A Season to Forget : The ’93 Mets Were So Bad, Even Dwight Gooden Was Ready to Give Up

The 1993 New York Mets lost a major league-high 103 games, but they did it with style.

They lost with sprays of bleach bursting in air and bombs blasting on clubhouse floors and outside players’ car doors.

They began the season with rape allegations hanging overhead and a boycott of the media, watched Vince Coleman outrage both coasts with an explosive-device incident that injured a child outside Dodger Stadium, and had to go on a six-game winning streak merely to finish the season with 59 victories--their fewest since Casey Stengel was their manager and was moved to say, “Can’t anybody here play this game?”

And maybe most telling of all, the 1993 New York Mets had their proudest, most popular player wondering if he shouldn’t get out.

“I won’t lie to you, it did cross my mind,” Dwight Gooden said the other day. “I never thought it would get to that point. But last year--especially when you come into the ballpark and you see guys where you don’t know if they really care or if they even have any pride.

“You just say, ‘Man, I don’t know if I want to go through this again.’ ”

The list of high-profile players--from Bobby Bonilla to Darryl Strawberry to Gregg Jefferies--who have found playing in New York too much to bear is long and continually growing.

But it had never included Gooden, not during his drug-rehabilitation stint in 1987, not during his shoulder problems, not even when his good friend Strawberry was allowed to sign with the Dodgers after the 1990 season.

Gooden arrived in New York in 1984 as a 20-year-old and has maintained a degree of dignity that has kept him free from the harshest criticism and allowed him to experience the best of playing for the Mets.

“I could have never imagined the things that took place (last season),” he said. “Something happened and you’d say, ‘Well, it can’t get any worse.’ Then the next week, something else. It went on and on like that.”

After Coleman’s incident in L.A., a firecracker was thrown near a group of reporters in the Met clubhouse. And after that, bleach was sprayed onto a reporter.

Pitcher Bret Saberhagen, who has been injured for most of his two years with the Mets, later acknowledged responsibility for both incidents.

“Every day I averted a controversy in the locker room, I was ahead of the game,” said Jay Horowitz, longtime Met public relations director. “It was an embarrassment for everybody. I was embarrassed, Fred (Wilpon, the team president) was embarrassed.”

Wilpon was embarrassed enough to denounce Coleman, who was eventually traded to the Kansas City Royals for Kevin McReynolds, and Saberhagen, and to declare that the Mets would not tolerate any more such behavior.

Late in the season, Wilpon rehired Joe McIlvaine, who most recently had run the San Diego Padres, to clean house. McIlvaine let Howard Johnson, Eddie Murray and Sid Fernandez go as free agents last winter, tried unsuccessfully to trade Bonilla and Saberhagen, and has assembled a group of young, unproven players.

Gooden is the last remaining Met from the 108-victory, championship season in 1986, or even the National League East title season of 1988. He says that, since a talk with McIlvaine last winter, he no longer is wondering whether it would be better to leave.

But he is wistful for the old days.

“I’ll tell you, it happened quickly,” Gooden said. “I remember after the season was over in ‘86, I was talking with my father. I figured we’d be one of the top teams like in the days where Oakland had those great teams in consecutive seasons, like the Yankees.”

Gooden, 29, says he recognizes that, as an elder statesman among no-names, he has a responsibility.

“There has to be somebody here to let them know that it’s better than the last couple of years, somebody that’s been there through the good times as well as the not-so-good times,” Gooden said. “Just to be that shoulder that they can lean on and let them know that New York isn’t all bad.”

The loud, talented team of Keith Hernandez, Ron Darling, Gary Carter, Strawberry and Lenny Dykstra now is a quiet team of Jeremy Burnitz, Jeff Kent, Todd Hundley and Ryan Thompson. And they will misbehave at their own risk.

Wilpon, who had been a very low-profile president, reiterated the front office’s resolve with a speech to the team on the first day of spring training.

“He basically sat down and told us, ‘Hey, no more screwing around,’ ” Saberhagen said. “ ‘When you guys are at the ballpark, your butts are mine. If you guys are going to act out of line, there’s going to be some serious consequences in the future.’

“He said, ‘If I’d have taken this stand last year, your butt would have been in a sling.’ He pretty much used me as an example, but rightfully so.”

Saberhagen, who had never had major problems before last year, says he is kind of surprised to still be with the team, but hopes to have a better relationship with sportswriters.

“The incidents with the firecrackers and stuff, I was just trying to loosen up the guys,” Saberhagen said. “When things are going bad, you try to keep everybody loose. . . . You try to make things go a little smoother.

“Last year, a couple of practical jokes didn’t go over too well. This year, there’s been a couple of chances where I’ve had an opportunity to pull a couple of practical jokes--I’m trying to stay away from them.

“It’s something where you’ve got to learn from your mistakes, especially when they backfire in a big way. A lot of people were upset with me, I was upset with myself. But for them, they can go home and go to sleep and forget about it. I’ve got to go home and I’ve got to live with it for the rest of my career.”

In a sign of how serious the issue is being taken, Wilpon suspended Saberhagen for the first six games of this season.

Gooden said Saberhagen’s actions were magnified by the sour mood of the clubhouse and media reports--and were not the signs of a malcontent. If the team had been winning, Gooden said, Saberhagen’s jokes would have been laughable.

“The thing with Vince Coleman, I think, was uncalled for and there’s no excuse for that,” Gooden said. “But Bret’s incident with the bleach thing, I think it was more of a joke. I remember when we had Roger McDowell, he used to do stuff that was 10 times worse than that.”

But Gooden cannot explain the losing so easily. The Mets started the 1993 season under then-Manger Jeff Torborg excited about their potential, believing that the 90 losses in 1992 were an aberration.

“I thought we had a good chance,” Gooden said. “I figured if myself, Saberhagen and Fernandez were healthy, and we had Murray, Coleman, Hojo, Bobby Bonilla . . . just on paper, we should have been right there.

“Things just happened. We got out of the box bad, and you could say we had some injuries, but we were playing bad before the injuries occurred. I guess it was just a bad mix and it definitely was time for changes. So hopefully now, being picked to finish at the bottom, maybe we can reverse it again.”

Said McIlvaine: “It seemed like Pandora opened her box last year and everything that could have gone wrong went wrong. Both on and off the field. You forget the Dodgers had one a couple of years ago like that, too, where everything went wrong.

“You just hope that was the bottom of the abyss and hope you can climb back out of it.”

Torborg was fired last May and disciplinarian Dallas Green was hired. As the team unraveled before his eyes, Green watched who handled the pressure well, who did not, and planned for this year--and beyond.

“I’m a head and heart guy--I don’t think you can survive in this game unless you’ve got that, unless you’re just a great, great talent,” Green said. “And unfortunately, baseball has come to the point where there’s not a lot of those great talents. There’s a lot of people playing this game who really haven’t earned the right to play it in the major leagues.

“We had a group of people that didn’t mix well together, and unfortunately, the frustrations kept building and building and they got away from individuals and they got away from the team. And we’ve tried to eliminate that in the winter time and also in our preparation work this spring.

“When you lose 103 games, it’s easy to throw your hands up and say everybody’s a loser. But everybody on the 1993 Mets weren’t losers, and they cared very much about winning.”

Said Gooden: “Dallas said, ‘Well, if we can finish .500, that’s great.’ But when you’ve been winning your whole career, (winning is) the only thing you want to do.”