The Enduring Essence of the Mets

I grew up in working-class New York City in the 1980s, which means I grew up with the ’86 Mets. The Mets, founded in 1962, had an unfair reputation for being “lovable losers,” a moniker they were given after losing their first-ever game. Those 1980s Mets teams were the opposite of lovable losers. They were New Yorkers like us. They were hateable winners. They embodied an essence that I think every New Yorker looking for success has to return to: Be good at what you do. Work. Never let a day go by. Fight like hell.

The first major league baseball game I ever attended was in 1985. I was nine years old. Like everything in New York, it was hard. I went to school all day, went home, had something to eat, and walked a mile with my dad up to Union Turnpike. Got the F train. Took it to Jackson Heights. Got the 7. Stood all the way. It took an hour to get to Shea Stadium. We didn’t have seats yet: In those days you bought tickets at the stadium. Tickets punched at the gate, up the ramps we went, climbing higher and higher. Dwight “Doc” Gooden pitched the game. My family was terribly poor. We didn’t have central heat or hot water or a telephone in our home. But my dad thought seeing Doc was worth the $4 per person for general admission tickets. (In those days the most expensive seats were $9, a luxury we never even dreamed of.) He was right. Gooden was majestic. His curveball curved so much we could see it from the nosebleed seats at the top of the stadium, where the players looked like blue-tipped white ants. We could hear the pop of his fastball in Gary Carter’s mitt.

The Mets had been through hard times. After a brief period as an expansion team with no good players, pitcher “Tom Terrific” Seaver led the Mets to their 1969 championship, and they remained competitive until leadership betrayed the team and traded Seaver off to the Cincinnati Reds, a trade dubbed the “midnight massacre.” The city was suffering then too, families departing en masse. There was rioting, looting, blackouts, crime. In those dark years, we rode the J train in to Manhattan through mile after mile of shuttered stores, burnt-out brownstones, and boarded-up churches. Packs of wild dogs roamed through the streets in Queens. I remember my mom grabbing me and lifting me up as our local pack turned round the corner into view on Atlantic Avenue. 

The Yankees were a good team during those years, leaving the Mets as the baseball equivalent of urban decay, the actual experience of our lives. My parents had contracted to buy a house in 1972, just as the city was falling apart. My father didn’t get the job he had hoped for, and my parents never made a payment on the house. No one cared. They didn’t pay real estate taxes either. No one cared. The boiler broke. There was no money to fix it. They chipped a hole into the old brick chimney—it’s a miracle it didn’t collapse on them—and stuck a stovepipe into it. To the stovepipe they attached a tiny cast iron stove, about a cubic foot in volume, made in Taiwan, which they bought on Rockaway Boulevard for $12.50. 

For the next decade this provided all the heat for our big old decaying five-bedroom haunted-looking Victorian home. Upstairs there was no heat at all. The pipes in the second-floor bathroom burst, so we shut off the water to the second floor and didn’t use the bathroom anymore. Hot water had to be heated on the stove, so all baths were sponge baths. For fuel we scrounged wood from people’s trash: old chairs, flooring, branches. We sawed it all up with bowsaws. I had a tiny one for myself. When we couldn’t find wood we carried home armfuls of newspapers, rolled them into “logs,” and fed them into the stove. We would sit by the fire listening to cassette tapes of classical music we borrowed from the library while my father drank in the darkness. We lived in ruins, but we remembered what had been ruined. Deep inside we knew how things were supposed to be done. Nothing was given. You had to earn it. Listening to recordings, I learned from my dad why the Metropolitan Opera was the best in the world, sure, but also why the New York Philharmonic wasn’t. Being in New York wasn’t enough. You had to work. There was plenty about the place that was terrible, and bad news poured in. They wanted to tear down Grand Central. They wanted to tear down Carnegie Hall. But the Mets were a sign—along with Bruce Springsteen, Lawrence Taylor, Madonna, the Ghostbusters movie—that things were going to get better, that we would not be flat on our backs forever. 

For nine innings Gooden and his St. Louis Cardinals opponent, John Tudor, dominated batters; the game was scoreless at the end of regulation. Jesse Orosco replaced Gooden in the tenth inning, and gave up a home run to Cesar Cedeno. Tudor came out to finish the game, a ten-inning shutout. We had lost. 

The Cardinals went to the World Series that year. But the next year was 1986. My dad got a job as an auditor for the Board of Education, checking attendance records, and my mom picked up extra work cleaning houses. I will never forget her raw, bright red hands: She worked, and worked, and worked. We could afford a telephone now. The Mets went into first place in mid-April and never relinquished their lead. But they didn’t coast. They were our people: They worked. 

By July 22, 1986, the Mets had sixty-one wins and twenty-eight losses, enjoying a thirteen-game lead over the Montreal Expos. They were in Cincinnati, and their hotheaded third baseman Ray Knight got into a fight with Reds player Eric Davis in the tenth inning of a tied game. So many Mets got ejected in the ensuing brawl that they had only eight position players left on the field, and two of them were catchers. 

So they sent relief pitcher Roger McDowell in to play right field, and their all-star catcher Gary Carter to third base. Both fielded their positions brilliantly, diving for balls on the hard turf. The game went fourteen innings, with Jesse Orosco and Roger McDowell shuttling between the pitcher’s mound and right field for four innings until the Mets finally scored and won. I still remember first baseman Keith Hernandez pumping his fist in excitement when he fielded a bunt that turned into a double play. Hernandez didn’t care about their thirteen-game lead. He didn’t think it was a meaningless road game in July. He wanted victory. He wanted to prove he was the best. He wanted to beat somebody. And God, we loved him for it. This was New York: a hunger to be the best, a desire for excellence that refused to let even one day be normal or mundane. The next night the Mets went out and beat the Reds again.

That fight during the game against the Reds was only one of several public brawls the Mets had. We understood them. In the suburbs people are spread out, and conflict is rare. In the city, when you were poor you had to fight. Not every day. I think I got into a fight every six months, from the time I was in third grade. What were you going to do when someone pushed you over to take your basketball court? You considered the risks and acted accordingly. One day I was playing one-on-one with a friend when some bully who had thirty pounds on both of us decided to pick on my friend. When the bully took a swing, I struck at his kidney from behind. He turned around and punched me in the face, sending blood everywhere: I had a famous “glass nose” that would bleed at first hit. (It was my secret weapon in fights: My opponent would think he had killed me.) But he had only made me mad. I lunged at him, bleeding profusely, hitting him in the face and body until he faded into his group of friends. Sometimes you just had to stand up and fight. So, when we saw Mets players charging after pitchers who had intentionally hit them, we understood, and we loved them for it. They fought fair. They dropped their bats, they threw off their helmets, they didn’t kick, and they didn’t gang up on anyone. When I got into fights, I thought I was fighting like a Met.

The Mets won 108 games that year, one of the five top finishes in National League history. And yet for all that, they retained their humanity. They stayed beatable. It was a team that had to work around its own incurable flaws. They went to the playoffs against the Houston Astros, and it became clear: There was no way they could ever beat pitcher Mike Scott. They couldn’t touch him, the same way they couldn’t touch John Tudor. So they had to beat everyone else the Astros put on the mound. The Mets weren’t machines. They were people. They never solved their problems. They just worked twice as hard to find a way to succeed despite their flaws. 

Eventually, it all fell apart. They partied and succumbed to drink, to drugs, to pride. After their 1986 World Series triumph, Doc Gooden missed the ticker-tape parade because he was hungover in a crackhouse. Ray Knight insisted he had to get a million dollars a year and refused to re-sign with the team for $800,000. Mets’ leadership traded Kevin Mitchell, their brawling rookie who played seven different positions and got clutch hit after clutch hit, for Kevin McReynolds, a nice Arkansas ballplayer with speed and power. In interviews, the Mets presented McReynolds as a good old boy who spent the off-season fishing and duck hunting. We heard this and screwed up our faces. “Duck hunting? What the f— is wrong with this guy?” McReynolds was perfectly fine as a player. He just wasn’t one of us. Mets management had fallen for the idea that players are fungible statistical performances, applicable to any situation. They started working to depersonalize, de-adrenalize, de-realize what had been a team.

But the essence of the Mets has endured. They represent what New York means: to be tough, to work hard, to have your flaws, to fight like hell but still play by the rules. If you bear down and get really good at something, you’ll become like the ’86 Mets, the hateable winners. And the fans will roar their approval, ready to love the team that works and suffers and fights with us.

John Byron Kuhner owns Bookmarx Books in Steubenville, Ohio. He writes at https://johnbyronkuhner.substack.com/.

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Image by Jeff Marquis, from Wikimedia Commons, licensed via Creative Commons. Image cropped.