You Bet Your Beard

Long after the Black Sox scandal shook the faith of fifty million people, yet well before SNY viewers were inundated with lingo-laden advertisements urging us to make the games we’re already watching more interesting, there was betting on baseball, right in the middle of a major league clubhouse — and I don’t mean the one Pete Rose was occupying. On Wednesday August 3, 1983, where the Mets dressed for home games, focus turned to a wager made by someone who regularly frequented the premises. If only Bowie Kuhn had known.

Actually, it wasn’t a secret. The evidence was printed in Newsday the day after the Mets won their fourth game in a row of what had been, until very recently, a completely lost season. The previous Sunday, the Mets swept a Banner Day doubleheader from the Pirates in stunning fashion, grinding out two twelve-inning victories worthy of placard praise, the opener by a score of 7-6, the back half, 1-0. The ending to the nightcap was a particular hoot, with Mookie Wilson burning a path from second base to home on a one-out ground ball that didn’t get turned into the 4-6-2 double play Pittsburgh attempted to execute. The Buccos left town not quite believing what they didn’t quite see, because when you looked for Mookie, all you saw was something going whoosh! The Expos arrived as the next victim. They lost the opening game of their series versus the Mets in more or less routine fashion. They attempted to even things up the night after. Nothing about it could be called routine, unless you considered a final play you had never witnessed in your life until three days prior being repeated representative of the norm.

When you had Mookie Wilson, a spectacular ending could seem routine, yet it was always spectacular.

Return as if by time travel to the bottom of the ninth on Wednesday night, August 3, 1983, Mets and ’Spos knotted at one; Darryl Strawberry had smacked what interim manager Frank Howard called a “bang, gone!” solo homer in the seventh, making up for the lone run Tom Seaver allowed over eight sparkling innings. Mookie singles his way on base to lead off, just as he did in the twelfth on Sunday when the score was tied nothing-nothing (starter Mike Torrez had shut out the Pirates for eleven innings that day). Hubie Brooks bunts his teammate to second, just as he did on Sunday. Keith Hernandez is intentionally walked to set up a potential DP, just as he was on Sunday. Tom Carvel had to love the way this was going, because at Carvel, Wednesday was Sundae.

The eerie similarities continued with George Foster coming to bat. On Sunday, Foster was the Met who hit a ground ball, that time to second. It was the ball Johnny Ray had a bit of trouble handling, which is why, after he forced a rampaging Hernandez at the bag nearest to him, the infielder who caught it, Pirate shortstop Dale Berra, thought it best to eschew the standard relay to first and sling the ball home. That’s where Mookie was heading, with third base coach Bobby Valentine’s vocal blessing. That’s where Mookie beat Berra’s throw.

Foster shuffled the script a bit on Wednesday by chopping a ball to short rather than grounding one to second. Montreal’s shortstop Bryan Little, “6” in your scorecard, did his part, flipping to the “4,” an Old Friend™ named Doug Flynn. Flynn had played with Wilson before being traded away from the Mets the same offseason the Mets traded for Foster. Flynn had played with Foster in Cincinnati before being traded to New York (with three other gentlemen) for Seaver. Perhaps Doug was flummoxed by all the familiarity in his midst. Nevertheless, he knew how speedy Mookie could be, so as Bobby V once again gesticulated Wilson home, he tried to complete a 6-4-3 double play.

George Foster was never particularly speedy, not on the level of Mookie Wilson, but all he needed to do here was hustle to first base. “The key, really,” Frank Howard observed, “was “George Foster getting down the line,” to which the skipper added the thought most closely associated with Hondo’s brief Met managerial tenure (thanks to it being cited intermittently over the ensuing decades by Howie Rose): “Ninety feet is the cheapest commodity in this business. You do it four times a game, that’s all we ask for.”

Foster delivered what was asked. Flynn’s throw to first baseman Al Oliver did not beat him to the initial sack. Now Oliver was holding the ball as Wilson raced for the plate. The man called Scoop threw home. It was too late. The man called Mookie had scored the winning run.

“I knew I didn’t have a chance to get him when I threw,” Oliver acknowledged. “All I saw was a blur on the basepaths.”

All the Met players saw were the fruits of their labors ripening at last. They were still in last place, a mere 41-65, but 41-65 practically glitters when you were, four games earlier, a luster-free 37-65. “I am happy for them,” Howard said in Marc Maturo’s Journal-News gamer. “A lot of people have put us down — rightfully so — but they’ve hung tough and they’re battling.” Until the preceding Sunday’s doubleheader, the 1983 Mets had been almost pauselessly dismal, a quality shared with several of their predecessor squads when boiled down to one embarrassing fact. Up to this tiny stretch spanning July 31 to August 3, the 1983 Mets had never won more than four games in a row. The 1983 season had begun on April 5.

If your first reaction in real time to the Mets being poised to go for five wins in a row was “it’s about time,” you were speaking from more than recent scarred experience. The 1982 Mets had never won more than four in a row. The 1981 Mets, with two mini-seasons in which to accomplish the mean feat, had never won more than four in a row. The 1980 Mets, for all their Magic is Back abracadabra, had never won more than four in a row. The last Mets team to have won more than four in a row was the even more dismal 1979 version, the bunch that lost 99 games, yes, but had the good grace to win their final six to avoid triple-digits in the loss column.

“Let’s face it,” Mookie, now in his fourth season of not winning more than four in a row as a Met, “five straight has been a rarity around here.”

Nobody knew that reality, or may have been more smug about it, than somebody who was around the team regularly, one of the Met beat writers, Dan Castellano of the Newark Star-Ledger. We didn’t see Castellano’s reporting on Long Island, but if you read Newsday on Thursday, August 4, the day the Mets were seeking to win their fifth in a row, you learned Castellano — who had covered the Mets for the good folks of North Jersey since 1978 — had been betting on baseball. Worse, he was betting against the Mets. Worst of all, he didn’t care who knew it.

Before anybody rushed to summon the ghost of Kenesaw Mountain Landis, it should be understood Castellano was betting not the money in his pocket but the whiskers on his face. He assessed the talent that shaped the 1983 Mets while they were still stretching in St. Petersburg — when Strawberry was ticketed for Tidewater and Hernandez couldn’t conceivably be pried loose from St. Louis — and put the area adjacent to his mouth where his mouth was.

“Also on the line today,” Steve Marcus wrote in Newsday in the hours leading up to the Mets’ drive for five on August 4, “is the Santa Claus-length beard of Dan Castellano…who has captivated the players and coaches with his wager in Spring Training that the Mets would never win five straight. ‘I don’t think it will happen,’ Castellano said last night. But he admitted he was readying his rusty razor.”

Castellano died in 2024 after a long illness, and was eulogized by those who worked with him as a truly admirable person. I can tell from immersing myself in his work on Newspapers.com that he was an essential resource to Mets fan readers lucky enough to live in his publication geography. Yet I stumbled across this business about betting against the Mets with his beard in 1983 the other day, and no matter how all in good fun the wager might have been proffered (Dan received a dinner if he was right), the whole idea made the hairs on my neck stand on end. I know you as well as any outside observer could and I think you suck so much you’re incapable of achieving one objectively excellent week over the course of six months. The nerve of Dan Castellano! Even if he was right about the Mets sucking! Maybe I shouldn’t take this bet so personally 43 years after the fact (44, taking into account that he’d made and won the same bet in 1982.) Maybe this was just what was done to pass the time between games before social media was invented, a development that has allowed modern-day reporters to post pictures of their sandwiches or take snapshots of the infield and caption them “my office for today”. Still, if ever there was a ready-made Met rallying cry, it should have been “Let’s Make Danny Shave!”

Back in the present day, when Mets telecasts are littered with come-ons to keep your bets from going “perpendicular” (or perhaps to ensure that they do; the oft-repeated lingo’s nuances escape me), the Mets have won four in a row for the third time this season, the first time since the end of May, which was more than two months ago. They have yet to win five straight this year. Last year they won seven straight in late July, then finished out 2025 by losing 35 of their final 56 games, never stringing together more than three wins in a row. What Mookie said 43 years ago this month applies. Let’s face it. Five straight is a rarity around here.

Yet today, five straight is within reach. The Mets swept the Guardians in Cleveland and then won their first game in Pittsburgh on Friday night, 6-4. They overcame rain and some late yips. They committed themselves body and soul to the victory, from Carson Benge crashing a wrist into the left field wall to make a brilliant catch (X-rays were negative) to Jefry Yan eschewing his customary leap to get down on the ground and make a critical tag at the plate after a pitch got away from Luis Torrens. Jared Triolo attempted to Mookie his way home from third, but he got Yanned. Jefry expressed his enthusiasm without going into orbit.

There were several big things to like, including Zac Thornton’s five shutout innings and Marcus Semien’s three-run homer, and there were a couple of little things I enjoyed, specifically Semien and Frank Howard’s descendant in interim managing Andy Green brushing off the inquiries of reporters regarding how this spurt of bristling Mets baseball differs from the drudgery we were beset by for innings on end pre-trade deadline. Each of them answered, in so many words, never mind what went wrong before, let’s be happy things are going well now, let’s keep getting better. I relish a good dwell within Mets history, but yeah, I’m with those guys. The 2026 Mets have stopped being the 2026 Mets and have become, for four, maybe five days THE 2026 METS! If it’s not quite as energizing as the summertime transformation of 1983 (when I was a lot younger, not nearly as cynical, and had no idea a Mets team clearly on the rise would not stay aloft into perpetuity), it’s fun as hell in the moment. We’ve won four in a row and we’re going for five! Yeah!

But I can’t leave you hanging regarding that fifth win in a row from 1983. It never came. The Mets lost the Thursday afternoon finale of their set with the Expos, 2-1, despite Ed Lynch scattering ten hits across six innings and giving up only two runs. Charlie Lea lasted longer and pitched better. Castellano’s beard was safe that day and for the rest of the season. The Mets concluded their schedule at 68-94. They were now and again fun as hell, but still stuck in sixth. When Dan came to Spring Training in 1984, he could tell the Mets might jell, yet he couldn’t help himself, and thus made the same kind of winning-streak bet he’d made with George Bamberger in 1982 and 1983 — one that Hondo inherited after Bambi resigned — this time with the new manager, Davey Johnson, albeit with different terms. He explained his thought process to his readers in the Star-Ledger that April 10, after the Mets had brushed aside an Opening Day loss to reel off four straight Ws as their maiden road trip through Cincinnati and Houston touched down in Atlanta:

“Basically, what everybody is saying is not to jump to any conclusions after five ballgames. But it’s difficult not to. I’m scared to death, to tell you the truth. For the last two years, I have had a bet with Met managers…that the team could not win five games in a row. The bet was that I would shave the beard I have had since 1974 if they could do so. I still have the beard, so you know they haven’t done it.”

With the Mets on the upswing, “I made the bet with Johnson,” Castellano continued, but sensing improvement, it was raised to six in a row for the shave to be made. I do expect it to happen some time this year, but they could at least wait until I get home to let my family and friends see me one more time with hair on my face. This isn’t fair.”

Fairness to a beat reporter in the narrow context of whether he was going to have to dip into his dusty can of Gillette Foamy did not concern the 1984 New York Mets. They went out and won both games they played in Atlanta. Six in a row. Goodbye beard? Not so fast there, said the manager who was less interested in gloating than he was in his team staying hot.

“I won’t make him shave until we lose again,” Davey told the Journal-News. “I’m not letting him off the hook. I’m just postponing it.” Castellano by then was simply hoping the Mets, headed next to Chicago, would keep winning before returning to Shea, not from a sudden outbreak of cheering in the press box, but because, “I’d like my family to see it” — the beard — “one last time before it goes.”

The streak ended at six. The razor ended its exile. “One more note about the beard,” Dan told his Sunday edition readers on April 15 after the Cubs did his hirsuteness no favors. “The picture adorning this column is no longer valid. Having lost the bet to Dave Johnson (I said the Mets could not win six in a row), I reluctantly shaved it off Friday night. But it will be back. And it will probably be back a lot sooner than another six-game Mets’ winning streak.”

Let the record show the Mets next won six in a row in June. We were no longer in an era when that many straight was a rarity around here.