The Keith Hernandez Trade & Me

The Inside Story of How a New York Mets Fan’s Magazine Launch in 1983 Led to the Acquisition of the Franchise-Changing Player

Note: This piece was first published on the website MetsMerized Online in 2009.

It all began in the fall of 1982, just after my 27th birthday. Since my early teenage years, I had dreamed of starting my own magazine about professional sports in New York. I remembered a short-lived magazine called “JOCK NEW YORK,” which published for one year in 1969, long enough to celebrate the Miracle Mets on its cover. It boasted writers like Dick Schaap and Jimmy Breslin. Even the legendary sports broadcaster Howard Cosell penned pieces for JOCK.

At 14, I was already a magazine fanatic and when JOCK folded, I remember saying to myself, “I’m going to publish a magazine like this one day — only better.” After starting my career at the late, great SPORT Magazine (1978–80), and then spending a year editing a magazine for the National Hockey League, I felt it was time to make the leap and start NEW YORK SPORTS Magazine.

With my wife Bea as the publisher and business mind, we decided we would launch our bi-monthly magazine with a May/June issue in April 1983. That would give us about four months to raise some money, find a printer, plan the first issue, assign stories and photographs, sell ads, and all that wonderful and stressful stuff that goes into launching a publication. Then in mid-December, I received a gift from the magazine gods. The Mets made a trade with Cincinnati and brought back my ultimate baseball hero Tom Seaver, who had been banished in a heartbreaking trade in 1977. It didn’t take a lot of soul-searching for me to decide who would be on the magazine’s first cover.

But while the premiere issue would carry a romantic tribute to “Tom Terrific,” we had already planned another Mets-related feature for that launch, a profile on probably the best player on that awful Mets team of the early 1980s — the colorful 25-year-old relief pitcher Neil Allen. The young closer had managed to save 59 games from 1980–82. Even better for a magazine publisher, he was cocky, fun, opinionated, and accessible. Going into the 1983 season, Allen was on the last year of his contract and would…