But by 1991, the Mets were a team that felt 50 years removed from a title rather than just five. The roster was an awesomely weird amalgam of people. They were prospects that hadn’t developed as expected and aging stars from ’86 on the freeway out of town. They had players who would later become clubhouse leaders—both in Queens and elsewhere—but were still too young to know their true potential. And there were the free agent signings stuck in an unfortunate limbo, too late for the mid-’80s glory years but who simply couldn’t stick around the late ‘90s rebirth.

While that ’91 club still retained some of the DNA from the Series-winners just five years prior, it was a roster ultimately doomed to mediocrity, stuck in a time of confusion and soul-searching. The Mets were no longer the powerhouse of their recent past, yet their path to a rebuild was still far from obvious.

So it’s no surprise they finished 77-84, fifth in the NL East, but this team was so much more interesting than that, at least in hindsight. A 10-game winning streak that spanned the All-Star break pushed the Mets to 49-34, just 2.5 games behind Pittsburgh for first. Hope abounds! But then they finished the year 28-50, the worst record in all of baseball during that time. In those final 78 games, they averaged an MLB-worst 3.48 runs per game. (For comparison’s sake, this year’s Mets are only scoring 3.69 a game. How times have changed.)

An up-and-down team struggling to find an identity? A team full of hope that’s maybe over-reliant on pitching and has great trouble scoring runs? Stop me if you’ve heard that one before.

Yes, we joke lovingly about the baaaaad Mets teams of the past, but if this year’s iteration is more akin to the ’86 champs than the ’91 schlubs, from now until the All-Star break is when that transformation has to happen. Otherwise, they could be remembered alongside this magnificent, ragtag bunch of hapless underachievers:

Ron Darling – Dumped in a midseason trade to Montreal, Darling was by then no more than a middling fifth starter, even in his age-30 season.

David Cone – Acquired in spring training of 1987, Cone was the rotational stalwart of the post-’86 hangover. Led the league in strikeouts (243) and FIP (2.52) in ’91, his last full season with the Mets. This was also his age-28 season and yet all five of his World Series titles (plus the perfect game) had yet to happen. Life comes at you fast.

Sid Fernandez – Bryan did a great roundup of El Sid’s career not long ago, but 1991 was, as he writes, a lost year for the hefty lefty with the smooth curve. At least Fernandez had one more full season left in him for ’92.

Gregg Jefferies – There was no prospect hyped in that post-’86 wake quite like Jefferies. Third in ROY voting in 1989, buoyed by one epic charge at Roger McDowell. Led the league in doubles in 1990. Always a high-contact hitter, Jefferies never quite put up the big power numbers people expected, and he was traded after the 1991 season in the ill-fated deal that brought Bret Saberhagen to Queens.

Howard Johnson – This was peak HoJo in all his glory: Holding down third base, socking 38 dingers, swiping 30 bases, maintaining that magnificent beard! It was all downhill in ’92, but this ’91 season was one to remember. Johnson finished in the top 10 in MVP voting three times in his nine seasons with the Mets. This was the last of the three.

Kevin McReynolds – Traded away with Jefferies to Kansas City in the Saberhagen deal, McReynolds was the first big pick-up after ’86, a fresh bit of energy in the intervening years. And in 1988, as a seven-year-old who was newly cognizant of baseball, his game-winning grand slam at Wrigley Field (and the gaping maw it induced in Cubs manager Don Zimmer) became a seminal moment in my life.

Dwight Gooden – Doc’s final season in Queens with a winning record (13-7). Still only 26, but his days of averaging more than nine strikeouts per nine were effectively over by then. Dumped after the 1994 season.

John Franco – After coming over in the Randy Myers trade after the ’89 season, Franco missed out on a ring with Cincinnati in 1990, but his consolation was spending the next 14 seasons with his hometown Mets, through eras both putrid and sublime. His earlier Mets teams skewed more toward the former, but Franco (when healthy) was as reliable as they come. Weird to think that he would survive long enough to concede the closer’s role to Braden Looper and witness the rise of a young David Wright, but Franco remains the modern-day Mets answer to Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon.

Frank Viola – Still only 31 by then, Viola actually finished fourth (2.6) in team bWAR, behind Cone, Gooden, and Johnson. You know who finished tied for fifth? Jeff Ennis and Rick Cerrone (1.7). This was a weird Mets team. They let Viola walk after the season.

Todd Hundley – Still five years away from breaking the single-season record for most dingers by a catcher and 16 years away from the Mitchell Report that named him and teammates Chris Donnels and Mark Carreon as suspected PED users, Hundley was simply another 22-year-old, late-season call-up in 1991. His first career homer came that year in the bottom of the 14th in a late September game against Pittsburgh. Hundley’s tater tied the game, but Wally Whitehurst gave up a run in the top of the 15th and the Mets lost. (It was the first game of a doubleheader.)

Anthony Young – I would never tell anyone to not chase their dreams, but I might make an exception for Young. This season wasn’t terrible for the 25-year-old rookie, but oh the pain that was to come. He pitched a shutout in his first start of 1992—a six-hitter in St. Louis—then won again 10 days later in a late-game mop-up appearance. Of course, as we all know, he then didn’t win another game for another 465 days, losing a MLB-record 27 straight decisions. The day he broke the streak? Maybe the only time I was ever happy to see Eddie Murray in a Mets uniform.

Pete Schourek – To this day, my father and I maintain all young prospective pitchers (read: babies) should be taught to throw left-handed simply because of Schourek. His reverse splits were maddening, and yet somehow he once finished second in Cy Young voting to Greg Maddux. But in 1991, he was simply a 22-year-old rookie with his whole career ahead of him. He pitched his only career shutout that season, a one-hitter over the last-place Expos in September. Oh what hopes he must’ve had.

Hubie Brooks – Talk about bad timing. You play for the unwatchable Mets from 1980 to 1984, only to return for one more go-around in 1991? Like getting to the barbecue early, then volunteering to go pick up some ice for the cooler, only to come back, see the grill cooling off, and wonder why no one saved you a cheeseburger.

Garry Templeton – Will always be known more as the shortstop St. Louis traded to San Diego for some guy named Ozzie Smith. To Mets fans, he’ll always be the guy who was acquired for Tim Teufel. The speed that once led the NL in triples three straight years was long gone by ’91, and Templeton retired after the season.

Tim Teufel – Despite never playing more than 100 games in a season following ’86, Teufel stuck around as a utility infielder who could get on base in a pinch and supply some pinch-hitting pop if needed. He spent two more full seasons in San Diego before retiring in 1993.

Tom Herr – Like Templeton, another infielder more known for his days with another NL team. Herr was the starting second baseman on Opening Day but was reduced to a bench/utility role by June. Traded to the Giants in August and retired after the season.

Dave Magadan – In 1990, Magadan challenged for a batting title and received actual, real MVP votes after the season. (He finished better than worst!) The year after, he was a solid fourth of an infield that was low-key super-enjoyable for Mets fans to watch. Magadan at first, Jefferies at second, Johnson at third, and Kevin Elster at short was a group that was, at its best, definitely not old and terrible.

Mackey Sasser – Everyone remembers the throwing yips that nearly derailed his career in 1990—14 errors in 87 games—but what many forget is that Sasser largely overcame those issues in 1991, committing just one error in 179 chances over 43 games at catcher. Regardless, his career was more or less headed in its natural downward trajectory by that time, even at 28. I talked to him years ago for a magazine story on the yips that never ran. He was coaching community college ball down in Alabama. He’s now also the athletic director there. Good for him.

Kevin Elster – I was a catcher in youth ball, but if I’d had a better throwing arm, I probably would’ve played shortstop and Elster would’ve been the reason. He made the position look easy and fun, 88 games without an error and all that. Little did we know that it would all come to an end after ’91. Shoulder surgery just a week into the ’92 season ended his Mets tenure, but he would go on to appear in Little Big League, so it worked out OK for him.

Vince Coleman – In 1992, Coleman, along with teammates Gooden and Daryl Boston, was brought up on a rape charge that was later dropped. He also physically assaulted manager Jeff Torborg on the field. In 1993, he was charged with a felony for tossing a lit firecracker at fans outside Dodger Stadium. (His attorney? A pre-OJ Robert Shapiro.) But in 1991, he was merely injured and terrible, clocking in a sub-zero WARP over 72 games.

Oh wait, nah, he also fought with coach Mike Cubbage on the field before a game in July. Manager Bud Harrelson chose not to discipline Coleman and instead chalked it up to a “moment of insanity.” GM Frank Cashen (himself facing retirement) later fired Harrelson before the home finale at Shea. Cubbage took over for the final week of the season, went 3-4, and never managed again.

What a team.

Photo Credit: Geoff Burke-USA TODAY Sports

Something I like to do from time to time is go back into the archives and re-examine the Mets greats of the past, and re-evaluate their careers knowing what we know now about statistics in the post-sabermetric age. Are the Mets of our memory greater than we remember? Were they worse? What kinds of careers did they have with the benefit of hindsight, and how do the numbers impact their stories?

So, today, I’ll debut Retro Mets, an article where I’ll do just that. We’ll examine the careers of the players that Mets fans remember fondly, and review their careers from where we stand today. And to start, I’d like to review the Mets career of one of the team’s most distinctive starting pitchers: the inimitable Sid Fernandez.

Drafted originally by the Los Angeles Dodgers, Sid was acquired by the Mets after just six innings in Dodger blue. The trade for Fernandez–who came over with Ross Jones in exchange for Bob Bailor and Carlos Diaz–turned out to be one of the most valuable deals in the team’s history, as Sid would go on to be a rotation fixture for the better part of a decade. Although often overshadowed by the dynamism of rotation-mates Dwight Gooden and David Cone, Sid was an elite strikeout pitcher and valuable left-handed weapon.

You wouldn’t exactly know that from his first season with the team, back in 1984. During his age-21 season, he was called up mid-year to slot into the rotation. Leveraging a traditional lefty combo of an upper-zone fastball and curve (a great combo for fooling hitters) and a weirdo delivery, he was … pretty average in his first season. First, he averaged six innings per start, which wasn’t all that deep into games for a young starter in the early 80s. Second, he displayed the high walk rate that would be a hallmark of his career–it sat at 9.2 percent in this first season–without a strikeout rate that would’ve offset his lack of control. The end result was a cFIP of 103. Now, cFIP, which I’ll reference more as we go on, is something of a measure of a pitcher’s true talent level; looking at his peripherals and the context, did he demonstrate better or worse talent than the league average? 103 reads as slightly worse than league average for all pitchers, so Sid was something close to an average starter during that intro to life as a Met.

His second season with the team, 1985, saw a substantive change … one that was all about the strikeout. Instead of a sophomore jinx, Sid ramped up his strikeout rate considerably to 26.3 percent–the highest full-season strikeout rate he’d ever post–and led all of baseball in strikeouts per nine innings with 9.5 punchouts per nine innings. That’s right, during the same season that Doc Gooden reached the dizzying heights of a Cy Young win and 24 wins, Sid quietly racked up more Ks than his much-ballyhooed teammate. El Sid also led all of baseball in hits allowed per nine innings (5.7 hits per nine), a trait that he’d carry with him through his career limiting successful contact. He’d only win nine games this season–of course we know by now that wins aren’t a great judge of pitching efficacy–but his cFIP dipped down to 83, which is a mark much more in line with a No. 2 starter on a good team … Matt Harvey posted an 86 cFIP last season, as a reference point. Fernandez also posted a 2.80 ERA and 3.02 FIP, good stats for any era.

Then came 1986, a special season for the Mets and the first “breakout” year for Fernandez in the popular opinion. He opened the season with three fabulous games in April, then tore off a string of wins to go to 12-2 by the All-Star break. As we now know, pitcher wins aren’t worth much, but at the time it was certainly enough to cement him his first All-Star Game appearance. He faded a bit after a dismal, homer-riddled August, but overall posted a very strong season in the run-up to the Mets’ second World Series win. Though Davey Johnson hesitated to use him in a starting role in the World Series, El Sid came on in relief of Ron Darling in the pivotal Game 7 to stop the bleeding and buy the Mets enough time to reignite the bats and win the game, series, and championship.

1986 also saw the beginning of a trend that would define Fernandez’s career: his home-away splits tilted heavily in favor of pitching at home in Queens. During the 1986 season, Sid’s ERA was almost three runs higher on the road (5.03) than it was at home (2.17). Some of that certainly could be attributed to Shea’s home run-reducing ways and to the league-wide benefit pitchers get from working at home, but this split is extreme even after you take that into account. This was also another year where Fernandez’s ERA (3.52) and FIP (2.98) tell one story, but his Deserved Run Average (3.79) tells a slightly different one. During this season, and many in the future, Fernandez would often post a higher DRA than his ERA and/or FIP–although those two numbers remained fairly close overall over his tenure with the Mets. Thanks to the contextual factors that go into DRA–and eventually WARP–Sid gets a little less credit in those areas than one might expect from a pitcher with his solid ERA and FIP. Of course, he posted 3.7 WARP in his 1986 season, which is hardly chopped liver, DRA gap or no.

He got off to another fast start in ’87, which snagged him his second and final All-Star appearance. However, this season would be a bit of an overall disappointment. His strikeout rate dipped, though he kept both his ERA and FIP under 4.00. His DRA, however, climbed up to 4.65 and perhaps reflected another year where he was heavily benefitting from the friendly confines in New York, where he was far more effective. And at the end of the season, he was slowed by a leg injury, bringing him to only 156 innings on the season. In the end, he allowed an opposing True Average of .246, the highest of any full season during his Mets tenure.

Without much fanfare, Sid started 1988 poorly, but then ripped off a three-season run of success. Over the next three years, Sid posted 11.2 WARP, as well as a 3.09 ERA and 3.21 FIP over that time. He was still overshadowed by his teammates Doc Gooden and David Cone–not to mention pushed aside as the rotation’s top lefty by new acquisition Frank Viola–but few teams could account for such an effective No. 3 starter. Sid was even banished to the bullpen for the start of 1989, but undeterred, he rose back to the rotation and finished that season with a 3.27 DRA, second-best of his career. His ability to get hitters to put the ball in the air over and over again led to precious few singles and many, many fly ball outs. Despite his steady effectiveness, Sid never received a Cy Young vote or All-Star appearance. He merely shouldered on in relative anonymity–as much as could be had while playing for the Amazins.

The 1991 season was a lost year, as Fernandez broke his arm in Spring Training and only made eight effective starts after returning before bowing out again with a knee injury. In 1992, having recovered, Fernandez did the one thing he’d never truly done previously with this Mets team: he cemented himself as the best starter on the staff with a virtuoso season that looked like every other Sid Fernandez campaign, just slightly heightened. He threw 214+ innings to the tune of a 2.73 ERA and 2.70 FIP … and even his nemesis–DRA–gave him credit with a Deserved Run Average of 3.17. He was better than Doc Gooden, better than David Cone and Bret Saberhagen, and even managed to pitch at a better-than-league-average level while on the road, for a change.

Alas, Sid’s last year with the Mets would be something of a disaster. The team was a mess, falling to seventh and last place in the division. He got lucky at times, holding hitters to a .196 batting average on balls in play and a 2.93 ERA, but his 4.45 FIP told the story of a pitcher losing his strikeout ability and giving up too many home runs. Worst of all, El Sid suffered a serious knee injury early in the season that would shelve him for a while, as well as haunt him through the rest of his career. His last game for the Mets was on October 2 against the expansion Florida Marlins, and it was almost a perfect Sid Fernandez start: seven innings, just two hits allowed, five strikeouts, and just two ground balls in play.

Sid would leave the team as a free agent at the end of that season, as the Mets looked to pick up the pieces and rebuild after such a terrible run. He’d go on to pitch for a few more years, drifting to the Orioles, Phillies, Astros, and even an ill-fated comeback attempt with the Yankees four years after his 1997 retirement.

Perhaps Sid’s claim to fame is this: only three other pitchers in baseball history who pitched more than 1500 innings gave up fewer hits than Fernandez. Those three include one former Met (Nolan Ryan) and two pitchers who only ever pitched for the Dodgers (Clayton Kershaw and Sandy Koufax). His mark of 6.85 hits per nine innings is staggering, but his ground ball rate is even moreso. For the years that Baseball Prospectus has groundball rate data, I could only find one pitcher of substantial innings who gave up fewer grounders than he did: former Met and World Series star Chris Young. Only 29.8 percent of Sid’s batted balls were grounders.

The entirety of Sid’s career paints the picture of a very good No. 2 or No. 3 starting pitcher: consistent and reliable for about a decade in orange in blue. And by the standard of today’s pitchers, he’s kind of prototypical in terms of peripherals–Sid was all homers and strikeouts and walks. His career BABIP is the thing of magic, a .247 mark that demonstrates that even when he was hit, those balls didn’t fall for many hits at all. That’s the lowest mark of any qualified Mets pitcher in history.

In the future, I’ll try to use this space at the end of the piece in order to identify the current-day Met that most resembles the legend in question. So is there a modern-day Sid Fernandez lurking around the organization these days? The short answer is no; even with the team’s vaunted collection of aces, no one fits the mold of Hawai’i’s finest pitching product. Everyone on the team who is good and strikes people out also gets ground balls or throws right-handed. The only possibility here is Steven Matz, who has the strikeout rate, repertoire and left arm to do a convincing impersonation. But, of course, he’d have to give up on grounders and stay viable for close to a decade.

No, Fernandez was a unique cat, even among a franchise famous for its myriad excellent hurlers. Not only was he a beacon for Hawai’i in major league baseball and a fascinating and unique type of pitcher, he was also an integral part of the great Mets teams of the 1980s. While history does an excellent job of highlighting the greatness of Doc and Seaver and Koosman and Johan, sometimes a guy like Sid takes a back seat. Sometimes we need to go back and go through the record, and then we can truly appreciate just how unique a guy like El Sid was.

Photo Credit:  Jim Brown-USA TODAY Sports