We haven’t asked Julio Franco to conjure his connective chronological magic in quite a while, but today — on the heels of one his old teams (the Mets) defeating another of his old teams (the Phlllies, by a score of 6-3, thanks in large part to Zac Thornton’s six-innings of sterling pitching and Juan Soto’s distant three-run homer) — Julio has agreed to remind us of one of his greatest feats, accomplished in the spirit of Woody Allen’s oft-quoted theory that 80% of success is showing up.
Julio Franco showed up alongside Tug McGraw on the 1982 Phillies.
Tug McGraw showed up alongside Warren Spahn on the 1965 Mets.
Julio Franco, by then 47, showed up alongside Carlos Beltran on the 2006 Mets. Pushed him out of the dugout at Shea Stadium to take a curtain call, in fact.
Nobody will have to push Carlos Beltran out of the dugout at Citi Field today when he is likely applauded appreciatively if less raucously than he was for belting a seventh-inning two-run homer off Joey Eischen (not to be confused with Joey Nichols, or Joey Five Cents, from Annie Hall). If Beltran reverts to reluctance to face a throng of Mets fans, there will surely be somebody else ready to give him a nudge. Beside, Julio Franco probably has a game of his own today. He’s only 68.
“In a few moments, you will enter the pantheon of legends who have helped mold what it means to be a New York Met. You will forever be etched next to Mets icons, names like Stengel, Hodges, Seaver, Piazza, Koosman, Hernandez, Mays, Gooden, and Strawberry.”
A beat or two later, Howie turned his attention to the crowd:
“Fans, we ask that you please turn your attention to the retired numbers in left field, where David’s iconic Number Five will live forever.”
And with that, the day’s entering and etching was complete. David Wright’s 5 was keeping company with Darryl Strawberry’s 18, Dwight Gooden’s 16, Willie Mays’s 24, Keith Hernandez’s 17, Jerry Koosman’s 36, Mike Piazza’s 31, Tom Seaver’s 41, Gil Hodges’s 14, and Casey Stengel’s 37, alongside markers representing the respective Met legacies of Bob Murphy, Ralph Kiner, and Bill Shea, and the 42 that transcends team identity, retired everywhere for Jackie Robinson. Howie’s use of the phrase “Mets icons” and the word “iconic” was appropriate for the occasion.
For the next number retirement ceremony Howie hosts (as if he doesn’t have enough on his mind this weekend), I’m not sure iconic will connect with the context of what is to be commemorated. But I am sure it is proper that the number about to be raised rises to these particular rafters.
In November, the Mets announced three inductees for their own Hall of Fame: Lee Mazzilli, Bobby Valentne, and Carlos Beltran. Nice multigenerational group. In March, the Mets slated an induction date for only two of the three, Mazz and Bobby V. What had changed between November and March was their classmate Carlos had gotten elected to another Hall of Fame, in January: THE Hall of Fame. Shortly after those results were released (but not immediately after), Beltran let it be known that the cap on his plaque in Cooperstown would bear the NY of the Mets. Just like Seaver’s. Just like Piazza’s. Just like nobody else’s other than those two. Beltran’s Mets Hall of Fame induction was now part of a bigger storyline.
Beltran’s Mets Hall of Fame induction was deemed to rate its own date, separate from the one that celebrated Lee and Bobby. Further, Beltran’s Mets Hall of Fame induction would include more than a plaque bolted to a pillar at the top of the Rotunda stairs and him being handed a light blue blazer. Carlos Beltran’s number would, on September 19, join that of Seaver and Piazza and all those other Met icons.
He came to Shea Stadium from the Houston Astros. He put on uniform No. 15 and was soon enough making a difference in how the New York Mets were perceived. He’d be an All-Star more than once. Thanks at least in part to his presence, we became known as a team to be taken seriously, a team with which to be reckoned, a team you’d see in October.
But enough about Jerry Grote.
I’m showing my vintage when I admit I’m first and foremost seeing Jerry Grote when I close my eyes and imagine someone wearing a Mets jersey bearing No. 15. But sometimes, like when Tyrone Taylor wore it, I saw George Foster or Matt Franco or Val Pascucci, the Quadruple-A callup to whom a previous Mets management (lord, there’ve been a lot of previous Mets managements) didn’t wait two months after trading Carlos Beltran to give Carlos Beltran’s number. I see Al Jackson in 15 sometimes, despite that vision coming to me from stock footage. I see Jose Vizcaino if I’m in a mid-’90s mood. I see Claudell Washington in those moments when I ruminate about the Magic having been Back. I also continued to see Taylor in it, along with his contributions to magical 2024, even once he switched to 28 in deference to 15 now being directed to its destiny of living forever in left field next door to 5.
This is not uncommon. I see A.J. Ewing in 9, and I see Todd Hundley and Todd Zeile and Joe Torre, among others. I see Carson Benge in 3, and I jump to Bud Harrelson and Rafael Santana and, I swear, Richie Hebner (Mets fans did a lot of swearing at Richie Hebner). Nolan McLean, No. 26, evokes Dave Kingman for me some nights, Rico Brogna for me other nights, Terry Leach on stray afternoons. The iconic nature of a Mets uniform number doesn’t demand an iconic Met performance or a certified Met icon performing in it. No. 1, to me, is as much Sergio Ferrer’s as it is Mookie Wilson’s. Well, maybe not as much, but Sergio occasionally flashes across the screen inside my head, as do Lance Johnson and Amed Rosario. Mostly Mookie, yet not exclusively. That’s how it works with Mets and numbers and me.
Make no mistake about it, though. When I see 15, Carlos Beltran shows up plenty, just as he did when he first put it on for his initial Met photo op in January of 2005, just as he did shortly before departing in the July 2011 deadline deal that acknowledged his Met contract was about to be up. While he was a Met, particularly when he was a fully or even reasonably healthy Met, Carlos Beltran was a helluva Met, maybe as great an in-his-discernible prime Met as has ever been on a daily basis. There’s a little bit of qualifying in that description. It’s intended as complimentary and aspires to accuracy.
The greatest Met was Tom Seaver, a pitcher. The greatest player to ever play as a Met was Willie Mays, a veteran nearing retirement when he arrived packing circumstances that were sui Meteris The greatest Met everyday player, when taking everything — statistics, longevity, impact, that certain something — into account? Could be Wright. Could be Hernandez. Could be Piazza. Could be Strawberry, maybe. I’ve never quite decided. But they’re all up there where Howie told us to look.
At his absolute Met best, Carlos Beltran was as good as any of them. Or, put another way, the rest of them might have been as good as Carlos Beltran at his absolute Met best. Carlos Beltran’s absolute Met best was too excellent to be phenomenal. After pressing too much for everybody’s own good in 2005, the seasons of 2006 and 2007 and 2008 gave us the Carlos Beltran who we might not have noticed smiled warily while donning No. 15 for the cameras, the one we were gobsmacked we’d signed and therefore didn’t believe he wouldn’t crush from Year One forward. We never got a player like him, and once the shakedown cruise through New York’s high-expectation waters was complete, we really got that player. Beltran was settled in and healthy and hitting and catching and running, and the Mets did a lot of (if not quite enough) winning. If you put together the segments of 2009 and 2010 when his knees let him play, he was similar. The older, slightly slower version of Beltran in 2011 was on point as well. He not only still played at an elevated level, you could sense he’d grown into the kind of leadership role he strained too much to fill when he first got here.
And then, a little like with Hernandez and Piazza as their contracts wound down, he was gone. There was going to be no bringing back Keith, turning 36, for 1990, or Mike, having just turned 37, for 2006. Strawberry was only 28 when he wasn’t re-signed. That, in retrospect, was crazy, unless you knew what his future looked like off the field. Nah, it was still crazy. Beltran was 34 in 2011. Could still make a difference to a team trying to go the playoffs. The Mets weren’t really doing that in 2011 nor did they plan to in 2012. Sending him to the defending world champion Giants was the agreed-upon resolution. Zack Wheeler represented a spiffy return.
Carlos Beltran played through 2017. His post-Mets production stayed relatively robust. His stature within the game grew. He kept going to All-Star Games until he’d made nine. He kept going to postseasons, seven in all. Whatever one thinks of the off-camera machinations involved, his final team won a World Series. A career chock full of hits (2,725) and homers (435) and ribbies (1,587) and runs (1,582) and steals (312) and Gold Gloves (3) and Silver Sluggers (2) and kudos had him on a Hall of Fame glide path. Revelations of how the 2017 Astros won him his only ring provided turbulence. But he got where he was headed.
And he went in as a Met. I thought he’d be one of those guys who’d choose a blank cap, not wanting to choose among the team in Kansas City where broke through as a star (1999 AL Rookie of the Year), the team in Houston where he became everybody’s idea of a get (the 2004 playoffs) and a sage (the 2017 pre-scandal run to glory), and the team in Queens where, well, he did it all for a not insignificant period, but, may not have been, to use that word, an icon.
Or he may have been. Not every Mets fan grew up identifying No. 15 with Jerry Grote. Not every Mets fan from 2005 to 2011 chose Jose Reyes or David Wright or Pedro Martinez as their favorite player. Many a Mets fan was delighted not only with Beltran signing here but the bulk of what he did here. Some choose to focus on one pitch in one at-bat with which he did nothing. Some choose to zoom out and take in a more expansive picture and identify the iconography throughout on its own terms. Ours has been a franchise of lovable Mookies and embraceable Buddys at its core. They started as Mets. They stayed as Mets practically forever. They strayed into other uniforms but came back and remained family in their own way. They were never the player on their version of the Mets, but boy, were they Mets icons.
Carlos Beltran’s origin story was different. He made a business decision to join us. All players make business decisions when they become professionals (even the Mookies and Buddys), but Carlos’s was back page news. His wariness was evident, less that of deer caught in the headlights than a buck checking his roadmap in those lights to see if maybe there was an exit. But he hung in there (in two languages, not incidentally), he excelled, he won over a slew of fans concomitant to his leaving a sizable portion of others cold. I’m tempted to label Carlos Beltran as polarizing a player as the Mets have ever had, except I believe polarizing is a bad-faith adjective, deployed to excuse disdain for something or someone a lot of people actually like. “Polarizing” rarely takes into account the popularity of the thing or person others take aim at. Let’s say Carlos Beltran inspired different levels of focusing in and zooming out.
When he left the Mets in 2011, I didn’t think about him coming back in any capacity. His tenure as offseason manager between very late 2019 and very early 2020 didn’t have a chance to fully sink in, but here he was again, joining us. And when the heat died down from the Astro escapade, he came back as a special assistant. He stepped back onto the field at Citi Field for Roberto Clemente Night festivities in 2022 and was greeted warmly. He put on his jersey again for the Alumni Classic in 2025 and seemed to fit seamlessly within our extended family. An extended family has room for all sorts of relations and relationships. Sometimes you bump into a cousin and you’re surprised to realize you’re hitting it off.
Mercenary tendencies of modern baseball notwithstanding, maybe Beltran decided he wanted to be a family man. A blank cap on a Hall of Fame plaque implies a lone wolf prowled the game and skulked into the shadows. Carlos’s stated reason for wanting to be represented in Cooperstown as a Met, expressed in his Hall of Fame speech and in the well-done SNY documentary exploring his story, is this is where he believes he became “a better man” and “the best version of myself”. Reflecting on his journey from ballyhooed signee to guy sharing his observations for organizational consumption, he concluded, “I have never been prouder to call myself a Met.” Realizing Beltran, with all his credentials, feels that way is somehow validating. <>He likes us — he really likes us! Hell, he is us!
But is it number-retirement worthy? Up there with the icons? Put it all together, and I say yes, even if when I first learned 15 would ascend, I thought, “Huh?” The Mets Hall of Fame, absolutely. Mookie’s in the Mets Hall of Fame. Buddy’s in the Mets Hall of Fame. Grote’s in the Mets Hall of Fame. A helluva Met, maybe as great an in-his-discernible prime Met as has ever been on a daily basis, surely deserves induction into our august body. But a spot in the rafters? A disc filling one of our holiest of holies, if you will?
There are 20 individuals in the Baseball Hall of Fame who wore a Mets uniform as a player or manager. As of today, all 20 will have had their number retired by the team we’ll call their “cap team” in terms of their Hall of Fame plaque. That’s a cohort about to include Carlos Beltran. I’d hate to think he’d be the only one left out. In some cases, the numbers were retired in response to election to Cooperstown. In some cases, the teams for whom they played most of their careers didn’t wait for the BBWAA to leave them instructions. Sometimes the chronology looks a little strange until you dig into the details. Then it still looks strange, but at least there’s an explanation. There’s no manual I know of that addresses the decorum. Every team does what it does, but every one of these 20 individuals has his number retired by the team whose insignia adorns the cap on his Hall of Fame plaque.
This is where we nudge Julio Franco’s timelessness out of the dugout to take a curtain call, because Julio Franco, who played with Carlos Beltran, played on the 1982 Phillies with Tug McGraw, who played with Warren Spahn on the 1965 Mets
Warren Spahn’s 21 was retired by the Milwaukee Braves in December of 1964. He was still an active player. At 43, he’d just been sold to the Mets by the Braves. But the board of directors of the Milwaukee Braves understood their operation was about to move south, to Atlanta, after the 1965 season, so with the franchise in turmoil, the only thing that could be agreed on harmoniously was the need to take care of Spahn’s Brave legacy, which encompassed 356 wins and dated back to 1942, when the Braves were in Boston. He never pitched for the Atlanta Braves, but 21 would never be issued by them. He also never got a formal number retirement ceremony in Milwaukee, but did receive a hero’s welcome from County Stadium’s otherwise disgruntled fans when he came back to Wisconsin in May of ’65 to pitch for the Mets against the Braves, lest you think that sort of thing was invented for Pete Alonso.
Paid attendance at County Stadium the night before the now 44-year-old Spahn pitched for the Mets against the Braves was 2,355. Paid attendance at County Stadium the night after Spahn pitched for the Mets against the Braves was 2,679. You, too, would be too disgruntled to show up to watch a team that told you it will be leaving town as soon as it can. But on the night Spahn pitched for the Mets against the Braves at County Stadium, May 20, 1965…well, let’s read what Katie Andrews of the Waukesha Freeman reported in the next day’s edition.
“Nearly 20,000 fans, including 17,433 paid, made a sentimental journey to the stadium to witness Warren Spahn’s homecoming. When the former Milwaukee left-hander strode to the pitcher’s mound for the New York Mets in the first inning, the crowd responded with a standing ovation that lasted nearly three minutes.”
For an evening, the Milwaukee Braves were Wisconsin’s team the way they were when they moved from Massachusetts (where people had stopped showing up as a rule) in 1953. “It was almost like old times,” Andrews wrote. “Cars streamed toward the parking lots, backing traffic up on the expressway for blocks. Lines were long and thick at the ticket booths, and many fans weren’t seated until the third inning. Because of the traffic crush at game time, some thought it would have been a gracious gesture on the part of Braves management to delay the starting time 10 or 15 minutes. But not many gracious gestures are forthcoming from the Atlanta-bound owners.”
There went reality intruding on the idyllic. The same could be said for Spahn’s performance. The old lefty could not quite turn back the clock. For four innings, Spahnie was Spahnie, allowing only two singles. Four innings of shutout ball for a 44-year-old — or a 24-year-old — would be a sensation these days. But this was Warren Spahn. Warren Spahn completed 382 games for the Braves, including one that lasted 16 innings (which he lost when Willie Mays homered; Juan Marichal went 16 for the win). Four innings didn’t mean Warren Spahn’s job was done.
Alas, the fifth inning indicated Warren Spahn was done. The Braves began to light him up. Two runs were in. The bases stood loaded. Eddie Mathews stepped to the plate. Spahn threw. Mathews swung. A grand slam left County Stadium. The Braves had hung six runs on their old ace.
Yet Spahnie stayed in. Another run resulted. It didn’t matter. On this night, with this pitcher, in this park, the worst thing that could have happened, according to contemporary mores, would have been Warren Spahn having to leave the mound while an inning was in progress. The Mets were down, 6-0, after Mathews’s slam? Hell, the Mets were always down, 6-0, to somebody. Casey Stengel, with whom Warren Spahn didn’t always see eye to eye with upon their 1965 reunion (Casey was Warren’s first manager in Boston when the Braves were as downtrodden as the early Mets, leading to his observation that “I played for Casey before and after he was a genius”), understood what was really at stake at County Stadium. Spahn was going to finish the fifth. And he did, even if it meant giving up that one more run to leave the Mets in a 7-0 hole en route to getting one-hit by Spahn’s former protégé Wade Blasingame. “A dignified exit,” Andrews called it. “It wasn’t a knockout,” Dick Young agreed in the Daily News.
“Casey Stengel wanted it that way,” the Mets beat reporter continued. “He wasn’t going to throw in the towel, not if there were 17 runs scored that inning. Warren Spahn, the champ, was going out like a champ, on his feet, and those 19,000 weren’t going to see him knocked out.” Instead, Spahn soldiered on until he could leave the game on something approximating his own terms. He went five before being pinch-hit for in the sixth.
“That Stengel is something,” marveled the Braves’ Gene Oliver, who made the merciful last out in the bottom of the fifth. “He showed me a lot of class.” Spahn was grateful for the grace Casey showed: “Damn, he’s been just great to me. I’m just teed off I didn’t do a better job.” As for the reception in Milwaukee, which included banners attacking ownership as “lousy saboteurs,” the southpaw was touched:
“The crowd was a great personal tribute and I’m very proud of it. It’s pretty nice that the people here think that much of me.”
It wasn’t a number retirement ceremony, but it might have been better. Warren Spahn was celebrated boisterously for his career, then got to keep wearing 21, albeit elsewhere. He lasted as a Met until July, then caught on with the Giants for the stretch run before his MLB days ended. He’d keep pitching a couple more years — a few games in Mexico in 1966, a few more at Triple-A Tulsa in 1967, close to his Oklahoma home — before finally retiring. Spahn was elected to the Hall of Fame in 1973, his plaque bearing the M of the Milwaukee Braves.
Casey Stengel would manage only a little longer beyond what amounted to Spahn’s County Stadium curtain call. The Mets retired Casey’s 37 as soon as the Ol’ Perfesser stepped aside, with little more fanfare than Warren officially received. Casey took his bow one morning at Shea Stadium in front of reporters and photographers, his folded jersey in hand. The next year he’d go into the Hall of Fame, with a Yankee cap on his plaque, reflecting his “genius” period, winning all those World Series titles and pennants between 1949 and 1960. But the Yankees didn’t retire 37 for Casey until 1970. They hadn’t circulated it, but they couldn’t get him to come back for ceremonial purposes, as their most successful manager ever still carried a grudge for them letting him go. “By 1970,” former Yankees PR man Marty Appel explained in his memoir, “there was no one left in the front office to hate anymore.”
Time can be like that. Eventually Warren Spahn got a statue at Turner Field, where he never pitched, and a spot along Miller Park’s Walk of Fame from the Brewers, a franchise for whom he was never affiliated. The important thing was somebody remembered. The Milwaukee Braves remembered to retire 21 before there were no longer Milwaukee Braves. The New York Yankees remembered to keep reaching out to Stengel so they could retire 37 properly. They invited Mets manager Yogi Berra crosstown in 1972 to retire 8, acknowledging his induction that year at Cooperstown. Yogi had one of those NYs on his plaque cap.
Richie Ashburn was nowhere near the Hall of Fame in 1979, but the Phillies retired 1 for him, anyway. The very first chronological Met ever had been a star for them in the 1950s and a fixture in their broadcast booth since retiring following his 1962 Most Valuable Met season at the Polo Grounds. As Jayson Stark noted in 1980, “About 10 guys wore 1 between the time Ashburn left [for the Cubs after the 1959 campaign] and the time his number was retired last summer. The Phillies finally had to trade Jose Cardenal to pull it off. And, in a way, they retired Cardenal’s number, too.” Timing issues aside, Ashburn went into the Hall of Fame in 1995, with a Phillies cap on his plaque.
It’s the thought that counts. The Expos thought to retire Gary Carter’s 8 in 1993, the year after he retired from playing. They hadn’t thought that someday the Montreal Expos would become the Washington Nationals, who would feel no obligation (unlike the Atlanta Braves with Spahn’s 21) to keep Carter’s 8 retired. Gary’s name is displayed with an Expos logo at Nationals Park, the least they could do for the man with an Expos cap on his Cooperstown plaque. The Blue Jays thought to retire Roberto Alomar’s 12 when he went into the Hall of Fame with a Jays cap in 2011. They also decided to unretire it once some unsavory off-field information emerged about a decade later. But, as with Carter, the number was retired by the team connected to the so-called immortality in question.
The Orioles didn’t wait for the Hall to anoint Eddie Murray. They retired his 33 five years before Cooperstown got involved. The Braves were similarly foresightful for T#m Gl@vine (player retired, 2008; number retired, 2010, plaque unveiled, 2014; me not impressed, since 2007). The Mets, who couldn’t hold onto Tom Seaver twice during his career, grabbed hold of 41’s legacy and retired the most Terrific number of them all in 1988, four years ahead of the Hall doing its thing, cap properly identified. The Giants placed 24 on the shelf the second they sent Willie Mays to the Mets in 1972, but didn’t get around to officially retiring it until 1983, four years after he became a Hall of Famer with an SF on his cap. As with Stengel and the Yankees, there had been some prickliness between legend and franchise. The Mets were the visitors to Candlestick Park the day 24 finally got its due; Tom Seaver, between being let go of by the Mets the first time and the second time, took part in Willie’s ceremony.
Nolan Ryan’s number was retired by three different teams. The Angels didn’t wait for him to retire before honoring him and his No. 30 in 1992, when he came to Anaheim with the Rangers. He stopped pitching in 1993. The Astros and Rangers did a Texas two-step by each hanging 34 in his honor in September 1996, three years before his plaque bearing a T for Texas was hung north of New York City. Number change. Teams change. Nolan Ryan wore 30 for the Mets. Hindsight suggests it’s too bad he changed uniforms when he did.
Rickey Henderson’s presence in the free agency era had him stealing bases for nine different franchises. His 24 is retired by the Athletics of wherever they are now. It was Oakland when he was inducted into the Hall of Fame in 2009. Henderson also wore 24 for the Mets in 1999 and 2000, because it wasn’t retired for Mays. It has been, since 2022. As Howie Rose recounted this past May on the day that marked the 54t anniversary of Willie coming home to New York, Steve Cohen considered the issue that had lingered in the shadows of Metropolitan history for decades, and reasoned, “This is Willie Mays we’re talking about. What are we doing?” What they’d do is retire 24 for Mays that August. Everybody seemed to take their time when it came to hanging his digits.
The Dodgers didn’t rush to honor the Duke who constituted one-third of Willie, Mickey & The Duke. Mr. Snider didn’t get 4 hung for him by the Dodgers until he became a Hall of Famer in 1980, eighteen years removed for when Duke Snider last played for the Dodgers. There’s a “B” on his plaque, but a 4 in Los Angeles. Same basic story for Gil Hodges, whose 14 the Mets took care of the year after his tragic 1972 death. The former Brooklyn club didn’t reserve 14 for Gil’s legacy, but once he was certified a Class of 2022 Hall of Famer, as a Dodger, 14 joined 4, among others. One number it didn’t join was 31, because L.A. prefers to pretend Mike Piazza didn’t launch his Hall of Fame career there. We in Flushing don’t mind. The Mets retired 31 in 2016, announcing they’d do so shortly after the Hall of Fame announced Mike would be one of theirs — in a Mets cap, as one of ours.
As the years have gone by, the synergy between entering the Hall “as a…” and having a number retired by the “as a…” club has become de rigueur. The Yankees and Joe Torre’s 6 in 2014; the Red Sox and Pedro Martinez’s 45 in 2015; the Astros and Billy Wagner’s 13 in 2025; the Giants and Jeff Kent’s 21 a few weeks ago; and, today, the Mets and Carlos Beltran’s 15. In essence, it’s the way things are done now. If what precedes this afternoon’s Mets-Phillies game therefore comes off as a Ritual of Numerical Obligation, so be it. The icons have it.
Geez. Talk about excruciating minutiae.
“Polar-izing?” I see what you did there, Greg. Even if you didn’t mean to do it .