RIP, Frank Cashen

By TheNaturalMevs on July 1, 2014

If you don’t know Frank Cashen’s name, you should.

He was one of the finest baseball architects of all-time, crafting what we believe was one of the greatest teams ever assembled, the 1986 Mets. We first learned of Frank Cashen while reading The Bad Guys Won by Jeff Pearlman (perhaps one of the best and most underrated baseball books ever written).

Cashen passed away today at age 88. If it were not for his vision, we would have never known of Mookie Wilson, Lenny Dykstra, Darryl Strawberry, Dwight Gooden, Gary Carter, Ron Darling, Jesse Orosco, Roger McDowell, Keith Hernandez, Ray Knight and all the various other guys who made that team so special.

The Mets of the mid-to-late 80’s didn’t win the three or four titles that many thought they would, but when Cashen arrived in 1980 the Mets were the laughingstock of baseball. By the time he left, they were a feared team that no other franchise wanted to cross in a postseason series.