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Faith and Fear in Flushing made its debut on Feb. 16, 2005, the brainchild of two longtime friends and lifelong Met fans.
Greg Prince discovered the Mets when he was 6, during the magical summer of 1969. He is a Long Island-based writer, editor and communications consultant. Contact him here.
Jason Fry is a Brooklyn writer whose first memories include his mom leaping up and down cheering for Rusty Staub. Check out his other writing here.
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by Greg Prince on 30 December 2020 7:08 pm Ray Daviault first came out of the bullpen for Casey Stengel on April 13, 1962. the second reliever used in the New York Mets’ first-ever home game. Ray’s mere presence made him the first Canadian in a Mets uniform. On July 7, after Marv Throneberry delivered a pinch-hit two-run homer in the bottom of the ninth at the Polo Grounds, Ray had his first win on this or any continent.
Les Rohr was the first player the Mets ever chose in an amateur draft, the second player chosen overall in 1965. On September 19, 1967, he became a big leaguer for the first time, beating the Dodgers at Shea Stadium, 6-3. Les would finish the year with his second win, besting Don Drysdale in Los Angeles come September 30.
Rick Baldwin would have had enough of a challenge reaching the majors at age 21. Assigning him No. 45 could have only added to the pressure. Forty-Five had just been vacated by Tug McGraw, traded in the preceding offseason. Being the first to follow a legend, even numerically, is the definition of a tough act to follow. Yet in his first appearance, on April 10, 1975, Rick threw a scoreless inning of relief and he settled in nicely, pitching in a third of all Mets games that season.
Claudell Washington had no act to follow. He was a trailblazer in his time, his time being 1980 in terms of the Met clock. He was the first acquisition of the Doubleday-Wilpon regime and, through his part in a Magic summer, Claudell indicated the new general manager Frank Cashen knew what he was doing when it came to reeling in talent.
Tony Fernandez was supposed to help make things better in 1993. Honestly, he didn’t, which was too bad, not only for the 1993 Mets, but for a shortstop who had distinguished himself greatly as a Blue Jay and Padre. The Mets would trade Tony to Toronto after a couple of months and Tony would help make things even better for the defending world champions, helping the Jays to their second consecutive Series win. Like Claudell Washington, Tony Fernandez enjoyed a long post-Mets playing career.
Phil Linz’s calling card was a last. It was his off-field playing, of a harmonica, that was credited in legend for spurring the Yankees to the final pennant of their seemingly endless American League dynasty. With Phil tooting away on the mouth harp on the team bus; manager Yogi Berra telling him to, in so many words, put the damn thing away; and Mickey Mantle making sure Phil heard differently (“Yogi says play it louder”), the backup infielder caused the usually mellow Berra to blow his stack. The slumping Yankees suddenly caught fire and Phil Linz was forever a musical icon.
That was in 1964. In 1967, with the Yankee empire too far gone to be saved by a charming anecdote, Phil Linz became a Met. He’d keep company for a season-and-a-half with beloved Mets coach Yogi Berra, the two of them posing happily for photographers once reunited at the Mayor’s Trophy Game. Unsurprisingly, a harmonica was in the picture. The Mets released Linz after the 1968 season, though Gil Hodges invited him to Spring Training for the following year. Phil declined, seeing as how he had thriving nightspot Mr. Laffs to tend to in the city. And besides, as the former New York/New York player put it to author Bill Ryczek decades later, “I was tired of sitting on the bench for a ninth-place team.”
 The Mets wouldn’t be a ninth-place team in 1969. Gil Hodges had plenty to do with that. So did his ace pitcher, Tom Seaver. Tom Seaver had a lot to do with everything from 1967 until almost the middle of 1977 and then again in 1983. How completely did Tom dominate the Met scene during his long, if interrupted tenure? Let’s answer that literally. Seaver started 395 games for the New York Mets and completed 171 of them. By comparison, since 1992 — the year Tom Seaver became the first player inducted into the Hall of Fame bearing a Mets cap on his plaque — 148 different pitchers have started 4,528 games for the Mets and together they completed 167 of them.
Whoever said they don’t make ’em like that anymore wasn’t kidding.
 Image by Warren Zvon. Numbers say so much on behalf of Tom Seaver. So do images, such as those designed by the fabulous illustrator Warren Fottrell (a.k.a. Warren Zvon), a beautiful soul we lost in 2020. Warren did most of his speaking through graphic art, but he stopped by our blog on the occasion of Tom’s 75th birthday and left this comment:
Some people have a special type of integrity that can’t be described with words. Tom, throughout all his years in the spotlight, before and beyond, has been this type of person. Not only true to himself but true to the world around him. Not afraid to speak the truth. He wanted to be a winner but knew that the only way to truly be one was to take responsibility for being a loser when that was a required truth.
Over the years I’ve learned a lot from the mightiest of Mets aces, things he never intended to teach me and things I never set out to learn.
As a kid going to Shea, watching the Mets play, I wasn’t as big a fan as I am now. I took George Thomas Seaver for granted then.
He was simply our best pitcher.
But now, because of the way he has lived his life, the way he has consistently been the person he strives to be, I no longer do. I’ve learned that he is so much more than just a great Mets pitcher of the past, and when he goes a piece of me will go with him. A big piece.
So, yeah, Tom was the complete package, the greatest Met we’ve ever known, the greatest Met we’ll ever know. But his death is not the complete story when we look back at this year that has had far too much sadness, baseball-related or not. We are well aware we lost The Franchise in 2020. We should also remember the six other Mets who passed away this less than terrific year. Ray Daviault. Rick Baldwin. Les Rohr. Claudell Washington. Phil Linz. Mets fans rooted for them when they entered a game. Mets fans applauded when they did something good. Mets fans might have wished each of them had done a little more or stayed a little longer as Mets, but what they did in our uniform of choice deserves acknowledgement and another round of applause.
Seaver shared an affiliation with those guys, just as he shared an affiliation with the half-dozen Hall of Famers beside himself who died in 2020. I can’t imagine this year didn’t set a record for most baseball fans left mourning the loss of a personal favorite. Every player who’s ever played is some fan’s favorite, probably, but this year saw the passing of not just those we dare to call immortals, but those who defined their ballclubs.
Bob Gibson. Lou Brock. Joe Morgan. Whitey Ford. Al Kaline. Phil Niekro. They, like Seaver, were ballplayers kids idolized and adults revered. Gibson with the ERA nobody’s surpassed (the only figures lower were the batters he sent sprawling to the dirt). Brock who ran on everybody and collected more bags than Carrie Bradshaw. Morgan who sent the Big Red Machine into a whole other gear and made necessary the split screen for postseason telecasts, just so NBC could keep showing him leading off first. Ford with the World Series performances that were so historic that they knocked Babe Ruth out of the record books (the pitching record books). Kaline who won a batting title as a veritable baby and kept piling up base hits into middle age. Niekro the eternal elder who practically never stopped getting outs on the pitch he mastered better than anybody who’d ever lived.
It wasn’t just that they, like Seaver, were great. They were epic. They left indelible impressions on anybody who loved the game.
 Bob Gibson became our assistant pitching coach, you might recall. It was 1981. Old teammate Joe Torre recruited him to give the Mets staff some attitude. It was not transferable, but the thrill of Gibby in a Mets uniform was something to behold. I was less thrilled at the thought of him knocking down an Agee here or a Milner there, but Bob had his reasons. Also, he was wearing a Cardinals uniform then. I wasn’t supposed to like him.
Lou Brock I never stopped liking, even on those occasions he was sliding into second ahead of the tag on a bullet delivered by Jerry Grote. Brock v. Grote never was fully settled, but we knew it was a case of the premier base stealer in the land versus an arm that was the envy of his catching peers. Only one of the people at the center of the battle that mesmerized Mets and Cardinals fans for a generation smiled much. Hence, though I pulled for Jerry to throw him out, I could never dislike Lou.
 Joe Morgan was something else. At his height (no pun intended), Little Joe was a bigger deal on those powerhouse Reds than any of his co-stars, and his co-stars were frigging Pete Rose, Johnny Bench and Tony Perez. Getting Morgan to Cincinnati was like adding whipped cream to ice cream and syrup. It was already fantastic, but now you won’t believe what this concoction tastes like. I can still see him breaking from the box on his 1974 card. He’s probably gonna come all the way around.
 Whitey Ford was a name out of the past when I first heard of him, so far out of the past that my father said he saw him in high school. Not “went to see the Chairman of the Board at the Stadium” see him in high school, mind you. My dad was in high school and Ford was in high school and their schools played each other on one diamond or another. They were contemporaries, a couple of kids from Queens. Ford retired two years before I started watching baseball, which I found hard to believe once I learned his career spanned 1950 to 1967. I had scattered memories of 1967. My dad was my dad. Hard to put that together when you’re barely more than a tyke. I discovered not too long ago that Ford tried a comeback of sorts in 1968, pitching at Shea in the Mayor’s Trophy Game against the Mets. They didn’t score off him. Not too many did.
 Al Kaline was part of the foundation of my baseball cognizance, one of the ’67 Topps my sister bequeathed me once it was clear I cared about the cards and she never would again. I gleaned from the back that he was the Tiger among all Tigers. He remained so into 1974 as he chased 3,000 hits and 400 homers. The former he got, the latter he missed by one (a moderate-sized disappointment to me the summer I was eleven and tracking his progress). Also in his last year playing for Detroit, I stared intently at a battery. It had the name of a great ballplayer. Alkaline. To this day I revel a bit when I pick up an alkaline battery. “It’s Al Kaline!”
 Photo by Sharon Chapman. Phil Niekro dared stand in the way of Met destiny in 1969, throwing the very first pitch they’d ever seen in a postseason game. Fortunately, the Mets persevered in Game One of that maiden NLCS, but the outcome was no given, considering Niekro won 23 games that year (finishing second to Seaver for the Cy Young) and was on a path that would take him past 300 before he was done. He was another of those opponents I couldn’t help rooting for on the side. When I attended college in Florida, Phil was still pitching for the Braves, whose games I listened to on the radio. This was when Torre had taken over in Atlanta and I felt a kinship with his new club. I rooted hard for the 1982 Braves to win the pennant, mainly so Phil Niekro could finally pitch in a World Series. The Braves lost that NLCS, too, making Phil 0-for-2 in his best stabs at a championship. Nevertheless, he made the Hall of Fame without a ring. He also made it to Citi Field one September day in 2012 to help promote a documentary called Knuckleball! His role, on film and in actuality, was to mentor another late bloomer named R.A. Dickey. Watching them reunite during BP was a joy, as was the chance to ask Niekro a question about what it was like facing Seaver in the playoffs. He threw me a curve, telling me he saw his assignment as facing the Met hitters and “Seaver batted ninth.”
 Maybe someday soon when we remember Hall of Famers who left us in 2020, we’ll add Dick Allen to the discussion. Allen isn’t in, but he’s come close via a veterans committee vote and is considered a favorite to cross the plate eventually. To Phillies fans in the ’60s, Allen was every bit the immortal that Seaver was to us and the aforementioned six were where they reigned. True, Allen didn’t necessarily mesh with Philly during his initial go-round, but those were complicated times. Nobody doubted he could mash (especially against the Mets), and everybody saw him put it together once he landed on the White Sox in 1972. When he died, I was moved to call up the image of his 1974 card. There he was, relaxed in the dugout and looking as he was to me when I was eleven: the coolest man in the majors.
Qualifying for Cooperstown isn’t a prerequisite for leaving an impression, not when you were a kid who collected cards and listened to games and took the announcers at their word. Bob and Ralph and Lindsey were always respectful of and effusive over the likes of Denis Menke and Bob Watson and Glenn Beckert (even if he was a Cub) and Lindy McDaniel (who always seemed to be notching a save for the Yankees) and of course Jimmy Wynn the Toy Cannon, as if it that was how it appeared on his driver’s license. Jay Johnstone was considered a real card (even if he never played for St. Louis). Biff Pocoroba caught in Atlanta and got a rise out of everybody when they heard his mellifluous name called. Horace Clarke was a misunderstood staple in the Bronx at second. Roger Moret was almost unbeatable for a spell in Boston. I had plenty of Bart Johnsons and Ed Farmers in my shoeboxes. I probably had a few Adrian Devines, too. Tony Taylor was endlessly dependable. Ron Perranoski helped revolutionize relieving. A little before my time but just in time for me to cherish his ’67 card was Lou Johnson of the Dodgers. A little later, but just in time to frustrate the Mets for the final time during the 1986 regular season, was the Expos’ Bob Sebra, who outdueled Ron Darling the final week of the year to remember.
Kim Batiste of the Phillies. Damaso Garcia of the Blue Jays. Matt Keough of the A’s. Ted Cox who stirred prospect hype with the Red Sox before they traded him to Cleveland. Tommy Sandt. Ed Sprague. Bob Oliver. Mike Ryan. They were pictured on cardboard. They were performing on television. They were important because we love baseball. They were important to those who knew and loved them, too, of course. For their families and friends, they didn’t have to be baseball players on baseball cards. Isn’t it something that actual people stand behind those images?
Eddie Kasko, who I remember as a manager of the Red Sox, died in 2020. John McNamara, who we all remember as a manager of the Red Sox, died in 2020. Billy DeMars, who I remember coaching for the Phillies forever, died in 2020. Jim Frey, batting coach and father figure to rookie Darryl Strawberry before he left to steer the Cubs past the Mets in ’84. Hal Smith, who isn’t the hero of the 1960 World Series but made it possible for Bill Mazeroski to be because he also hit a dramatic home run. Don Larsen, who threw a perfect game in the World Series in 1956 (as if that’s a sentence to type in a nonchalant font).
Four of the heretofore 17 surviving New York Giants: Gil Coan, Johnny Antonelli, Mike McCormick, Foster Castleman. Antonelli won 25 games for the 1954 world champions; the Mets acquired him for 1962, but Antonelli opted to retire. McCormick won a Cy Young in ’67, still a Giant in San Francisco. Now there are 13 surviving New York Baseball Giants. I get together with other lovers of the New York Baseball Giants over Zoom these days. We used to get together at an East Side bar called Finnerty’s, an establishment usually devoted to serving Bay Area fans. That place, like too many that depend on people being out and about, didn’t survive 2020’s pandemic ravages. Same for a Midtown sports bar very close to the hearts of myriad New York baseball fans, yours truly included, Foley’s.
“Young man!”
That was my favorite line from the movie 42 because it was what the actor playing Jackie Robinson said to the actor playing a young Ed Charles. We know who mature Ed Charles grew up to be. We also got to know the actor playing Jackie Robinson as one of cinema’s brightest stars, Chadwick Boseman. He died on rescheduled Jackie Robinson Night in 2020 at the age of 43.
Young man, indeed.
 I went to a game in 2019, which seemed unremarkable as an event because going to a game is what a person who loves baseball routinely did prior to 2020, except this was kind of a special game for numerous reasons. One of them was I found myself sitting in the same section as the family and friends of the visiting Pittsburgh Pirates, right next to the wife and child of outfielder Starling Marte. Mrs. Marte urged her youngster to cheer “Daddy” on every time he batted. Steven Matz was pitching a shutout, so I didn’t particularly want Marte to succeed, but I have to admit I did get a kick out of the cry. When Big Daddy Marte was rumored to maybe be coming to the Mets, I hoped a little it would happen given my (admittedly tenuous) connection. When I learned in May that Noelia Marte, all of 32, had died of a heart attack, I felt the connection again.
“Pat Cawley of Glendale” was the State Farm Agent of the Day on basically every SNY telecast for years; Gary, Keith and Ron spoke of him as if he was a relation. Suddenly one night this offseason I saw Pat passed away. He was only 55. Luke Gasparre greeted me and who knows how many fans from his post atop Section 310 at Citi Field. Luke ushered at Shea Stadium for the life of the old ballpark and did the same through the first decade of the new ballpark. The World War II veteran died this year, too, having lived to be 95. Claire Shulman became Queens borough president in 1986 and had the honor of presiding as the Commissioner’s Trophy came home to Flushing — she also showed homeland loyalty by making municipal bets on behalf of the Mets during various Subway Series conflicts. Shulman died in 2020 at 94. Roger Kahn, who made Brooklyn even more famous than it already was via The Boys of Summer, signed off the beat for good at 92.
“As an old National League fan,” Pete Hamill reflected in 2000 of the interborough Fall Classic just completed, “I was rooting for the Mets.” Hamill’s report in The Subway Series Reader, which was maddeningly evenhanded, took the time to celebrate the Mets’ lone win, in Game Three, particularly Benny Agbayani’s exploits. “Instantly,” Hamill wrote, “hope rose for millions of Mets fans.” Sort of like it did for readers every time they saw Pete Hamill’s byline. We wouldn’t see it again after his passing in 2020 at the age of 85.
In the midst of that World Series, I wrote as much as I could to every Mets fan whose e-mail address I had. One of those fellow Subway Series travelers was a former colleague named Jim Ryan. Jim had sold advertising at the magazine I edited. He wasn’t a me-level Mets fan, but Shea was where his sympathies resided, which was no small thing when you worked in an office in New York in the Baseball Chernobyl years that followed 1996. I still remember Jim’s reply to whatever I wrote coming out of Game Three. He scored a ticket for the game and reported on a peanut vendor who, like Berra to Linz in 1964, told some overly loud Yankee bellower to stick it. Jim was so impressed that he claimed to have bought out the vendor’s entire stock on the spot.
Jim knew how to execute a grand Met gesture. Two years earlier, in 1998, Jim asked a friend of his who worked for the Mets to arrange for a dream of mine to come true. The dream was embedded so deeply in my subconscious that I don’t know that I dared speak it unless specifically asked. In the course of conversation, however, I revealed to Jim that I had never set foot on the field at Shea Stadium. Others would have nodded and shrugged. Jim made it happen. He arranged through his friend to get us on the VIP list for the DynaMets Dash one Sunday after the Mets played the Braves. We were very big kids to be taking part in this decidedly youth-oriented promotion, but they didn’t have the dash when I was 14 & under. So we ran the bases as if we weren’t too old for such glorious nonsense.
When I divined in September that Jim Ryan, 54, died of a heart attack, I was back on the field with him again, each of us dashing (he was way more dashing than I was), each of us laughing that we were part of this. I was in the office with Jim, too, sharing a stray moment related to some client of his or some story of mine or some ’70s song we both loved. When word spread through channels that Jim had passed away far, far too young, I noticed two of my fellow co-workers from those days used the same term to describe Jim: a friend to all. It was true. Everybody liked him and nobody didn’t like him. We were never incredibly close, but in those passing minutes that make a day and a week and a big chunk of your life before you know it, he was a friend to me, and I appreciated it. I still do.
by Greg Prince on 29 December 2020 1:34 pm Considering he didn’t file a single column all year, Oscar Madison had a pretty good 2020. You might even say he showed up ready to play more often than Jed Lowrie did…but who among us in a Mets cap didn’t?
 Oscar and his milieu enjoyed a recurring role across the pages of The New York Mets in Popular Culture, a recently published buffet of eclectic “critical essays” edited by the diligent David Krell. Leaning on the academic side of the street, a little up the block from what we do in this space, the book explores the margins of the Mets baseball experience. The more ephemeral it goes, the better it gets. The essays in which the Mets-loving reader learns more about Rheingold; Joan Payson; Bob Murphy’s beginnings; the truly original Mets of the American Association; calling Sports Phone, winning the Mayor’s Trophy; and one man’s adoration of Dave Kingman make this, as Murph might have put it, an excellent addition to your baseball library. The Mets-curious reader receives as well a bit of an anthropological explanation for what makes the Mets the Mets in movies and other media. Krell and his collaborators make a thoughtful case for the Mets mattering in every corner of the universe they touch — and The Odd Couple indeed gets its due in its various incarnations.
The fiftieth anniversary of The Odd Couple series was celebrated by that living, breathing Smithsonian Institution of show business, Gilbert Gottfried’s Amazing Colossal Podcast when Gilbert and his co-host Frank Santopadre (a devoted if inevitably disgusted Mets fan I’m delighted to call my friend) invited on the sons of Jack Klugman, Adam and David, to recall how their dad and Tony Randall made television history as Oscar and his reluctantly tolerated roommate Felix Unger.
In an even more specific district of the podcast universe, diehard OC fans like myself were introduced to 1049 Park Avenue, in which Ted Linhart and Garrett Eisler began to painstakingly break down every episode of the ABC sitcom. Well, not every episode. They have little use for the first, laughtracked season, and they’re a little choosy about the second season. Also, they’re not at all into sports, which I find odd since Oscar’s a sportswriter who we revere for wearing a Mets cap, but to each podcast its own. Though the title — taken from Oscar’s fancy Manhattan address — is quite clever, my wife expressed surprise they don’t call their show The Pod Couple. (I did a search. The title was already taken.)
As you can see, regardless of what’s on the air in a given year, Oscar lives, whether a person likes baseball or not, just as Felix lives, opera buffdom optional. Still, it never hurts to idealize Oscar. Take it from one of his press box successors, so-called real-life division, Sports Illustrated all-timer Steve Rushin, whose second coming-of-age memoir, Nights in White Castle came to paperback in 2020 and therefore into my price range. “Marriage,” Steve recalls through the filter of his college-age thinking, “seems inevitable and impossible. Even my literary hero, the divorced sportswriter Oscar Madison on The Odd Couple, had to get married before he became single, free to roam — in his Mets cap and sweatshirt, sandwich in hand — through his eight-room apartment in Manhattan.”
A little subtler sighting, but a sighting is a sighting: In The Happy Days of Garry Marshall, a tribute aired on ABC, May 12, 2020, a publicity shot from The Odd Couple features Oscar Madison in his Mets cap. (Another still photo shows Marshall — who wore a lot of baseball caps — wearing a 2000 Subway Series cap, which included the Mets NY logo.)
An Oscar named de la Renta was world-renowned in the realm of fashion, but it’s Oscar Madison’s headwear choice that remains eternal. We wouldn’t let a year go by, even a year such as 2020, without grabbing a sandwich for ourselves and rewinding to all the times we sighted the New York Mets in the popular culture. When we do, whether it’s from art produced in the year just past or from art from a ways back that became evident to us over the preceding twelve months, we tip Oscar’s Cap.
The 2020 Oscar’s Cap Awards, our ninth such annual salute, got the earliest possible start, on a New Year’s Eve that seemed like it was ushering in just any other year. It was then, at Barclays Center, that the Strokes rung out 2019 by debuting a song called “Ode to the Mets”. It would soon appear on their 2020 albumThe New Abnormal, produced by Rick Rubin (known far and wide as a musical icon, known to me in second grade as new kid in the class Ricky, who borrowed and diligently returned my copy of Kosher Comics). The Mets aren’t actually mentioned in the lyrics, but lead singer Julian Casablancas said he wrote the song on the Mets-Willets Point subway platform after what The Athletic termed “a disheartening trip to Citi Field”. The motivator was eventually revealed to be the 3-0 loss inflicted by Madison Bumgarner in the 2016 Wild Card Game. “I’ve had my heart broken many times, obviously, as a Mets fan,” Casablancas told mlb.com.
More evidence that people used to routinely take trips to Citi Field, or at least on the 7 train to somewhere, emerged in January when commuters had the chance to hear the following over MTA-approved speakers: “This is Mets-Willets Point — HOME OF THE METS! I love the Mets, ’cause I’m from Queens, and you’re riding the 7 train.” That was Awkwafina, promoting her very funny Comedy Central show Awkwafina is Nora From Queens. You can tell it’s from January because nowhere in her announcement does she remind you to wear a mask. On the show itself, in the fifth episode of the first season (February 19, 2020), one of the dads at the Elmhurst Community Center laid this bit of emotion on its viewers:
“He’s got his little Mets cap on, and he just pulls away from me, darts across the street, runs right at me, jumps in my arms. So that was the first time Timmy hugged me after the divorce.”
The Late Show with Stephen Colbert senior producer Jake Plunkett wore a Mets cap while he drove his mother Bootsie to meet Dr. James Hamblin to learn more about the coronavirus on March 16, 2020. To be sure, by March we learned 2020 was a good time to, if you weren’t deemed essential to others’ well-being, stay home, catch up on one’s streaming or, better yet, reading. Sure, you couldn’t take a cruise, but thanks to Friend of FAFIF Kevin Chapman, you could definitely be a passenger on Lethal Voyage, the third book in the Mike Stoneman detective series. And as long as you’re setting a course for adventure with Det. Stoneman, you might as well sit in on board for a hand of poker with 1986 world champion New York Met Lenny Dykstra — wearing his championship ring as he sails the high seas, no less. Mike, addressing Lenny as Nails, tells him, “I just want to say that I always appreciated your hustle on the field. When you hit that home run off Houston in game 3, I jumped three feet off my bar stool.” Gosh, who didn’t?
Just as there was no cruising to a game in Flushing this summer, there were no jaunts to the U.S. Open across the boardwalk. Yet that doesn’t mean there wasn’t Two For Tennis (The Adventures of Mark) by Michael Elias, another author we’re proud to count in our community of readers and commenters. In Michael’s book, protagonist Mark seeks solace and distraction in the doings of the Mets before and after the last days of Shea. Mark follows his favorite ballclub’s pursuit of playoff berth redemption behind Johan Santana and Carlos Delgado in September of 2008; sees the Mets fall short in their Wild Card bid on Shea’s last day and realizes while doing a crossword realizes that the 41-down clue for “Stadium in Queens” is ASHE rather than SHEA. Nelson Figueroa also gets a shoutout.
We’ll give a shoutout to Steve Cohen for maybe sparing us lines like these in the future: “Married a Mets fan. He’s a glutton for punishment.” That view of the world was stated by Jerry Orbach as Lennie Briscoe on Law & Order, referring to Rafael Celaya (who “loves the Mets, always listening to their games in the summer”). That’s from “Couples,” Season 13, Episode 23, May 21, 2003, just as the Fred & Jeff Wilpon ownership cabal was making its presence truly felt. Its vibe was still being felt on May 7, 2020, when Seth Myers devoted his “A Closer Look” segment on Late Night to baseball’s pandemic-fueled absence:
“Who are we supposed to root for when baseball comes back, the Mets? I mean, they’re the only team that’s doing better during quarantine. I’m pretty sure the last president they met with was William Henry Harrison, and then he died ten days later. That was the year Mr. Met caught typhoid.”
This endorsement of the way Wilpon things were followed directly on the heels of the finale of the brilliant Brockmire, which aired May 6, 2020, in which title character Jim Brockmire (portrayed by Mets fan Hank Azaria) begged protégé-turned-tycoon Charles, “Oh please buy the New York Mets. Somebody should. Those people have suffered for long enough.” (“The Long Offseason,” Season 4, Episode 8). It didn’t take a sharp eye to notice a large portrait of Shea Stadium’s upper deck hangs in a conference room during the final season of Brockmire.
“Can you buy the Yankees?
“No.”
“Can you buy the Mets?”
“Oh yeah!”
—Dell Scott (Kevin Hart) determining just how rich his fabulously wealthy employer Philip Lacasse (Bryan Cranston) is in 2017’s The Upside
On Patriot Act with Hasan Minhaj (Volume 2, Episode 2, released May 24, 2020), the host explains the dollar value of the legal marijuana marketplace in the US as such: “With that much money, you could buy the Mets thirteen times.”
Yet for all the grief the Mets took right up until Cohen took over, contemporary creative types can’t resist paying homage.
On Netflix’s Big Mouth, Andrew has a Mets poster in his room featuring the ’80s racing stripe.
Rapper Tobe Nwigwe posted a picture of himself wearing a black Mets jersey to his Facebook page in October 2019.
In the 2020 documentary Miss Americana, Taylor Swift is spotted with Jack Antonoff in a Mets cap about 42 minutes in.
A framed blue Mets jersey appears in the background when Fred (Seth Rogen) visits the office of his friend Lance (O’Shea Jackson) in the 2019 comedy Long Shot.
In the Netflix series Unorthodox (2020), a character with the unfortunate name Yanky wears what can be best described as a weird Mets cap.
In 2020’s interactive Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt interactive special Kimmy vs. the Reverend, Mikey appears to tell the viewer that a wrong decision was made, and adds, “the Mets don’t suck, you suck!”
In the third episode of the 2020 HBO Max series Love Life, Danny Two Phones (Gus Halper) invites Darby Carter (Anna Kendrick) on a date to Friday night’s Mets game, which is bucket hat night. Darby demurs.
“We heard the heartbeat for our little Mets fan.”
—Chris Fischer, wearing a Mets cap, regarding his wife’s pregnancy, Expecting Amy, Episode 1, HBO Max 2020 documentary series
In the Season 32 premiere of The Simpsons (“Undercover Burns”; September 27, 2020), Mr. Burns assumes an incognito persona by the name of Fred Kranepool.
Here’s an exchange from The Outsider, “Dark Uncle,” Episode 3, January 19, 2020 (HBO); while a Cubs game is on at a bar:
ALEC PELLEY: The first game my Dad ever took me to was at Wrigley. 1985, Cubbies-Mets, must’ve been towards the end of the season somewhere. After all these years, who can remember the date?
HOLLY GIBNEY: Did they win or lose?
ALEC: Cubbies lost.
HOLLY: September 26.
ALEC: September 26. I wish I could remember who was pitching.
HOLLY: Johnny Abrego started for the Cubs, but was knocked out in the fourth. He was relieved by Ron Meridith, Steve Engel and Jay Baller. Dwight Gooden, on the other hand, threw a complete game shutout for the Mets.
You’ve heard of a political football? The Mets are sometimes a political baseball.
• Mr. Met was listed as part of the festivities for the opening of Mike Bloomberg’s Bayside field office, February 6, 2020, when the ex-mayor ever so briefly ran for president. Earlier, while campaigning in Oakland, Bloomberg had made a reference to how being the Mets manager — as opposed to the position he’d filled in New York or the one he seemed to want in Washington — is the hardest job in America.
• On June 20, 2020, celebrity Mets fan John Leguizamo sent out a fundraising email for Long Island Congressional candidate Perry Gershon in which both the endorser and the endorsee wore Mets caps. Gershon was seen often on the campaign trail in an orange cap with a blue NY, matching the motif of his signage and Web site. Alas, the candidate most likely to introduce resolutions praising the “valiance and vitality of the New York Mets” in the House of Representatives lost his primary. But Leguizamo’s garb was not incidental; John also wore a Mets cap during a Zoom panel presented by Variety dedicated to Latinx creatives, released October 15, 2020.
• “I couldn’t be a better pitcher for the New York Mets than Jacob deGrom.”
—Chris Christie on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert February 25, 2020
• Paterson, N.J., mayor André Sayegh appeared on MSNBC’s All In With Chris Hayes on May 21, 2020, to discuss his city’s success with COVID-19 contact tracing, wore a Mets hoodie — blue, with a big orange NY — while addressing the topic.
• On Full Frontal with Samantha Bee, September 30, 2020, one day after the first presidential debate, Bee countered Donald Trump’s charge that Joe Biden wears the biggest mask he’s ever seen, offering Mr. Met and his mask as evidence to the contrary.
More real life than politics: The scheduled guest on Late Night with Seth Meyers when NBC News broke in to announce Trump tested positive for COVID-19 at around 1 AM, October 2, 2020, was David Wright, promoting his upcoming book, The Captain. After the initial report, anchored by Brian Williams, the network rejoined Late Night, with the previously recorded Wright interview already in progress.
As if I have to tell you, the Mets and elections interacting is hardly a recent phenomenon. One excavated-in-2020 example comes from the October 14, 2000, Saturday Night Live presidential debate sketch, moderator Jim Lehrer (Chris Parnell) grew so disengaged by Al Gore and George Bush that he tuned into the Mets-Cardinals playoff game on his monitor (that year’s second debate and Game One took place on the same night, October 11). 
Here a few other Mets sightings from the SNL archives, including a couple from very recent times:
In his first appearance as a Saturday Night Live cast member, during host Jack Black’s monologue/musical number on October 4, 2003, Kenan Thompson wears a contemporary Mets road jersey.
“A Manhattan eye surgeon is offering free LASIK Eye Surgery in exchange for a pair of Mets playoff tickets. Here’s some advice: If someone can’t afford baseball tickets, don’t let them operate on your eyes. With lasers.”
—Seth Meyers, Weekend Update, SNL, October 7, 2006 (when Mets swept Dodgers in NLDS); Season 32, Episode 2
“I love the Mets! But every time I suggest a Mets-themed prom, you guys look at me like I’m crazy! Well, here I go — final effort: Let’s do a Mets prom! Blue and orange streamers, hot dogs! My uncle knows Mookie Wilson. He can come! Therefore, my theme is, ‘Remember the Night We Mets?’ Thank you.”
—Fred Armisen (wearing a Mets road jersey and a blue Mets cap) as Billy Zerillo, in a prom committee meeting, Saturday Night Live, May 19, 2007 (Season 32, Episode 20)
On Saturday Night Live, October 6, 2007 (Season 33, Episode 2), Fred Armisen as Omar Minaya and Kenan Thompson as Willie Randolph take to the Weekend Update desk to unsuccessfully explain away the Mets’ late-season collapse (with Thompson in a home Mets uniform and blue cap).
Kenan Thompson wears a blue Tom Seaver throwback batting practice jersey in the “Driving School” sketch on Saturday Night Live, March 8, 2008 (Season 33, Episode 7) 
An egg wearing a tiny Mets cap was part of a bumper during the 2019-20 season finale of Saturday Night Live (S. 45, E. 18), May 9, 2020.
On Saturday Night Live, October 31, 2020 (Season 46, Episode 5), in another of the big John Mulaney-led musical sketches celebrating New York’s weirdness, Maya Rudolph appeared as the Statue of Liberty channeling Elaine Stritch by singing, in an updated version of “I’m Still Here”: “Danced for the ’86 Mets and broke my ankle, but I’m still here.”
“I had my first New Year’s Eve kiss with Mr. Met’s daughter. Stacy Met. Sweet girl. Big head.”
—Timothée Chalamet, monologue, hosting Saturday Night Live, Season 46, Episode 8, December 12, 2020
The death of the artist Christo (1935-2020) brings to mind Fred Armisen as Tom Jankeloff visiting The Gates in Central Park on Saturday Night Live, February 19, 2005 (Season 30, Episode 13), while wearing a windbreaker displaying the Mets script logo and the number 31. All that was missing was a blue cap to complement the onslaught of orange fabric.
A couple of other passings in the realm of pop culture and the Mets are worth noting here. Richard Herd (1932-2020) was Matt Wilhelm, George Costanza’s boss with a New York baseball team on Seinfeld. In “The Millennium” (Season 8, Episode 20; May 1, 1997), Mr. Wilhelm departed that organization to take on a new role: head scouting director for the New York Mets — the job George wanted. And Jerry Stiller (1927-2020), when he wasn’t George Costanza’s Festivus-inventing father Frank, played characteristically none too pleased as Arthur Spooner when his son-in-law Doug Heffernan (Kevin James) took him to Shea Stadium on The King of Queens (“Doug Out”; Season 2, Episode 6; October 25, 1999), though he did cheer up when Doug leapt onto the field to attempt to retrieve a foul ball for him. Alas, Doug was thrown in “Mets jail” for his would-be good deed.
Now let’s spend a few moments with Philip Roth’s 1997 novel American Pastoral:
One night in the Summer of 1985, while visiting New York, I went out to see the Mets play the Astros, and while circling the stadium with my friends, looking for the gate to our seats, I saw the Swede, thirty-six years older than when I’d watched him play ball for Upsala. He wore a white shirt, a striped tie, and a charcoal-gray summer suit, and he was still terrifically handsome.
[…]
“You’re Zuckerman?”, he replied, vigorously shaking my hand. “The author?”
[…]
“These are my friends,” I said, sweeping an arm out to introduce the three people with me. “And this man”, I said to them, “is the greatest athlete in the history of Weequahic High. A real artist in three sports. Played first base like Keith Hernandez — thinking. A line drive doubles hitter. Do you know that?” I said to his son. “Your dad was our Hernandez.”
“Hernandez’s a lefty,” he replied.
[…]
The following letter reached me by way of my publisher a couple of weeks before Memorial Day, 1995.
Dear Skip Zuckerman:
I apologize for any inconvenience this letter may cause you. You may not remember our meeting at Shea Stadium. I was with my oldest son (now a first year college student) and you were out with some friends to see the Mets. That was ten years ago, the era of Carter-Gooden-Hernandez, when you could still watch the Mets. You can’t anymore.
[…]
Sincerely,
Seymour “Swede” Levov, WHS 1945
Need a few more reminders that 1986 is eternal?
In the 2020 Long Island-set film Standing Up, Falling Down, Marty, a dermatologist played by Billy Crystal, watches the 1986 World Series, calls the son from whom he is estranged and mentions that Ron Darling is his son’s favorite player.
“What a great-looking crowd — so many stars, so much cocaine. Is the is the Emmys or the Mets’ locker room?”
—David Letterman, 2020 Emmys (9/20/2020), reading jokes ostensibly left in his tuxedo pocket from when he last wore it, hosting the 1986 Emmys
ESPN announced a multipart documentary delving into the 1986 Mets, their city and the times in which they conquered the world will appear in 2021. It is being crafted by Friend of FAFIF Nick Davis and I have a feeling it will be very much worth watching.
Need another reminder of what life was like ten years after 1986?
From Mystery Science Theater 3000, Episode 704 (February 24, 1996), during the opening scene to the The Incredible Melting Man, amid a countdown to launch:
VOICEOVER: T-minus 25 seconds.
CROW T. ROBOT: The Mets lost today.
The Oakland Mets (whose uniforms looked more softball than baseball) lost to the California Stars when Ralph Hinkley homered for the California Stars in Season 2, Episode 1 of The Greatest American Hero, “The Two-Hundred-Mile-an-Hour Fast Ball,” November 4, 1981. No, we’re not sure what a team called the “Mets” was doing playing as “Oakland”. We are, however, certain the Mets were nowhere near a World Series in the late ’70s, but a stock photo of a Mets game at Shea Stadium (wide angle, probably from the ballpark’s early days) appears in a TV Guide ad for the March 20, 1977, premiere of the ABC movie Murder at the World Series, which itself filmed its baseball sequences at the Astrodome, as the World Series in question pit the Astros versus the A’s. Maybe somewhere in here was the seed of the idea that became Major League Baseball’s 2020 postseason bubble.
And maybe, had the Mets provided season tickets to one of the leading songstresses of the late ’70s, they would have been invincible, because “of the fifteen New York Met games she’s attended, the Mets have won all fifteen.” The lady in question was Gloria Gaynor, whose great baseball luck was mentioned by Casey Kasem as he introduced “I Will Survive” as the No. 1 song on American Top 40, March 17, 1979. Casey had been telling a story of how Gaynor’s South American tour crossed paths with that of New York Cosmos, and how her pregame concert may have helped the Cosmos break their winless streak (the Cosmos resented the idea they needed an opening act let alone the kind of luck Gloria claimed to bring her teams). Nine years earlier, in his very first AT40 (July 4, 1970, based on the Billboard chart of July 11, 1970), Casey talked up “Everything Is Beautiful” by Ray Stevens at No. 29 this way: “If success contained calories, this guy would outweigh the New York Mets.”
In those days, the Mets were defending world champions, a fact that didn’t escape the showrunners of That Girl at the time:
“There are a lot of great men. There’s the infield of the Mets…”
—Donald Hollinger, That Girl, “Easy Faller,” Season 4, Episode 25, March 19, 1970
“When I can explain why I can miss an entire inning of a Mets baseball game because I’ve been staring at your picture on my television set […] then I’ll be able to explain why I love you.”
—Donald Hollinger’s note to Ann Marie, That Girl, “All’s Well That Ends,” Season 4, Episode 26, March 26, 1970
The Dick Clark 20 Years of Rock N’ Roll double album from 1973 included the front page of the Post announcing the Mets’ world championship in 1969 part of its gatefold art, indicative of what a surpassing cultural moment, not just pop cultural, the Mets winning it all was. Though they didn’t make it as tracks in the Clark-curated collection, two songs in the aftermath of the 1969 World Series that celebrated the most unlikely championship ever made themselves known to us a mere 51 years later: the Calypso-flavored “Mets” by the San Joe Trio (which namechecked several of the champs); and the garage-rocker “The Mets Special” by Rodd Keith (sounds a little like Eric Burdon and the Animals). 
To understand just how far the Mets came to get where they got as the ’60 ended, here are a couple of instances of how they were portrayed just a few short years earlier:
• The 1963 Off-Broadway revue Put It In Writing included a song, written by Fred Ebb and Norman Martin, that included the following lyrics: “When you run for a ball run right into the stands/Don’t forget, you’re a Met/When a grounder arrives let it slip through your hands/Don’t forget, you’re a Met,” asserting Mets fans preferred their new team lose.
• George Carlin on The Merv Griffin Show in 1965 referred to his character Lyle O. Higley, head of a chapter of the John Birch Society, as “a veteran of two wars, a depression and a Mets doubleheader”.
More recently from the world of big-time talk shows, especially those helmed by Mets fans and/or hosting Mets fans…
• Jerry Seinfeld joined Jimmy Kimmel on May 5, 2020, and compared notes on throwing out first pitches at Citi Field.
• Bill Maher’s suit jacket lining displayed the Mets skyline logo on Real Time, October 23, 2020. Four weeks later, on the eighteenth-season finale of his show (November 20, 2020), Bill’s montage of audiences applauding — a symptom of doing pandemic shows in front of nobody — included a clip from the Polo Grounds of fans behind a LET’S GO METS banner. Maher had been a minority owner under the Wilpons; Steve Cohen had just bought the ballclub when this episode aired.
• And on May 7, 2020, over on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, Pete Alonso appeared in the extended (142-part) version of The Last Dance, ESPN’s Michael Jordan documentary, offering this rumination: “I remember him. He played baseball for the Birmingham Barons. He also played basketball? That makes sense. He was pretty tall?”
He was, Pete, he was.
Archie Bunker may have been a Mets fan from Astoria, but nobody could accuse him of having been a particularly progressive Mets fan. One wonders what he might have made of Kim Ng being named Miami Marlins general manager in 2020 after hearing him express disgust to son-in-law and philosophical foil Michael Stivic that neighbor Irene Lorenzo was about to receive pay equal to his own: “Whaddaya gonna say when a woman is managing the Mets?” (All In The Family, “Archie’s Helping Hand,” Season 5, Episode 6; October 19, 1974).
It’s just a guess, but he probably would have said what he said less than a year later:
“I gotta go down to Kelsey’s and watch the Mets play ball.”
That pressing appointment came up on September 15, 1975 (“Alone At Last,” Season 6, Episode 2), on a night when in real life Mike Vail tied the franchise and league rookie hitting record versus the Expos. In TV Land, “I won on a ballgame,” the betting Bunker reports to wife Edith. “The Mets beat them San Diego Padres.”
Think Archie took in a lot of Broadway? Probably not, but to appeal to the widest possible audience, there was this radio ad copy for the explicitly gay-themed production Torch Song Trilogy that ran on the New York airwaves in 1982:
“…which then leaves the rest of us non-gays who will be immediately threatened and say, ‘Torch Song Trilogy? No way, nah, listen, I’m going out to Shea Stadium to catch the Mets and squash beer cans with my bare fists.’”
Once you’ve squashed beer cans with your bare fists, what’s left to do except tick off a bunch more Mets pop culture sightings to close out the year?
In the series finale of Anthony Bourdain: No Reservations, “Brooklyn,” Season 8, Episode 16, November 5, 2012, there are two Mets sightings: a green Mets cap on a waiter at Pok Pok, a Thai restaurant; and a Mets beer mat in the garage of a collector in Red Hook.
In his 2013 novel Dissident Gardens, set largely in Queens, Mets fan Jonathan Lethem has one of his characters, Lenny Angrush, try to convince Bill Shea to name the Mets the Sunnyside Proletariats.
On Flea Market Flip, Season 8, Episode 11, “Zen and the Art of Flipping” (February 19, 2017), a fella wearing a Mets cap backwards (adorned by upside-down sunglasses, no less) is spotted browsing for bargains.
In the 1988 film Rocket Gibraltar, very young Macaulay Culkin plays Cy Blue Black, a kid who wears a Mets t-shirt and a Mets cap.
In Billy On The Street, Season 2, Episode 4 (January 4, 2013), a bystander named Jonathan is asked to help a contestant answer a question, and Jonathan is wearing a blue Mets t-shirt (Mets script logo on front).
“I’ve watched a Met game from the owner’s box and partied with Gooden and Strawberry afterwards.”
—Matt Bromley (James Van Der Beek), Pose, Season 1, Episode 1, June 3, 2018
Ron Darling made two appearances on Sesame Street in 1985: walking in on Telly (who’s wearing a Mets cap) just as Telly is looking at his Ron Darling baseball card (from the Mets MVP Club series) on April 26, 1985; and teaching Big Bird how to throw a fastball on May 15, 1985. In each instance, Ron is wearing No. 44, which he wore in 1984. By the time these episodes aired, he had switched to No. 12.
The final shootout of 1987’s Deadly Illusion, starring Billy Dee Williams as private detective Hamberger, takes place at Shea Stadium.
Deacon King Kong, a 2020 novel by James McBride, takes place in Brooklyn in September 1969, with the New York Mets embroidered within the story.
On Mad About You, “The Spy Girl Who Loved Me,” Season 1, Episode 20 (May 8, 1993), Ira Buchman (Paul’s cousin) identifies Ron Swoboda and Ed Kranepool as a couple of people he used to worship.
Tom and Nancy Seaver hosted the Detroit (J.L. Hudson’s) portion of The CBS All-American Thanksgiving Day Parades, November 26, 1970
As for Metsian pop culture worth looking forward to, in 2020 it was announced Calico Joe, a John Grisham novel that included a Mets angle, would be made into a motion picture, and photos released from the upcoming Coming 2 America showed Prince Akeem (Eddie Murphy) will once again don his varsity-style Mets jacket from the 1988 original, replete with a pin announcing, “I’M A METS FAN”.
And because it’s likely everybody who’s read this far is A METS FAN, we’ll conclude on what we process at the end of 2020 as a most optimistic sighting:
In the Law & Order episode “Navy Blues” (Season 8, Episode 3; October 15, 1997), Det. Lenny Briscoe (Jerry Orbach) tells a slow-moving shopkeeper who’s searching for a receipt, “Hurry up. I have Mets tickets next month.”
Imagine having Mets tickets next year and going to a Mets game. Or watching a Mets game that has in-the-flesh, three-dimensional Mets fans like you in attendance. Pretty nice to think about, eh?
But when the Mets aren’t on, in whatever form their games do or don’t take, keep watching, keep reading, keep listening to whatever tickles your fancy and, should you see something Mets-related appear outside a baseball context, let us know what you saw. This annual feature’s depth (to say nothing of its extreme frivolousness) is made possible by a bevy of contributors who are kind enough to drop us a line when they see some show, hear some song or pick up on something that we might have missed despite our trying to see, hear and pick up on everything. Thank you all for feeding us the ball so cleanly and allowing us to make the pivot from there.
Particular thanks are due One SNL A Day for both its aspirational obsessiveness in recounting and reviewing every single episode of Saturday Night Live and for all the Metsian asides and screen captures the site has posted along the way.
by Greg Prince on 25 December 2020 5:04 pm Previously on Flashback Friday…
A little piece of me is always watching the Mets in 1970.
Mostly I was enchanted with the possibility that the Mets would win the World Series in 1975.
I was in love with the 1980 Mets. They weren’t the first Mets team I was ever hung up on, but I think, given where I was in life, that they were my first love.
I gave myself over to baseball and the Mets in 1985 in a way I never had before.
If there was ever going to be a year when I might have discarded baseball and pleaded no lo contendre to the charge that I allowed myself to be distracted from the Mets by overwhelming matters of substance, 1990 would have been that year. But it wasn’t and I didn’t. Amid a seismic personal shift that separated what came before from what came after, I was just doing what I’d always been doing. I rooted for the Mets like it was life and death. I didn’t know how not to.
In 1995, I was determined to spend as much time at Shea as was humanly possible.
It was the Year 2000, Y2K. Actually, it wasn’t any different from the 1900s, at least not the last few of them. Since 1997, the Bobby Valentine Mets had become my cause, my concern, my reason for being. Even more, I mean. If I had to rate the intensity of my baseball-commitment on a scale from 5 to 10 (let’s face it, it was never going to dip into low single-digits), these were the 9-10 years. The needle never saw 8.
For all the sporadic delight I’ve derived from the Mets since 1969, I don’t think I’ve ever been quite as personally gratified by a season as I’ve been by 2005.
Make no mistake about it: we lived in 2010. Of course we did. We live in every season as if it’s our permanent residence. We inhabit them fully. Each one is the most important season of our lives while it is in progress. Across the entirety of 2010, I sat at this very spot and, in concert with my blogging partner sitting in whatever spot he was in, set in type that entire April-to-October effort. It mattered to me. It mattered to you. Then it mattered no more. Weird how that happens.
And now: Flashback Friday.
***It’s five years later. It’s eventually always five years later. Right now, it’s five years beyond 2015, a season that resides only in retrospect. That’s technically been the case since a little after 12:30 AM on November 2, 2015, when Wilmer Flores looked at strike three from Wade Davis, and the Kansas City Royals ended the only Met season that lasted into the eleventh month of a calendar — and yet another season that ended too soon.
It stopped being the 2015 season right then and there, but the feeling of winning the pennant and going to the World Series lingered all winter. A flag was raised the following April to remind us all over again of what 2015 had been. Soon, 2016 unfurled in a fashion unlike 2015 but rallied, with a substantially (if provisionally) revamped cast, to insert itself into every relevant informational sentence thereafter. In 2015 and 2016, the Mets went to the postseason in consecutive years.
That was the era. It was over in a practical sense before April ended in 2017. Some residual emotion now and then resurfaced. Who could look at Wilmer Flores continuing to belt walkoff homers as late as 2018 and not think of 2015? Who could spot Yoenis Cespedes striding to the plate during his short-lived 2020 return, as blindingly fluorescent as he was preternaturally powerful (when he made contact), and not think of 2015? YOPENING DAY, as at least one back page called it, came and went, as did Yoenis, but he was a reminder. So, to a certain extent, have been the continuing contributions of the handful of 2015 Mets who figure to be 2021 Mets: Jeurys Familia, Jacob deGrom, Steven Matz, Michael Conforto and, once he’s fully rehabbed from Tommy John surgery, Noah Syndergaard. Roster construction subject to change, of course, at the discretion of Sandy Alderson, who, like Familia, had left for Oakland at some point but then returned from a checkered Met past whose most decorated squares were planted on the board in, yes, 2015.
Honestly, though, despite the presence of a few living, breathing participants from the 2015 Mets in Mets seasons of the future, it hasn’t been a whole lot like 2015 for the Mets since 2015. That was a sui generis year in Flushing. Unprecedented, somebody insisted. Inimitable since. Maybe someday soon its accomplishments will be matched and surpassed. That’s the plan under new ownership. That’s the hope always. Don’t kid yourself, though. Just getting a 2015 up in here is no mean feat. Good luck to us all getting more.
I don’t necessarily visit 2015 that much in my head, but it comes to see me once in a while. I’m happy for the get-togethers. These days, we put on masks and we reminisce.
***We remember that before it began, our expectations for it were limited, as were our imaginations regarding how good it could be. We’d conditioned ourselves since the end of Shea Stadium to dream small.
Still, my informal predictions for 2015 were vaguely positive. I thought the Mets would be better than the clutch of unsatisfying seasons that preceded it from a baseball standpoint. How much better, I wouldn’t have guessed. We still relied on Jonathon Niese and Dillon Gee. We signed Michael Cuddyer to middling fanfare. We had yet to fully replace Jose Reyes at short by my reckoning, and Jose Reyes hadn’t been a Met since 2011. Bartolo Colon shaped up as more effective than most pitchers about to turn 42, but he was about to turn 42. Curtis Granderson, like Colon, had come over in 2014 and, like Colon, was somebody you loved rooting for, but like Colon, Granderson didn’t hit for average (.227 in ’14).
There were signs, however. DeGrom, with barely a dab of advance heralding, had won NL Rookie of the Year even if the Mets didn’t score enough to net him more than nine measly wins. Juan Lagares tracked everything down in center, including a Gold Glove. Jenrry Mejia was a heartstopping but ultimately lockdown closer, especially with Familia setting up for him. Travis d’Arnaud was showing enough of the stuff that made him worth trading R.A. Dickey for, so we’d be set at catcher for a while. Second baseman Daniel Murphy couldn’t field, but he could surely hit. Lucas Duda could slug and wasn’t bad at first base. David Wright was very much The Captain and forever the third baseman. Matt Harvey was very much returning from TJS and ready to resume his acedom in tandem with young Jacob. Zack Wheeler, like Josh Edgin and future closer Vic Black, would be out, but Gee and Niese were still around.
Bottom-line types might have concluded that a person who devoted his mental capacities to the fortunes of the Mets of 2009 through 2014 had not put his brain to its best use. Yet the early part of the 2015 season undermined the Mets’ handy image as a waste of time, assuming you were already partial to devoting time to a baseball team. These Mets took off like no Mets in ages. From a 2-3 start that followed a 453-519 epoch that dated to the season Citi Field opened (not to mention the pair of September collapses that shuttered Shea), the Mets presented themselves as unbeatable. For eleven games, including an entire ten-game homestand in April, the Mets went 11-0. That was stuff out of 1969 and 1986, and that got a Mets fan revved up for the rest of the season.
There’s nothing better than the year that Feels Different, and before we had a chance to feel anything else, 2015 felt different. We were no longer entering games as a decided underdog. Three of the teams we battered at home in April — the Phillies, the Marlins and the Braves — had slipped into rebuilding mode (the Marlins lived there). We had already done rebuilding. When we weren’t looking, or perhaps when we were looking but not fully processing, we had rebuilt, at least to the extent that we needed to be taken seriously and the extent we needed to take ourselves seriously. Who knew it was just a matter of adding Michael Cuddyer?
Before long, the ease of April would find muck in May and get jammed in June. The injury bug, an inevitable if uninvited Met guest, would arrive. Presumed stalwarts headed for the disabled list. Reinforcements appeared. Some, like the kind you applied around the holes on your loose leaf paper, stuck. The rest didn’t. Somehow the Mets didn’t come totally unglued. There were days and nights when the shallow depth of the lineup threatened to drown them, but they stayed afloat. It helped that it wasn’t a tough division, with only the Nationals seeming imposing (without being as imposing as they seemed). It helped that the Mets were deep in pitching. Jenrry Mejia tested positive for PEDs? Jeurys Familia merely changed his address from the eighth to the ninth inning. Dillon Gee faded onto the DL, practically never to be heard from again? Noah Syndergaard emerged from the wings, a Thor fully formed. A glint of a void opened up in the shadows of deGrom, Harvey and Syndergaard? Somebody call Steven Matz of Stony Brook and tell him to bring his bat.
The pitchers were pitching and often hitting. Those relied on to hit were another matter after a while. Batting orders were makeshift. Batting results shifted into neutral, then nil. Things began to feel desperate, yet not hopeless. Vive la différence after a brisk start (15-5) that provided just enough cushion for the plunge back to Earth (21-32). The Mets hung in there in all ways applicable: around .500, around the division lead, around the Wild Card race if a side door to glory was deemed necessary. The fresh air of April had not grown totally stale. It was there for the breathing. Sucking into our lungs that we no longer sucked…it didn’t suck.
Nor did having the Mets as an outlet when 2015 got sad and serious in a context I couldn’t foresee.
***When I’m with 2015, I’m also with my father quite a bit. I wouldn’t have predicted that when 2015 began.
Early one morning in May I saw my phone blinking. Florence, my father’s girlfriend of 23 years, was trying to reach me. My 86-year-old father had to go to the hospital. Something about him falling. I got in touch with my sister. In a matter of minutes were on our way to North Shore in Syosset before learning, no, now he’s at North Shore in Manhasset. So we were on way there.
When we caught up to him, Dad seemed relatively unbothered by his circumstances, a passenger taking note of his journey while lying on a gurney in front of an admissions desk. It wasn’t his first choice for a destination, but he put up with it. We made small talk as we usually did. Something about the NBA draft lottery. The final episode of Mad Men (he thought it was “OK”). Later, when he was transferred temporarily to a small room where testing proceeded, he grew antsier and antsier. He demanded to be taken to the bathroom across the hall, which he was told was off limits. “If you’ll pardon the expression, I have to take a piss.” I’d never heard him use the phrase. He was also getting hungry and began reciting the dishes he could really go for if they would just let him out so he could go home and eat like a healthy person, which he was asserting he was. He’d like a western omelet. Some barbecued spare ribs. I would’ve loved to have run out and rustled some up. I wasn’t particularly useful otherwise.
This was a Wednesday morning and afternoon, leading into the night I was supposed to be at Citi Field but had to bow out of previously made plans. On Friday, when a mound duel in Pittsburgh between young guns Gerrit Cole and Noah Syndergaard failed to engage me (but it was my night to recap), Dad had brain surgery. Wednesday he wakes up in a state of normality. Less than sixty hours later, they’re opening his head. Jesus, that’s quick, but I guess you don’t wait when you find something wrong. He was seeing visitors on Saturday. A doctor came by and asked me to step into the hall and introduced me to the word glioblastoma. That’s what was like 99% removed. But it could grow back.
This is the thick line of 2015. Some years demarcate themselves definitively from the past. Before that morning in May, family business as usual was cordial but distant. I’m guessing the last time we had all gotten together as a family — Dad and Florence; my sister Suzan and her husband Mark; my wife Stephanie and me — before the hospital was in January. Or maybe the previous June. Or previous January. Our holiday, birthday and just-because get-togethers had condensed over the years. Stephanie, Suzan and Dad had birthdays that coalesced over a three-day period in January, so that was usually it. Unless it snowed a lot, then we’d postpone it. And if the postponement bumped up against the Super Bowl, maybe we’d just push it off to Father’s Day, though maybe Father’s Day would encompass just four of us, depending on who was miffed at who.
Actually, it occurs to me we may not have gotten together as a family in toto the entire time my father was in and out of hospitals, rehabilitative facilities and, ultimately, whatever name they used for a nursing home in 2015 and 2016. There was quite a bit of tag-teaming keeping Dad company, pending people’s availability, proximity and tolerance for one another. I seemed to show up mostly on weekday afternoons at first, especially once he was transferred to Glen Cove to recover his sea legs thinking and his land legs walking. I’d take a train to Jamaica then transfer north and east on the Oyster Bay line. Driving any kind of distance had presented a challenge to my anxieties over the previous two decades. One small offshoot of Dad’s eventual transfer to the final place he lived, in Woodbury, and my determination to visit him regularly was it got me back behind the wheel whether I wanted to be or not. I became a competent and reasonably confident driver again. Not on highways, but I’m OK on side roads.
The improved driving came later. In June, it was the train, bringing Dad the Times so he could try to do the crossword and get his brain going. We’d sit together, engage in the best possible version of the idle chit-chat we’d perfected over the past quarter-century of midweek phone calls and take in whatever show Steve Harvey was hosting (Dad had developed a love of Steve Harvey hosting anything). If he napped after lunch and before ambulatory sessions, I’d wander into my iPad. Up in Glen Cove, during the dreaded San Diego-Arizona trip — dreaded annually by this blog for the lateness of the games and the lameness of the action — I had gotten unreasonably excited over something I noticed the night before. Four-ninths of the Mets’ lineup wore a double-digit uniform number: Ruben Tejada in 11; Kevin Plawecki in 22; Matt Harvey in 33; and John Mayberry in 44. In a previous era, all that double-vision would have sent me scurrying to get the papers, get the papers to see if there was anything on it. But neither the Times with its fancy crossword nor any of the tabloids covered esoterica the way blogs did. I knew it was up to me to track this minutiae down. So I sat by my father’s bed and scrolled all the usual suspect sites for background. Had the Mets ever run out players clad in 11, 22, 33 and 44 in the same game before? Had they done it in this century? My inquiring mind needed to know.
As I intently cross-referenced uniform data with box scores, Dad stirred. Whatcha doing, he asked me.
“Research.”
***Sandy Alderson did his research, too. Took his sweet time doing so from where I and millions of my fellow Mets fans sat. By July, as my father got the green light to return home (with near-daily trips for radiation mandated and a pill for chemotherapy prescribed), the Mets’ pulse beat haltingly. These were the days of John Mayberry and Johnny Monell and Eric “Soup” Campbell and Danny Muno and just after the days of Dilson Herrera and Darrell Ceciliani. It seems bad sport to call out a stream of Mets who combined for a trickle of base hits just to prove that offensive times were getting hard, but we were trying so hard to think of ourselves as contenders. Instead, we contended with batting averages for which snuff was eternally elusive.
Get us up to snuff, Sandy. Get us some hitters to go with our pitchers. Get us some depth. We’re doing this without David, without Travis, without Daniel. We’re going oomphless in pursuit of a playoff spot. How we’re still talking playoffs is a credit to the rotation, the closer and Curtis Granderson’s ability to draw walks. Yo, a little help?
Yo, we’ll get to in a minute, but cavalry was coming. Last year’s No. 1 draft pick Michael Conforto alighted ahead of schedule and not a minute too soon, one day after Clayton Kershaw toyed with a lineup whose No. 9 hitter, Bartolo Colon, brandished only the eighth-lowest average (he had Anthony Recker beat by ten points). Conforto was 22 and born to hit. Kelly Johnson and Juan Uribe, nabbed from Atlanta, were much older but professionally skilled enough to make a difference in depth. And Carlos Gomez…
We were trading for Carlos Gomez, the ex-Met we dealt for Johan Santana ages before. Gomez had bloomed into a legitimate star for Milwaukee. It would be good to have him back, even if we’d have to give up baby-faced, sometimes-slugging Wilmer Flores, the infielder without a position. Gomez could run, Gomez could hit, Gomez could field. He’d be an upgrade.
Except reports of Flores’s departure proved not only premature, but inaccurate. The exchange between New York and Milwaukee got called off if it was ever truly on. It would go down an unmade trade, little harm, little foul, if not for the fact that Twitter, in full swing on the night of July 29, linked Citi Field seatholders (myself among them) with the news that Flores was as good as gone. We delivered unto him the bulletin and a warm ovation.
Flores had no idea he was traded. Terry Collins had no idea he was traded. Sandy Alderson had not traded him. Big misunderstanding, but not harmless. Wilmer, likable enough to that moment, transformed into instantly beloved because he shed a tear or two, as detected by SNY when he thought he was outta here. He wasn’t. We were glad.
Except we didn’t get Carlos Gomez and we still needed another player and not only did we lose on the night of the bizarre non-trade, we lost the next day in soaking, excruciating fashion in the ninth inning when Familia imploded versus the Padres. We had held the fort for as long as we could. We clearly required another bolt to secure it.
It came from out of the blue. Detroit, anyway. Yoenis Cespedes — Yo! — was acquired for real and for two minor league pitchers. This was the addition onto our house that Alderson had never made in the middle of a season before. An impact player for an impact season. We got word on Friday afternoon that Yoenis would be here Saturday. In the interim, during the second-place Mets’ Friday night showdown with first-place Washington, Wilmer Flores was embraced as perhaps no Met ever, certainly as no Met ever whose major achievement to date was public emoting.
Flores was so touched by the affection that he responded by winning the game on a twelfth-inning home run. From not outta here to triumphantly OUTTA HERE! The Mets, if we hadn’t figured it out yet, were also for real. Cespedes pulled into town on Saturday and things got realer. By Sunday night, the reality was a sweep of the Nationals and a virtual tie for first place. The real thing, first all for ourselves, followed in very short order.
One of the elements of baseball fandom that never fails to fascinate me is how quickly we can change our concerns and perceptions as the fates demand. For six season we’d been this lumpy punching bag of a franchise, either completely out of it or only tentatively and ultimately fleetingly in it. The “it” in question was the quest for a berth in the postseason tournament to determine a champion. We hadn’t been truly sincere about contending since September 28, 2008, the last day of Shea, and it translated to our attitude toward our Mets and ourselves. They were not winners. We were not happy. But at least we could relax.
The months leading up to July 31, 2015 — the date we got Cespedes and the date Flores went deep — had seeded the ground a little for a change in the way we saw ourselves and our team, but that weekend, followed by our commandeering of the National League East lead, catapulted us full-force into a new and dizzying headspace. We are winners. We are happy. We can’t relax because now, suddenly, every single game and every single pitch matter. Not just in the caring about the Mets, therefore of course it matters sense, but in the holy crap, we can actually go places this year sense.
It was a beautiful place to be.
***Less beautiful: That hospital in Manhasset on a Wednesday night in August. Dad’s clearance from the woods proved temporary. I suppose that was predictable. On July 29, the same day Wilmer Flores wasn’t traded, he’d gotten something of a clean bill of health after his month of radiation and chemo. At 86, it would have been a bit much to expect a long-term thumbs-up (at some point he sought assurances from an oncologist that he’d be fine for the next “eleven or twelve years”), but it would have been nice if he could have enjoyed something resembling normality for more than three weeks.
There had been another fall and another need to call. Stephanie and I helped settle him into his next room until maybe two in the morning. I’d be back Friday evening. The Mets were in Colorado. Cespedes led them to a 14-9 win, something that the Mets, in their 54-season history, had never statistically notched. I was back Saturday night. The Mets were still in Colorado and the Mets were winning again by a score of 14-9. The big “go figure” of 2015 was on. Go figure, the Mets keep sweeping series. Go figure, Dad can’t stay out of the hospital.
When the weekend in Denver and Manhasset began, the Mets existed on the periphery of my father’s consciousness. They were something I stepped out into the hall to keep tabs on while he grudgingly got felt up by a nurse. We watched Jeopardy or The Big Bang Theory reruns or NFL exhibitions on his TV. I glanced at my iPad for updates from Coors Field. “Big Met doings?” he’d ask. I’d half-apologize for my first-place distraction. He didn’t seem overly put off.
My dad couldn’t have cared less what the Mets were doing had he thought to care at all when the 2015 season began. He was at home with Florence, grooving to Steve Harvey and whatever he pleased whenever he pleased. If we talked about the Mets, it was to confirm that I was still devoting an outsize portion of my consciousness to them despite the diminishing returns he believed I was collecting for my passion. The blog and a couple of books had convinced him I was at least getting some use out of being a Mets fan, but on the telephone line between me and him, the Mets were essentially handy conversation-filler in our irregular chats, a box to be checked. “So, are you going to any Mets games? I see they lost again in heartbreaking fashion.”
Despite my trying to keep them politely isolated in the hall, the Mets seeped into his room, and then his consciousness. On the Monday after Colorado, the Mets were in Philadelphia. Dad suggested turning on the game so we could watch together. I did and we did. It wasn’t a perfect viewing situation — I was emptying his urinal while David Wright was homering in his return from spinal stenosis — but it was a good time. It woke up the echoes of 1986, when Dad, like Mom, was into the Mets like all of New York was into the Mets. That interest dissipated almost overnight when Mom died in 1990 and the Mets fell away from contention. But now it was all coming together again. The Mets were hot, Dad was into it and I was the facilitator. By Friday, he was calling me at home asking when I’d be over to watch tonight’s game.
I couldn’t make what was ailing him (lots) go away, but I could give him something to take his mind off it (a little). I could give him more of me than I had managed to peel off in recent years. I could give him more Mets than I ever dreamed he wanted. I liked that I could do that. I’m sorry it took this to get it done. I liked that the Mets were so good in 2015 that there was no way they couldn’t or wouldn’t be involved.
***The Mets clinched the National League East on September 26. The Nationals, so hyped in the preseason, never really challenged them after the Flores/Cespedes series. In early September, we descended upon Washington and swept the last evidence of fight right out of them (except, maybe, for their fighting with one another). Then we went to Atlanta and kicked the Braves’ ass all over Turner Field, an activity that was never out of favor. The finale of that series looked to be a loss until Daniel Murphy smashed an unlikely ninth-inning home run to tie it. We won in ten. It was after Murph went yard that Gary Cohen proclaimed these Mets didn’t know how to lose. After so many seasons and so many Septembers when the opposite was true, it was a thrilling pronouncement.
Plus, it had the benefit of being essentially true. The Mets at one point tore off 31 wins in 42 games. Good enough for the divisional flag, hoisted in Cincinnati on a Saturday afternoon. Good enough for a feeling of near-invincibility. We had been Mets fans too long to believe we were permanently unbeatable, but here we were, owning the East and heading to the playoffs. We kept pinching one another. It didn’t sting in the slightest.
The Mets would play 14 postseason games. Five I experienced at Citi Field, which seemed impossible to grasp until I was at the first of them, Game Three versus the Dodgers in the NLDS. Citi Field had been a big mope from its opening in 2009. That first genuine October night, as we booed Chase Utley for dismantling Ruben Tejada’s leg and cheered Ruben Tejada for enduring Chase Utley’s venom, it became Shea the Second. All it had been missing all those years was our most vocal support and a reason to express it.
My good fortune to be in Flushing in the fall extended to the World Series, Games Three and Four. It was better than any World Series game I’d ever experienced at Shea because I’d never had that opportunity. Citi Field is indisputably the best place I’ve ever seen a World Series game. The park doesn’t play like Coors Field, but I swear the atmosphere was elevated. If I hadn’t known there’s nothing like a World Series, I discovered it for myself, and that will stay with me forever.
As will the four postseason games of 2015 I watched with my dad, one versus L.A., one versus the Cubs and, most of all, the two against the Royals in the World Series. It wasn’t crazy that the division champion, 90-win Mets persevered through two playoff series to win the pennant. They were a very good team firing on all cylinders, especially the one marked Murph (seven homers in nine games). What was crazy was a remark I made from thin air in August to calm my father down as he resisted yet another invasion of his person by medical personnel. Appealing to his well-honed logic wasn’t working — though after months of doctors and nurses, maybe the most logical thing was to resist another poke or probe — so I held out a carrot. If you don’t get better, Dad, I dared to say as if speaking to a child, then I won’t be able to watch the World Series with you.
Like I had the World Series in my pocket or in the trunk of my car and needed only his cooperation to dispense it. The Mets hadn’t clinched anything when I said that. The Nationals were still viable. The Dodgers, Cubs, Cardinals and Pirates all loomed as obstacles. Hell, all four of the other NL playoff teams would wind up with better records. But I inadvertently uttered magic words before there was even a magic number. “The World Series” spoke to my father. He grew up in a New York when there was always a World Series nearby. He supposedly rooted for the Dodgers as a kid though he rarely emitted any Boys of Summer vibes. His father liked the Yankees so much that he himself couldn’t stand being dragged to any more games after he was a teenager. Some weirdo in his high school was loyal to the schleppy Giants of the Forties (he once told me I reminded him of that guy). He used withholding the 1969 World Series as a threat on me so I’d take eye drops from an eye doctor when I was six, but the difference was the Mets were already in that World Series.
“The World Series” stayed aloft in our dialogue from late August on. My dad, with whatever faculties he maintained, decided it was coming. We watched the Mets win the NLDS together as a necessary step. He called me in rare moment of peak lucidity after the Mets won the NLCS, impressed by their attainment of “the pennant,” another word that stayed with him from childhood on. And now, on October 27, we had a World Series to watch.
I still don’t know how I pulled that off.
The Met lost our two World Series games, Games One and Five, each of which went on far too long. The Mets were defeated in Kansas City in 14 innings in Game One and again in decisive Game Five in 12 innings. They went on far too long because a) we lost and b) my car was in the shop, so getting to my father’s nursing home and getting back home thereafter was, to borrow Pete Campbell’s phrase, an epic poem. Still, it was worth the trip. My father enjoyed it as much as he could. Naps were needed as the innings piled up. I filled his sleepy intervals by texting back and forth with my sister, the Prince least susceptible to baseball’s gravitational pull. Suzan empathetically climbed aboard the bandwagon just the same.
GAME ONE, AROUND MIDNIGHT
S; U still watching there?
G: Yes. W/O car; in shop. Big fan CHP sleeping last several (most) innings.
S: Ugh, and xtra innings too. What’s w/ ur car? Maybe take cab home? Either that or lie down in one of the empty rms (!)
G: Will take cab.
S: Glad ur taking cab. Still cheaper than scalper tix.
G: More impressive: u know what’s going on in game.
S: Lovin’ it especially crotch signals. Cant other team see them on tv?
G: Other team isn’t watching TV, doesn’t know what crotch signals mean.
S: Ok, will take ur word for that.
GAME FIVE, AS THINGS GO IRREVERSIBLY AWRY
S: Oh no Charlie Brown!
G: My fault. I was looking at train schedules.
S: Get out ur sleeping bag.
G: Go big or go home.
S: Yeah man. Here goes nuttin. Ain’t over til it’s over, or so I’ve heard…
G: Your bromides are inspirational.
S: Cliches help in trying to stay awake. Oy vey dis is not looking good.
G: That’s the way Drake’s Coffee Cake crumbles.
S: Hope for best expect worst.
G: Wind up with the Mets.
S: Yup. Still alive, barely.
G: Have a Niese Day.
S: Ha I get it! Could Mets mgr chew gum any harder?
G: Four out of five dentists agree.
S: Ho ho. Dad asleep?
G: Totally. Woke only briefly when I detonated my f-bombs in the 9th.
S: That’s funny, kinda. Looks like u cn shred train schedule…
***It went on too long and it was over too quickly. The World Series needed to go seven or at least encompass three additional Met wins. That’s math when you’ve lost four games to one. That’s 2015, too, the Met portion. That July day that brought Cespedes to Flushing. That July night that launched Flores into legend. That August and September in first place. That October capturing the pennant. Those three months lasted as long as it says right there, three months, but they lasted about three minutes. Or so it feels five years later. Still, I’m delighted to dwell in them and on them whenever the mood hits. It does sometimes. Because 2015 landed in our midst without much buildup — no 1984 and 1985 foreshadowing its stab at 1986 — and because it didn’t birth a run of lasting, even modest success — no 1970-1972 competence bracketed by 1969- and 1973-style miracles — it feels detached from the overall Met narrative. Sure, there was the Wild Card spurt in 2016, but that postseason lasted exactly nine innings, and then the cliff beckoned. Our Wile E. Coyote ballclub couldn’t zoom off its farthest edge fast enough.
Sandy Alderson, when baseball was in its 2020 sleep mode (and before he was rehired by Steve Cohen), joined Tim Britton and Pete McCarthy on the Athletic’s Met podcast the Metrospective. In a wide-ranging conversation, Alderson touched on how swiftly Metsian attitudes changed by his last season as GM, in 2018, once 2015 became definitively past-tense: “The team got off to such a poor start, and when that happens, people typically go back to their default positions. In the case of the Mets — I don’t mean internally but externally: cynicism, skepticism, negativity, and they never really recovered. […] When you are faced immediately with an overwhelming number of losses, you lose that momentum and you default back to where you once were.”
Like I said, we do quickly change our concerns and perceptions as the fates demand. Pointing out the awesomeness of 2015 by 2018 (really, by 2017) was about as relevant to those contemporary Mets as bringing up ’69 and ’86. It was fine and fun for nostalgic purposes, but it was in a past that left faint footprints and exhibited short tentacles. Even 2006 had a couple of full years of contention in front of it, never mind how they melted. Twenty Fifteen didn’t so much belong to an era as serve as the baseball equivalent of Rudy in Rudy getting that Hostess cupcake with a candle in it in the break room at the steel mill from his best friend for his birthday. It’s a thoughtful gesture. Rudy blows the candle out. Not much later, Rudy’s friend dies in an explosion.
The movie, it should be noted, has a happy ending. Rudy gets to go to Notre Dame, makes the football team and runs out of the tunnel, fulfilling his dream. Us? We didn’t get a world championship in 2015 and we didn’t get an era surrounding 2015, but I don’t feel shortchanged. We still have proof the usual narrative can be disrupted, and boy did we need that. We still have that pennant, which is not to be confused with a fluttering handkerchief (nothing to blow one’s nose at). We still have Conforto, deGrom and Syndergaard, each with postseason spurs earned, each potentially leading another batch of Mets back near and maybe to the promised land. I’ll never not have that eleven-game winning streak in April; the invigorating Citi Field debuts of Thor and Matz; the injection of talent exactly when we needed it; the stomping of the Nats twice; the thousands of words with friends of the “can you believe this?” nature; and the toasting and drinking of champagne with Stephanie every time we clinched something. I don’t have my dad anymore, but I have that World Series with him.
Funny, I feel surprisingly nonspecific about Game Five in terms of the parts that are supposed to hurt worst. Collins left Harvey in a batter or two too long. Wright threw to first instead of home. Duda threw to Corona instead of d’Arnaud. We scored nothing in the tenth, eleventh and twelfth. The Royals scored five and I vehemently resent them for it, yet the loss doesn’t really grab me by the throat. I recently came across this Times photo feature that ran the following spring. They found a bunch of fans standing behind home plate with agonized expressions etched on their faces and asked them to elaborate on how awful it was that Hosmer scored the tying run in the ninth. That’s right, I thought anew, that was awful. That was the Series right there. Fuck, I guess.
But it felt less awful to look at it in 2020 than it did when it first ran in 2016, and though it was absolutely awful to live through on November 1, 2015, I don’t feel defeated by it, and I don’t feel 2015 was defined by it. I was with my dad when it happened. He had nodded off, but we were together. And the Mets were in the World Series.
That was 2015. It’s five years ago now.
by Greg Prince on 22 December 2020 1:15 pm Here we are, as in olden days, happy golden days of yore. It’s December. Snow lingers on the ground. We reflexively marvel at a picture of it on a baseball diamond. Photographing such a landscape is an irresistible rite of wintertime passage. It’s the oxymoron of the hot stove league, a winter classic, like that New Year’s Day the Rangers and Sabres skated at Citi Field. It’s not what we’re used to in the context of the setting, but it comes, it goes, and we move on to what really belongs on all that grass and dirt. Not snow. Not hockey. Baseball.
The Baseball Equinox, that exact moment when we are as close to the first pitch of next season as we are to the final out of last season, is slated to arrive Thursday, December 24, 2020, at 6:55 PM Eastern Standard Time. It’s a mark we hit without fail. We do it here every year. We did it last year because we knew when the final out of 2019 was made and we knew when the first pitch of 2020 was to be thrown.
Or we thought we did.
The Baseball Equinox proved retroactively fallible last March through no fault of its own. The first pitch of what was then “next season” was postponed indefinitely. By the time it left Jacob deGrom’s right hand on July 24, the Equinox drifted from the end of December to…I don’t know. Somewhere in Spring Training, I guess, which also made a mockery of Spring Training’s stated purpose to get baseball ready for the immediately upcoming season. But that wasn’t Spring Training’s fault, just as the Baseball Equinox losing its chronological footing wasn’t a stumble on the part of a date on the calendar. While we’re not assigning blame, maybe take it easy on cursing out “2020” as if it was a knowing perpetrator of disappointment and devastation in our collective existence. The year was the field, not the game.
An Opening Night for the 2021 Mets has indeed been announced, at Nationals Park on ESPN, April 1, 7:08 PM EDT, 186 days and 26 minutes since the Nats finished pounding the Mets on Closing Day 2020. A Spring Training schedule has been announced, too, with the Mets hosting the Marlins in the first Grapefruit League game on February 27. Be sure to take your blood pressure medication if applicable, because all such schedules come with copious grains of salt.
As we learned in 2020, schedules aren’t necessarily worth the paper they’re rarely printed on anymore. Pandemics are the new rainouts. Vaccines are angling to be the new tarps. They’re also the big “we’ll see” of the baseball season. The NBA is tipping off tonight. The NHL drops its puck next month. They’re both showing up later than usual and playing through the public health raindrops, preparing to produce television content rather than the traditional shared fan experience. One way or another, we’re all still bubble-wrapped.
Baseball has a schedule but no certainty. Maybe Spring Training starts in February. Or later. Maybe Opening Day comes on April 1. Or later. Seats will be filled. Or not. The “terms and conditions” relating to ticket sales on mets.com includes a lengthy section regarding “COVID-19 and Other Infectious and/or Communicable Diseases, Viruses, Bacteria or Illnesses”. Things are somewhat hopeful (tickets are on sale), but nothing is guaranteed. Nothing was ever guaranteed, but it used to be you counted on a few things. One season ended, another was coming right on time. Time plays in its own league now.
Perhaps there’s no point counting down precisely to Pitchers & Catchers or Opening Day. But there’s always reason to look forward. You can believe in the Baseball Equinox. You just can’t take it as gospel. Then again, by the luck of the draw, it does show up on Christmas Eve this year. Maybe on December 24, come five to seven at night if you’re not otherwise distracted, look to the star of your choice to guide you forward.
I tend to look to deGrom, but that’s me.
by Greg Prince on 16 December 2020 9:26 am Someday maybe, maybe someday soon, Jared Porter will be “Jared” to us. For now, he is “Porter,” and that fits. America has been saddled with enough celebrity Jareds of late.
We’ve also had our run of celebrity general managers. “Brodie” came to us a master of hype — wasn’t he loudly threatening to guide Jacob deGrom to greener pastures than Flushing Meadows mere months before he persuaded Jeff Wilpon to let him switch sides? “Sandy” was a more orthodox choice for GM, but in context carried outsize fame and symbolic weight (godfathering Moneyball before it was a fully recognizable phenomenon). “Omar” was Met-famous as a Steve Phillips aide and well-known to any baseball fan paying modest attention when MLB dropped the withering Montreal Expos in his lap, only to have Omar revitalize them for a couple of summers. After as he returned to Shea, the Kid from Queens narrative soared to LaGuardia takeoff levels. Mind you, there’s nothing necessarily wrong with camera-ready charisma. It surely helps a person get attention before a single throat is cleared.
Jared Porter? If you’d ever heard of him before his name arose as a leading candidate for Met GM, you’re either playing in a front office fantasy league or you worked with the guy in baseball. In professional circles, he’s apparently a star, his glow attained the old-fashioned way. He earned it.
After seventeen seasons elsewhere doing what baseball people do — a little of everything — Jared Porter is now a GM for the first time. From the Red Sox to the Cubs to the Diamondbacks to us, in this role. It’s a path heretofore untrod by the thirteen previous Met GMs. We’ve had GMs who were GMs for other teams. We’ve had GMs who worked their way up the company ladder here. We even tried a fellow who negotiated player contracts on the other end of the table.
It wasn’t too long ago that Brodie Van Wagenen was someone we took seriously in terms of trusting him with sorting through the details of our future happiness. His era hasn’t been over sixty days, yet his tenure already seems destined for clickbait content on the likes of Cracked.com. “23 Crazy Baseball Things That Actually Happened!”. The AGENT Who Became GM and Gave a HUGE Contract to his Ex-Client Who had SEVEN ABs in TWO YEARS! would slot snuggly somewhere between The VERY Diminutive Pinch-Hitter Bill Veeck Sent to the Plate WITHOUT a Strike Zone! and The Team That Sold Beer for TEN CENTS and DIDN’T Expect a Riot!
Yet Brodie was our GM for a pair of officially regulation campaigns and we came to accept the seemingly oddball arrangement pretty quickly as business as usual. Some of his business he conducted well to our semi-trained eye, some less so. Who’s to say we won’t discover some innovation he implemented at the sub-Jed Lowrie level, after his hiring in the offseason following 2018 and before his dismissal in the offseason following 2020, wasn’t effective and won’t be deemed to have paid off down the line? Who’s to say, should the Mets ascend relatively soon, there won’t be spirited online debates over how much of it was Brodie’s doing, the way a rearguard faction seemed obsessed in 2015 with noting how many Mets of the moment had been drafted by Omar rather than acquired by Sandy? Who’s to say Brodie, had he been retained, wasn’t going to ultimately make Jeff Wilpon appear visionary?
Alas, we won’t know how Brodie Van Wagenen might have pursued the immediate Met future, because this time we went to Jared. Jared Porter, that is.
Preconceived notions are few. Endorsements are myriad. Peter Gammons loves the guy. Bill James loves the guy. Everybody who’s come in contact with him loves the guy. Or they love the work the guy’s put in and the results his work has yielded, which is the important thing. I watched Porter introduce himself to the media the new-fashioned way, via Zoom. He came off as somebody I’ll readily trust with the post-Brodie, post-Wilpon fortunes of my franchise. No sloganeering. No over-the-top promises. An amiable enough baseball person who appeared ready to get back to depth charts as soon as he could log off the call. An actual GM for virtual times.
Maybe, like Brodie, he’ll sit with The Seven Line Army for a game. Maybe, like Sandy, icon status will attach itself to him. Maybe, like Omar, he’ll be promoted as a major selling point. Or maybe none of these. It could matter greatly across the great sweep of Metropolitan history that Jared Porter is GM. Or it could prove a well-intended footnote. Tom Seaver won three Cy Youngs for the Mets under three different general managers. You think Tom worried himself over whether it was Johnny Murphy, Bob Scheffing or Joe McDonald up in the front office? (It was only the unyielding presence of the corrosive chairman of the board that proved a fatal distraction.)
Jared Porter’s appointment is fine. Fine is what we’re all striving to be as 2020 gathers its strength for a final push to next year. Get us to 2021 and we can start to believe COVID-19 will be properly vaccinated away and baseball will start anew and somewhat normally not long after. We can, like Porter, choose to enthusiastically buy into Steve Cohen’s timeline of three to five years for a world championship despite the lack of guarantees therein. When Steve, a first-namer to be sure, did his first Zoom, his estimate of when he’d like to handle the Commissioner’s Trophy sounded offhanded yet not unreasonable. It’s what an optimistic fan who’d just bought a decently talented team and was used to succeeding might throw out there as a best-case estimate. Maybe it will happen. Maybe it won’t. If we get and stay close — finishing first occasionally and contending for the playoffs perennially — I won’t demand an emotional refund. Steve Cohen as owner, Sandy Alderson as team president and now Jared Porter as general manager, along with Luis Rojas, the skipper who chronologically predates each of them despite technically reporting to all of them, are going to invest themselves in designing and staffing an infrastructure that’s built to last. Do that, and we’ll clear every October on our calendar in good faith.
The people putting together the Mets can only make so many promises and we who wish to believe they know what they’re doing can make only so many projections. Also fine. Do your best and we’ll at least verge on being satisfied.
by Greg Prince on 12 December 2020 6:13 pm The Ages of Lo Duca, Schneider, Santos, Barajas, Thole, Buck, d’Arnaud, Plawecki, Mesoraco and Ramos (to say nothing of the intervals of more than a score of backups) have given way now to The Age of McCann. James McCann, that is, starting backstop for your New York Mets, a franchise that hasn’t fully filled its Piazza-sized hole behind the plate never mind in the lineup since the Greatest Hitting Catcher Ever completed the terms of his seven-year contract on October 2, 2005; took a seven-minute seventh-inning stretch curtain call; and packed his gear for San Diego. Mike would be back to help close Shea in 2008, be inducted into the team Hall of Fame in 2013 and have his number retired in 2016, and the Mets would still be cycling through successors every time Mike dropped by for a ceremonial first pitch. Whoever caught the actual pitches on those days and nights proved to be, at best, a short-timer or inevitable letdown.
McCann isn’t here to make us forget Piazza (fat chance). He’s here to make our pitchers comfortable and us confident. He’s here to get to more balls in the dirt than landed in Wilson Ramos’s sadly flailing grasp. He’s also here to continue riding the defensive and offensive trajectories that transformed him from somebody the Tigers didn’t see the need to keep a couple of years ago to the most attractive free agent catcher this winter this side of J.T. Realmuto.
The Mets believe in the 30-year-old McCann enough to have signed him from the White Sox, where he was an All-Star in 2019 and Gold Glove finalist in 2020, reportedly snagging him for four years at the cost of plenty-sufficient Cohen currency. The Mets fan intermittently immersed in hot stove hype isn’t quite certain why Realmuto wasn’t the prime target, but trusts the Mets will tell us their reasoning soon enough, and trusts even more that heretofore prohibitively priced targets at other positions have been identified and will be sincerely and successfully pursued.
Steve and Alex Cohen were at Citi Field Saturday afternoon as reports lit up Twitter that McCann was becoming a Met. The couple that owns the Mets were out front greeting season ticket holders and distributing last season’s bobbleheads. Nobody got any trinkets last year, as we know. We also know we got little out of Ramos in 2020. Little production, little protection, zero confidence. The Buffalo stampeded opposing pitchers in 2019 and was good enough to shepherd that deGrom fellow toward another Cy Young, so maybe ’20 was just an off year for him the same way it’s been an off year for the bulk of the world. Regardless, Wilson wasn’t coming back in 2021 and we really needed a catcher.
If McCann plays like a more cheerful Charlie O’Brien, a guy who knows what he’s doing while wearing all that equipment and brings over some of his good South Side vibes, that would be minimal. He’s being entrusted to do more, but doesn’t have to be Piazza or, for that matter, Carter with the bat. Just keep the fellas on the mound in their zone; be simpatico with the umps; stay nimble on your feet; place and/or move your mitt precisely where it needs to be; and…geez, that’s a lot. It’s amazing catchers are elevated to Cooperstown mostly based on hitting.
Anyway, thanks for the catcher, Steve and Alex. What else ya got for us? Besides a new GM?
by Greg Prince on 3 December 2020 6:42 pm This time his observations were outrunning his understanding. This vague America he was now reporting was swelling with strange, vague forms which his thinking could no longer shape into clean stories. No piling up of more reportorial facts, no teasing anecdote, no embracing concept, could hide from him what was wrong: his old ideas no longer stretched over the real world as he saw and sensed it to be. Thus, as the campaign wore on, he found himself more and more bewildered. How had America come to this strange time in its history, and he with it?
—Theodore White, In Search of History, 1978
Ah, good old familiar baseball, especially its tension and drama. It’s timeless. Can’t ya just picture it?
It’s the last inning, meaning it’s ninth inning.
Unless there’s another game scheduled, in which case it’s the seventh inning.
Let’s just say it’s the last inning, whichever it is, unless there’s an extra inning, in which case we’ll play a tenth.
Or an eighth.
With a runner on second before anybody bats.
If it’s the bottom of the inning, at least we know the home team is batting.
Unless hastily cobbled rearrangements dictate that the visiting team is batting last.
Pitching is whoever was pitching for the previous two batters, no matter what, basically.
Batting ninth for whichever team is hitting is likely whoever was batting ninth all game long, and certainly not because their pitcher is pitching a complete game.
Warming up in the pen, however, could be just about anybody these days, and somehow anybody will eventually come in.
It makes ya wonder who might be doing what in the minors — wait, are there still minors?
Anyway, whatever play is made here will get no reaction from anybody in the stands, because they are literally a bunch of stiffs.
Yet there sure is a lot of crowd noise.
Maybe whoever’s up in the broadcast booth can make sense of this…provided they’re up in the broadcast booth of the same ballpark in which this game is being played.
Whatever happens in this inning, the key thing here is we still have a chance to be one of the…how many teams make the playoffs again?
***So all right, it’s not timeless. It’s clearly 2020. From a baseball standpoint, I’m thankful it’s no longer going on. From a baseball game standpoint, I’m surprised the average game from the year we can’t put in the rearview mirror fast enough isn’t still going on.
Thanks, baseball. You’ve got me on lawn patrol at last. Get off mine with your changes nobody invited.
Admittedly, I’m veering into Crotchety Old Columnist territory here, and I’m about to ramble a bit, as a person who’s not meaningfully interacted with people outside of a screen, a phone or a doctor’s office very much for many months might, but I assure you my kvetching emanates from a place of authenticity. As much as I comprehend the desperate contingency that went into creating a sixty-game schedule gussied up with atonal bells and off-key whistles, the parts that masqueraded as progress made feel something in 2020 that I never before felt quite so acutely in my 52 seasons as a baseball fan. I felt estranged from the game I love. The stubbornly timeless game had a surfeit of change shoved down its throat to a point where even if I could recognize it as essentially the same game that captivated me in my youth, it became more difficult than ever to engage it on the same level where I’d embraced it for decades.
The season was too short. And the games dragged on too long. Somewhere within, emotions trembled, but not often. Maybe not until the end. On suddenly arrived Closing Day, SNY reran the tribute video the Mets produced after Tom Seaver died. I teared up. When the game was over, credits rolled over a montage of cheering crowds from 2019. Not the players, just the fans. That made me tear up more. Soon after, the club e-mailed out its annual thank you video, with highlights from the season just concluded. In the background, I saw empty seats and cutouts.
Tears turned to dismay. Distance returned. Go away, 2020 season. Keep going, please and thank you.
In late July, baseball came on television again after several months of sensible absence. I attempted to process it, interpret it, absorb it and generate passion to want more of it. It only partially took. That went for Mets baseball as much as it went for all baseball. The result made me yearn for the replacement of Rob Manfred as commissioner with Paulie from Goodfellas. I yearned to hear Paul Sorvino’s boss of a character giving it straight to MLB about what to not do next:
I don’t want any more of that shit…just stay away from the garbage, you know what I mean…I’m not talkin’ about what you did inside. You did what you had to do. I’m talkin’ about now. Now, here and now…don’t make a jerk out of me. Just don’t do it. Just don’t do it.
I suppose I’m preternaturally resistant to change, but during the 2010s, I came to see the wisdom of baserunners not slamming into catchers. I like the idea of video replay review if not the logistics. Middle infielders as targets should have gone out long before Chase Utley came along. I don’t hate the Wild Card. I’m fine with new, hopefully enlightening statistics entering our general conversation. Tradition flecked with progress keeps tradition fresh. Yet there was nothing about the 2020 baseball season that wasn’t around in 2019 (give or take Andrés Giménez) that I wished to pack up and ship ahead in care of 2021.
I’m going to project a little here and decide I can’t possibly have been the only one to have experienced such a “this is not my beautiful game” disconnect, and I’m going to declare the Nikon Mini Camera Player of the Year award — dedicated annually to the entity or concept that best symbolizes, illustrates or transcends the year in Metsdom (amended this year to acknowledge how briefly the campaign ran) — belongs to the sensation of Distance. Reaching out and touching someone was a bad idea if you wanted to stay well. But not being able to get a feel for the thing you were certain you knew?
So far away. Doesn’t baseball stay in one place anymore?
Distance, whether expressed in terms social, physical or mental, was an overriding fact of 2020 life, imposed with the noble aspiration of avoiding more 2020 death. Don’t stand so close to me. Or me. Or me. Nothing personal. We get it and we got it in the hopes that we wouldn’t catch it. It would be disingenuous to say the least strange element of baseball this past year was that it was played without fans in the stands in deference to COVID-19. It was awfully strange, yet to have baseball at all was to understand the isolation of players and coaches from the rest of baseball’s usual citizenry had to be baked in. Little media. Skeleton staff. Zero spectators. Play ball?
We can be as adaptable as phonographs when we have to be, and after a while, baseball played in front of empty seats disguised as fans seemed provisionally normal. When the neutral site doors of Globe Life Field in Arlington were opened to a capped quantity of ticketed customers for the NLCS and World Series, and the biggest games of 2020 were played in front of a quarter-full house, the weird part was having anybody at all on hand — and their hands high-fiving, presumably sans sanitizer.
The ballpark-as-studio conceit was as eerie as it was necessary. Getting used to it was likely more depressing than encountering it (from a distance) the first dozen or so times. It wasn’t so much that I missed being at games. I missed anybody being at games. Jacob deGrom leaving the mound after striking out 14 in his final 2020 start should have received a standing ovation. But corrugated cutouts, whatever they’re made out of, are notoriously unresponsive.
But, again, per Paul Cicero, they did what they had to do, assuming we had to have baseball, as if it delivering it to us was an essential service. Having had it, I can’t say it wasn’t better than having none at all. On the other hand, I had resigned myself in March to not having any and was going along relatively fine without it. I had my share of Tuesday/Friday essays to occupy my Met muscles. I had a fairly fresh passel of Mets Classics on SNY. I had a half-century of Mets baseball coursing through my brain. What was I missing exactly? The chance to obsess over whoever the Jason Vargas of the 2020 Mets was going to be?
“The thought crept in,” Teddy White, the author of four Making of the President books, acknowledged to himself when he realized he didn’t quite have it in him to go out on the road and make a fifth, “it was probably more useful to go back than to go on.”
But we went on when baseball said it could, when the public health forecast was looking up, or at least across, so I went along for the virtual ride, the one with…
• the DH invading the National League (a vile experiment the AL neglected to unplug in 1973);
• the doubleheaders with seven innings apiece;
• the runner magically appearing on second base to start each extra half-inning;
• the shuttling in of mysterious characters from “alternate sites”;
• the looking live at Citizens Bank or Nationals Park with the voices of Gary, Howie and their cohort reporting live from Citi Field;
• the seeing plenty of the Rays and Jays with no glimpses of the Padres or Pirates;
• and the corrugated cutouts frozenly cheering the whole deal on.
Compared to all of that, pushing a shopping cart while wearing a mask and having to wait six feet from the customer ahead of me at checkout was perfectly normal.
Not everything about baseball in 2020 was a product of attempting to avoid a potentially deadly virus. They were ready already to mess around with relief pitching, with the constraining three-batter rule previously sketched out. They were ready already to take an axe to the minors and kill off dozens of affiliates. Too many strikeouts and a proliferation of home runs didn’t materialize with the turn of the decade. Yet within the eerie confines of the empty ballparks, even the distant home runs felt cheap, and the thrills they were intended to give us felt distant.
And no matter what they did, the relatively regulation games dragged into perpetuity. I think the Mets are still playing the Braves from a few month ago (it’s the bottom of the sixth).
This baseball season, even while in as much progress as it could muster, felt uncommonly far away. It was removed from looking like, sounding like and feeling like the game we fell in love with. Certainly the game I fell in love with. If I were a conspiracy theorist, I would theorize baseball was conspiring to detach me from baseball. Take the DH (please) for example. The arguments for endorsing it as its fulltime adoption probably grows inevitable are becoming ubiquitous in our neck of the woods mainly because we have two power-hitting first basemen. Will getting a few swings out of Pete Alonso without sending Dom Smith to left or the bench benefit us? Often it will, I imagine. Will the designated hitter also help some other team with excess boppers and a finite number of defensive outposts and might it help them, to the hindrance of our pitchers? Most coins have at least two sides.
But never mind the transactional component. I won’t even play the “strategy” card, even though, yeah, there is some thinking that’s missing by not having deGrom on deck in the sixth or seventh of a tie game. What I discovered I really disliked about the DH was it unhinged the tops and bottoms of innings from one another. Here’s the game where the Mets are batting. Here’s the game where the Mets are in the field. They don’t meet in the middle. The flow is disrupted. The action is unmoored. There’s a game where we bat, there’s another game that takes place in an inset, like a pitcher-in-picture. It’s not what a pitcher does while batting that I miss. It’s that the pitcher bats at all. It’s that the pitcher isn’t off conducting his own game apart from his teammates. Call me old-fashioned. I like my team presenting itself in unison. If the manager doesn’t want the pitcher to bat, pinch-hit for him and bring in a new pitcher.
On the other hand, stop bringing in so many pitchers so soon. Let starters extend themselves long enough to make their at-bats an issue. Your bullpen will appreciate the breather. Your viewers will appreciate the continuity. Reliever after reliever — even with the manager being told he has to stick with one reliever until he has a third out in an inning — takes its toll. Arms get weary. The roster-replacing gets dizzying. You couldn’t tell the players without a scorecard in a year when nobody printed any. The Mets needed 25 pitchers to win 26 games and lose 34 of them. And two of the pitchers were position players.
If keeping track of the 30-, 28- or whatever-it-was-man roster on a given day was difficult for the team a fan followed, it would have taken a data dump worthy of Statcast to have a handle on who was elsewhere in the majors, especially in a season when it was decided (not illogically) that the COVID environment wasn’t suitable for loads of travel. So the Mets played their own division and their geographic counterparts in the AL East. Even if it was reasonable, it was another cause for detachment.
There was a Sunday in September when I learned a Cub was pitching a no-hitter. I tuned to MLB Network to see if the pitcher would get it. I realized I didn’t recognize the pitcher (Alec Mills), and that the batters he was facing on the Brewers were 2020 strangers. I hadn’t seen either of these teams play the Mets, which meant I hadn’t seen either of these teams play at all. One of the satisfactions of a regular season is the tour through the league’s opponents. What’s new with L.A.? San Fran? Cincinnati? And so on. The Central and the West were rumors and the occasional highlight.
It would take the arrival of postseason to see some teams that didn’t play in the Easts, yet October left me as cold as anything else. Teams I didn’t know playing in vacant lots, with lots of synthetic noise and those damn cutouts. I mostly skipped the tacked-on first round. I tried to involve myself in the LDS as an October tourist, the way I always have, getting caught up in somebody else’s storyline for a couple of weeks. It didn’t really take, save for being happy the Yankees stopped being involved. I rooted for the Rays to beat the Dodgers in the World Series. The Dodgers, whom I’ve reflexively despised since Utley brutalized Ruben Tejada, won. I shrugged.
Eight playoff teams per league. Neither league’s playoffs encompassed the Mets. Can’t blame 2020 for that, but it’s not a feather in the year’s cap, either.
***Now that I’ve bahhed and humbugged about the distance I felt from a sport that stood so close to me for more than fifty years, let me seek some proximity.
First off, I’m still here. I wasn’t going anywhere. It would take a lot to altogether turn me off. That’s not a dare to Rob Manfred, mind you, but it’s a fact. Baseball’s got the Mets. I can’t quit them, as illustrated by this conversation between my wife and me one weekend while the 2020 Mets were playing and losing:
“This team gives me such a headache.”
“Maybe you shouldn’t watch them.”
This is usually where I would scoff at such a curative notion. Instead, I insisted, “I’m pretty close to not watching them!”
Then I went back to watching them, with a headache. Eventually they lost. After thorough disgust had overtaken me, I needed a shower. I went to grab a clean t-shirt. It was a Mets t-shirt. I flung it on the bed and remarked how this was not the cause I needed to represent at this moment. My wife helpfully suggested I could pick another shirt from my drawer, as I do have a few that aren’t inscribed with the Mets wordmark or logo.
Nah, I said.
Granted, it wasn’t much of a rallying cry, but, nah, I wouldn’t think of not representing the orange and blue, even if it’s only in quarantine.
A few days after the World Series, there was definitive word that our team would be run by a new owner, a Mets fan who didn’t have to pick and choose among free agent targets. Dismounting the carousel as the Steve Cohen Age kicks in would be self-defeating. Not that I’d be exiting even if one Wilpon was leading to another Wilpon, which was what I thought it was always gonna be. Granularly, I didn’t feel 2020. But in the great journey through Metsdom, my path’s end point defies distance. I don’t believe it’s out there. Lately I might’ve had my fill, but I feel it still (just let us kick it like it’s 1986 once in a great while).
When Cohen was announced as on the verge of taking over, the date was October 30. Instinctively, I assumed it was March. Man, I thought, I could really go for some Spring Training right about now. If eighteen years of sole Wilpon control — with the eighteenth of them shapeless, rhythmless and no more than semi-relatable — couldn’t douse the embers of my childlike enthusiasm, chances were they could only be stoked.
Then there was my yearbook. My 2020 yearbook. As noted above, you couldn’t buy a scorecard or even pick up a pocket schedule, but the Mets did print some yearbooks. They put them on sale via their Web site and offered to ship you one if you really wanted to buy it.
 Salvation lies within? I really wanted to buy it. The desire wafted in on a breeze from 1972, the year of my first yearbook, the year before I first went to Shea, so I had to send away for it, to 123-01 Roosevelt Avenue, Flushing, NY 11368. It costs quite a bit more than it did back then, but it’s not prohibitive. I pick one up every year at Citi Field even though there is less and less content worth ponying up for. I leaf through it on the train ride home. I leaf through it a couple of more times once I get home. Then it lands on my pile of checked boxes. Like playing those teams from the other divisions, having the yearbook is just something that makes a season complete.
My 2020 yearbook came to me, just like the Mets said it would. It still has no content worth savoring. Some nice four-color photography, as Bob Murphy might have touted, including from early in the 2020 season (a.k.a. late July). No text beyond the basics. No special sections commemorating anything. Just pretty pictures and compulsory corporate cheerfulness.
This I savored. I savored having it in my hands. It had been accessible via download for a while, but leafing through it on an iPad wasn’t the same. That was just more distance. This was something to have and hold. This was the Mets in one bound volume, like the Mets of any year. Sometimes you just want something tangible to remind you that something is or was real. True, there were players featured who barely existed in the present tense, players I’d all but forgotten since summer turned to fall. Brian Dozier had a page. So did Eduardo Nuñez. And what piece of official Mets propaganda would be complete without a straight-faced salute to Jed Lowrie?
They were all there, and I was happy to see them where they belonged.
Knock scientific wood, we’ll get through the pandemic. We’ll get a vaccine, we’ll get inoculated, we’ll cease being so careful of getting in each other’s way and maybe we’ll get out to the old ballpark. Of the many items on Steve Cohen’s punch list, I hope, is the elimination of the stupid rule about bringing in backpacks or any bag remotely considered a backpack. It should be way down his list, but now that Trevor May has been signed, maybe bag policy climbs a notch. (My brief scouting report on Trevor May: he’s just a couple of smart moves away from being an anagram for Mayor’s Trophy.)
I’d all but forgotten that I had to adjust my routine in 2019, that I couldn’t carry my schlep bag, that I had to dig out a tote bag instead. It occurred to me during what little 2020 season there was that I wasn’t certain where my game tote bag was. Surely it was under a pile of stuff — and it was — but even once I found it, would I remember that I was supposed to take it with me the next game I go to? Would I remember how to go to a game? The getting on a train, the getting off a train, repeating the process until it got me to what is now called 41 Seaver Way, the approaching the entrance, the stiffening up prior to being searched (get rid of that, too, Steve).
Can you imagine, in 2021, going out to a game? Going out to a Mets game? Being that close to the Mets and Mets fans again so soon?
I’m still working on it.
FAITH AND FEAR’S PREVIOUS NIKON CAMERA PLAYERS OF THE YEAR
1980: The Magic*
2005: The WFAN broadcast team of Gary Cohen and Howie Rose
2006: Shea Stadium
2007: Uncertainty
2008: The 162-Game Schedule
2009: Two Hands
2010: Realization
2011: Commitment
2012: No-Hitter Nomenclature
2013: Harvey Days
2014: The Dudafly Effect
2015: Precedent — Or The Lack Thereof
2016: The Home Run
2017: The Disabled List
2018: The Last Days of David Wright
2019: Our Kids
*Manufacturers Hanover Trust Player of the Year
by Greg Prince on 28 November 2020 7:24 pm Every fall, the postseason brings three individual awards: the NLCS MVP; the ALCS MVP; the World Series MVP. I inevitably stay tuned after championships are determined to find out who won each respective series MVP, never thinking that it’s odd that a prize is about to be presented for a performance spanning as few as four and no more than seven games. Likewise, I always hang around to learn who the MVP of the All-Star Game is, and that is literally about how well somebody did in just one game — a game that doesn’t count (and a game in which almost nobody plays the entire game).
This all seems normal behavior in the realm of baseball fandom, yet when the Faith and Fear in Flushing Awards Committee commenced to contemplate who would receive the coveted Richie Ashburn Most Valuable Met award for 2020, FAFIFAC paused. The Mets, as you know, played a sixty-game season this year, more than a hundred games off the norm. Ascertaining value within this smallest of full-season sample sizes struck the committee as an exercise doomed to incompleteness. Was that really a season? And, other than having something new to watch on TV sixty times, was there any value in it?
The Baseball Writers’ Association of America signaled yes and yes, as the BBWAA gave out all its usual MVP, Cy Young, Rookie of the Year and Manager of the Year awards in November despite the absurdly low totals it was determined to recognize. That the season didn’t feel quite authentic was beside the point. It was called a season. Players played in it. That, apparently, was enough.
After months of delay and doubt, we had what we agreed was a 2020 Mets season. But was there “Most Valuable” value demonstrated by any of the 26-34 Mets? Far be it from us to dismiss a sub-.500 team from the realm of individual praise. FAFIFAC renamed its MVM in honor of Ashburn in 2017 precisely because Richie was chosen by beat writers in 1962 as the Original Mets’ MVP. Ashburn was a touch bewildered by the designation — “Most Valuable Player on the worst team ever. Just how did they mean that?” — but in our minds, a precedent was set. No Mets team is so bad that you can’t say somebody hadn’t stuck out as good…or at least stuck around, and that was good. Maybe, then, we can say that no Mets season is so brief that somebody doesn’t accomplish a few things that deserve lasting recognition.
What’s inescapable, however, is the lack of length prevented a traditional course of MVM events from emerging. There was no palpable first half or second half. There was no stretch drive. There wasn’t a long enough haul from which a single Met could truly emerge as vital or triumphant or a model of perseverance. There were just sixty mostly messy games plopped onto a shapeless grid of a semi-schedule sanctioned seemingly for the amusement of corrugated cutouts. Within this bizarre atmosphere, the Mets never really got going. They just got gone.
But FAFIFAC likes to give out its awards, so it will, but with a caveat: this was quite obviously no normal year, so we are presenting here not the normal Richie Ashburn Most Valuable Met award, but, for 2020 (and hopefully never again), the RichAshes: truncated trinkets for what proved a disposable seasonette. We still sincerely salute our winners, we’re just sorry they didn’t get a fuller chance to totally show their stuff.
True, had 162 games been played, maybe some other Met would have come along and surpassed them in our estimation, but we’ll never know. We only know what we experienced in 2020. Most of it wasn’t worth preserving let alone cherishing. But what these guys did wound up more than a little cut above the rest.
Prelude stated, the RichAshes of 2020 go to Michael Conforto and Dom Smith, co-MVMs in a compressed context. They individually made the most of the Mets’ limited run and were, together, the most compelling reason to keep tuning in nightly, even when shtickless stalwart for all seasons Jacob deGrom wasn’t pitching. If we could, we’d give them each their very own Amphicar, just like the one Ron Hunt won as sole MVP on the 1963 Mets. But since they’re reasonably chummy to begin with, we’d like to imagine they’d happily share one, given that Amphicars are tough to come by these days.
 A most valuable prize for all seasons. The Smith-Conforto combo seems a most appropriate choice when considering each enjoyed a particularly scalding chunk of baseball when either could have been on his way to traditional Ashburn honors. For a while, Michael Conforto looked like NL MVP timber for any season. Perhaps it was because the Mets never legitimately contended — and probably because elite offense ran rampant practically everywhere — no BBWAA voter officially noticed a batting average of .322, an on-base percentage of .412 and a slugging percentage of .515. The shadow cast by the onslaught of hot-hitting Braves, Padres, Sotos and Mookies blanketed any attention Conforto might have gotten, and Michael received no votes for league MVP.
On the other hand, Dom Smith hit so much that the writers had to mark their ballots with pens containing thimblefuls of orange and blue ink. After riding the bench on Opening Day, Dom started starting and making the most of his opportunity. The slash line of .316/.377/.616 is not only impressive to the naked eye, but it represents a sizable jump in every category over anything he posted in previous years. Smith’s 10 homers in 50 games nearly matched his 2019 total of 11 launched in 89 games. The voters noticed, placing Dom 13th in the MVP race, the only Met to garner any support and pretty good for a team whose offensive noise didn’t amount to much in the way of winning.
The most recent set of Mets consolidated as a strange collective creature when it came to batting. Remember how they started the baseball portion of 2020? They were putting runners on by the baseload but had a hard time shaking them loose from first, second and third — particularly second and third. Here are some of their in-game RISP performances as the season got going:
July 26 — 1 for 8
July 29 — 3-for-14
July 30 — 1-for-10
August 1 — 1-for-10
August 2 — 1-for-15
Not surprisingly, those were all losses. After stranding oodles of runners in scoring position, the Mets fell to 3-7 and never really recovered. Eventually they began to drive one another in with a little more regularity, yet an offensive rhythm eluded them. Consider that when it came to leaguewide OPS+, the metric designed to factor ballpark conditions into combined on-base and slugging percentage, the NL East champion Atlanta Braves placed fourth; the top Wild Card and holder of the second-best overall record Slam Diego Padres placed third; and the eventual world champion L.A. Dodgers placed second. Who did all those juggernauts look up to in this presumably very telling category?
The also-ran New York Mets, whose 122 OPS+ topped the senior circuit. Yet who came in seventh among total runs scored, well behind the Dodgers, Braves and Padres? Those same New York Mets, whose 286 runs checked in just slightly above the league average.
When the Mets didn’t drive in runs, from whatever base, the hole they left in their wake was gaping. But when they did score, they seemed to do it in gobs — in one of every ten games, they scored in double-digits; in three of every ten, they scored at least seven — and when the Mets scored gobs of runs, it was Michael and Dom doing much of the gobbling.
 Most of the runs in creation came courtesy of these guys. Runs created is a measure originally crafted by Bill James to gauge just how effective all the hitting a given player is in…well, creating runs. “To put runs on the scoreboard,” the godfather of modern advanced statistics posited, is the whole idea of getting on base, never mind slugging. Best among the 2020 Met run creators were Smith and Conforto, each weaving 42. In the realm of weighted runs created plus, or wRC+, which has nothing to do with RC Cola but everything to do with external factors like ballparks and overall league performance, Conforto (13th) and Smith (19th) were, by FanGraphs’ reckoning, the only two Mets to land in the NL’s Top 20.
In traditional and perhaps more easily digestible numbers suitable for the weekend after Thanksgiving, Dom finished tied for fifth in RBIs in the National League; Michael was seventh in hits; Smith finished second in doubles behind only MVP Freddie Freeman; and Conforto came in sixth in singles. Conforto’s OBP ranked sixth, while his batting average placed seventh. Smith was tenth in batting average, fourth in slugging. They were both Top Tenners in adjusted OPS+, with Dom in fourth and Michael in tenth.
Dom’s ability to hit for extra bases — 32, most for anybody in the league except for Freeman — stands out even more in light of his not having a position when the year began. Even with the National League giving in to peer pressure and sinfully adopting the designated hitter, a batting order slot specifically designed for a fellow who is more stick than leather, Smith had to sit. Yoenis Cespedes was still around, and the 2020 version of Cespedes was judged not physically capable of patrolling the outfield, where he’d once won a Gold Glove, thus his salary got priority at DH. First base, Dom’s natural habitat, was filled as far as the eye could see by a Polar Bear named Pete. Dom as a left fielder has always had a tough time being taken seriously. As he had in 2019, the man had to wait his turn.
Fortunately, it didn’t take long for Luis Rojas to ascertain a sitting Smith wasn’t nearly as useful to the cause of winning games as one who is depended on regularly. By the second weekend of the season, Yo wrote his ticket out of town by not showing up at the ballpark in Atlanta (and not saying anything to anybody about it until he cited COVID concerns). Suddenly, Dom was a born DH…except, wait a second, he was actually a born first baseman when he was drafted in the first round by the Mets in 2013. Sure, Pete Alonso had marked his territory with his Rookie of the Year/MVM tour de force in 2019, but 2020, as if anybody didn’t notice, was a totally different year. Though Smith was capable of taking reps in left field, more and more we saw Dom back in the infield, starting fourteen of sixteen games at first at one point. His hard-earned versatility reveals itself in the sum totals for the year. Dom took 22 starts at first base, 21 in left field and, perhaps surprisingly, just five as DH, with none of those over the final forty games. It was Alonso (17 designated hitter starts) who had to scoot over to make a little defensive space for Smith.
Where Conforto would play was no more mystery than whether Conforto would play. Michael was a mainstay in right field from Opening Day forward, at least until a hamstring injury ended his season a week early. A corner seemed to have been turned at last in 2020 for the Mets’ top pick of 2014. No one was any longer shifting him to center or left or much questioning his defensive dexterity. No one was proffering trade proposals out of disappointment or impatience with him. Everyone was wondering how soon the new owner would get around to extending him beyond his final year of team control, which arrives next year, one year after Conforto’s must-sign status became universally apparent.
It constituted a bonus to take stock and realize that the Mets’ top selections from back-to-back drafts (chosen by Sandy Alderson, no less) had blossomed in unison. Smith had been picked a year earlier, but Conforto beat him to the bigs by a couple of seasons. They’d each bounced up and down quite a bit. In 2020, though, Michael put together an essentially slump-free season just as Dom was morphing into a vital Met regular. Everything you hoped they could do, they were doing. Everything you weren’t sure they were able to do, you stopped worrying abut. It was a short summer and the quickest of falls, but it was nonetheless a season for coming of age for these maturing teammates. We’re no longer doubting all Conforto can do; we’ve stopped being wary of what Smith can’t do. We’re content to let them play, let them field, let them hit…and we trusted them on one occasion when they let us know maybe the game itself wasn’t the most important thing for the Mets to worry about.
Dom Smith motivated the Mets and their opponents the Marlins to step back from the field on August 27, one night after Dom took a knee during the national anthem out of anguish for what had occurred in Wisconsin. A Black man named Jacob Blake had been shot by police in Kenosha. It wasn’t too many weeks after the life of a Black man named George Floyd had been ended in the name of law enforcement in Minneapolis, an episode that set off protests across the nation. That wasn’t too many weeks after a Black woman named Breonna Taylor had been shot to death by police in Louisville. Floyd and Taylor, like Blake — and Smith — were Black. These surely weren’t the first three times or only three times the existential American question of whether Black lives truly mattered to those in authority was on the table. One would have thought the matter was self-evident, what with everybody being human.
Nor was it the first time that the question came to the arena of sports. Blake’s shooting was too much to bear for his home-state Milwaukee Bucks, and they decided that even isolated in a “bubble,” they wouldn’t play their NBA playoff game on August 26. Sports, never wholly separate from the world in which they are contested, felt the gravitational pull of events. It compelled Smith to silently, peacefully drop to one knee during the ritual playing of The Star-Spangled Banner prior to the Mets-Marlins game that night. Smith was noticeably the only Met to take a knee. Forced by external albeit familiar circumstances to take notice of larger issues, he was also the only African-American player in the Mets starting lineup that night. With Marcus Stroman having opted out for the season because of the pandemic, Smith started and ended 2020 as the only African-American player on the Mets’ active roster; Billy Hamilton joined the Mets in early August but lasted only about a month.
When you watched the Mets in 2019, especially when they came on like Natbusters in the second half, you were taken by their togetherness. They were Mets and they pledged to each other their lives, their fortunes and their sacred honor. Technically, those words are from the Declaration of Independence, but experiencing the Cookie Club vibe from the summer before and through video check-ins during baseball’s hiatus, you believed these guys would stick together through thick, thin and everything in between. These two guys in particular were still, if we filtered out everything else, at the core of a fun crew of Mets answering to silly clubhouse nicknames (“Sloth Bear” for Smith; “Silky Elk” for Conforto). Thus, when you watched Smith kneel alone in 2020, it was discomfiting on multiple levels. I can’t say I know what it feels like to be a Black person in America and have to have it restated repeatedly for a general audience that your life matters until the thought doesn’t come off as controversial, but I do know what it is to be a Mets fan, and I saw one of our own alone out there on the 26th of August. I knew that felt wrong.
Smith, who’d been moved to his gesture by the Bucks and others in sports, wasn’t necessarily looking for company. In his postgame remarks, he said what he’d done was “not for them,” meaning his teammates. He had to do it in the moment. But he also wasn’t taking a knee in a vacuum.
“I think the most difficult part is to see people still don’t care,” he said through tears that night. “For this to just continuously happen, it just shows the hate in people’s heart…and that just sucks, you know? Black men in America, it’s not easy…”
Dom had played despite acknowledging his mind had been elsewhere. The next night, none among the Mets nor Marlins played. While the joint statement that transcended MLB’s usual attempts at performative empathy — both teams lining up for 42 seconds of silence; draping a Black Lives Matter shirt at home plate; departing an even quieter than usual 2020 Citi Field after not playing ball — wasn’t solely Dom’s doing, it was his display of genuine angst the night before that set the stage. And, for what it’s worth (and I think it was worth plenty), it was Conforto, as the Mets’ Players Association representative, who negotiated the symbolism and logistics with his Miami counterpart Miguel Rojas. The night before, Conforto had said of Smith, “His world is much different than mine. So it’s definitely helped me to listen and understand where he’s coming from and where a ton of people are coming from here.”
Within 24 hours, Michael developed a better idea of Dom’s perspective. “It really touched all of us in the clubhouse, just to see how powerful his statements were, how emotional he was,” Conforto said on the 27th. “He’s our brother, so we stand behind him and we stand behind Billy. All the players who stand up against the racial injustice, we stand behind them. And that’s what you saw tonight.”
 A most unusual tableau from a most unusual night from a most unusual season. What we also saw was, in the press availability that followed the Mets and Marlins proactively postponing their game, were Conforto and Smith standing together, alongside veterans Robinson Cano and Dellin Betances, to embody the Mets’ unified front. “It’s still overwhelming at this moment,” Dom said after the two teams voted to not play, “just to see how moved my peers are, my teammates, my brothers, the front office, the coaching staff, everybody who talks to me on a daily basis. Just to see how moved they were, it made me feel really good inside. It made feel like we are on the right path of change.”
It was just one night in a season that didn’t have nearly as many nights or days as usual, and it was surely as unusual a night as one could absorb viewing a ballpark’s activities from afar. Maybe it wouldn’t have happened or been so meticulously scripted had this been a season with a ticket-buying crowd filing into the house. The differences between 2020 and all years before it cannot be stressed enough. Then again, the issues that got to Dom were issues that had been present in his life and his nation’s life for too long. It wasn’t as if the phrase about Blacks’ lives mattering was invented this year. Perhaps the right path of change is indeed being pursued, even as way more needs to be done. Perhaps there’s only so much you can ask of a couple of ballplayers in their twenties to do about changing the world, particularly when the schedule has them going back to being ballplayers playing ball the next night.
We hope for a lot of things in this world. Dom Smith and Michael Conforto are Mets who make you believe that once in a while your hopes don’t go for naught.
FAITH AND FEAR’S PREVIOUS RICHIE ASHBURN MOST VALUABLE METS
2005: Pedro Martinez (original recording)
2005: Pedro Martinez (deluxe reissue)
2006: Carlos Beltran
2007: David Wright
2008: Johan Santana
2009: Pedro Feliciano
2010: R.A. Dickey
2011: Jose Reyes
2012: R.A. Dickey
2013: Daniel Murphy, Dillon Gee and LaTroy Hawkins
2014: Jacob deGrom
2015: Yoenis Cespedes
2016: Asdrubal Cabrera
2017: Jacob deGrom
2018: Jacob deGrom
2019: Pete Alonso
Still to come: The Nikon Mini Camera Player of the Year for 2020.
by Jason Fry on 20 November 2020 10:00 am A Met for All Seasons began as an idea and an email exchange in which your Faith and Fear authors swapped picking seasons and players who’d suited up for the Mets during that season, players who were emblematic of Mets history for a decade or a year or maybe just a few minutes.
That email exchange was, um, in 2011. We do like to take our time.
More self-charitably, what happened was life got in the way, first and foremost the fact that the Mets kept playing baseball games and adding to their history, so there was no particular need to stop this happy/miserable carousel and look back at moments in time through a different lens. At least not until the pandemic brought us a silent spring, two cooped-up authors and a baseball-sized hole in a lot of lives. The idea we’d never quite had time for was at the door, leaning insistently on the bell.
And so, at long last, A Met for All Seasons, here presented in summation. Thanks to all of you for playing along at home, and a tip of the cap to all the teammates we most certainly remember even if they weren’t explicitly profiled in these posts. Hey, maybe next time.
1962: Richie Ashburn
The problem was that Ashburn hated losing. Which is the dark side of the ’62 Mets, the theme that usually stays submerged beneath the funny stories. Stengelese dominated headlines (and distracted the press from the wretchedness of the team), but there was no shortage of ’62 Mets who didn’t find their manager’s act particularly funny, or enjoy being National League doormats. Ashburn’s season came down to Sept. 30, 1962, a sparsely attended Wrigley Field matinee featuring two horrible teams. In the eighth, with the Mets trailing 5-1, Sammy Drake singled and Ashburn whacked a 2-2 pitch between first and second, singling and moving Drake up a base. Joe Pignatano came up … and hit into a triple play. (The Man Who Walked Away)
1963: Ron Hunt
In 1963, Ron Hunt was a player. The Mets had themselves a player. Not one to remember from distant better days or mock or pity or grow as old as Casey Stengel waiting for to develop, but one you could pay your money to enjoy right now and soon thereafter. This flirtation with eptitude grabbed attention throughout the Metropolitan Area and well beyond. (First Star I See Tonight)
1964: Rod Kanehl
Kanehl played baseball hell for leather. Fans loved that. He also played it intelligently, with sound instincts and a hunger to learn. His teammates and coaches respected that. The problem was that for all his verve and brains, Kanehl didn’t play baseball very well. He saw time at seven positions in ’62, a sign of admirable versatility … except for the fact that he somehow made 32 errors playing those positions. Herein lies a question to ponder: Is a utility player who can’t actually play any position still a utility player? (The First Patron Saint of Ridiculous Causes)
1965: Ron Swoboda
Swoboda has always understood what that summer meant to the fans, and refused to see what he did and what we did as disconnected. He has always been willing to bridge that gap, and make us feel like it doesn’t have to exist, even though he and we know better. “I never felt above anyone who bought a ticket — I just had a different role than they did,” he’s said. “We were part of the same phenomenon.” (My Swoboda)
1966: Shaun Fitzmaurice
What happened? I can’t find a record of a significant injury, or some mischance that derailed Fitzmaurice’s career. He simply never ignited the way that 1964’s record of successes suggested he would. And there’s no shame in that. It’s easy to forget it, watching the best players in the world plying their trade on TV or down there on the field, but baseball’s really hard. The vast majority of “next Mickey Mantles” turn out to be the latest somebody elses, not because they’re unworthy but because the game is grueling and demanding and fickle and unfair. (The Prince of Proximity)
1967: Al Schmelz
The problem, I soon discovered, was that it was easier to find Jimmy Hoffa than to locate a decent color photo of Al Schmelz in a baseball uniform. A couple of Mets yearbooks had pictures of him grouped with other guys invited to camp — but they were always small and in black and white. He’s in the team photos — in glorious color, no less — in the ’67 and ’68 yearbooks, but of course he’s in the back, almost completely blocked by his teammates. So I did the best I could. (The Great White Whale of Arizona)
1968: Cleon Jones
The biggest moment in Mets history is also one of the quietest. You’ve seen it: With two outs in the ninth of Game 5 of the 1969 World Series, Davey Johnson hits a fly ball to left. At first the ball looks like it has the distance to be trouble, but the peril is illusory. Its momentum dies in the cool air of October and gravity pulls it down, to where Cleon Jones is waiting at the edge of the warning track. He catches it with two hands, almost gingerly, and then both his glove and his knee come down, until his knee brushes the dirt and his hands are clasped — as if in prayer, or benediction, or a little of both. (A Mobile Moment)
1969: Donn Clendenon
The exchange of players from June 15, 1969, however, transpired in a whole other beautiful world, one where Mets general manager Johnny Murphy could look at the roster he and his predecessors had been crafting when no one was taking them seriously and realize they were at last at the juncture when that mythic big bat could make a meaningful noise. Enter the strong, long and lanky Clendenon, albeit a couple of years removed from his most muscular production (28 home runs, 98 runs batted in and a .299 average in 1966 — adding up to an OPS+ of 141, not that anyone knew what the hell that was then). But the 1969 Mets, while they craved a legitimate cleanup hitter, didn’t necessarily have to have a superstar; nor were they willing to give up too much of their awesome young pitching to nab one. They needed someone who’d been around the league, someone who could get around on a fastball, and someone who would be OK playing sometimes. They needed a dependable right-handed hitting first baseman to complement their perennially developing lefty-swinging incumbent Ed Kranepool. Kranepool was 24. Clendenon was a month from 34. Between them, they averaged out as a 29-year-old switch-hitter, forging an ideal everyday player within Gil Hodges’s platoon of platoons. (With & Without Donn Clendenon)
1970: Tommie Agee
Guy hits home runs. Guy steals bases. Guy continues to make great catches in center field and becomes the first Met to win a Gold Glove. Is it any wonder the guy becomes the talk of day camp in the summer of 1970? Tommie Agee is the name I remember taking up the most Met talk when I talked Mets with other seven-year-olds. Slugging, sprinting, snaring…that’ll get kids’ attention. He was fearsome in his talent, approachable in his demeanor. Me, I liked to talk about Tom Seaver, but I didn’t mind hearing about Tommie Agee. It was a good Tom to be a kid. (Mutual Attraction)
1971: Tom Seaver
It was very important in the summer of 1971 that when I was assigned to a Long Beach Recreation Center Pee Wee League baseball team that I got to wear 41. I worried that because of my late registration (our family tended to be late for everything) that I’d miss out on the plum number because, c’mon, it was 1971 and didn’t every kid want to wear 41? Wasn’t every eight-year-old’s favorite player Tom Seaver? (My Seminal Seaver Summer of ’71)
1972: Gary Gentry
Some of the Miracle Mets had retired because they were old, at least for baseball, but others had disappeared before their time — what had become of Rod Gaspar, or Jack DiLauro? As I kept reading and learning, I figured out that Gaspar and DiLauro had been the last guys on the roster, the kind of guys who had to keep fighting for big-league jobs. But that still left one mystery: What had happened to Gary Gentry? (Pitchers Break)
1973: Willie Mays
I wouldn’t have traded those two years of Willie Mays for anything or anybody. I wouldn’t have traded him for Hank Aaron, Johnny Bench or any of the in-their-prime future Hall of Famers from the All-Star Game three years earlier. I wouldn’t have asked to have Charlie Williams back had Charlie Williams gone to California and turned into Nolan Ryan rather than remaining Charlie Williams. I had Willie Mays as a New York Met when I was nine and ten. Maybe Willie was too old to play like he did when he was a kid, but I was old enough to get why it didn’t matter. I got the New York Giants connection. I got the meaning behind the ovations. I got why baseball made people not just happy but weepy. It all came together on the night of September 25, when Willie Mays and his 660 home runs — same number Topps would put into its base set of cards over the next few years — said “goodbye to America” in a New York Mets uniform at a packed Shea Stadium. The Mets had improbably scratched and clawed their way into first place. Willie, who’d been hurting and sitting the previous few weeks, gave them his blessing. You gotta believe you me that they won the division and, with Willie pinch-hitting at a critical juncture in Game Five of the playoffs versus the Reds, the pennant. (Mets Legend Willie Mays)
1974: Tug McGraw
The Mets were on their way to the division title, the pennant and a seven-game World Series duel that fell just a touch short of dethroning the Oakland A’s mid-dynasty. Tug was more than a beloved teammate and character by the time it was over. He was a folk hero, a legend, the personification of Belief. By shouting and leaping and pounding his glove to his thigh (and getting batters out by the bushel), he was the Met who made 1973 a miracle of its own. The Mets have never retired “You Gotta Believe” as a catchphrase since then. When things get dark enough to allow in only the slightest glint of light, it’s the light that takes precedence in our collective inner Tug. We gotta believe, we keep telling one another, because in 1973, that’s what Tug told us. Those words would live with us forever. Yet somehow, Tug McGraw would stay in our immediate company only one year longer. (A Trade Beyond Belief)
1975: Mike Vail
Mike Vail had breathed life into the cause surrounding a team otherwise running out of time. As fans, even when we’re 12-year-old fans, maybe especially when we’re 12-year-old fans, we need a cause. In September of 1975, we needed Mike Vail’s hitting streak to keep on keepin’ on. (Live From New York, It Was Mike Vail)
1976: Mike Phillips
My one memory of Phillips as an actual Met is seeing him hit a leadoff homer, with his name immediately popping up in yellow capital letters on the screen, which was Channel 9’s way of noting round-trippers. That’s the entire memory — I have no context beyond it, and when I sat down to write this, I wouldn’t have sworn that what I recalled was accurate. Plenty of memories from when you’re seven years old turn out to be incomplete, distorted or fundamentally incorrect. So I checked. (My Superhero)
1977: Lenny Randle
For one season, Lenny was a legend of perhaps not quite Kiner-Mays proportions, but in 1977, especially after June 15, you learned to not expect too much. On Saturday afternoon, July 9, a day devoted to playing stickball with/against a frenemy of mine (he’d committed the traitorous sin of quitting on the Mets and taking up with that other New York team, thus revealing a disturbing paucity of character), a transistor radio kept us apprised of what the Mets and the Expos were up to at Shea. They were up to extra innings. Extra, extra innings. In the seventeenth, with Lee Mazzilli on first and two out, Randle crushed a Will McEnaney pitch to end the game in the Mets’ favor, 7-5. I don’t remember how the stickball turned out, but as far as I’m concerned, I won the day. (At Least We Had Lenny Randle)
1978: Craig Swan
[P]itchers whose baseball cards you’d think twice before risking in flipping all took a back seat to this guy from the Mets. The Mets made hardly anybody take a back seat to them in 1978, but when it came to earned run average, all you hurlers can just be quiet back there. Mr. Swan is driving. (The Last Ace From the Deck)
1979: Ed Kranepool
[O]n September 30, 1979, anybody who was watching or listening to the Mets and Cards from St. Louis was about to witness something that seemed unimaginable across the history of the Metropolitan Baseball Club of New York. It was Ed Kranepool’s last game. Torre sent him up to pinch-hit for John Pacella in the seventh. Eddie produced a double, his 1,418th base hit, which remained the Met standard until David Wright passed him in 2012, and his 90th career pinch-hit, still a franchise record (and 31st all-time in the major leagues). The manager just as quickly removed him for pinch-runner Gil Flores. That was it. The Ed Kranepool Era was over. Well, the part where he played for the Mets, that is. When you’re talking Mets, I don’t think the Ed Kranepool Era ever ends. (18 and Life)
1980: Lee Mazzilli
Lee Mazzilli in 1980 was an idol the likes of which we just don’t have today, yet he was surely who we reveled in idolizing back then. If deconstructing the whole Archie Graham/Burt Lancaster dynamic challenged the sanity of the contemporary characters played by Kevin Costner and James Earl Jones at the end of the ’80s, we began the ’80s confident Mazzilli was the Met on whom the sun and moon rose and set, and it didn’t seem the least bit crazy in our world. (Local Boy Made Good)
1981: Mookie Wilson
Had the Mets used that weekend series against the Cardinals as a launching pad, had they refused to lose, the immortality would speak for itself and there’d probably be a documentary airing intermittently on MLB Network celebrating the achievement. The Mets of Mookie Wilson would rate that kind of enshrinement down the line, just not these Mets of Mookie Wilson, nor this swing of Mookie Wilson’s. Knowing what was to come, perhaps it’s a little greedy to wish the transcendent Mookie Wilson moment of 1981 would live on for everybody as another Mookie Wilson moment from five years hence does. (One’s Moments in Time)
1982: Rusty Staub
The name was the second thing. How did that work? Had his parents given him the alternate name Rusty? If so, why hadn’t mine given me a wonderful parallel identity? Or — and this was where the foundations of the world really got wobbly — had Daniel Staub named himself that? Could you do that? Maybe you could, if you were brave and audacious enough — if you were a hero. Which Rusty Staub plainly was. He was my favorite Met, after all. (Big Man at the Beginning)
1983: Darryl Strawberry
The Mets were a last-place team again in 1983. That 6-15 start didn’t shake off so easily; they were 37-65 before truly getting it in gear to finish 68-94…which isn’t much of a record. And the attendance was still pretty light. But if you’d stuck with the Mets in the years before they earned the right to draft Darryl Strawberry, then after the clock officially started on the wait for Darryl Strawberry to rise to the majors, you knew this last-place finish was nothing like the cellar-dwelling that had been the rule of the house prior to 1983. The future heralded by Darryl Strawberry had commenced in earnest. And, oh, what a future it would be. (Star of the ’80s)
1984: Wally Backman
Was Backman still the right personality for the job he’d always wanted? I wondered. After one Las Vegas season ended, Backman was brought in as a September coach, and chose 86 as his number — the only time, I believe, that’s adorned a Met back in a regular-season game. It was nice to see, but also a little sad — because I had the feeling that was as close as Backman was fated to get. (A Foxhole Player)
1985: Dwight Gooden
What Darling did on the first night of October, Gooden did basically every five days through the month of September. In the heaviest month of the year in the fiercest year the Mets had ever contested to that point (from July 29 to September 24, the Mets and Cardinals traded first and second place continually, with the Mets never more than a game ahead of the Cardinals and the Cardinals never more than three in front of the Mets), Doc started five times. He compiled 44 innings of must-win work that yielded an earned run average of 0.00. Grab yourself four paper clips, attach those five games and call that the greatest starting pitching performance in New York Mets history. Or, given the time of the season and the franchise at the time, the greatest finishing kick. (Doc, for All Seasons)
1986: Keith Hernandez
Hernandez battled insecurity and loneliness as a Cardinals rookie, overcame it with the help of veterans (Lou Brock and Bob Gibson were vital mentors, the first sympathetic and the second famously not), shared an MVP award, got married, got divorced, developed an infatuation with cocaine, kicked it, wound up in Whitey Herzog’s doghouse, and was exiled to the hapless Mets in the summer of 1983. His first reaction was to ask his agent if he had enough money to retire. Fortunately — for the Mets, for all of us, and for Hernandez himself — he didn’t. (A Complicated Man)
1987: Lenny Dykstra
Dykstra retired after 1996, 33 years old and beloved in two very different cities. And since he retired, everything has gone horribly wrong. Or, perhaps, it’s gone pretty much as it went then, except there are no baseball heroics to make us want to hand-wave the rest away. Sure, some of the stories were entertaining, such as Dykstra’s brief time in the spotlight as a stock-market guru, anointed by CNBC’s Jim Cramer as a homespun American genius. But others weren’t, at all. (Nails and the Chalkboard)
1988: Gary Carter
In the days after Carter’s death, the memories from his teammates were heart-breaking — and raw in a way I’d rarely if ever heard from pro ballplayers. Keith Hernandez — Goofus to Carter’s Gallant — responded with grief so raw that listening to it made me feel like an intruder. But the words that really got me came from a sadder, wiser Darryl Strawberry: “I wish I could have lived my life like Gary Carter.” (The Kid Is Still in the Picture)
1989: Ron Darling
To those qualities he added a handful of ineffable somethings — style, glamour, and ease with the bright lights. And he had an intriguing background, one not exactly standard for a professional ballplayer. For openers, he was the son of a Chinese-Hawaiian mother and a French-Canadian father, a proto-Benetton ethnic mix that made vaguely cringy references to “exotic good looks” de rigueur when he was written about outside of the sports pages. He spoke French and Chinese, and he’d studied French and Southeastern Asian history at Yale. If I’d told you back then that George Plimpton — he of the Paris Review bylines and the good-schools accent — was going to invent a fictional Mets ballplayer, you’d have expected a creation a lot more like Darling than Sidd Finch. (Pitching With Mister P)
1990: Gregg Jefferies
It was soon an open secret that Jefferies’ teammates hated him. They thought he was Davey’s pet, a baby, and a brat. That kind of thing usually wasn’t allowed to leak out of a clubhouse, but the late-80s Mets leaked like a dysfunctional White House, and sports-talk radio was starting to bloom into the poisonous flower it would become. And Jefferies proved regular grist for this cynical mill. He made a fetish of his signature-model black bats, rubbing alcohol on them after games to spot the points of contact. He pouted after poor at-bats and misplays in the field. None of it would have mattered if the kid had outhit his personality, but he didn’t. And as the bad buzz got louder, the past came to look more like a warning that had gone unheard. (I’ve Seen the Future and It Doesn’t Work)
1991: Rich Sauveur
I’m at a baseball-card show in a sad hotel in Alexandria, Va., one I’d debated not bothering with. It’s in one of those half-ballrooms, with the accordion divider separating the couple of dozen card-dealer tables from the quarterly meeting of the Northern Virginia Chapter of Actuaries. I pay my $2, walk in, scan the room with my by-now-practiced eye and know immediately that I should have stayed home. There are barely any tables with storage boxes — just the usual tipped glass cases maintained by the price-guide set. I circle the perimeter anyway, because it’s 40-odd minutes back to Bethesda. At one of the tables, I do a double-take. Clipped to the tilted-up display case is a 1993 Topps Gold card. And it’s … Rich Sauveur. The card I’ve been searching for. The one nobody else seems to know exists. (Cardboard Lessons)
1992: Todd Hundley
Hundley was retired by the time the Mitchell report came out in 2007, but finding his name in there was about as surprising as waking up in the morning to discover the sun had risen again. Todd Hundley’s power surge might not have been entirely natural? Hell, I was surprised he hadn’t glowed in the dark during night games. (A Baseball First Husband)
1993: Joe Orsulak
[W]hy did I decide, somewhere toward the end of his perfectly representative but objectively unremarkable three-year tenure in our midst, that Joe Orsulak is one of my favorite Mets ever? Honest to god, I really don’t know. But just as honestly, he really is. (Right There)
1994: Rico Brogna
I immediately think of Rico Brogna when I think of the 1994 Mets season because of the idea he represented to me coming out of that strike-shortened year. Rico Brogna was who and what I wanted to come back. He’d brought me hope and I figured he could only deliver more. I was going to hold tight during absent August, silent September, ohfer October, the long, even colder winter, and the farce spring when MLB lured replacement players to wear their clubs’ uniforms in games that didn’t count, threatening to keep them around for games that did. By April 26, 1995, the latest the Mets have ever opened a season (until 2020), I should have been fed up with baseball, which didn’t even have the dignity to be around for months on end to let me be fed up with it. Instead, I kept hanging tight, waiting for Rico and welcomed back the whole package, lock, stock and Brogna. (The Very Idea of Rico Brogna)
1995: Jason Isringhausen
An impression was made. This player who hadn’t been in the majors until mid-July wound up fourth in NL Rookie of the Year balloting (Hideo Nomo won; Chipper Jones placed second). Further, Izzy made Mets rookie pitching history. Nobody who’d come up so late in a Met season — right after the midpoint of the strike-shortened 144-game campaign — had ever done so much winning right out of the box. Going 9-2 overall would be astounding from April until October. Izzy crammed all of his wins into a two-and-a-half month window. By comparison, Jacob deGrom in 2014 and Noah Syndergaard in 2015 also won nine games as callup starters, but both of them debuted in May. Rick Aguilera notched ten victories, but was called up in June 1985. Izzy was a young man in a hurry that hadn’t quite been seen before at Shea. (Land of Trope and Dreams)
1996: Rey Ordoñez
You hear the cheers — and Howie Rose’s astonished “threw it from his knees!” has endured — but what I remember happened a few seconds later, between innings. It was a sound I’d never heard before in a ballpark, a kind of murmur/mutter all around me and Greg. After cocking my head a moment, I realized it was the noise made by 25,000 people turning to the 25,000 people next to them and asking some variant of, “Did he really just do that?” Yes, he had. And he’d keep doing it through a seven-year Mets career that was sometimes annoying and occasionally infuriating but never dull. (That Sound)
1997: Edgardo Alfonzo
As the year went on, anybody who relished watching the Mets daily realized there wasn’t anything Edgardo Alfonzo couldn’t do well. He wasn’t particularly fast, but he wouldn’t get himself thrown out unnecessarily. If you needed a runner moved along, he could handle the bat. There was pop. There was savvy. There was silky smoothness at a position that had been missing dexterity since…well, forever. The Mets had steadily received some fine production out of third base dating back to the days of Hubie Brooks, but nobody stationed at the hot corner — not Brooks, not HoJo, not Knight or Magadan or Bonilla or Kent — was assigned its challenges in deference to defensive skill. Third wasn’t even Fonzie’s first position, but you would have thought he was born to play it. As the Mets ascended from a typical 8-14 start to a rousing 88-74 finish, it was Fonzie who led them from nowhere to somewhere. He placed ninth in the league in hitting and thirteenth in MVP balloting for a team that almost nobody noticed was building itself into a winner. (Eighth Wonder)
1998: Todd Pratt
When Todd Pratt was 29, he was working at a Florida instructional school and managing a pizza parlor. He was out of baseball after playing 102 big-league games over 11 pro seasons as the property of six organizations, and it would have taken a truly heroic optimist to predict his future would include star turns on baseball’s October stage, cult-hero status and years of reasonably secure big-league jobs. Somehow, that’s what happened. (Nine Wonderful Days in the Life of Todd Alan Pratt, Backup Catcher)
1999: John Olerud
John Olerud, content to hit and field without a lot of muss and fuss, went relatively unnoticed in 1999 as the Mets chased that playoff spot that eluded them in 1998. Mojo rose in his midst. He played in every game but one, starting all but four the Mets played. Opposing pitchers presumably kept an eye on him just as Olerud watched what they were doing quite closely. He walked 125 times in ’99, taking as gospel the bromide about it being just as good as getting a hit. It would figure that in the season cleanup man Mike Piazza set the franchise RBI record and five-hole hitter Robin Ventura drove in more runs than any Met ever other than Piazza, somebody would be on base a lot just ahead of them. Oly, you know, batted third in 159 games. (Love in the City at Century’s End)
2000: Melvin Mora
The good news is there was going to be 2000. We’d get through the 20th century and cross the bridge into the next one. The computers and lights would stay on, and life would resume pretty much as it functioned in 1999. Parochially speaking, this meant we could look forward to Melvin Mora on the New York Mets. True, the element of surprise wouldn’t burst from every swing he took or every throw he gunned, but we had him. World, you’ve been warned. (Mora in America: Melvinnium Approaches)
2001: Mike Piazza
Piazza was a courtesy pick, whom the Dodgers had no intention of actually signing — or of having play pro ball if they did expend a pittance as an additional courtesy. The courtesy pick would get to suit up for pro ball, but only because Lasorda was his bodyguard, strong-arming anybody who got in his buddy’s son’s way. Which was pretty everybody drawing a Dodgers paycheck who wasn’t named Tommy Lasorda. The Dodgers reluctantly signed Piazza (for all of $15,000) after a tryout in Dodger Stadium, during which Lasorda told the team’s skeptical scouting director that Piazza was now a catcher. So far, if we’re being honest, it’s a story that probably makes you feel a little queasy. But here’s where it gets interesting. (This One Has a Chance)
2002: Al Leiter
Thirty-seven regular-season games at Shea Stadium Al Leiter was my starting pitcher, plus twice in the playoffs and, to be rotationally retentive about it, once as an opponent. I don’t ever remember thinking in advance, “Leiter? Not again.” Nor, probably, did I think, “Oh boy, Leiter!” It was more like, “Al Leiter…all right, let’s go…” The games could get edgy when Bobby Valentine was managing, but a bit of the edge was taken off knowing Al Leiter was starting. His near-constant presence was comforting. That was where my head was at on Opening Day 2002, just as it was more than two-dozen times before. Standing and applauding in the right field boxes, it was exciting to welcome Alomar and Vaughn, welcome back Burnitz and Cedeño, value as ever Piazza and Alfonzo. But when we got to “pitching and batting ninth, warming up in the bullpen…” Al Leiter. All right. Let’s go. (Face of the Franchise)
2003: David Cone
Plenty of power pitchers look impressive on the mound but arrive with mechanics that make you cringe because you can almost hear things grinding and fraying in their shoulders and elbows, but Cone looked like a gyroscope, from the way he loaded his arm down near his hip to the finishing, energy-dissipating kick of his right leg. It was like an engineer and an artist had collaborated to create the Platonic ideal of a pitcher. (Baby-Faced Killer)
2004: Joe Hietpas
Hietpas was called up in mid-September 2004, which was a strange time in Mets history. Art Howe had been fired but agreed to finish the season, which seemed pointless from the perspective of employer and employee alike. Hietpas was a catcher known for his receiving skills and a rifle arm, though he’d never hit in the minors. Somehow Hietpas hurt himself despite having nothing to do; updates on his status were perhaps understandably scanty. All I knew was the remaining games on the schedule were dwindling with no sign of Hietpas in a box score. Howe might not have lit up a room as promised, but he was universally hailed as a genuinely nice man; surely he wouldn’t let Hietpas’s opportunity pass him by. (Beginnings, Endings and Things That Were Both)
2005: Pedro Martinez
I’m wary of any sentence that begins with the words “people forget”. A mighty big supposition is required to decide what is commonly retained and what escapes the collective consciousness. I can suspect you’ve forgotten a fact or two, yet I can’t possibly prove it without a torrent of interrogation. Maybe the stuff I’m thinking about today has been buried in your subconscious under stuff you’re thinking about today. Maybe you remember this stuff very well but haven’t seen fit to think about it of late. Nevertheless, I suspect people forget just how big Pedro Martinez was as a New York Met, especially in 2005, but really pretty much to the conclusion of his contract in 2008. He loomed as large as an individual Met possibly could over the entire operation from the instant he got here. Pedro was where we looked for answers, for progress, for hope. In that first year, Pedro was where we got it. (Unforgettable, That’s What You Are)
2006: Carlos Beltran
I suspect Beltran’s entire Mets career would be regarded differently if he’d swung and missed that final pitch instead of taking it, even though it would have changed nothing. Should he have swung too late to show he really cared? Smashed himself in the face with the bat to express his grief? Does Beltran remain unappreciated because he didn’t grimace enough? (The Sins of Carlos Beltran)
2007: Jose Reyes
In a game that enters the bottom of the twelfth, with San Francisco ahead, 4-3, Reyes leads off against the closer of blown leads past, Armando Benitez. Seven years since J.T. Snow and Paul O’Neill convinced us to cringe, it is surprising to realize somebody is still trusting Armando Benitez with save situations, but at this point in his managerial career, Bruce Bochy is not yet a certified genius. Armando is his man. Fortunately, Jose is ours. Benitez walks the shortstop with whom he briefly shared a clubhouse four years earlier. The count had gone to three-and-two and…yeah, we recognize Armando Benitez. We also recognize Reyes on first. First? Make that second, for Jose has goaded Armando into a balk. Endy Chavez then bunts Jose to third. Carlos Beltran grounds out, and Jose has to stay put, but since when does Jose Reyes stay put? He dances off third. He is Lola from “Copacabana”. She would merengue/and do the cha-cha… And while Armando Benitez tried to concentrate on getting a third out, Jose Reyes has teased from Benitez’s ever-tender psyche a second balk. Jose can dance home. The game is tied. Moments later, Carlos Delgado homers, and the Mets have won, 5-4. Jose Reyes and the Mets are 33-17, five games up on the Braves, eight ahead of the Phillies. Who the hell is going to stop Jose Reyes and the Mets? (7 Days)
2008: Johan Santana
The Johan Santana start of September 27, 2008, lives in a class of its own. That it wasn’t a no-hitter — or the no-hitter — is immaterial. We’d never had a no-hitter. We wouldn’t have known what to have done with one. What we had was the cloud that followed us from the previous September to this one. What we required was someone to chase the cloud away. That September, specifically on a gray Saturday afternoon, the last Saturday afternoon Shea Stadium would ever know, Johan Santana was every element under the sun. He was earth, wind and fire while chasing the clouds away. (Dates With Destiny)
2009: Angel Pagan
The other emblematic player was the Cyclones’ first heartthrob — a lithe, dark-eyed center fielder with a name borrowed from a shoegazer band you wanted your parents to hate. The girls screamed for Angel Pagan; so, in my own nerdy blue-and-orange way, did I. I was certain that he was the one, the Cyclone who’d solve the pitiless math of the minor leagues and show up one day at Shea. Pagan was going to be a star, and I was going to be able to point at him from the back of the mezzanine and tell people how I’d seen him play in a little park on the beach, not so long ago and not so far away, and now just look at him. Which turned out to be true. Eventually. If you squinted a little. (Lost and Found)
2010: Ike Davis
I’m tellin’ ya, brother, you want in on Ike Davis. Talk about a sound investment. Gonna be the best all-around first baseman our Mets have had since John Olerud. Wait, did I say Olerud? I meant Hernandez. Yep, Keith Hernandez — Mr. Seinfeld himself. I bet ya loved Keith Hernandez. I bet in your heart of hearts you don’t think the Mets have ever truly replaced Keith Hernandez. Well, this Ike Davis is the sure thing, Mac. The bat. The glove. The personality. Wait ’til you listen to the kid speak. He’s a natural! And you don’t even have to hope the Mets’ll trade Neil Allen and Rick Ownbey for him. He’s on his way — it’s in the bag. Whaddaya say, how about putting down your heart and your hope on some of this Ike Davis action I’m lettin’ you in on.Oh, you won’t be sorry you did. I’m promising ya, pal, you’re gonna flip for Ike Davis. (The Sure Thing [One of Them])
2011: David Wright
That first at-bat wasn’t what he’d hoped for during all those nights dreaming about what might be: he was retired on a pop-up in foul territory, with Expos catcher Brian Schneider making a nifty catch that ended with him flipped over the dugout railing. Wright made outs in his other three at-bats as well: a groundout, a pop to short and a fly ball to right. The Mets won by a single run. Not a debut heavy on fireworks, but as I left Shea I made sure to tuck my ticket stub deeper in my pocket. When I got home, I filed it in a cubby of my desk instead of tossing it in with the recycling. Everything I’d heard and seen had convinced me that David Wright would be special. (A Special One)
2012: R.A. Dickey
The language-lovers among us who absorbed every step of his Metsian journey, especially his accounts and descriptions thereof, felt a thrill going up our leg, to borrow a 2008 phrase from Chris Matthews (himself more about Hardball than a knuckleball). I noticed that as much as virtually every Mets fan in creation toasted R.A.’s success warmly and effusively, it was those of us who worked closely with the language who seemed most thrilled on the man’s behalf. We intrinsically felt we had one of our own was out there on our behalf. Editors. Writers. Educators. This wasn’t just a Met excelling at pitching. This was a kindred linguistic spirit. We were in awe that somebody like this was so good at the sport we cherished even if most of us had never had any hope of playing it at any competitive level beyond the schoolyard (and even back then not that competitively). (Nothing Standardized About Him)
2013: Wilmer Flores
Flores was 22, looked 12, and ran like he was 52. He seemed uncertain in the field, making physical errors and sometimes going saucer-eyed in the heat of the moment. The Mets would move him around the infield, looking for a place to hide him and never finding one. Not exactly a recipe for success, but Flores could hit — in fact, he destroyed lefties. He showed a knack for big moments, which he’d eventually ride to a niche in the Mets’ record books. And while baseball players are taught to be stoic and stone-faced, as armor against the game’s cruelties, Flores’s emotions were always front and center. When he succeeded, he radiated joy; when he failed, he was accompanied by a little black cloud of misery. You sometimes wondered how the Mets should best use Flores, or if they should at all, but you always rooted for him. It was impossible not to. (The Man Who Was Untraded)
2014: Jacob deGrom
Ideally, all the Mets pitchers we pictured forever starring for us when we were dreaming our pitching dreams circa 2014 — including Rafael Montero, who was considered a bigger star in the making upon his concurrent-with-deGrom promotion — would still be starring for us at the dawn of the 2020s. It hasn’t worked out that way. Little deal was made of Jacob deGrom, yet nobody’s been the bigger deal or has signed one, for that matter. He’s been certified the best pitcher in his league two years running. He’s clearly the signature arm of a franchise that fancies itself legendarily pitching-rich. He’s carved himself a niche on the Mets’ version of Mount Pitchmore alongside Tom Seaver, Dwight Gooden and Jerry Koosman, and is maybe not too many innings from joining Tom Terrific in elevating their dual status to twin peaks. (Shtickless Wonder)
2015: Michael Conforto
Terry Collins’ mishandling of Conforto led to him not being able to hit anybody, which led to his being banished to the minors, which led to him hitting like his old self because he got to play every day and his luck turned and Collins wasn’t around to fuck with him, which led to his recall, which led to a ridiculous Just So story about what had happened and the supposed lesson of it. But the Mets weren’t done — they tried to turn Conforto into a center fielder, a position for which his ceiling was “heroic adequacy.” They did pretty much everything they could to derail him, but somehow he survived. (The M Met)
2016: Matt Harvey
The Dark Knight drifted in the span of a few seasons from a major storyline for the Mets to a suddenly faded piece of their history. “A Met for All Seasons is right,” Boras insisted. “Matt Harvey as an outsize Met figure is right. But we know what seasons were the most right. The seasons that were less right we’d prefer he not be a part of.” Alderson countered, “Us neither. Sometimes, however, you play the ball where it lies, and sometimes you pitch the pitcher there, too.” (After the Fall)
2017: Paul Sewald
A Jonah needs a certain modicum of talent — your overmatched emergency starters and stone-fingered infielders don’t count, because they shouldn’t have been put it that position in the first place. A truly tragic or star-crossed player isn’t a Jonah either, because when a Jonah screws up your reaction should be more of a sigh than remote-throwing, drywall-punching rage. Life with a Jonah is a grinding, corrosive series of letdowns, not a sequence of blowups that leave craters in the soul. And a Jonah need not be universally viewed as such — the identification can be completely subjective, with one fan’s Jonah another fan’s guy to merely shrug and grumble about. Which brings us to the 2017 Mets, and Paul Sewald. (Sympathy for a Jonah)
2018: Noah Syndergaard
As origin stories go, that one’s up there with Steve Rogers agreeing to the U.S. Army’s experiment or Peter Parker encountering a radioactive spider. But Syndergaard, endearingly, has never stopped sounding a bit like his old geeky duckling self even after turning into a fiery, terrifying swan. “My arm is like a trebuchet,” he told reporters during the 2015 playoffs. “It’s got to be loose and whiplike, and you have to use the force of your body to deliver the pitch.” When I read that, I needed a minute. Trebuchet? Really? Who was this kid? (The Model of a Modern Pitcher)
2019: Dom Smith
Because Braves manager Brian Snitker was also determined to torture us, he switched pitchers yet again, bringing on someone named Grant Dayton. The Mets countered with none other than Dom Smith — the same Dom Smith who hadn’t had a plate appearance since late July. This seemed cruel, to say the least. It all seemed cruel by that point. And then Smith hit the ball over the fucking fence. (The Shot Heard Through the Spring)
2020: Pete Alonso
The statistical odometer reset to zero for the new year, as it always does, and it wouldn’t budge until who knew when, but the legend of Pete Alonso kept gathering mileage and momentum because Pete Alonso was determined to live up to his legend, bat or no bat. Pete was on Zoom extending his best wishes to a Mets-loving grandma whose spirits were thus lifted out of the park. Pete got in touch with medical teams fighting the virus, and they took an instant from saving lives to say thanks for his saying thanks. Pete started a foundation called Homers for Heroes. Pete stood up for the idea that the lives of Black people matter before every sports league figured out that was a pretty simple truth. You didn’t need baseball to be in progress to keep rooting for one of baseball’s rising stars. (The Power Broker)
2021: Steve Cohen
Though Anybody But the Wilpons would have garnered some degree of applause, it was Cohen who stood as the people’s choice as reporting mounted through 2020 that the Wilpons were still trying to sell the franchise (word was the next generation of Katzes wasn’t keen on hitching its wagon indefinitely to Jeff). Other groups bid or tried to bid. Cohen, though, despite having his first attempt dashed in winter, never let go of his desire to own the Mets and never hesitated to dip into his pockets to make it happen when the opportunity arose anew in summer. And it happened. The Wilpons and Katz sold him the Mets. That’s all that had to happen for Steve Cohen to be the best thing that ever happened to the Mets on the cusp of 2021. Whether that description would hold once 2021 unfolded in real time… “Well,” Mets fans could tell one another, “we’ll see.” (Honeymoon in Flushing)
by Greg Prince on 18 November 2020 5:44 pm I had come around on Robinson Cano in 2020, a man we learned Wednesday won’t be a Met in 2021. I had come to not automatically grimace at the sight or thought of him in a Mets uniform. I even got over my distaste for No. 24 being taken out of informal retirement on his behalf in deference to his having been named for Jackie Robinson and 42 not being available. Willie Mays wore 24. Then, save for the Kelvin Torve hiccup of 1990, only Rickey Henderson wore it thereafter. Nobody’d touched it for nearly twenty years. It was reserved for legends whose backstory merited it. Robbie, at his best, wasn’t quite in the Willie/Rickey stratosphere, but he’d been fairly close. We saw evidence that he could still resemble his younger, outstanding self, the perennial AL All-Star whose path to 3,000 hits and probably Cooperstown would require only decent endurance and a little forgiveness from a previous suspension time might sweep down the memory hole. After 2020, he’d have three seasons to build out his statistical portfolio and enhance his reputation anew.
Once he found his Met footing, Cano’s revitalized offense and the universal appreciation he seemed to elicit from his younger teammates for his informal coaching and words of veteran wisdom made me forget what an absolutely asinine trade had been executed to bring him and the shall we say inconsistent Edwin Diaz to Flushing in exchange for our top outfield prospect about ten minutes after the kid was drafted. I’d even decided to overlook that Cano viewed running the 90 feet to first base as purely optional.
Maybe it started with the three-homer night against San Diego and the hot streak he carried into an unfortunate infield injury in the summer of 2019, just as the moribund Mets were coming to life. The amazing part wasn’t that he was tearing up a hamstring just as he was tearing up a new league. The amazing part was that he picked right up where he left off when he returned in September, and essentially kept it going once baseball returned ten months later. Wow, I had to admit, Robinson Cano can still hit.
Insert here your own rhetorical question of gee, just how, as he approached 38 years old, did he manage to effect such a renaissance?
I guess the proof is in the positive.
Robinson Cano has been suspended for 2021 after testing thumbs-up for Stanozolol, previously known to us as the steroid of choice for fallen mid-2010s closer Jenrry Mejia. That makes it two suspensions in less than three years for Cano; the first was for the diuretic Lasix and cost him half a season. Cano forfeits his $24 million salary for next year, which is quite a paycheck to risk under an otherwise guaranteed contract. Perhaps it speaks, perversely, to a desire to win at all costs. Or tells us athletes, no matter how undeniably veteran or presumably wise, believe they are impervious to niceties like testing for banned substances.
The Mets themselves didn’t owe Cano all $24 million for ’21, incidentally. The Mariners were on the hook for a percentage. So call it merely a ton instead of a spit ton of money the Mets are off the hook for in the coming year, a welcome savings even for a franchise now connected to plenty deep pockets. And call it good fortune that the Mets are deep enough in perfectly viable second basemen — Jeff McNeil, Andrés Giménez — so that there is nothing glaringly debilitating from a competitive standpoint as one begins to construct hypothetical lineups for the season hopefully ahead. And if the Mets want to take a run at a free agent like DJ LeMahieu, hey, look — about $20 million just got freed up!
The news is not a terrible bruise to the Mets’ aspirations, but it’s too bad anyway. Cano was part of the team we came to embrace in 2019 and gave us a lot of hitting in 2020, hitting that added up (.316/.352/.544) and hits that still count as having happened. I watched him closely at FanFest last January, the last time I was inside Citi Field. He impressed me just by showing up and then by being one of the guys. I expected aloofness. I witnessed warmth. (With his contract, why shouldn’t he always beam?) I entered a George Foster post-1982, pre-July 1986 mindset with Robbie. The commitment to an aging star had been proven overly optimistic, but here was a once top-flight player now and again reminding you why he was considered it worth it — or in Cano’s case, worth it to a general manager who has since been relieved of his duties.
We don’t know how much of his 2020 production was Stanozolol-enabled and how much was simply good old baseball knowhow and residual reflexes remaining in working order. I understand it’s nearly impossible to say anything positive about a player who has just tested exactly that for a second time without sounding naïve or Pollyannish about the whole thing. Still, I came to kind of like the guy, and, as I’ve grown older, I’ve hesitated to be overly judgmental about people’s mistakes, especially if they don’t particularly hurt anybody else. We’re all capable of making them more than once. We’re all capable of learning from them eventually.
That said, yeesh. I can hear Norm Macdonald’s voice reporting, “Experts have announced they’ve discovered a way to NOT forfeit $24 million in guaranteed salary after testing positive for PEDs: DON’T use PEDs.”
Also, don’t trade Jarred Kelenic.
Cano has two years on his contract lingering lavishly beyond 2021, carrying him through his age 40 season. One wishes to believe the new regime can negotiate and easily cover a buyout. Once that deal is done, please deposit No. 24 at the front desk on your way out.
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