A Worldwide Symphony

“This is Ellis Island here, people. I don’t care who you are, where you’re from, whether your relatives came over on the fucking Mayflower or on an inner tube from Haiti. This right here is the land of opportunity.”
—Jordan Belfort, The Wolf of Wall Street

Tom Seaver was from Fresno, California. Bud Harrelson and Tug McGraw were from somewhere in the same state. Jerry Koosman hailed from Minnesota. Cleon Jones and Tommie Agee were The Mets from Mobile. Ron Swoboda was, ironically, from Baltimore. Jim McAndrew was a product of Lost Nation, Iowa. Ed Kranepool graduated from James Monroe High School in the Bronx. Alvin, Texas, gave us Nolan Ryan.

With the exception of absorbing from the back of a baseball card that Ron Taylor called Toronto home, every Met when I was first a Mets fan was from one of the United States of America. It was information about the Mets, so I welcomed having it, but I otherwise gave any individual Met’s background little thought. They were in New York and they were Mets. That was all I needed to know.

That stance has stood mostly unchanged, even as Mets have come to New York from an array of other countries. Once they’re Mets, they’re Mets, and are therefore Metropolitan-Americans to me. If I didn’t embrace the World Baseball Classic upon its introduction in 2006, it was because I couldn’t grasp as anything but deleterious to our greater good the idea of Mets leaving the Mets, even during the extended meaninglessness of the Spring Training schedule, and taking on an alternate identity. They’d be playing for their countries, which I translated as playing for assorted teams that weren’t the Mets and playing against assorted teams that weren’t the Mets but that also had Mets on them.

Wright of Team USA might be sliding hard into Reyes of Team Dominicana? Or vice-versa? Beltran or Delgado playing for Team Puerto Rico might not hesitate to take out either one of them?

Guys, stop it! You’re Mets! Slide hard into Braves!

A month later, the WBC enters the thought process.

My particular parochial aversion to the so-called Classic has mostly melted. When the WBC came around this Spring, I didn’t worry about pitting Met against Met. Pitting Met against injury was a thought that continued to haunt from 2023, but nobody in the Mets’ immediate plans went down celebrating his temporary team’s good fortune this time around, yippee. I also instinctively wondered about pitting Met against diverted focus, though baseball players seem to be nimble enough of mind to exchange uniforms for a couple of weeks before again donning the orange and blue and remembering, no matter which flag they salute, they’re Mets.

I watched a bunch of the WBC in March when it was as big a story as any going in sports. I watched crowds everywhere wave flags and make noise. I watched Team Italia down shots of espresso after taking opposing pitchers downtown. I watched Team USA manager Mark DeRosa lose track of the standings. I watched Nolan McLean acquit himself decently if not dominantly twice. I watched Team Venezuela win it all. Then I pretty much forgot about the whole thing once the swallows returned to Port St. Lucie. Spring Training resumed in earnest. Its meaningless schedule concluded. And, before we knew it, we were ten games deep inside the regular season, as if nothing out of the ordinary was going on a month earlier.

Yet during the tenth game of the current campaign that counts, the World Baseball Classic re-entered my thought process, as I noticed what an international flavor the Mets-Giants contest from San Francisco carried. I guess every game in the major leagues these days carries an international flavor, but because of the recency of the WBC, the accents in action really grabbed my attention.

The Mets were led to an Easter Sunday victory by, among others, Mark Vientos, who was born in Connecticut and raised in Florida but represented Team Nicaragua in March (WBC parameters regarding heritage being what they are); Jared Young, a part of Team Canada in the global tournament; and Kodai Senga, a Team Japan veteran from 2017. Vientos has been on a heater that could warm all of North and Central America. Young has been an offensive and defensive revelation. Senga is Senga again, going toe to toe for five-and-two-thirds with Team USA’s lead starter Logan Webb until the sixth. Young was 3-for-3 with a circus catch in and a brilliant throw from left; Vientos drove in the first and fourth runs of an eventual 5-2 win.

Let us not overlook the contributions of Jorge Polanco of the Dominican Republic, who overcame his Achilles issues to leg out a key double to start the Mets’ pivotal seventh-inning rally; Luis Robert, Jr., born in Cuba and sliding around a tag at second base to keep Met momentum going on a gutsy steal attempt; and the enormous pinch-double from Venezuelan Luis Torrens that drove in both Robert and Polanco’s pinch-runner Tyrone Taylor, giving the Mets a lead they wouldn’t relinquish. Marcus Semien, from the same neck of the Northern California woods as Harrelson and McGraw way back when, drove home Luis to top off the most satisfying inning the 2026 Mets have played to date.

Let it be noted that Taylor ran for Polanco the DH and Torrens hit for Young the left fielder in a righty-lefty switch. With Juan Soto and Brett Baty sitting out hopefully slight injuries, Taylor and Torrens were the entirety of Carlos Mendoza’s bench. Mendy’s machinations meant Taylor would have to replace Young on defense, and Torrens would have to take over for Francisco Alvarez behind the plate, meaning there’d be no designated hitter should Polanco’s spot in the order come around, no recourse if something happened to Torrens, and nobody other than a pitcher to back up anybody.

But Mendoza, who didn’t mind admitting he turned emotional when his native Venezuela captured the World Baseball Classic, managed the seventh inning of the season’s tenth game like it was the ninth inning of the seventh game of the World Series, and went for it. He made the changes that needed to be made, and they paid off. The same could be said on the pitching end of things, as he successfully deployed Huascar Brazoban of the Dominican Republic for an inning-and-a-third, followed by Floridian Luke Weaver and Missourian Devin Williams for a frame apiece. Williams, aided immeasurably by a torrid Torrens dart to second when Matt Chapman tried stealing second, got Jung Hoo Lee — born in Japan to a Korean baseball family before going on to star in the KBO — swinging for the final out.

I recently watched a documentary called When Soccer Came to America, which revisited the influx of international stars who elevated the NASL in the 1970s, which in turn seeded the sport’s growth in the decades ahead. I’m not a soccer fan, but I can say Pelé, Giorgio Chinaglia, and Franz Beckenbauer made me perk up to the Cosmos during my adolescence. Baseball can’t tell that kind of story, exactly, but a game like Sunday’s between the Mets and Giants indicates the sport we love flourishes these days because players from other places come here and continually help shape it anew. The WBC being a part of that process, no matter what happened to Edwin Diaz three years ago, means the WBC is probably more of a net-positive than I usually care to admit.

The Mets have fifteen US-born players on their 26-man roster. They also have one born in the United States commonwealth of Puerto Rico, one born in Canada, one born in Cuba, one born in Japan, two born in Venezuela, and five born in the Dominican Republic. All told, you know what that makes them?

The 2026 Mets who have won three in a row.