The old brawl game: Fight Club founders

BY ANTHONY RIEBER | Newsday Staff Writer

August 17, 2006

The Mets cruised through spring and early summer as their deep pitching staff piled up wins.

Ron Darling started 6-0. Dwight Gooden and Bobby Ojeda started 5-0. Sid Fernandez started 4-0. Even No. 5 starter Bruce Berenyi won his first two decisions, his only two wins of the season.

Darling’s sixth win was a rather ho-hum, 8-1 victory over the Dodgers at Shea Stadium on May 27.

Ho-hum except for the brawl that broke out in the sixth inning when Dodgers reliever Tom Niedenfuer hit Mets third baseman Ray Knight with a pitch and Knight charged the mound.

It was the first of four brawls in which the Mets were involved that season. All of them were memorable and all of them were real brawls.

By real brawls, we mean flat-out, bare-knuckle, barroom-type action, not the choreographed tea parties you see in most baseball fights these days, in which players do a lot of yelling and pointing but not a lot of punching.

The 1986 Mets did a lot of punching.

Need more proof it was a different era? Neither Knight nor Niedenfuer was ejected.

"If he wants to hit me, fine," Knight said after the game. "I’ll do the same thing to him."

That was the Mets’ attitude, on the field and off. A lot has been made of the hard-drinking and hard-partying ways of the 1986 Mets; it’s become part of the legend of the team. Mostly because it’s true.

"It is a legendary group," shortstop Kevin Elster, a late-season call-up in 1986, said recently in a telephone interview. "It’s something that won’t be repeated in baseball. There’s too much media scrutiny. Guys couldn’t get away with the stuff we did. It was amazing. The bus rides, the plane rides.

"Everything you’ve read was true. Pretty much everything."

The other brawls that season were on June 6 in Pittsburgh, when Mets first-base coach Bill Robinson got into a shoving match with Pirates pitcher Rick Rhoden over the Mets’ contention that Rhoden was scuffing the ball; July 11 at Shea, when Darryl Strawberry charged the mound after getting hit by a pitch from Atlanta’s David Palmer, and July 22 in Cincinnati, when Knight punched Eric Davis at third base.

The Mets got into trouble off the field, too.

They opened the second half of the season with a 13-game lead in the NL East and a four-game series in Houston. In the early morning of July 19, Darling, Ojeda, Rick Aguilera and Tim Teufel were arrested after a scuffle with a pair of off-duty police officers acting as bouncers at "Cooters," a local nightspot. Darling and Teufel were charged with felonies but eventually pleaded no contest to misdemeanor charges of resisting arrest. They were sentenced to one year of probation and fined $200.

Misdemeanor charges against Aguilera and Ojeda were dropped. The players always maintained the off-duty officers were the aggressors.