“We’re gonna take you home to Queens. You’re gonna love Queens. It’s got the New York Mets and…not much else actually.”
–Doug Heffernan to adopted baby Ming-May in China, King of Queens series finale.
The Kevin James character Doug Heffernan was the prototypical Mets fan—a blue-collar delivery truck driver who loved living in Queens and rooting for his local team. And for the Doug Heffernans of the world, there was a never a better time in New York Mets history than the late 1980s.
SHEA IT’S SO
THE 1980s NEW YORK METS
It was the time of Dwight Gooden and Ron Darling, of Darryl Strawberry and Lenny Dykstra, Gary Carter and Keith Hernandez, all with Davey Johnson orchestrating from the dugout. And it all happened at a time when the New York Yankees were going through a relative dry spell. In the 1980s, it was the Mets who owned the Big Apple.
Shea It’s So covers all seven seasons from 1984-90, including game-by-game narratives of each postseason series and laying out the case of why Strawberry was robbed of the MVP award in 1988. These eleven articles are all published individually on TheSportsNotebook.com. They have been edited and pulled together for this free download.
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The Mets of this era won the World Series in 1986. They won the NL East twice. Their five second-place finishes would all have been playoff seasons by the standards of today.
It’s an era that can be looked back with both fondness and regret. Fondness for the championship run of ‘86 and the great players that came through Shea Stadium. Regret in that it didn’t turn into a dynasty.
But wherever you stand on the fondness/regret spectrum, there’s no doubt about this—it was a lot of fun to follow this team if you were a Mets diehard and they were on the radar of every baseball fan in the country.