Mets' Bobby Ojeda's 1986 heroics vs. Red Sox were fueled by revenge
Mets' pitcher Bobby Ojeda grips the ball for the first time at Shea Stadium on Nov. 18, 1988. Ojeda nearly severed the tip of his finger with a hedge clipper prior to the start of the playoffs. Credit: AP/Mark Lennihan
One of the seeds of the Mets’ 1986 championship was planted well over a year in advance, in Winter Haven, Florida.
It was spring training of 1985 and John McNamara had just taken over as manager of the Boston Red Sox when a wiry, 27-year-old lefty walked into his office. At that point, Bobby Ojeda had been in the league five years, and was coming off his strongest season to date. But McNamara wasn’t particularly interested.
“He goes, ‘I saw you pitch back in ’81,’ . . . and I was like, ‘uh oh, this isn’t good,” Ojeda told Newsday in a recent phone interview. The issue was that Ojeda had shut out the McNamara-led Angels twice in 1984 and the comment reeked of antipathy. And sure enough, by the end of the season, Ojeda had been relegated to the bullpen — a role for which he said he was miscast.
McNamara “just didn’t like me, and that’s OK,” Ojeda said. “You want to know what really drove me in ’86? Knowing I could get him back for what he tried to do to me in ’85. I got him, and I’m grateful to this day. I mean, I’m not glad he’s dead, but I’m glad I got him.”
And that is Ojeda in a nutshell. It’s easy to get lost in a rotation with Dwight Gooden and Ron Darling, but when you tell the story of the 1986 Mets, who will be feted at Citi Field this weekend, you can’t do it without the third starter who became the team’s unlikely stopper.
“He gave us yet another lefthanded starter following in the footsteps of John Tudor, both escapees from the Boston Red Sox,” Keith Hernandez told Newsday. “He was our top leader in wins with 18 and he won big games in the postseason. Game 2 [of the NLCS] in Houston always comes to mind . . . Game 3 at Fenway, down 2-0 in an obvious game we had to have, [and he had a] seven-inning, one-run performance in his old stomping grounds. Two pressure starts, two must wins, two gems — money pitcher.”
It was Ojeda who led the rotation with a 2.57 ERA that year. It was Ojeda who went toe-to-toe with Nolan Ryan in the NLCS and won. It was Ojeda who stopped the Red Sox from taking a three-games-to-none lead in the World Series. And with everything on the line in Game 6, it was Ojeda on the hill, staring down the team that let him go.
“It was personal,” he said.
“I learned [something] about myself” that year, he added. “I’m getting punched in the face, but I’m getting up. I’m coming back. I knew guys on that [Red Sox] team who wanted to punch me in the face in the worst possible way, but I wanted to punch them too. It teaches you that OK, I’m going to get hit. I’m going to make a mistake. I’m going to hang a slider. I’m going to do this, that, and the other. But I’ll be all right.”
And in fact, Ojeda did get punched in that Game 6, putting the Mets in a 2-0 hole by the end of the second inning before settling down to pitch four more scoreless innings. By then Ray Knight had gotten it started against Roger Clemens in the fifth, and Gary Carter tied it at 3 in the eighth. Rick Aguilera, though, coughed up two runs in the 10th, and the game looked to be all but over.
It wasn’t the knockout punch everyone expected, though. Not for this team.
“We’re down two runs, two strikes, two outs, every reason to quit,” Ojeda said. But then the ball got by Bill Buckner, and Ojeda, who was in a towel and icing his elbow in the clubhouse, came scampering out in just that, and shower shoes — tucked into a corner of the dugout so no one could see he was celebrating alone and half naked.
It was a surreal moment in a surreal season, and one that displayed Ojeda’s steel nerves. Forget that he was shipped to the bullpen the year prior, or that he started his season with the Mets as a reliever — “It was like casting Shirley Temple in a horror movie,” he said — or that, to this day, he doesn’t get quite the same recognition as the other Game 6 heroes.
Ojeda treated desperation like it was an opportunity, and manager Davey Johnson knew that.
The Mets “manipulated it at times to get me in those spots,” Ojeda said. “They knew it was going to be a big game, and they wouldn’t tell me because they didn’t want to freak me out. They just let me do my thing, and it worked out. Davey and pitching coach] Mel [Stottlemyre] had a lot of trust in my ability not to choke.”
In fact, “I liked the extra pressure,” he said. “I would put it out of my mind, as if it was a Saturday afternoon game in April. But something about the big games drove me, and I think it was fear of failure. I didn’t want to fail. I didn’t want to let my teammates down.”
All these years later, Ojeda paints the season in a bittersweet lens. Winning was phenomenal. Doing it against his old team was otherworldly. But there could have been more, he said.
He was sad to see that Knight became the first World Series MVP to depart his team the following offseason — something Ojeda thinks unmoored a team noted for its wildness. And he regrets that the 1986 Mets — “a ‘we’ team” — became “a ‘me’ team” just a year later.
“After [1986], everybody got a sense of ‘Oh, I’m a star. I want to be a star. I want to be a bigger star,’ ” he said. “And that [old] sense of ‘We’ve got to win and if we don’t win, I hate the world’ was gone.”
And mostly, he’s sad that when the 1986 Mets converge in Flushing this weekend, it will at least partially highlight the four decades of failure since. It’s great to be remembered, but in this case, it would be nice if the current crop of Mets fans had reason to remember 1986 just a little bit less.
“Something is drastically wrong,” he said, noting that the “wrong” has spanned different owners, front-office officials, and managers, making the genesis hard to pinpoint. “Billions of dollars have been spent, and change in ownership, same results . . .
“It’s unfortunate. You know, you catch that magic, and we had magic in ’86,” he said. “By and large, people forget who played unless you win it all. And here we are, 40 years later, and we’re still talking about it.”
Laura Albanese is the Mets beat writer for Newsday. She's been covering MLB since 2014 after starting at Newsday as an intern seven years earlier.
