The 1986 Mets Rewatch Newsletter is a newsletter for people who spent their childhoods detesting John Tudor and Terry Pendleton.
This next game in our rewatch series is one of the more consequential ones of the season.
This game was the third game in a four-game series between the Mets and Cardinals. For those who unfamiliar, this was part of the four-game sweep that established the Mets as the team to beat in the National League that season.
The Mets won the first two games, 5-4 (10 innings) and 9-0. The first game as highly consequential. The Cardinals led 4-2 in the 9th inning when Howard Johnson had one of the biggest hits of the season, a game-tying home run against Cardinals closer Todd Worrell. George Foster got the game-winning hit, a 10th-inning single. Alas, that game isn't available online. But the one from April 26 is.
The gist: The Mets won 4-3. Danny Heep paced the offense with 2 hits and 2 RBI. Sid Fernandez struck out 10 and allowed only 2 runs and 2 hits in 8 innings. Jesse Orosco earned the save, though he threw only one pitch and allowed a hard-hit ball, so 'earned' is perhaps a bit much.
I watched the first inning, in which the Mets scored four runs and the Cardinals scored one, and the bottom of the ninth inning, in which the Cardinals scored two runs and threatened to tie the game … but didn't.
Bad Blood? - There's a reference to a quote from Mets second baseman Wally Backman about whether the Mets could get a bye into the postseason. Cardials manager Whitey Herzog's retort was that of course the Mets are the team to beat because they act like they won the division the last two years.
Cardinals center fielder Willie McGee on 1985: "The whole season, it seemed like we were chasing them; reading the papers, you'd think the Mets had won, not us."
And one more:
The Mets were cocky. The Cardinals were bitter. Those were the days. It was a good rivalry.
Start Spreading the Boos - After a Len Dykstra leadoff homer (the second home run of his career) and a Wally Backman lineout to Terry Pendleton (who made a nice leaping catch), Keith Hernandez got booed pretty fiercely, which was apparently the case throughout the series.
This was three years after he was traded by the Cardinals to the Mets. If Cardinals fans wanted to boo someone, they should have booed the guy who forced the trade (Whitey Herzog) and not a Hall of Fame-caliber player.
Modern Baseball … just like the 1980s - NBC’s Joe Garagiola notes that Herzog has spray charts on where Hernandez hits the ball. A few minutes later Garagiola talks about pitcher scouting reports and knowing what a pitcher wants to throw in different situations. He could easily have been talking about 2026 baseball.
What seems so new (detailed scouting reports) isn't new at all. It's just more organized, more detailed, and more accurate now thanks to modern technology.
What were the most memorable regular season sweep in Mets history? E-mail me at [email protected] and let me know what you think!
History Lesson - Cardinals pitcher Danny Cox was making his season debut after missing time due to an offseason skiing accident (I think most contracts forbid skiing now).
The last time the Mets faced Cox was the pivotal game on Oct. 3, 1985. The Mets were a game back with four games to play. A win would tie the Cardinals for first, a loss would put them in a very big hole, two out with three to play.
The Mets scored a run in the top of the first in that 1985 game and had the bases loaded with one out but couldn't get any more runs. The Cardinals came back to win the game and won the NL East.
In April 1986 the Mets got the hits they didn't get in October 1985.
Gary Carter had a two-run double and Danny Heep had an RBI single that scored Carter, thanks to an aggressive send by third base coach Bud Harrelson and the Cardinals not thinking Carter would try to score.
This all came against Cox, who allowed 25 runs in the first inning the year before (second-most in the NL). Welcome back!
Stat of the Day (thanks, NBC) - Ray Knight entered with an MLB-leading 6 home runs. The Cardinals entered the day with 5 home runs total.
Knight finished the season with only 11 home runs. In fact, he hit only 2 in his last 70 regular season games and first 11 postseason games. That made him an unlikely person to hit the go-ahead homer in Game 7 of the World Series. But he did!
Dee-fense! - In the first inning, Knight made an impressive backhand on Jack Clark's hard grounder, threw low to second and Backman dove forward to hold the back. Out was the call, as Howie Rose would say. It's hard to tell with the blurry picture, but Scully and Garagiola think Backman was off the bag. This was 1986. The Cardinals couldn’t challenge the call. Too bad.
Baseball’s dinosaur - Sid Fernandez took a one-hitter with 10 strikeouts into the 9th inning. The last strikeout was Vince Coleman, who swung at what would have been Ball 4 to end the 8th inning, and got an earful from his manager, Herzog, in full view of the whole team.
That seemed a little much, though Herzog had plenty of frustration with the Cardinals offense that season. They ranked 1st in the NL in runs scored in 1985, last in 1986.
However, Sid couldn't get an out in the 9th though and the broadcasters lamented how Fernandez had only 3 complete games in 45 career starts. Joe Garagiola refers to the complete game as "the dinosaur of baseball." Joe saw it coming.
Average Number Of Complete Games Per Team – National League
1946* | 62 |
1986 | 19 |
2026 | 1 |
* Joe Garagiola's first season in MLB
A Football Game Broke Out - I said I watched only the first and ninth innings, but thanks to YouTube, I also was alerted to this play from the eighth inning. Check out how Smith tried to break up a double play by running into Backman after Backman had tagged second base.
Was Ozzie Smith playing linebacker?
I thought Ozzie Smith said there was no bad blood between these teams.
Player of the Game - Fernandez would be named Miller Lite Player of the Game. It wouldn't be the last time this season that he earned that honor.
(rewatch Game 7 of the World Series if you don’t know what I’m talking about)
Remember Jack Clark? - I always remember Jack Clark as being one of the most intimidating hitters in baseball and some of that may be due to people like Joe Garagiola, who made references to both Stan Musial and Ted Williams during Clark's 9th-inning at-bat.
Clark hit a missile off the left field wall that resulted in only a single because Clark was still recovering from injury and couldn’t run, and Heep played the carom well. Clark came pretty close to hitting a game-tying homer but a few feet turned out to make a pretty big difference
You don’t bunt on the 1986 Mets - Instead the game came down to two plays with the Mets up 4-3 in the 9th.
The first was this: With first and second and nobody out, the Mets were so confident that Mike Heath would bunt that they had their shortstop standing on second base to hold Jose Oquendo close to the bag. Heath had 10 successful sacrifices in 1985.
When Heath bunted, Roger McDowell was able to field the ball and threw Oquendo out at third base for the first out of the inning.
The Defensive Play of the Year? The Mets then had Jesse Orosco come in to pitch to Terry Pendleton and turn Pendleton from a left-handed hitter to a right-handed one. Vin Scully noted that would cost Pendleton three steps out of the batter's box. Good foreshadowing, Vin!
Sure enough, Pendleton hit a hard grounder that hit the side of the mound, took a hop over ducking second base umpire Ed Montague, and was fielded on an all-out dive by Backman.
“Snared, great play by Backman…” — Bob Murphy
Backman shoveled the ball to Rafael Santana for one out and Santana survived a rolling block by Heath, who came into Santana with his left arm raised, to fire to first. Pendleton slid for some reason and was called out by first base umpire Dutch Rennert.
Replays showed the play at first was too close to call, with Pendleton and the ball arriving at almost the same time. Since Pendleton was coming from the right-handed batters box instead of the left-handed one, it took him a split-second longer to get to first base. That made all the difference.
Never slide into 1st base, kids. It’s bad fundies.
But if we're going to say replay would have made things different, so too would the rulebook. Heath would have been certainly called out for sliding into Santana without touching second base, so it all would have washed out in the end.
Seriously?
Final score: Mets 4, Cardinals 3.
It was the Mets 8th straight win and the Cardinals 6th straight loss. We were less than 10% of the way through the season. The Mets had a 3.5 game lead and the Cardinals and their dirty slides and bad blood were effectively done.
Brought to you by …: Today's game was brought to you in part by U.S. Liberty Coins. You can get the 1886/1986 coins on EBay now for $35 or as much as $200.
Man About Town You can catch me on the National League Town podcast with Jeff Hysen, who regularly brings on authors, former Mets, and notable Mets fans to talk about the team. Jeff and I lamented the team’s current state and reminisced about the 1986 team.
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I also appeared on the wonderful 1988 Topps podcast, co-hosted by David McEllis and Matt Kuzma. David and Matt are going through the entire 1988 Topps set and devoting an episode to the biography of each player. This is my 4th appearance and definitely the one with the most obscure player. We talk about Ross Jones, who had one hit for the Mets, was cut by them in February 1986, and now works in the movie industry.
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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.