To Be Older and a Mets Fan

“It’s great to be young and a New York Giant,” second baseman Larry Doyle declared to Damon Runyon in 1911, the year Doyle turned 25, the season the Giants won the first of three consecutive National League pennants. More than a century later, you could hear an echo of Laughing Larry in the earnest sentiments Jonah Tong expressed into Michelle Margaux’s SNY microphone:

“I love being a Met. It’s truly one of the coolest things I’ve ever done in my entire life.”

It’s great to be young and a National Leaguer in New York…

Tong, at the time, was 22 and dressed as a Christmas elf, helping out at the annual holiday party the New York Mets host for area kids. Perhaps that, too, is truly one of the coolest things he’s done in his entire life. Ballplayers get more done before they’re 23 than a lot of us do before we turn 63, which, incidentally, is what I’m doing today.

…whatever the uniform.

Young Jonah spoke his truth in late 2025, following what we’ll call his first rookie season. He didn’t throw enough innings to use up his freshman eligibility, so he’ll get to be a rookie again in 2026. So will his fellow elves/phenoms Nolan McLean and Brandon Sproat. Sproat and Tong showed flashes of potential, maybe glimpses of brilliance as they answered an unexpected call to the majors. McLean landed ahead of them, chronologically and developmentally, looking like a full-grown ace for the bulk of his 48 frames in the bigs. Fifty would have made him a sophomore next year. We get to get excited about his and his prospective rotationmates’ breaking through all over again in a few months.

McLean, Sproat, and Tong — Generation MST3K to me — couldn’t do enough in their initial MLB go-round after responding to the Mets’ SOS to keep the team from being AWOL during the NLWCS and any further postseason alphabet soup action. Yeah, as if it was their fault. The sneak peek they gave us of their evident talent and gestating poise was sufficient vis-à-vis our anticipation of getting acquainted with them. The Mets thought enough of the trio’s sample size to have had them support Clay Holmes when Holmes dressed up as Santa Claus.

I should have learned, en route to turning 63, not to make assumptions based on past experience, but I can’t help but think introducing 32-year-old Clay Holmes into a rumination on youthful Nolan McLean, Brandon Sproat, and Jonah Tong will someday resonate like remembering that when the Mets had Ron Darling, Walt Terrell, and Dwight Gooden ready to go in 1984 (with Sid Fernandez waiting in the wings), a soon-to-be-released Mike Torrez was their Opening Day starter. Then again, Clay Holmes was our Opening Day starter last year, and pitched pretty well the whole season, give or take some dips. The whole team took some dips, which explains why quite a few Met veterans who could have donned the Santa suit were no longer available for Citi Field events this December.

We love old players when we have come to terms with their careers. Presently, we don’t have any of those kinds of sages under contract, at least not any we know well. We love young players when we are able to imagine their careers — like we do with these kid pitchers and like we have lately with a few position players (Alvarez, Baty, Vientos) currently approaching their respective make-or-break junctures. The players who have ceased being young but are not yet old require some discernment. The Mets discerned they’d be better off going forward without four key players who’d reached their early thirties. That’s baseball middle-age. The ticking of the actuarial clock may not be precisely why Brandon Nimmo, Edwin Diaz, Pete Alonso, and Jeff McNeil weren’t dropping by Mets-run holiday parties in 2025’s waning weeks, but they were here for a long time, and now they’re not.

Get ready, ’cause here they come (again).

Here now and for the foreseeable future (which comes with the caveat that you never know what lies ahead) are McLean, 24; Sproat, 25; and Tong, 22. At the moment, we are Dorothy Boyd to their Jerry Maguire.

We love them!
We love them for the Mets we want them to be.
We love them for the Mets they almost are.

With the Mets idle since the end of September, I’ve occupied myself watching the Giants mostly lose football games and the Nets beginning to occasionally win basketball games. The Giants were effectively eliminated from playoff contention that October Sunday they converted a 26-8 fourth quarter lead at Denver into a 33-32 loss. The Nets commenced their season at 1-11, pretty much torpedoing any thoughts that April will deal me any roundball/hardball conflicts. Yet Brooklyn has gone 9-9 in their past eighteen, buoyed by a couple of capable rookies, Egor Dëmin and Danny Wolf. And the Giants finally won a game the other day, which doesn’t help their draft position, but added to the sense that their first-year quarterback Jaxson Dart, who’s the reason (besides ingrained habit) that I keep tuning in, won’t need replacing under center. Dart can be a real QB. Dëmin and Wolf and the other youngsters among the Flatbush 5 first-round draft class are making the Nets, until further notice, into a real team. It’s real beautiful to watch kids grow up as pros.

McLean, Sproat, and Tong started getting the hang of that in 2025. It was only the beginning of what we want to feel forever, forever being a malleable concept to a Mets fan who’s been around, a Mets fan who keeps coming back for the raising of hopes regardless of prior results. In 2025, I kept waiting for the Mets to sweep me off my feet, but apparently they lacked upper-body strength. Still, there was something about those arms. Those arms (and ingrained habit) will keep me coming back.

I may be old enough to know better than to fall in love with the next fledgling youth movement, but I’m also old enough to know it’s not much fun getting older without a few Met futures to anticipate. It’s truly one of the coolest things I’ve ever done in my entire life…which must be why I keep doing it.