Anatomy Of a Franchise: New York Mets; Part VI: Building for Greatness

(Photo by Stephen Dunn/Getty Images)

I want to dedicate this part of my self-proclaimed series to Cathy.  She is wife number two and although we are no longer together, she remains my dear friend.  She gave me an incredible, bright, beautiful daughter and she deserves to be nominated for sainthood for putting up with me for 14 truly bipolar years.  Cathy, who taught me that out of every bad can become a good, the only person whom I ever met that really put others in front of themselves, I thank you for pointing and guiding me in the right direction.  You are truly a special one of a kind person.

1981 dawned bright for the Mets and me because I began to think we were both on the same path of rebuilding for greatness.  The Mets had lost 95 games in 1980 and the “streak” and my marriage to Ellen was over.  By year's end, the talk of a possible players' lockout didn’t strike me as too serious a possibility since Cathy and I decided to tie the knot, and that we did, on November 9, 1980.

I made her a promise that we would not attend any Mets games together and she was okay with that because baseball was not anywhere near the top of her priority list.  Besides, I had a ten-year-old son and an eight-year-old daughter and they would make great partners to my many planned trips to the Vet to see the World Champion Phillies take on my Mets.

I need to clarify a point about my fanhood after I received many comments about my rooting for the Phillies during their great run from 1976-1983.  I never rooted for them in any game they played against the Mets no matter how far out of the race the Mets were and, although I was rightly disturbed at the Mets organization and the way they ran things then (and still do today), I could never, under any circumstances, change my loyalties.

During the next five years, the Mets were about to change the perception at that time from laughingstock to world champion, and the team that everybody outside Brooklyn and Queens loved to hate.

Frank Cashen was brought in to be the general manager in February of 1980 and although the Mets still had three straight losing seasons, one could see the handwriting on the wall and the excitement certainly found it’s way heading south on the New Jersey Turnpike.

The Mets finally got it together in the amateur draft by getting Darryl Strawberry, Roger McDowell and Dwight Gooden.  His trading for Keith Hernandez, Howard Johnson, Gary Carter, Sid Fernandez and Ron Darling set the nucleus for what some have called the greatest single-team season—1986.

The 1981 team was managed by Joe Torre.  Nobody at the time could have ever possibly imagined the future success that Joe would achieve. In 1981, he had finished a very solid career with the St. Louis Cardinals and was entering his fourth year as manager of the Mets.

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