The thing that’s holding up the Ishii deal, according to Fran Healy, is “a contractual matter”. He said it like he had a scoop.
And you miss MSG.
Mets By The Numbers lists a handful of other recidivist Mets:
David Cone
Jim Gosger
Clint Hurdle
Josias Manzanillo
Ray Sadecki
Jeff Tam
Mike Birkbeck is an asterisk unto himself. His two brief stints with the Mets in ’92 and ’95 sandwiched two years as Brave property. Atlanta never called him up, proving that anything the Mets could do twice, the Braves were smart enough to never do at all. After pitching in a bit of hard luck his second time around, the Mets sold him to a team in Japan.
Since I’ve never really believed that everybody’s entitled to his or her own opinion unless it’s also mine, I am compelled to dispute and grind to dust your assertion that the reacquisition of Dave Kingman was a shrugger. He was a huge story (granted, as much for his mood as for his bat) on his return and led the NL in home runs in his second second year. But you stood up for Craig Swan when it counted.
I’m surprised you left out David Cone among the two-timers, particularly as we witnessed, side by side (in reality, not just memory), his final Shea Stadium pitch, a strike to Jeff Bagwell to end a second-inning threat. We knew he was done, but we didn’t know he was done done when he didn’t come out for the third. Cone’s 2003 return was a Leiter-Franco production, which may be the reason you blotted it from memory.
Greg McMichael was the linchpin of the effective early 1998 bullpen. As soon as he got traded, everybody moved up a notch and couldn’t handle it. Rojas reverted to seed. Bohanon had the shakes. Jeff Tam, who would boomerang later on, wasn’t ready. So the Mets retrieving McMichael in the same year was necessary. But like Brenda ‘n Eddie, he couldn’t go back to the greasers.
With the exception of maybe Jorgy who started at first most of 1980 and hit a game-winning slam against the Dodgers in the tenth that June in a series in which there had been some bad blood between the two teams, nobody actually seems to have tangibly topped his first Mets tenure by having a second. Even Jorgensen wound up lingering, making a living as Kingman’s defensive replacement from ’81 to ’83 until Keith Hernandez rendered them both obsolete.
DeJean and Looper made me wish I wasn’t watching MSG this afternoon (6-2 lead in the eighth, 6-9 deficit in the ninth), but Eric Valent made everything better with a three-run homer to win it 10-9. We’re still oh and oh.
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