on the training table.”

You Gotta Believe it was as fitting a reaction to all that had transpired in 1973 as any.

ALSO QUITE HAPPY: On September 27, 2008, Johan Santana…actually, that pretty much describes it. “Johan Santana” earned its place as a synonym for “one player saved an entire team, an entire season and an entire stadium,” even if it was only for one day.

The Mets needed a starting pitcher to keep them viable on the second-to-last day of the 2008 season. They trailed the Phillies by two in the N.L. East and Milwaukee by one for the N.L. Wild Card. Lose on Saturday, and their season was all but over and Shea Stadium would be destined for a meaningless game on its final day the next day. Of course they needed a starting pitcher in order to forestall calamity, but what they really needed one who would prevent their bullpen from doing any more damage to their chances than their relief corps had already done.

No kidding. The Mets’ relievers were a horror show. And their logical options to start with proper rest — raw rookie Jonathon Niese, retreads Brandon Knight and Nelson Figueroa — were not what you’d call stoppers. In a perfect world, they’d turn to Santana, who had given them their last excellent start on Tuesday: eight innings, two runs, ten strikeouts (on 125 pitches) against the Cubs. He even scored a pair himself. Santana was indeed the pitcher for the job, exactly what the Mets had in mind when they shipped four prospects to Minnesota to acquire him and forklifted a metric ton of money into his bank account to keep him around through 2013.

The only problem with the Santana-on-Saturday scenario was Johan would have only three days’ rest. And Johan Santana, two-time American League Cy Young Award winner, had never started a game in the big leagues on three days’ rest.

So why not give it a try now? It’s not like Santana wasn’t willing to do it — he “begged for the chance,” Jerry Manuel said — and it’s not like the manager had a remotely better option. And as far as anybody knew, it wasn’t like Santana wasn’t fully healthy. But in reality, he wasn’t. It wasn’t mentioned publicly, but Johan was going to require postseason surgery to repair a torn meniscus in his left knee. It had been aching badly for a month, though Johan being Johan rather brushed it off as an inconvenience.

“He told me that the only way he was not going to finish the season,” Santana’s agent Chris Leible said, “was if they took him to the hospital in an ambulance.”

Let’s back up, then. He’s never gone on three days’ left. He needs surgery. The Mets are desperate in the standings. They have nobody else who can start. They want, at all costs, to use as little of their bullpen as possible. The stadium is about to close forever. And, oh yes, the Mets are still laboring under the burden of having let a playoff spot slip through their fingers at the same time the year before.

Anything else? Anything else to put more weight on Johan Santana’s broad shoulders? Any bold statements — bolder than insisting he be the one to pitch this do-or-die game?

How about, “It’s time to be a MAN”? That’s what Johan actually wrote on a piece of paper and actually hung on the wall inside the Mets’ clubhouse before the Saturday matinee against the Marlins.

Anybody who thought Johan only scribbled a good game had seen nothing yet. On a day with as much on the line as any Mets team had ever encountered, Johan wasn’t a man — he was a team of men. He was from another planet. The Planet Johan, where pitchers don’t worry about adequate rest, joint pain or anything as silly as a pitch count.

How long could Johan go? How long did the Mets need him to go? Whatever it would take, Santana would deliver. Nine innings? Obviously. One-hundred seventeen pitchers? Fine. A complete game, three-hit, nine-strikeout, 2-0 shutout that by day’s end pulled the Mets even with the Brewers for the Wild Card? That’s why they pay the man the millions they do.

That last one isn’t quite fair. The Mets paid Santana an acely sum (six years, $137.5 million) to go out and do the kinds of things he had done for the Twins every five days. Doing them on the fourth day…on the second-to-last day of the season and the stadium…on one good leg…while using one foot to keep the Mets’ bullpen door sealed securely shut…and then triumphantly tossing the ball from the final out (a deep fly to left from Cody Ross, caught by Endy Chavez) to a fan sitting behind the Mets’ dugout?

It was exactly the right time to be JOHAN, in capital letters.

Johan Santana fashioned the last win in the history of Shea Stadium. Sadly, it didn’t coincide with the last game of Shea Stadium and it wasn’t capable of creating more games at Shea Stadium, as in postseason games. By October 1, Johan would be not on a mound, but at the Hospital for Special Surgery getting that meniscus fixed. Whatever ailed the Mets after their second consecutive collapse or implosion or whatever you wanted to call it couldn’t and wouldn’t be repaired so easily. But that was hardly Johan’s fault. Nothing in the wake of the wreckage of another lost September could be left in Johan’s lap except kudos for what, all things considered, might have been the most clutch game a pitcher ever pitched in a New York Mets uniform.

In 2010, a documentary titled The Last Play at Shea was released, centering on the final concert the old ballpark ever hosted, Billy Joel’s second show in July of 2008. Because the Mets failed to make the playoffs, narrator Alec Baldwin declared Joel’s big night — which ended with Paul McCartney sitting in to perform “Let It Be” — “the stadium’s last magic moment”.

Anybody who was blessed enough to watch Johan Santana go the distance two months later would be compelled to not let that rather shortsighted assessment be.

“Tonight the New York Mets and the Saint Louis Cardinals. The Mets have a magic number of one. This afternoon, the Chicago Cubs won their ballgame from Montreal by a score of six to three to keep alive their chance for a tie for the championship. So the Mets’ magic number is one; a Met victory here tonight would clinch the championship in the Eastern Division of the National League. So we have a big, big crowd on hand for this concluding game of the series.”
—Lindsey Nelson, pregame

Seven years removed from the humblest beginnings imaginable. Two years removed from 101 losses. One year removed from a place so low that the standings didn’t include it anymore. Light years removed from what the human imagination could have dreamed up six months before. The longest of long shots six weeks earlier. Yet for two weeks, nobody couldn’t have known this was coming.

Still beyond the realm of the imagination, but there was no stopping it. The New York Mets were about to become champions. Champions of the National League’s Eastern Division, but it might as well have been the universe. Just by arriving on the edge of clinching, they were the champions of possibility. They were the champions of wishing and hoping and praying, if not necessarily thinking, because thinking would have guided any sane person away from this scenario. They were the champions of faith.

And this Wednesday night, the final scheduled home game of 1969, may merit the title of champion of all regular-season games in Mets history. Considering where the Mets had come from and where they would go shortly thereafter, no Mets win in the first half-century the team existed — or maybe ever — could possibly mean quite as much.

“Hello everybody, it’s Lou Brock coming around to lead off now for the Saint Louis Cardinals in what is, for the Mets and Mets fans, the biggest baseball game ever played in this stadium.”
—Lindsey Nelson, top of the first

Was there any way the Mets were going to lose this game? Putting aside whatever latter-day metrics might tell us retroactively about win probability; and the factors that might have influenced this matchup — Steve Carlton was 17-10, Gary Gentry was 11-12, the Mets were 11-6 vs. the Cards; and the eternal truth that it’s anybody’s ballgame, particularly before one starts…no, the Mets were not going to lose this ballgame.

The Mets were going to use this ballgame as the template for all celebratory events to come. They and the 54,928 on hand needed the practice. They’d never had anything concrete to celebrate before other than themselves. Mets fans led the league in mere happiness to be here — that there were Mets to root for and that they were the ones doing it.

Even Leo Durocher’s Cubs cooperated. The former frontrunners had lost 9 of 14 coming into their afternoon action. Had they dropped their matinee to sixth-/last-place Montreal, the Mets would have been in Anticlimax City. But they beat the Expos, less keeping their own chances alive than making sure the party in Flushing would be more than hugs and hearty handshakes.

“Carlton strikes out Jones. First strikeout for Carlton. Donn Clendenon’s coming up. Clendenon’s hitting Two Forty-Six, he has thirteen homers and forty-five runs batted in. Lefthander Steve Carlton checks the runners, here’s the pitch to Clendenon, swung on and hit DEEP to center! Way back, Flood goes back into the track, it’s going, going, it’s gone, it’s a home run! A home run for Clendenon! Donn Clendenon hit a three-run homer over the center field fence. The Mets are out in front by a score of three to nothing, one man out, nobody on and Ron Swoboda coming up.”

Donn Clendenon, 34, was acquired for nights like these. Not that there were nights like these in the Mets’ past, but GM Johnny Murphy and manager Gil Hodges were intent on making sure there’d be a few in the near future when they pulled the trigger on a four-for-one deal with Montreal at the June 15 trading deadline. They had to give up a quartet of youngsters. One of them, Kevin Collins, had been a Met on and off since 1965 — he pinch-hit on Opening Day against the Expos. One of them, Steve Renko, had pitched at Wrigley Field that very afternoon of September 24, taking the well-timed loss in front of 52,711 fewer people than would be at Shea Stadium this night. The other two fellows, Bill Carden and Dave Colon, never reached the majors. Collins played in the bigs until 1971. Renko had a representative career, winning 134 games (while losing 146) from 1969 until 1983.

Steve Renko was still pitching and occasionally winning more than a decade after Donn Clendenon retired. Renko theoretically could have helped the Mets throughout the 1970s and into the 1980s. But that didn’t matter. The distant future, that time toward which the Youth of America had been mythically developing since Shea Stadium was under construction, was no longer the Mets’ nebulous aim. The Mets in the middle of June 1969 decided they were a “now” team. They now needed a power-hitting first baseman, a veteran righty complement to the prematurely ancient if technically 24-year-old Ed Kranepool.

Clendenon’s three-run homer off Carlton marked the instant “now” arrived. Four prospects were a scant price to pay for that 3-0 lead.

“Low and away for a ball, it’s two-two. I got a letter this week from an army chaplain in Korea saying that the United States servicemen there were pulling for and following the fortunes of the New York Mets day by day. Here’s a swing, a fly ball to deep right field, Flood going back into the track, he’s way back there, and he leaps up, can’t get it! Home run! A home run for Ed Charles! A two-run homer! Ed Charles hit his third home run of the year over the right field fence, the right-center field fence, a two-run homer that scored Swoboda ahead of him, the New York Mets are leading five-nothing, and that is all for Steve Carlton! The sign has gone to the bullpen now for Dave Giusti.”
—Lindsey Nelson, bottom of the first

Ed Kranepool, born in November 1944, made his major league debut in 1962. Ed Charles, born in April 1933, made his major league debut in 1962.

Something was wrong with this picture, and it had nothing to do with the high hopes and big bonus applied to 17-year-old Kranepool. Charles should have been a major league infielder in the 1950s. He was a .300 hitter in Class C ball at age 18. He maintained that level his next couple of seasons as he climbed the Braves chain before and after a stint in the military. He reached Triple-A for the first time in 1956 and put all the lower minors behind him by 1958.

And there, it seemed, Ed Charles was left, an experienced, skilled minor leaguer in his sixth…seventh…eighth…ninth year in the pros. The Braves never brought him up from Triple-A.

Couldn’t have anything to do with a quota system that informally limited the number of black players on any given roster, could it?

Charles thought so. Prevailing evidence doesn’t suggest otherwise. Ed Charles may not have been a player the caliber of incumbent Braves third baseman Eddie Mathews, but he certainly should have been given a shot long before Eddie Kranepool got one. Charles was a native of the Jim Crow South, Daytona Beach, Fla. His inspiration was the sight of Jackie Robinson playing Spring Training baseball in 1946, the year before he broke the major league color line (another “informal” obstacle) with Brooklyn. Jackie may have integrated baseball, but he didn’t make the business end of it color-blind.

Ed didn’t get his break until Milwaukee traded him to the Kansas City A’s, where he put up respectable numbers for a hopeless organization. As he established himself in the American League, the Glider, as he was known, became intent on making his own luck as much as he could, displaying “a discipline and humility that is rarely seen in the clubhouse,” by George Vecsey’s Joy in Mudville reckoning. “He began attending college in his late twenties and wrote inspirational poetry, paying for the printing and mailing it to young fans who asked for autographs.”

When the Mets traded Larry Elliot (and cash) to Kansas City in May 1967 to get Charles, they got more than a third baseman. They got a man who, per Vecsey, “drew the Met players closer together with his warmth and maturity.”

Twenty-eight months later, as the righthanded half of a third base platoon on a first-place team, Ed drew them two runs closer to a championship.

“In case you joined us along the way, the New York Mets got five runs in the bottom of the first. Harrelson singled and Agee walked. After Jones struck out, Clendenon hit a three-run homer. Swoboda walked and Charles hit a two-run homer, and that was all for the starter Steve Carlton. Dave Giusti came in to relieve him, here’s Giusti’s pitch. Hit DEEP to right, that’s WAY back there, it’s going, going…and it is GONE for a home run for Clendenon, his second home run of the night! The Mets are leading six to nothing. Home run number fifteen for Donn Clendenon, over the right field wall and into the Met bullpen.”
—Lindsey Nelson, bottom of the fifth

Has any in-season trade in Mets history paid the immediate dividends that the Donn Clendenon deal did? They got him in the middle of June and well before September was over, they had a single-digit magic number. Who else effected that kind of result? Even Keith Hernandez, acquired exactly 14 years later, didn’t make that quick a difference.

In Stanley Cohen’s 1988 retrospective, A Magic Summer, it is instructive to reread how Donn Clendenon’s teammates recalled him almost twenty years on. “The catalyst,” according to Art Shamsky; “a take-the-pressure-off kind of guy,” said Tug McGraw; “probably the key to our whole season,” in Wayne Garrett’s mind — “the ingredient we needed.”

Were 35 RBIs ever as important as those Donn Clendenon collected between June 22 and September 24, up to and including the bottom of the fifth when his second home run of the night increased the Mets’ lead to six? He played in only 72 games for New York in ’69 because he platooned with Kranepool. Think about that for a moment. The fortunes of a franchise, a city and maybe the sport pivoted on the presence of a man who split time with, well, Eddie Kranepool. But Kranepool plus Clendenon, along with Ken Boswell plus Al Weis, Wayne Garrett plus Ed Charles, and Art Shamsky plus Ron Swoboda added up to the sum of Gil Hodges’ parts. Their individual numbers may have matched their reputations, but their collective contribution was writing a fairy tale.

Clendenon was clearly the most accomplished of the 1969 Mets’ irregulars. He’d had two seasons of better than 90 RBIs as a Pirate and in ’68, The Year of The Pitcher, drove in 87. The Mets didn’t have anybody with those credentials. The expansion draft made him an Expo. Good sense — Clink’s no-BS threat to retire — prevented him from becoming an Astro despite Montreal’s attempt to trade him to Houston. A college education and off-season planning gave him a path outside baseball, working for the Scripto pen company (as a VP, no less). Foresight and fortune, though, had a different script in mind. Commissioner Bowie Kuhn convinced him to play in Quebec. Johnny Murphy convinced his employers to send him to Queens.

It’s no wonder Donn Clendenon stood out as a veteran, accomplished, professional power hitter on the New York Mets. He was that good and they hadn’t had anybody quite like him before. Yet he meshed as well as he mashed. Consider Tom Seaver’s recollection of the Mets’ first home game after Donn joined their ranks. It involved his wife, Nancy, introducing herself to hubby’s new teammate, and Donn “putting on a little show” in return, suavely charming the ace’s better half as only a veteran, accomplished professional power hitter might.

“Hi Donn,” Tom greeted him after perhaps enjoying the show enough. “What are you kissing my wife’s arm for?

“It’s great to be a Met,” Donn replied.

It was even better to be up 6-0 with 14 outs to for a divisional flag.

“So two cast aside by Gary Gentry here in the seventh inning, it brings up Tim McCarver. The Cardinals’ talented backstop has fouled to third and fouled out to first, nothing for two. In the Astrodome tonight, the Atlanta Braves will call on Pat Jarvis and Houston will pitch Tom Griffin. Over the inside corner, strike one called. Tom Griffin of Houston and Gary Gentry of the Mets the two top rookie pitchers in the league this year. Interestingly enough, both are trying for their twelfth win tonight. Ground ball hit hard, but right at Al Weis, he has it. Throws to Clendenon and the side is out. No runs, no hits, no errors, none left. Now seventh-inning stretch time for the huge crowd at Shea Stadium. At the end of six-and-a-half innings, the New York Mets six and the Saint Louis Cardinals nothing.”
—Bob Murphy, middle of the seventh.

How did they do it? How did the Mets keep churning out hard-throwing young arms? Seaver in ’67, Koosman and Ryan and McAndrew in ’68, now this year Gary Gentry? You could piece together lineups from what others would consider spare parts if you could pitch like the Mets. And boy could the Mets pitch.

Gary Gentry sure could. He was drafted out of Arizona State in June 1967. It was off to Double-A Williamsport, where his ERA sat under two and his strikeout-per-inning rate was nearly nine. Promoted for a full year at Triple-A Jacksonville, he threw 198 innings in 1968 and won 12 games.

Gentry was ready. In his first start, on April 10, he came within one out of a complete game, giving up two runs to the Expos. Tommie Agee hit a home run to Shea Stadium’s highest fair perch and the Mets were a game over .500. The team was 2-1. The rookie was 1-0. Gary Gentry slotted in nicely behind Seaver and Koosman. He may not have been quite at the level in his rookie year that they had been in theirs — Seaver was Rookie of the Year, Koosman finished a hair behind Johnny Bench — but there was no shame in holding down a spot every five days with this crew. He had the stuff and he had the self-confidence to fill an important role on a team that didn’t necessarily think it was making a miracle. Gentry was just doing what he had always done.

“I never played on a team that didn’t expect to win,” Gary told Cohen, recounting his squads’ successes through college and the minors. “So when I came up with the Mets in ’69, I never thought about anything except winning. I didn’t know much about the team’s history.”

Yet here he was, 33 games into his big league career, emphatically rewriting it. Through seven visiting innings, the Cardinals landed only three baserunners, and two of those were erased on double plays. The Mets of this new era, of these days of Gentryfication when winning was the norm and losing was for the other guys, had their eyes on the finish line. They were going the distance, and Gentry would be damned if he wasn’t going to be the one to take them there.

Gentry, as befit a pitcher pitching behind Seaver and Koosman, liked completing games, even if he wasn’t given that many opportunities relative to his more-established teammates. In 1969, pitchers were geared to finish what they started. Mets starters completed 51 of their starts and that was good for only sixth in the National League. Just as Gil Hodges wasn’t shy about platooning, he didn’t hesitate to deploy an effective bullpen led by the likes of righty Ron Taylor and lefty Tug McGraw. It was all about the team winning.

Nevertheless, Gentry preferred to complete games. He finished five entering the action of September 24: a number stellar in modern terms (as many as Clayton Kershaw would compile in 2011, for example), a total that wasn’t even on the radar in 1969. In retirement, Gentry would rue that he was a victim of “the relief syndrome,” the budding pattern in baseball that didn’t demand nine innings out of every starter. Gentry wanted that demand made of him. He wanted Hodges and pitching coach Rube Walker to leave him in. “That was my style of baseball,” he told Cohen. “I always felt that I got to the majors ten years too late.”

Actually, after he worked the eighth and prepared to take the ball in the ninth, the Mets still out front by a half-dozen runs, it was clear Gary Gentry was right on time.

“Lou Brock will lead off against Gary Gentry. The crowd is standing, waving and cheering. The Mets are three outs away from a divisional crown. Fouled back to the screen, strike one. This is the moment Mets fans have waited for. Ed Charles in close at third against Lou Brock. Brock has one of the two hits given up by Gary Gentry, who has turned in an absolutely magnificent performance with the pressure on. Now the lean righthander stands and pitches. Call strike on the outside corner! It is two strikes. And the standing room crowd will be roaring with each delivery.”
—Bob Murphy, top of the ninth

Brock produced a grounder up the middle that Harrelson made a play on, but Buddy couldn’t throw out the speedy Redbird. St. Louis had a man on first. Vic Davalillo was up next.

“Not a soul is leaving the stadium. Everybody just jamming the aisles and standing right by the exits. Now the Glider comes over from third to have a word with his young pitcher. This has to be a huge moment in the life of Ed Charles. He has known about as much hard times as anybody. Ground ball hit toward the middle, Harrelson can’t get it. It’s a base hit to center for Davalillo, and the Cardinals are slowing things up on back-to-back base hits by Brock and Davalillo.”

Gentry had hoped for an “easy game,” and that it had been for the longest time. The confident rookie was nervous for the first four or five innings and then was “just more or less in a hurry to get the game over with so that everyone could enjoy what was happening.”

The nerve of those Cardinals to delay such a well-planned party. But Gentry got two quick strikes on the next batter, Vada Pinson, before the St. Louis right fielder fouled one off.

“Now Gentry up in pitching position. And the pitch on the way…swing and a miss, he struck him out! The Mets are two outs away. Strikeout number five for Gary Gentry. Now the hitter is Joe Torre. The infield is set at double play depth.”

Joe Torre grew up in Brooklyn before there were Mets. In the borough of Dodgers, he was a Giants fan. Then he left to become a Milwaukee Brave. There was talk through the spring that the kid who had grown into a five-time All-Star catcher might come home. The Braves were looking to trade him in the aftermath of his role during the Spring Training player job action (more a boycott than a formal strike). Torre was sitting out camp — “sulking” in Manhasset, by Vecsey’s account  — waiting for resolution. In March, the Mets still needed a power-hitting first baseman, and Joe could certainly fit that bill. He’d played the position intermittently since the Braves had moved to Atlanta in 1966. With a hitter of Torre’s caliber, Hodges wouldn’t have to platoon at first.

What would it take to make it so New Yorkers could come see what this Brooklyn kid could do in Queens? A lot, Joe Durso recounted in Amazing. The first request filed by Atlanta GM Paul Richards was for Ryan, outfield prospect Amos Otis, and Jerry Grote (which would have sent Torre back behind the plate). After Johnny Murphy presumably stopped laughing at the audacity of the proposal, he countered with something less Met-onerous: Grote’s backup J.C. Martin, Kranepool, either Ryan or Jim McAndrew, and somebody else for Torre and third baseeman Bob Aspromonte. This time it was Richards who demurred.

Murphy held on to all his young players until Clendenon became available in June and then  stayed in possession of the ones he really liked. Richards, meanwhile, swapped Torre to St. Louis for Orlando Cepeda. If the division leads held over the next week, the Mets and Braves would meet not at the trading table but in the first National League Championship Series. Atlanta had just the night before wrested control of the wild West from San Francisco by winning their fifth in a row.

The Mets, meanwhile, were still looking at Joe Torre, but in a very different context than they did six months earlier.

“Torre, the cleanup batter, has lined out, bounced out and popped up, nothing-for-three. Al Weis shaded toward the middle of the diamond. And the pitch on the way…low and outside, it’s ball one. The crowd chanting We’re Number One. The Mets made up fifteen-and-a-half games since the thirteenth of August. And the pitch thrown…fouled into the air, back toward the crowd. It’s one ball and one strike to Joe Torre. Tim McCarver is the on-deck hitter. Mets have the infield hoping for a chance to make a double play that would end it. Tommie Agee just a stride to left-center. Now the ballboy brings out some balls for umpire Al Barlick. Lou Brock is on second and Vic Davalillo is the runner on first with one man out. Ninth inning, six-nothing New York, and the pitch…ground ball foul, down the third base line. He went after a curve from Gary Gentry.”

Ralph Kiner, Bob Murphy reported over Mets flagship WJRZ-AM and affiliates like WKAJ-FM in Saratoga Springs, was down in the clubhouse awaiting to “talk with the players as they come in”. Lindsey Nelson was handling play-by-play duties on Channel 9. The three men had been Original Mets, chronicling every move Casey Stengel made, dating back to St. Petersburg in the runup to 1962, and following the fortunes of his successors Wes Westrum, Salty Parker and now Hodges. They weren’t “we” announcers, though. They were even-handed — complimentary to the other side when the other side deserved it, which was most of the time from 1962 through 1968. Life was different now, though. The Mets were the heart of the story Murphy and Kiner and Nelson told. The Mets were the story everywhere. They had been on the cover of Time  and Life that September. They would dominate the front page of the New York Times the next day. And the Mets fans were the story every bit as much as the Mets team.

“[T]he roar that is going to come out of this stadium on the final out, if the Mets are still in front,” Murphy predicted in the seventh, “is going to be something to hear. After seven agonizing years and many frustrations, the Mets fans, the best and most loyal baseball fans to be found in this land, are really going to have something to cheer about.”

It’s easy enough to butter up your listeners, but Murph wasn’t saying anything that wasn’t easily verifiable. The Mets opened for business in a crumbling Polo Grounds with a roster that was every bit as dilapidated, and the best and most loyal baseball fans were born. They accepted the Mets and their flaws. They took them to their heart and didn’t let them go. The 40-120 Mets drew 922,530 to a neighborhood most (including the erstwhile New York Giants) were bent on avoiding. This was in an age when a million fans was not a given for any team and nearly a million for a historically horrendous team was as laughable as the idea of trading Ryan, Otis and Grote all at once.

In 1963, the Mets barely improved to 51-111, the Polo Grounds crumbled a little more and attendance leapt to over a million. Those fans, identified immediately by Metsologists as a New Breed, made noise, made banners, and made a pledge of undying love with no evidence their ardor would be rewarded with anything but more losing.

The love affair continued in a new ballpark in another borough. The Mets drew 1,732,597 to beautiful Shea Stadium in 1964. The facility sparkled. The team (53-109) was mostly grim as ever. Novelty? The Mets were a shade worse in 1965 (50-112) yet they drew a shade more. They showed the slightest sign of forward progress in 1966 — not finishing last, not losing a hundred games (66-95) — and attendance soared toward 2 million. The gate leveled off in 1967 and 1968, but the Mets were still bringing more fans through the turnstiles for tenth- (61-101) and ninth-place (73-89) baseball than just about anybody in the National League was attracting for outfits sporting better records. And if Mets attendance didn’t lead one and all in sheer body count, nobody beat it for enthusiasm generated.

Why? Why were Mets fans so giving of affection when the Mets couldn’t possibly reciprocate in the win column? Theories abounded from the first day Ol’ Case set to putting the most human face in captivity on what could have been a very dismal enterprise. Mets fans were the way they were because they were imps…or ironists…or inveterate optimists…or enthralled by being in on the ground floor (or basement) of what was brand spanking new — at a moment in time when Camelot was in full swing and the Beatles were first tuning their instruments…or reassured by a well-orchestrated throwback to what had recently departed (Senior Circuit successors to the Giants and Dodgers, the Mets held an Old Timers Day during their very first year of existence)…or underdogs in life, so therefore they couldn’t help but identify with the most clearly identifiable underdogs of baseball.

“The Metophile,” the Times’s Robert Lipsyte wrote with tongue a touch in cheek as he attempted to explore what made Mets fans tick in 1963, “is a dreamer. He believes that one day he will punch that arrogant foreman at the plant square on his fat nose; that he will get in the last word with his wife; that he will win the Irish Sweepstakes; that the Mets will start a winning streak.”

Early in that second season, Lipsyte predicted the Met Mystique would wear thin soon enough. “The pure Metophile,” he warned, “is likely to disappear in a few years. Even now, more and more ordinary people go to the Polo Grounds to watch a baseball game. As the Mets progress from incompetency to mediocrity, their psychological pull will be gone.”

The Mets, however, breezed right by mediocrity and bulleted to overwhelming success. Their appeal required little analysis now. As the franchise’s top executive, M. Donald Grant, would put it with the kind of grace and accuracy with which he wouldn’t forever be associated, “Our team finally caught up with our fans. Our fans were winners long ago.”

“This,” Bob Murphy assured his listeners in the seventh inning on September 24, 1969, “has truly been an amazing year for the New York Mets.”

What else was left to say?

“It’s two-and-two on Joe Torre with one out in the ninth. The pitch by Gentry is…fouled, out of play behind the third base dugout to the crowd. Everybody right on the edge of their seat. I’ll bet Cleon Jones sets a track record getting to that dugout from left field when that final out is made.

“Gentry, working hard here against Joe Torre, now in the set position, here’s the pitch. GROUND BALL HIT TO SHORTSTOP. HARRELSON TO WEIS, THERE’S ONE, FIRST BASE, DOUBLE PLAY! THE METS WIN! IT’S ALL OVER! OH, THE ROAR GOING UP FROM THIS CROWD! An unbelievable scene on the field. Fans are POURING onto the field, the ballplayers trying to get to the dugout. A six-four-three double play, and it’s all over. Congratulations to Gil Hodges, the coaches and the ballplayers — what a year! It’s hard to believe.

“The Mets are on their way into the clubhouse, final score, the New York Mets six and the Saint Louis Cardinals nothing, they knocked Steve Carlton out in the first inning, Donn Clendenon hit a three-run homer, Ed Charles hit a two-run homer, later in the game, Clendenon hit another home run, and Gary Gentry, the rookie righthander from Phoenix, Arizona, pitched a marvelous FOUR-hit shutout.

“THOUSANDS and THOUSANDS of fans are out on the playing field. Banners are being paraded. The Mets are IN the clubhouse. And in just a very few moments, we’ll be joining Ralph Kiner as he picks up the comments from the players.

“Ah, it’s almost too much to believe. Imagine finishing ninth a year ago, one game out of tenth, although it was a vastly improved club…Gil Hodges, who a year ago today suffered a heart attack in Atlanta, Georgia, fighting back from a heart attack to take his ballclub in his second year and MOLD a championship team.”

“Well, we’ll be back with the locker room show now in just one moment.”

But first, after a commercial break, and as the microphones picked up Jane Jarvis’s happy organ accompanying the nonstop elation in the background, Bob Murphy offered a coda from the booth that would eventually bear his name:

“THOUSANDS and THOUSANDS of Mets fans are out on the field, all shouting We’re Number One, We’re Number One. You have to see this scene to believe it. All the happiness comes pouring out.

“For the first six years of their lives, the Mets were laughed at, kicked around. They were the ballclub that was the big joke. They never believed it themselves, they knew they were going to be a ballclub.

“George Weiss, the first president of the Mets, had put together a good organization. The SCOUTS, the best he could get his hands on, turned out to be exactly that, the very best. They started signing GREAT young pitchers. It took a short time to develop them in the farm system. It took the guiding hand of a Gil Hodges to put it all together. And now THIS is the climax, a scene that Mets fans, I’m sure, since that first day eight years ago, have longed for.”

On July 31, 1994, Bob Murphy stood at a podium in Cooperstown accepting the Ford C. Frick Award for baseball broadcasting. In his acceptance speech, Bob singled out his favorite Mets team of them all.

“They were my boys of summer,” the Hall of Fame announcer said. “You’ll never enjoy a year any more than following the 1969 Mets.”

Though he never used his signature phrase that Wednesday night at Shea Stadium when Clendenon, Charles and Gentry starred and first place was clinched, chances are pretty good that September 24, 1969, endures as Bob Murphy’s Happiest Recap of them all.

ALSO QUITE HAPPY: On October 1, 1985, the clock was ticking on the Mets’ playoff chances. Good thing they employed a slugger who could make time stand still.

Of course if the Mets could have done that sooner and longer, they’d have been in better shape entering their final week. But things had not gone to plan since their dramatic three-game series at Shea against the rival Cardinals three weeks earlier. They came out of that showdown up one game on St. Louis. Alas, their advantage was short-lived. Within 48 hours, they had dropped a half-game behind the Redbirds. As the Mets were splitting six games against the Expos and Phillies, the Cards were off on a seven-game winning streak.

There was no momentum for New York. From September 13 through September 27, while the Cardinals were ripping off 14 wins in 15 games, the Mets scuffled as a barely .500 team, going 9-7 and never stringing together two consecutive wins. Dwight Gooden was blazing through September — in his three post-Cardinal starts totaling 26 innings, Doc drove in seven runs…or seven more than were charged to his microscopic earned run average. Gary Carter was catching him superbly and knocking in practically every Met he saw: 19 RBIs in 15 games played. But the team as a whole was sagging at the worst possible juncture. Not only was it getting late, but the Cardinals had gotten unbeatable.

The nadir came on Friday night the 27th in, not surprisingly, Pittsburgh. Pittsburgh represented rampant bad news for the Mets in September 1985, dating back to Keith Hernandez’s detour there to testify in the baseball drug trials early in the month. The last-place Pirates were an unlikely crew to sidetrack the Mets, but when they sailed into Shea the weekend of the 20th, it was more “oy” than “ahoy”. Despite Doc’s breakout offensive game on Saturday the 21st — which included his first major league homer — the Pirates took two of three in Flushing. Then, on the night when, thanks to the ravages of Hurricane Gloria, much of Metropolitan New York had to listen to the Three Rivers opener on battery-operated radios, the Mets’ chances practically blew away.

Early leads of 2-0 and 5-2 were gone with the wind in Pittsburgh as Ed Lynch left with recurring back spasms after two, and Tom Gorman, Wes Gardner and Randy Niemann each imploded in a six-run bottom of the third. The Mets were down 8-5 and lost 8-7. The defeat left them 4½ out with eight to play, an almost impossible hill to climb given how hot St. Louis had been.

A series of small miracles unfolded from there. The Cardinals displayed elements of being human and lost two of three in Montreal, the rubber game there turning on a two-run triple from ex-Met Hubie Brooks. Back in Pittsburgh, the Mets recovered from their devastating Gloria Night defeat to take the next two from their Buccaneering tormentors. Saturday afternoon’s 3-1 win was keyed by a George Foster home run and eight solid innings from rookie Rick Aguilera.

That would have been no more than a footnote had Sunday not been rescued at the last minute. Roger McDowell and Jesse Orosco let a 6-4 lead slip away in the eighth when they allowed three horrifying runs. Now down one run with three outs remaining in the competitive portion of their season, Howard Johnson tied the game at seven when he homered to lead off the ninth against Cecilio Guante. And Gary Carter capped his National League Player of the Month bid when he blasted a two-run home run off Larry McWilliams in the tenth; it was Kid’s 13th dinger in September. Orosco straightened up in the bottom of the inning to preserve the 9-7 win that literally saved the Mets’ 1985 season.

The Pirates, who had taken 8 of 18 from the Mets on their way to 104 defeats (while losing 15 of 18 to St. Louis), may have threatened the Mets’ viability, but their effect on the pennant race no longer mattered once Orosco grounded out Sammy Khalifa to let the Mets squirm out of Three Rivers with two wins. Their attention was focused squarely on their next destination: Busch Stadium.

“The only thing we were hoping for was  to have our fate in our own hands,” said HoJo after doing his part to ensure the Mets’ fighting chance. “We’re three games back. There’s still a ways to go.”

“It was so important to go into St. Louis and be no more than three out,” Carter assessed of where the Mets stood with six to play. “It’s up to us to prove we can beat them. We basically have to beat them all three games. We have to play our best baseball of the season in the next three.”

Over the next eleven innings, you could say they did. Unfortunately, as had become the Mets’ burden, the Cardinals were no slouches, either. “St. Louis has been so hot lately,” HoJo said, “every mistake we’ve made has been magnified.”

The answer was to make no mistakes, starting with the manager and to whom he’d give the ball in the do’est-or-die’est game the Mets had played since the 1973 World Series ended badly in Oakland. A dozen years earlier, Yogi Berra skipped over one of his well-rested hot hands, George Stone, and prevailed on Tom Seaver in Game Six and Jon Matlack in Game Seven to finish off the A’s on short rest. It didn’t work out. While it wasn’t exactly analogous, Davey Johnson had options entering the Tuesday night opener in St. Louis. It was Ron Darling’s turn to pitch, but because Monday was an off day, Gooden was clearly available. His last outing, a shutout in Chicago, had taken place five days earlier. Gooden hadn’t allowed an earned run since August. With everything riding on this game, how could Davey not go with not just his ace, but baseball’s premier pitcher?

“I got telegrams telling me that I was a fool not to start Dwight against [John] Tudor,” Johnson wrote with Peter Golenbock in Bats. “I received one telegram from a doctor in Brooklyn suggesting I pitch Gooden the last five innings of each of the last three games! One fan suggested that if Darling was really going to start, I should fool the Cardinals by letting Doc take batting practice and then have him walk down from the bullpen just before the game, as though he was going to warm up. Very clever.”

Somehow, Johnson remained unmoved. Darling kept his spot in the rotation. The second-year righty may not have been Doc (17-1, 1.36 ERA in his past two-dozen starts), and he may not have been Tudor (19-1, 1.46 ERA in the same span), but he wasn’t a desperate choice. Entering October, Ron was 16-5, sporting a 2.94 ERA. He had been an All-Star selection in July. “All I knew,” Darling reflected nearly a quarter-century later in The Complete Game, “was that it was my turn to pitch and that we needed this game, so I went at it hard.”

That made two of them, for Tudor, too, was competing at an elevated level. Less was at stake for the Cardinals, given their three-game edge, but beating the Mets a night before Gooden showed his face would be tantamount to the knockout blow the Busch Stadium crowd craved. One placard held aloft beyond the outfield fence described what everybody on both sides was thinking:

LET’S GET IT ON

Hernandez, vilified in his first post-drug trial trip to St. Louis — he had testified that he had done coke as a Cardinal — became the first baserunner of the game when he walked with two out in the first. But Tudor stranded him there. Irrepressible rookie speedster Vince Coleman (109 bags and counting) led off for the Cardinals by walking, but was forced at second, and Darling didn’t give up anything else in the inning.

A pattern was established. Tudor and Darling were shadowing each other. A man on here, a man on there, but nothing substantial of an offensive nature could be sparked. Mets 0 Cardinals 0 for the longest, tensest time. The first serious threat arose in the top of the seventh when the bottom of the Mets’ order sprang to life. With one out, Ray Knight singled. Howard Johnson ran for him and raced to third when Rafael Santana doubled. Second and third, Darling up. Davey Johnson attempted to squeeze HoJo home.

Ronnie didn’t get the bunt down. Howard was a dead duck. Two out, with Santana taking third on the failed attempt. Swinging away, Darling popped to third. Inning over, still no score.

Darling went back to doing what he did well. He got a first out in the bottom of the seventh before allowing a double to Terry Pendleton and a walk to Mike Jorgensen. Ozzie Smith was next and he rapped into a 1-6-3 double play.

Still no score.

The eight was three up, three down for Darling, then for Tudor. The ninth showed potential for the Mets when Carter doubled to start it, but he never got any further than second. Darling pitched the ninth as well as he pitched the previous eight: Tommy Herr fouled out, Darrell Porter grounded to second and Andy Van Slyke grounded to first. When Darling took the toss from Hernandez, he had just completed nine shutout innings. Four hits, three walks, no runs. “Quite simply,” Hernandez judged, “Darling pitches the game of his career.”

“It was the first time,” Darling would write with Daniel Paisner, “I experienced the full intensity of the professional game.”

But it was still 0-0 going to the tenth. Darling was pulled for pinch-hitter Tom Paciorek. And Tudor was still on the mound for St. Louis. The lefty flied Paciorek to right, Mookie Wilson to left and grounded Wally Backman (technically a switch-hitter, but notoriously feeble against southpaws) to short. Jesse Orosco would now be charged with matching Tudor’s latest zero. It was a little dicey — stretch drive pickup par excellence Cesar Cedeño walked and stole second — but Jesse escaped trouble when he retired aching pinch-hitter Jack Clark. Most encouragingly from a Met perspective, the Cards’ aborted rally saw Whitey Herzog send up Tito Landrum to bat for Tudor. The Mets had officially withstood the best the White Rat could possibly throw at him. Tudor went ten and allowed no runs, but like Darling, he was now irrelevant to the outcome.

At 0-0 in the eleventh, the heart of the Mets order had to skip a beat knowing that instead of taking on Tudor, its task at hand was reliever Ken Dayley. Except Dayley was pretty tough himself. The lefty struck out Hernandez and Carter. Strawberry, 0-for-4 versus Tudor, was next.

LET’S GET IT ON

“Oh baby, that one is WAY outta here!” Steve Zabriskie declared. The time was 10:44 PM Central Standard. We know that because WOR’s replay showed Darryl’s rocket on Dayley’s 1-1 pitch — “one curveball too many,” according to Ralph Kiner — smacking into and bouncing off the clock along the facing of Busch Stadium’s right field upper deck.

Zabriskie: “Right fielder Andy Van Slyke didn’t even move.”

Van Slyke had something in common with Mets fans back in New York, where the remote controls in 6.7 million households throughout the Metropolitan Area were staying put on Channel 9. This riveting game at the climax of this riveting season had drawn the highest rating of any WOR program in the station’s 36-year history. But the occupants of the previously still Mets dugout moved, with everybody leaping up and out onto the Busch Astroturf to swarm Darryl upon his triumphant arrival following his 28th home run of the season, the 80th home run of his career and the biggest home run he’d ever hit in any regular-season at-bat.

“When I hit it,” Straw said in a masterstroke of understatement, “I knew it was gone.”

Oh, and the scoreboard certainly moved. It had just clicked to Mets 1 Cardinals 0.

Darryl’s mighty blow provided enough of a lead for Orosco to protect in the bottom of the inning. The Mets came away 1-0 winners when they absolutely had to gain some kind of advantage. They were two games back with two more to go in St. Louis, and five left on the schedule overall. They were still in second, but suddenly it seemed as if they weren’t running out of time…not the way Darryl had just stopped it in its tracks.

“Tell me,” Davey asked reporters afterwards, “is the clock still working?”

The Mets were, and they knew it. Darling: “I’d never seen my teammates so emotional, so invested. Ray Knight actually had tears in his eyes in the clubhouse after the game. He was pumping his fists for sheer joy, that’s how much the game meant to him and it meant much the same to every guy in that room.”

In the standings, it offered another day of hope, though Herzog was happy to point out his club was still the one with more of that where a postseason appointment was concerned. “We’ve got to win a game,” the Rat appraised. “They’ve got to sweep.”

But “they” had Doc Gooden ready for his closeup, just as Davey had planned. No telegrams were necessary from Mets fans who tuned right back in to Channel 9 on Wednesday night. That viewership record from the night before was smashed — just like that clock in right field. More than one of every four television households in the Metropolitan Area tuned in Doc’s October 2 start; four of every ten sets that were in use were used to watch Gooden strike out ten Cardinals. If he wasn’t at his sharpest (nine hits and two actual earned runs), the Doctor was as in as he had to be. With a Nielsen-boggling 61 percent of the New York viewing audience hanging on every pitch, Gooden nursed a nervous 5-2 lead home in the ninth. The Cardinals had loaded the bases with two outs, and Herr lined one final delivery (Gooden’s 136th of the night) in the general direction of right field. Fortunately for those about to gasp, Backman stood in its way and caught Herr’s ball for the final out.

Gooden had won again. His 1985 numbers were now etched for posterity and immortality: 24-4, 1.53 ERA, 268 strikeouts in 276 innings, 16 complete games. The Mets, of course, had won again. Their 20-year-old ace had brought them to a 97-61 mark, just one game behind the 98-60 Cardinals. They needed to sweep three games. They were two-thirds of the way there.

The Mets would not complete the job. Channel 9 attracted yet another record-setting audience, Hernandez answered his St. Louis detractors with five hits in five tries, and Aguilera battled gamely across six innings, but the Mets went down, 4-3, in the Thursday October 3 finale. They took it to two out in the ninth, Keith on first, Gary up, but Cardinal reliever Ricky Horton drew a fly to right from September’s Player of the Month. This ball wasn’t headed where Strawberry’s two nights earlier had gone. This one landed in Van Slyke’s glove.

Time had run out on the 1985 Mets.

At two out with three to go, they weren’t mathematically eliminated, but spiritually, it was all over. The Mets flew home to play Montreal Friday night. They won, but so did their rival. The Cardinals clinched on Saturday afternoon by beating Chicago. When Shea’s out-of-town scoreboard flashed the final from St. Louis, 45,404 Mets fans ignored the game in front of them and stood as one to salute a 161-game pennant race like no other.

It was Fan Appreciation Day in Flushing. Scarves were distributed to help the Mets faithful through the cold days ahead. Yet all the scarf recipients could think to do was create a breeze by waving them in swirling acrylic acknowledgement of the spring, summer and early fall they had just lived and died through.

The scarves were nice enough. But the memories of 1985 were what would warm Mets fans down to their souls.

Their team had never been more than five games from the lead all year long, and was in first or second every day from July 8 on. They spent a composite 68 days atop the N.L. East. But that didn’t begin to describe the passion 1985 elicited for the committed Mets fan. No numbers, not even Doc’s, could express the urgency of a full season of living on the edge with these Mets.

Gary Carter began it with an introductory home run to beat the Cardinals on Opening Day. Darryl Strawberry extended it with a home run to beat the Cardinals 155 games later. Gooden excelled the next night, Hernandez the night after that. HoJo, with Kid, in Pittsburgh over the penultimate weekend. Mookie homering in L.A. at the end of the last California trip. Mookie rushing home from second to win the first St. Louis series in New York four days later. Everybody in Atlanta on the longest and strangest night of them all. Doc essentially every fifth day for six months. And Rusty…can’t forget Rusty zipping (in his fashion) between left and right that April Sunday at Shea, Davey trying his darnedest to keep the ball from being hit to him, and the ball finding Rusty anyway, and Rusty, a 41-year-old pinch-hitter, finding the ball before it could fall in in the 18th inning.

Rusty wouldn’t be forgotten in Game 162, either. Twenty-three Sundays after making his last outfield putout, he stepped up to the plate wind down his 23-season major league career with two out in the ninth inning in the only allegedly meaningless game the Mets would play in 1985. But how could it be without meaning if Rusty Staub was batting?

The final appearance of Le Grand Orange, as a pinch-hitter for Ronn Reynolds, was greeted by the final Shea crowd of the year as everything else was that weekend: warmly, sentimentally, maybe a little mistily. Rusty Staub came to the Mets in 1972 the way Gary Carter had come to the Mets in 1985, an established big bat imported from Canada in exchange for promising youth…the missing ingredient intended to put a talented team over the top. It wasn’t to be in ’72, just as it hadn’t been in ’85, but Rusty powered the Mets to a pennant in ’73, the last pennant Shea had seen. He was petulantly traded away after ’75, but reacquired prior to ’81. A new Mets contender grew up around him in the early ’80s. He wouldn’t be in uniform to see how much it would grow after 1985, but he was still wearing No. 10 for now, and the final 31,890 Sheagoers of the year (part of the 2,761,601 who established a New York City baseball attendance record) stood to thank Rusty for both of his Met terms and all of his Met swings.

His last one, against Jeff Reardon of the Expos, didn’t result in anything more than a groundout. The game ended. The Mets lost. The season was over. But the applause didn’t quite die down. Anybody who wasn’t there Saturday was going to get his appreciation in on Sunday before letting the team scatter for winter. This was a different kind of fan appreciation day. This was sincere appreciation by the fans for the team; for 1985; for 98 wins that somehow didn’t qualify for the playoffs; and for the palpable sense that 1986 would end later and better. Rusty might not be back, but everybody else who mattered would be.

Doc. Darryl. Keith. Gary. HoJo. Mookie. Wally. Lenny. Rafael. Ronnie. Jesse. Roger. Aggie. Sid. Ray. George. Danny. Doug. Davey.

And us.

A special The Happiest Recap thank you goes out to FAFIF readers Joe Dubin (September 24, 1969) and Larry Arnold (October 1, 1985) for their respective archival material contributions to this installment.

GAME 061: June 14, 1965 — Mets 1 REDS 0 (11)
(Mets All-Time Game 061 Record: 21-28; Mets 1965 Record: 21-39-1)

There was rarely a penalty for any pitcher deciding to pitch the game of his life versus the New York Mets in their first four years. Ask Jim Bunning, whose 1964 perfect game at Shea Stadium raised his profile so high that it probably edged him into the Hall of Fame and maybe Congress. Ask Sandy Koufax, who would pitch plenty of his games of his life before he was done but chose the 1962 Mets for his first no-hitter. Ask most every ace moundsman nine National League staffs sent to face the basement babies throughout ’62, ’63, ’64 and well into ’65.

But don’t ask Jim Maloney. He didn’t get to take full advantage of excelling against the Mets, not on this Monday night at Crosley Field. But, oh, did he excel, and oh, was he taking advantage of the generally easily duped Mets.

From striking out Billy Cowan to lead off the game to striking out the side in the third and striking them out again in the eighth, Maloney was untouchable. His only imperfection was walking Ed Kranepool to open the second…and choosing the wrong night to go so long without being touched.

His opposite number on the mound was Frank Lary, known in his American League days as the Yankee Killer, but he was doing an admirable job of snuffing out Reds. He wasn’t as close to flawless as Maloney, but for eight innings, he did what he had to do, holding Cincinnati to five hits, three walks, a hit batsman and — this is key — no runs. In the top of the ninth, Casey Stengel pinch-hit for Lary with Joe Christopher, but Maloney struck him out. He did the same to Cowan for the third time in the evening.

By the middle of the ninth, Jim Maloney had faced 28 Mets batters. One of them walked. Twenty-seven of them made outs. Fifteen of them struck out. But Maloney wasn’t winning. He was only tying because of Lary, also known as the Mule. Frank was at his most mulish in the eighth when after hitting Tommy Harper, Harper stole second and raced to third on Chris Cannizzaro’s bad throw. With the go-ahead run ninety feet away, Lary grounded Pete Rose back to the mound to erase the Red menace.

Met defense had been surprisingly obstinate, too…after a fashion. In the fourth, Vada Pinson made it second on a stolen base attempt in which Cannizzaro’s pitchout worked beautifully until shortstop Roy McMillan dropped the throw. Gordy Coleman (who would later make a dazzling stop on the Mets’ only bid at a hit in regulation) continued his at-bat and struck out, but strike three got by Chris, who chased the passed ball. While he did so, Pinson kept running from second. Cannizzaro found the ball and fired it to Lary, who tagged him at home.

In the bottom of the ninth, it fell to Mets reliever Larry Bearnarth to display a little stubbornness, and he proved plenty recalcitrant. Pinson flied to rookie Johnny Lewis in right before Frank Robinson drew a walk. But Bearnarth bore down, getting Coleman to foul to Gonder (who had replaced Cannizzaro behind the plate) and Deron Johnson to ground to McMillan, forcing Pinson at second.

For Maloney to cash in on his incredible night’s work, he’d have to keep going. So he did. Chuck Hiller lined out to start the tenth. Charley Smith struck out swinging. Kranepool stuck out looking. Maloney had now pitched ten hitless innings and collected seventeen strikeouts. “A catcher’s dream,” Cincy backstop Johnny Edwards would call him.

Yet he still wasn’t winning.

An Edwards single to lead off the bottom of the tenth and a sacrifice of pinch-runner Chico Ruiz by Leo Cardenas got a Red into scoring position for the fourth time all night, but Ruiz never got past third. It was 0-0 heading to the eleventh.

Lewis led off for the Mets. On a 2-1 pitch, he homered to center. There — just like that Maloney was not only not winning, he was losing, 1-0. He’d recover to strike out Swoboda for his 18th K of the game and two batters later, after allowing a single to McMillan, get a double play ball out of Gonder, but the spell was broken. Bearnarth made sure it stayed that way by pitching a scoreless eleventh, and the Mets came away with a 1-0 win.

Despite being no-hit for ten innings. Despite being struck out eighteen times. Despite being the 1965 Mets.

“I can’t help but feel good,” Lewis, who had struck out thrice, said afterwards. “But it was a heartbreaker for Maloney to lose. He threw good, real good. In fact, I never saw a pitcher throw as hard to me as Maloney did.”

What was hard on Maloney was losing the game of his or most pitchers’ lives. “I’d just as soon win ballgames as pitch a no-hitter,” the flamethrowing righty insisted before taking his postgame shower, though he acknowledged he knew the no-no was in progress and that he really wanted it. He may not have felt terribly enriched by the experience of losing a game he judged “by far the best I’ve ever pitched,” but Reds owner Bill DeWitt immediately announced a $1,000 raise for Maloney, big money in those days for the son of a California car dealer.

Not bad for losing to the last-place Mets.

ALSO QUITE HAPPY: On June 13, 1988, David Cone was making a habit of not giving up the ball. Eleven days after going 10 innings in an eventual 13-inning win over the Cubs, Coney found himself working overtime once more. Versus St. Louis at Shea, he had given up only one run in nine innings (on a Bob Horner sac fly in the fourth), so Davey Johnson let him ride. Cone gave his manager no cause to regret the decision, retiring Tony Peña, Luis Alicea and pinch-hitter Duane Walker — up for Card starter Larry McWilliams, who had gone nine — in order. The Mets got Kevin McReynolds to third base in their half of the inning and chose to pinch-hit for Cone. Alas, Lee Mazzilli popped to third. The teams kept playing until the twelfth, when Mazz, who stayed in the game at first, made amends by singling home Wally Backman with the decisive run. The bulk of the pitching this Monday night was performed by Cone, but the 2-1 win went to Randy Myers, who hurled two perfect innings of relief. More than just another win for the East-leading Mets, the game marked the last time a Met starting pitcher pitched ten innings twice in the same season, let alone month.

GAME 062: June 11, 2005 — METS 5 Angels 3 (10)
(Mets All-Time Game 062 Record: 25-24; Mets 1965 Record: 32-30)

It wasn’t an easy assignment awaiting Marlon Anderson. He was coming off the bench to pinch-hit against one of the best relievers in baseball, one he had seen only once before. Then again, Marlon Anderson was one of the best pinch-hitters of the National League in 2005, having connected for a dozen pinch-hits since signing as a free agent with the Mets.

Still, he was going to be facing Francisco Rodriguez of the recently redubbed Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim, the 23-year-old fireballer they didn’t call “K-Rod” for nothing. As if there was some doubt to the kid’s effectiveness in this Saturday night Interleague Shea showdown, Rodriguez had just struck out David Wright to start the bottom of the ninth. The Mets trailed 2-1 and were down to their final two outs when Willie Randolph chose Anderson to hit for fellow utilityman Chris Woodward.

Anderson chose this moment to do something no Met had ever done before, on a 3-1 pitch from K-Rod. We pick up the action from Gary Cohen on WFAN:

Fastball driven in the air toward right-centerfield…chasing back is Finley…on the track, reaches out…

CAN’T GET IT! Kicks it away! It’s rolling toward the corner!

Anderson around second! He’s on his way to third! Finley’s tracked it down! Anderson is being…WAVED AROUND! He’s comin’ to the plate…the relay throw…he slides…

SAFE!

It’s an inside-the-park-home run! And it ties the game!

Marlon Anderson with an inside-the-park home run…he is shaken up…Jose Molina arguing the call, Mike Scioscia out as well, but Marlon Anderson has tied the game at two and two with an inside-the-park home run. Finley tried to field it on the warning track, kicked it toward the corner, and Anderson came all the way around ahead of the relay throw by Adam Kennedy…

Anderson still down on his knees as Mike Herbst and Willie Randolph look after him, but with his FIRST home run as a New York MET, Marlon Anderson has tied the game, and as he gets to his feet, he gets a ROUSING ovation from the crowd at Shea Stadium!

A stunning turn of events, and not just because it was the first pinch-hit inside-the-park home run in New York Mets history. Consider that Anderson was not blessed with great speed, so no wonder he was down on his knees when the play was over. Consider that he hit it between two of the great outfielders of their time, Steve Finley in center and Vladimir Guerrero in right, but the ball eluded them both. Finally, consider what the television replays showed as Anderson huffed and puffed his way around the bases.

He was blowing bubbles. Chewing bubble gum and blowing bubbles from it while tying the score at three.

Marlon was hardly the only star of what became a 5-3, ten-inning Mets win. Kris Benson had pitched seven strong innings, allowing his only two runs on a double play grounder to Bengie Molina (later replaced in a double-switch by his brother Jose) and a Kennedy sac fly. He got his last out when Carlos Beltran robbed Molina (Bengie) of a two-run homer with a leaping grab at the center field wall. Aaron Heilman followed with two scoreless frames. After Anderson’s PHITPHR — and K-Rod’s subsequent strikeouts of Kaz Matsui and Doug Mientkiewicz — Braden Looper was nicked for an unearned run in the tenth. Jose Reyes, turning 22 that Saturday, opened the bottom of the tenth by reaching first base on a pop fly over third that fell into very shallow left. He moved to second on Mike Cameron’s seven-pitch walk against Brendan Donnelly and, after Beltran and Mike Piazza struck out, stole himself a birthday present — third base — with two down.

That little surprise came on the eighth pitch of Donnelly’s battle to the bone versus Cliff Floyd (the Angel reliever thought time had been called). Floyd, healthy and thriving as a Met after two injury-riddled seasons, jumped on the ninth pitch from the rattled Donnelly — who threw 32 pitches in all in the tenth — and sent it soaring into the Flushing night for a three-run game-ending homer.

The win went to Looper, the walkoff mob surrounded Floyd (whose epic at-bat included a drive to right that appeared homerbound before hooking foul), but it was Anderson, 31, who created the indelible image of the Bazooka blast. It may not have been as majestic a shot as Floyd’s, but it sure was something to see. Anderson turned on as many afterburners that were available to him once his ball hit Finley’s knee. Third base coach Manny Acta waved him toward the plate, and Marlon blew bubbles and sucked wind until he was all the way home.

In the annals of New York National League inside-the-parkers, it may have been the most dramatic of the genre since 33-year-old Casey Stengel sped as best he could around the bases to give the Giants a 5-4 lead in the top of the ninth in the opening game of the 1923 World Series at Yankee Stadium. That was a trek Damon Runyon captured it 82 years earlier in prose very much of its time.

With apologies to Mr. Runyon, then…

This is the way old “Marlon” Anderson ran Saturday night, running his home run home.

This is the way old “Marlon” Anderson ran running his home run home in a Met victory by a score of 5 to 3 in the second game of an interleague series in 2005.

This is the way old “Marlon” Anderson ran, running his home run home, when there was one out in the ninth inning and the score was Angels 2 Mets 1 and the ball was still bounding inside the Met yard.

This is the way—

His mouth wide open.

His warped old legs bending beneath him at every stride.

His arms flying back and forth like those of a man swimming with a crawl stroke.

His flanks heaving, his breath whistling, his head far back.

Angel infielders, passed by old “Marlon” Anderson as he was running his home run home, say “Marlon” was muttering to himself, adjuring himself to greater speed as a jockey mutters to his horse in a race, that he was saying: “Go on, Marlon! Go on!”

People generally laugh when they see old “Marlon” Anderson run, but they were not laughing when he was running his home run home last month. People — 34,000 of them, men and women — were standing in the Met stands and bleachers out there in Flushing roaring sympathetically, whether they were for or against the Mets.

“Come on, Marlon!”

The warped old legs, twisted and bent by many a year of baseball campaigns, just barely held out under “Marlon” Anderson until he reached the plate, running his home run home.

Then they collapsed.

They gave out just as old “Marlon” Anderson slid over the plate in his awkward fashion with Jose Molina futilely reaching for him with the ball. “Larry” Young, the Major League umpire, poised over him in a set pose, arms spread wide to indicate that old “Marlon” was safe.

Half a dozen Mets rushed forward to help “Marlon” to his feet, to hammer him on the back, to bawl congratulations in his ears as he limped unsteadily, still panting furiously, to the bench where Willie L. Randolph, the chief of the Mets, relaxed his stern features to smile for the man who had tied the game.

“Marlon” Anderson’s warped old legs, neither of them broken not so long ago, wouldn’t carry him out for the top half of the next inning when the Angels made a dying effort to undo the damage done by “Marlon.” His place in the lineup was taken by “Braden” Looper, whose legs are still unwarped, and “Marlon” sat on the bench with Willie Randolph.

ALSO QUITE HAPPY: On June 14, 1963, a Met of great renown achieved a long-in-the-making career milestone. Since the Mets hadn’t been around even two years and they had done little as a unit to earn anything but infamy, it figured that most of what this Met had done before was done as something else altogether. Nevertheless, Duke Snider wore a Mets uniform as he blasted a first-inning, two-out pitch from Bob Purkey out of Crosley Field. When Snider drove himself and Ron Hunt home, it gave the all-time Dodger great the 400th home run of his career, making him the eighth player in big league history to hit that many. The Mets would go on to beat the Reds, 10-3, and sixteen summers later, a plaque would hang in Cooperstown featuring Snider’s likeness and a notation that somewhere between 1947 and 1964, Snider logged time with NEW YORK N.L.

GAME 063: June 21, 1984 — METS 10 Phillies 7
(Mets All-Time Game 063 Record: 27-22; Mets 1984 Record: 36-27)

If Believing with a capital “B” hadn’t been much in vogue at Shea Stadium for the previous ten years, there was a pretty good reason: there had been little to Believe in, certainly not in the vein of when Belief was last in style there.

1973 was a very long time removed from 1984, and it wasn’t just the chronology that made it seem so distant. The Mets had only now and then sniffed contention since the autumn Tug McGraw made the phrase “You Gotta Believe” part of the Mets’ Talmud. They certainly hadn’t made the most of their fleeting acquaintance with success in the ensuing decade, but 1984 was unfolding in a very different, very pleasing manner.

After losing their first Opening Day since 1974, the ’84 Mets won their next six games. Fueled by two sterling rookie pitchers, Dwight Gooden and Ron Darling, and led by first-year manager Davey Johnson, exploded expectations, never fading from contention as April became May and May became June. Once they reached seven games above .500 on June 14, it was as high as they had gone beyond break-even since 1976 ended. As summer dawned, they found themselves in a three-way dogfight for first place with the similarly surprising Chicago Cubs and the perennially contending Philadelphia Phillies. They Mets entered this Thursday Shea matinee against the Phils in second place, a half-game behind their neighbors to the south. Overall, it was as good a position as they’d been in this late in a season since 1975.

Most Met seasons were effectively over by June. This one was just getting to the good part.

A tight 1-1 duel between starters Walt Terrell and Charlie Hudson veered in a completely different direction come the bottom of the fifth as a Juan Samuel error helped the Mets score five times and chase Hudson. Their 6-1 lead, however, began to crumble in the top of the seventh when Terrell walked his first two batters and Jeff Stone beat out a bunt (his third hit of what would be a 4-for-5 day) to load the bases. Terrell left in favor of Jesse Orosco, but Orosco allowed a pair of two-run singles to Mike Schmidt and John Wockenfuss and, before long, the Mets were down 7-6.

It was a familiar script from what life had been like at Shea since 1973, but the Mets called the press box and bellowed, “Get me rewrite!” Or something like that. Phillie reliever Bill Campbell opened the home seventh by allowing back-to-back singles to Danny Heep and Hubie Brooks. Ron Hodges, one of two 1973 Mets still extant in Flushing, grounded to second, resulting in a fielder’s choice to first, scoring Heep from third. Now it was tied. George Foster, getting the day game off, was brought on to pinch-hit for shortstop Jose Oquendo and was intentionally walked to set up a double play.

Orosco was due up, and a pinch-hitter was in order. Usually in a late-game situation, that would be the other 1973 Met on the active roster, Rusty Staub. A cursory glance at Campbell would lead one to infer it would definitely be Staub. He was a righty and Rusty was a lefty. Perfect matchup…except for one thing. Rusty couldn’t hit Campbell. Dating back to 1976, when Staub was with Detroit and Campbell was with Minnesota, he didn’t hit him…at all. Over fourteen at-bats, Rusty was 0-for-14 versus this pitcher. And if any manager in 1984 was aware of matchups, it was statistic-savvy, computer-literate Davey Johnson.

But Johnson also knew Rusty Staub was one of the best pinch-hitters ever and figured he was due. Besides, Rusty, like Ron Hodges, had been around Shea the last time the Mets made a move on first place. Hence, as if 1973 had just been reincarnated, Rusty swung and singled home Hubie with the go-ahead run. And if the ghosts of pennant races past didn’t already seem present, Phillie right fielder Sixto Lezcano misplayed a Wally Backman foul fly, extending the second baseman’s at-bat long enough for him — facing Jim Kern, who had replaced Campbell — to manage a run-scoring grounder that plated Foster. The Mets were up 9-7.

Doug Sisk negotiated a tough top of the eighth and kept the margin at two. In the bottom of the inning, Kern (a Met on paper for two months in 1981-82 before being sent to Cincinnati as part of the Foster deal) loaded the bases for Hodges who, per the prevailing Belief of the day, walked to drive in a tenth New York run. The Mets led 10-7 and Sisk ended it that way.

The Mets leapfrogged the Phillies to take a half-game lead in the N.L. East on the first day of summer. Their ascension occurred sooner than it did in 1973 (when it happened on the first night of fall), but with Hodges and Staub coming through when it counted, it felt a lot like that year of blessed memory. Except that Tug McGraw, in his final season as a player, was languishing on the Philadelphia disabled list.

ALSO QUITE HAPPY: On June 20, 1985, the Mets didn’t win that year’s division title but they did everything they could to take care of the previous year’s business, understanding it would pay definite dividends in the present. The Cubs had come into Shea for a midweek quartet of games so big to both team’s fortunes that a stadium attendance record for a four-game series was set: 172,092. Every Mets fan who paid his way into Shea got his money’s worth when the Mets swept all four from their former nemeses from the Windy City. The ’84 division champs came to New York on a five-game losing streak. They left it absolutely reeling, with nine losses in a row. The Mets, on the other hand, were surging in the general direction of first place after Sid Fernandez struck out ten Cubs in six innings and George Foster drove in four runs on one grand slam swing in the third inning to complete the sweep. The good it did the Mets in the standings was plain as day following this matinee — they stood in a flat-footed second-place tie with St. Louis, a half-game back of Montreal for the lead in the East. What it meant to the Mets psychically a year after the Cubs beat them out for first? Let’s just say that when the Shea public address system blared Paper Lace’s 1974 hit “The Night Chicago Died” after this Thursday afternoon capper, nobody in New York questioned the taste behind the musical choice.

Congratulations to David Hurwitz, Mickey Lambert and Ken Mattucci for winning our 1986 World Series DVD Happiest Recap Quiz. And congratulations to you if you order what they won from A&E Home Entertainment.

GAME 016: April 23, 1992 — METS 1 Cardinals 0 (13)
(Mets All-Time Game 016 Record: 29-22; Mets 1992 Record: 9-7)

Although monochromatic grandstand wardrobes are long a thing of the past, announcers are still wont to talk about players losing balls in all those white shirts. When they go to that old saw, they generally mean the fielders not getting a good read on a fly against the backdrop of the crowd. Yet their description of the havoc shirts can play with balls could easily apply to what happened one thirteenth inning between Juan Agosto and Daryl Boston.

The Mets and Cardinals dueled in the April sunshine at Shea to a zero-zero deadlock. Bret Saberhagen gave the Mets the kind of Cy Young start they had hoped for when they acquired him the previous December from Kansas City: 5 hits, no walks and 7 strikeouts over 9 innings. Donovan Osborne’s start for St. Louis was close enough to Saberhagen’s to keep the Mets from scoring. Their best chance on this Thursday matinee came in a bases-loaded threat in the bottom of the third, but it was short-circuited when Saberhagen’s fellow new Met savior, Bobby Bonilla, fouled out to catcher Rich Gedman.

The Redbirds took dead aim at going ahead in the eleventh when they loaded the bases off reliever Jeff Innis. Two handy plays by Dave Magadan, sandwiched around a strikeout of Pedro Guerrero, prevented Met calamity and the game wore on. Good thing, then, that Boston wore the jersey he chose.

Bottom of the thirteenth, Agosto starting his second inning of relief. A Dave Magadan infield single, an event akin to a solar eclipse, raised Met hopes with one out. Rodney McCray, who would literally run through an outfield wall to make a catch, came on to pinch-run for Mags. Junior Noboa singled McCrae to second. From there, with Charlie O’Brien at bat, Rodney stole third. St. Louis manager responded by intentionally walking O’Brien and setting up outs at every base.

Boston came up, fell behind 1-2 to Agosto and then gently absorbed the lefty’s fourth pitch. Anybody hollering from the Mezzanine that Daryl should take one for the team had to be thrilled, for Daryl Boston received that pitch with little fuss. It almost fluttered inside uniform No. 6. No need to stick yer elbow out! as somebody is always prone to suggest in those situations. Agosto’s delivery couldn’t have been any more cooperative.

Daryl, too, was unfailingly polite. Discovering that the ball landed between his jersey and his undershirt, he pulled out the white sphere from behind his white shirt, handed it to home plate ump Mike Winters and proceeded to first as McCray trotted home with the only run of the game. Mets won, thanks to the shirt on one of their backs, 1-0.

ALSO QUITE HAPPY: On April 30, 1986, the Mets methodically pounded the Atlanta Braves at Fulton County Stadium for two runs in four of the first six innings, giving Dwight Gooden all the support he needed for an easy 8-1 win, the team’s eleventh consecutive. It marked the third time in Mets history they had won that many in a row, and they had surely put the streak to good use. The Mets raised their season mark to 13-3, took a 5-game lead on Montreal and looked as unbeatable as any first-place team could look at the end of April. The N.L. East was already shouting, “MAY DAY!” and it wasn’t even May 1.

GAME 017: April 28, 1985 — METS 5 Pirates 4 (18)
(Mets All-Time Game 017 Record: 22-29; Mets 1985 Record: 11-6)

Forty-three players appeared in this game’s box score, yet one in particular stands out. Actually, he does more than stand out. He shifts — 11 separate times between positions. He hits, sure, for that’s what he always does, but what blows the mind is he runs and he lunges…successfully, catching that which all the shifting was intended to keep him from getting anywhere near.

Rusty Staub doesn’t do it all in this eighteen-inning exploration of the bizarre, but he does the bulk of what stands out. And “bulk” is not intended as a crack about the figure Rusty cut as a 41-year-old emergency outfielder making his last stand, lunge and catch in the pasture that used to be his stomping grounds.

Rusty is the climax of this story, but plenty happened before he stumbled into it. Plenty of nothing also occurred. You don’t play all day without a lot of both.

The plenty from a Met point of view this Super Sundae Sunday — a Carvel promotion — occurred right away, with Darryl Strawberry (honored with Strawberry Sundae fame a year earlier) launching his first career grand slam, with one out in the bottom of the first. With a 4-0 lead, all figured to be ice cream and syrup, but, lack of rain notwithstanding, Shea Stadium was more like MacArthur Park, the sweet, green icing of an easy win flowing down and the Mets never having that recipe to score at will again.

After Straw’s slam the Mets stopped hitting. They really stopped hitting. There would be walks and there would be errors and there’d even be a bases-loaded situation in the bottom of the eighth, but the Mets went from the bottom of the first with one out through the bottom of the eleventh without registering a single base hit — a virtual no-hitter. In the meantime, the Pirates hung three runs on rookie starter Roger McDowell and another on reliever Calvin Schiraldi. Pittsburgh did a ton of hitting, but not nearly enough of it from their perspective with men on base. They had their own sacks-full situation go by the board in the top of the ninth.

Gary Carter shone defensively as his first month in a Met uniform neared an end. He engineered a 2-1 putout when his retrieval and return of a wild pitch to Jesse Orosco nailed Rafael Belliard at the plate to end the Pittsburgh ninth. In the tenth, he blocked George Hendrick’s path to scoring, and come the 14th, in what would become a Camera Carter highlight reel favorite, he knocked an onrushing Doug Frobel somewhere toward Astoria, keeping him from scoring, too.

Keith Hernandez, meanwhile, was tagged by first base umpire Harry Wendlestedt with a balk call. No, Mex wasn’t one of the six pitchers Davey Johnson used that Sunday; rather, he charged a prospective bunt and then doubled back to first to receive a pickoff attempt on Belliard from Doug Sisk in the ninth. Wendlestedt ruled that a first baseman’s balk and award the Pirate shortstop second base. Neither Hernandez nor Johnson had heard of such a rule, and the Mets played the remainder of the game under protest.

In terms of sheer volume, there was a mass quantity of baseball left to protest, let alone consume. Extras commenced, the score stayed tied and, by the bottom of the twelfth, the eventual star did what he usually starred at. After Rafael Santana led off with the Mets’ first hit since Strawberry’s four-bagger eleven innings earlier, Rusty Staub — who came on to play his first outfield since June 1983 in the top of the inning, when Tom Gorman replaced Orosco on the mound — doubled. Santana went to third, and Wally Backman walked. With victory tantalizingly close (and every Pirate outfielder playing alongside their infield brethren), the Mets resisted temptation. Ray Knight grounded into a 6-2-3 double play to cut down Santana at home. Hernandez was then issued a free pass and Carter flied out.

The Mets played on. And Staub got a move on. The Pirates were already exposed to Davey’s core strategy, which was keep Rusty as far from fly balls as possible. When inserted for not exactly defense in the twelfth, Staub went to right because Bill Madlock was a righthanded hitter. When lefty Jason Thompson came up as the next batter, Staub trotted to left field and Clint Hurdle took over right.

Back and forth they would go for the rest of the game. At first it was kind of amusing, particularly when Hurdle advised Staub as they crossed paths in center, “Now be alert. This guy hits the other way.” It was funny because Thompson had a reputation as a dead pull hitter, but the ball has a way of finding the pinch-hitting specialists who don’t, as a rule, do a lot of running. Thompson lined a Gorman pitch in front of Staub. He had no chance to catch it, but he did handle it like he handled a rack of ribs at his Manhattan restaurant — cleanly and with zest. After firing the ball into second to hold Thompson to a single, the Shea fans gave Rusty a standing ovation.

Staub and Hurdle would trade positions eleven times in all. It grew progressively less lighthearted as Staub grew more and more leadfooted. Then it became downright dangerous to the Mets’ well-being when, in the top of the 18th, as pitcher Rick Rhoden pinch-hit for left fielder Frobel (it was that kind of game). Rhoden, a righty, flared a fly to right, where Staub was supposedly hidden. Rusty’s red hair, however, was in ample evidence as was all of his frame as he took off, tracked down and nabbed the ball in a half-dive, ending Gorman’s seventh scoreless inning of relief and stranding the 14th Pirate baserunner of the day.

“I knew I could catch the ball all the way,” Staub said. “That was as fast as I could run.” Nobody doubted the second part of that statement.

At last, something gave, and it wasn’t Rusty’s constitution. Lee Tunnell walked Gary Carter to lead off the bottom of the 18th. Mookie Wilson ran for the Kid and zipped to third on Strawberry’s single. Hurdle, Staub’s dance partner, enjoyed his moment in the fading sun when he poked a ground ball through Thompson’s legs at first base, and the Mets — on six hits, beat the Pirates — who had accumulated 18 hits — 5-4 in the longest home win in team history.

“A wicked game,” Chuck Tanner summed it when the five hours and twenty-one minutes of baseball reached their conclusion. As for the signature spell of Le Grand Orange magic, the Pirate skipper was properly appreciative: “I thought it was going to be a hit. It was a great catch. If this was a World Series, they’d be talking about it for 30 years.”

ALSO QUITE HAPPY: On April 27, 1976, the cult of Bruce Boisclair was born in earnest. Boisclair, a fourth outfielder and lefty pinch-hitter, was popular all out of proportion to his playing time during his late ’70s Shea stay, thanks in part to a memorably alliterative name but also because of clutch performances like the one that beat the Braves on a late Tuesday afternoon when the Mets took early possession of first place in the N.L. East. Atlanta led 5-3 going to the bottom of the ninth at a scarcely populated Shea (4,002 on hand for a 4:05 start) when Brave reliever Pablo Torrealba allowed singles to Dave Kingman and Bud Harrelson. With two out, John Milner produced a pinch-RBI to bring home pinch-runner John Stearns. Then up stepped Boisclair, who lashed a double to right, scoring Grote and Milner for the 6-5 win.

GAME 018: April 27, 1969 (2nd) — METS 3 Cubs 0
(Mets All-Time Game 018 Record: 24-27; Mets 1969 Record: 7-11)

Nobody in his right mind would have figured this was a sign of things to come. The Cubs were loaded, and the Mets were still, to most eyes, the Mets. Still, even if this were to be regarded as an aberration, it was a pretty sweet one.

Chicago came into the second game of this Sunday doubleheader at Shea with the best record in baseball, a sizzling 14-6, which included three straight wins over the traditionally hapless Mets. The Mets were expected to pack a little more “hap” in 1969, but their 6-11 mark didn’t even exceed that of the expansion Expos. If they weren’t the same old Mets, they were close enough to not inspire any immediate confidence on the part of the 37,000+ on hand.

The Mets, however, hung in with the Cubs in this nightcap, no easy task given Chicago’s stacked lineup — featuring Billy Williams, Ron Santo and Ernie Banks at its heart — and the dismay attached to losing the opener 8-6 on four unearned runs in the top of the ninth. Starter Jim McAndrew matched zeroes with Cub counterpart Rich Nye, taking a nothing-nothing game into the fifth. But McAndrew allowed a pair of baserunners (one on an errant Ken Boswell throw), so Gil Hodges removed McAndrew and brought in McGraw — Tug McGraw, to that point of 1969 a lightly used reliever thought of more commonly as a failed starter.

But Tug cottoned to his new role that Sunday, squirming out of McAndrew’s jam and keeping the Cubs off the scoreboard every bit as much as Nye was shutting down the Mets. The game stayed scoreless to the bottom of the ninth, when Rod Gaspar’s fly ball to left eluded the great Williams, allowing Gaspar hustle to second. Leo Durocher ordered an intentional walk to Boswell. One out later, up stepped Cleon Jones, who was as hot as the dickens as 1969 gained traction. The Mets’ left fielder kept sizzling, belting Nye’s 1-0 pitch over the fence for a 3-0 Mets win, their first walkoff triumph of the year.

The shot brought Jones’s batting average up to a cool .443, while McGraw’s four scoreless innings gave him his second relief win of the season. A three-game losing streak was snapped, and the Mets avoided tumbling into solitary occupation of last place. They ended the day tied for fourth with St. Louis and Montreal, six behind the still front-running Cubs.

Not that there was yet any reason to believe the Mets’ position relative to the Cubs was going to matter much in the long term.

ALSO QUITE HAPPY: On May 7, 1972, the Mets spotted Fred Norman and the Padres a 6-0 lead at Shea and then, in the bottom of the eighth, woke up from their Sunday afternoon nap. Three doubles, two singles and a Norman error resulted in five runs to close the gap to one. In the bottom of the ninth, Teddy Martinez led off a second consecutive inning with a single and took second on a Leron Lee error. Tommie Agee, who had doubled behind Martinez in the eighth, drove in the second baseman to tie the game. The teams went to a tenth inning, when — after Tug McGraw’s second inning of spotless relief — Bud Harrelson reached on the Padres’ sixth error of the day. with two out, Agee delivered his third big hit in as many innings, this one a two-run homer off Ed Acosta to cap a furious comeback for the Mets 8-6.

“Joe Torre,” Roger Angell wrote, “should have such problems. The Mets have no one like Bull Durham at any level of their organization.”

In March 1980, they didn’t. Three months later, they would — no bull. And when he surfaced, he would change everything about how the Mets would perform and be perceived for a very long time.

It would be disingenuous to say they were the two definitive decisions of his tenure as general manager of the New York Mets, for there were other momentous choices made in between, but you can almost chart the trajectory of the franchise by two moves Frank Cashen made ten years apart.

June 3, 1980: He drafted Darryl Strawberry as the first pick in the amateur draft.

November 8, 1990: He didn’t re-sign Darryl Strawberry when he became a free agent.

As we watch the two of them enter the Mets Hall of Fame in the company of Dwight Gooden and Davey Johnson today, we can comfortably declare the first decision represented the cornerstone of the ensuing decade of Mets baseball. To a great extent, the same could be said of the second decision.

• By taking the best athlete available in his first draft as Met GM, Cashen guaranteed himself (as much as any guarantees can be made regarding 18-year-old phenoms) a potential superstar around which he could build a contender, a champion and perhaps a dynasty.

• By eschewing a continued association with the same man after he had proven himself the best everyday player ever developed by the Mets, all Cashen guaranteed was a gaping void for the Mets and Mets fans that wasn’t really filled until one of Cashen’s successors traded for Mike Piazza. That was in 1998, eight years later.

Eight long years later.

The Mets of the ’80s, when they were at their best, were never Strawberry’s alone, which may explain why it wasn’t considered essential to keep him at any price as he approached free agency in 1990. Darryl was one of four pillars upon whom the club that competed year in and year out at the top of its division was built. Selecting Dwight Gooden in the first round of the 1982 draft would prove transformative. Trading for Keith Hernandez in the middle of 1983 would be most callers’ guess if there was a Foxwoods Resort and Casino Turning Point of the Decade contest. Dealing for Gary Carter in December 1984 communicated a seriousness of purpose, that the surprising Mets of the previous season were as for real and real could get. And there were probably at least a dozen other transactions worth mentioning as crucial to Cashen’s construction of a winner.

Yet drafting Darryl Strawberry came first. From the moment he was chosen, we knew he was coming. If it didn’t cause a mania on the plane of a Stephen Strasburg, it was instantly the most famous amateur draft pick the Mets had ever made. And though it would take Strawberry three years to land at Shea, Darryl was instantly the most talented player in the Mets organization, major leaguers included. The Mets may have been making a spirited run toward the .500 barrier in the summer of 1980, but anyone who wasn’t 17 and mesmerized by the exploits of Steve Henderson would have agreed with Roger Angell’s assessment from that same spring, a couple of months before Darryl Strawberry became our future.

The Mets had nobody. And they were nobody.

You know the best part about Darryl Strawberry’s Met tenure? For all the majestic home runs he’d dispatch to the nether regions of National League stadia, I don’t believe it was anything he did in a New York Mets uniform. It was that we knew he was going to put on a New York Mets uniform — that his summers in Kingsport, Lynchburg and Jackson, along with his holding room month in Tidewater, were leading to the grand entrance. Someday, we’re going to have Darryl Strawberry on the Mets. And when we do, watch out world, we’re gonna get real good.

When the big moment came and we learned Darryl would be at Shea and in right field on May 6, 1983, batting third between Tucker Ashford (!) and Dave Kingman, I have to confess I was 90% excited and 10% let down. So much of being a Mets fan from the day Darryl Strawberry was drafted was waiting for Darryl Strawberry to be called up. Then it happened and I felt a bit at a loss.

Now what was I going to look forward to?

Darryl Strawberry’s at-bats took care of that pretty quickly. I looked forward to those every game. I looked forward to the long swing and the long trips those balls took when he connected. I looked forward to his loping stride toward first when he couldn’t trot; to his 6’ 6” frame sliding safely into second on a stolen base attempt; to how he made up for his refusal to reposition himself from of his worn Strawberry patch of grass by turning as needed toward the wall and grabbing the would-be opposition home run (Endy without the obvious effort); to the gun of a right arm that left the other team a little shy of going first to third on the basepaths. The phrase “five-tool player” was gaining resonance around 1983. I don’t think it was a coincidence that it came up around the same time as Darryl Strawberry.

Still, there was no escaping the sense that the five tools weren’t always necessarily put to optimal use. Shouldn’t have the “black Ted Williams” (a phrase his high school coach made famous in Sports Illustrated) hit .300 at least once? Walked 100 times? Launched 40 homers? Won an MVP? Straw never did hit much for average, with .284 the best he ever managed as Met, in 1987, the same year he collected a career-high 97 walks and established a career-best .398 on-base percentage. He set the Met record for homers then, with 39, and matched it a year later when he came closest to attaining his only Most Valuable Player award. Darryl finished second in 1988 for MVP, behind the gritty, gutty Dodger Kirk Gibson (who, ironically, can watch Darryl’s induction today from the Diamondback dugout).

Ted Williams was elected to the National Baseball Hall of Fame as soon as he was eligible. Darryl Strawberry was on the Cooperstown ballot once, received the support of 6 of that year’s 516 voters and dropped off the ballot for good immediately. If you go by Bill James’ Similarity Scores, he wasn’t Ted Williams for the next generation. He was a template for Jeromy Burnitz.

So what? Darryl basically asked at a Citi Field press session Saturday. “Everybody has their opinions of where we should be,” Straw said of himself and Gooden and the massive expectations they didn’t live up to. “Should we be in the Cooperstown Hall of Fame? Well, guess what — we’re going into the Mets Hall of Fame, and that’s what’s most important. That’s all I really care about.”

It’s the right sentiment for 2010. It’s a good enough explanation for 1983-1990, even if it papers over that Darryl Strawberry in real time was as perplexing a Met who ever was. It’s not just that he didn’t ascend to immortality beyond the village limits of Flushing. Nor is that he never quite had a season for the ages on offense that was comparable to Dwight Gooden’s 1985 on the mound (though you’d pretty much have to be Ted Williams in 1941 to claim one of those). You couldn’t watch him, love him, root for him without deep-down knowing he could be doing more. He could be running a little harder to first. He could be paying attention to Bill Robinson or the scouting reports when it came to moving over a few steps for a hitter who might not hit it directly to where he was standing. He could not seem intermittently sullen or surly or less than fascinated by the niceties of baseball.

As one of his predecessors among local pop culture icons might have observed had she been around deep into the 1980s, With Darryl Strawberry, it’s always something. If it’s not one thing, it’s another. With apologies to the incisive commentary of Gilda Radner’s Roseanne Roseannadanna, we sure do ask a lot of our greatest position player for fans from a team without any other players anybody ever compared to Ted Williams.

But honestly, it was always something: a police report; an alcohol rehab stint; a rap recording session the day of a game he’d call in sick for; clubhouse feuds gone public; an interview with an L.A. Times reporter in which he said it sure would be nice to play for his hometown Dodgers while he was still very much a Met.

Perhaps because his 1985 was so transcendent and he seemed so ideal a person in the process and he did it before turning 21, we get reflexively wistful over what Doc Gooden could have been. I don’t know if the coulda-been quotient attached to Darryl Strawberry is quite as romantic or, more precisely, as graspable. The best we saw out of him — 37 to 39 home runs three times, 101 to 108 RBIs those same three times (’87, ’88 and ’90), 30-30 once — was phenomenal Metwise, yet just very good in any given season of its era. They were the batting and running equivalents of Doc’s post-’85 Met years, which were perfectly fine 18-9 type campaigns, but not the stuff that layers our memories of him with regret for what he didn’t do.

Darryl did plenty. We just wish he’d done it longer and with us.

If you wanted to frame Darryl as something more than not quite as great as advertised, you had to look for an angle as Allen Barra did in the Voice in 1989 when he made much of Straw outhomering and outstealing Willie, Mickey and the Duke when you lined up all four New York outfield legends’ first six full seasons…and if you took the pitcher’s park nature of Shea into account, Barra added, Darryl might have been better than Mays or Mantle or Snider.

It may have been true, and it may have told an underreported story — Barra insisted we weren’t fully appreciative of what we had in our midst — but even as I cheered the evidence, because I very much wanted Darryl Strawberry to be my Willie Mays, I didn’t quite buy it. I read that Sports Illustrated sidebar in the 1980 baseball preview issue with the black Ted Williams quote. I thrilled to our drafting him, especially when I read the Mets gave serious thought to drafting Billy Beane with that first-in-the-nation pick (the future Moneyball hero was still available later in the first round and we grabbed him at No. 23). I salivated at the coverage Newsday gave his professional debut in Kingsport, how they were immediately scheduling strawberry-themed promotions. I teetered between accepting and rejecting the organization’s assessment that he wasn’t ready coming out of Spring Training in 1983 despite totaling 34 homers in Double-A in 1982. Yeah, he hadn’t yet faced Triple-A pitching, but how much International League did the black/young/next Ted Williams need anyway?

I didn’t think Darryl Strawberry was going to be another Ted Williams or Willie Mays. I took it on faith that he’d be Darryl Strawberry and that the top prospects who came after him would be touted as another version of him.

It didn’t really work out that way — but it wasn’t exactly a misfire, either. Darryl did win the Rookie of the Year award on merit, did make the N.L. All-Stars seven consecutive years as a Met (often on merit), did pair 30+ homers with 30+ thefts in 1987, did lead the league in long balls in 1988 and, when he wasn’t physically, mentally or spiritually AWOL, made for an unmatched presence in Met reality and Met lore.

You watched Doc every fifth day. You watched Mex batting with (or holding) runners on base. You watched the Kid when he saw the cameras. But you could not take your eyes off Darryl Strawberry when he came up to bat because you never stopped imagining what he might do and how far he would do it. In legend, his long balls are still traveling.

• There goes the one he hit just foul in the bottom of the ninth the night he came up to the majors to stay. George Foster would hit one fair in extras to win it for us, but Darryl had suddenly and emphatically served notice that more and straighter clouts were coming.

• There goes the one off the clock in St. Louis in the last valiant week of 1985, where he added an extra hour to our pennant savings time.

• There goes Al Nipper’s self-esteem in the last half-inning we would need before making a formality of clinching the last World Series we won.

• There goes one on Opening Day 1987, with Doc Gooden at Smithers and Doc Gooden’s pants worn by his power-stroking buddy who managed to stay out of official trouble to that point. Who the hell wears a teammate’s pants as a tribute? I wondered, but maybe it was just a different way of walking a mile in someone else’s shoes.

• There go two on the next Opening Day, at Olympic Stadium. The second clanks off the top of the Big O. We all learn the phrase “tension ring” on April 4, 1988 because that what it hits. Without a roof, it would have rung the North Pole.

• There goes the Shea scoreboard, bruised halfway up in the middle of the hottest of hot streaks, in 1990. As Joe Durso reported it in the Times, it “carried 450 feet from home plate and struck halfway up…against the lighted word ‘Ball,’ where the count on the batter is recorded but where baseballs rarely carry.”

That’s where Darryl Strawberry sent baseballs: into uncharted territory and off toward eternity. He did it 252 times as a Met, most ever by one of ours. He was doing it and everything like crazy in what turned out to be his final Met year. Strawberry was in yet another of his phases of carrying the ballclub on his back (he had a knack for imbuing clichés with doses of accuracy). The Mets were on a 27-5 roll in June and July of 1990. Darryl was doing about as well, with 15 home runs and 36 runs batted in over a 29-game span. He batted .389 from June 8 through July 13. Keith Hernandez was gone. Gary Carter was gone. Dwight Gooden was finding himself after a wretched (for anybody, not just him) start. By 1990, the Mets were Darryl Strawberry’s team.

By 1991, they were not.

That’s the flip side of Frank Cashen’s Hall of Fame general managership. Darryl wanted to be paid like the best player on the Mets, one of the best players in the sport. Frank Cashen chose not to concur with that desire. For all the letting go of Ray Knight and Kevin Mitchell and Wally Backman and Lenny Dykstra, this may have been the worst decision Frank Cashen made as Met GM.

Darryl did not maintain the Mets on his back the rest of that season, but nobody else’s back on that club was near broad enough to even broach the possibility of carriage. Nobody had the presence of Darryl Strawberry in the Met lineup or the Met imagination. Howard Johnson proved capable of hitting one more homer (38) and driving in nine more runs (117) in 1991 than Darryl did in 1990, but let’s be serious: Howard Johnson was no Darryl Strawberry. Nor was good old Hubie Brooks, reacquired from L.A. to play Darryl’s former position when Darryl headed west to play it for the Dodgers. Nor was the oddball Met signee of the winter of 1990-91, Vince Coleman.

Cashen built his Mets on trades and from the farm. He hated free agency. When he was hired to re-create the Mets from the ground up in 1980, he gave free agency one legitimate shot — trying for Dave Winfield and Don Sutton in his first full off-season but settling for Mike Cubbage, Dave Roberts and the second coming of Rusty Staub — before removing that distasteful arrow from the organizational quiver.

“Fans think that because of free agency, you can turn a ballclub around very quickly,” Cashen told Angell the spring before, “but that isn’t a useful way to go about what we have in mind here.” Thus, the open market went largely untapped by Cashen…and it didn’t hurt a bit in the buildup to 1986.

Mazzilli for Darling and Terrell.

Terrell for Johnson.

Allen and Ownbey for Hernandez.

Brooks, Winningham, Youmans and Fitzgerald for Carter.

Bailor for Fernandez.

Young, Lee and Cook for Knight.

Christensen, Gardner, Schiraldi and Tarver for Ojeda.

Beane, Klink and Latham for Teufel.

Even Treviño, Kern and Harris for Foster.

Heck, even Scott for Heep.

Frank Cashen didn’t always fleece the other guy, and not every guy he got was the equal of what he gave up (Mike Scott) or the equal of what he thought was getting (George Foster), but every part contributed to a beautiful whole. Mix the fruits of those deals with Strawberry and Gooden and Dykstra and Elster and Aguilera and Mitchell and McDowell and Sisk, all drafted by the Cashen regime — along with pre-Cashen holdover youngsters Wilson, Backman and Orosco — and you have a contender that became a champion if not a dynasty. Hardly any free agency was involved in making the Mets great in the 1980s.

So why not keep Darryl Strawberry, the homegrown star you nurtured when he was tempted to test the free agent waters? And why on earth would you break with your philosophy and throw big money at a poor fit and questionable human being like free agent Vince Coleman?

1990 was different from 1980, both for Strawberry the superstar and Cashen the GM. The short answer is both were older and more recalcitrant than they were ten years earlier. Strawberry had done his blossoming. Now he wanted to do his banking. Cashen didn’t care for that attitude, certainly didn’t care for the money Straw wanted, which was in the neighborhood of what then reigning face of baseball Jose Canseco had re-signed for with Oakland — $4.7 million a year for five years. The Mets offered three years, a little over $3 million a year. The Dodgers ultimately gave him five years at approximately $4 million per year.

The numbers, as obscene as they are to the average fan twenty years later, don’t sound all that ludicrous in the context of the megastar money that would be flowing soon enough in the 1990s. Cashen, though, was standing on his version of principle when he snorted his best ballplayer wasn’t worth anywhere near $5 million a season. Maybe Darryl was standing on principle, too, when he accepted all the money he could get out of L.A.

Hindsight tells us neither one of them was right.

Vince Coleman — four years, not quite $12 million — was not a logical solution for any challenge regarding the Mets post-Darryl, not as a leadoff batter, not as a natural grass hitter, not as a positive influence on the roster, certainly not as a gate attraction. He was more Al Harazin’s idea than Cashen’s — the GM in the bowtie was moving toward stepping down, calling it quits after the 1991 season — and typified the Harazinian quick-fix thinking that would hamper the franchise as the new Met decade rapidly disintegrated. The Mets were kind of desperate once Straw signed with his hometown team, so they lunged at a guy who used to regularly beat them.

What Vince Coleman did to the Mets as a Cardinal barely compared to what Vince Coleman did to the Mets as a Met. In the context of Darryl and Frank, he represented collateral damage of a relationship gone awry. By not reaching accord with Darryl, we got Vince. And with Vince, we got tsuris.

The toxic outfielder helped wreck the Met winning ways from within in 1991 by breaking down (72 games played, on base at less than a .350 clip), acting up (unleashing a “profane outburst,” as the Times put it, at coach Cubbage) and being generally miserable. The Coleman solution to the Strawberry void shoved the Mets down a hole that made Harazin double down on desperation…in other words, 1992 and Bobby Bonilla. Bonilla was more bad news, as was all of 1992 and 1993 and so on for the Mets who extracted every wrong message possible from everything episode that went sour. It was like the opposite of teachable moments.

Players got in trouble after 1986? Get rid of potential troublemakers.

Less troublesome players not playing well? Sign whoever looks good.

Guys we spent on making the situation even worse? Stop spending — and look out for troublemakers.

Cashen served the Mets as a consultant but was retired from active duty. Strawberry had a good first year as a Dodger, two lousy, injury-riddled seasons and was released after substance abuse and Tommy Lasorda got the best of him in 1994. By then, the Mets were a shell of what the two men had begun to build together in 1980. Coleman was gone. Bonilla would go. The Mets would spin their tires in the mud of a few more mostly lost seasons and scrounge around for replacement parts before Bobby Valentine pounded together a scrappy competitor in 1997. The following year, Nelson Doubleday ordered Steve Phillips to trade for the suddenly available Mike Piazza, and it was only then that the Mets could be said to have replaced Darryl Strawberry as a presence and a player.

The Mets are on their fifth general manager since Cashen. Three of his successors — Joe McIlvaine, Phillips and Omar Minaya — can be said to have been successful, but none on the level of Cashen. Edgardo Alfonzo, Jose Reyes and David Wright are the only homegrown position players the Mets have signed and developed since Strawberry bolted to establish themselves as legitimate stars while wearing the Met uniform. That’s three in two decades. Alfonzo was more technically sound, Reyes has been pound-for-pound more exciting. Wright is no doubt more consistent and will likely wind up as more productive.

But you only get one Darryl Strawberry in a lifetime. No wonder Frank Cashen picked him first.

Surely there can be only one.

***

Dear Greg and Jason:

I’m a 16 year old diehard reader whom you’ve never met, but I want to share with you a couple of connections I made with last night’s game:

The first is that the game bore a striking resemblance to World War I. Both were epic monstrosities that robbed every witness and participant of his livelihood.

Both ended on account of utter fatigue.

Both began with promises of glory (Johan Santana vs. “The War to End All Wars”) and ended with shattered illusions (Mets’ failure to score vs. Felipe Lopez/Trench Warfare).

Both affairs were finally mitigated by a young, goofy upstart arriving upon the scene to bail out his misbegotten elders (Big Pelf/U.S.A.).

And finally, Jerry Manuel is Woodrow Wilson, a well-meaning intellectual who is nonetheless completely aloof and ineffectual.

My second connection comes in the form of a paraphrased quote from Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea:

But The Mets are not made for defeat.
The Mets can be destroyed but not defeated.

Thanks, and here’s to nine (nine!) innings of peace at 8 PM.

Faithfully yours,

Benjamin Joshua Nathan

***

Lost here in the, uh, excitement of the multiple innings Saturday night was the no-hitter thrown versus the Braves by Ubaldo Jimenez of the Rockies. Colorado has a no-hitter. We don’t. If you had told me on April 5, 1993, as their ragtag ballclub took the field for the very first time at Shea Stadium that they’d have a no-hitter before we did, I wouldn’t have believed you.

If you told me they’d have a no-hitter before we would play another 20-inning game, I might not have believed you either.

Never mind that they’d be in the playoffs (1995) before we would return to them (1999).

Last night, incidentally, was the first time the Braves were no-hit since Randy Johnson pitched a perfect game against them in 2004. On that very night, at virtually the precise moment Johnson was striking out Eddie Perez for his 27th consecutive out, Cliff Floyd was driving home Karim Garcia in a 5-4 walkoff win against Jason Isringhausen of the — who else? — the Cardinals. Nice symmetry, I’d say.

***

Prior to last night, the longest game the Mets had won was 19 innings, which happened twice. The most famous of them was the second one, clearly the most insane game the Mets ever played, Mets 16 Braves 13, July 4 and 5, 1985, which we memorialized here for all its rain-soaked and endless glory on its 20th anniversary.

Less instantly recalled is the first Met 19-inning win, played at Los Angeles on May 24 and 25, 1973. The Mets trailed 3-1 before a run-scoring Buddy Harrelson double in the 7th and a George Theodore RBI single in the eighth off 1969 Orioles reliever Pete Richert, the guy who gave up J.C. Martin’s extraordinarily well-placed bunt that won Game Four. That made it 3-3 for quite a while.

Much as the 19-inning game of 1985 was started by ace Doc Gooden and the 20-inning game of 2010 was started by ace Johan Santana, the 19-inning game of 1973 was started by ace Tom Seaver, proving it always helps to have your ace going in the literally big games. Tom pitched 6 so-so innings, however — don’t tell him 3 earned runs in 6 innings pitched is a “quality start” — and it was the Mets bullpen that ensured history that night and morning (game over at 4:47 AM EDT) by delivering 13 scoreless frames. George Stone’s first Met decision came that night, from having pitched innings 13 through 18, scattering 4 hits and 2 walks, twice inducing L.A. into stranding the potential winning Dodger run at third.

If only George Stone had been the subject of a much-needed managerial decision in the same state later that same year, but never mind that right now.

In the middle of the cascade of bullpen heroes registering bullpen zeroes stood Tug McGraw, who pitched from the 8th through the 12th. He walked 5 and surrendered 4 hits, but he allowed no runs and kept the game going into the wee small hours. Tug even managed a 10th-inning, two-out single off fellow screwballer Jim Brewer and advanced to second on an error by shortstop Bill Russell. With three Dodger runners cut down at home, his night wasn’t neat — Tug’s 1973 wouldn’t be for several more months — but, along with Phil Hennigan in the 7th and Stone during his six innings, it kept the Mets in the game long enough to score 4 runs in the top of the 19th, Rusty Staub, Ken Boswell and Ed Kranepool driving them in. Jim McAndrew picked up the save with a scoreless bottom of the 19th.

As with last night in St. Louis, that night (and morning) in Los Angeles was a full team effort, but I wanted to underscore Tug’s role since today, April 18, was the date in 1965 when Tug McGraw first pitched for the New York Mets. Manager Casey Stengel inserted him in the eighth inning of the fifth game of the season, the Mets trailing the Giants at Shea 4-1. Relieving Jack Fisher (who had just relieved Al Jackson), Tug came on with the bases loaded and one out to face pinch-hitter and future Hall of Famer Orlando Cepeda.

Tug got Cepeda looking on strikes and then opposing pitcher (and future Met teammate) Bob Shaw to ground out to second baseman Bobby Klaus. With that, Frank Edwin McGraw was a big leaguer…a big leaguer who had gotten the Mets out of a bases-loaded jam. Stengel pinch-hit Billy Cowan for him in the bottom of the eighth, and the Mets wound up losing 4-1, but McGraw had officially made the first of the many marks he would make as a Met.

Finishing exactly 45 years after No. 45 started.

It’s exactly 45 years since No. 45 first took the mound for the Mets. And on the day after the Mets secured their first marathon win that ever ran longer than the 19-inning victory of 1973, our friend Sharon Chapman — who is diligently raising funds for the Tug McGraw Foundation to help fight brain cancer and other terrible diseases — ran the Rutgers Half Marathon in just over two hours and thirty minutes (or 6 innings in modern baseball terms).

Congratulations to Sharon, whose wrist was banded appropriately for the occasion. If you’d like to contribute to the outstanding cause of the Tug McGraw Foundation, please visit Sharon’s fundraising site here.