Mets Walk-Offs And Minutiae

For those discouraged by the recent prospects of the Flushing 9, it is important to remember that a lot of good things can happen to a baseball team in a rather short period of time. It was 36 years ago Saturday that the Mets had one of their most significant regular-season victories and conveniently for us, it happened in walk-off fashion. The Mets entered September 10, 1969 on the precipice of great things, just 1/2 game out of first place after beating the first-place Cubs twice at Shea Stadium. Chicago travelled to Philadelphia afterwards while the Mets caught a scheduling break, with a doubleheader against the expansion Expos. The first game started in twilight and the Mets, winners of four straight, put Jim McAndrew on the mound against rookie Mike Wegener. Neither a first nor second inning run by the Expos dampened the Mets spirits, as they responded with unearned runs in the first and fifth to knot the game at two apiece. The game evolved into a pitchers duel, albeit a rather o...

The Braves 86'd the Mets out of town and on to St. Louis on Wednesday night, laughing merrily as they did so on Wednesday night as the Flushing 9 gagged up some good ole' southern tomahawk slop. The good game giveth and the good game taketh away and this was one of those occasions where the latter came to fruition in a manner that most fans probably found ugly and disgusting. We told you on Tuesday that it wasn't always this way, of how the Braves were once the punchline to their own baseball joke. Today we'll tell you to feel better because baseball tends to be cyclical. What goes around, comes around. How appropriate then that we reminisce about a game about which Joseph Durso of the New York Times wrote "In another chapter of their life and struggles against the Atlanta Braves..." The date was Saturday May 22, 1971 and the meeting of the two squads at Shea Stadium turned into one of those crazy see-saw flip-flops that feel awfully good when you win and awfu...

Do you remember the days when the Braves were just an insignificant piece of dust on the windowsill of baseball life? There have been these mini-eras in the history of the game in which the Braves were the team at which everyone poked fun. Two of them have actually occurred in my lifetime and I shall speak of the first one on this occasion. The 1975-1979 Braves were a rather pathetic bunch They were a joke of a squad, with players whose names rang with mediocrity and good humor, such as Rowland Office, Pat Rockett, Biff Pocaroba and Pepe Frias. Yes, they were able to add the likes of Bob Horner and Dale Murphy to the squad, but this was the time before they made a significant impact. The most notable thing about the team was its biggest fan, an Indian mascot named Chief Noc-a-homa. The owner, Ted Turner, tried to manage the team, but even that didn't work. Bobby Cox, version 1.0, came around at the end of this run to turn things around a little bit, but even he suffered through th...

No, I don't have a story of a walk-off that made Chipper Jones cry...Perhaps tomorrow. Instead, I digress slightly... Some Mets fans may get confused if you tell them that you saw Bob Gibson, John Sullivan, Frank Thomas, or Billy Baldwin play for the Mets. But they all did. Ok, so Gibson was a former Brewer and not the Cardinals Hall of Famer (who did serve as the team's pitching coach), Sullivan was a catcher, John P. and not John L. the heavyweight champ, Thomas was 6-foot-3, 205 pounds, big for his time, but not sized like the 6-foot-5, 260-pound White Sox slugger and Baldwin had an Oscar Gamble-style afro, and at least to my knowledge, doesn't have any brothers as colleagues. Baldwin, an outfielder who came to the team in the Rusty Staub for Mickey Lolich swap, is our subject of choice for flashback today, as he fits what we were looking for- a September call-up who earned his way into our database. Baldwin's Mets career lasted a grand total of nine games and he mus...

By my calculations, the Mets have only one Labor Day walk-off win in their illustrious history, and for good measure, it came exactly 22 years prior to Labor Day 2005 The NL East was a bit of a mishmash on this date in 1983, similar to how the race for the NL wild card looks this season. The Mets weren't among the teams battling for the top spot, as the Pirates, Expos, Phillies and Cardinals duked it out, with no team seeming to want to take control (similar to this year's NL West). The Pirates, at 70-65, had a one-game edge on the Phillies, who happened to be the Mets opponents that day. Fewer than 8,500 were on hand for this one as most Mets fans had lost interest at this point, with the team 22 games under .500, even though the lineup featured some excitement in the form of first baseman Keith Hernandez and rookie rightfielder Darryl Strawberry. That's too bad because they missed a dandy of a finish to this contest. Perfectly willing to play the spoiler role, the Mets st...