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They drank, smoked, spit and brawled their way to becoming baseball's most bawdy champions of the last quarter century, trading virtue for the grace of Red Sox mischance. And why would anyone think 18 years later that the 1986 Mets wouldn't catch up to themselves?
Trouble whipped its way around the horn from cocaine binges to barroom dustups, filling police blotters and morning papers with tales of misdeeds that wouldn't have been tolerated on any other team. But these were the Mets, bulletproof in the face of any law because along with the handcuffs came 108 wins.
And in sports, titles always trump the booking log.
Maybe this was why Wally Backman seemed so surprised last week at discovering he should have revealed a police and tax record as long as the Shea Stadium foul pole when the Arizona Diamondbacks promoted him to manager. He was an '86 Met after all. Didn't that speak for itself? Doesn't it always?
So humiliated were the Diamondbacks at unknowingly hiring a manager with a DUI, a conviction stemming from a domestic dispute and a fistful of tax debts that they dumped him four days after he was hired.
"It's obviously a mistake on our part to have made a decision without having done the proper background check," a humiliated Arizona managing partner Ken Kendrick told reporters Friday. "I take full responsibility for that."
Billy Martin should be glad he didn't live to see this day.
Whatever happened to not only being able to punch a marshmallow salesman but also getting a beer commercial where you can make fun of it?
Which isn't to make light of anything Backman has done. Drunken driving and domestic harassment are serious charges, especially when they appear on the same police record. But something has changed in sports. Much as they apparently do at the polls now, morals matter.
After taking responsibility for failing to do even a full LexisNexis on Backman, Kendrick added that had he known his manager's past, he wouldn't have hired him. Fifteen years ago, if confronted with the same information, a Ken Kendrick probably does not make that statement.
Fifteen years ago, Wally Backman goes to spring training as manager of the Diamondbacks. 
"The world has changed in the way the world looks at the world now," baseball historian David Pietrusza said. "When you go back several decades, drinking was just an accepted part of the game."
John McGraw, considered the best manager of his time in the early 1900s, was arrested for assault and violating the prohibition act after a night of drinking and brawling. His defense, according to Pietrusza, was: "I only fight when I'm drunk."
Pietrusza laughed.
"That was that — nothing happened to him," he said. "He wasn't charged and baseball didn't punish him."
Neither did Martin's occasional scrapes with the law seem to affect his ability to be employed through the 1970s and 1980s. Martin, after all, was everybody's favorite, a hard-drinking second baseman who caroused all night even after several teams — most notably the Yankees — put him in charge of their players. It never killed his ability to win 90 games a season.
In many ways, Backman was another Martin, feisty and brawling. At one point, teammate Darryl Strawberry called him "that little redneck" and nobody said he was wrong. Then again, nobody seemed to care because Backman was the heart of a team that tussled and clawed its way through the late 1980s.
Nothing changed when Backman became a minor-league manager, winning league titles despite frequent eruptions and routinely getting kicked out of games. At his last stop, this past year, in Lancaster, Calif., he was suspended twice for on-field explosions. Apparently the Diamondbacks, so deep in debt they won't be able to afford much in the way of talent, were hoping "that little redneck" could be Martin and would will a young team to a few victories.
Who knows? Maybe he could. But times are different, and even though Arizona offered him only a two-year contract worth about $500,000 a year, the morals clause still applies. You can not put a man with a past like Backman's in charge of a team anymore. The days of Billy Martin are over.
So why did the Diamondbacks not learn from the likes of the Blue Jays, for hiring a manager who lied about his war record? Or from Notre Dame, for hiring a coach who lied on his résumé?
Why did they not order a simple background check? Do they have so little money they couldn't afford one?
Then again, does anybody learn from the past? Perhaps oblivious to the lament of former Alabama football coach Mike Price, who failed to sign his contract before the team fired him, Backman did not sign his Diamondbacks contract.
For his four days of work he got nothing.
He's probably still wondering about the lifetime pass you're supposed to get for being part of baseball's most rebellious champion of the last quarter century. Only in today's world, a background check always trumps being an '86 Met.
Someone should have told him.
Les Carpenter: 206-464-2280 or lcarpenter@seattletimes.com
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