In Praise of Craig Swan

I went looking for the worst Mets Opening Day lineups I’ve personally watched (to compare this year’s disaster), and it took me back to that oh-so-sweet era of roughly 1978 through 1982, when the Amazins’ lost 96, 99, 95, 62 games in the strike-shortened year, and 97 games. The team always cobbled together a lineup that had a few up-and-comers and a few failing stars (remember the Willie Montanez deal?), and the starting pitching was always a disaster. Yet two of those four Opening Day assignments went to Craig Swan – a gritty, oft-injured rightly saddled early with “next Seaver” status and the worst set up Mets teams between 1973 and 1986.

Yet Swannie was a terrific starter who deserves far more credit in the Mets’ justifiably lionized pantheon of famous arms.

And he’d easily be the Mets’ second best starter after Johan Santana on this year’s club. Oh, if we only had Craig Swan! (You don’t hear that every day).

Swannie was a fireballing right-hander out of Van Nuys when the Mets took him in the third round of the ‘72 amateur draft, and mixing a mid-90s fastball with a tricky slider, he had a September cup of coffee with the ‘73 NL Champonship squad. After middling success in the ‘76 and ‘77 campaigns, Swan moved to the top of the rotation in ‘78 and posted a 9-6 mark with league-leading 2.43 ERA. The next year, he led the NL with a 2.54 strikeout-to-walk ratio en route to a 14-13 mark with a 3.29 ERA in 251 innings on baseball’s worst team.

Then the injuries came in, and Swan’s time became limited – though his ERA generaly remained under 3.50 for the duration. On the 97-loss 1982 team, Swan had his last full season – 11-7, 3.35 – and finished second to Joe Morgan for NL Comeback Player of the Year. He retired with the hometown Angels in 1984.

So which of those Swan-led teams had the worst opening day lineup? I’d have to go with 1980 by a hair over 1979:

There was literally no hope in that lineup – it was a veteran squad, and a very bad veteran squad. By the next year, Mookie Wilson and Hubie Brooks had made the team and you knew things were changing for the better.

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