Pitcher Bobby Ojeda summed up the team when he said: “We were
throwbacks. We were like, ‘Gimme a steak, gimme a fuckin’ beer, gimme a
smoke, and get the fuck out of our way.’” Compared to today’s bland
players, the Mets were monsters, the antithesis of everything the game
has become.

They kept a refrigerator stocked with beer in their locker room at Shea. After games, players stayed late into the night emptying it. Many times the team trainer arrived the next morning to find men passed out all over the floor, half-naked, surrounded by crushed Budweiser cans…

…Although the Mets had pretty much steamrolled most of
their opponents, in the NLCS they ran headlong into a feisty
Houston Astros team who steadfastly refused to believe that
the Mets were the Chosen Ones. For a time all looked lost,
and for a team as powerful as the Mets to fail to go on
to win the World Series would be a failure of mammoth proportion.
So they got serious, or what passed for serious with these
guys, and eventually body slammed the Astros in Game 6 to
take the NLCS pennant. They were off to the World Series…

…The plane ride back to New York turned into a scene of
such drunkenness and debauchery that it became the stuff
of Major League legend. Putting it baldly, the Mets ate
their chartered plane alive and sucked the marrow from its
still-shivering bones…

…Not every member of the squad boozed it up regularly (Gary
Carter was something of a teetotaling publicity hound),
but the men who did more than made up for the others’ lack
of effort. First among the diehard boozeheads was the trio
made up of Danny Heep, Jesse Orosco and Doug Sisk. Together,
they were known as the Scum Bunch. The rest of the dugout
feared their practical jokes (a hot foot given to a coach
on national television was one notable example), with rookie
players and the more straight-laced team members as preferred
targets. Their primary motivation was, according to sportswriter
Jeff Pearlman, “to corrupt as many Mets as possible.” They
were very good at it…

…Darryl Strawberry, who was about as nasty a drunk as you’re
likely to find, decided he wanted to lay down, convinced,
in his stupor, that the seats turned into couches. They
didn’t, but that didn’t stop Straw from breaking
a good half-dozen in his attempt to make them lay flat…Rafael Santana peed down the back of Ed Hearn’s shirt…People did things in the restrooms that defied logic and the laws of physics.

When they landed in New York to the cheers of thousands
of fans, the players looked so horrible that spectators
could only gape in astonishment, but that didn’t stop
Darryl Strawberry from emptying a bottle of Andre Champagne
over the head of Mayor Ed Koch.

The next morning at the team meeting, manager Davey Johnson
reamed the players in a tirade that lasted several minutes,
waving the bill from United in one fist for emphasis.

Then he paused.

“Well,” he said, “do you know what I
think? I think in the next four games you’ll put enough
money in these guys’ pockets to cover this. So fuck
this bullshit.”

The team cheered.

About two weeks later, the Mets beat the Boston Red Sox
to win the World Series

Read more about the hard partying 86 team here in Modern Drunkard Magazine Online.