The 1986 World Series: Mets, Red Sox and the Tenth Inning of Game Six

By 4Baseball Staff · November 5, 2026 · 10 min read

How the 108-win Mets and the 95-win Red Sox reached the 1986 World Series, what happened in the tenth inning of Game Six and why Game Seven mattered more than the grounder everyone remembers.

With two out and nobody on base in the bottom of the tenth inning of Game Six, the Boston Red Sox led the New York Mets 5-3 and needed one more out to win their first World Series since 1918. They did not get it. Within minutes the Mets had tied the game with three singles and a wild pitch, and then Mookie Wilson's slow ground ball rolled under the glove of first baseman Bill Buckner and the winning run scored. The Mets won 6-5, and two nights later they won Game Seven and the championship.

The 1986 World Series is remembered for that single play, which is unfair to both teams. The Mets won 108 games in the regular season, the most in the major leagues, and had already survived one of the most grinding League Championship Series ever played. The Red Sox had come back from a 3-1 deficit against the California Angels to reach the Series at all. The final result, four games to three, is the sort of outcome that two evenly matched teams produce.

This article puts the Buckner play in context: the seasons that produced the teams, the five games that came before, the inning itself and the seventh game that decided the title. Every record and standing comes from the historical record through the 2025 season. Game-by-game scores and play-by-play details come from the widely documented history of the Series, and where a detail is disputed the article says so.

Two very different regular seasons

The Mets finished 108-54, 21 and a half games ahead of the second-place Philadelphia Phillies at 86-75, a gap that tells you how one-sided the National League East was in 1986. The Red Sox went 95-66 and won the American League East by a more modest margin over the New York Yankees at 90-72. In the West, the Houston Astros (96-66) and the California Angels (92-70) won their divisions and became the Mets' and Red Sox's playoff opponents.

The two league-wide narratives of the year were pitching and power. The American League's Most Valuable Player and Cy Young Award winner was the same man, Roger Clemens of Boston, who won 24 games and posted a 2.48 earned run average. In the National League the Cy Young Award went to Houston's Mike Scott, who struck out 306 batters and led the league with a 2.22 ERA, while Philadelphia's Mike Schmidt won the MVP with 37 home runs and 119 runs batted in. Wade Boggs of the Red Sox won the American League batting title at .357, and Don Mattingly of the Yankees led the majors with 238 hits.

The scoring environment was ordinary: the historical record shows 4.41 runs per team per game across 26 major league clubs and 0.91 home runs per team per game, with 5.87 strikeouts per team per game. Those are the conditions in which a two-run lead in the late innings feels safe, which is the background to the story that follows.

The 1986 leaders: who ruled the statistics

The historical record lists the league leaders for the year, and they show a season in which the best individual numbers mostly belonged to players on other clubs.

Of the 16 leaders in the table, only two, Clemens and Boggs, played for a World Series club. The rest were scattered across the other 24 major league teams, which is a reminder that October is decided by the clubs that get there and not by the leaders of the regular season. Two other points are worth a note: Toronto reliever Mark Eichhorn posted a 1.72 earned run average, lower than Clemens's 2.48, but in 157 innings he fell short of the 162 needed to qualify for the title, and the Rookies of the Year were Jose Canseco of Oakland, who drove in 117 runs, and Todd Worrell of St. Louis, who saved 36 games.

The league championship series that nearly ended both seasons

Neither team reached the World Series easily. In the American League, the Red Sox played the Angels, who led the best-of-seven series three games to one. California was one strike from the pennant in Game 5 when Boston's Dave Henderson hit a home run to keep the game alive. The Red Sox won that game in extra innings and then won Games 6 and 7 to take the series 4-3.

The Mets faced Mike Scott's Astros and had a harder time than a 108-win team should have. Scott beat them twice in the series, in Games 1 and 4, which left the Mets desperate to avoid a Game 7 against him. They won Game 6 in 16 innings to end the series 4-2, one of the longest and most dramatic postseason games on record, and with it any need to face Scott again. The Mets reached the World Series exhausted but alive.

Both clubs, in other words, arrived having used up their margin for error. The Series would be decided by teams that had been one inning from elimination in the round before.

Games 1 to 5: Boston ahead, Mets level, Boston ahead again

The format was the same as today's: seven games, with the first two and last two at the home park of the team with home-field advantage. In 1986 that was the National League's Shea Stadium, so the Mets hosted Games 1, 2, 6 and 7 and Boston hosted Games 3, 4 and 5 at Fenway Park. The first five games went as follows.

Boston won the first two games in New York behind strong starting pitching, including a one-run Game 1 in which the Mets lost on a ground ball that went through second baseman Tim Teufel's legs. Tim Teufel's error in that game is often forgotten, which shows how a Series can turn on a fielder's mistake more than once. The Mets then won both games at Fenway, with Gary Carter hitting two home runs in Game 4, and Boston won Game 5 to take a lead of three games to two back to New York.

Game 6: what actually happened in the tenth

The game was tied 3-3 after nine innings. In the top of the tenth, Henderson led off with a home run, Boggs doubled and Marty Barrett singled him home, and Boston led 5-3. The Mets retired the first two hitters in the bottom half: Wally Backman flied out and Keith Hernandez flied out, which left the home team with two outs and nobody on base.

What followed was a sequence of singles. Gary Carter singled, Kevin Mitchell singled and Ray Knight singled, which scored Carter and made it 5-4. Boston manager John McNamara replaced Calvin Schiraldi with Bob Stanley, and Stanley threw a wild pitch that scored Mitchell and tied the game at 5-5, moving Knight to second. Mookie Wilson then hit a slow ground ball up the first-base line. It rolled through Buckner's legs, Knight scored from second, and the Mets won 6-5.

The details that are most often misreported are these. The error did not tie the game, because the wild pitch had already done that. The Mets had needed three consecutive hits and a wild pitch to get to that point, from a position in which they were down to their last out. The ball Wilson hit was slow, and Buckner played with well-documented ankle problems. Whether a healthier fielder would have gotten the out is a question that cannot be answered, and whether Wilson would have beaten the throw is debated.

Why a two-run lead with two outs is not safe

Baseball has no clock, so a team that is ahead has to get the last out; there is no way to run out the time. In the tenth inning of Game 6 Boston was one out from winning, which in the arithmetic of the sport means three outs in the inning had been reduced to one. That is as close as a team can be to a win without finishing it, and yet the offense still has everything it needs: a batter at the plate and no limit on the number of baserunners it can put on before the third out.

The chain that tied the game illustrates the point. To erase a two-run lead the Mets needed two runs while keeping the third out away. Carter, Mitchell and Knight supplied three singles, the last of which scored a run. Stanley's wild pitch supplied the next run without a hit. That sequence is not especially likely, but it is not unusual either; over a long season, teams do blow leads in the ninth or tenth inning, and a short series gives their rivals more chances to do it.

This is also why analysts treat one-out-away stories with caution. A team's chance of winning in that position is high, but not so high that a bad inning is impossible. The error by Buckner did not turn a safe win into a loss. It ended a game that was already in danger.

Putting the Buckner play in context

Buckner finished his career with 2,715 hits, 498 doubles, 174 home runs and a .289 average, and he won the National League batting title in 1980. His 1986 season for Boston was a good one: .267 with 18 home runs and 102 runs batted in. He played in two World Series, in 1974 with the Dodgers and in 1986. Whatever else he did, he is remembered for one inning.

That memory is incomplete in two ways. First, the Red Sox still had Game 7. Even with the error, Boston's season did not end on that play; the team that led the Series three games to two lost the last two games. Second, McNamara's decision to leave Buckner at first base rather than substitute a defensive replacement, as the team had done in earlier games, was the subject of a long-running argument. Managers make such decisions in uncertain circumstances, and the choice would have drawn little notice if Wilson's ball had been fielded cleanly.

Boston's fans turned Buckner into a symbol of a championship drought that stretched from 1918 and ended only in 2004. That is how a single error becomes a national story: it fits a narrative about a franchise with a long wait. The facts of the play do not support putting the whole weight of the series on one player. For the other end of that wait, see the account of the 2004 Red Sox.

Game 7: the Mets come from behind again

The seventh game was originally scheduled for October 26, and rain postponed it for a day. Boston took a 3-0 lead in the early innings with Bruce Hurst, who had won Games 1 and 5, as its starter. The Mets tied the game in the sixth inning and moved ahead in the seventh when Ray Knight hit a home run. They added to the lead later in the game, and the game ended 8-5. Knight was named the Series Most Valuable Player, and the Mets had their second championship, 17 years after their first in 1969.

Game 7 is the better answer to the question of why the Mets won. The Red Sox led, lost the lead against a team that had gone through the wringer in two straight rounds, and could not get it back. The Mets had trailed the Series two games to none and again three games to two, and each time they came back.

What the two clubs carried into the next decade

The Mets did not win another pennant for 14 years. The 1986 team remains the high-water mark of the franchise in terms of regular-season victories, and its 108 wins are the franchise record. Boston returned to the postseason several times in the following years, including 1988 and 1990, but did not win a Series until 2004. The long gap is why the 1986 loss is so closely tied to the identity of the club.

For readers who want other Series shaped by a single inning, the 1975 Series between the Red Sox and Reds has a Game 6 that is routinely compared with 1986. The 1991 Series featured five one-run games, and the 1960 Series ended with a home run that lifted the Pirates over a Yankees team that outscored them across the seven games.

Common questions

Who won the 1986 World Series? The New York Mets won over the Boston Red Sox, four games to three.

Was Buckner's error the last play of Game 6? Yes. Wilson's ground ball let Ray Knight score the winning run, and the game ended 6-5 in 10 innings. It did not end the Series, which went to Game 7.

Who was the World Series MVP? Ray Knight of the Mets.

Did Buckner lose the Series? The Red Sox lost Game 6 when the ball went through his legs, but the game was already tied by the wild pitch, and Boston then had to lose Game 7 as well. A fair summary is that the error decided one game and a series of other events decided the Series.

How good were these teams? The Mets were 108-54 and the Red Sox 95-66. The historical record shows the Mets as NL East champions by 21.5 games over the Phillies.

Where to go next

If this account made you want to follow the next postseason, the playoffs and World Series topic page tracks the current round. For another Series that ended with a late rally in its final game, read about the 2001 Series, and use the scores page for results from the current season.