WE WIN THE ’86 WORLD SERIES

--> To this day, I swear that me and my son double-handedly won the 1986 World Series for the NY Mets. Strange things have occurred in this world, but no stranger than what occurred in my den one fall night during a World Series thirty years ago.

The stage was set for the best team in baseball that year to fall to an inferior team from Boston in less than the 7 game limit.

Let me set the positions up for the major players that evening. On left couch sat a scrappy second baseman for a local funeral parlor baseball team: Anthony, hugging the line to keep anything from getting by him, and pacing the floor, awaiting the inevitable once again stood Joe Joe Del, ready to fall to his knees to gather up grounders or plop in utter defeat once again.

Pitch by pitch the night grew darker, with each pitch to doom, Anthony started fighting tears, realizing all that time spent watching such notables as Darrell Strawberry, Keith Hernandez and

Dwight Gooden would NOT end up in a championship. Gosh, even the scoreboard at Shea was making the obvious concessions to the reality: “CONGRATULATIONS TO THE BOSTON RED SOX, 1986 WORLD SERIES CHAMPIONS!”

THE PLAY or MISPLAY!!!

Being I was still standing, over on my right stood my bar, which happened to be directly under the TV mounted into the wall. On the bar surface sat a 1986 NY Mets schedule, a small fold out type of 4-fold piece of paper. Why I reached for it I still to this day don’t know why, since the regular season was over. The cover was a dark royal blue. But something happened when I picked it up and started to rub it, a magic so to speak, maybe an incantation I employed, the karma in the room suddenly took on a new light. 

Somewhere in life we all have to do something for our children, some act of defiance against the odds, some act of camaraderie with the kid, all in desperation. That little piece of paper somehow was it. As I rubbed it, the Mets bats came alive, one by one things changed and the gods of Baseball were determining that the Boston Red Sox would not use logic that night, since there was so much arrogance already steaming in their hearts.

Then when Mookie Wilson hit the ball that was guided by the hand of error under Bill Buckner’s glove at first base and the Mets won, giving them another day of life, we knew we had the World Series in hand, and we won it the next day in seven. But without that piece of paper… who knows?