The Mets open the 2021 season Monday in Philadelphia and SNY will provide fans with a special 60-minute Citi Pre-Game Live at 6:00 p.m. SNY’s coverage will continue with W.B. Mason Post-Game Live following the game.
Welcome to Opening Day, Mets fans, that magical calendar moment when your team is the greatest in the history of Major League Baseball, a juggernaut without equal and one that is not particularly threatened, either.
No, really.
The Mets begin the 2021 season with the best Opening Day record ever, a 39-20 mark that ought to be the envy of every other club. It’s all the more remarkable considering that the Mets, born in 1962, did not win the first game of any season until 1970. They are 39-12 since then.
So what’s behind this feat that gives the Mets a .661 winning percentage in the opener? (To give you an idea of how good that is, the best team in franchise history, those wild 1986 Mets, had a .667 winning percentage over a full season).
It’s probably not sorcery. There’s no win-the-lidlifter switch, though both Dwight Gooden and Darryl Strawberry note how the jolt provided by the start of a new season can fuel players.
“We always wanted to make a statement, how good we were going to be,” Strawberry says. “I just remember on Opening Day, I’d look down our roster and we’d always have a pretty good team.”
Sure, but that’s not true for every year in club history, as any fan can attest. Perhaps, then, it’s the pitching?
From Tom Seaver to Gooden to Jacob deGrom and beyond, the Mets have enjoyed top-of-the-rotation stars. But, as Ron Darling points out, “Other teams have aces, too, and they’re always facing off against that guy on Opening Day.”
Maybe Darling nails it here: “It seems to me to be the happiest happenstance of all time, for Mets fans and Mets players.”
Darling adds: “I don’t remember saying, ‘Hey, it’s Opening Day, we always win.’ It’s just one of those things that over time has built up. Playing at a (.661) clip, hey, OK. But the clip since they started 0-8 (.765) is amazing.
“The Mets are a beautiful and quirky professional franchise in so many ways, right? From the beginning to the Miracle in ‘69 to the craziness of ‘86.
“It’s just part of quirky Mets history.”
The Mets lost the first ever game, 11-4, to the Cardinals on April 11, 1962. (They didn’t win their first game until 12 days later). Even in 1969, they fell to the expansion Expos, 11-10, on Opening Day in front of 44,541 at Shea.
But won their first opener the next season, 5-3, over the Pirates, thanks to Donn Clendenon’s two-run single in the 11th inning. Since then, they’ve proven time and again since how incredible they are in openers.
In 1994, they won even though their ace, Gooden, gave up three homers to Tuffy Rhodes, a Cubs player most fans had probably never heard of before.
In 1998, the opener took so long that club executives started worrying that the Welcome Home Dinner, an annual rite, would have to be canceled. But in the 14th inning at Shea, backup catcher Alberto Castillo hit an RBI single off Ricky Bottalico to lift the Mets to a 1-0 victory over the Phillies, just in time to save the event.
Boldface names have delivered for the Mets, too. Seaver, who made a record 16 Opening Day starts in his career, including 11 for the Mets, triumphantly returned to Shea with six shutout innings in 1983 as the Mets toppled Steve Carlton and the Phillies. Strawberry smashed two homers in Montreal in 1988, including one that struck the roof of Olympic Stadium.
“I knew that I hit it hard,” Strawberry says. “I looked up and I couldn’t figure out where it went. That was one of my bigger Opening Days.”
And Gary Carter, the new star, smacked a walk-off homer in 1985 in his first game as a Met. “They were chanting his name as he went around the bases,” recalls Jay Horwitz, the Mets’ official historian.
And so it goes, all the way up to last year, when, during a season impacted by the pandemic, the Mets were brilliant in an opener again. DeGrom, who will start the opener again this season, shut out the powerful Atlanta Braves for five innings and Yoenis Céspedes homered for the game’s only run in a dramatic return.
Monday, deGrom will join Seaver, Gooden and Johan Santana as the only pitchers to start three consecutive openers for the Mets and he’ll be looking to continue the club’s four-game opener winning streak and a shorter binge of two shutouts in a row.
Doubtless, there will be plenty of pomp and celebration. Gooden, whose eight Opening Day starts are second in Mets history behind Seaver, recalls an atmosphere that’s “almost like postseason — big crowd, big media, introductions, so much hype. The adrenaline was always there.
“Every game I pitched, I was pumped up, but not like Opening Day.”
Oh, if you’re wondering what team is second in Opening Day success, well, it’s perhaps a reminder that winning the first game of the season isn’t necessarily a harbinger of success. The Seattle Mariners, one of six MLB franchises that hasn’t won the World Series, are 27-18 (.600) on Opening Day.
Whatever it means, in baseball, it’s best to win as much as you can. Historically, the Mets are better than any other team at doing it on Opening Day.
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