That's right. That was the year the Yanks were wrapping up The Big Dynasty, 29 pennants and 20 World Series wins in the space of 44 seasons.
The Mets? Try 5 pennants and 2 World Series. Total.
The Yankees have finished first 49 times, and last, 4 times. The Mets? First 6 times. Last...13.
The amazin' part is that the Mets actually started faster, at least when it came to rings. The Flushing team took their first title in 1969, just 8 years into their existence; the Yanks, not until Season 21.
After winning it all in 1986, the Metsies were still "tied" with the Yankees: 2 World Series wins in their first 25 seasons.
Since then? NYM has played in exactly two Fall Classics—and won exactly two World Series games. That's right: just two wins since Jesse Orosco hurled his glove in the air and the fans hurled flares onto the field.
Meet the Mets/ Cleat the Mets/ Come right down and beat the Mets...
Think that's bad? Try this on for size: the Mets, all-time, are 4,698-5,041, .482.
Every other major-league team that's played as many as 15 years in New York has a winning record. The Giants. The Dodgers, by any other name (Trolley Dodgers, Grooms, Bridegrooms, Superbas, Robins, Flock, Bums). Even Boss Tweed's old New York Mutuals, tossed out of the National League for "hydroplaning" (throwing games), had a winning record.
This leaves the Mets in the company of the obscure and the abandoned, the losers in old Negro Leagues and forgotten circuits and outlaw leagues: the Brooklyn Gladiators and the Tip-Tops, the New York Black Yankees and the Brooklyn Royal Giants. And, oh yes, the New York Metropolitan, of the original American Association.
Even in the 19th century, the "Mets" were losers.
Cheat the Mets!/ Delete the Mets!/ Come on out and bleat like Mets!
How did this happen?
Well, mostly thanks to the same things we complain about every day in this space. In Metsland, it's all gone on for generations.
You shiver in fear of whatever terrible trade Brian Cashman will make next week?
Try Amos Otis for Joe Foy, Nolan Ryan for Jim Fregosi, Rusty Staub for Mickey Lolich, Jeff Reardon for Ellis Valentine, Melvin Mora for Mike Bordick.
After 1986, the Mets decided that Kevin Mitchell was a corrupting influence on Doc Gooden and Daryl Strawberry (hahahahahahahaha), so they traded him for Kevin McReynolds. A couple years later, Mitchell won the MVP—something no Met has done yet.
In 1992, they traded David Cone to the Blue Jays for Ryan Thompson and Jeff Kent. Then, in 1996, they turned around and traded Kent and Jose Vizcaino to the Indians for Carlos Baerga and Alvaro Espinoza. Kent won the MVP for the Giants in 2000. Vizcaino ended up driving in the winning run in the first ever, Mets-Yankees World Series game. For the Yankees.
Tired of Cashman signing guys who are over the hill and making believe they will perform like they did at their peak?
How about George Foster, Vince Coleman, Bret Saberhagen, Bobby Bonilla (twice!), Mo Vaughn, Mike Hampton, Baerga and Roberto Alomar (Yes, two second basemen from Cleveland! What are the odds??), Kaz Matsui, Jeromy Burnitz, Mike Stanton, Graeme Lloyd, Pedro Martinez, Mike Cameron, Shane Spencer, Tom Glavine, Cliff Floyd, Moises Alou, Shawn Green, Johan Santana, Francisco Rodriguez, Jason Bay, Curtis Granderson, Jay Bruce, and Robinson Cano, don'tcha know.
Even one of the Mets' best free-agent acquisitions, Carlos Beltran—an outstanding postseason hitter—is best remembered for standing at the plate with his bat in his hand, while Cardinals reliever Adam Wainwright pumped strike three down the middle of the plate to end the 2006 NLCS.
Then there were the guys they gave up on too early and let walk, people like Jim Hickman, Ron Hunt, Daniel Murphy, Justin Turner, Zack Wheeler.
Think Brian Cashman embarrassed himself in that tawdry sex scandal ("The Yankees run the world—and I run the Yankees.")? Come on down, Steve Phillips! With extra, heaping doses of hypocrisy.
Hey, the Mets fired Yogi AND Willie.
Mets general manager M. Donald Grant shipped out the heart of the club's miracle teams, Jon Matlack, Tug McGraw, Jerry Koosman, and Tom Seaver, mostly for back-sassin'. He publicly humiliated Cleon Jones for the unprecedented baseball sin of sleeping with a woman not his wife.
Fred Wilpon and Saul Katz? They spent over a decade running the team on the cheap because they claimed to have lost all their money to their pal Bernie Madoff, which was a lie.
Think Aaron Boone is a boob? Mets manager Bobby Valentine was once thrown out of a game and tried to return to the dugout wearing a fake moustache and glasses.
Weird, disturbing things happen to the Mets, like Edwin Diaz injuring himself by celebrating in the World Baseball Classic, or Yoenis Cespedes.
The Mets' best hitter ever, Mike Piazza, was a known juicer. But hey, they made him wait four times before putting him in the Hall.
The only Met ever to pitch a no-hitter was Johan Santana, while making his comeback from serious arm surgery in 2012. Carlos Beltran—now a former Met—hit a ball that clearly landed on the line in left field. The umps somehow ruled it was foul. Santana was left in to complete the no-hitter, threw 134 pitches, and ruined his arm all over. He never pitched again, once the season was over.
The first Met ever to win a batting title was Jose Reyes, in 2011. It came down to the last day, and almost 29,000 Mets fans turned out to watch an otherwise meaningless contest. In the first, Reyes laid a bunt down the third base line against a disinterested Reds team, decided that was good enough, and took himself out of the game. He never played for the Mets again, signing with Miami in the off-season.
Last year, Jeff McNeil won a second batting title for the team. He's now batting .248.
Who can forget the Mets losing back-to-back playoff spots in the last games of the season, at home, in 2007 and 2008? The second year, the fans were treated after the game to a "celebration" of Shea Stadium, about to be demolished for a new park named for an odious bank.
The Mets never seem to quite get it.
Last night, with the off-day, YES broadcast, back-to-back, Games One and Five of the 2000 World Series. Wild, pulsing, scintillating contests, playing in a cacophony of sound, with the Yanks' Old Guard pulling out the wins.
SNY?
They showed a replay of the Mets coming back from four runs down to J.A. Happ, and winning on a tenth-inning, walk-off homer by Pete Alonso off Albert Abreu...in 2020, the Covid year. It was a make-up game, played on an overcast September afternoon, with all those eerie cardboard faces they put in the seats in Flushing, and fake crowd noise pumped in. The win put the Mets at 17-21 on the year, inspiring them to a 26-34 finish, good for fourth place in the NL East.
Is this the future? Have we met the Mets, and they is us? Let us hope not.
The Mets just started earlier than we did when it comes to idiotic trades, stupid signings, and dumb executives.
ReplyDeleteBut now that Cashman knows how to be just as good, we can take 'em when it comes to incompetence!
Because we are the New. York. Yankees. The best damn also-ran in New York baseball.
Yankees mistake making is contagious. Look at me, I just made the mistake of checking the score.
ReplyDeleteThis is why I've never understood the Yankees-Mets 'rivalry'. The balance of success between the two teams is so lopsided, I can't see why there should be any bad blood. Aside from 2000, when has one team ever stood in the way of the others' success? The past brief flashes of Met success mostly coincided with Yankee doldrums. For most of the past thirty years the one team has been good and the other ludicrously inept.
ReplyDeleteBut times have changed! We seem to have now reached parity in ludicrous ineptitude. Given the Mets' long history of ineptitude, as Horace has documented here so well, they might have the advantage of experience. But their example certainly doesn't give any lessons for how to break out of the loop of failure. Just keep throwing poorly-constructed teams out there, and every thirty years or so you'll guess wrong, the overpaid over-the-hill veterans you collected will have a miraculous bounceback coinciding with a few good performances from younger players who have not yet had their careers ruined, and the team can be respectable for a season or two? Cashman is an absolute pro at that and has nothing to learn from those guys.
If Aaron Boone were ever to try the moustache-and-glasses trick, my respect for him as a manager would increase immeasurably. I can imagine him in the postgame press conference: "I think, you know, I was looking pretty anonymous there in the dugout, just kind of unlucky that they spotted me, I guess you just gotta keep putting some glasses on there, and try to get back to having the kind of incognito thing where you, you know, where we all know what sort of just, like, capable of doing."
Very true, and very funny, Kaiser Bill!
ReplyDelete"I was pleased with the way none of my players gave me away, though I did notice a few eye rolls, which is perfectly natural in a situation like that. Next time I'm thinking about maybe a beard and a Rasta hat, see how that goes over."