As Mookies Go & Eras End

Welcome to a special Wednesday edition of Flashback Friday: I Saw The Decade End, a milestone-anniversary salute to the New York Mets of 1969, 1979, 1989 and 1999. Each week, we immerse ourselves in or at least touch upon something that transpired within the Metsian realm 40, 30, 20 or 10 years ago. Amazin' or not, here it comes. In the span of six summer days in 1989, the Mets traded Mookie Wilson and Berke Breathed stopped drawing Bloom County. Both entities had been a staple of my life over the previous nine years. That's it, I thought at the time, the '80s are really ending. I loved Opus the penguin. I loved Mookie the centerfielder. Many fine things happened to me in their time. Yet I was never crazy about the 1980s as a decade. I always I was loitering in them with a visitor's pass. Josh Wilker of Cardboard Gods articulated my feelings on these artificially arranged ten-year periods almost exactly earlier this year when he wrote: I am a citizen of t...