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Sign up NowThe TONE and the timbre on the other end of the telephone was much thinner than it had been 35 years earlier, back when it seemed Davey Johnson’s wasn’t just the loudest — and smartest — voice in the room, but in all of baseball.
“I’ve taken a lot of hell for this for a lot of years,” Johnson was saying on the line from Winter Park, Fla., where he’d retired after a long and colorful and wonderfully successful baseball life. He was already experiencing the ire of the health woes that would finally take him Friday night at age 82. Weakly, he said, “I had the nerve to tell the world I thought we were pretty damned good.”
It was more than that, of course. On the morning of Feb. 26, 1986, Johnson gathered his team around him in the clubhouse at St. Petersburg’s Huggins-Stengel Field. It was the first time the 1986 Mets would be together as a full unit. There was already terrific excitement about the Mets who, under Johnson, had risen from the ashes of a seven-year purgatory to finish second in 1984 and ’85. They were expected to compete for their first pennant in 13 years.
Manager Davey Johnson of the New York Mets looks on from near the dugout during a Major League Baseball game against the Pittsburgh Pirates at Three Rivers Stadium. Getty ImagesTo Davey Johnson, that was a preposterously low bar to set.
