One can debate endlessly about the brightest Mets moment. Many would opt for the final out of the 1969 World Series, when the impossible dream suddenly came true. Others would contend it was the club's birth itself which filled the intolerable National League void in New York City back in 1962, and still others might pick the improbable 1986 championship comeback against the Boston Red Sox spiced by Bill Buckner's lamentable gaffe. But when it comes to the darkest moment of ball club history, there is no debate and certainly no hesitation in choosing. That tragic episode is the one that arrived on the eve of the 1972 season, when beloved fifth-year manager Gil Hodges was suddenly and sadly felled by a fatal heart attack.

Even if Hodges had not created a true Mets miracle in the autumn of 1969, he would still have been sorely missed. Few figures in the game have exuded such leadership on the field, inspired such confidence and respect in the clubhouse and on the bench, or generated such love from the grandstand partisans. But given what Hodges had, in fact, done for team fortunes in recent seasons, the sudden loss was all the more devastating to everyone in the New York Mets' family.

The ball club didn't handle the aftermath of the tragic death very well at all. The front office alienated many of Hodges' devoted fans almost overnight when they too hastily announced that Yogi Berra had been signed up as a replacement and that the club was already preparing for business as usual. Perhaps it was a necessary front-office stance to ward off a potential paralysis that might well have gripped the stunned franchise. But what appeared as callousness on the surface didn't sit very well with ball fans all around the city and the country. It all seemed so cold and impersonal when the day after 36,000 mourning fans had attended the wake in Hodges' neighborhood in Brooklyn, the ball club excitedly announced it had just closed a deal to obtain Rusty Staub, Canada's first baseball hero, from the rival Montreal Expos. And once the season unfolded, things went from bad to worse on the field of play.

While the club enjoyed one of its fastest-ever starts under Berra, injuries soon wiped out any hopes of a serious pennant revival. Newcomers Staub and Willie Mays made contributions, but Jim Fregosi (obtained in the unpopular trade for Nolan Ryan the previous winter) immediately flopped at third. Berra's first club won the same number of games as the last two editions under Gil Hodges. But that fact was accompanied at year's end by very little celebrating anywhere around the environs of Shea Stadium. The Mets' ball club may have been due for some unraveling under even the best of circumstances in the third season of the seventies. But with the inspiring Gil Hodges still on the job, it likely would not have been quite so painful or somber a scene.

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