They're Outta Here | Defector

"The Mets had been too troubled by injury and addiction and natural attrition to come close to repeating in the years after '86. Getting to watch that utterly dominant and worryingly disinhibited team so early in my life as a fan was disorienting and set some very strange expectations; watching it fall apart, little by little and then all the way down to stinking rubble, was my first and most painful lesson in what being a fan is mostly like."

"I cried all the same, just for a minute, while walking up a long grassy hill towards the bunks. It seemed, even then, like something that wasn't quite worth crying about on the merits, but you can't really negotiate with yourself on stuff like that. A big part of caring about a sports team amounts to figuring out how to accept things that are entirely out of your control, and it is a life's work."

"The many incandescently radioactive personalities from that championship team had always existed in an extremely tenuous dynamic tension, and the front office swapped them out gradually and very carefully, like plutonium rods. The biggest miss there was Kevin Mitchell, who became a star slugger and National League MVP after being traded for the dour Arkansan leftfielder Kevin McReynolds in 1987. In 1989, the team traded rageaholic platoon second baseman Wally Backman before the season, then dealt manic centerfielder Lenny Dykstra to Philadelphia in June."

An 11-year-old Mets fan cried alone at summer camp upon learning that Mookie Wilson had been traded, feeling a sudden, private grief. The experience crystallized an early lesson about emotional attachment to a sports team and the difficulty of accepting events outside one’s control. The 1986 championship team’s collapse stemmed from injury, addiction, and natural attrition, and the front office gradually dismantled its volatile personalities. Several trades proved costly, most notably the Kevin Mitchell deal; subsequent moves included sending Wally Backman, Lenny Dykstra, and Rick Aguilera along with pitching prospects away.

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