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Normally I try to sync up my topics with games played during this week in 1986. But this week I decided to do something different. With trades the topic of conversation, I thought I'd look at trades and trade conversations, though not necessarily deadline deals, related to the 1986 Mets.
And there are a few deals that weren't made that could have greatly impacted the 1986 Mets.
Bill Buckner
This one is the headliner. The Mets once tried to trade for Bill Buckner!
Jack Lang detailed it in April 1981 just before the season started. Buckner was unhappy with his contract and wanted out. He had just won the NL batting title, hitting .324 with 18 strikeouts in 578 at-bats The Mets were offering third baseman and outfielder Joel Youngblood, who was actually more valuable than Buckner by modern measures. He was a good hitter and a good defensive player, worth a combined 7 WAR in the previous two seasons.
The story was written up in all the New York newspapers. I found variations of it in both Newsday and the Star-Ledger, thanks to Newspapers.com. Dan Castellano of the Ledger even asked Joel Youngblood about it and Youngblood wasn't happy.
And how's this for a touch of irony from the spring training game against the Reds that day. A key moment involved a ball going through the first baseman's legs! (poor Rusty Staub). Bucknerian foreshadowing!
The Chicago papers were on the story too.
I didn't see anything from the next few days regarding how the deals for Bill Buckner and Jason Thompson fell through (Thompson ended up traded to the Angels), but it goes without saying how much things would have been different if either (and not Keith Hernandez) had been the team's first baseman for much of the 1980s.
Buckner apparently was in a bad mood that season. Regarding Wrigley Field, he said to one reporter "The grass is so long, I could feed my whole herd of cattle," he said. "I figure it must be another economy move. They're going to let the infield grass grow until its time to bring in a combine. After all, hay is going for $100 a ton these days."
The Cubs groundskeeper, who headed a crew that Buckner referred to as "lazy" a year earlier, said Buckner was welcome to cut the grass himself.
Buckner was traded by the Cubs to the Red Sox in 1984 for pitcher Dennis Eckersley, and some folks in Boston were not happy about the deal. Said one friend of Eck's to the local media: "Nothing against Bill Buckner, but (this trade) stinks."
You know who said that? Fellow Game 6 of the 1986 World Series goat, Bob Stanley.
One other thing: If either trade had happened we would have been deprived of some famous moments in baseball history.
It was during the 1982 season that Youngblood had hits in two cities on two different days. Youngblood got a hit in a game for the Mets at Wrigley Field but left the game when he learned he was traded to the Expos, who were playing in Philadelphia that night and he got a hit for them too.
The Youngblood trade got the Mets Tom Gorman. Three years later, Gorman gave up the famous 18th-inning home run to Braves pitcher Rick Camp in the 19-inning Mets win on July 4, 1985.
Ray Knight
I've mentioned in previous newsletters that Frank Cashen very much wanted to get rid of Ray Knight and would have traded him to the Pirates for Lee Mazzilli in the 1985-86 offseason if the Pirates had said yes.
There were even reports around the winter meetings that the Mets wanted to sign Richie Hebner as a pinch-hitter/third baseman, which is hilarious given how much Hebner hated New York when he played for the Mets in 1979 (he didn't like the traffic and he didn't like the fans). He didn't play in the majors again. And Knight won World Series MVP.
Disasters averted all the way around.
Len Dykstra
Also around the winter meetings, there were anecdotes in stories saying the Padres were hot for Len Dykstra and that the Mets eagerness to get a lefty reliever might land them Craig Lefferts or Mark Thurmond, and that the Mets also had interest in Ed Vande Berg of the Mariners (who got traded to the Dodgers instead).
Lefferts or Thurmond would have been interesting but the 1986 Mets got by fine with Jesse Orosco and Randy Niemann. Their starting pitchers gave them enough length that someone of Lefferts' or Thurmond's caliber would have been wasted.
And holy heck, could you imagine trading Lenny Dykstra for a middle reliever? It would have been worse than trading him for Juan Samuel (maybe not?) The Padres ended up getting another outfielder from the Mets the following offseason in the Kevin Mitchell-for-Kevin McReynolds deal when the Mets put Shawn Abner into that trade.
Lefferts didn't win a World Series in 1986 but he did do something historic for the Padres that season. He is the last pitcher to hit a walk-off home run (read my interview with him here).
Tim Teufel
Since we're on the subject of Len Dykstra and trades that weren't made, there's a golden nugget within the story of a trade that was made- in January 1986 the Mets traded Billy Beane and pitching prospect Bill Latham as part of a deal with the Twins that netted Tim Teufel.
Jim Naughton of the Daily News noted that the Twins initially asked for Dykstra in return for Teufel! The Mets said no and the Twins came back with new proposals that led to a deal that got the Mets the right-handed hitting second baseman they needed and the Twins some prospects for whom they had high expectations.
The key parties involved were happy. Latham said he wanted a chance to pitch in the majors. Beane was going to be playing in the hometown of his fiancé. Teufel, a Greenwich native, used "excited" and "thrilled" to describe how he felt.
In the end, it was the Mets who were most satisfied with this one. Teufel played five seasons for them and filled his role on the 1986 team respectably.
Bob Ojeda
The other big trade that set up the 1986 season was the 4-for-4 swap with the Red Sox in November 1985 that basically amounted to trading Calvin Schiraldi for Bob Ojeda. The trade was made the same day Dwight Gooden was given the Cy Young Award and that got bigger headlines. A Mets-Sox swap was first proposed right after the season ended and then consummated a few weeks later.
Two observations I found humorous:
One is that the AP story said that Ojeda would be the Mets' fifth starter that season. I suppose at the time that made sense. He had a 4.00 ERA and people didn't know what FIP was back then, otherwise, they might have noted his 3.25 FIP was pretty good.
Well, maybe one person noticed and he surely wasn't surprised when Ojeda went 18-5 with a 2.57 ERA for the 1986 Mets.
"He can go over there and become a big winner," said the man who pulled the trigger on the trade for the Red Sox, Lou Gorman.
Lou knew of what he spoke!
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