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Mark your night off from 2018 Mets baseball by re-watching this August 9, 1990 brawl between the Phils and the Mets. It's not as celebrated as some other famed throwdowns of the era — he Knight vs. Davis show of 1986, the Jeffries-McDowell squareoff that technically happened after the season was over, or even the Braves-Mets fight that featured Charlie O'Brien trying to throw a noogie punch at John Cangelosi on the cover of Sports illustrated — but it's got a ton of action!
The Mets were streaking toward a late-summer, too-little-too-late run at first place after Buddy Harrelson took over from Davey Johnson about a quarter of the way in. Brawls are nothing to celebrate kids, but it's 28 years later, nobody got seriously hurt, and it's a peek-a-boo into the human condition and the masculine Metsculine mystique.
Let's re-watch.
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Thoughts on the Fight!
[list=1][*]See how quickly Gooden responds and gets out there! And how inconsolable he is throughout the ordeal. It’s like Piazza vs. Mota. He doesn’t catch his breath and calm down. Several minutes in, he still has death in his eyes. Death!!
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[*]Don’t wait for the vets. Mark Carreon enters the fray early and aggressively and pays for it by ending up under a lot of dudes.
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[*]Dennis Cook’s got one awful, stringy mullet.
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[*]Mullet McDowell trying to restrain Gooden. Go restrain your own dude, Roger.
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[*]Dicky Thon and Howard Johnson have a brief bonding moment. Recall that it was Thon getting hit earlier in the game that precipitated this in part, and it was Thon getting hit by then-Met Mike Torrez six years earlier that prefaced his career going from All-Star level to utility journeyman level.
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[*]Randy Marsh is a sweaty, sweaty ump, Randy Marsh is.
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[*]Look how many people it takes, from both sides, to hold back Strawberry at 3:00. His reach is terrifying!
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[*]Mackey Sasser goes ape shortly after that. Gooden always looked out for Mackey, telling the opposition that anybody who made fun of Mackey’s throwing kinks would eat one. And seriously, who the hell would want to be on Mackey Sasser’s bad side? I bet he had a long memory. Magadan ends up at the bottom of that scrum.
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[*]Gooden looking fit during a sober period in between slip-ups, rocking a hard flat stomach. He was usually ripped in the limbs, but with a little Axl Rose-y beer gut. Not here.
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[*]Teufel is not sure which guy to hit, but wants somebody. It’s a Cooter’s flashback for Tim.
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[*]Speaking of Cooter’s, Ron Darling appears to not have a shirt on, and seems to have quickly thrown a warmup jacket on in the clubhouse while checking his tan torso out in the mirror. I think he inadvertently catches a Teufel elbow at one point, too.
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[*]Mike Cubbage, that guy kept his head. He’s practically sleepwalking out there.
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[*]“There’s Irish Mike in the middle of it. THAT doesn’t surprise anybody." Phillie announcers trading in ethnic stereotypes.
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[*]Gregg Jeffies and his muscular butt walking like he’s trying to hold something in between his cheeks.
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[*]Slo-mo time! Didn’t see him earlier, but Keith Miller is the first Met to the pile after Gooden and swan dived right in there.
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[*]Herr (I think) comes in spikes first. Dirty play there, Tommy!
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[*]Kelvin Torve wearing #24!!! WTF?!!!
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[*]Strawberry was one of the last guys out there. Turned into one of the main combatants.
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[*]Alejandro Peña has a tilde over then n in his name. That must’ve been one of the first appearances of such. On his warmup jacket, no less. Alex Treviño, too. The Phillies provided no such courtesy to Tom Ñieto.
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[*]Toward the end, you see Dennis Cook leave the field infuriated. What you don’t see is that this is the fight during which he got famously slammed to the ground by Country Joe West.
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[*]Ultimately both pitchers got tossed, with the Mets coming back against Phillie reliever Darrel Akerfelds, while Bob Ojeda picked up the win in relief for the Mets.
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[*]Amazing to see so many 1993 Phils out there three years earlier while they still kinda sucked. By the time they reach the pennant, they would be the whitest, mullet-est, roidiest team ever. They frankly seem like they’re already pretty far down the road in all three categories, though.[/*:m][/list:o]
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