NO. 1 WITH A BULLET
Opening Day isn’t a problem for Mets — it’s been the other 161
IT MIGHT’VE seemed a little silly, all these veteran baseball players taking such great satisfaction in winning a baseball game on a cold day in Pittsburgh on the seventh day of April, 1970. After all, contained within these walls in the visitor’s clubhouse at Forbes Field were most of the men who’d stunned the world just 174 days earlier.
That was the day a deep fly ball to left died just shy of the warning track, officially perishing inside a glove belonging to Cleon Jones. The Mets — the very definition of losing in professional sports for seven straight years — had won the most unlikely world championship ever in Year 8. It was as glorious a moment as the sport allows.
And yet moments after those Mets clinched a 5-3 win over the Pirates, here were these Mets — the defending champion Mets — falling over themselves to properly convey how much this meant to them.
“It’s about time,” said Ron Swoboda, a foundational hero of the previous October.
“It feels like a giant burden has finally lifted,” said Tom Seaver, who was the team’s foundation, period.
The source of their joy was simple: this was the first time the Mets had ever won a game on Opening Day. Until Donn Clendenon drove in two runs in the top of the 11th that day, they’d gone 0-for-8 in season lidlifters. The Montreal Expos, born in 1969, had won their first opener before the Mets did, taking a wild 11-10 game on Opening Day ’69, their first official day of existence. Hell: the Mets had won a World Series before ever winning on Opening Day.
For all they’d done in 1969, winning 107 of the 169 games that followed the Montreal mishap, the 0-for-Opening-Day remained as a persistent link to a legacy of loveable losing that every Met wanted cut. And when Tug McGraw struck out Gene Alley as the tying run in the bottom of the 11th, finally it was done. “Can we finally bury the Old Mets now?” Gil Hodges, Miracle Manager, said with a smile afterward. “Please?”
The funny part, of course, is that beginning on that overcast Pennsylvania day nearly 54 years ago, the Mets have been, virtually, bulletproof on Opening Day. On Opening Day they are the ’27 Yankees cross-pollinated with the ’98 Yankees (with a little of the ’86 Mets thrown into the mix). Since 1970, they are 41-13 on Opening Day.
They have won six of their last seven on Opening Day. They have had Opening Day moments that remain a part of the team’s eternal DNA: Tom Seaver’s triumphant return in 1983, Gary Carter’s walk-off homer
in 1985, Rey Ordonez’s happy-to-meet-you relay throw home in 1996, the 14-inning, 4 ½-hour, 1-0 win over the Phillies in 1998.
So if there is one reason as a Mets fan to bemoan the postponement of an Opening Day, it is because it has generally been the one day of days when Mets fans believe their team to be unbeatable — mostly because they generally have been unbeatable. Even factoring in those eight losses to begin their history the Mets are 41-21 all time on Opening Day, a .661 winning percentage, far ahead of the Mariners who are No. 2 at 29-18 (.617). For the record, the Yankees were fourth on the list, at 68-52-1 before their opener in Houston Thursday.
It is, of course, the flip side of Metsdom that the remaining 161 games in any given year often don’t go quite so well: they are 4,686-5,054 from games 2 through 162 since 1962. That’s a .481 winning percentage, which is like the 2011 Mets cross-pollinating with the ’95 Mets, and nobody is interested in that brand of science.
Baseball being baseball, not even a businessman as daring as Steve Cohen will offer a guaranteed win for Opening Days, and the Mets have thrown out a bunch of clunkers. The Art Howe Era, for instance, got off to an appropriate start with a 15-2 strafing at the hands of the Cubs in 2003. The ’97 Mets were blasted 12-5 in San Diego. Baseball is baseball. And Mets fans have the market cornered on dark clouds and falling skies.
It’s just that those skies usually wait until Day 2 to fall onto Flushing.