1986 New York Mets: A Team Reconsidered

1986 New York Mets: A Team Reconsidered

1986: The New York Metropolitans

To the victors go the spoils, except when the victory is spoiled by the losers. At least, that’s how it must seem to the 1986 New York Mets.

A Team Remembered for What Might Have Been

I’m guilty of it myself. I’ll admit it. I’ve devoted far more ink, and far more thought over the years, to the 1986 Boston Red Sox than I have to the 1986 New York Mets, despite the fact that it was the Mets who prevailed that year.

This is partly because it’s hard not to view this Mets team through the lens of what might have been, had its players not slowly broken down, fallen prey to self-destructive impulses, and been sold off. It wasn’t just Darryl Strawberry and Dwight Gooden, either. Lenny Dykstra and Ron Darling didn’t quite click in New York, and Gary Carter was already running down.

If we can, however, let’s forget about what came after 1986. Let’s live in the moment, some 30 years ago, when the Mets were poised to be the new force from New York. Let’s remember how good this team actually was.

A Historically Dominant Regular Season

108 Wins, Deep Pitching, and a Balanced Lineup

They won 108 games that year, the most in franchise history, and we’ll come back to that number in a moment. Nine of the eleven pitchers the Mets used regularly posted an ERA+ better than 100, meaning better than league average, and the two exceptions still managed a 93 and a 96. That’s a deep pitching staff. Five Mets recorded 4-plus WAR that season. Gary Carter, in his last truly excellent year, topped 3.5, and four more Mets reached at least 3 WAR apiece. That’s a balanced, dangerous roster from top to bottom.

Where the 1986 Mets Rank Among Baseball’s Best

Remember those 108 wins? They were the most in baseball that year by twelve games, and the most since the Big Red Machine-era Reds won 108 in 1975. Since 1986, only two teams have won as many games or more: the 1998 New York Yankees, who won 114 games en route to a World Series title, and the star-crossed Seattle Mariners of 2001, who won 116 games and still got knocked out in the ALDS.

Only eight times in history has a team won more than 108 games. The Mets had won 98 games the year before and somehow managed to outpace themselves by 10 games.

Over the first half of the season, they went a mind-bending 59-25 before settling into a more sustainable groove, going a somewhat more reasonable 49-29 after the All-Star break. Lest you think they were slouching into the playoffs, however, they went 13-4 over the season’s last three weeks. In a nutshell, yeah, these guys were pretty special.

A Postseason for the Ages

Surviving a Classic NLCS Against Houston

They fought through a determined Houston Astros team in the NLCS, four games to two. It’s not fair to the Astros to reduce them to a footnote. They won 96 games themselves, behind a monster year from Mike Scott and the aging Nolan Ryan. The series stood at 2-2 after four games, before the Mets and Dwight Gooden took down Ryan in Game 5. That set the stage for the sixteen-inning epic of Game 6, which some call the greatest playoff game ever played.

The World Series and Game Seven Immortality

Once they reached the World Series, they faced a Boston Red Sox squad riding its own historic triumph, having come back from a 3-1 deficit against a talented California Angels team.

Everyone reading this already knows how that series went. The Red Sox took a 3-2 lead into Game 6 and came within a Bucknerian inch of clinching their first world title in 68 years. We won’t dwell on any of that right now, though. We’ll end instead on this coda from John McNamara, the Red Sox manager, who said it best: We lost Game Six, but they won Game Seven.

That’s the truth, and it’s the only thing that matters. It doesn’t matter what happened in 1987, 1988, 1989, or on down the line. That Mets team in 1986 won Game 7 of the World Series and, with it, immortality.