1986 World Series team look back on city's support four decades later

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NEW YORK -- The youngest of the 1986 Mets is in his 60s now. The oldest is 77.

The players who defined a generation in Queens, winning the World Series and establishing a bad-boy counterculture that made them both adored and reviled, are beginning to face their own mortality. Already, some of the principal names of that group are gone. Gary Carter. Davey Johnson. Even titans cannot live forever.

For Darryl Strawberry, that idea of mortality resonates as strongly as it does with anyone. A middle-of-the-order force for that team, Strawberry is 64 now. He has survived one heart attack and a second cardiac episode that left him unresponsive in bed. When he and his 1986 teammates gather at Citi Field this weekend to celebrate the 40th anniversary of their title-winning club, Strawberry said recently, “it could be the last time a lot of us see each other.”

“We don’t know how many we’re going to lose over the next, what, 10 years, 20 years?” Strawberry said in a telephone interview. “We’ve had a pretty good run at most of us being able to get together for this. When you kind of reflect back on it, you just remember how good you really were and how the city embraced us as a team more than anything.”

To this day, only nine Major League teams have won more regular-season games than the 1986 Mets, who finished 108-54 before navigating -- not without some trouble -- through a two-round postseason to win the second title in franchise history. Unlike the upstart 1969 Mets, whom few believed would win the World Series, the 1986 team were always the favorites. Brash. Intimidating. Memorable.

For those reasons, their names and faces still resonate with fans four decades later. It helps that two of their top players, Keith Hernandez and Ron Darling, went on to become broadcasters who remain in the public eye. Strawberry owns a second career as a preacher, Mookie Wilson as a chef. Over the years, many ’86 Mets have shown up to Citi Field for various events.

But only ever so often does a round-number anniversary bring them all together. When that happens, the players tend to feel as if no time has passed.

“I relish it because we don’t see each other [often],” Hernandez said. “We’re all scattered around. It’s a fun weekend for everybody to get together and yuk it up and have a good time and tell stories and share the day and the weekend with each other. It’s something that we did when we played -- half the year, we spent together. Now, we don’t spend hardly any time together.”

Over the last 40 years, much ink has been spilled regarding the 1986 Mets’ place in history. The stories, both on and off the field, remain almost mythical.

Strawberry compared the ’86 Mets to the reigning NBA champion Knicks, a team that resonated with him this spring. The way the Knicks consistently came back in games, Strawberry said, reminded him of how the Mets played in their postseason run four decades earlier. The way that New York City embraced the Knicks reminded him of how it had embraced him and his teammates years ago.

This weekend, fans at Citi Field will have another chance to shower love upon Strawberry, and Hernandez, and Dwight Gooden and so many others -- a collection of talent that remains one of the most unique, most memorable and most successful in New York history.

“There will never be another one like it,” Strawberry said. “They tried many years over in Queens, and they haven’t been able to duplicate that. Because our team had a lot of fight in us. We knew we could beat people. We knew we could come back and win ballgames. It was never over.”