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The 1986 Mets Rewatch Newsletter is a newsletter for Mets fans who like their fly balls towering, their defensive plays marvelous and their recaps happy.
June 16, 1986 NY Daily News headline
Sometime around 1986 I got a subscription to Baseball Digest, a small magazine that came out monthly and had feature stories on players of the past and present, and quizzes that tested your knowledge of baseball and its rule book.
One of the things I always noticed was the ads for this company, Danrick Enterprises, that sold audio tapes of baseball games. I bought one or two and I remember saying to myself that if I ever had the money to afford it, I'd buy a whole bunch and make sure I got my money's worth.
Years later I had the money and I bought a bunch of tapes from Danrick and another company, The Miley Collection. And when I say a bunch, I mean close to 100. I've gotten my money's worth just as you may have gotten it from your music CD collection.
My collection includes games from many seasons, with an emphasis on 1962, 1969, 1973, and of course 1986, both from the regular season and the postseason.
I haven't used them on this project because well, YouTube was easier to work with. But none of the games from this week in 1986 are on YouTube and with us having gone beyond the Mets division clinching, there's not much left that's interesting to cover.
This is all a longwinded way of saying that this week's rewatch is a relisten. With it being the end of Howie Rose's career on Sunday, I realized that while I'd acknowledged 1986 broadcasters Ralph Kiner, Tim McCarver, Steve Zabriskie, and Fran Healy, I'd not done anything for Bob Murphy.
So I've plucked one of Murph's games from my collection, the first game of a sold-out Banner Day doubleheader between the Mets and Pirates from an 85-degree Father's Day, June 15, 1986, which aired on 1050 WHN.
Bobby O
I also realized that I'd not done anything in this entire newsletter run on one of the Mets best pitchers, Bob Ojeda. So I purposely picked an Ojeda start and it's a good one for him. It's the start of a nine-start stretch in which he went 5-0 with a 2.10 ERA and averaged better than 7 innings per start.
Ojeda went the distance, scattering 9 hits and not allowing a run until the ninth inning. Four of the first 5 hits were "cheap hits" per Murphy's partner Gary Thorne, leading Murphy to say "Bob Ojeda must be wondering what's going on out there?"
Nonetheless, Ojeda was unbothered by the bloops being hits and the blasts being outs. "When I'm throwing right, that's pretty much my game," Ojeda told reporters afterwards. I get a lot of ground balls, a few strikeouts, and only a few walks."
When the Mets obtained him in a trade with the Red Sox after the 1985 season, Daily News sportswriter Jack Lang said that they might use him as both a starter and a reliever, which seems odd to think about now. "I'd rather not have a floating role," Ojeda said.
Ojeda relieved in his first two appearances, as he had two starts rained out and was not needed early in the season but those were the only two bullpen efforts.
Ojeda was the Mets best pitcher going into the playoffs. He had a 1.69 ERA in his last 8 starts. He'd be their best pitcher in the postseason too, pitching to a 2.33 ERA in high-pressure games. After an early May win over the Reds, Keith Hernandez kind of predicted this saying of Ojeda: "He wants the ball. He's got guts."
The Boston Globe notes that Ojeda was in demand and that getting Wes Gardner from the Mets (part of the package that included Calvin Schiraldi) was a coup. The Red Sox chose the Mets for the deal despite the Yankees offering Don Baylor and the White Sox offering Tom Seaver, two players Boston would eventually pick up in other trades.
As I noted a couple months ago, Red Sox GM Lou Gorman said "He can go over there and become a big winner" of Ojeda. Lou got it right. So did the Mets.
Murph
If you know your Murphisms, this broadcast had many of them from the Hall of Fame honoree.
- He referenced the cumulus clouds in the sky, of course. 40 years later. Gary Cohen likes to regularly point out that Murph did this.
- He had his way with descriptive language, calling a fly ball "towering," a great play by Ray Knight "marvelous" and described how Pirates pinch-hitter Lee Mazzilli "jackknifes" away from an inside pitch. He also called one pitch as "shaving the outside corner."
- he offered up a "boy I'll say …" when wanting to put emphasis on something, in this case his surprise at a pitcher being ejected for hitting a batter in a 1-0 game referenced on the out-of-town scoreboard.
- "Pitching 2 and 1." If you listened to Murph, you knew that was how he gave the count.
- Rather than call ex-Met Bill Almon a utility player, Murph referred to him as "a handyman" who had played 7 of the 9 positions.
The Happy Recap
The Mets won the game, 4-1 behind the complete game from Ojeda.
Hernandez drove in the first run with a double in the corner, plating Wally Backman. "Buddy Harrelson was not intimidated (by a previous runner being thrown out)," Murphy said. Buddy was very daring as he waved Backman around."
The next two runs came in during the sixth inning on bases-loaded walks by Pirates reliever Jim Winn (coincidentally, the runs were charged to Pirates starter Bob Walk. A Kevin Mitchell double scored the last one in the seventh inning though the Mets had another runner thrown out at the plate.
Len Dykstra and Backman were sparkplugs, with 4 hits, 2 walks, and 4 runs scored.
Knight had excellent defensive plays in back-to-back innings. Hernandez made an over-the-shoulder catch that turned into a double play in the third. Notably, Strawberry dove for a ball, with Murphy and Thorne thinking that was Straw's first dive since injuring his thumb on a dive last season. Straw later left after fouling a ball off his foot but was back in the lineup the next day.
Today's game brought to you by …
Commercials included
- A Mets cruise from November 15-21 from San Juan to St. Thomas with gourmet meals, private functions with Mets players, and more.
- Benjamin Moore Paint, which sponsored the Mets Player of the Month and donated paint(?) to the charity of the winner's choice.
- Polaroid, which featured Gary Carter, Dwight Gooden, and the first Met to hit a walk-off home run, 1962 original Hobie Landrith, explaining how you could get free Mets tickets with your Polaroid film and video tape purchases.
- And People's Express Air Lines. Watch games from the stands, not your sofa. If you've never heard of People's Express, that's because it merged with Continental in 1987, perhaps because (as Wikipedia points out) people were calling it "People's Distress."
At the end of the broadcast it was time to take a break before Game 2, because of Banner Day (The Mets hit 3 home runs and won that game, 8-5). Murphy, who seemed to show respect for everyone he encountered as a baseball broadcaster, gave props to Al Roker and Wally Backman's wife for being willing to be judges. It's tough to judge 5,000 banners that you only get to see for a second.
Alas, they wouldn't be broadcasting it because-as Murphy points out- "It's pretty hard to see it on radio."
PS: Not 1986 related, but did anyone else notice that Howie Rose’s last Mets home run call was done in the style of Lindsay Nelson?
You can contact me on Bluesky or via e-mail ([email protected]). You can find my other newsletter, which summarizes interviews I do with journalists, here.