For Yankees & Mets, a Summer Reminiscent of 1987
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.

It must have seemed like a pretty obvious ad campaign going into the 1987 season. The Mets had won the World Series the previous fall, and there was every reason to think they’d be good again. The Yankees had gone 90-72, finishing second in the American League East behind the Red Sox. Their pitching was unremarkable, to say the least, but with Don Mattingly, Willie Randolph, Rickey Henderson, Dave Winfield, and more, the Yankees had the best offense in their league, if not in baseball. Thus, that year, the MSG network, then the cable home of the Yankees, began promoting the “Subway Series Summer.”
In the aftermath of interleague play and the anticlimactic 2000 World Series, it’s hard to imagine a time when “Subway Series Summer” was supposed to be a big-time come-on, but there it was, and on infinite loop. As the summer wore on, the network was slow to react to the actual standings. Both teams were competitive, but each had significant problems. The Yankees’ offense took a huge step back, in large part because Henderson spent half the season on the shelf with hamstring problems while fending off frustrations with manager Lou Piniella and charges in the press that he just didn’t want to play (given how reluctant Rickey was to finally hang up his spikes, it’s clear that although he didn’t want to play at certain given moments, overall he really did want to play). Simultaneously, the Mets’ pitching staff fell apart, with every starter except Ron Darling missing time. Most devastatingly, Dwight Gooden’s drug abuse problem surfaced, sending one of New York’s most beloved young athletes off to rehab.
Yet, neither team was bad, just troubled. Whether through indolence or indecision, the network never did pull the “Subway Series Summer” interstitials. The Yankees were in and out of first place until finally dropping out of the race in August. The Mets struggled early, dropped well down in the standings, then finished furiously before falling short. There must have been days that MSG must have felt certain that they might get away with not substituting “We Oversold This Summer” bumpers between innings.
That season was so much like this one, with both the Yankees and Mets bobbing up and down, confounding efforts to write them off or cheer them home. Right now, you can swap the two teams for the Bronx and the Battery in the Leonard Bernstein song “New York, New York”: The Mets are up and the Yankees are down (though people still ride in a hole in the ground). In 1987, as today, both teams had obvious vulnerabilities that seemed to invite July trades. The teams took opposite tacks: The Mets, confident in their championship nucleus, played the hand they had dealt themselves in April. The Yankees, as was their wont, made trades. The deals, particularly one that sent three pitching prospects, chief among them Bob Tewksbury, to the Cubs for Steve Trout and another swapping Dennis Rasmussen to the Reds for righty starter Bill Gullickson, were damaging both to the short and long-term health of the franchise.
Now the teams and their general managers find themselves on the cusp of these same decisions. With their current nine-game winning streak, the Mets are, despite their deficiencies, in a virtual tie for first place. The heroes of the day are pitchers Oliver Perez (0.90 ERA in his last three starts) and Mike Pelfrey (6-0, 2.26 ERA in his last nine starts), who have transformed the starting rotation from “Santana and Maine and pray for rain” to a unit that can give the club a chance to win three or four nights out of five — or five nights out of five, as the winning streak attests. The offense still has its health problems, but Carlos Delgado has lately remembered how to hit and Jose Reyes is in one of his torrid streaks, perking up the whole unit. The question now is, do the Mets look at this run as a gift, enjoy the ride, and hope it works out, or do they try to force the issue, dealing what little prospect material they have on the shelf?
When the Yankees made the Steve Trout deal in mid-July, 1987, they had a .618 winning percentage and led their division by three games. “Lou, I just won you the pennant,” George Steinbrenner jubilantly told Piniella. “I got you Steve Trout.” The Greeks defined this as hubris. Trout was DOA, didn’t win a game for the Yankees, hardly recorded an out, and the team rapidly fell back. Tewksbury would establish himself as one of the great control pitchers of all time and pitch, albeit not without injuries, until 1998.
This is one of the great cautionary tales. Both the New York clubs have too many problems for one deal to make a difference unless it’s the rare trade in which they get an MVP-level player who has a great finish while giving up virtually nothing of value. It’s unlikely to happen. Better to have fun, hope it all works out, and play for next year, when these two aging clubs will have an even more difficult time remaining relevant. Reeling in a Trout could have reverberations far beyond this year’s races.
Mr. Goldman writes the Pinstriped Bible for yesnetwork.com and is the author of “Forging Genius,” a biography of Casey Stengel.