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The Shea or Nay thread sent my mind reeling, or at least spinning.
In the summer of '78 I was 15. It was the one summer when I was very much a beach bum, or at least went to the beach as a matter of course. Though I lived a few blocks from a perfectly good one in Long Beach, my friend Matt and I made a big point of riding our bikes several miles to Nassau Beach in Lido. It was somehow more exotic and had more amenities (snack bar, basketball court, swimming pool, girls who didn't know us). But there was one August Friday when I was told I would have to cut my trip short. Since I wouldn't have my cell phone with me for another 20+ years, I must have been under orders to check in or perhaps was given a curfew. Either way, my mother, going through a set of her periodic back miseries, insisted I come home early because she feared herself bedridden and didn't want to be alone in case of god knows what.
So I rode home and I sat myself down to read about the Mets in the paper. Thanks to doing some digging as a result of the Shea or Nay thread and the question about where Gaylord Perry was pitching, I now remember precisely what I was reading. I was reading about the Padres beating the Mets on a Wednesday afternoon, which annoyed me because it was already Friday afternoon and the Mets had lost to the Padres Thursday night and why was I still on Wednesday's loss in Friday's paper?
Because it was August 1978. The New York newspapers had gone out on strike earlier in the month and all I had at my fingertips were the strike papers that took the place of the Post, the News and the Times (we had stopped subscribing to Newsday when I stopped delivering it and it was hard to come by otherwise during the stirke, such was the demand for Long Island's paper bolstered by a temporary monopoly). The paper I was reading was the City News, which existed, like the Daily Press and the Daily Metro, to fill the void. They did a damn poor job of it, with their deadlines pushed way up from the norm. Printing and distribution was a chore, as you could imagine, for papers that had just sprung up in an industry that was rife with turmoil.
Thus, in Friday's City News, while I sat around either hoping my mother was all right or wouldn't need anything (I was 15, what can I tell ya?), I had to settle for a game story from Wednesday afternoon with a picture of Jerry Koosman pitching in front of empty box seats (per usual in 1978). Kooz had pitched eight shutout innings and kept the Mets ahead 1-0, but gave up a baserunner in the ninth, left for Skip Lockwood and the Mets lost 2-1. It was another "poor Jerry, no run support" story. That's what was being relived in the paper on Friday, a game from 48 hours earlier. The Thursday night game, which Perry pitched, was a far less heartrbreaking 1978-style loss: San Diego 9-2. Mickey Lolich, I see, got the save. The Mets would lose that Friday night, too, to the Dodgers.
Anyway, funny how all that sort of bubbled up from that one picture of Gaylord Perry at Shea.
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