A brief history of the Mets' eleven-game winning streaks

By defeating the Atlanta Braves yesterday afternoon at Citi Field, the New York Mets tied a franchise record with their eleventh straight win. It’s an impressive streak, considering the absence of David Wright for the grand majority of it, Travis d’Arnaud and Jerry Blevins for part of it, and Zack Wheeler, Vic Black, Josh Edgin, and Bobby Parnell for all of it. It’s also an encouraging streak, considering Major League Baseball’s current playoff format. There’s a lot of baseball left to play, but the Mets are off to a start good enough to keep them relevant for quite a while, especially since they won these eleven games against the Phillies, Marlins, and Braves, all of whom are in the Mets’ division.

Let’s take a look back at the other four times the Mets have won eleven games in a row.

1969

The Miracle Mets did not get off to a fantastic start. As the month of May was coming to a close, they already had a few losing streaks under their belts, and they were only at or above .500 a handful of times through their first 41 games. They got to 18-18 on the season by beating Atlanta on May 21 but dropped five straight after that to fall to 18-23. They were nine games out of first place in their division.

That’s when the streak began. On May 28, 1969, they beat the Padres 1-0 in an eleven-inning game at home. They then swept the Giants in three games at home, a series that included one walkoff win of its own, swept the Dodgers in three games, a series that ended with a 1-0 victory in fifteen innings. They flew to San Diego and beat the Padres three more times and won their eleventh in San Francisco. The Mets were 29-23, and somehow they were still seven games out of first place. They ultimately closed that gap—and then some—with some dominant stretches of baseball as they won their division and went on to win the franchise’s first World Series.

1972

The 1972 season did not begin as planned. The first two weeks of games were cancelled as players were on strike from the first of April through the thirteenth. And on April 2, beloved Mets manager Gil Hodges died suddenly of a heart attack. With Yogi Berra as their new manager and Rusty Staub in the fold after a trade, the Mets got off to a very good start.

With a 14-7 record in the first twenty-one games, they traded for Willie Mays on May 11 and won eleven in a row from May 12 through 21. At home, they swept the Giants in a three-game series—which saw Mays make his Mets debut with a home run, a couple of runs scored, and a couple of walks on May 14—and swept Expos in a four-game series. They traveled to Philadelphia and beat the Phillies four straight times, too, and had a 25-7 record with a six-game lead in the division. But they didn’t play nearly as well in June and July, and the ‘72 Mets went just 58-66 the rest of the way to finish the year in third place in the division with an 83-73 record. Again, they weren’t bad, but after a start as good as theirs, the rest of the season was a disappointment.

1986

Having gone 2-3 in their first five games, the 1986 Mets established themselves very early by winning their next eleven. There were some close games in those eleven, but the Mets blew out the competition a few times. They swept the Phillies in three games and the Pirates in two, both at Shea Stadium, before beating the Cardinals four times in St. Louis and the Braves twice in Atlanta to get to 13-3 on the season before losing a game to the Braves to end the streak.

Photo: MLB Photos/Stringer

After the eleventh win, the Mets were five games up in the division. They maintained that lead for a couple of weeks and increased it by early June before taking off and running away with the division. Like the ‘69 Mets, they were dominant and went on to win a World Series, but the eleven-game winning streak was their longest.

1990

The ‘90 Mets probably get overlooked a bit in team history, which isn’t entirely unreasonable since they were so good in 1986 and 1988. But the team went 91-71 on the season, which matched the record of the National Least West champion Cincinnati Reds but left the Mets four games behind the National League East champion Pittsburgh Pirates.

These Mets had a 31-29 record before their eleven-game winning streak began in the middle of June. Having won the first game of a series at home against the Pirates and lost the second, the Mets’ winning streak started with their defeat of the Pirates on June 17. They swept the Cardinals in two games at home and won three more against the Phillies before winning a three-game series in St. Louis and taking the first two games of a three-game series against the Reds at home. At the start of the streak, the Mets were six games back in the division. At the end, they were tied for first place.

From there, they alternated between first and second place for a bit before settling into second for a while. They reclaimed first place briefly in early September, too, leading the division by a half-game after a victory on September 3, but they fell to 3.5 games back with a five-game skid that included three losses to the Pirates in Pittsburgh. That pretty much did them in.