998. NEW YORK METS VS. ST. LOUIS CARDINALS
APRIL 9, 1985
SHEA STADIUM
“THE KID’S DEBUT”
QUALITY OF PLAY
6.66
DRAMA
7.55
STAR POWER
7.53
CONTEMPORARY IMPORT
6.66
HISTORICAL SIGNIFICANCE
5.46
LOCAL IMPACT
7.90
TOTAL: 41.76
“I learned right away that New York was going to be different.”
All of us who rooted for the Montreal Expos have a complicated relationship with Gary Carter. His youthful exuberance and big bat made him a fan favorite, and earned him the timeless baseball nickname, “The Kid.” He was a key cog of the Expos team that made a run in the late 70s and early 80s, but by the winter of 1984, his large contract was being labelled a mistake by ownership, whose struggles with money became a never-ending issue with keeping star players. Dealing him for a nice package was painful to contemplate, but it was a foregone conclusion.
Trading an Expos star was one thing—trading him to the division rival Mets was another. The players Montreal received in return (Hubie Brooks, Mike Fitzgerald, Herm Winningham, and Floyd Youmans) were decent but hardly enough quality for a great like Carter, who became the finishing piece for the up-and-coming Metropolitans. His time in New York was great for the media friendly Kid (also known as “Camcorder Carter” for his willingness to chat to the press), but was horrible for Expos fans who loathed the Mets.
Fans of the bleu, blanc et rouge aside, the excitement in NYC was palpable for Carter to begin work with his new team as the 1985 season began. The Mets opened at home with the St. Louis Cardinals, the first game of what would culminate in a dramatic race for the division title.
It was an icy Tuesday afternoon in Queens, 45 degrees for the afternoon first pitch. Nevertheless, 46,781 turned out, clad in blue and orange mufflers and earmuffs, eager to see the reigning N.L. Rookie of the Year, Dwight Gooden, take the mound and chase a presumptive Cy Young Award. Joaquin Andujar, a 20-game winner in ’84, took the hill for the Redbirds. The vice-president, and future Oval Office holder, George H.W. Bush, threw out the first pitch. “Read my lips—I’m freezing my ass off” Bush pere supposedly said afterwards.
Carter batted cleanup in his debut, and came up for the first time with the Mets already ahead 1-0, thanks to a Keith Hernandez single. He dug in, the crowd rose to its feet, Andujar kicked and delivered—and plunked Carter in the elbow, causing the new Met to wince in pain. His 1983 season had been cut short by injury, and here he was, brand new to the Apple and already writhing in agony.
“All I could think of was 1983 all over again,” he told the Daily News after the game. It turned out to be but a flesh wound, and The Kid stayed in the picture.
The Mets got the better of the action early. George Foster, a shadow of the player who hit 52 homers with the Reds in 1977 at age 36, found a little throwback juice, slugging a third-inning homer to put the Mets ahead 3-2. Hernandez and Rafael Santana added RBIs, and Gooden struck out six in six innings. But Doc K gave up hits to the first couple of Cards he faced in the 7th, and left after 117 pitches. Doug Sisk replaced him, and surrendered a two-run single to Tommy Herr that made it 5-4, New York.
Sisk got through the 8th, and the Mets loaded the bases in the bottom of the frame, but failed to boost their lead. In the top of the ninth, still trailing 5-4, the Cards loaded the bases themselves, and burly Jack Clark worked a walk that tied the game. Jessie Orosco came in to retire Tito Landrum and end the inning. In the last of the ninth, the Mets loaded the sacks yet again, but Mookie Wilson hit a can of corn to end the threat. The iced-over fans groaned at the thought of extra innings. “I can’t tell you how unbearably cold it was in those last two innings,” Hernandez said after the game.
The Cards didn’t score in the top of the tenth. Hernandez started the home half by whiffing against Neil Allen, who spent five years with the Mets before being part of the lopsided deal that brought Hernandez to the Mets (Allen would wind up later that season in the Bronx with the Yankees—he is one of 135 players to wear both uniforms). That brought The Kid to the plate.
Hilariously, Carter had been hit by a second pitch, this time by Bill Campbell, earlier in the game. He also doubled, struck out looking, and bounced out, along with being charged with a passed ball. Overall it was looking like a dubious debut for The Kid.
But Carter showed Mets fans what was to come when he faced Allen in the tenth. An 0-1 curveball left Carter with his keister halfway to the visiting dugout, but he nevertheless roped a line drive that just cleared the fence in left—a walkoff home run in his very first game in New York. The crowd bellowed for a curtain call, which the ever-smiling Kid was happy to grant.
“I learned right away that New York was going to be different,” Carter wrote later. “I was now playing for a special breed of fans. If hitting a walk-off home run in your first game with a new team is not special, I don’t know what is.”
Backhanded (and unfair) slap at Montreal fans notwithstanding, the homer was a glorious moment in the Hall of Fame career of Camcorder Carter.
AFTERMATH
Dwight Gooden would indeed win the 1985 Cy Young Award, unanimously, after a brilliant 24-4 season. But the Mets lost the greater war (as we will see later on in this list), falling just short of the Cardinals in a dramatic race for the N.L. East in the years before the wild-card. Carter was a key element in the team’s success in ’85, hitting 31 more homers after that Opening Day swat, and serving as a “one-man scouting system” in the words of manager Davey Johnson. Carter would of course win an championship ring the next year, 1986, before injuries blighted the end of his career. He tragically passed away from brain cancer in February, 2012, at just 57. The Expos retired his number 8, which the subsequent Nationals have honored.
The Mets have yet to do so.
WHAT THEY SAID
“The people at the top of the ballpark, which had become as cold as Everest by the finish, were the last to leave Shea. A lot of them were drunk, and some of them were swaddled in blankets, and they were still throwing any kind of paper toward the baseball field, hoping it looked enough like confetti. And they were real loud as they chanted Gary Carter’s name…They did not want to let go of the day.”
Mike Lupica, New York Daily News
FURTHER READING
Still A Kid At Heart: My Life In Baseball and Beyond, by Gary Carter
VIDEO
997. NYU VIOLETS vs. ST. JOHN’S REDMEN
FEBRUARY 7, 1931
102ND ENGINEER’S ARMORY
“THE WONDER FIVE, BEATEN”
QUALITY OF PLAY
6.68
DRAMA
7.92
STAR POWER
5.46
CONTEMPORARY IMPORT
8.09
HISTORICAL SIGNIFICANCE
6.96
LOCAL IMPACT
6.67
TOTAL: 41.77
“Their style was deliberate, and at times very slow, but they worked as a team, each player knowing and understanding their role to perfection.”
In the early days of college basketball, the best team in the nation was made up of a bunch of Jews representing a Catholic school.
The St. John’s Red Storm of course continue to play big-time college hoops, but their finest hour came all the way back in the early-1930s. That’s when the then-Redmen, known far and wide as the fabled “Wonder Five,” took the court and bested all comers. The Five were comprised of defensive specialist Jack “Rip” Gerson, bruising forward Max Posnack, sweet dribbling Mac Kinsbrunner, star shooter Allie Schuckman and center Matty Begovich. All but Begovich were Members of the Tribe. St. John’s was still a college back then, and was based in Brooklyn, where far more Jews lived than in Queens, where St. John’s University would eventually settle.
The Wonder Five went 86-8 as a quintet, 68-4 over a three-year stretch, 1929-31, including a 24-game win streak that included the final 11 games of the ’29-’30 season and the first 13 of ’30-’31. The Five dominated opponents under coach James “Buck” Freeman, one of the earliest b-ball stars and a Johnnies alum. There was no national championship to compete for (the NIT started in 1938, the NCAA one year later), but the Redmen were generally considered the finest team of the era—certainly in the east, which was really all that mattered, anyway.
Depression-era basketball wasn’t exactly a high-flying, up-tempo game. There was no shot clock, no jump shooting, no midcourt line, and obviously no dunks. “Their style was deliberate, and at times very slow, but they worked as a team, each player knowing and understanding their role to perfection,” is the way the website Jews In Sports described the Five, and that’s an understatement. A typical game came against City College of New York (CCNY), part of a triple header at Madison Square Garden that raised unemployment relief funds. The Redmen defeated the Beavers, 17-9. Despite the lack of thrills, basketball’s popularity rose dramatically in the period—in particular, at Madison Square Garden, where college hoops became the primary draw. The Wonder Five are usually given credit for the boost.
Kinsbrunner, a Proto-Bob Cousy, usually killed the final dozen or so minutes of the game with a patented dribbling display, as stall ball was a crucial tactic and teams had not yet learned to deliberately foul. Handles, not buckets, were the order of the day. Kinsbrunner was known as the “Indian Rubber Man” due to playing for the Redmen (hence “Indian”—this was the 1930s, after all) and for his double-jointed, highly elastic technique, which often went on for several minutes at a time as the Five held possession.
“Not only did the king of college dribblers give a neat display of dribbling, but he also managed to cage three difficult two-pointers” was a typical description, this by the Brooklyn Daily Eagle. His scoring was considered secondary to his dribbling skills—Kinsbrunner scored all of 4.3 points per game. His path to the Johnnies was circuitous; born in Austria, he emigrated with his family to the US and settled in the City. Kinsbrunner began schooling and basketball at Syracuse before transferring back to be closer to home (my Orange blew that one…)
The lone goy on the squad, Begovich, played a crucial role beyond circumcision debates. At the time, there was a jump ball after every made basket, and Begovich, a 6’5” leaper with ginger hair, ensured that the Johnnies had a lot of “make it, take it” possessions. Kinsbrunner would bounce around the perimeter, trying to work it to Schuckman, the outside threat, or inside to Posnack. Mostly, they held it for minutes at a time. The style was incredibly tedious, but winning earns popularity regardless of aesthetics, and the Wonder Five drew large crowds as the win streak mounted.
Some familiar names pop up in the list of those vanquished by the Wonder Five—Syracuse, Villanova, Providence. But the Johnnies also beat a team of Redmen alumni, something called Savage Institute, and a team representing the Knights of Columbus. All counted in the long win streak. After the CCNY win at the Garden, St. Johns cruised past Crescent A.C. (against whom the streak had begun back in January, 1930) and St. Thomas at the Redmen’s usual home gym, the 106th Infantry Armory (known more lately as the 23rd Regiment Armory) at Bedford and Atlantic Avenues, to run the streak to 24 in a row.
On Saturday, February 7, they traveled across the river into Manhattan for a road game against NYU. The Violets were led by two-sport star Jerry Nemecek, who captained both the football and basketball squads, and tiny Monty Banks, a 5’9” terrier who harried even the best dribblers, like Kinsbrunner, and was tough to slow on his wild forays to the hoop. Despite their efforts, NYU were having a mediocre season and were considered no match for the beasts of the east from Brooklyn (St. John’s college was then based at 75 Lewis Avenue, in Bedford-Stuyvesant).
The contest was held at the 102nd Engineers Armory. The Armory was far uptown, at 168th St. in Washington Heights, almost as long a trip from the Village as it was from Bed-Stuy (the site, now known as the Fort Washington Ave. Armory, houses the Track and Field Hall of Fame). Some 4,000 fans packed every available space, many of them not in seats or bleachers but hanging off ledges and beams high above the floor.
The game started wild and fast, making “the passes hurried and inaccurate,” according to the New York Times. Banks made an early three-point play with a brilliant bit of dribbling and pivoting, working around Schuckman to score and draw the foul. “Sugar” Joe Hugret, N.Y.U’s center, who ran Begovich off his feet in the game, threw in a long shot at the halftime buzzer to give NYU a stunning 12-11 lead over the Vincentians, as the pious men of St. John’s were sometimes called despite their Hebrew leanings.
The teams went back and forth. Banks put NYU up six, usually a comfortable lead in the era, but “then St. John’s came through with the excellent basketball that has marked its many victories.” (Brooklyn Times-Union) Kinsbrunner dimed one to Posnack, then set up Begovich for a layup. A Schuckman jumper from the corner gave the Five eight straight points, and number 25 in a row seemed foreordained.
However, NYU managed to tie it, after which followed the play of the game. Banks raced downcourt “with the whole St. Johns team trailing” to snag a pass, score—and the foul! The Violet (singular, as they were often called in the sports pages) were up 3 after Banks swished the free throw, and they maintained that lead as the Five missed long shot after long shot. With the minutes dwindling away, St. Johns got a taste of its own medicine. Banks dribbled away the clock, with no one on the Redmen able to dislodge the ball. The crowd, at first supporting the Five but now thrilled at seeing a huge upset in the making, stomped wildly as the final seconds ticked away, then rushed the court in the lone hint of modernity on display that cold afternoon uptown.
AFTERMATH
The Wonder Five’s story ended in scandal. After winning the rest of their games in 1931 to win a third straight Eastern title, it came out that the five stars all had played for pay while at St. John’s, using aliases in New Jersey to cover their tracks (poorly, as it turned out). But their popularity triumphed over the tarnishing of amateurism, and the Wonders turned professional, calling themselves the Brooklyn Jewels, an independent and successful traveling team. In 1933, they renamed the team the New York Jewels and entered the American Basketball League, the top pro league in the East at the time. They remained together for five more years in the ABL and played in two championships (1935 and 1938), but lost in both of them.
N.Y.U. had less success on the court the rest of the season, but the Five took its hard-learned lesson and invited Monty Banks to join the Jewels upon graduation.
Decades later, the Wonder Five nickname was reborn, at least among b-ball fans of a certain age, when the 1986 St. John’s starters—Walter Berry, Mark Jackson, Willie Glass, Shelton Jones and Ron Rowan—displayed ironman tendencies, seldom checking out of games. The Original Wonder Five was honored as a collective in 1997, inducted into the New York City Basketball Hall of Fame for their hardwood exploits.
WHAT THEY SAID
“The St. John’s five had polish and class but in the face of the madcap attack and tenacious defense offered by the Violet quintet it found itself powerless. New York’s team had to go a long way to register its startling upset but with pluck and a fiery spirit showing in every move the team coached by Howard Cann did it.”
The New York Times (unbylined)
FURTHER READING
Encyclopedia of Jews in Sports, by Bernard Postal, Jesse Silver, and Roy Silver