Sunday School: Forgotten Faces of Flushing #69: Rick Anderson 1986 the Year the Door Finally Opened (Briefly)

Welcome back to Sunday School: Forgotten Faces of Flushing, our weekly wander through the Mets attic where the air is a little musty, the cardboard baseball cards are slightly curled, and every so often you find a story that makes you stop mid-sip of coffee and say, “Wait… that actually happened?”

Last week we spent time with Vern Hoscheit, one of the true behind-the-scenes faces of the 1986 Mets, a man who collected World Series rings the way some people collect airline miles and could turn a catcher into a different position like he was rearranging furniture.

This week we stay right in that same 1986 neighborhood, but shift from the dugout to the mound, from coaching wisdom to pitching persistence, and to a man who spent nearly a decade knocking on the door of the big leagues before finally getting it to swing open just long enough to say hello.

Meet Rick Anderson.

If baseball careers were judged by patience alone, Anderson would have been a Hall of Famer by the early 1980s. A 24th round pick out of the University of Washington, he wasn’t exactly stamped “future ace” when he arrived in the Mets system. He was more like “let’s see what happens if we leave him in Triple A long enough and hope something clicks.”

And yet, he kept showing up.

At Everett Community College, Anderson threw a no-hitter. At Jackson in the Mets system, he threw another no-hitter in 1979, the kind of performance that usually earns you a fast track to the majors or at least a nicer locker. Instead, he earned something more Metsian: another assignment, another bus ride, another season of proving it all over again.

By the mid 1980s, while a parade of young Mets arms like Dwight Gooden, Ron Darling, Sid Fernandez, and Rick Aguilera were becoming household names, Anderson was still doing his time in Tidewater, quietly stacking up appearances like frequent flyer miles he hoped to cash in someday.

He once told his wife Rhonda he would either pitch in the majors or become a coach or scout, whichever came first. By 1986, he was starting to suspect the second option might arrive early.

Then baseball finally blinked.

In June of 1986, just shy of his 30th birthday, Anderson got the call. A injury to Bruce Berenyi opened a spot, and suddenly the guy who had been circling Triple A like a holding pattern aircraft was headed to Shea Stadium.

His debut on June 9 was the kind of story that makes you believe in baseball karma. Seven innings, no earned runs, five strikeouts, and a performance that looked less like a fill in starter and more like someone who had been there all along. His wife had just given birth. His parents were in the stands. Gary Carter was behind the plate. If you wrote it in a movie script, the producer would tell you it was too neat.

And then, as baseball often does, it sent him back to Tidewater.

But Anderson returned, because that is what he did. He came back in July, then August, pitching out of the bullpen, starting when needed, taking the ball wherever it was handed to him. No complaints. Just innings.

He threw scoreless frames in Houston. More in Cincinnati. Picked up his first win in Chicago. Even earned a save in Montreal. Somewhere in there, he stopped being a story about waiting and became a story about belonging.

By September, he was even outdueling a young Greg Maddux, which is the baseball equivalent of showing up to a piano recital and casually outplaying Beethoven.

For the season, Anderson finished 2 and 1 with a 2.72 ERA, a line that feels almost modest until you remember the journey it took to get there. He even sat in the dugout during the Mets’ postseason run, technically not on the roster, but very much part of the room.

After that October, he was traded to Kansas City in the deal that would eventually bring David Cone to Queens. Mets history moved on. Anderson did too, into coaching for the Twins, into teaching, into a long second life in the game.

But for one summer in 1986, he was exactly where he had been trying to get for almost a decade.

And in a season full of larger than life personalities, he was something else entirely.

Proof that sometimes, persistence is its own kind of talent.

Jump into the comments and let’s talk about it. And as always, keep the conversation going over on the KinersKorner.com Facebook group, where Rick Anderson’s long road to 1986 reminds us that in baseball, timing is everything, even when it takes a decade.