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: Outside Counsel

By Bill Altreuter

Our television habits are formed around LCA's dance schedule, which means that we seldom sit down and watch a whole program from beginning to end. We scroll, and if we spot something we watch it until it is time to take or retrieve LCA from dance. One of the rules of scrolling is that if we see a ballgame we pause for a moment to check it out, and lately the ballgames we've been coming across have been from 1986.

Of course back then we lived in New York, and were Mets ticket holders, so we may have been at some of those games. We almost certainly watched quite a few, but the appeal remains. These games are fun to watch on so many levels it is hard to list them all. There's the mustaches, for instance, and the body types. Latter on Lenny Dykstra would bulk up, but back then he was just a skinny kid. Darryl Strawberry was a thing of beauty. There is the better understanding of the game that we have now. Last night was Game 5 of the NLCS. Davey Johnson kept Dwight Gooden in for ten innings. Nolan Ryan went the full nine. Can you imagine that happening today? Both teams had great bullpens-- Roger McDowell and Jesse Orosco were probably the best tandem in baseball. Why would you keep your ace in the game for ten innings?

I used to think that those Mets were a pretty slick fielding operation. What they actually had was an outstanding pitching staff and Keith Hernandez. A slick fielding first baseman almost sounds like an oxymoron, but Keith really was so good that he made the other guys -- I'm looking at you, Wally Bachman-- look capable.

The best part is watching the guys we'd forgotten about. There was a July game against the Padres on a week or so ago. Dane Iorg! Carmelo Martinez! Amazing to think that the '86 Padres featured more future Hall of Fame players than those Mets. Watching Straw play we knew that there were no limits to what he might do-- except there were. Gooden was never the same after 1986, but at the time he was 20 years old and looked like nothing anybody had ever seen before. Hell, Kevin Mitchell seemed like a world-beater. On the Padres side? Well, Tony Gwynn. Also Goose Gossage. A said, "He's one of those guys I'm glad I can say I saw play," and she nailed it. As great as those Mets were, the only HOF player in the clubhouse turned out to be Gary Carter. We knew he was going in back then, of course. We just thought he'd have company.

Full post as published by Outside Counsel on April 14, 2010 (boomark / email).