Welcome to Flashback Friday, a weekly feature devoted to the 20th anniversary of the 1986 World Champion New York Mets.
Twenty years. Forty-three Fridays. This is one of them.
Over these past 40 (as in American Top 40) Fridays, including this one, nobody has mentioned it to me. I can only assume it's so obvious that it requires no comment or that time has rendered it too obscure to elicit instant recognition. Perhaps it was never up your alley at all. But for the record — or cassette or newfangled compact disc — every headline in this Flashback Friday series since the second entry has been borrowed from a song that charted (or attempted to chart) on the Billboard Hot 100 between the beginning of 1986 and the end of that year's baseball postseason.
Of course you knew that.
Or now it all makes sense.
It's not a particularly unique claim to note that music has always been a big part of my life, dating back to when I was 9 and heard “American Pie” for the first time. As with seeing Tom Seaver when I was 6, I instantly had my all-time favorite…and music joined baseball as my dual obsession.
A lot of people say that about music, so allow me to digress and explain what I mean. “Music” is such a big subject, so I want to be clear on what I am and what I am not talking about.
I don't play an instrument. My mother yeckled me into piano lessons between the ages of 11 and 14. She insisted that when I grew up, I'd be glad I took them because I'd be able to play at parties. Except for trotting out that anecdote from time to time, I take no pleasure from having attempted lamely to play the piano. And I don't go to parties.
I know nothing technical about music. I have only the most passing vocabulary about what those italicized, Italian terms on the sheet music mean. Furthermore, I don't worry too much about individual musicians. I know from “acts” and “artists” but I couldn't tell you who played what kind of horn on any given album and, for that matter, I'm not sure I keep bass and guitar straight in any given quartet.
But I love music as I came into it when I was 9. I loved the radio with their jingles and their identities. I loved the charts with their stats that were just like standings. I loved record stores with their categories for LPs and the slotted shelves for 45s.
Most of all, I loved pop songs. To me, everything I heard was a pop song. I knew there was soul and there was country and there was hard rock and there was easy listening, but I heard it all from the same place. I heard it on what was called Top 40 radio. That's where Don McLean explained what happened the day the music died (an awful lot), where America warned what was missing in the desert (someone to remember your name), where Paul Simon estimated the distance to the mother and child reunion (only a motion away). Johnny Nash could see clearly now, Helen Reddy was woman, a very high-pitched man in the Stylistics was stone in love with you and Chicago spent their Saturday in the park.
I don't know if you like those songs or hate those songs. Furthermore, I don't care. I never cared what anybody else thought, except perhaps for the idea that by definition pop songs were popular. As with baseball when I was 6, discovering music when I was 9 was a way of connecting to something bigger than myself, something that I'd heard about, something that was out there, something that if I enjoyed it must mean that I was somehow more normal than I felt.
Like Gallery, I…I believed in music. I always have. I still do.
This is a topic that could go off in many directions, which is why I've only winked at it here and there in the course of baseball blogging. Me writing about my personal relationship to music — songs, really — is like trying to cover center at Petco Park. There's a lot of ground. I think we'd be best served if I keep the conversation confined to the year a group called The Outfield peaked at No. 6 on the singles chart.
The year was 1986. I was 23. And I was convinced every other song I heard was somehow describing some aspect of my post-collegiate life.
One year before, we got cable, so I was only just immersing myself in MTV and VH-1. One year later, WHN would become WFAN, meaning hours of sports talk would eat into my Z-100, Power 95, Hot 103, Mix 105 and WPIX-FM (“the ballads and the beat of New York”) habits. For the balance of 1986, except for those three or so hours a day devoted otherwise between early April and late October, I listened to music constantly. It's no wonder I thought most of it was written for me. Me and nascent romances that never got off the launching pad mostly.
“Something About You.” I'm sure of it.
“Invisible Touch.” That's exactly how I'd describe it.
“Why Can't This Be Love?” Yeah, why not?
“When I Think Of You.” Wait! I have a whole bunch of emotions I want to share!
“No One Is To Blame.” Aw, don't tell me that.
“The Captain Of Her Heart.” You mean him, not me?
“Taken In.” Whether that was your intention or not, that's how I feel.
It was a little dopey for a 23-year-old to entwine himself with lover's lament crap coming out of a radio or a video, but my development was stunted in a lot of ways. I didn't even own a proper stereo until I was 22. And I still took baseball ridiculously seriously.
There, music worked better for me. Where the Mets and music were concerned in 1986, I wasn't so literal-minded. I just enjoyed having a backbeat to this season of seasons.
“West End Girls” does not get me to thinking of girls from the West End. Instead, I hear the season beginning and the Mets winning those 18 of 19.
“Digging Your Scene” places me midyear into the scene the Mets created atop the N.L. East.
“Two Of Hearts,” “Typical Male” and “We Don't Have To Take Our Clothes Off” are still playing on my car radio as Fred and I barrel down the Jersey Turnpike in August to see the Mets in Philadelphia. (Fred thought Jermaine Stewart an atypical male for discouraging ladies from disrobing.)
“Dreamtime” came out in time for playoff time.
1986 wasn't the greatest year ever for pop music. The greatest year ever for pop music, according to my very particular scientific survey, was 1974. In 2002, I completed my own Top 500 Songs of All Time, “all time” encompassing 1972 (the year I started listening) through 1999 (end of the century…and I had to stop somewhere). 1974 contributed 50 hits, exactly 10% of the list. 1986 was responsible for 17, somewhere in the middle of the pack. Though the songs that came out between Spring Training and the World Series afterglow all carry some Met meaning by association, only one is on the list because it was My Mets Song.
You can find it at No. 483, nestled between the best of Superdrag below it and John Parr above it.
During the week ending February 15, 1986, just as pitchers and catchers were returning to St. Petersburg, a duo far less recognizable than Gooden and Carter debuted in the Billboard Top 40. The 40th most popular song in the land, as Casey would have put it, was by two men, one who had been involved in one the seminal funk bands of the 1970s: Gary “Mudbone” Cooper, a part of the legendary Parliament/Funkadelic. Cooper teamed up with a vocalist named Michael Camacho, and together they became Sly Fox. Their first single — which if you needed to ghettoize it by genre could be described as a dance number — had nothing to do with the Mets and everything to do with the Mets.
It was called “Let's Go All The Way”.
Come on! How could it not be about the Mets? I don't remember the moment I first heard it, probably during exhibition season, but if that driving beat in the intro (zhub-ZHUB! zhub-ZHUB! zhub-ZHUB!) didn't get me, the chorus did.
Let's go all the way.
Let's go all the way.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Let's go all the way.
It's March 1986. The near-miss of 1985 is still fresh. The promise of the season ahead tantalizes so. The Mets are a year wiser, a year stronger and enhanced. They're loaded for Cardinal. Davey says we will dominate. This is no time for subtlety, none of the “let's just worry about tonight's game…no, just the first inning…make that the first pitch” caution of later adulthood. This coming year was gonna be our year. Why hide it?
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Let's go all the way.
I started writing it down in my journal. It became my private rallying cry. I didn't share it with anybody. I somehow thought it would take off on its own. Hell, it even mentioned where we were!
Living in New York.
Looks like an apple core.
Asphalt jungle.
Got to be a man of war.
Perhaps it peaked too soon. Sly Fox reached their chart apogee in the week ending April 12, climbing as high as No. 7 on Billboard, stalling there for a week and then tumbling out of the 40 in the May 24 survey. By then, the Mets didn't need a song to rev up the Big Apple. And when it seemed like a great idea to have one in August, “Let's Go Mets” was created with the blessing and participation of the club.
But “Let's Go All The Way” remained My Mets Song. It stayed in my head all summer. When the playoffs approached, I thought it would be a good idea to actually own the single to play it outside my mind (and perhaps clear up the “traffic jam of the brain” that Sly Fox said “makes you want to scream and shout”). On the eve of the Houston series, I drove to TSS Record World in Oceanside to look for the 45 — I couldn't imagine I needed an entire Sly Fox album. Since the song had been off the charts more than four months, I had to pick through the oldies section to find it, but couldn't. I checked the 12-inch singles, and there it was. Well, I reasoned, five dollars for one song is a little steep, but it's what I want. Still, I'd rather keep this thrifty. There was another record store in the strip mall next door, the Record Den (the one with the Haulin' Ass poster in the window). Maybe they have the 45.
Here's the Amazin' thing from this particular October morning. I ran across the parking lot to the other store. They did not have “Let's Go All The Way”. OK, I thought, I'll ante up for the overpriced 12-inch. I get back to TSS…and it's not there.
It's not there! The Mets are about to play the Astros for the pennant and this song which I decided was MY song for MY Mets has disappeared. In a matter of maybe 20 minutes, somebody else must have come along and decided owning a copy of “Let's Go All The Way” right this very minute was crucial.
Damn. So I bought the album. As I predicted, the seven other tracks made no impression on me (nor on the United States; Sly Fox's only other hit was “Stay True,” which rose to No. 94 in June and quickly sank out of sight), but I didn't care. I got my money's worth out of playing “Let's Go All The Way” to psych myself up, to send out good vibes, to fulfill whatever mission one assigns a song out of its original context.
The Mets won the pennant. They were one step closer to going all the way. And their opponent, if you listened to what Camacho was singing, was a lock.
California dreamers sinking in the sand.
The Hollywood squares are living in Disneyland.
Yes, obviously we were going to play the California Angels and our apple core-man of war toughness was going to dispatch them from our asphalt jungle. No doubt they were going home to Orange County emptyhanded. Sly Fox wouldn't lie to me.
Except the Red Sox beat the Angels and we played Boston. Who knew?
The verses may have been failing me, but the chorus was still operative. Let's Go All The Way.
I played it to mixed results as the World Series got underway. The Mets showed no signs of going anywhere but down in the first two at Shea. It wasn't pleasant, but I honestly didn't fear for our lives. You're gonna tell me, I told myself, that this Mets team, this 108-win juggernaut, can't take four of five from ANYBODY? I knew better. Games Three and Four proved me not crazy, and we tied it up at two. Game Five wasn't so hot and we returned from Fenway with no margin for error.
Game Six was Saturday evening. I still thought/knew we'd win the World Series, but it was going to take all the exhortation I could muster. I kept my record by the turntable just in case I would need it.

The email came at mid-afternoon: Two tickets for tonight, did I want them?
I nearly broke several fingers replying in the hell-yes affirmative, then fired off a note to Greg. (You never know, he might have been busy tonight or something.) And so it was off to the ballpark for Faith and Fear — a rambling odyssey home, then to Penn Station for the securing of tickets, then out to Shea on the LIRR, then to Gate E where Mr. Prince was waiting, resplendent in his orange Mr. Met jacket. Endless thanks to our original benefactor, a Yankee fan who felt strongly that the two tickets he couldn't use should go to raving Met fans (a kingly gesture — there is some good in Yankee-fan hearts, folks), and to pals Aileen, Keith and Nick for their kind middlemanning.
Greg and I made our way along the mezzanine during the top of the first, and the roar of the crowd told us exactly what was happening. We were in a fine section, too — lots of high-fiving and high spirits and no horrible drunkenness — the worst thing we saw was scattered Cardinals getting rough vocal treatment, but even that seemed to be in good fun, though obviously the blue-and-orange masses enjoyed it far more than the lonely outposts of red. (OK, the worst thing was actually poor Greg getting nailed in the face by a vendor's bag-of-peanuts missile, but that was really just startling. He was fine and the guy behind us, for whom the peanuts were intended, felt so bad that he shared them.)
If this had been a game on a sultry July evening, we'd have praised it to the skies as a classic pitcher's duel, a modest little baseball gem. I suppose that's still true — but this was October and I, at least, wasn't in a frame of mind to admire the ratcheting tension and all that. Instead, I was bouncing around in my seat in complete terror, aware that something was gonna break and aware that it could well be us. Glavine's pitching line came out looking spectacular, but appearances can most definitely be deceiving: He benefited from seemingly innumerable balls hit right into gloves, a great catch by Endy (replacing Cliff Floyd, now our pinch-hitter deluxe) and some boneheaded Cardinal baseball. After Pujols was doubled off first, he was left standing in the center of the diamond, alone except for the umpires, for an excruciatingly long time, waiting for someone to bring him his hat and glove already. Of course we occupied his time by serenading him with various critiques of his baserunning.
Meanwhile, I don't know if some heretofore-unknown Weaver brother was impersonating Jeff for most of this year, when he sucked, or has been doing so this fall, when he hasn't sucked. But something is definitely up. Weaver was well-nigh unhittable, and it was interesting to hear the crowd's bloodlust slowly diminish and turn to befuddlement and then desperation. In the sixth, with two out, the crowd was begging Lo Duca just to work the count and get Weaver somewhere in the vicinity of 100 pitches. His modest little single through the hole didn't exactly fire up the faithful, particularly not when Beltran immediately found himself in an 0-2 hole. But then, that thunderbolt into the night — it didn't exactly have the trajectory and acceleration of the game-ender off Isringhausen, but we all knew exactly where it was heading. By the time Beltran came home, our section and every other one had dissolved into a happy pandemonium of slapping hands and screaming and spilling beers and fans falling into each other and nobody minding. Of all the magical things about baseball, I think this is my favorite part of all: one swing — a few seconds of bat meeting ball and ball in urgent flight — blasting hours of frustration away like a cork from a bottle, turning worry into joy so quickly and thoroughly that it actually hurts a bit, like a mild case of whiplash from toes to fingertips.
That was of course the signature moment of a marvelous game, though there was drama yet to be witnessed. When Guillermo Mota went 3-0 on Preston Wilson with Pujols looming on deck as the go-ahead run I could barely watch. And there were some anxious moments as Wagner recorded his outs on a hard shot right at Delgado, another one speared by Valentin and a dunker that sure looked like it would drop between Valentin and Green.
Were we lucky tonight? Maybe. Oh, make that probably. But you know what? Luck's part of it too — balls with shoe polish on them and backup catchers not called for running inside the baseline and right-fielders making foolhardy but marvelous catches and balls hitting off the top of walls and rebounding right to outfielders and little rollers behind the bag and tagging one runner out and then finding a second bearing down on you.
Luck, the kindness of friends and strangers, and thrilling baseball on an October night. I'm grateful for all three.
(Keep going — we're doubling up. It's October, after all.)

Pitching. Defense. Two-run homer.
Mets baseball.
Learn it. Know it. Live it.
It's one game. One game does not make a series. But better to win one game than lose one game.
We won. The Cardinals lost. A perfect equation.
And at Shea, all was good. We waited six years to rereach the NLCS and five days to get it started and I waited an hour plus a few pitches for my co-blogger to arrive with two out-of-the-blue-and-orange tickets he laid his mitts on just this very evening. It was, as I have to imagine a headline or two will say somewhere, worth the wait.
I love Queens in October. I love that where once I could stand in peace and wait for my blogger half I now have plenty of company. I love the flood of Mets caps and Mets jackets and Mets jerseys that roll off the trains in waves. I love that when I saw one or two splashes of red, they seemed lost in the tide. I love that the object of our derision tonight was in the building. It was Cardinals fans who elicited semi-good-natured implied comparative chants regarding rear orifices and such. It was Cardinal players whose abilities were derided, wrongly (Pujols) or rightly (Looper).
And Mets who were loved, by me and by 56,000.
I love the way we start and end double plays, how our defensive replacements defend, how our big-time free agents — Glavine, Beltran, Wagner — pay off, just like our spare parts — Chavez, Mota, Valentin on this night. It's a team effort.
I love our team effort.
I love our team this time of year.
I love Shea Stadium this time of year.
I love my new Faith and Fear t-shirt and so will you who are part of the smart set who ordered one or more.
It's a good night to be a Mets fan.
It's a good month.

The Mets are in the NLCS!
Really they are.
I know I heard it somewhere.
I think I did.
It does feel like a month of Mondays since we last played, when in fact it's been only five days. It's way long, but it's not unprecedented. This matches the interval between the day we clinched the division in 1973 (24 hours after the season was supposed to end, it always bears repeating) and the day the NLCS began. We lost Game One to the Reds but won the ensuing series. In 1999, there was virtually no time between the night we clinched the Wild Card (more than 24 hours after the season was supposed to end, it always bears repeating) and the night the NLDS began. We won Game One over the Diamondbacks and the series that ensued.
The last time the Mets had a wait of more than five days between games and won both was March 31, 1998 when the Mets beat the Phillies 1-0 on Opening Day. It had been 184 days since the Mets beat the Braves 8-2 on Closing Day, September 28, 1997.
Makes five days seem like five minutes.
What does it mean for what lies ahead? I have no idea…though I'm a little amazed to realize it's been nine years and counting since the Mets ended one season/postseason with a victory and started the next the same way.
Juan Encarnacion — dangerous guy I forgot to mention yesterday, so I'm making up for it today — and the Cardinals have waited four days, which is long enough. That was the stretch we had from the Sunday before the All-Star break to the Friday afterwards. We won both of those games, too. I sense that's fairly irrelevant, but when you're winding down your fifth Mets-free day, you tend to vamp.
If this reminds me of anything for real, it was the decision in April to send Victor Diaz (remember him?) to Norfolk about a minute before neither Cliff nor Carlos B could play and we were strapped for outfielders because we didn't DL either of our starters. We muddled through and it all proved highly irrelevant in the scheme of things. Right now, the scheme of things is quite concentrated, so I don't know if the decision to lop off a pitcher (Ring) and add an infielder (Hernandez) will impact us in a tangible way. Much is being made of playing five consecutive days, though I'm pretty sure that's what baseball teams do consistently through the year. The difference is doing it with four starters instead of five. Of course our starters don't exactly exhaust themselves with complete games, so perhaps there's not a ton to worry about there.
Chris Carpenter might get moved up? So did Bruce Hurst. It's twenty years apart, they're different pitchers and these are different circumstances, but the Hurst thing was supposed to scare us back to the Scott age. We got by.
No fear — not even of these interminable delays.

On Monday night, June 30, 1997, after having finagled a business trip so I wouldn't have to pay for too much of the privilege, Stephanie and I were in Detroit. Tiger Stadium. For someone whose long-term goal was to see every ballpark, this was a medium-sized dream come true. Tiger Stadium was beautiful. Maybe because I had seen relatively so little of it on television, I was far more taken with it than I was Fenway or Wrigley, its only surviving demographic brethren. It was almost an afterthought that on the night I'd finally get to see one of the two oldest ballparks in the Major Leagues that the opponent would be the Mets.
We made sure to get there early to take lots of pictures. I'm not the photographer in the family, but Stephanie handed me the camera and told me to go have fun. The Tigers weren't any good and the Mets weren't any draw, so I had the run of the place. Walked all over the field level, snapping away. Snapped retired Tiger numbers and the legendary overhang and every angle I could find.
Down on the field while I was moseying about in the seats in right, was a little nearby commotion. Bobby Jones, newly minted All-Star pitcher Bobby Jones, was making his way to the Met dugout and was recognizable enough to draw a crowd. He was signing autographs for visiting Mets fans and curious Tigers fans. I closed in to get a picture. It wasn't a very good one.
I looked beyond the small Jones knot and there was another Met. No commotion surrounding him. Nobody recognized him. I imagine I wouldn't have recognized him without the blue warmup jersey that said NEW YORK and the No. 11 on its front and back. Although I always liked to think I was too cool for this sort of thing, on this night — Tiger Stadium, Mets' first game here, my first game here — I wasn't.
I closed in again.
“Cory! Cory! Can I get a picture?”
Cory Lidle shrugged. Looked like he could have done without it, but he stopped and stood in place. I wouldn't say he posed. I snapped.
“Thanks! Thanks! Great pitching, man! Great pitching!”
“Thanks.” He seemed slightly but sincerely appreciative.
And with that, Cory Lidle kept walking.
I wasn't buttering him up. In May and June of 1997, Cory Lidle was what we baseball fans like to call a pleasant surprise. I had never heard of him before he was recalled in May in Houston. He had come in a trade in an earlier offseason for a spare part, Kelly Stinnett (weirdly a 2006 Met). His first inning in the Astrodome, an afternoon I wouldn't have ordinarily been watching except I had been covering a conference that day and was able to come directly home, was all right. For a bulllpen that was rebuilding from moment to moment — Toby Borland, Ricardo Jordan, Barry Manuel, Yorkis Perez, Rick Trlicek, Takashi Kashiwada, Joe Crawford, Greg McMichael — Lidle wasn't too bad. Wasn't too bad at all. The weekend before we arrived in Detroit, Chuck and I went to a Met-Pirate slugfest when the Mets were short a starter. So Bobby Valentine started Cory Lidle. He wasn't particularly effective and didn't last terribly long, but the Mets won on a Carl Everett home run. All told, in my estimation, he had given us great pitching.
Though Lidle stayed all year, I don't have any sharp recollection of him from later in the season, a wondrous season if you lived through it. The Mets remained a pleasant surprise even if Lidle proved to be like the bullpen as a whole, a shaky proposition. He was chosen by Arizona in the next expansion draft. His one season as a Met, like that Mets season to a lot of minds that don't retain everything that ever happened, has been forgotten by many. Obviously when the news came down about him crashing his plane into a building on the Upper East Side, him and another losing their lives, I found myself remembering him instantly, remembering my moment with him in Detroit as if it happened yesterday. Oddly, I relived the story with Stephanie this past Saturday, the day he pitched against the Tigers, the day the team he last played with was eliminated. Didn't expect I'd feel compelled to tell the story again any time soon.
Somewhere along the way, Cory Lidle ceased being a Met or an ex-Met when his name was mentioned. He was either an opponent of ours or a pitcher for somebody else. But on a day like this, you think about the guy wearing your colors, the guy whom you exhorted by first name from your couch across a summer, the guy in whose hands your fleeting happiness was entrusted for pitches at a time. The guy you asked to stop for a picture and he agreed and you don't even need to open the photo album to see that picture.