In the twenty seasons they called it home, I never visited Shea Stadium to see the Jets play. It never came up as a possibility or as a desire. I wasn’t a committed Jets fan (a redundancy) until I was 15 and the mechanics of seeing an NFL game in person, even though the Jets didn’t necessarily sell out every week until late in their Queens tenure, struck me as too daunting to even consider. Baseball was something you wanted to go to. Football was something you watched on TV if it wasn’t blacked out.

Watching the Jets from Shea on television was strange, especially once I started going to baseball games there enough to be familiar with its topography. Where did home plate go? What happened to the dugouts? Is that the 410 sign? If Lee Mazzilli can handle centerfield, why can’t Pat Leahy?

Most stadiums used to have baseball teams and football teams. Even historic old ballparks had both. The Lions played in Tiger Stadium forever. The Bears used to kick up dust amid the brown Wrigley ivy. Lyric little bandbox Fenway hosted Patriot games. When Yankee Stadium was still Yankee Stadium, it was also the Giants’ stadium. It wasn’t unusual. The Mets and Jets as co-tenants, albeit with the Mets as seniors treating the Jets like perpetual freshmen, was the way business was taken care of until fairly recently.

Somewhere between the Jets threatening to move to the Meadowlands in the spring of 1977 and the fall of 1983 when they abandoned New York in search of spiffier restrooms, I decided that it was OK they were here…even if they were tearing up our grass. As one who didn’t attend Jets games, there were no practical concerns for me, but New Jersey? For the Jets? That was Giants territory. It was Giants Stadium, for crissake. The Jets were headquartered at Hofstra. What were they going to do? Practice in Hempstead all week and then cross two rivers on a bus to play on Sunday?

Yeah, that’s exactly what they did and still do and will do for at least a little longer before they relocate all operations to the Garden State and begin playing on a new piece of swampland in conjunction with their Big Blue cousins. The setting has never set right by me (the green drapes help only a little), but again, it’s all a matter of television when I bother to be interested, and they do sell out every game over there, so what do I know?

With the floodgates wide open for Shea Met memories since last Monday, it occurred to me that we happen to be right upon the 25th anniversary of the greatest Jet game I ever watched from Flushing. That I saw it on a portable black & white set in Tampa doesn’t diminish the joy I recall at its resolution.

In the first semester of my freshman year at USF I didn’t really know anybody, so the first acquaintance I made was sports. Sports I knew. No baseball in Florida then, but there was football. The Bucs were in their sixth season in 1981, on the verge of an unlikely Central Division title in the NFC. I couldn’t stand the Bucs, though. They were just too damn absurd to take seriously. Since they were all that Tampa Bay had to get excited about — besides the NASL Rowdies, that is — I took an abiding dislike to them the whole time I was in school. (If you heard “hey, hey, hey we’re the Buccaneers!” a dozen times a day on Q-105, you would have, too.)

So I wouldn’t have to follow the Bucs with any kind of commitment stronger than osmosis, I listened to Dolphins games. Miami was nowhere near Tampa, but they’d been the state’s team before anybody knew what a Buccaneer was, hence their games aired in locally on WFLA. I had liked the Dolphins when I was 9 and they were finishing 14-0 while my family was spending Christmas in North Miami Beach (though if I knew they were going to be annually obnoxious about it, I wouldn’t have). I hadn’t given them any thought since they stopped appearing in Super Bowls except to hope the Jets beat them twice a year. One Sunday in mid-November, my first semester, I was listening to the Dolphins’ postgame show after they lost to the Raiders (boy did I have no social life) when it was noted the Jets had won in Foxboro and had moved to within one game of Miami for the division lead. Next week, it would be the Dolphins (7-3-1) and the Jets (6-4-1 after an 0-3 start) in a battle for first. At Shea.

Having grown up in New York in the ’70s loyal as a matter of principle to our home teams (how the bleep could you live here and root for the bleeping Cowboys?), I had had very few football games to which I could look forward, Jets or Giants. This one, on November 22, 1981, automatically became my biggest autumn Sunday to date. I anticipated it all week. I may have been something of a Johnny “Lam” Jones-come-lately to the Jets’ cause, but a battle for first at Shea was a battle for first at Shea. I’d been waiting for one since 1973.

So it wasn’t the Mets. You can’t have everything.

One of my suitemates at my off-campus dorm (four guys, two rooms, connected by a bathroom) was from Fort Myers, about two hours down the coast. He was a Dolphins fan. Although the Mets were my calling card, I had made it clear that I liked the Jets. Well, he said, looks like we’re going to have something to watch on Sunday. Lucky for me he had a TV and even luckier just about all Dolphins games were televised in Tampa.

Well, it was a great game. Richard Todd wasn’t even supposed to play because of cracked ribs, but they outfitted him in a flak jacket. Generally not having Richard Todd wasn’t that much of a hardship, but he was the starter and it was no time to leave our starters on the bench. Todd played magnificently. The Jet defense (in this, the year of the New York Sack Exchange) curbed Miami and gave Todd a chance to lead the Jets to victory. It would be tough. They were down 15-9 and on their own 23 with just over three minutes left.

But he did it. He hit six different receivers along the way. The last pass was to Jerome Barkum for a touchdown. It was 15-15. Then Leahy, never a sure thing kicking into Shea’s Edmund Fitzgerald winds, nailed the extra point. Just like that the Jets were in first place.

The Jets were in first place!

My suitemate whose TV it was had left for work by the time his Dolphins lost. So it was just me and his non-fan roommate watching at the end. At the final gun, I did one of those leaps from a sitting position that one does without thinking. You’re pretty excited there, the other suitemate said. You’ve got to understand, I told him. This is the first time I’ve seen the Jets in first place since 1969, a year I always liked to stick into sentences whenever I could.

He didn’t care. But I did.

Shea Stadium was going wild, too. Sitting and leaping out there that late afternoon/early evening were 50,000-plus of the green and white who considered Shea home every bit as much then as I would for the next quarter-century. No doubt a lot of them were Mets fans as well as Jets fans. No doubt a lot of them were season-ticket holders who packed up with the Jets in 1984 and kept going to see them in the Meadowlands, fall after fall, decade after decade (bus after bus).

But the Jets have never looked right over there, even on TV, even when they were beating the Dolphins 51-45 in 1986, even considering they’ve now spent more years in Jersey than they did in Queens. They looked good at Shea a quarter-of-a-century ago tomorrow. They looked great. So did Shea.

Nothing strange about that.

Congratulations to Ryan Howard, the National League's Most Valuable Player. He joins Joe Girardi, N.L. Manager of the Year, and Brandon Webb, the circuit's Cy Young winner in the 2006 awards pantheon. Great jobs, fellas.
Howard, you beat out Carlos Beltran (fourth in the voting after becoming the first Met to win a Gold Glove and a Silver Slugger and start an All-Star Game in the same year), Jose Reyes (seventh), David Wright (ninth) and Carlos Delgado (twelfth).
Girardi, you topped Willie Randolph, the runner-up skipper.
And Webb, you finished way ahead of Billy Wagner, sixth among pitchers when all the ballots were counted.
You guys rocked. And you were smart. You piled up your qualifications and then beat the rush. I mean you and your Phillies, your Marlins and your Diamondbacks were all home by the evening of October 1, the morning of October 2 at the latest. Our Mets had to keep working for almost three more weeks.
What suckers.
But seriously…
Franchise record for homers (tied).
Franchise record for runs scored (broken).
Silver Slugger.
Gold Glove.
All-Star starter.
Team has best record in sport and wins division by largest margin.
And he finishes FOURTH?
Where's that New York bias we're always hearing about?

Congratulations to Ryan Howard, the National League's Most Valuable Player. He joins Joe Girardi, N.L. Manager of the Year, and Brandon Webb, the circuit's Cy Young winner in the 2006 awards pantheon. Great jobs, fellas.

Howard, you beat out Carlos Beltran (fourth in the voting after becoming the first Met to win a Gold Glove and a Silver Slugger and start an All-Star Game in the same year), Jose Reyes (seventh), David Wright (ninth) and Carlos Delgado (twelfth).

Girardi, you topped Willie Randolph, the runner-up skipper.

And Webb, you finished way ahead of Billy Wagner, sixth among pitchers when all the ballots were counted.

You guys rocked. And you were smart. You piled up your qualifications and then beat the rush. I mean you and your Phillies, your Marlins and your Diamondbacks were all home by the evening of October 1, the morning of October 2 at the latest. Our Mets had to keep working for almost three more weeks.

What suckers.

But seriously…

Where's that New York bias we're always hearing about?

Greetings from Omar Minaya's pocket. That's where I'm wintering.
The healthy level of skepticism one should maintain in any situation has seeped away where me and the Mets' GM are concerned.
Trade away relatively young lefty Royce Ring when lefties are lefties? Omar knows what he's doing.
Sign potentially decrepit Damion Easley off a tepid year? Omar knows what he's doing.
About to grab Moises Alou, the recently achy 40-year-old who doesn't move well and isn't a stickler for hand sanitation? Omar knows what he's doing.
I'm a shill. I'm Tony Snow. I've got sunshine on a cloudy day if Omar Minaya's my forecaster. My hot stove is room temperature. There's nothing to debate: Omar says it; I believe it; that settles it.
When did I get this easy? I didn't trust Steve Phillips as far as I could throw him even after he general-managed us to a World Series. Omar Minaya could package Jose Reyes and David Wright for Jimmy Wynn and lawn furniture and I suspect I'd rationalize it.
Getting rid of those contracts now is going to free up the budget nicely. Reyes never did get to 20 homers or 20 triples. Wright has yet to win an MVP. That GQ spread was pretty embarrassing. Wynn's a proven commodity. He's the Toy Cannon! Sixty-five isn't that old for a slugger. If he hit 37 homers playing in the Astrodome in '67, imagine what he'll do at Citi Field in '09 when his option kicks in. Lawn furniture will come in handy when we start to move. Omar's a genius!
This is supposed to be the time of year when we question authority, when we assume that every move our team makes is the wrong one. You know, like swapping that stud Mike Jacobs for that malcontent Carlos Delgado…like taking on the overrated Paul Lo Duca…like letting go of good ol' Jae Seo for Duaner Somebody…like giving up dependable Kris Benson for a Yankee patsy and a minor leaguer nobody ever heard of…like soaking up Quadruple-A flotsam along the lines of Endy Chavez…like signing clearly decrepit Jose Valentin off a tepid year.
What I can't figure out is where I got the idea that Omar knows what he's doing.

Greetings from Omar Minaya's pocket. That's where I'm wintering.

The healthy level of skepticism one should maintain in any situation has seeped away where me and the Mets' GM are concerned.

Trade away relatively young lefty Royce Ring when lefties are lefties? Omar knows what he's doing.

Sign potentially decrepit Damion Easley off a tepid year? Omar knows what he's doing.

About to grab Moises Alou, the recently achy 40-year-old who doesn't move well and isn't a stickler for hand sanitation? Omar knows what he's doing.

I'm a shill. I'm Tony Snow. I've got sunshine on a cloudy day if Omar Minaya's my forecaster. My hot stove is room temperature. There's nothing to debate: Omar says it; I believe it; that settles it.

When did I get this easy? I didn't trust Steve Phillips as far as I could throw him even after he general-managed us to a World Series. Omar Minaya could package Jose Reyes and David Wright for Jimmy Wynn and lawn furniture and I suspect I'd rationalize it.

Getting rid of those contracts now is going to free up the budget nicely. Reyes never did get to 20 homers or 20 triples. Wright has yet to win an MVP. That GQ spread was pretty embarrassing. Wynn's a proven commodity. He's the Toy Cannon! Sixty-five isn't that old for a slugger. If he hit 37 homers playing in the Astrodome in '67, imagine what he'll do at Citi Field in '09 when his option kicks in. Lawn furniture will come in handy when we start to move. Omar's a genius!

This is supposed to be the time of year when we question authority, when we assume that every move our team makes is the wrong one. You know, like swapping that stud Mike Jacobs for that malcontent Carlos Delgado…like taking on the overrated Paul Lo Duca…like letting go of good ol' Jae Seo for Duaner Somebody…like giving up dependable Kris Benson for a Yankee patsy and a minor leaguer nobody ever heard of…like soaking up Quadruple-A flotsam along the lines of Endy Chavez…like signing clearly decrepit Jose Valentin off a tepid year.

What I can't figure out is where I got the idea that Omar knows what he's doing.

I like to give Hozzie The Cat a little chest/belly rub when he allows it, which is infrequently. Tonight he did. As I crouched down to find his purr zone, I serenaded him with a quick and unoriginal chorus of Ha-ZEE! Ha-zee Ha-zee Ha-ZEEE! I was a little more off-key than usual when it occurred to me that it must be more than a week since I'd caught myself wandering around the house singing the “Jose!” song. I'd been doing that a lot during the playoffs and afterwards. Same for “off to never never land!” I even entered November breaking into occasional chants of LET'S GO METS! with no Mets (or cats) in sight. So much of that stuff had built up on my brain since the first game of the postseason that there was no way it would evaporate with the last out of October 19.
It's November 19 now. An entire month has passed since Carlos Beltran passed on a curveball. Somewhere along the way, the mourning period passed. Just like that, we've crept deep into the offseason.
The World Series came and went. Sports Illustrated's World Series issue came and went…into the trash. An MLB holiday gift catalog came today. The back page features all kinds of world championship merchandise, with the METS misspelled terribly and various shades of orange and blue registering as red. MLB should get itself some better copyeditors and a new printer.
It's been a month and it still annoys. But it's been a month. You think you'll never get over these kinds of losses and…well, you don't, but you do. You don't in the sense that you're always going to replay and regret in your mind what you can do no longer do anything about on the field. That's baseball's evil beauty. But you do get on with your life, limp as your life is without any new baseball to fill it.
A month is behind us. Nineteen weeks are ahead of us until Opening Night in St. Louis. ESPN has been thoughtful enough to make a rematch between us and the Cardinals their Sunday night lidlifter on April 1. The bad news is the last time we were assigned this particular slot and responsibility, we were postponed (it was April 2, 1995, “Mets” and “Marlins” in replacement baseball until a judge issued an injunction to stop the madness; actually, that wasn't bad news at all). The good news is the Baseball Equinox has been moved up by ten hours from our previous estimate. On Tuesday, January 9, at 9:55 PM, we will be just about exactly between that final called strike in October and whatever 2007 brings us starting in April.
One month removed from 2006, we're closer to next year than we've ever been before.

Tom Seaver and I have this much in common: We had crappy 32nd birthdays. Mine culminated in a cafeteria at C.W. Post on New Year's Eve 1994. But never mind me.
Tom's? Well, I don't know where he was coaxed into “celebrating” by well-meaning/misguided/übertouchy relatives on November 17, 1976, but I do know that thirty years ago today, he did not get exactly what he wanted. The Atlanta Braves, not the New York Mets, signed Gary Matthews as a free agent. It was perhaps the signal event that led to the departure of Seaver seven months hence along with the intents & purposes collapse of National League baseball in New York.
Happy birthday to us.
When I think of Gary Matthews — now Gary Matthews, Sr., I suppose — I usually think of the Sarge who helped lead a platoon of Cubs over the hill in 1984, capturing the divisional flag that was very nearly ours. His numbers weren't astounding (14 homers, 82 ribs, .291), but it seemed like he collected all of them against the Mets. By then, Matthews was 34, playing almost every day for the last time in a career that ended in 1987.
Right now, I'm thinking of the Gary Matthews who didn't become a Met in the winter of '76-'77. That Gary Matthews, 26, had lots of company. Every player in the very first free agent class, just freed by the death of the reserve clause, didn't become a Met. The critical mass of the suddenly shuttered Oakland A's dynasty was on the market, but none of them — not Rudi, not Tenace, not Bando, not Campaneris, not Fingers, not Athletic by way of Baltimore Reggie Jackson — was coming our way. Nor was Bobby Grich or Don Baylor or Don Gullett. Nor did we think they might.
This was the daring new world some were salivating over and others were dreading. This was a clutch of star and superstar ballplayers who would become available to the highest bidders every November. This had never happened before. Instead of engineering trades or banking on minor leaguers, you could just buy the guy you needed. Pay the man and he was yours.
Not the kind of atmosphere that sounds conducive to the business practices of one M. Donald Grant. Maybe if Mrs. Payson were still alive…Joan Payson, after all, wasn't stingy. It's been said the Mets' original owner, who died in 1975, tried to buy Willie Mays from the Giants when he was truly Willie Mays. She wanted to purchase Stan Musial from the Cardinals to kick things off in grand style in '62. Grant might have gone for that, a cash transaction from his team to another team. But the idea of forking over a barrelful of currency to the player himself? That wasn't Grant's game even if it was rapidly become everybody else's.
So if you read the papers, you didn't entertain too many fantasies about Reggie Jackson reporting to Huggins-Stengel in February. Though the Mets made their picks like everybody else in the re-entry draft (in which you chose whom you'd have the rights to negotiate with, a rather pointless barrier that was done away with in the next collective bargaining agreement) and they were theoretically thinking about several players, it was clear the Mets were not going to part with top dollar to snag top names.
There was one player, however, who seemed like a fit. That was Gary Matthews, then of the Giants. He had just completed his fourth full season in San Francisco. His stats weren't stunning, not even by the standards of the day — 20-84-.279, 12 steals — but he was solid. Good outfielder. Didn't miss games. Entering his prime. In other words, he was the kind of regular the Mets were missing. Despite a spurt that earned the Mets their best record since 1969 (86-76), the Mets were hurting for offense in 1976. Only Dave Kingman managed more than 15 homers or 80 RBI…and he batted 238. Heck, Matthews would have led the '76 Mets in stolen bases.
Those Mets, as was their fashion for nearly a decade, relied on pitching. Jerry Koosman caught fire and won 21 games, finishing second for the Cy Young. Jon Matlack chipped in 17. And Tom Seaver? Future lock Hall of Famer Tom Seaver? Nine-time All-Star Tom Seaver who led this power trio in strikeouts (235) and ERA (2.59)? Tom went 14-11.
Like the Met offense of the mid-'70s, that was just sad.
The world was changing around Seaver. It always had. The June amateur draft was just coming in when Seaver was first eligible in 1965. The Dodgers tabbed him but he opted to stay in school at USC. The next year he was thrown into a January draft that, according to a very thorough Met historian, included those who had been drafted the year before but did not sign — a status that would have been impossible to garner without there having been a June draft in the first place. The Braves picked him and signed him but hadn't noticed or decided not to notice that the Southern Cal season had begun when they secured his signature. They were two non-Pac 10 games and Seaver hadn't pitched in them, but they violated a line between professional and amateur. The Brave contract was voided and, after Seaver was deemed ineligible for college ball, every Major League team was afforded the opportunity to match Atlanta's offer to Tom.
That led to the greatest hat there ever was, the one into which three pieces of paper were tossed representing the three teams who thought it was worth signing 21-year-old Tom Seaver for a little more than $50,000. One said Phillies. One said Indians. One said Mets.
You know which one was drawn.
Seaver's appeal upon his Met debut in 1967 wasn't just the pitching, though that was key. The writers loved him. He was educated. He was articulate. He thought about things. He was the harbinger of the erudite athlete and at the vanguard of the Mets who would no longer be automatic losers. It was his professionalism as much as his right arm that made Tom Seaver one of the icons of his age.
All those qualities also manifested themselves into a player who dared to use an agent to negotiate a contract (heresy until the early '70s), to be very active in the union and to speak his mind about how his team was run. By 1976, he had made two things fairly apparent: he wanted to be paid what his pitching was worth and he wanted the Mets to pay a hitter who would make his pitching pay off.
He wanted Gary Matthews. He didn't get him. None of us did. While Grant, as recounted by Jack Lang in the indispensable New York Mets: Twenty-Five Years of Baseball Magic, did make an offer, it wasn't competitive with what Ted Turner was willing to ante in Atlanta. Three decades ago today, as Tom Seaver blew out 32 candles, Gary Matthews went to the Braves, agreeing to $1.2 million for five years — barely enough to win you one year of Damion Easley now, but big bucks then.
Repercussions?
Tom Seaver was burned twice. First, no middle-of-the-lineup hitter. The Mets entered '77 with essentially the same personnel from '76, meaning their offense was a disgruntled Kingman and seven other fellows who weren't here on hitting scholarships. Lee Mazzilli and John Stearns may have portended a youth movement, but neither was a slugger-in-waiting. Otherwise there were several aging parts (Grote, Harrelson, Millan, Torre) and not a lot of improvement.
Second, Tom Seaver was being outpaid if not outearned by the new free agents. Seaver, who had been voted three of the previous eight National League Cy Young awards, had signed a new deal in the spring of '76 just ahead of the gold rush. Now the likes of Wayne Garland, who timed his single 20-win season perfectly to earn a ten-year $2.3 million deal from the Indians, were racing by him. The Yankees made Reggie Jackson a very rich man. The Angels, Padres and Rangers all invested in ex-A's. They didn't succeed but it wasn't for lack of investing.
Seaver was on a team that wasn't trying to get better and now he was being underpaid, certainly relative to what the first free agents were getting ($225,000…less than Wayne Garland on an annualized basis). He didn't have much use for the way Grant was taking care of business, feeling he'd not been dealt with in good faith when he last signed. A feud erupted and by the third month of the 1977 season, Seaver, like Kingman (also contract-discontent), was gone.
The Mets were done. They were already playing badly and they just got worse. They finished last for the first time in ten years in '77. They would repeat the feat in '78 and '79, performing their unremarkable brand of baseball before handfuls of the disinterested. They fell off the map in a manner that makes 2002 and 2003 and 2004 look like a golden age.
If thirty years ago today, when Tom Seaver turned 32, the Mets had decided it was worth topping Ted Turner's bid and had signed Gary Matthews, would have things changed? Would have Seaver thought, hey, that's a great addition and maybe taken a different tone or tack in attempting to renegotiate with Grant? Would have Grant, probably looking a bit like a hero, softened, too? Would have there been more player activity? Might have the Mets made a move on Reggie Jackson who greatly admired Seaver and was not yet in the Yankees' pocket and never said which New York team he'd have to play for in order to get that candy bar? Would have the city's baseball landscape shifted one way instead of another?
That's a lot of ifs there and they probably ignore the systematic rot of the Mets' operations that predated passing over Gary Matthews. Still, even though the early free agentry didn't help too many teams (many got hurt or old and Matthews never broke out as a superstar), it would have sent a message to the fan base that the Mets weren't living in the past. When Grant fired Joe Frazier at the end of the next of May, he exclaimed things were going just peachy in light of the Mets' successes in 1969, 1973 and the two good months at the finish of '76.
Oh brother, I thought at the time. We are so screwed.
Seaver, of course, would have more dalliances with the changing times. His second go-round as a Met ceased abruptly with the bizarre experiment known as the compensation pool. Had the players and owners not negotiated such an insipid compromise to their free agent haggling in 1981, Seaver never would have been available for the White Sox to pluck after their pitcher, Dennis Lamp, signed with the Blue Jays in a spectacularly unrelated move.
Oh brother, I thought at the time. We are so screwed again.
Seaver's Major League coda, his truncated comeback with the Mets in '87, was also a product of the free agent waters turning choppy. He was on the open market the winter the teams were colluding. He said a couple of years ago he is convinced this kept anybody from giving him a legitimate looksee after his perfectly decent showing with the Red Sox in '86 when No. 41 was 41. His stay in Boston ended injured, but he insists he was healthy and good to go the following spring. By the time the Mets auditioned him in June, it was too late and his career was over.
Add 'em up and you have four separate instances — amateur eligibility violation, the first re-entry class, the compensation pool and collusion — in which off-field machinations very much tied to their times had a profound effect on where Tom Seaver played. He wouldn't have been a Met without the Brave mistake. He might have stayed a Met had Matthews not been a Brave. He might have finished a Met had it not been for Lamp and the White Sox (and Cashen's front office not protecting him). He might never have put on the Met uniform a final time had collusion not gotten in the way of him continuing his career unobstructed.
The one we're interested in at the moment is the Matthews component, and not just because this, Tom's 62nd birthday, is the 30th anniversary of it. This is the 31st free agent season, the 31st winter in which baseball teams have been allowed to pursue ballplayers in mostly unfettered terms and the 31st winter in which ballplayers have happily accepted their advances.
It's definitely not the 31st year in which the Mets have been an enthusiastic participant in these sweepstakes. After avoiding taking it seriously in '76-'77, they dipped a toe in the next winter. Two toes: Tom Hausman and Elliott Maddox. We were led to believe free agents could change our lives. Reggie Jackson did that for Yankees fans. Reasonable contributors for a few years apiece, Hausman and Maddox weren't lifechangers. The Mets didn't go after those. Oh, they took a brief run at Pete Rose in the winter of '78. But Rose laughed them out of the room when they came in about two- or three-hundred grand lower per annum than what he grabbed from the Phillies. Also, the Mets weren't any good and Pete Rose (no good in a different sense) recognized that.
The Mets' first honest-to-goodness bid for name free agents came in the winter of '80, chasing Dave Winfield and Don Sutton. By then, Wilpon and Doubleday were in charge and were desperate to be taken seriously. They missed out on both eventual Hall of Famers, settling for reMetsing Rusty Staub plus Mike Cubbage and the pitcher Dave Roberts. 'Twas nice to have Rusty home, but otherwise, not a lot of impact there.
Frank Cashen pretty much stopped after that. He was building a farm system and making shrewd swaps. His disdain for free agents was practically Grantlike. Once in a while, a Dick Tidrow or a Don Aase would wander in through the back door, but otherwise, free agentry was tantamount to the plague in Flushing for the balance of the 1980s. Given that it was the Mets' longest period of sustained excellence, it was hard to argue the Bowtie should have gone the other way.
The '90s represented a sea change. Cashen was leaving, Harazin was taking over and the Mets were trying to fend off mediocrity. It was time to bring out the checkbook. Coleman following 1990, Murray and Bonilla following '91. Bobby Bo was the prize, as hard as it is to believe today. The Mets outbid the Angels and the Phillies to get him. It was considered a good thing.
As you know, all three were disappointments (to put it kindly) and the Mets retreated from free agentry; their only significant additions between the 1992 and 1998 seasons via the FA route were Joe Orsulak, Brett Butler and Lance Johnson. It wasn't until Steve Phillips succeeded Joe McIlvaine that free agents were pursued with any sense of purpose, an approach that yielded Robin Ventura and Rickey Henderson for 1999, the first time any free agents played a major role in major Met success.
Phillips' later stabs — Zeile, Appier, Trachsel, Cedeño, Weathers — didn't click nearly as consistently. His last winter crop, specifically Tom Glavine and Cliff Floyd in '02-03, wouldn't pay off until much later. The Mets fell down a veritable well and the next GM, Jim Duquette, didn't find much of a rope in free agentry. He would sign Mike Cameron, Braden Looper and Kaz Matsui but lowball Vladimir Guerrero. Duquette used free agentry to plug holes rather than make splashes.
That all changed with Omar Minaya. Pedro Martinez and Carlos Beltran and Billy Wagner are Exhibits A, B and C. The results were happy. This winter, the Mets will try to sign somebody of substance. If they don't get it done, it won't be because they don't really want to or don't really know how to. This quote from a Bob Klapisch piece in the Record this week shows how differently free agentry is treated by the Mets — and how differently free agents treat the Mets — on Tom Seaver's hopefully happy 62nd birthday from the way it all went down (or failed to) on The Franchise's 32nd:
“We're hot. It's hot to be a Met, we've got a good thing going on here,” said one club official. “A couple of years ago, we couldn't get Henry Blanco to come here, and that was even after we offered him more money than anyone else. He still said no. That's all changed.”
As we like to say in these parts every November 17, that's Terrific.