THE WILD FLIGHT

September 18, 2023

Good evening. This is Dead Legends. The daily newsletter that loves baseball as much as Greg Maddux loved winning Gold Gloves.

Let’s dive in.

Today’s story is about the rowdiest team in history, and the time they completely trashed a plane.

Looking back, it’s pretty clear that the ’86 Mets felt untouchable from the beginning.

The team was known for railing lines, chasing groupies, and drinking more alcohol in a day than most of us could drink in a year.

But when they weren’t getting shitfaced, they were winning ballgames.

And they won a lot of them.

By far, one of the most important games that they played that year was Game 6 of the NLCS.

Mets vs ‘Stros at the Astrodome.

Even though they had the lead in the series, they really didn’t want to face Mike Scott - who was having the season of a lifetime - in Game 7.

Going into the ninth, New York was down by three, but there was still a few outs left.

Dykstra hit a triple, Mookie fisted a blooper over second base, then Keith Hernandez hit a ball in the gap.

Two walks and a sac fly later, the game was tied.

The game proceeded to go 16 innings, and at the end of it, the Mets were heading to the World Series.

Pretty much immediately, they started getting as turnt up as possible.

Kevin Mitchell says he was in the hot tub with his uniform on taking a bottle to the face.

This continued from the clubhouse, to the bus, and ultimately onto the team plane where the party reached a crescendo 30,000 feet up.

Sexual relations were had, seats were ripped out, and they legitimately had a full-on food fight.

Imagine getting pegged with a dinner roll thrown by Doc Gooden.

Keep in mind, this was a flight from Houston to New York - so about 3.5 hours - which is enough time to get pretty rowdy.

When all was said and done, the plane was in shambles.

Darryl Strawberry said the bill was probably more than $100,000.

Supposedly, the Mets ownership tried to give the bill to Davey Johnson, and he gave it right back to them.

The logic was simple: “we just won you a f**kin pennant, you pay the bill.”

If you wanna go deeper on this, I highly recommend watching this short film about the incident from Victory Journal.

Super well done and includes commentary from Kevin Mitchell, Darryl Strawberry, Lenny Dykstra, and Dwight Gooden.

SO AMAZIN’

Let’s keep this party rollin’.

In the spirit of today’s story, we’re dropping our favorite Mets-inspired gear from Homage.

Here’s our top five picks:

STRANGE NAMES

If you're just joining us, we play this game every day where we try to find the weirdest names throughout baseball history.

Why?

Don't ask us, it's just something we like to do.

If you've been rocking with us for awhile now, you know what time it is.

Today's winner is:

Leslie Ambrose aka "Bullet Joe" is most famous for inventing the forkball.

If only he could see how far we’ve come.

He won three world championships with three different teams - The Athletics, Yankees, and Red Sox.

In 1916, Bush no-hit the Indians and only missed a perfect game because he walked the first hitter.

THE DEAD LEGENDS ARCHIVE

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