We here at Brokelyn are well-known partisans of the New York Metropolitans baseball club, for a couple of reasons. One is because we were born this way. The other is that we’ve got a high tolerance for pain. So it certainly piqued our interest to learn that Brooklyn-based director Heather Quinlan is raising money to put the finishing touches on her documentary about the 1986 Mets, one of the best and most interesting baseball teams of the modern age. Have you ever wanted to see Lenny Dykstra AND Paul Auster star in the same movie? Then throw her some cash!
The movie, called ’86 Mets: Lords of Flushing gives the documentary treatment to the team full of drunken, fisticuffs enthusiast, airplane-destroying World Series champs who captured the city’s imagination (and popularized the rally cap) like few teams before and after. The purpose of the Kickstarter is to pay for some travel costs to talk to a few players, some equipment and editing costs and most importantly of all, the rights to use footage from the 1986 season. After all, while you could use this R.B.I. Baseball recreation of Game 6, the real thing is much better.
Quinlan isn’t just any fly-by-night documentarian, the proof being her excellent and entertaining documentary on New York City’s fight over bicycling. The documentary itself will be made up of both players central to the team’s mythology, like Daryl Strawberry, Kevin Mitchell, Mookie Wilson (and Bill Buckner) as well as interviews with famous fans and journalists who’ve covered the team, like Paul Auster and Jeff Pearlman. Considering the problems facing the Mets right now, we say that giving Quinlan a few bucks will probably contribute more happiness in the immediate timeframe than buying a ticket to a game.