Second base, like the beverage-branded seating section [1] that overlooks it at Citi Field, has a new occupant. Neil Walker, unlike Ben Zobrist, turns out to be the real thing.
The former Pirate did not get a tour of our leafy suburbs [2]. The Mets don’t care where he lives as long as he shows up for work somewhere between short and first. Walker’s a sound second baseman, a solid hitter and not owed more than one year’s arbitration-eligible salary. Zobrist can enjoy his proximity to Joe Maddon and Nashville [3] all he wants from now through 2019. We have indeed moved on, not just from the free agent we didn’t get, but from the pitcher we had forever.
Jon Niese was the price that had to be paid to Pittsburgh to obtain Walker [4]. Niese was signed to a team-friendly contract [5] in 2012. The team it’s friendly to now is the Pirates.
It’s a little strange to consider Niese without the Mets and the Mets without Niese. For so long they went together like C&C Cola and Bachman Cheese Jax — not the most glamorous of brands, but presumably they’d get the job done if that’s what your mom stuck in your sixth-grade lunch bag (when I was 12, I had a friend who brought those items to school every single day and he made it to 13 just fine).
Of course the Mets very recently earned eye-level shelf placement and Niese was a part of that. He had to take on a new role to make himself extraordinarily useful, and he did. Niese was a reliable lefty specialist in the postseason and a valuable contributor to the first pennant-winner here since the turn of the century. I would have loved to have kept tapping that newfound equity, considering the one out you get in the seventh or eighth is often the tipping point of a given ballgame, but his contract wasn’t friendly enough to justify ongoing specialization.
Before Niese’s brief rebirth out of the bullpen, he made 177 starts for the Mets between 2008 and 2015. Several of them were stellar, many of them were adequate, enough of them grew frustrating enough in the middle so that you could resist growing attached to the most accomplished homegrown lefty starter the Mets had produced since Jon Matlack [6]. The Mets didn’t produce many homegrown lefty starters of tenure after Matlack, so Niese is sort of a default victor of that title.
Jon plugged away, as best as we could tell. He wasn’t the most fascinating postgame deconstructor of his outings [7] and his in-dugout tantrums seemed to speak volumes. A fan could be forgiven for losing patience [8] with Niese. Niese could be forgiven for not blossoming in an uninterrupted fashion. He did throw a lot of innings for a lot of clubs that weren’t going a lot of places. By the time they were stepping up, it was primarily via pitching younger and stronger. Niese, who quietly turned the same age as the Mets’ most recent world championship during the last World Series, became that browser the URL you sought no longer supported.
Niese was promoted to the Mets amid the last pennant race of their Shea lives [9]. He and current free agents Daniel Murphy and Bobby Parnell — all of whom played at the stadium that no longer exists — stuck it out longer than anybody who wasn’t David Wright. Now Jon’s gone, Murph’s clearly not coming back [10] and, unless there’s a minor league Spring Training deal issued, Parnell is going to be a former Met, too. Behind Wright in the longevity pecking order now are Jenrry Mejia (tendered a contract but still PED-suspended) and Ruben Tejada, each of whom debuted as Mets on April 7, 2010. They were each 20 years old. They’ll enter 2016 at 26 apiece. They are veterans.
Time marches on, but it leaves a plethora of images in our rearview mirror. The one of Niese I’ll keep won’t be from the field or those moments when he couldn’t entertainingly explain what went wrong (or right) to reporters. I’ll think of him in Long Beach, my hometown, doing his best to help the victims of Superstorm Sandy. I realize Niese was there because the Mets were dedicating their community relations to the towns, villages and cities hit hard in the fall of 2012 and it was probably just Niese’s turn to be the player in the middle of it. But Niese seemed to make the most of it [11], handing out badly needed supplies, cordially greeting those who recognized him, lending unyielding support to those who didn’t. He wasn’t Jon Niese of the Mets that day. He was Jon Niese, human being. What he did for a living didn’t matter.
When he went back to his craft the following spring, he was good sometimes, he was less good other times and people like us judged him accordingly. In a realm without uniforms, I’d like to think I saw him at the top of his game.