He Got Us

Many a Met could echo the official team ditty and implore us to hurry up and come on down to meet them as they’ve attempted to be really socking that ball, hitting those home runs over the wall. But only one in recent years had accrued the moral authority to lay on the line what he believed everybody — East Side, West Side, all sides — needed to be doing pronto:

“Mets fans, we need you guys to fill this place up. This place needs to be rockin’ Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday, we need your help. We need everybody to get out here, we need this place full. This is playoff baseball, this is what you guys want. Let’s go! Let’s Go Mets!”

It’s the “Let’s Go Mets!” that really sold it, maybe sold some extra tickets, too. On the Monday night before Brandon Nimmo made his Wednesday sales pitch, the Mets had drawn a few hundred shy of 22,000 to Citi Field despite being in the thick of a hotly contested Wild Card derby approaching its climax. By the weekend series versus Philadelphia, attendance was doubled. The place was full and, in fact, rockin’.

Well-compensated professional ballplayers telling us to dig deep and spend in order to support them vocally can land as a little discordant these days. Uh, you gonna pick up my parking, big shot? Yet when Smilin’ Brandon Nimmo shouted into Steve Gelbs’s microphone in the middle of September 2024 that, yeah, we needed to join him and his teammates as they sought a postseason berth that once seemed out of their imaginable grasp, it was possible to process that beseechment as simply one of our guys asking us for a favor. Dozens of players annually wear the uniform we identify as ours. Few are truly our guys. Brandon Nimmo, indisputably our guy, was as franchise-defining a Met as any Met in the past decade, one of those “look up ‘Met’ on Wikipedia and you’ll see his picture” Mets. Winding down his ninth of ten seasons as a Met, his fourteenth of fifteen within the organization, we not only knew Brandon, he knew us, our folkways, our language. He spoke Mets Fan. It wasn’t his native tongue, but he’d mastered the emotional dialect.

On the last night of that homestand Brandon insisted we needed to fill up, he hit a monumental home run to help win a monumental ballgame, providing a springboard toward a monumental playoff lunge that resulted in quite a lot of what we guys wanted. Yes, he knew us and he got us and he gave us all he had to give.

It only feels as if Brandon Nimmo had been a Met since 1975.

Now he’s a Texas Ranger, because every time you convince yourself Brandon Nimmo might have been on to something when he guessed LFGM stood for “Lovely Friends, Great Memories,” you remember baseball’s business aspects and competitive aspects and all the aspects you don’t really see under the surface when you’re watching from those seats you are asked to fill. You remember that for as long as it takes a No. 1 draft pick out of somewhere in Wyoming in 2011 to make his major league debut for New York in 2016; establish himself as a regular in 2018; cement himself as star-level in 2022; and play a vital role in pushing his team toward the top of the sport in 2024, that same kid who grew up in your presence can be gone in a veritable blink. The decision to trade Brandon Nimmo to Texas for Marcus Semien was no doubt pondered by David Stearns for more than a minute, though when you glance at your phone on a Sunday night in late November for the first time in about an hour, and suddenly Nimmo’s name is prominent in your timeline and past-tense Metwise, you are entitled to your shock.

The word had gone out in the last week that the Mets were letting teams know Brandon Nimmo was available. OK, I thought, you should consider anything and everything after a year like last year, but Brandon? Brandon Nimmo? Re-signed after 2022 (albeit by Stearns’s predecessor) to an eight-year deal that still had five lucrative years to go? The fella who never accepted that first base would be waiting for him patiently after he worked a walk, so he never stopped skedaddling? Brandon Nimmo from the portion of the lineup none other than Steve Cohen dubbed the Fab Four during one of those summertime spurts when everything was going super? One-quarter of the Fab Four is already a free agent. Maybe Pete Alonso will be back. Maybe he won’t. But we could figure on Nimmo joining Francisco Lindor and Juan Soto as they played on into relative Met perpetuity. It wasn’t indefensible suggesting he could be had in the right deal, but I took that as a suggestion. Get other GMs talking with our POBO. Maybe something will come out of it.

Brandon Nimmo leaving is what happened. He had a no-trade clause, a provision presumably invoked if you want to stay with your team, which may not be your preference once the team lets it be known it would rather not have you on hand for the length of your contract. Talk is sometimes more than talk. An hour away from your phone is sometimes long enough to confirm talk turns real.

Thus, the Mets, about to enter the sixth year of Cohen’s five-year plan to attain a world championship, have swapped 32-year-old Nimmo’s capabilities for those of 35-year-old Semien’s. They’re both players who’ve played ball well for quite a while if not as well as they ever have lately. Semien’s calling card is infield defense, a valuable commodity for a team whose primary decisionmaker has emphasized run prevention like the concept was just invented. Marcus (if we can be on a first-name basis so soon) just won a Gold Glove at second base. He has a history of hitting, if not hitting a ton in 2025. Good guy, it is said. Was a big part of a World Series-winning team when he was the age Nimmo (if we must be on a last-name basis henceforth) will be next season.

The gentle downward slope may have already begun for Brandon, who has moved with continually less alacrity in left field since moving over from center and hasn’t looked especially swift along the basepaths. Like every player, he posted the occasional ohfer and now and then couldn’t get to a ball as it was about to touch grass. Still, he continued to make big plays and get big hits and be a big presence. Nimmo’s presence is what I think about as he moves down to deGrom Country. It’s not that he’d been around. It was that he’d been around here. It would figure he was the guy who would talk to the fans, talk to the media, talk about what the Mets were in whatever form they were taking in a given stretch at whatever microjuncture of their history was taking shape. Brandon Nimmo has witnessed the Mets being all kinds of things in his ten seasons in Flushing, which themselves followed five seasons of his working to arrive among us. He was drafted so far back, that Sandy Alderson selected him less than two weeks after Fred Wilpon agreed to sell the team…to David Einhorn. Brandon and David Wright are the only Met players ever to take part in three different Met playoff seasons, and, thanks to David’s lengthy 2016-2018 injury struggle, only Brandon was active for three different playoff clinchings: 2016, 2022, and 2024. Throw in the boisterous 2019 second-half rise from oblivion, and Nimmo has seen some of the most invigorating Met days of this century.

Conversely, Brandon was part of the dismal 2017 Mets, the bumbling 2018 Mets, the bad-dream 2020 Mets, the sleepwalking 2021 Mets, the comatose 2023 Mets, and the 2025 Mets who developed a teamwide allergy to success. Hence, Nimmo’s also seen some of the most dispiriting Met days of this century.

Which is to say Brandon Nimmo has experienced the same things we have, and you could tell he’d internalized it in a manner similar to how we had. That’s where the moral authority to tell us to get our asses to Citi Field and yell our heads off when the Mets took on the Phillies came in. That’s how he became the most reliable thermometer for what was right or wrong with this team in those postgame Q&A scrums. I never thought I was listening to a professional baseball player talk about his job when Brandon Nimmo spoke. I was listening to a Met talking about the Mets. I appreciated that.

I also recognize that while Brandon can’t be held particularly responsible for the alarming dips that seem to inevitably follow the giddy spikes that dot the Mets’ ongoing Satisfaction Probability Chart, this is a team that evaded consistency throughout his extended tenure. Stearns, who strikes me as one of those executives who would probably embrace the challenge of constructing a baseball team even more if it didn’t involve baseball players, can’t worry about how much we’ve loved or identified with Brandon Nimmo. He has to be cold, or at least a little chilly, as he calculates how to craft a genuine, perennial contender, one that doesn’t treat athleticism as an archrival and fundamentals as a foe. If somebody else saw something in Nimmo, and Stearns saw something in somebody he thought would lift the Mets above what they are, well, that’s why conversations spark from theoretical to actual. Semien changes the infield, presumably for the better, in 2026. Nimmo’s absence absolutely changes the outfield now and later. Brandon was the epitome of a solid player, doing everything above average when he was at his best, yet his exit potentially opens opportunities for a younger, fleeter fielder assuming his position in left in the long term, perhaps a more productive power hitter there right away.

It has to. If not, why are we trading a lifetime Met like Brandon Nimmo? There was only one of him.