The last World Series championship for the New York Mets came in 1986. The man largely responsible for the team's revival during that decade was owner Nelson Doubleday Jr. He passed away on Wednesday, but his legacy lives on.
The 81-year-old Doubleday died of pneumonia at his home in Locust Valley, Long Island, according to the New York Daily News. He purchased the Mets back in 1980 for $21.1 million from the family of former owner Joan Whitney Payson and dug the team out of their horrid slump in the early '80s.
He was the last majority owner to guide the franchise to a World Series championship, and his former partner, Fred Wilpon, is now the controlling owner of the team. After a contentious few years between the two, Doubleday sold his share of the team to Wilpon in 2002 for $135 million.
Doubleday's great-granduncle, Abner Doubleday, is still known today as the mythical founder of baseball. It was once widely believed he invented the game back in 1839, but it's said the evolution of the game was "long and continuous and has no clear, identifiable single origin," according to Jeff Idelson of the Baseball Hall of Fame.
Nonetheless, Doubleday followed in the family's baseball footsteps, and after purchasing the Mets, further invested money into the team to help get them under the right direction and back into relevance. He hired Frank Cashen as general manager in 1980 to build a better team from within. Cashen was responsible for developing players such as Darryl Strawberry, Dwight Gooden, Lenny Dykstra, Kevin Mitchell and Wally Backman as well as trading for Gary Carter, Keith Hernandez and Bobby Ojeda, all of whom were on the 1986 World Series team.
Doubleday also overruled Wilpon in 1998 and allowed then-GM Steve Phillips to trade for catcher Mike Piazza and then sign him to a franchise-record seven-year, $91 million contract.
Doubleday's money came from his ownership of the publishing powerhouse Doubleday and Company, which he sold to Bertelsmann in 1986. It has since merged with Knopf Publishing Group in 2009 to form the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group.
Doubleday is survived by his wife, four daughters and two stepchildren as well as two sisters.
