On a day Mets fans across the city, across the country, received the news they’d been dreading for months, another old Mets fan decided to go another way. His thoughts kept drifting to another day, another set of news stories, another round of telephone calls from one Mets fan to another, and another, and another.
Howie Rose thought of Dec. 10, 1984, the day the Mets traded Hubie Brooks, Mike Fitzgerald, Floyd Youmans and Herm Winningham to the Montreal Expos for Gary Carter. A 4-for-1 blockbuster that even in the moment felt like a steal.
And would prove to be so much more than that.
“I remember in the time between the end of the ’84 season and the day it happened, we would keep telling ourselves, ‘Boy, that was a nice 90-win season, I sure hope it wasn’t a fluke,’” Rose, then a WCBS sports reporter and now the longtime radio voice of the Mets said yesterday by phone while on vacation in — of all places — Palm Beach Gardens, Fla., about a mile from where Carter lived in retirement.
“The team had just come through all the darkness of the ’70s and early-’80s and they’d made strides, gotten Keith [Hernandez] and Darryl Strawberry in ’83 and Doc [Gooden] in ’84. And then the news broke: The Mets got Carter. And I remember thinking one thing: Start the season tomorrow.”
The jumble of emotions colliding inside the souls of Mets fans yesterday, when it was announced that Carter had lost his fight against brain cancer at the cruel age of 57, was matched only by the collage of pictures and images and moments swirling inside their memories.
There was the Opening Day walk-off home run against ex-Met Neil Allen and the Cardinals in ’85. There were dozens of curtain calls across five years, and nobody seemed to relish those moments of raucous community between stadium and player more than Carter. There were all the days and nights at Shea when Carter caught Gooden, the Kid and the Doctor, nights Carter would later describe as “precious, because I always thought this could be a game where he strikes out 20 hitters. Or throws a perfect game.”
But there was one moment above all of them that stands out for Rose, probably the one moment that will always stay closest to the hearts of Mets fans. Maybe you had to be in the building that night — Oct. 25, 1986, Game 6 of the World Series at Shea, Mets versus Red Sox — to fully understand the pall, the despair, that descended over the yard just before midnight, two outs, none on, bottom of the 10th inning, Sox up 5-3.
Maybe it takes a full fan’s investment in a team and a season to understand how devastating it was to look at all of that on TV, or listen on a radio. A few years ago, I mentioned to Carter where I was — my dorm, Devereux Hall at St. Bonaventure, sitting glassy-eyed with a roomful of other crestfallen friends — and what I was ready to do — drink, immediately and heavily, to forget — as I watched him step to the plate that night.
“You should have had a little bit of faith in me,” he said with a smile. “There wasn’t a chance in the world that I was making the last out of the World Series. Not a chance in the world.”
He didn’t. He dunked a soft line drive in front of Jim Rice.
You may have heard what came after that.
“I keep coming back to this,” Rose said. “Here’s a guy, he hits a home run on that Opening Day, he hit over 300 in his career, big, tough, powerful guy. And the one thing I keep thinking about is this little single he hit. The at-bat that started the rally. If you knew him, you knew he was a man of faith. And, well, you could see why.”
The final piece of the puzzle, making the first dent in the comeback.
“Now we have our DeBusschere,” Rose remembers thinking Dec. 10, 1984. Dave DeBusschere: another final piece to another championship puzzle, another timeless tough guy taken far too soon. Another icon, in a city that treasures them. In life. In death. Forever.