Rob Gardner carved out a place in Mets history on October 2, 1965, and he did it in the kind of game that barely seems real now.
The Mets were closing out a season in which they had already piled up well over 100 losses, so the focus that final weekend wasn’t on the standings. It was on individual performances, and Gardner delivered one of the strangest and most memorable starts the franchise has ever seen. In the second game of a doubleheader against the Philadelphia Phillies, he went toe-to-toe with Chris Short in a 0-0 tie that lasted 15 innings.
For Gardner, a rookie making just his fourth career start, that outing made up a huge chunk of his year. He logged 15 of his 28 innings in that one day.
Entering the game, he had a 6.92 ERA; by the time he was done, that number had fallen to 3.21. And before that night, he had never worked more than six innings in any appearance.
The crowd at the ballpark was just over 10,000 for that Saturday finale, and the pitching lines were as different as they were impressive. Gardner allowed five hits, walked two and struck out seven over his 15 innings. Short was even more overpowering in his own way, giving up nine hits and three walks while piling up 18 strikeouts.
Gardner’s time in New York didn’t last long, which is part of why the performance is easy to overlook more than 50 years later. He pitched regularly in 1966 as both a starter and reliever, then was traded to the Chicago Cubs in the middle of the 1967 season for Bob Hendley.
He showed up again in New York baseball circles in 1969 when he was traded to the Yankees, though he didn’t appear in a major league game until the next year. His best season came in 1972 with the Yankees after a short stop with the Oakland Athletics.
The strangest part of all is that the game didn’t even count in the standings. The Mets and Phillies replayed it from the beginning the next day as part of another doubleheader to finish the season.
Still, the numbers stayed on the books. And Gardner’s 15-inning outing remains a Mets record that no one will top.
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