Saturday Seasons: In 1984, the Cubs Avenge 1969

            In 1984, the Chicago Cubs got back at the Mets for what the Flushing squad did to them in 1969.

               Both teams were awful in 1983. The Cubs’ season, which ended with a 71-91 record, was marked less by the effort to overcome the Billy Goat Curse than it was by the curses that flowed from manager Lee Elia’s mouth in an expletive-driven tirade against the fans and the media that, 42 years later, is still the gold standard for profane rants. (You can find it on YouTube; we won’t repeat it here).

               As for the Mets, well, they were three games worse than the Cubs at 68-94 in a season marked by their manager resigning after 46 games because all the losing was detrimental to his health. And things got worse from there.

               Mets general manager Frank Cashen began the retooling immediately after the season ended, promoting AAA Tidewater manager Davey Johnson to helm the big club. Johnson, of course, had his own ties to the 1969 season – as the Baltimore Orioles second baseman, he made the last out of the World Series. And the Orioles tie on his resume seemed to check a box on Cashen’s unwritten list.

               But from the start, Johnson made it clear he wouldn’t just be a new manager, he’d be a new kind of manager – one known both for his brashness and candor and for making decisions based on data and analytics.

               At the news conference announcing his hiring, Johnson had comments such as these, according to published reports:  “I want to thank Mr. Cashen for having the intelligence to hire me.” When asked why he kept interim manager Frank Howard on as a coach, Johnson said: “I like Frank Howard, I like his enthusiasm. I like his energy and the fact that he is a good baseball man….But I did not like the way he managed.” And of Earl Weaver, his manager on the 1969 Orioles: “I like to go with the percentages, like Earl Weaver, but I have a little better idea of what I’m doing.”

               Much was also made at that news conference of the fact that Johnson had a college degree in mathematics, of his belief in analytics and that he not only knew how to operate a computer, he owned one (It was nicknamed the Big Apple. Must have been a Mac).

               “What we’ve got to do is get a game plan,” he said. “I really don’t think we’ve had one. We’ve got to find out about a lot of people, stay with some people.”

               So you’d think the Mets were heading on the right track as the calendar turned to 1984, but this being the Mets, well……No sooner had people started writing the correct year on their checks than Cashen made what perhaps still ranks as his biggest gaffe as general manager: leaving Tom Seaver unprotected in the free agent compensation draft so the Chicago White Sox could scoop him up. Cashen tried to defend his move by saying that he and his staff looked at the White Sox’ roster and determined they were unlikely to select a 39-year-old pitcher (with a high salary) when they already had a solid rotation and needed infielders instead. So Cashen protected Hubie Brooks and Ron Gardenhire (as well as Junior Ortiz, Kevin Brown and West Gardner).

               “In retrospect, we made a calculated, regrettable gamble leaving him unprotected,” Cashen said.

               The writers were somewhat less charitable in their assessment. “Move over. M. Donald Grant. Your place as No. 1 villain in Mets’ history now belongs to J. Frank Cashen,” Jack Lang wrote in the Daily News. “They didn’t make a deliberate and calculated decision to trade him, they let him get away out of neglect. They parked on the hill and didn’t turn their wheels to the curb,” Newsday’s Steve Jacobson opined.

               And it actually had been pointed out by the News’ Bill Madden that the Mets should have had more than a hint that the Chisox would take Seaver since the year before, they took another future Hall of Fame hurler, the Cubs’ Ferguson Jenkins, in the same compensation draft until they decided to forego the pick after the Cubs vowed retaliation and White Sox’ owners decided to back off.

               Seaver’s departure cost the Mets more than their planned opening-day starter (that task would fall to Mike Torrez, who wouldn’t make it out of the second inning, yielding six runs on the way to an 8-1 loss and a 1-5 record that would see him released in late June). They also lost a mentor for a young pitching staff. “Now they have to start again with a pitching staff they say has talent but no experience and no real role model,” owner Nelson Doubleday was quoted as saying in Jacobson’s column.

               The veteran Torrez aside, the rotation was stocked with hurlers long on talent and short on major league innings: Walt Terrell and Ron Darling, the two pitchers acquired in the Lee Mazzilli trade, and 19-year-old Dwight Gooden, promoted essentially from Class A Lynchburg at the insistence of manager Johnson, who saw him briefly at AAA Tidewater at the end of 1983.

               Gooden made his major league debut on April 7, allowing one run on three hits, striking out five in five innings and amazing the Houston Astros in what was a 3-2 Mets win. “He has the liveliest arm I’ve seen in a long time,” commented Astros third baseman Ray Knight, who would become Gooden’s teammate later in the season. Mets first baseman Keith Hernandez was quoted as saying, “All Houston guys who reached base said to me, ‘I don’t know how I hit the ball.”

               The Cubs shellacked Gooden in his next start, putting up seven hits and six runs in three and a third innings, a loss that ended a six-game winning streak, the team’s longest winning streak since 1979. All that did was make Gooden hungry for his next start. “I just want the ball again,” he said after the game.

               His third start came on April 19, against the Montreal Expos, and bounce back he did: five innings, five hits, seven strikeouts, no earned runs. Gooden’s performance left the writers gushing about not just his talent, but his poise, working out of trouble in the third inning by striking out, in succession, Tim Raines and Andre Dawson, with two men on base. Speaking of Gooden, his catcher in that game, John Gibbons, and the other young Mets, pitcher Ed Lynch told Newsday’s Joe Gergen, “These guys have no idea that the Mets have been brutal for the last eight years. They’ve all played on championship teams in the minors, they’re all wearing rings. They don’t care if we’re playing the Montreal Expos or the Bad News Bears.”

               The win that night improved the team’s record to 8-4, their best start in history, and put them in undisputed possession of first place.

               A week later, Gooden pitched seven innings against those same Expos, striking out 10 and again allowing no earned runs in a 2-1 win.

               Gooden would go on to win 17 games, losing only nine, with a 2.60 ERA and 276 strikeouts, breaking along the way the National League rookie strikeout record set in 1911 by  Grover Cleveland Alexander, the only pitcher named for one U.S. president and played by another in his biopic (Ronald Reagan, in “The Winning Team”) and who, like Gooden, experienced  substance abuse issues that affected his career.

               When Gooden broke Alexander’s record, he did it in style: an 11-strikeout complete game in which the only hit was a cheesy infield single in the fifth inning by the Cubs’   Keith Moreland. Gooden would lates surpass herb Score’s 245 K’s to set the major league rookie mark. He also won eight of his last nine starts, set the record for most strikeouts in three consecutive starts, 43, and broke Sam McDowell’s record of strikeouts per nine innings, with 11.39 on his way to being voted rookie of the year.

               Terrell went 11-12, with a 3.52 ERA and Darling, 12-9 with a 3.81. Rounding out the rotation was Bruce Berenyi, acquired from the Reds in a June trade, prompting Torrez’ release (Berenyi went 9-6 with a 3.76 ERA), and another rookie pitcher acquired in an offseason trade from the Dodgers.

               In his major league debut on July 16, Sid Fernandez scattered eight hits over seven innings, striking out six as the Mets pounded out 22 hits in a 13-3 win over former Met Mike Scott and the Houston Astros.  “We have a good young pitching staff that is throwing well, and we are scoring runs for them,” said Darryl Strawberry, who had three hits and knocked in two runs in the game. 'This team has a lot of good hitters, and when we get hot, we are going to score some runs. I think we could get better.” Fernandez would finish the season 6-6 with a 3.50 ERA. Jesse Orosco would emerge as the closer, saving 31 games while winning 10.

               Among the hitters, Strawberry led the team with 26 home runs and 97 RBI. Geroge Foster had 24 dingers and 86 RBI; Keith Hernandez knocked in 94. Mookie Wilson laid claim to center field while Hubie Brooks held sway at third. The only weak spot was catcher, where neither Mike Fitzgerald, Ron Hodges or Junior Ortiz would hit enough to justify remaining in the lineup, prompting the Mets to trade for a better-hitting catcher before the 1985 campaign.

               The 1984 Mets were a streaky team: they’d rip off five consecutive wins, then lose three in a row. But the winning was greater than the losing, and as June turned into July and July turned into August, the season was starting to look a lot like a repeat of 1969, when a basically young team emerged from obscurity to capture the National League pennant and the World Series.

               And, shades of 1969, their chief rival in the division pennant chase was none other than the Chicago Cubs, who, like the Mets, catapulted from the near-cellar to the first division.

               Gone was Elia, replaced by the milder-mouthed Jim Frey. The rotation was anchored by Rick Sutcliffe, who would beat out Gooden for the Cy Young Award, and a bullpen headed by closer Lee Smith. The lineup featured Ryne Sandberg, Ron Cey, Leon Durham and Gary Matthews.

               And the head-to-head battles between the teams would define the season and determine its outcome.

               For the Mets, the high point of the season probably came on July 27, when they bested the Cubs, 2-1, at a sold-out Shea Stadium for their seventh consecutive win – a victory that boosted their lead over Chicago to 4 ½ games.

               But then, they lost seven in a row, stanching the bleeding with a three-game sweep of the last place Pittsburgh Pirates before going into unfriendly confines of Wrigley Field for four games, a game and a half behind the Cubs. When they departed Chicago, they were five and a half out on the way to another seven-game skid.

               Nevertheless, they gamely held on, treading water so that by the end of the month, with the team still five and a half out and with six remaining against Chicago, they made the kind of trade deadline deal fans hadn’t seen since the Mets pried Donn Clendenon from the Expos in 1969. In exchange for three minor leaguers, the Mets acquired third baseman Ray Knight from the Houston Astros. Injured for much of the season, Knight was viewed as a potent right-handed pinch hitter who could spell Keith Hernandez at first and Hubie Brooks at third every now and then. Knight performed as expected for the remainder of the season: .280 batting average, about his career norm. But his presence didn’t provide the spark the Mets needed.

               By the time The Cubs came to town on September 7, their lead had grown to seven games, and this time, there were no black cats to spook the Chicago nine. The Mets did take two out of three, but they really needed a sweep. And by the time they went back to Chicago for three on Sept. 14, it was essentially all over. Pat Calabria’s lead on the Newsday story?  “The Mets begin a three-game series against the Chicago Cubs at Wrigley Field today that no longer qualifies as a confrontation. It might turn out to be an obituary.”

               The Mets finished with a 90-72 record – their first winning record since 1976 -- six and a half games behind the Cubs, who would make their first postseason appearance since 1945 but who would not make it to the World Series. Somewhere a billy goat was braying. The Mets’ biggest obstacle? Winning at Wrigley, where they went 1-8.

               But as the finished the season in Montreal and dispersed for the winter, optimism pervaded the mood in the clubhouse. “I wish we had seven more games,” Brooks said. “We could still catch the Cubs.”