My Favorite Year

By Mike McGann
Posted Sunday, May 13, 2007

No one looks twice at you when you argue that the Mets are one of the best teams in baseball, arguably the best team in the National League (the Brewers’ record notwithstanding). That’s not hype, or fandom, just a fact.

And as good as the last two seasons have been, even in the frustrating years of the early part of this decade, and even the early 90s, it was never completely hopeless. Ownership and management made mistakes — a lot of mistakes — but the team’s failures never came from a lack of effort and desire to win from on top.

That’s why none of those teams, including the current batch, good as it is, is my favorite Mets’ team of all time. Sure, I have warm feelings for 1984 and ’85 — and no, you don’t sneeze at titles, so 1986, too. ’99 was a blast, but less fun for me than ’98 was — and 2000 always seemed headed for a bad end to me for some reason. I was too young for 1969 and too far away — and despite being left misty-eyed as a kid at the end of seven games in 1973, I wasn’t old enough to understand how rare World Series appearances would be.

Aside from not being my favorite, each of those teams had one thing in common: optimism and positive energy — space doesn’t allow me to go into detail, but those teams all were surrounded by the sense of things headed in the right direction, moving forward.

In March of each of those respective seasons a number of folks thought the Mets could, at minimum, be interesting, if not a playoff team. As much as Mets’ fans like to complain about Fred Wilpon and his former partner, Nelson Doubleday, people can easily forget how bad things were in Flushing before they took the reins.

When Wilpon and Doubleday bought the Mets in January of 1980 for $21.1 million, the team and its ballpark were a disaster. The organization was short on talent, the ballpark was little more than a rotting hulk and with the Yankees’ return to championship form, the Mets were little more than a punchline — the few times anyone remembered to mention them.

The 1979 season was the deepest, darkest hell for a baseball fan, if you happened to root for the Mets. It often seemed like no one, from owner Lorinda deRoulet who inherited the team from her mother, the passionate Joan Payson, and seemed more worried about getting fans to return foul balls to save money, to the players, such as Ritchie Hebner, who basically phoned in his entire Mets’ playing career, cared about winning or even putting a decent team on the field. The team sleepwalked to 63 wins and last place.

1980 started differently. New owners outlined an aggressive plan to clean and renovate the ballpark and the roster. Within a few years, the ballpark got a whole new look — as did the roster.

But the new energy around Shea allowed for a few brief moments of hope, not of contention or even competitive baseball, but maybe something better than the darkness of the last couple seasons — the first seen since Tom Seaver had been shipped off to the Reds in 1977. The new sense of hope even made the Mets semi-competitive for the first couple of week of the season, at 5-7 after taking two of three from Phillies, who would go on to win it all. Then the bottom fell out — or reality set in, so it seemed — and the Mets plummeted to 9-18, winning just four of their next 15 games.

While the ‘78 or ’79 Mets would have cashed it in right then and there and hit cruise control for a run to sixth place, something odd and unexpected happened: in the middle of May, the Mets starting winning. By month’s end they were back to flirting with .500 — a confusing, unfamiliar place the team would find itself for months.

The game of that season, a Flag Day affair against the Giants, made believers of thousands of fans. Trailing 6-2 headed into the bottom of the ninth. John “The Count” Montefusco had handcuffed the Mets all day, while Pete Falcone, the Steve Trachsel of his era, got hammered for five runs in an inning and a third. Mark Bomback allowed just one more run in 4 and 2/3rds innings and Ed Glynn added two more scoreless innings to stop the bleeding, but the Mets could only muster two runs and six hits against Montefusco, before finally driving him out of the game, in favor of Giants’ closer Greg Minton, who managed to put down the uprising.

Glynn held off the Giants, but most of the 22,918 in the building began to get a head start towards the Grand Central Parkway. Minton managed to get the first out, but Doug Flynn singled, moved to second and scored on a Lee Mazzilli single. Frank Taveras drew a walk. Claudell Washington, who would later hit three home runs in one game against the Dodgers, drove in a run with a base hit. Giants manager Dave Bristol had seen enough and brought in Allen Ripley, who spent half the 1980 season in the Giants’ rotation.

With two down, two on and trailing 6-4, the Mets had Steve Henderson up next, the keystone of the trade that sent Tom Seaver to the Reds and the Mets’ cleanup hitter. One minor problem: school had led out and Henderson was looking for his first home run of the season. Still. But he had hit for average and shown some skill for clutch hitting — a rare bright spot on the team in 1978 and 1979.

Ripley, no fool, did what any smart pitcher of the era would do: he threw at Henderson’s head, and knocked him down. Then having backed Henderson off the plate, in theory, Ripley tried to go away with his mediocre fastball. But he caught a bit too much of the plate — and a bit too much of Henderson’s bat. The ball shot like a rocket into the Mets’ bullpen — and the remaining throng of fans exploded in an orgasm of baseball delight. It was June and the Mets were within one game of .500 at 37 and 38. Anything was possible.

Being the Mets, the shock from the win was too much and the team immediately went into a seven-game losing streak. But like the earlier tailspin, it wasn’t enough to get this team to quit on itself: by mid-July, they clawed their way to the holy grail — the .500 mark at 42-42.

For another month, the Mets continued this way, never getting above .500 but staying within a couple game of it — and in third place of all things.

Finally, fate and reality intervened: they were within just one game under .500 (56-57) when they were supposed to host the first-place Phillies in a crucial five-game series. They lost all five. It was such devastating loss that the Mets went 11-38 down the stretch and finished fifth.

Even among those losses, there were exciting portents of the future: Mookie Wilson, Wally Backman and Hubie Brooks all made their debuts — and a kid with the silly-sounding name of Darryl Strawberry was drafted no. 1 by the team in the June draft. The first glimmers of the great mid-1980s teams came to life that amazing summer — and 25 guys showed guts, courage and played way over their heads for three months.

The magic really was back, if only for one amazing six-week period — when fairy dust fought for space with the airliners coming in and out of LaGuardia and baseball came back to Queens.

That summer, at age 16, made baseball a permanent part of my life.
 

Happy Mother's Day to all of our favorite mothers, from everyone here at Flushing University — and a special mention to my favorite mother, my wife Stephanie, who puts the capital M in mother.