When he came off the mound on Sept. 30, 1988 after finishing off his eighth complete game and 20th win of the season, David Cone high-fived his teammates and walked into the home dugout unaware of what awaited him. Minutes earlier, as the ninth inning wound down, a fan in the stands decided that he was so thrilled with the All-Star’s performance that he just had to let him know about it, immediately. And so he did. Waiting for Cone in front of the tunnel to the clubhouse was not Cone’s pitching coach Mel Stottlemyre, nor a teammate lagging behind the line, but a former President of the United States. Looming in the shadows like Nosferatu, surrounded by his personal security service, with an outstretched hand and a burning desire to talk pitching with His Favorite Hurler, was Richard Milhous Nixon.
“It made you feel important,” David Cone told me, remembering his days on Nixon’s beloved Mets. “If these kinds of people are watching us or they care about us, it certainly made you feel that way.” If there was one thing connecting every player who came across the former President during the years he spent lingering in the orange seats of Shea Stadium’s lower deck, it’s that every one of them came away from their interactions feeling special. Not always good, exactly, but at the very least like someone whose job tossing a baseball was significant enough to win the attention of and an occasional handshake from Richard Nixon.
In perhaps the only scenario more intense than trying to wrap up a complete game, Cone suddenly found himself the subject of Nixon’s fascination. The former president congratulated him on his 20th win and told him what a joy he was to watch every fifth day. “I really didn’t know what to say at that point,” Cone said, sounding as if he was right back at that bottom step. “I remember saying something along the lines of him being our good luck charm, and You better keep coming out. It was the first thing that popped into my head, really. I was kind of floored by the whole thing.” They exchanged goodbyes and Cone went back to celebrating the highest point of his young career. Nixon, for his part, became another Mets fan riding the high of meeting one of his favorite players, and eagerly anticipating the next day’s duel between Sid Fernandez and Jose DeLeon’s Cardinals on the ride home.
The story of Richard Nixon and the New York Mets goes far beyond one uncanny interaction in the fall of 1988. As a matter of fact, it goes further back in time than the team itself. It could be argued that the Mets are one of the most accursed franchises in the sport; it is inarguable that, for the first half of the team’s six decades of existence, America’s most infamous president was a constant presence around the organization. Not that one has anything to do with the other, but it just seems worth pointing it out.