St. Louis 1986 vs. Washington 2018

[Centerfield]

So I heard a lot of references to the St. Louis sweep in 1986. That St. Louis sweep has become stuff of legend now, but to be honest, I remember none of it. I mean, all Cardinal games then were a big deal, but I can't remember if I watched any of these in particular. I don't think I understood the significance of these games at the time. Thankfully there is a website that is the ultimate source of Mets information!

http://leaptoad.com/mets/metannual.php?ThisYear=1986&tabno=3

According to UMDB, the St. Louis sweep also featured one blowout, and two one run games, one of them going extra innings. That series was a four game series though, and we beat their ace, while here, we missed Scherzer. Looks like Gooden threw a shutout in Game 2, and Ojeda outbattled Tudor in the finale. It doesn't mention game time, so we are not sure if it was a Sunday Night ESPN broadcast where the Mets faithful had to endure some douchebag talk about how he should have come to play for the Mets 18 years ago.

When the Mets left town, they had won 9 straight, and were 4.5 games ahead of St. Louis.

[HahnSolo]

That 86 series had the Mets clicking on all cylinders. The HoJo HR to snatch victory from defeat in game 1. Doc being Doc in game two. The great DP to end the third game, then beating Tudor in game 4. It just felt like two teams going in entirely different directions, and as much as an April series can do it ended the Cardinals season.

Sunday was a typical afternoon game, no Sunday night nonsense.

[G-Fafif]

Mets had ten games in the books when they went to St. Louis, have only eight having finished in Washington. Small sample sizes either way, but 1986 felt close to clinched when we left town. What made it resonate was how and where 1985 ended, the Mets coming so close to knotting the Cardinals with three to play and just missing. With no Wild Card, it was all about catching, passing and burying the Cardinals as 1986 came into view. And we did it in a blink. We were 11-3, they were dead.

Because the Cardinals held such an outsize place in our psyche, and because the Phillies were the team that delayed us from making it official in September (and finished a very distant second), it tends to get lost in the larger retelling that the Expos were the only club that stayed close enough to eat the Mets' dust for a while. Entering the evening of May 24 (they'd won at Candlestick, we'd be playing at the Murph), Montreal crept to within 2 1/2 of us. We'd been phenomenal, yet they wouldn't go away. After one season neck and neck with the Cubs and another with the Cardinals, feeling anybody's breath on the back of our necks was discomfiting. Padres trailed, 5-4, in the ninth, got their first two on versus McDowell. Davey went to Orosco, who retired the next three (Bruce Bochy as the third out) and it never got any closer in the NL East.

Obviously, the Mets shook the 'Spos off like they shook off everybody, yet as late as June 24, the spread was "only" eight games following two Expo victories at Shea. The finale, a midweek matinee, actually bordered on critical. Montreal jumped out to a 2-0 lead, but the Mets stormed back as the Mets tended to do and won, 5-2. I warmly remember the sentiment from Expos shortstop Hubie Brooks: seven games back (which they would've been had they swept) is close to five; nine games back (which they were) is close to ten. With that disappointment publicly uttered, I knew the race was over.

I wish I could say the same of the dynamic between the 2018 descendants of the Mets and Expos. Can't yet, but it's pretty good as is.

[Guest John Cougar Lunchbucket]

I would compare this series to the 2015 opening series

[Ceetar]

what about that statement 2007 series where they came out of the gate and swept the Cardinals? NLCS was a fluke! We're awesome! Suck it!

very flowery prose about David Wright and Willie Randolph standing in the dugout really taking in the ring ceremony.

[dinosaur jesus]

I was at the Gooden shutout in 1986. That was fun. I'd started grad school in St. Louis in the fall of 1985, which was when I learned to hate the Cardinals. I'd always kind of liked them before--Dizzy Dean, Stan Musial, Bob Gibson, those great old-school uniforms. Plus my great-grandfather, picking up KMOX on the radio way down in north Texas, had been a fan. I actually enjoyed the pennant race that year; that last series, when the Mets couldn't quite pull off the sweep, was some amazing baseball, even if it did turn out wrong. But that "Mets are pond scum" crap, and having to hear nonstop about Whitey ball, wore on me. When the Cardinals got lost game 6 on the Denkinger call, I felt bad for them. But when they imploded in game 7, like they were still sulking about it and didn't want to play anymore, my schadenfreude was like a revelation to me. I liked the city—still do, really. But screw the Cardinals. And their uniforms looked like shit, too. (They really did in those days--those double-knit all-whites and all-baby blues.) From a St. Louis perspective, it really did feel like it was over after that series in May.

But then I had to be there for the 1987 season too. Oh well. Savor your schadenfreude while you can; you'll pay for it someday.

[G-Fafif]

The inflection point floating through my mind is the twelfth game of 2006, when Pedro Martinez won his 200th and the Mets separated themselves from the floundering second-place Braves by five games. It set a record for largest divisional lead after a dozen contests, which meant 150 games remained, but the guard felt resolutely changed. Pedro was in his second Met year, but everybody else who had a big hand in the win -- Delgado, Lo Duca, Nady, Sanchez and Wagner -- was an off-season acquisition, conveying the transformation from getting beat by the Braves to beating the Braves. The last out was Wagner's K of Braves veteran backup backstop Todd Pratt, which somehow also felt appropriate, that we were on to an era when the Wild Card wouldn't be sate our division-sized appetite.

The Mets lost the next two, but never fell behind the Braves or anybody else. The closest thing they had to a showdown series was mid-June in Philly, when we swept them (at the end of that glorious 9-1 road trip that wound through L.A. and Phoenix), but those Phillies never felt like legit competition. 2006 remains the only regular season to hold a candle to 1986 in terms of blowing away the field. 1988 was won by 15 games, but the Pirates and, to a certain extent, the Expos stayed close until late August. There've been no other April-to-October blowouts.

Man, this is so much better than invoking 1979, 1993 and 2017.

[TransMonk]

John Cougar Lunchbucket wrote: I would compare this series to the 2015 opening series

This is what I was reminded of as well.