What it might have looked like in our house after another aggravating, low-scoring loss in the 60s and 70s
So I looked at the Mets scoring for their first 21 years of existence.
Yep, putrid. He had to remind me - what a guy.
Just 3.6 runs per game.
That includes earned and unearned runs, folks.
By comparison, 4.9 runs per game in happier times last season.
So, just guessing, let's say that the opposing pitchers' combined ERA against the Mets for those first 21 seasons was 3.25.
Don Sutton made the Hall of Fame with a 3.26 ERA.
Mike Mussina made the Hall of Fame with a 3.68 ERA.
I guess the Mets over those 21 seasons, in scoring only 3.6 runs per game, faced only Hall of Fame pitchers.
Against those Mets teams, most pitchers probably felt like Hall of Famers.
Hey, even Dwight Gooden had a career 3.51 ERA.
In that 21 year drought period, the Mets had teams that scored 473 runs (1968 - 2.92 runs per game), 495 runs in 1965, 498 runs in 1967, 501 runs in 1963, and 528 runs in 1972 - which is 3.26 runs per game in the best of those 5 sorry offensive seasons in 1972.
Down a run back then was probably like being down by 10 runs.
(Remarkably, in 1968, the Mets' 473 wasn't the lowest, as the Dodgers scored 470 and the White Sox scored an awful 463 - only 4 teams had over 600 runs and 10 teams had 100 or more HRs - the Yanks did score 536 runs, but hit just .214 - RAISE THAT MOUND!)
Eleven of the Mets' first 21 seasons, they scored under 600 runs. Only ONE season with over 646 runs, meaning only ONE season with more than 4 runs per game!
From 1977 to 1982, a stretch of 6 seasons, the Mets' team averaged 80 homers, with a high for season homers of 97, including lows of 57 in 1981 and 61 in 1980. I wonder if Pete Alonso knows that piece of Mets history?
Not just team stats, either.
Individual Mets career records are woeful. Here's a few:
RBIs - Wright - 970
Runs - Wright - 949
HRs - Strawberry - 252
No Mets 300+ HRs guys; no Mets' 1,000 runs scored or 1,000 RBIs guys. The Mets' career leaders' records above are all well less than half of the all time major league records.
Think of players produced by other teams (or who played most of their career with those teams) since 1962 who had superior career stats with their teams.
Reds: Pete Rose, Johnny Bench, Joe Morgan, Tony Perez, Joey Votto. Even Adam Dunn had 270 runs as a Red, and Barry Larkin scored 1,329 Reds runs, about 350 higher than Wright's Mets record.
Orioles: Ripkin and Powell...and even Brady Anderson (1,044) scored more O's runs than any Met ever.
Red Sox: Jim Rice, Wade Boggs, Dwight Evans, and David Ortiz - and Carl Yastrzemski started in 1961, but leave those 1961 #s out and he still far exceeded any Met. And they had a bunch of guys who were prolific but split careers with other teams (like Mo Vaughn and Manny Ramirez), so would not have topped the Mets' record charts.
Phillies: Mike Schmidt, Ryan Howard, Jimmy Rollins (1,325 Phillies runs), with others like Bobby Abreu putting up great numbers, but not enough time with the Phils to quite eclipse Mets RBI or HR records.
Chicago: Sosa and Sandberg far eclipsed Mets' records, and Billy Williams and Ron Santo started their careers slightly before 1962, but their 1962 and later stats far exceed Mets team HR/RBI records.
Yankees: Jeter, A Rod, Bernie, Jorge Posada, Don Mattingly.
Astros: the Mets' NL-entry contemporaries had 3 Bs who far exceeded one or more of those Mets' careers stats: Bagwell, Berkman and Biggio.
All told, any Mets fan since 1962, like myself, or even like my brother Steve, since the early 1970's, had for so much of that time rooted for a woeful Mets offensive team year after year.
Even since 2000, the Mets have had many poor seasons in terms of runs scored.
Yet still fans we are, even if we grumble a lot about the team's historic poor hitting.
Even since 2000, the Mets have had many poor seasons in terms of runs scored.
Yet still fans we are, even if we grumble a lot about the team's historic poor hitting.
Being a team's life long fan is a really peculiar thing, sometimes.
Especially when through thick and thin has a lot more thin than thick.
Especially when through thick and thin has a lot more thin than thick.
10 comments:
I have always been a 'don't look back and don't look too far forward' person.
Makes for a great Mets fan.
You're right on there, Tom. The offense was awful. I remember reading that in 1 season (I don't know which) if the Mets had scored exactly 3 Runs in every start by Tom Seaver, he would have had a record of 31-3.
I imagine that the Astros, who were born simultaneously with the Mets, had much better offensie stats in their first 20 seasons. But while we had 2 WS appearances in that span, they had zero. Pitching wins.
Bill, very true.
Mack, I am doing lot of look-back articles in the weeks ahead! Most are a lot more positive than this one, though.
I think it was 1980 that Lee Mazilli lead the Mets in homers with 12.
Bob W.
The Mets have been very consistent in not drafting big bats. How they landed Alonso, Conforto, Nimmo and McNeil is anyone's guess.
Well, Conforto and Nimmo were both top 12 picks. They seemed to get average to perhaps above average value for those picks.
I wonder if McNeil's skinny college physique pushed him down to the 12th round. He realized that big flaw in his game and added 30 pounds of muscle.
As far as Pete, I know I was begging for the Mets to draft power after so many bust punch hitting picks like Cecchini and Mazzilli. I'm so glad they went out of character and drafted power in the second round. They gambled and hit the jackpot.
If there is any consistency, it's pure co-incidence. Or do you think that all the GMs were told by the owners to avoid power instead of using their own diverse philosophies?
During that time with Seaver, the Mets were known to have the pitching, but the hitting wasn't there most of the time.
Bill, did they avoid power and go after low-powered, supposedly more versatile players? Based on the results from about (off the top of my head) 2000 to 2013 or 2014), I would say yes. Before Conforto, name any potent draftees. Hard to think of any.
Bill, I did a Draft Duds and Dudes series a few years ago, then recapped it in one very long summary article. I will re-post that soon. You can draw your own conclusions after reading that.
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