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Inspired by the batmags picture show in the KTE, following is the story of the legendary Mets-Reds game of July 22, 1986, as described recently in the FAFIF series, The Happiest Recap.
For those of you who haven't necessarily been following along here or here, THR is on a seasonlong mission to choose, for lack of a better word, the "best" 163 wins in Mets history by Game Number. We started with Opening Day (best Game 001) and have proceeded apace, three at a time, twice a week (with an Also Quite Happy alternate choice thrown in for each entry).
Game 090 appeared orginally here in the company of two other epics: the Matt Franco game from 1999 (088) and the Tug McGraw start from 1973 in which the Mets fell behind 7-0 and rallied to win 8-7 at Atlanta (089).
This game in Cincinnati, however, resists being boiled down to one line.
PROLOGUE: PROBABLY
Howard Johnson blasted a three-run homer in the top of the fourteenth inning that proved to be the difference in the Mets’ eventual 6-3 win this Tuesday night in Cincinnati, but y’know what? It was maybe the fifth-most noteworthy aspect of what was probably — and this is saying a ton — the most bizarre game the New York Mets have ever played.
We have to say “probably,” because it was only 382 days since the other most bizarre game the New York Mets have ever played, the one that had started 383 days before and required a night and a third of a morning to complete. That was the 19-inning rain-soaked Fourth & Fifth of July marathon in Atlanta the Mets won 16-13 after Rick Camp tied it in the eighteenth with…well, you know. Yeah, that might have been more bizarre than this one, but this one did a fantastic job of compressing its weirdness.
For the first eight innings, this game’s only really strange quality was that the first-place Mets were losing, 3-1. Bobby Ojeda scored the Mets’ only run in the fifth, and Darryl Strawberry was ejected for arguing a called strike three in the sixth, but otherwise, it was just another tepid Tuesday.
Then the ninth and a different kind of Fireworks Night erupted. |
PART I: THE DROP
Reds player-manager Pete Rose had the right pitcher in the game to end things routinely. Ron Robinson was 7-0 on the season and began the inning as a perfect pitcher might, by striking out Johnson, who was pinch-hitting. But his catcher, Bo Diaz, dropped the ball and HoJo kicked it away, ran inside the baseline and was hit by Diaz’s throw. He was ruled safe anyway. It might have been just the spark the Mets needed, except Robinson grounded Mookie Wilson into a 4-3 double play, leaving him with just one out to attain.
Robinson, however, walked Dykstra and gave up a double to Tim Teufel to put runners at second and third and compel Rose to make a pitching change. He called on his tough lefty closer, John Franco. Franco had been pitching quite effectively of late. Back in his hometown of New York just two weeks earlier, he garnered a save and a win at Shea against the team he rooted on from the upper deck when he managed to clip enough milk-carton coupons. Franco threw two-and-a-third and two innings in those respective outings. Here his task figured to be briefer, if challenging: get Keith Hernandez to make the final out of the game.
Franco did his part. Got a simple fly ball out of Hernandez. Couldn’t have been any simpler. It was lofted to right field, almost directly to the sure hands of Dave Parker, three times the winner of a Gold Glove award. All Cobra, as he was known, had to do was snare the kind of ball he no doubt hauled in with ease thousands of times in his life. If you were the impatient type, it was a real Warner Wolf “you could have turned your sets off right there” kind of moment.
But if you’re the kind to stick with a ballgame all the way through, then stay tuned.
Parker — whose two-run homer off Ojeda in the third gave the Reds a lead they hadn’t surrendered clear to the moment Hernandez swung — dropped the ball. Or, technically, he didn’t catch it. It glanced off his glove. He didn’t use two hands. He said he was concerned about having a play on Teufel if it came to that and stumbled a bit in his approach. Whatever. The ball was not caught. Dykstra scored. Teufel scored. Hernandez was on second on an E-9.
The right fielder’s error pulled open the curtain on a whole new ballgame, one so determined to leap off the charts in its bizarreness that Parker’s misplay would have to rank as maybe the fourth-most noteworthy aspect of the night.
Because, really, the Mets and Reds were just getting rolling. |
PART II: THE BRAWL
Gary Carter left Hernandez on second to end the visitors’ ninth. Doug Sisk, Davey Johnson’s fourth pitcher of the game, was entrusted with getting the Mets to extras. Two Reds reached, but Sisk escaped the bottom of the ninth. After one out in the top of the tenth, Sisk was due to bat. Davey looked down his bench and saw little from which to choose. The circumstances of the first nine innings had strained the resources of his 24-man roster. He had used three pinch-hitters, made one double-switch and was forced to replace Strawberry upon his ejection. So for the fourth time in 1986, Davey called on Rick Aguilera (the previous night’s starter and winner) to pinch-hit. And for the first time in 1986 in that role, Aggie reached base when Franco walked him.
The Mets were in good shape that was getting better. Ray Knight singled Aguilera to second, and Franco wild-pitched both of them up a base. HoJo, however struck out. Rose ordered Mookie intentionally walked and, with the bases loaded, Franco struck out the side when he fanned Lenny Dykstra.
Jesse Orosco replaced Sisk on the mound and struck out Parker to start the bottom of the tenth. Pete Rose called on his favorite pinch-hitter in the entire world, Pete Rose, and Rose came through for himself, singling to center for the 4,247th hit of his 24-year career, setting the all-time major league record for hits for the 56th time. Rose thought less of his baserunning skills at the age of 45 than he did his hitting, so he removed himself and inserted Eric Davis to pinch-run for him.
Rose made a good bet betting against himself. While Eddie Milner batted, Davis stole second without incident. He then took off for third.
Where there would be incident.
Davis was running for Rose but might have been channeling his manager circa 1973 when he slid hard into Ray Knight just as Rose took aim at Buddy Harrelson thirteen years earlier, precipitating a legendary NLCS melee at Shea. Now, Harrelson was the Mets’ third base coach and had a ringside seat for arguably the fiercest regular-season donnybrook in which the Mets had ever engaged.
Not that fights were new to the 1986 Mets. They’d been in three of them already. It seemed to come with the first-place territory or perhaps the methods by which the Mets laid claim to the top of the heap that season. The Mets gave more than lip service to taking no prisoners as they pillaged their merry way through the National League. Tom Niedenfuer of the Dodgers, Rick Rhoden of the Pirates and David Palmer of the Braves had all incurred the Mets’ wrath in the preceding two months. The Mets offered each of those opponents fist service. They had developed a reputation.
And they had no compunction about living up to it.
Davis’s hard slide struck third baseman (and former Golden Gloves boxer) Knight as unnecessarily hard. The players pushed each other and said a few things. The last thing Ray said was, in essence, “POW,” via a right hook to Davis’s pretty — and pretty enraged — face.
“He said, ‘You pushed me,’” Knight recounted. “I said, ‘I didn’t push you on purpose.’ He said, ‘Don’t push me again, you so-and-so.’”
This round of he said/he said could only say so much. “He came at me,” Knight continued. “His eyes looked like he was mad. He was moving toward me, so I popped him. It was just reaction.”
The Mets didn’t need much provocation to react when pushed, and every one of Knight’s teammates poured on the field to defend Ray’s honor — everybody but apparent pacifist George Foster. All the Reds came rumbling in, too, and the main event was on. It was like one of those cartoons in which Popeye and Bluto went at it, except there were approximately two-dozen Popeyes and two-dozen Blutos taking swings and nobody needed any spinach.
It was a fight for the ages, though probably, at best, the third-most noteworthy aspect of the game. Its real significance came into focus just after everybody stopped punching everybody else. For when the infield-cutout dust settled, the Riverfront Stadium turf was deprived of the company of four ejectees: Knight and Davis, quite obviously, along with Reds pitcher Mario Soto and Mets right fielder Kevin Mitchell.
Which was a problem, because Mitchell, unlike Soto, was playing in the game at the time, and he was playing because Strawberry had been thumbed four innings earlier. Remember, Davey Johnson was so hard-pressed for reserves in the top of the tenth that he had to use a pitcher to pinch-hit. Now, with Mitchell (who would take on Popeye, Bluto and Olive Oyl at the drop of a hat) ejected, Johnson had a problem. |
PART III: THE RESHUFFLE
Wally Backman had started at second, but Teufel pinch-hit for him in the seventh. Danny Heep had started in left, but Wilson replaced him in a double-switch in the eighth when Sisk took over the pitching from Randy Myers. Foster had earlier pinch-ht for Ojeda. Rafael Santana was the starting shortstop, but that’s who HoJo was pinch-hitting for in the ninth. Straw, as mentioned, got himself thrown out by Gerry Davis; Mitch drew the same punishment when he attempted revenge on Eric Davis.
That left Davey with the following players in the game: Carter behind the plate, Hernandez at first, Teufel at second, HoJo at short, Wilson in left and Dykstra in center. He just lost his third baseman and right fielder to crimes of passion, and he had but one position player on his bench, backup catcher Ed Hearn. Johnson hated to not have a catcher in reserve because if your last catcher goes down, then what? Even in the 19-inning game in Atlanta, Davey managed to hold out Ronn Reynolds altogether. But he had no choice here. Hearn would have to come in.
Which was fine, but that gave Johnson seven position players and he needed to fill eight positions…and not to be picky about it, but he has two catchers yet only three infielders at this point. And still no third outfielder.
Let’s see, then…Hearn was a rookie catcher, so he was told to go catch. Carter, a veteran catcher, once played one inning of third base for the Expos eleven years before, when he was a rookie. So he became the Mets’ 80th third baseman right then and there. It may not have been ideal, but it literally covered the Mets’ bases.
But still no third outfielder. How to compensate for that shortfall?
By inventing one, of course.
Davey Johnson made like Dr. Frankenstein and created a right fielder comprised of the most useful parts his two relief aces. While lefty Orosco was finally allowed to continue his figurative battle with Eddie Milner, righty Roger McDowell was directed to right field. McDowell was a pitcher, but even a team that holds a double-digit lead in its division encounters desperate times across the vast expanse of a 162-game season. This was one of them, and Johnson responded to it with a plainly desperate measure.
Two of them, actually, because once Orosco struck out Milner (with pitcher Tom Browning on third, running for Davis), Davey made a defensive change unprecedented in the quarter-century history of the New York Mets. He sent Orosco to right and brought in McDowell to pitch. It was desperation born of lefty-right discomfort, for sure — not of concern for lefty-righty pitching matchups but for whether lefty or righty Reds were likely to hit a ball to a pitcher playing right instead of left.
Yet it was audacious, too. It seemed of a 1986 piece with the slamming down of bats and the charging of mounds and the inevitable curtain calls that made the Mets appear “arrogant” to the rest of the outclassed league. Let other teams running short on arms and legs struggle with their personnel depletions. The Mets would bask in theirs and turn them into opportunities. Seriously, the only thing that would have made Johnson moving his nine pieces around more perfect would have been Roger and Jesse high-fiving as they literally passed in the night.
Oh, and McDowell struck out Wade Rowdon to end the tenth inning.
Would you believe that the Jesse-Roger tango, repeated several times (and eventually incorporating Mookie, who gamely shuttled between left and right when Davey tried extra hard to hide a hurler), was probably only the second-most noteworthy aspect of this game?
Maybe nothing beat it for peculiarity — a sense enhanced when Rose flipped through a rule book in the Reds’ dugout in an effort to protest Orosco being allowed to throw warmup tosses when he and McDowell switched in the midst of the eleventh inning — but the presence of a pitcher in the outfield didn’t truly define the classic this game was about to become. |
PART IV: THE DP
That defining moment arrived in the bottom of the twelfth. It was still 3-3, the two-headed pitching outfielder experiment proceeding apace when Orosco allowed a leadoff single to Buddy Bell. As McDowell scurried from right to left and Wilson glided from left to right, lefthanded slugger Parker singled up the middle. The Reds now had first and second with nobody out. Carl Willis, the Cincinnati relief pitcher, was up in a clear bunting situation. It was Willis’s first plate appearance of 1986.
But it wasn’t Keith Hernandez’s first rodeo at first base. The best defensive first baseman anybody had ever seen was not shy about playing close in on bunts. He was, as the cliché went, close enough to the lefty-batting Willis to shake hands…or, more accurately, pick his pocket.
Willis got down his bunt. Hernandez pounced and fired to the third baseman, who, let us not forget, was a catcher. In the bottom of the twelfth of a game that was all but over in the top of the ninth, though, Gary Carter wasn’t interested in labels. He had already proven himself a quick study by handling two balls cleanly in the eleventh, so he was a third baseman now. And third baseman Gary Carter took Hernandez’s lightning-fast throw for the force on Bell and then zipped a throw of his own across the diamond to Teufel, who was covering first on the bunt play. The throw nabbed Willis.
The Reds went from two on and nobody out to one on and two out on the 3-5-4 double play of a lifetime. Its brilliance and beauty, engineered by two of the top players of the decade, have to make it the most noteworthy aspect of a game where the notes piled up almost as high as the worthiness. Though you could take the Orosco-McDowell business if you like. Orosco kept pitching, flying Milner to center to end the twelfth after that sparkling DP, and later returned to fielding, catching Tony Perez’s liner to right to help McDowell record a 1-2-3 thirteenth.
It was more than Dave Parker had done for John Franco when Franco could have used a little help. |
PART V: THE BIG HIT
Hearn, who had come in only because Davey had to break the glass on the EMERGENCY case in which he preferred to leave his last catcher, doubled off Willis to start the fourteenth. After Orosco walked for the sixth time in his seven major league seasons, Rose took out Willis and brought in the intimidatingly named Ted Power, who fanned McDowell for the first out of the inning. Howard Johnson, however, wasn’t intimidated at all. The 1986 Mets never were.
“We’re probably the cockiest team in the league,” HoJo said after speaking power to Power in the form of a resounding three-run homer to give the Mets a 6-3 lead. “You can’t push us around.”
Nor could you beat them, even if you held a two-run lead with two outs in the ninth; even if you attempted to shove their players from the game; even as you forced them to resort to their wits in a pinch. These Mets had those in spades and were no more hesitant to use them than they were their fists. They had Orosco and McDowell pitching a combined five innings in non-consecutive fashion. They had Carter, a man who crouched for a living, standing tall at a corner so hot four guys had just been thrown out from it. They had Hernandez, a deceptively selfless soul who wouldn’t allow an opponent to even think about sacrificing.
Geez, they even had two pitchers, Aguilera and Orosco, drawing walks in extra innings. |
EPILOGUE: HOW BIZARRE?
Most of all, they had a 6-3 win in fourteen innings in one of their, let’s say, two most bizarre games ever. It was either this one or the 16-13 spectacle from the year before. That one had twenty more runs, five more innings, went several hours later and you can’t forget about Rick Camp and the 4:00 AM fireworks. This one had…well, let’s ask the manager who won both of them.
“This is the strangest game I’ve been involved in,” Davey Johnson declared in picking the set-to in Cincy over the jaw-dropper in Georgia. “Even stranger than Atlanta. I’m out of pitchers, and I’m out of extra players.”
Yet never out of whatever it took to win. For the 1986 Mets, there was nothing strange about that. |
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