In 2009, I did a project for my website, Mets Walk-Offs and Other Minutiae, celebrating the best home runs in Mets history. I selected the top 60 regular season home runs and the top 15 postseason home runs. The reason I picked 60 was because it represented the top 1% of home runs in Mets history (and 15 just felt right for postseason).
This was fun to do, but it was imperfect. I had one egregious omission. I tended to favor oddities.
It’s time to give that project an update. And why not do it as a top 100?
The Mets have hit 7,671 regular season home runs. The top 80 represent about the top 1%. And the top 20 postseason home runs get us to an even 100 to celebrate.
Come along for the ride. Hopefully you’ll enjoy the reminiscing. Hopefully you’ll find it Amazin’.
Maybe future Hall-of-Famer Steve Carlton should have stayed in bed.
Carlton
decided to pitch on September 15, 1969, despite a morning fever, backache, chills, nausea, and rainy
weather that delayed the Cardinals game against the Mets 20 minutes at the
start and 54 minute after a half-inning.
Carlton
struck out 19 to set what was then an MLB record. He seemed oddly pleased at
game’s end, given that he lost the game (“When I did it, I had done something
that was great. I was really happy. I was a lot of things, more things than I
have words for.”)
He
also noted that he was determined to go for the record when he reached 9
strikeouts. “It cost me the ball game,” Carlton said. “I was challenging
everyone.”
Carlton
had mixed emotions but the Mets were ecstatic. After all, they beat Carlton and
the Cardinals for their 11th win in 12 games and upped their NL East
lead to 4.5 games.
This
is one of the most improbable victories in team history, carried entirely by
Ron Swoboda, who hit two two-strike, two-run home runs, including the go-ahead
shot in the eighth inning (Carlton set the record by striking out the side in
the 9th). New York Daily News writer
Dick Young described it as “ludicrously fantastic.”
“Superswat
got me,” Carlton said in the aftermath. “I got him twice and he got me twice.”
Swoboda
humorously noted afterwards that he was glad that he didn’t waste this kind of
game on the bad Mets teams of the past. He had been a part of that having begun
his career with the franchise in 1965. Swoboda claimed that this game was the
first in which he hit two home runs. It actually wasn’t. He had a two-homer
game in his rookie season too. Easy to forget, I suppose. He was far from a
superhero then, but was in this game.
Said
Carlton “I think the Mets are great for baseball because it shows the guy on
the bottom can come up.”
“It’s
almost inebriating, or to use a contemporary term, you almost go out there on
high because there’s so much at stake. Whoever wrote Cinderella must have been
our man,” Swoboda said.
My favorite stat: Six pitchers lost games in
which they struck out at least 18 batters. Two of them lost to the Mets – Jim Maloney
(1965 Reds) and Steve Carlton (1969 Cardinals).
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