Opening Day at Shea Stadium: 1985

It’s always one of my very favorite days of the year: Opening Day for Major League Baseball. For many in the colder parts of the USA, it’s a line of demarcation between winter and spring. For fans of the grand old game, the anticipation towards Opening Day is not unlike a young child waking up at 4:00a on Christmas morning, not able to wait to unwrap their presents. Opening Day is an unofficial holiday for many and an annual American celebration that has included eleven sitting U.S. Presidents throwing out the ceremonial first pitch, dating back to William Howard Taft in 1910.

Today, March 26th, 2020, it was supposed to be Opening Day for all 30 teams in Major League Baseball. Sadly, because of the Coronavirus pandemic that has shut down much of the world, all we have today are memories. As I write this, MLB Network is showing Derek Jeter‘s first Opening Day, a game between the Yankees and Cleveland Indians on Tuesday, April 2, 1996. Jeter, who was elected into the Hall of Fame this January, celebrated his first Opening Day in style, hitting his first career home run in the first inning (off veteran Dennis Martinez) while also making a run-saving catch on a bloop to left-center off the bat of Omar Vizquel. MLB Network will be showing several other classic Opening Day tilts throughout the day and night.

I’ve been lucky enough to attend several openers in person, whether it’s been the team’s actual opener or their first home opener. It’s always better when it’s the team’s first game of the season but the first home game is the next best thing. Five years ago, I enjoyed a cold day in the City by the Bay in the San Francisco Giants’ first home game after their World Series win. It was a festive occasion at AT&T Park as the fans got to see their team on the field for the first time since Madison Bumgarner’s legendary performance and the team’s 7-game win over the Kansas City Royals in the 2014 World Series. It hardly mattered that the Giants lost 2-0 to the Colorado Rockies.

In 2013, a group of work colleagues of mine and I attended the Boston Red Sox home opener at Fenway. It didn’t matter that it was the BoSox seventh game of the season. It was the first for us; a beautiful day in the sunshine highlighted by Daniel Nava hitting a three-run home run over the Green Monster to break a scoreless tie and set the tone for the magical season that resulted in the bearded Bostonians’ improbable run to their third championship in the David Ortiz era.

(cover photo: Associated Press/Ray Stubblewine)

Opening Day at Shea Stadium: 1985

My favorite Opening Day, one which will likely never be topped, was my first. It occurred 35 years ago at Shea Stadium in New York. I was 18 years old, a senior in High School with Dr. Kent’s English class on the schedule for the afternoon of Tuesday, April 9th. Yours truly, along with seven or eight classmates, decided that Dr. Kent would take a back seat to Doctor K, the Mets’ ace pitcher Dwight Gooden, slated to toe the rubber on Opening Day (the actual opener, not just home opener) against the St. Louis Cardinals. Gooden was the NL rookie of the year in 1984 and, at the age of 20 in 1985, only a couple of years older than our group of class-cutting high school seniors.

The group of us attended Horace Mann High School in the Riverdale section of the Bronx; as seniors a couple of us had cars, so we piled into the vehicles and drove straight from our morning classes to the ballpark in Queens. It was a brutally cold, blustery day, not preferred baseball weather by any standard. But despite the cold, the ballpark was nearly full (the announced attendance was 46,781).

There was great anticipation for the ’85 edition of the Mets. In 1984, after seven truly miserable seasons, the Amazins’ posted a 90-win season, finishing 6 1/2 games behind the division-winning Chicago Cubs. The ’84 Mets showed the potential of bigger things to come: 22-year old Darryl Strawberry (the ’83 Rookie of the Year) was emerging as one of the big power bats in the National League and former MVP Keith Hernandez (a legitimate Hall of Fame candidate who acquired in an ’83 trade with St. Louis) gave the young Mets the kind of veteran leadership often so crucial to the development of a winning ball club.

But the key reason that the ’85 version of the Mets held such promise for the long-suffering fan base was the off-season acquisition of future Hall of Fame catcher Gary Carter. The always-smiling Carter, whose enthusiasm for the game and positive demeanor earned him the nickname the “Kid,” was already a seven-time All-Star and had been the face of the Montreal Expos franchise. The Mets traded four players (Hubie Brooks, Floyd Youmans, Herm Winningham, and Mike Fitzgerald, no big losses among them) to get the Kid from the Expos. Carter was viewed by many as the “last piece” to get New York from a 2nd-place 90-win team to a division winner.

In addition to adding a power bat to complement Strawberry and aging slugger George Foster, Carter was the perfect veteran backstop to guide the Mets’ young starting staff. Besides the 20-year old Gooden, the ’85 Mets featured three other talented young hurlers under the age of 25: Ron Darling (24), Rick Aguilera (23) and Sid Fernandez (22). With Carter behind the dish, all three flourished, with season ERA’s of 2.90, 3.24 and 2.80 respectively. And of course Gooden turned in one of the greatest season-long pitching performances in the history of the game, going 24-4 with a 1.53 ERA. Of course, all of this wasn’t quite good enough for the Mets to make the post-season; they won 98 games in ’85, three fewer than NL East Champion St. Louis.

Anyway, on that frigid day in April, the magic of the ’85 season was still a wish, a pent-up desire for the fans who had endured so many awful teams. Gooden and the Mets were facing the team that would ultimately be their nemesis in September, the Cardinals. The Redbirds’ starter, Joaquin Andujar, was a 20-game winner the previous season and had finished fourth in the NL Cy Young voting. The Mets gave their cold fans something to warm their hearts with two first inning runs and Gooden had a 5-2 lead when he took the hill in the 7th inning. But after two singles by Andy Van Slyke and Ozzie Smith, manager Davey Johnson went to his bullpen and Doug Sisk.

The right-handed Sisk would be awful in ’85 but he had been an effective relief pitcher for the ’83 and ’84 Mets, sporting a 2.18 ERA for those two seasons. However, his success was largely a mirage; he walked 5.6 batters per nine innings and was constantly pitching out of jams, something that’s not sustainable in the long term.  Sisk allowed the two runners he inherited from Gooden to score but still had a 5-4 lead going into the top of the 9th inning. With frostbite seemingly settling in, the throng of fans still in attendance were eager to close out the Opening Day win. Alas, Sisk loaded the bases for Cards’ slugger Jack Clark, who had homered earlier in the game off Gooden. Sisk pitched to Clark carefully and wound up walking him to allow the tying run to score.

So, with the wind swirling on that miserable weather day, the game would go to the bottom of the 9th. Former Met Neil Allen (who had been traded for Hernandez in 1983) came out of the bullpen for Whitey Herzog’s Redbirds. Thanks in part to an error by 2nd baseman Tommie Herr, Allen loaded the bases. However, he got Mookie Wilson to fly out to center field and extend the misery of the anxious but freezing fans.

Jesse Orosco stranded a runner on 2nd in the top of the 10th inning and so the Mets had the heart of the order coming up in the bottom of the frame. By now the game had lasted over 3 1/2 hours; all but one of my classmates had left, leaving just two of us to shiver in the bitter cold. Hernandez led off the inning by striking out, which brought Gary Carter to the plate. And then, in a Hollywood finish, the Kid delivered a game-winning home run to deep left field and the Mets had their Opening Day victory. As the future Hall of Famer crossed the plate, flashing his megawatt smile, all was good at Shea Stadium and the tone had been set for a magical season at the ballpark in Queens, one that didn’t end with a playoff appearance but one that turned the back pages of the Big Apple tabloids from Yankees territory to Mets territory. After drawing just over 1.1 million fans in 1983, the ’85 edition of the Metropolitans drew over 2.7 million fans to Shea.

This particular fan, inspired in part by that Opening Day win, attended nearly 40 of the Mets’ 81 home dates in 1985 and over 50 in the championship season of 1986. In many ways, thanks to this one game and also a burgeoning friendship with people I had barely known until the spring of my senior year (great Mets fan friends Adam and Stephen), my passion for the game of baseball spiked and I wound up working at ESPN two days after graduating college in 1989.

Gary Carter finished the 1985 season with 32 home runs and 100 RBI and finished 6th in the league MVP voting. The following year, driving in 105 runs, he was an integral part of the 108-win championship Mets’ squad. The Kid finished his career with 324 home runs and 11 All-Star appearances. I had the privilege of meeting him in September 1998 when he did an interview on the Up Close show, for which I was the Coordinating Producer. Carter always had a “nice guy” reputation and I can attest that it was richly deserved. Carter was enshrined into the Hall of Fame in 2003. Sadly, less than 10 years later, he was afflicted with brain cancer and passed away at the age of 57 in 2012.

Every year, on Opening Day, something happens that reminds us of the magic of the game of baseball. It sets the tone for the season and reminds us that the cold of winter is (almost) behind us. That magic has been stolen from us for now by the insidious COVID-19 virus. We can only hope that life will soon return to normal and we’ll all be watching Major League Baseball again on TV or in ballparks. I have faith that here will be an Opening Day this year, whether it’s in late May or June or beyond.

Anyway, here is Gary Carter’s game-winning home run from 35 years ago with legendary Hall of Fame Mets broadcaster Bob Murphy on the mike:

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