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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 17 December 2019 2:14 am Welcome to the eighth chapter of Faith and Fear’s countdown of The Top 100 Mets of the 2010s. An introduction to the series is available here; you can read the most recent installment here. These are the more or less best Mets we rooted for as Mets fans these past ten years. Since a decade is coming to a close, we thought it would be fun to round them up and recall a little something about them.
30. ANGEL PAGAN, 2010-2011
(Also a Met from 2008 to 2009)
Angel Pagan was nearly the Met who got away altogether, and that would have been a shame. Drafted in 1999 and signed in 2000, Angel’s flight up the Met system took him through Kingsport, Brooklyn (in the Cyclones’ first year), Capital City, St. Lucie, Binghamton and Norfolk. The next stop for the swift outfielder was obviously going to be Shea Stadium, but the Mets sold him to the Cubs prior to the 2006 season, and the first time Angel saw Flushing, it was as a visitor. The Mets brought him back in 2008, and by 2010 — with Carlos Beltran still rehabbing his right knee — he established himself as an everyday player and flirted with stardom. Pagan finished in the National League Top Ten in singles, triples and steals; turned an 8-2-6-3 triple play; and registered high in defensive metrics. Alas, Angel fell off his game a notch in 2011 and the Mets decided the 30-year-old could get away for good, engineering a swap of centerfielders with San Francisco. Pagan went on to excel for the 2012 world champion Giants. Andres Torres did no such thing in his one year as a Met.
29. CARLOS BELTRAN, 2010-2011
(Also a Met from 2005 to 2009)
The Carlos Beltran the Mets knew at the beginning of the 2010s was an older, slower, bulkier version of the five-tool stud the club signed as a free agent in the middle of the 2000s. He’d missed much of 2009 with a bone bruise to his right knee and would start 2010 on the DL after arthroscopic surgery the team didn’t sign off on. Carlos and the franchise he hopefully dubbed “the new Mets” upon his 2005 arrival rarely seemed to be on the same page. Yet through it all, when he played, he was quite clearly the same Carlos Beltran, perhaps diminished a bit by time and injury, yet matured as the team leader it was hoped he would be. The Beltran of this decade made the hard slides nobody else would. He gracefully shifted to right field from his longtime glamour perch in center without making a prima donna peep. One afternoon in Denver, he socked three homers. By midseason 2011, the 34-year-old was an All-Star selection again. Not too many weeks later, as his contract was expiring, the Mets traded him for a celebrated pitching prospect named Zack Wheeler. A year later, when the Mets celebrated their fiftieth anniversary, he was named the center fielder on the all-time Met team. He’d always looked good in a Mets uniform. He looked even better in memory. By the end of the 2010s, we’d get a whole new view of him when he was named the new manager of the New York Mets.
28. BRANDON NIMMO, 2016-2019
Was that a bat in his hand or was Brandon Nimmo just happy to see us? Brandon Nimmo was happy to see everybody once the Mets’ first-round pick from 2011 made his major league debut after five years in the minors, but his smile really caught everybody’s attention in 2018 when the kid from Wyoming broke through as a regular in Mickey Callaway’s otherwise erratic lineup. Yes, the outfielder did fine things with a bat — socking 17 homers, slugging .483 — but not swinging served him well, too. Brandon led the majors in getting hit by pitches with 22 (a Mets record) and ranked second in the NL with a .404 on-base percentage, elevated by a Top Ten finish in walks. When he wasn’t taking first base when it was practically handed to him, Nimmo showed he was the giving kind, fitting by personality into the team’s holiday party Santa suit and grinning at all comers like every day was Christmas.
27. IKE DAVIS, 2010-2014
Not staying on his two feet seemed to define Ike Davis’s Mets career. Shortly after his 2010 callup from Buffalo, Ike demonstrated a willingness to flip himself over barriers to catch foul pops. The first baseman did it three times inside his first month as a major leaguer, never letting the railing in front of the Mets dugout at Citi Field separate him from making a putout; the last time he did it, it capped a spectacular comeback against the Nationals (the Mets were down, 6-1, yet won, 8-6). With a flair for dramatic defense, nineteen home runs in less than a full rookie year and an undeniable air of confidence, it seemed nothing would stop Ike Davis. “WE LIKE IKE” t-shirts were dotting the Flushing stands in a blink of an Ike. His second year, however, took Davis off his feet altogether. A May collision with David Wright at Coors Field put Ike’s left foot in a walking boot and ended his 2011 after 36 games. The rest of his Met stay was punctuated by the positive — he piled up 32 homers and 90 ribbies in 2012 — but he never found consistency again, probably a symptom of his energy-draining bout with valley fever, a condition that was diagnosed prior to the ’12 season. Before valley fever, Ike was a career .271 hitter. For the rest of his Met tenure, he batted .219. His last big hit as a Met came on April 5, 2014, a pinch-hit, come-from-behind walkoff grand slam…the first of its kind in franchise history. Two weeks later, Davis was traded to Pittsburgh.
26. RUBEN TEJADA, 2010-2015; 2019
Somewhere in an attic in Queens is a painting of Ruben Tejada in which the subject ages. Playing baseball across six seasons for the Mets, however, the infielder seemed forever young. At first, he was. Promoted to the big leagues at twenty, Tejada’s maturity in the field (the rookie successfully called for a pickoff play at second base to end a game in Washington) was belied by an aura that suggested he was a little awestruck by where he was. In September of his first season, he couldn’t hit his first home run without sliding into third first, for he didn’t realize the ball he crushed had left Wrigley Field, or perhaps he simply didn’t believe it was something he was capable of doing. In 2012, after the Mets didn’t make an obvious effort to re-sign NL batting champion Jose Reyes, Ruben took over at short after Jose bolted to Miami. He certainly didn’t appear overmatched by the challenge, fielding splendidly and actually outhitting his predecessor, .289 to .287. Tejada never much developed beyond the 2012 season, but the Mets kept sending him out to short, sometimes second or third. They never really seemed to have a better option. Ruben was good enough to be the starting shortstop for the NL East champs in the second game of the National League Division Series versus the Dodgers in 2015, which is when Ruben Tejada became a Met cause for the ages, getting viciously taken out by sliding slimebag Chase Utley. We would have rallied around any Met in that circumstance, but the eternal boyishness of Tejada made his broken leg that much more offensive to us and cast Utley in an even deeper shade of villainy. Ruben’s final role for the 2015 Mets was to serve as the personification of the bloody shirt when he limped out during pregame introductions — using a Mets-logoed cane, no less — when the NLDS shifted to Citi Field. Winning one for Ruben Tejada, the kid who couldn’t play anymore for himself or for us, became paramount.
25. DILLON GEE, 2010-2015
Maybe nobody ever yelled “YO MAN!” when Dillon Gee pitched for the New York Mets, though it might have been fitting, because for parts of six seasons, Gee gave the Mets a truly yeoman effort. Rising to the majors in September 2010 without the hype that would accompany the next wave of Met hurlers, Dillon merely gave his club a good chance to win whenever he pitched (especially in his seven-inning, two-hit debut at Washington). From late May 2013 to the end of that campaign, he truly put it together, forging a 2.71 ERA in 22 starts and effectively taking up the role of staff ace once Matt Harvey was sidelined. The 21st-round pick who was never high on anybody’s prospect radar began 2014 on the Citi Field mound as the Mets’ Opening Day starter. His yeoman work wasn’t as productive in the season ahead, though, and injury cost him two months of action. Gee was part of the 2015 Mets who hinted they were ready to contend, but ended up spending most of their league championship season in Las Vegas, never to return to the big club again.
24. ZACK WHEELER, 2013-2014; 2017-2019
(Missed 2015-2016 due to injury)
No matter where you look it up, a pair of DNPs rudely interrupt Zack Wheeler’s statistics. Nothing for 2015. Nothing for 2016. A gaping void where postseason exploits could conceivably be listed. Wheeler and the Mets were heading upward together, or so it was thought. Obtained from San Francisco for two months’ worth of Carlos Beltran in the summer of 2011, Wheeler arrived from the minors in June of 2013, the first Met to have been born in the 1990s. His debut start was in Atlanta, not far from where he grew up — and it was a win in the night half of a two-admission doubleheader, the first part started and dominated by Matt Harvey. Harvey was having a dynamite first full year and Wheeler seemed bound to follow. But Zack’s path wasn’t nearly as clear as Matt’s. Tommy John surgery deleted two seasons of progress for the pitcher who’d been picked sixth overall in the nation in 2009. The Mets looked into trading him. Zack asked them to keep him around. He made it back to Flushing in 2017, just in time for the Mets to go on contention hiatus. Wheeler would need a year-and-a-half to find his groove. Finally, with the 2018 Mets deep in the middle of going nowhere, the future star the Mets traded for seven years earlier commenced to shine. His post-All Star break stats were eye-popping: 9-1 with an ERA of 1.68 in eleven starts. He didn’t exactly pick up where he left off in 2019, as he and the Mets again started slowly, but at last the two parties landed on the same encouraging page come July. The Mets chased a Wild Card and Zack, in his last seven starts, posted an ERA of 2.54, striking out nearly a batter per inning. Now that he was established as one of the better starting pitchers in the National League and the Mets were perhaps poised to make a full-season run at glory in 2020, it seemed perversely natural to learn Zack Wheeler would not be around. In December, the free agent righty signed a lucrative five-year contract to pitch for Philadelphia. At last, his timing was exquisite.
23. TRAVIS D’ARNAUD, 2013-2019
Batting practice for the second game of the 2015 NLCS was marked by a touch of whimsy, as Citi Field’s Home Run Apple displayed an immense bandage, signifying where Travis d’Arnaud’s sixth-inning home run the night before off the Cubs’ Jon Lester practically dented the dang fruit. That shot was one of three dingers Travis delivered in the National League playoffs, but winking at a deeper truth was the implication that first aid was required wherever the catcher went. D’Arnaud, acquired with Noah Syndergaard in the trade that sent very recent Cy Young winner R.A. Dickey to Toronto in December 2012, was supposed to fill a perennial void behind the plate and pop balls over fences (bruises to apples were optional). To a certain extent, Travis made good on the expectations he’d carried since the Phillies made him a first-round draft choice in 2007, totaling double-digit round-trippers three times as a Met; serving as a vital cog in the Big Met Machine that took first place for keeps in ’15; and catching every single pitch of the subsequent postseason. But the man simply could not stay healthy. Td’A never caught as many as two-thirds of the games the Mets played in any one season and topped 400 plate appearances only once. It wasn’t anything chronic holding Travis back. Rather, some piece of him always seemed to be getting in the way of a bat or a ball. All of it cost him time and likely drained his development. After showing no signs of shaking off the rust of a mostly missed 2018, the Mets released him in May of 2019. Five months later, he was the starting catcher in the AL playoffs for the Rays, again catching every October pitch.
22. STEVEN MATZ, 2015-2019
If you liked narrative, you had to love Steven Matz, especially on the summer day in 2015 when you first got to know him. Promoted from the minors with nothing left to prove at Triple-A on June 28, Steven brought a massive rooting contingent to Citi Field, attributable to his family’s Suffolk County locale and their allegiance to the orange and blue. Yup, Steven was a Mets fan, a Mets pitcher and, as would be learned three at-bats deep into his major league career, a Mets hitter. When the dust cleared that Sunday afternoon, Matz had gone 3-for-3 with four runs batted in while racking up seven-and-two-thirds innings of five-hit ball to beat Cincinnati, 7-2. What made it all the more memorable was the sight on SNY of Steven’s grandfather — Grandpa Bert — going wild on his boy’s behalf. It was enough of a marker in an injury-abbreviated 2015 to earn Matz starts in each round of the postseason, clear through to the World Series…where the Mets were headed after their four-game sweep of the Cubs in the NLCS, with the fourth game effectively handled by Steven. Once the narrative of Matzmania wore off, the Mets were left with a lefty marooned somewhere between promise and frustration…and a slugger who launched homers in consecutive starts in September 2018.
21. SETH LUGO, 2016-2019
He was drafted in the 34th round. He wore No. 67. Yet more than once in the second half of the 2010s, he was as important to the Mets as any pitcher in the house. The righty whose curveball singlehandedly injected the phrase “spin rate” into the Mets fan vocabulary, Seth Lugo was exactly what the Mets needed when their rotation developed dangerous holes in 2016. Lugo took the start seven times between August 25 and September 28, and the Mets won all seven of his games en route to clinching the first Wild Card in the National League. By 2019, Seth evolved into the full-time reliever his team simply could not live without. As the summer grew later and the competitive implications of every appearance deepened, Lugo was trusted with the most crucial outs of any game, whatever inning they appeared in. Eight times in August and September, Seth threw outings of two innings, and the Mets went 7-1. A history of elbow issues kept the de facto ace of the pen from pitching daily. Otherwise, the Mets’ year might have lasted well into October.
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by Greg Prince on 11 December 2019 4:48 pm Welcome to the seventh chapter of Faith and Fear’s countdown of The Top 100 Mets of the 2010s. An introduction to the series is available here; you can read the most recent installment here. These are the more or less best Mets we rooted for as Mets fans these past ten years. Since a decade is coming to a close, we thought it would be fun to round them up and recall a little something about them.
40. LaTROY HAWKINS, 2013
To say LaTroy Hawkins’s best days were behind him when he joined the Mets at age 40 is to take a narrow view of what the phrase means. Of Hawkins, who seemed to exert an outstanding influence wherever his journeys took him, it could be said this two-decade stay in the majors was constructed of myriad good days. Take his 2013 tenure in New York, where he might not have figured as a key piece of the Mets’ pitching plans, but after literally every reliever around him succumbed to injury or ineffectiveness, it was Hawkins and Hawkins alone who remained uninterruptedly active. Indeed, he was the only member of the Mets’ season-opening bullpen to not at some point or another go on the disabled list; be demoted to the minors; or find himself otherwise dispatched. LaTroy just kept on pitching — 72 appearances — and by August he was Terry Collins’s designated closer. What’s more, he was good at it, notching thirteen saves in fourteen tries over two months for a team that was just trying to get through the season. The baker’s dozen represented Hawkins’s highest save total since he was a Cub in 2004. What’s more, the righthander never stopped looking out for the younger pitchers around him, hoping he could do for them what the veterans he encountered in a major league career dating to 1995 did for him way back when. In September of ’13, Hawkins referred to up-and-comer Vic Black has having “late life on the ball.” Having engineered a personal renaissance that extended his own MLB run through 2015 (encompassing 23 saves for Colorado in 2014), the same could be said for LaTroy himself.
39. BOBBY PARNELL, 2010-2015
(Also a Met from 2008 to 2009)
The development of a homegrown star can be a beautiful thing, even if it never comes to full fruition. Bobby Parnell seemed to be en route, though. After sipping one of Shea Stadium’s final cups of coffee in September 2008 (he threw the last pitch delivered by any Met there), Parnell made himself an increasingly larger part of the Mets’ plans over the next four seasons, eventually taking command of ninth innings in April of 2013. After years of devoting resources to big-ticket acquisitions in search of often elusive door-slamming capabilities, the Mets had cultivated a closer of their own. For four months, Parnell was practically a dream come true. The 22 saves he accumulated by July 30 were the most in a season by any signed-and-raised Met pitcher since Randy Myers (24) in 1989. Plus there was a pulsating inning thrown on May 7 — the tenth, against the White Sox — that earned Bobby a win on the back end of Matt Harvey’s near-perfect game. Together, Harvey and Parnell had spun a one-hitter, striking out 14. If it all felt a little too good to actually be true, August brought reality into the equation. Bobby was diagnosed with a herniated disk in his neck and didn’t pitch again in 2013. A blown save on Opening Day 2014 hinted that he wasn’t altogether healthy, and, sure enough, Tommy John surgery awaited around the corner. Parnell’s 2015 comeback fizzled and the righty was left off the postseason roster prior to his departure as a free agent. He had only six big league appearances ahead of him.
38. MIKE PELFREY, 2010-2012
(Also a Met from 2006 to 2009)
Big Pelf loomed over the Mets’ pitching plans as the 2010s commenced, and no wonder. At a listed height of 6’ 7”, Mike Pelfrey tended to loom over a lot of things. Given his status as a former first-round draft pick, the Mets had nurtured tall hopes for the righthander. They were only intermittently delivered upon prior to the dawn of this decade, but in 2010, they seemed to coalesce for good. On a staff led by undisputed ace Johan Santana and accented by the emerging R.A. Dickey, it was Mike Pelfrey who put up more wins than any Met, going 15-9, doing so while registering the lowest full-season ERA of his career (3.66). When Jerry Manuel found himself otherwise bereft of relief pitching on April 17 in St. Louis — it was the twentieth inning, after all — he called on Mike to take on a wholly new role. One scoreless frame later, the Mets had secured their longest win ever and Pelfrey was 1-for-1 lifetime in save opportunities. Pelf’s next skipper, Terry Collins, trusted the big guy enough to start on Opening Night in Terry’s Met managerial debut. Unfortunately, 2011 wasn’t nearly the year for Pelfrey that 2010 was, and an injury-curtailed 2012 turned out to be the last time Mike pitched in orange and blue.
37. WILSON RAMOS, 2019
What would you rather have: a catcher who hits or a hitter who catches? When the player in question is standing at the plate doing damage to the other pitcher, nobody much picks apart the distinction. For a solid month of 2019 — August 3 to September 3 — Wilson Ramos played in 26 games for the Mets and hit in every one of them. The hitting streak was the best by any Met in the 2010s (second only to Moises Alou’s thirty in franchise annals), and it couldn’t have come at a better moment. The Mets were making a bid for the postseason, and their mostly everyday catcher was batting .430 and slugging .590 as they strove. That span included four games in which Wilson came off the bench to extend the streak or, more accurately, help his team maintain its momentum. You can also factor into his monumental achievement that by August, a catcher is bound to be physically run down at any age; Ramos turned 32 on August 10. Oh, and don’t overlook that not every pitcher appreciated this catcher’s defensive abilities, and by September word leaked that at least one batterymate (Noah Syndergaard) was asking for someone else to handle his workload. Another, however (Jacob deGrom), clinched a Cy Young Award by tossing three scoreless seven-inning starts, each with Wilson behind the plate. By 2019’s end, Ramos completed his first season as a Met with 141 games played and a .288 batting average. Catch that, why don’t you?
36. JERRY BLEVINS, 2015-2018
If you were casting the ideal veteran lefty reliever for your baseball movie, you couldn’t do much better than Jerry Blevins, stalwart of the Met pen in good times and less. Experienced to the tune of nine seasons before arriving in New York. Affable enough with the media to earn a regular pregame slot in which he and host Pete McCarthy bantered good-naturedly over WOR. So fan-friendly that he invited his Twitter followers to submit concepts for his avatar and committed to the lighthearted entry he deemed his favorite. Critically, Jerry eventually proved a highly durable contributor to the Met cause, though he’d have to first endure a detour that suggested the contrary. The best of the southpaw’s times were just getting rolling in early 2015 when, as if inserting himself into a GEICO commercial, Blevins retired the first fifteen batters he faced. What the Mets couldn’t insure against were a pair of fractures that prevented him from competing beyond April 19. Over the next three seasons, though, Jerry missed no time, and his managers rarely missed an opportunity to deploy his talents. He pitched in 212 games for the Mets from 2016 through 2018, including 73 for the playoff-bound Mets of ’16. The one element that didn’t adhere to a script for a nominal lefty specialist was how effective Blevins could be against righthanded batters. In two of the three years he worked consistently out of the Mets bullpen, he held righty hitters to averages under .200. Then again, nobody ever said baseball movies had to be predictable.
35. J.D. DAVIS, 2019
Who was this guy and what could he do? Before long, Mets fans learned J.D. Davis was a dangerous hitter who could alter the trajectory of a season. Pried loose from Houston in a little-noticed trade in January 2019 — after he posted encouraging minor league numbers if little during major league auditions — the Mets fit the third baseman/left fielder into their starting lineup 99 times and let him loose on National League pitching. The impact was deep. In 140 games in all, Davis slashed .307/.369/.527, with 22 home runs and an undeniable flair for the dramatic. In the tenth inning of a thrilling back-and-forth affair versus Cleveland on August 21, Davis rapped the game-winning double and, after he’d been ceremoniously stripped of his uniform top, addressed postgame interviewer Steve Gelbs and everybody remaining at Citi Field with a rallying cry for the ages. “Hey Mets fans,” he roared into the microphone, “we did it again! This team has no quit, we were grinding all game. We had that New York swagger, that New York attitude, we didn’t quit, we didn’t quit.” Usually mild-mannered when intentionally out of uniform, J.D. could just as easily have been describing his own approach to baseball.
34. MARLON BYRD, 2013
Sometimes a scrap heap yields gold. In 2012, Marlon Byrd was limited to 47 games played for two teams, batting .210 overall when not serving a 50-game PED suspension. In 2013, plucked from encroaching obscurity, Byrd, 35, shimmered as the Mets’ everyday right fielder, eliciting talk that he’d win Comeback Player of the Year honors in the NL. There was no trophy for Marlon in ’13, but he certainly produced a compelling candidacy, blasting 21 homers; batting .285; cutting down seven runners trying to advance on him; and tutoring eager-to-learn teammate Justin Turner on the fine art of swinging. The lessons turned Turner into a dangerous hitter once he left New York for Los Angeles. Marlon, meanwhile, preceded Justin out the Flushing door, having been traded to Pittsburgh in the waning days of August 2013 for the Pirates’ playoff drive.
33. AMED ROSARIO, 2017-2019
No Met position player prospect across the decade rose to New York with higher expectations attached to his scouting reports than Amed Rosario, universally tabbed a star-in-waiting ahead of his August 2017 debut. Once the 21-year-old “finally” appeared, you could see what the fuss was about — and discern that few players arrive in the majors at the top of their game. As a shortstop, he needed polishing. As a batter, he needed discipline. As a youngster, he needed maturity. All told, most of Rosario’s first three seasons amounted to a case for patience, because there was quite obviously something there. Yet in the second half of his third season it seemed a combination of patience and practice was catapulting Amed to a state hinting at perfection. He really could hit, for both average and power. He really could field and throw. It was clear from the get-go he could run, but now we had a clue where he was headed: toward the upper echelon of all-around shortstops in the National League.
32. ADDISON REED, 2015-2017
The successful setup man inevitably becomes the baseball equivalent of the backup quarterback. At the first sign of trouble for the main guy, people start asking why we can’t go to the next guy? Addison Reed made himself a theoretically attractive alternative behind a usually reliable if not wholly infallible Jeurys Familia in 2016, as his eighth innings could be rightly considered held forts of the highest order. In eighty appearances, the righty’s ERA clocked in at a microscopic 1.97, and during the Mets’ spurt to the Wild Card, when every game mattered, Reed’s participation was vital to most every win. In the same span that saw the Mets go 27-12, Addison pitched 21 times. The Mets’ record with his name in the box score? A white-hot 18-3. The next season, with Familia going to the DL in mid-May with an arterial clot in his right shoulder, Reed stepped up to the ninth with a flourish, collecting fifteen saves in his All-Star teammate’s absence. By the time Familia returned in September, Reed was long gone, having been targeted for trade by the playoff-bound Red Sox, making it three consecutive postseasons for an extraordinarily useful right arm.
31. JENRRY MEJIA, 2010; 2012-2015
(Missed 2011 due to injury)
Cats have nothing on Jenrry Mejia in the multiple lives department. The righty from the Dominican Republic showed up as a twenty-year-old at Spring Training 2010, drew rave reviews for a sharp cutter and pitched his way into Jerry Manuel’s bullpen. The lack of a defined role curbed his progress. A trip to the minors converted him to a starter. Tommy John surgery removed him from the Mets’ radar until late in 2012. When he next made a splash, it was starting in the summer of 2013, and he was tantalizingly good at it (six outings, 2.30 ERA) before a bone spur pushed him off the mound. Come 2014, he was all right as a starter for a spell, then, almost out of nowhere, terrific as a closer, saving 28 games, often punctuating his last outs with a crowdpleasing stomp of triumph. Having carved a niche for himself at last, Mejia pulled into Port St. Lucie in 2015 ready to go for a team on the rise. What nobody was ready for were repeated positive PED tests that ultimately saddled him with what was billed a lifetime ban from Major League Baseball. Naturally, someone with as many professional lives as Jenrry was back in organized ball soon enough, pitching in the Red Sox system in 2019. When that minor league season was over, he hadn’t yet reached his thirtieth birthday.
by Greg Prince on 7 December 2019 6:06 pm Welcome to the sixth chapter of Faith and Fear’s countdown of The Top 100 Mets of the 2010s. An introduction to the series is available here; you can read the most recent installment here. These are the more or less best Mets we rooted for as Mets fans these past ten years. Since a decade is coming to a close, we thought it would be fun to round them up and recall a little something about them.
50. JUAN URIBE, 2015
49. KELLY JOHNSON, 2015; 2016
No delivery from Amazon Prime was ever as anticipated or yearned for as much as the one Sandy Alderson ordered from Atlanta on July 24, 2015. Is it here yet? Is it here yet? When it arrived, containing precious cargo, there were yelps of joy across the land, for the Mets had finally received reinforcements for their depleted bench. Juan Uribe and Kelly Johnson were two veterans gathering dust for the utterly out-of-it Braves. Alderson rescued them from baseball irrelevance, and the duo rescued the Mets right back, bringing trusty bats to a pennant lunge that was desperately flailing in search of traction. To make room on the roster, the Mets demoted Danny Muno and DFA’d John Mayberry, Jr. Nobody wished ill on the departees, but nobody complained that they’d been replaced. Understand that the Mets had barely shown a pulse against Clayton Kershaw on Thursday, July 23. The two were traded for on Friday. On Saturday, Johnson homered in a rout of L.A. On Sunday, Uribe won the series finale in extras. Traction was secure for another week and the Mets’ bench was solid for the rest of the season.
48. JOSH THOLE, 2010-2012
(Also a Met in 2009)
47. MIKE BAXTER, 2011-2013
Two men have caught no-hitters for the New York Mets. Conventionally speaking, it was Josh Thole behind the plate for the entirety of Johan Santana’s history-altering effort of June 1, 2012, remarkable from a catching standpoint when you realize Thole was just off the disabled list and was, for the first time, wearing a hockey-style mask in deference to his recovery from a concussion. Through whatever protective device Josh looked out at his pitcher, he put down the right fingers, set the right target and was right on time to embrace him on the mound after he caught the final strike three of the night. One of the putouts that wasn’t scored a K landed memorably in the glove of the Met in left, Mike Baxter, though it might be more accurately recalled Baxter landed in the grasp of the wall where that ball was surely headed. The moment when Santana’s flirtation with indelible Met immortality appeared most endangered came in the seventh when legendary Cardinal villain Yadier Molina sent a liner deep to left field. It looked like a sure double to everybody but the left fielder. Mike from Whitestone — a Mets fan growing up, you know — gave his body and soul to make the catch that made the first no-hitter in New York Mets history possible. All of Baxter went on the DL. None of him wasn’t instantly a local baseball hero.
46. KIRK NIEUWENHUIS, 2012-2015; 2015
As noted often in Met telecasts, Kirk Nieuwenhuis played high school football, experience that came in handy when the alumnus of Denver Christian in Colorado was asked to pick up essential yardage between home plate and areas beyond the outfield fence. The Air Nieuwenhuis offense executed several memorable bombs during his relatively limited reps on the field. Highlights included a Father’s Day walkoff blast versus the Cubs that turned around the 2013 Mets (at least for a while); a trio of homers on the Sunday before the All-Star break in 2015, especially notable because they came at Citi Field and no Met had ever gone deep thrice in a home game before; and, most crucially, the eighth-inning dinger that donged Jonathan Papelbon on September 8, 2015, vaulting the first-place Mets ahead of the second-place Nationals, 8-7, the climactic moment of a contest the Mets had very recently trailed, 7-1. Not incidentally, all four of the 2015 home runs came after the Mets sold Kirk’s contract to the Angels and then, having missed his obvious intangibles, grabbed it back on waivers a few weeks later. Nieuwenhuis batted .079 before he left Queens, .279 following his return. Explanation? Perhaps it takes even the most talented high school running back a while to find the end zone.
45. JUSTIN TURNER, 2010-2013
Justin Turner was pretty much the ideal Met utility player. Once he was up from Buffalo to stay in 2011, Turner made himself extraordinarily useful. When Rule 5 wonder Brad Emaus flamed out as the projected everyday second baseman, Justin Turner emerged to help plug the resulting hole. When David Wright detoured to the disabled list for an extended absence, Justin filled in at third. When Daniel Murphy went down, Justin’s value only rose. When any Met did anything to create a win worth celebrating, Justin brought a pie to the postgame interview tableau. He even found time to break a club record set by Ron Swoboda (most consecutive games with an RBI by a rookie). There was little Justin Turner didn’t do at least a little bit well as a righthanded bat and versatile infielder coming off the bench for parts of four seasons. Not doing anything remarkably well, however, made the Mets decide Turner was expendable. Non-tendered in December 2013, he was picked up by the Dodgers. He’s stayed in Los Angeles ever since, making one All-Star team, earning MVP votes three times and batting .526 against the Mets in the 2015 NLDS.
44. TODD FRAZIER, 2018-2019
In 2017, for the first time since Robin Ventura appeared on the free agent market nineteen years before, the Mets entered a winter looking to acquire a full-time third baseman. Most of the stability that had reigned at the hot corner was because David Wright had played third forever. It seemed like he always would. His bad back had other ideas, thus the notion of Todd Frazier on the New York Mets came to be. The pride of Toms River fit into Flushing as comfortably as could be hoped. He served de facto clubhouse spokesman for a team in transition and was willing to star in goofy promotional videos as needed. It didn’t hurt that Todd’s flair for hitting fly balls to left coincided with the sportwide emphasis on launch angle and the deployment of baseballs that seemed to have a little extra oomph in them. Though he batted only .233 and struck out more than 200 times in his two seasons as a Met, he totaled 39 home runs, at least a couple of a highly dramatic nature.
43. ROBERT GSELLMAN, 2016-2019
HAR — Hair Above Replacement — wasn’t a problem for a starting rotation that featured Jacob deGrom and Noah Syndergaard, yet it could be said the 2016 Mets played to their follicular strength when they promoted Robert Gsellman. He had the flowing locks that were de rigueur on the Met mound, but far more substantially, the righty had the stuff to carry the Mets forward when they came up short in the healthy arms department. Pitching every fifth day as a rookie in the heat of a playoff chase, Gsellman posted a 2.63 ERA in seven starts and played a wholly unforeseen role in the unlikely rush those Mets put on to capture a Wild Card. Robert’s future awaited him in the bullpen, where his outings got shorter but his hair stayed long.
42. FRANCISCO RODRIGUEZ, 2010-2011
(Also a Met in 2009)
Even though perennially losing teams try their best to win games, clear up to the ninth inning and maybe later, it’s up for debate how badly an outfit going nowhere needs an elite closer. Yet the Mets of 2010 and 2011, for whom .500 was an aspirational mark, had an all-timer in Francisco Rodriguez. When Frankie — whose 62 saves for the 2008 Angels remains the MLB standard — was on call to pitch as a Met, he usually did his job as desired, notching 25 saves in 2010 and another 23 in 2011. Those were both partial seasons, truncated by caveats. In 2010, nothing Rodriguez did out of the pen got as much attention as what happened between him and the father of his common-law wife: an August 11 altercation that saw the closer arrested for third-degree assault. A brief suspension was followed by the diagnosis of a torn ligament in his right thumb, attributable to the fight. In 2011, K-Rod was back and generally keeping both himself and the Mets out of trouble when it became clear, thanks to a vesting option in his already-lucrative contract, that the more he pitched, the more the Mets would have to pay him. In a nod to budgetary restraint, the Mets sent their 2009 All-Star reliever to the Brewers at the break in ’11 for what amounted to salary relief.
41. PEDRO FELICIANO, 2010; 2013
(Also a Met from 2002 to 2004 and 2006 to 2009)
Tony Bennett and Pedro Feliciano could compare notes on what parts of their anatomy they left where. Bennett, though he’s from Astoria, has proclaimed loud and clear that his heart wound up in San Francisco. Feliciano, by all evidence, sacrificed his left arm to the playing fields of Flushing — first Shea, then its successor. The sole survivor from the gruesome bullpen implosion of 2008 just kept pitching once Citi Field opened, breaking his franchise record for most appearances not once but twice, culminating with the 92 times he jogged in from the bullpen at Jerry Manuel’s behest in 2010. Having shown admirable durability, Feliciano signed a two-year deal with the Yankees. Unsurprisingly in hindsight, his durability went on hiatus after leading the majors in appearances three straight years and he never worked for the team in the Bronx. When Pedro was next ready to pitch, he came home to Queens for 25 more games in 2013. Despite having been affiliated with six other major league organizations between 1995 and 2015 (and spending a year abroad with the Fukuoka Daiei Hawks in Japan), every one of the 484 MLB appearances Pedro Feliciano logged came in a New York Mets uniform. It’s the second-highest total in Mets history, behind only John Franco, and most among any pitcher who never threw in a regulation game for any big league unit but the Mets.
by Greg Prince on 6 December 2019 10:48 am Welcome to the fifth chapter of Faith and Fear’s countdown of The Top 100 Mets of the 2010s. An introduction to the series is available here; you can read the most recent installment here. These are the more or less best Mets we rooted for as Mets fans these past ten years. Since a decade is coming to a close, we thought it would be fun to round them up and recall a little something about them.
60. JUSTIN WILSON, 2019
Signed for depth in the winter. Thrust by necessity to the forefront by fall. Justin Wilson journeyed in a season’s time from journeyman to setup man as the 2019 Mets climbed the ladder of possibility. After most of the veteran’s first half was spent on the injured list, Wilson began making an impact from the port side of the bullpen in July, and eventually manager Mickey Callaway relied on him regularly to pave the way for de facto closer Seth Lugo — or vice-versa, as improvisation, combined with Justin’s hot hand, saw the lefty save the Mets’ day on several key occasions.
59. ROD BARAJAS, 2010
58. JOHN BUCK, 2013
The prizes found inside a pair of cereal boxes the Mets opened twice in the first half of the decade were catchers who came out swinging. Rod Barajas in 2010 and John Buck in 2013 were each veteran backstops whose bats made loud, likable impressions as Mets fans became familiar with their respective forms. Rod provided power unseen from behind the plate since the heyday of Mike Piazza, socking nine balls out of parks in his first 23 games. Buck broke from the gate with even more thunder, totaling 10 HR and 29 RBI by May 3. Of no less import, John nurtured young Matt Harvey to All-Star starter status. Neither Barajas nor Buck could maintain their respective blistering paces, but their reputations as potential game changers stayed strong, and both catchers were successfully sought by contenders before their lone years as Mets were done.
57. JORDANY VALDESPIN, 2012-2013
It’s been a while since they made Characters of the Game like they used to, but in 2012 and ’13, Jordany Valdespin presented himself as a throwback, whether he meant to or not. At bat, he was lightning in a bottle, setting the Met season record for pinch homers (5) as a rookie. In the field, he could be called versatile, posting perfect percentages at four positions, if a dreadful one (.727) as a shortstop. He swiped ten bases in 2012 despite playing fewer than a hundred games. Jordany’s real calling card, though, was his no [bleeps] given personality, starting with the exuberant statement he offered Kevin Burkhardt after his first game-winning hit: “I’m ‘The Man’ right now.” In context, he wasn’t inaccurate. Amid the niceties of baseball protocol, however, it came off as a little gauche, but if you can back it up, you can say what you want. Across two seasons, it became progressively harder for JV1, as he liked to be known, to let his game do his talking. Valdespin would get thrown at by opposing pitchers and not have a Met immediately retaliate on his behalf. The celebratory pie-in-the-face he received for an extra-inning grand slam seemed to land a little hard. A t-shirt of his was sliced to ribbons by anonymous clubhouse vandals. There was also the matter of his decision to not wear a cup in a Spring Training game…with Justin Verlander pitching and coming, shall we say, inside. By the middle of 2013, the lightning in the bottle was losing its fizz and after a testy exchange of NSFW words with Terry Collins, Jordany Valdespin could be termed an ex-Met right now.
56. ERIC YOUNG, Jr., 2013-2014; 2015
Speed kills. Speed thrills. Speed was often absent from the Mets’ strategy after Jose Reyes bolted for Miami ahead of 2012, but Eric Young, Jr., was a reminder that a fast pair of feet could really get a team going. EYJ was quite capable of running and did so often. Following his 2013 in-season trade from Colorado, Young took over as starting left fielder and leadoff hitter and sparked the Mets to their best spurt of the year. His 38 steals in 91 games, combined with eight he’d garnered as a Rockie, won him the NL stolen bases title. Eric’s production leveled off in 2014, leading the Mets to let him depart as a free agent, but as they were speeding toward clinching a division title in 2015, they remembered their erstwhile burner and picked him up in late August. His abbreviated second go-round as a Met perfectly encapsulated Young’s skill set. In nine plate appearances, Eric never reached base, yet he crossed the plate nine times in September, each time as a pinch-runner deluxe.
55. JAY BRUCE, 2016-2017; 2018
When he was on, Jay Bruce was a powerful force for the Mets. When he wasn’t, a black hole stood a better chance of getting a base hit. Jay was on a substantial amount of the time during his up-and-down Metropolitan tenure, especially in 2017, when the bat that had made the right fielder a perennial trade target in Cincinnati burned. Bruce entered the ’17 All-Star break with 23 homers for the Mets and was up to 29 in early August when another contender (something New York was no longer) came calling. The Mets sent him to Cleveland, and Jay helped the Indians secure their AL Central crown. When the Mets were the ones acquiring Bruce for a playoff drive in 2016, it had been a different story, as Jay arrived from Ohio ice cold. Still, the sum total of Bruce’s Met experience was positive enough to convince the club to re-sign him as a free agent in 2018. His next term was more reminiscent of ’16 than ’17, which added up to Jay being part of the package sent to Seattle for Robinson Cano and Edwin Diaz in advance of ’19.
54. SCOTT HAIRSTON, 2011-2012
A part-time outfielder who mashed like a full-time slugger, Scott Hairston tended to get the most out of his select playing opportunities. In 2012, despite starting only 86 times, Hairston hit 20 home runs, becoming only the seventh Met to produce a quantity that high in fewer than 400 at-bats. That was the same season Scott struck for the cycle at Coors Field and contributed a grand slam to a 17-1 rout of the Cubs at Wrigley. His defensive reputation may have kept him glued to the bench when Terry Collins was filling out a lineup card, but his bat had no problem nudging him loose as the innings grew late. In extras in 2012, Scott was a .571 hitter.
53. CARLOS TORRES, 2013-2015
Carlos Torres personified the kind of fabric from which a baseball season is manufactured. Across three years in New York, he often represented the difference between fragility and firmness for Mets teams at different competitive junctures. From the middle of June in 2013 through Labor Day 2015, Carlos was regularly on call and responded to whatever a situation called for. Torres was used mostly out of the bullpen to soak up middle innings, but he was also handy to have for nine starts in 2013 and ready to go when a family emergency prevented Bartolo Colon from pitching in 2014. After plowing through two also-ran seasons, Torres was an essential element of the Mets’ rise to prominence in 2015, most notably when he and Daniel Murphy teamed on an unlikely tenth-inning 1-3-1 putout in Philadelphia in late August; the first “1” in that equation was Torres’s left foot, which absorbed the brunt of Met alum Jeff Francoeur’s line drive up the middle (part of the reason Gary Cohen immediately dubbed the sequence of events “the play of the year”). Carlos himself singled to lead off the thirteenth and score the game’s winning run. In a critical showdown in Washington on September 7, Torres was on in the fourth to bail out Jon Niese. Carlos took care of the Nationals, but after being the Met to endure longest without time missed due to injury, he strained his left calf covering first in the fifth. The bad timing didn’t hurt the Mets’ roll toward October, but it did derail Torres from the club’s pitching plans for the postseason.
52. T.J. RIVERA, 2016-2017
The kid from the Bronx makes good in Queens. That sentence, however brief, wrote itself down the stretch in 2016 when T.J. Rivera emerged from both across the Triborough Bridge and out of nowhere to rush the Mets along to a playoff berth. Despite going unselected in the amateur draft, the Mets took the word of an impeccable source — their former catcher Mackey Sasser, who coached T.J. at Wallace Community College in Alabama — and signed Rivera as a free agent in 2011. Five years later, he was called up to the majors when, as seemed to be the case every summer, the Mets were beset by injuries. Soon settling in at second base in place of a hobbled Neil Walker, Rivera proved a lifeline, batting .333 and pushing the Mets to first place in the National League Wild Card standings. T.J. was the only Met to reach Madison Bumgarner for an extra-base hit in the winner-take-all affair to follow, doubling to lead off the bottom of the fifth of what was still a scoreless game. It remains the most recent postseason extra-base hit off the bat of any Met.
51. JAMES LONEY, 2016
The Mets weren’t exactly angling for another Keith Hernandez in May of 2016 when they found themselves bereft of a full-time first baseman, but they surely needed somebody who knew how to play the position and swing a bat competently. With Lucas Duda sidelined for an indefinite period, they reached out and reeled in James Loney, a ten-year veteran wallowing in the minors for Texas. His contribution to a team trying to get back to the postseason was essential, never more so than when with a playoff spot on the line, James delivered. Loney was up with two out and Curtis Granderson on second in the sixth inning at Philadelphia on October 1, the score knotted at two. Facing reliever David Hernandez, the first baseman launched a three-and-one fastball far over the right field wall to put the Mets by up a pair, the same margin by which they’d bring home the Wild Card three innings later. The joy inherent in his 426-foot accomplishment was summed up in the jubilant bat drop with which James followed up his feat. “That’s called being in the moment right there,” Loney said as the postgame champagne flowed. “There’s just times in those big moments where it’s fun to enjoy it, and you’ve gotta have fun in this game.”
by Greg Prince on 5 December 2019 2:22 am When the rich guys meet for cocktails at the Rich Guys Club — which is where rich guys get together to tell each other how beautiful and brilliant they are — and one rich guy makes a deal to buy a baseball franchise from another rich guy, maybe one of the rich guys, after everybody’s shaken hands on everything that needs to be shaken on, could leave a large enough gratuity on the table so somebody can sign a frontline starting pitcher.
Or is that too shortsighted a priority for the rabble up here in the not-so-cheap seats?
I don’t know what to make of the news that Steve Cohen, very rich guy, is in negotiations to buy more than half of the Mets from the presumably doing OK for themselves Wilpons. I mean, yeah, hurrah for new blood, new money, a potential new attitude toward offseasons that Patti LaBelle herself would praise to high heavens. Cohen, if and when he takes over, shapes up on a thin sheet of paper as the kind of guy you’d want owning your team. I don’t want or need to know more than the part that says he can afford a baseball team and he’s committed to it being the best possible baseball team. People who have the means to buy professional sports franchises are different from you and me, and who are we — the ticket-buying, cable-subscribing, blog-penning public — to judge them and their outside-the-lines endeavors? Their job is to position the team we love to win and therefore make that team more lovable.
The best news about Cohen, in addition to his resources, is that he’s a Mets fan. Not a Mets fan because he already owns a minority stake in the Mets. Not a Mets fan in the sense that he politely applauds his investment. He’s a 63-year-old Mets fan originally from Great Neck, eight stops on the Port Washington line from Shea. I’ve read he attended games at the Polo Grounds, which means he’s old enough to remember the entirety of the Mets experience and young enough to not remember a time before the Mets. The latter shouldn’t feel like a positive, but after eleven seasons passing through the turnstiles of a ballpark whose guiding architectural principle was Ebbets Faux, I’ll take my chances on a baseball worldview shaped by love of the Mets and nobody else.
The least encouraging news is that this deal is by no means done. It’s supposed to take five years. Or less, depending on common sense and how rich guys operate. Five years sounds a little strange. Fred Wilpon sticking around for a half-decade as “control person” (the MLB acronym for owner that reads as both descriptive and chilling) when we are told Steve Cohen and his billions are en route sounds very strange. When I first heard these were the terms in play, I thought of the Season One episode of M*A*S*H in which everybody’s very certain there’s going to be a ceasefire…everybody but Trapper John, who rejects the rumor of peace “with all my cynical heart”.
“I’ll drink to it,” Trapper tells Hawkeye, “but I don’t believe it.” M*A*S*H, you may be aware, ran ten more seasons (plus a bloated finale movie), so Trapper was on to something there. And, by the way, anybody remember the name David Einhorn? He was the rich guy identified as the Mets’ owner-in-waiting in May of 2011. By September, that deal was dead.
If this does go through, though, it’s nice to think that when the Steve Cohen Mets encounter a baseball situation like the one that encountered the Fred & Jeff Wilpon Mets most recently, the Steve Cohen Mets will respond differently. The F&J Wilpon Mets had Zack Wheeler declaring free agency and fielding offers from all sorts of teams. Well, not all sorts of teams. The Met sort sat out pursuit of a pitcher who’d been very good for them the past couple of years and projected to be something similar a while longer. Zack just signed with Philadelphia, five years at $118 million total, a sum we’ll call Zack Wheeler money.
Maybe there are better options for the Mets than Zack Wheeler. I liked Zack Wheeler as a Met, but I could move on to another pitcher in his place. Who’s that gonna be? There are some fine pitchers out there on the market. I’d take Gerrit Cole, for example. He’s a major league free agent and the Mets are a major league franchise that isn’t paying Zack Wheeler anything. Cole would definitely loom as an upgrade.
Also as a fantasy in the F&J Wilpon Mets world. It’s never occurred to us to think the Mets, as run by their current control person and his right-hand son, would ever, ever, ever go after a pitcher like Cole who would command at least a Wheeler-and-a-half. That’s because we’re hyperconscious of who’s running the show and how they run it. But, hey, if a baseball decision were made that somewhere between Wheeler and Cole there’s an optimal answer for who will start games every fifth day, I’d be all for it. Walker Lockett ain’t it. Corey Oswalt ain’t it. Seth Lugo, unless you got a lot of relief pitching to take his spot, ain’t it. Any good ideas that will take wherewithal — the i is dotted with a dollar sign — are non-starters. That’s who the Mets figure to get to replace Zack Wheeler: a non-starter. When he arrives, we’ll be told it’s a creative choice.
The Steve Cohen Mets, had the clock truly started on their existence, might have extended Wheeler already. The Steve Cohen Mets might have said goodbye to Wheeler because they knew they were going hard after Cole or somebody else approximating his caliber. We don’t know what the Steve Cohen Mets would do. We don’t know for sure that there will be a Steve Cohen Mets. But if there are, I look forward to not even being aware that they’re the Steve Cohen Mets. In a decent-case scenario, they’ll just be the New York Mets whose control person will empower the baseball people to figure out who they need and tell them to do what it takes to get him. In an even better-case scenario, the next time we’d think about who’s in control will be when the control person shows up amid a couple of dozen heartily celebrating Mets to accept a many-flagged trophy from the commissioner.
That’s the best-case scenario, actually. I’d really like to see that.
by Greg Prince on 4 December 2019 3:03 pm Welcome to the fourth chapter of Faith and Fear’s countdown of The Top 100 Mets of the 2010s. An introduction to the series is available here; you can read the most recent installment here. These are the more or less best Mets we rooted for as Mets fans these past ten years. Since a decade is coming to a close, we thought it would be fun to round them up and recall a little something about them.
70. ERIC CAMPBELL, 2014-2016
Eric Campbell definitely nailed Triple-A. In parts of four seasons with the Las Vegas 51s, the righty swinger tore up the Pacific Coast League, hitting .322 in close to 900 at-bats. Most compelling was the .355 average he had going in 2014 when the Mets called him up to New York for his major league debut. The Mets weren’t doing particularly well and anybody scalding in the minors, even in an acknowledged hitters’ league, looks pretty darn good from afar. Up close, Campbell — known, naturally, as Soup — wasn’t bad. Over three seasons at Citi Field, he’d fill in at first, in the outfield and, when David Wright went down with spinal stenosis in 2015, a lot at third (39 starts in place of the Captain). The year the Mets won the pennant, Eric was a valuable pinch-hitter, producing at a .308 clip off the bench. Ultimately, sustained MLB success wasn’t part of the recipe for Soup, a reminder that a player compiles nearly 900 ABs at AAA for a reason.
69. JOSH EDGIN, 2012-2014; 2016-2017
(Missed 2015 due to injury)
Josh Edgin opened eyes in his first big league camp in 2012 and brought intriguing stuff to bear when he debuted that July. The lefty retired the first four batters he saw at Turner Field before giving up a home run to Chipper Jones and a double to Freddie Freeman, a one-two rite of passage for any Met reliever. A 1.47 ERA in 2014 portended great things, but then Tommy John surgery cancelled his 2015. Josh returned to help the Mets capture a Wild Card in 2016. On April 28, 2017, in his Moment of Zen, he extricated Jeurys Familia from a bases-loaded ninth-inning jam in Washington by teasing a game-ending double play grounder from Bryce Harper. Edgin earned his second and final major league save that night. Two years later, he’d be retired from pro ball and coaching his high school team in Pennsylvania.
68. RAFAEL MONTERO, 2014-2017
The Mets found themselves needing a pair of starting pitchers to get through the 2014 edition of the Subway Series. One was listed by reliable sources as a real comer. The other was Jacob deGrom. The prospect labeled more prime than his contemporary was Rafael Montero. Jake and Raffy were elevated to New York together in the middle of May and, except for their major league beginnings, they’d rarely be mentioned in tandem again. While deGrom commenced carving a Rookie of the Year campaign almost immediately, Montero struggled as a starter and encountered injuries as a reliever. A depleted rotation in 2017 provided him at last with an opportunity to get the ball regularly and he now and then exhibited the form that made talent evaluators mark him for stardom. On August 30 at Cincinnati, it all seemed to come together for Rafael, as he carried a three-hit shutout into the ninth inning, a game the Mets won, 2-0. It was the first of three consecutive starts the righty would win…the last three W’s of a frustrating Met tenure.
67. HANSEL ROBLES, 2015-2018
The live right arm of Hansel Robles was so quick on the draw that sometimes balls he threw weren’t through their flight when his index finger was raised in the air providing a missile guidance system of sorts to help anybody watching follow their trajectory to points unknown. Yes, Hansel was regularly Greteled by opposing batters (seven home runs surrendered over his final 17⅔ innings as a Met), yet that arm did pack enough promise to keep getting chances, especially as the Mets chased playoff berths in 2015 and 2016. Robles went unscored upon in three postseason appearances in ’15 and eventually delivered on his talent by registering 23 saves in 2019. By then, unfortunately, he was pitching for the Angels.
66. RENÉ RIVERA, 2016-2017; 2019
Nobody manning any other position on the diamond is asked to be acutely sensitive to the needs of a teammate, but a catcher has to be there for his pitcher, to say nothing of the ball, which is pretty much the only thing defenders elsewhere on the field have to worry about. René Rivera revealed himself to be the sweet spot for an entire pitching rotation in 2016, becoming the guy more Met hurlers seemed to prefer throwing to than any other option. Noah Syndergaard seemed to benefit most from his presence, crafting his breakout season under the tutelage of the well-traveled pitch-framing vet. When Thor started the Wild Card Game at Citi Field, it was Rivera who handled him from behind the plate. The pitcher responded with seven shutout innings. Noah liked René so much, he asked for him by name when Rivera returned to the Mets as a backup catcher in 2019.
65. MICHAEL CUDDYER, 2015
He’d been a Twin, a Rockie and, most relevantly, a Virginian who grew up in the vicinity of David Wright. His abilities (reflected by a batting crown in Denver) and his connections to a Captain landed him in New York for 2015. From there, Michael Cuddyer built on his background for a club coming into its own. The everyday left fielder as the Mets broke from the gate at 15-5, Michael took on the role of team leader, all the more vital once Wright went out with a monthslong injury. Postgame celebrations were highlighted by Cuddyer awarding a championship belt to the player deemed most responsible for a night’s win. His own playing time got trimmed once the Mets traded for Yoenis Cespedes, yet Michael Cuddyer never ceased being a frontline teammate to the rest of the 2015 NL champs.
64. JASON ISRINGHAUSEN, 2011
(Also a Met from 1995 to 1997 and in 1999)
The longest homecoming story in Mets history had a happy enough ending. Jason Isringhausen was an ex-Met more than a decade removed from the orange and blue when the former phenom returned to rekindle his career in April of 2011. Shea Stadium was no longer around and Generation K was a distant memory, yet the former All-Star closer was delighted to be back proximate to where it all began. “To put the ‘Mets’ across your chest,” he confessed, “it’s pretty special.” Izzy, 38, emerged from the pen 53 times in ’11, notching seven saves after Francisco Rodriguez was traded in mid-July. The seventh, on August 15, was the 300th of his career, a milestone the righty watched John Franco reach fifteen years earlier at Shea. Yup, Jason Isringhausen had been around forever and gone from the Mets almost as long. It was indeed special to have him back.
63. NEIL WALKER, 2016-2017
In the annals of tough acts to follow, Daniel Murphy bequeathed a spectral presence Neil Walker didn’t really need. The timing for the solid second baseman’s transfer from Pittsburgh to New York was decidedly less than wonderful, as Neil’s Mets debut followed on the heels of Murph’s NLCS MVP performance the previous fall. Walker did fine for himself in his new locale, especially as a slugger his first Met month. With nine home runs on the board prior to May 1, it appeared possible the Mets wouldn’t miss the perpetually defensively challenged Murphy. Except Daniel the Washington National blossomed into an everyday elite batter whose hitting made everybody forget he wasn’t much of a fielder. It didn’t help the inevitable comparison between second basemen that the guy the Mets didn’t re-sign beat up on his old team like crazy. In 2016, Daniel Murphy batted .347 against all comers, but really came to play against the Mets, raking at a .413 pace. With that as background noise, Neil Walker acquitted himself more than adequately, totaling 23 homers (including a couple of critical blasts that rescued games that appeared lost during the ballclub’s extended flailing period) before an injury ended his season in late August. The next year, Murphy made his second consecutive All-Star team with the Nationals, lifted Washington to another division flag and continued to relentlessly pound Met pitching. Walker was traded to Milwaukee.
62. DOMINIC SMITH, 2017-2019
A slow burn didn’t much more than smolder once Dominic Smith reached the big leagues amid the lost summer of 2017. The erstwhile first-round draft pick demonstrated enticing power during his initial audition at first base, yet couldn’t raise his batting average as high as .200. Injury and a lack of progress kept him from seeing Citi Field in 2018 until June. His most vivid highlight came in left field where he ran into shortstop Amed Rosario on a fly ball and cost the Mets a game against the Giants. Facing the third strike of his stunted career, Smith turned the cliché about the best shape of my life into truth. Shed of weight and baggage in 2019, Dom transformed into a latter-day Lenny Harris when not starting (PH OPS of 1.031) and made himself into a decently serviceable platoon left fielder once first base became the permanent province of Pete Alonso. Another injury turned Dom into the Mets’ most vocal and vibrant cheerleader during the team’s stab at Wild Card glory, but it was Smith who’d be eliciting the final huzzahs of the 2010s. Batting for the first time in more than two months, on September 29, Dom belted a three-run home run to beat the division champion Braves in the eleventh inning of Game 162. Judging from the raucous reception he received, you’d think Smith had won the Mets something bigger than the last game of a non-playoff season. With everybody in attendance suddenly leaning forward into hot anticipation of 2020, maybe he did.
61. HISANORI TAKAHASHI, 2010
Versatility, thy name at decade’s outset was Hisanori Takahashi, a one-year wonder of starting and closing rarely demonstrated in Queens this or any century. No Met pitcher who started as many as a dozen games in a season had ever saved as many as eight other games in the same season before the erstwhile Yomiuri Giant came to Flushing in 2010…and no Met has done it since. When his lone year with the Mets began, the 35-year-old Takahashi was just another crafty middle reliever to manager Jerry Manuel, but a rotation in flux changed Hisanori’s role in May (the same week R.A. Dickey made his Met debut). The southpaw shifted back to the bullpen in August when a combination of legal and physical factors deprived Manuel of Francisco Rodriguez’s services. Takahashi — technically a major league rookie — responded with aplomb, shutting doors as if that’s what he’d come over from Japan to do in the first place.
by Greg Prince on 3 December 2019 1:54 pm Welcome to the third chapter of Faith and Fear’s countdown of The Top 100 Mets of the 2010s. An introduction to the series is available here; you can read the most recent installment here. These are the more or less best Mets we rooted for as Mets fans these past ten years. Since a decade is coming to a close, we thought it would be fun to round them up and recall a little something about them.
80. COLLIN COWGILL, 2013
Coming out of the what outfield? winter of Sandy Alderson’s ill-concealed discontent, the Mets were entering the 2013 season with an assortment of options that made Abbott & Costello’s lineup look like known quantities. Who was in center? No, it was Collin Cowgill, late of Arizona and Oakland and reminiscent of, at least according to Spring Training buzz, Lenny Dykstra. Several inches shy of six feet, Collin had the height to compare. By the time Opening Day was over, he also had the memorable home run, in his case a grand slam to ice the Mets’ win over the Padres. Granted, it wasn’t up there with the walkoff wallop Dykstra launched to beat the Astros in 1986’s NLCS Game Three, but power from an unexpected source will make anybody an instant fan favorite. For Cowgill, the favor didn’t last; he batted .180 in 23 games and was dealt to the Angels in June. But no Mets fan around for the rest of the 2010s would hear his name and ask, “Who?” One swing is sometimes all it takes.
79. FRANK FRANCISCO, 2012-2013
The cult of the closer had a perfectly logical avatar to carry its faith forward in Flushing when Frank Francisco, an American League relief pitcher with credentials, was signed for $12 million by Sandy Alderson to pitch ninth innings in 2012 and 2013. Francisco, who’d totaled as many 25 saves in a season for Texas, did what he was asked to do right away, preserving wins in the Mets’ first three games of the year. The club was 3-0, their closer was 3-for-3 in save opportunities and…well, neither entity could quite keep up the blistering pace. Still, Francisco compiled 23 saves (in spite of a 5.53 ERA) and backed up a bit of bizarre Subway Series bluster — “I can’t wait to strike out those chickens” — by throwing a scoreless ninth to end a Citi Field victory over the Yankees on June 22. A lingering elbow injury accompanied by a suspiciously lengthy rehabilitation period sidelined him until September in 2013. Frank notched his one and only save of the year on the last day of the season, closing the books on the last instance in the 2010s that the Mets would entrust their fate to a pricey free agent closer.
78. TYLER CLIPPARD, 2015
Fortification of the back end of the bullpen is the goal of any contender, and the Mets fortified what they hoped would be their fortress of solitude in July of 2015 by trading for veteran righty Tyler Clippard. Handed primarily eighth innings, Clippard tended to protect them very well as the Mets commenced to lap one of his former teams, the Nationals, in the race for first place in the NL East. Chalking up eight holds plus a save in his first twenty-four Met appearances certainly helped clear a path to a division title. The last New York stats Tyler posted, however, are the ones that resonate: two walks in a third-of-an-inning versus Kansas City in the eighth inning of Game Four of the World Series, both of which became earned runs on his ledger and a dagger of loss for both him and the Mets.
77. CHRIS CAPUANO, 2011
Chris Capuano was probably miscast as a 2011 Met, though that was through no fault of his own. A veteran lefty of the sort any contending team would desire down the stretch, the Mets never got around to converting Capuano into prospects as their season went south. Chris made the best of his static situation, most notably on a Friday night in late August at Citi Field when he thoroughly shut down the Braves, one of the clubs that could have used a guy like him: 9 IP, 2 H, 0 BB, 13 SO for a 6-0 whitewashing on the eve of Hurricane Irene storming the Metropolitan Area. Capuano’s Game Score, a metric that measures an outing’s dominance, was the highest for any Met starter since David Cone struck out 19 on the last day of 1991. A little over a month after Atlanta succumbed to Chris, the Braves would complete a colossal collapse, blowing their once-comfortable Wild Card lead to the Cardinals and missing the playoffs by a single game. They surely could have used a guy like Capuano…or benefited from him being on a mound somewhere else on August 26.
76. MARCUS STROMAN, 2019
Were the heretofore comatose Mets serious about making a run in 2019? They must have been, because on July 28, the contenders-come-lately swooped in ahead of other more logical trading partners, threw prospects to the wind, and worked out a swap with Toronto for Marcus Stroman, a Long Island kid who salivated at the chance to pitch with something on the line for a New York team. It may not have been the New York team Marcus expected to be joining, but the energetic righty acclimated quickly to his new surroundings, emitting excitement and occasionally flashing the form that earned him a spot on the AL All-Star squad a few weeks earlier. Becoming the first Met to pitch regularly with a single digit on his back (7), Stroman straddled the line between erratic and effective for a spell before settling in as a valuable member of a rotation striving to keep an unlikely Wild Card bid alive.
75. JASON BAY, 2010-2012
Signing Jason Bay didn’t seem like a terrible idea. The left fielder, 31, established a stellar track record with Pittsburgh and Boston, capturing the Rookie of the Year award in 2004, making three All-Star teams in a five-season span, and belting 36 home runs in 2009 while playing his home games in a park whose left field wall is known as the Green Monster. Coming to Citi Field for four years, starting in 2010, shouldn’t have proved daunting, even if almost no 2009 Met managed to hit balls out of its uncozy confines in its inaugural year. Plus Bay could claim Met roots of a sort, having shuffled through New York’s minor league system in 2002, playing alongside the up-and-coming Jose Reyes at Binghamton. There was no reason Bay on the Mets shouldn’t have worked. Yet it didn’t very much. Part of it was bad luck born of hustle. Bay ran into walls of all sizes in pursuit of catches, and staying in one piece proved a challenge. His persistent slump of 2010 and 2011 devolved into a nightmare .165 batting average in 2012. There was residual pop in his bat, most notably the night in Detroit when Jason belted the grand slam that broke a Mets four-run homer drought that had stretched nearly 300 games (Carlos Beltran added his own grand slam the very next inning; go figure). Bay’s pro’s pro aura rarely diminished, but it couldn’t obscure a bat that just wasn’t getting around like it used to. The Mets ate the last year of his contract.
74. JEREMY HEFNER, 2012-2013
From the out-of-nowhere files came the case of Jeremy Hefner, a righty who’d spent five seasons in the San Diego chain, never advancing beyond Triple-A before the Mets picked him up in the offseason prior to 2012. His major league debut was on the nose for an afterthought of a pitcher, as he was called up to serve as the first “26th man” mandated by MLB for use in a makeup doubleheader. His second start, on May 29, was auspicious at the plate (a home run off Joe Blanton) and quality on the mound (6 IP, 3 ER for his first win). Jeremy gave Terry Collins 36 starts over two years, intermittently shining — he carried a shutout into the ninth inning the last time the Mets played the Astros in a National League game — and generally hanging tough, at least until his right arm required not one but two rounds of Tommy John surgery. Hefner’s Met pitching career ended shy of a comeback, but a uniform awaits him in Flushing in 2020, as the new pitching coach for his old team.
73. TIM BYRDAK, 2011-2013
No bullpen that is called upon multiple times a night can persist without a pitcher the caliber of Tim Byrdak. Having been through the wars since 1994 (including a four-year tour of the minors after having already spent parts of three seasons with the Royals), Byrdak joined the Mets in 2011 and became the lefty specialist Terry Collins couldn’t get enough of: 72 appearances in ’11, another 56 in ’12. Though Tim was new to New York, his experience at many prior rodeos made him the bullpen spokesman of record during a couple of fairly lean seasons. He seemed to relish his elder statesman role, never more than when he decided what the clubhouse really needed was a live chicken in the aftermath of the poultry-inflected jibe Frank Francisco directed at the Yankees. Byrdak named the temporary pet Little Jerry Seinfeld, an homage to the cockfighting episode of Seinfeld, before the bird moved on to a more suitable home. A shoulder injury curtailed Byrdak’s 2012, but he fought to return to pitching in September 2013, determined to put in every last day until he qualified for MLB’s Lifetime Pass, a gold card that entitles a player lifetime admission to any ballgame. The catch was a player qualifies only if he’s lasted eight years as a major leaguer. Byrdak, pushing 40, made it back to the Mets, pitched in the final eight games of his career and surely earned his free pass.
72. ROBINSON CANO, 2019
71. EDWIN DIAZ, 2019
It was a matter of debate whether the December 2018 headline-grabbing deal the Mets made with Seattle would be known as the Robinson Cano Trade, the Edwin Diaz Trade or, ultimately, the Jarred Kelenic Trade. The back pages in New York were initially all about Cano, a potentially Hall of Fame-bound second baseman returning to the city where he established himself as a superstar. The smart money said that absorbing the 36-year-old’s megacontract was worth it because the real prize was Diaz, a closer who had just completed dazzling the American League to the tune of 57 mostly unhittable saves. At 24, the righty projected as the centerpiece of what had to be an improved Mets bullpen. Sure enough, Edwin pitched to his burgeoning reputation as the 2019 season got underway, recording save after save and inspiring calls for his entrance into games prior to their ninth innings. What nobody saw coming was Diaz’s penchant for the home run ball undoing his spate of good work, isolating his 26 saves from the sense of foreboding that surrounded the mere sight of him stirring in the pen. As for Cano, he was definitely old, definitely prone to the gentle jog to first on grounders to second and definitely the object of growing derision as 2019 went down the tubes. Then a funny thing happened on the way to oblivion: Cano got ridiculously hot (a three-homer explosion one night versus San Diego; a five-game OPS of 1.445 that was derailed only by a trip to the IL) and the Mets caught fire. His younger, more consistently productive teammates continually vouched for how much Robbie’s leadership meant to them, maybe yielding hope that former top Met prospect Kelenic, whenever the 20-year-old outfielder reaches the majors, won’t totally turn the erstwhile Mariners into latter-day synonyms for Foy and Fregosi.
by Greg Prince on 2 December 2019 3:05 pm Welcome to the second chapter of Faith and Fear’s countdown of The Top 100 Mets of the 2010s. An introduction to the series is available here; you can read the first installment here. These are the more or less best Mets we rooted for as Mets fans these past ten years. Since a decade is coming to a close, we thought it would be fun to round them up and recall a little something about them.
90. DAISUKE MATSUZAKA, 2013-2014
89. SHAUN MARCUM, 2013
88. BUDDY CARLYLE, 2014-2015
“Prison time is slow time,” Red said in The Shawshank Redemption, a movie that itself runs for two hours and twenty-two minutes. Baseball seasons fly by too quickly, yet in the 2010s, we had three pitchers who conjure thoughts of games that seemed to take a decade to play. Daisuke Matsuzaka, a fallen idol from his Red Sox days, worked so slowly that SNY put a clock on him to measure the time he took between pitches (it would have been snarkier had they labeled their device a Matsuclocka). Eventually, as opposed to quickly, Dice-K evolved into a reasonably reliable reliever. Shaun Marcum’s specialty was the extra-extra-inning game, taking the ball for the final two innings of a fifteen-inning loss on April 29, 2013, at Miami and eight long frames — the thirteenth through twentieth — against the Marlins at Citi Field on June 8 that same year. Shaun’s FIP of 3.64 indicated he deserved better than a 1-10 mark as a Met; his criticism of the sainted GKR booth post-release, however, guaranteed he’d go unmissed in New York. Buddy Carlyle, meanwhile, never showed anything less than happiness to be here, starting with his insertion into the eleventh inning of a thirteen-inning win at Philadelphia on May 31, 2014, that required 5:32 to complete and tested even the good humor of Gary Cohen. Carlyle, whose professional career dated back to 1996, got the win that long night at Citizens Bank, saw his first Opening Day action anywhere in 2015 and saved the first win of the eventual pennant-winning season ahead. Longevity sometimes has its rewards.
87. BOBBY ABREU, 2014
There’s nothing wrong with a dimmed star hanging on until he’s told to let go, and the Mets have certainly provided space on their rosters for players who used to be much better to flicker away. It doesn’t always end with everybody in agreement that the end has come (neither Adrian Gonzalez nor Jose Bautista ever quite retired after the Mets furnished them with what amounted to their respective final moments in 2018). Bobby Abreu, who built a prospective Hall of Fame case with five previous teams between 1996 and 2012, received an exit strategy from the Mets, and Abreu took it. The on-base specialist returned to the field in 2014 after a year’s absence and provided Terry Collins — his first manager, in Houston, eighteen Septembers earlier — a viable lefthanded bat off the bench. On the eve of the season’s final series, Abreu announced this was gonna be it, and on Closing Day, September 28, Bobby went out in style, starting in right and singling in his third plate appearance. Once he reached first, he tipped his cap to a standing ovation and departed for a pinch-runner, the last of his 2,470 big league hits securely in the books.
86. SCOTT RICE, 2013-2014
It happens most every spring somewhere. There’s a pitcher who appears in camp who’s been trying to make the majors forever. He’s not really on anybody’s radar, but he gets a chance, he gets batters out and, with luck and numbers finally on his side, he makes it. That feelgood story came to fruition prior to the beginning of the 2013 season when southpaw Scott Rice, who’d pitched at every level except the highest of them since 1999, made the Mets, a rookie at 31. On April 1, no foolin’, Rice entered the Mets’ Opening Day game at blustery Citi Field and set down the Padres in order in the ninth to seal an 11-2 victory. Scott was no one-day wonder, pitching 73 times in 2013 and 32 more in 2014, earning from Gary Cohen the nickname Scott “Every Minute” Rice. Sometimes it’s the stuff that takes the longest to boil that tastes most delectable.
85. ANTHONY RECKER, 2013-2015
Unless his picture was printed on both sides, it didn’t show up on the back of his baseball card that Anthony Recker was a handsome devil. What did show up was Recker’s predilection for pop from behind the plate, noteworthy for a catcher who didn’t play all that often. Six home runs in fifty games in 2013. Seven more in 58 games in 2014. A couple more as the Mets got serious in 2015. Anthony was a day game after a night game plugger, and he looked damn good filling the role.
84. LOGAN VERRETT, 2015-2016
A ballclub that confidently shapes its five-man rotation is one that knows it better have a sixth starter ready to supplement its efforts. For a team going somewhere at last in 2015, that quintessential spot starter was Logan Verrett, never more so than on August 23 at Coors Field when, with Matt Harvey needing a breather in the year he came back from Tommy John surgery, Verrett elevated his game in the Mile High City. Eight innings of four-hit, one-run ball kept the Mets’ mind-boggling momentum going, as the first place New Yorkers swept the Rockies and took their act to Philadelphia to conclude a road swing for the ages. The next April, Logan proved similarly indispensable, halting a patented Panic Citi outbreak (the Mets had stumbled from the gate 2-5) with another solid outing — 6 IP, 3 H, 0 R — against the Marlins. Starting and relieving, he’d soon build his record to 3-0 as the 2016 Mets refound their footing.
83. RAJAI DAVIS, 2019
The midday ride of Rajai Davis loomed as a nice little story. It became better than that once he emerged from his vehicle. The veteran of thirteen major league seasons and one intensely memorable World Series, yet assigned to Syracuse at age 38, was alerted that he’d be needed in New York. Sitting there in Allentown on May 22, 2019, thinking he’d be playing just another night of Triple-A ball, Davis hauled ass via Uber to Citi Field. The fare was $243. The payoff was a three-run, eighth-inning pinch-homer that assured the Mets a 6-1 win over the Nats en route to a series sweep. Rajai would be traveling back to the minors before long, but he’d also have cause to book a return trip to Queens in time to crush a crucial three-run double that captured an enormous September game from the Dodgers.
82. DEVIN MESORACO, 2018
If they gave out Cy Young Awards to catchers, Devin Mesoraco would have been the same near-unanimous choice Jacob deGrom was among pitchers in 2018. Mesoraco arrived from Cincinnati via a trade of unwanted assets (for Matt Harvey) that May. Besides showing a proclivity for hitting home runs late in games, Devin settled in as the catcher of choice for deGrom as deGrom grew more and more unhittable. The pairing helped result in the lowest ERA by any Met pitcher in 33 years.
81. JASON VARGAS, 2018-2019
(Also a Met in 2007)
The transformation of Jason Vargas from presumably dependable old pro who’d shore up the starting rotation, to possibly the worst pitcher anybody’d ever seen receive start after start, to quietly and rather suddenly reaching the status of “you know, he’s really not that bad” was, in retrospect, a sight to behold. The lefty got few major league batters out between late April and early August of 2018, and his earned run average soared toward a run an inning. But when the Mets visited Williamsport as part of MLB’s embrace of Little League, the man who wore VARGY on his back seemed reborn. Over his final eight starts of ’18, Jason dropped his ERA by nearly three runs. It was still unspeakably high, but improvement is to be applauded at any juncture. Vargas compressed his trajectory in 2019, looking bad at the very beginning, discovering his groove fairly soon and establishing his Met bona fides once and for all by tossing a complete game shutout versus the Giants on June 5. At the end of the month, Vargy sabotaged his well-earned stability, threatening a reporter and essentially punching his own ticket out of town.
by Greg Prince on 1 December 2019 2:50 pm Welcome to the first chapter of Faith and Fear’s countdown of The Top 100 Mets of the 2010s. A full introduction to what we’re doing is available here, but the concept is pretty self-evident. These are the more or less best Mets we rooted for as Mets fans these past ten years. Since a decade is coming to a close, we thought it would be fun to round them up and recall a little something about them.
100. DAVID AARDSMA, 2013
David Aardsma leads off any alphabetical consideration of New York Mets players, having broken Don Aase’s record for Double-A Mets on June 8, 2013, when he entered a tie game versus the Marlins and pitched a scoreless twelfth inning. That game went on to become the longest game in Citi Field history, going twenty, by which time the Mets lost, but Aardsma couldn’t be headed off on the great Metropolitan Roll Call of this or any decade. Also, he inherited 19 runners over 43 appearances and never allowed one to score.
99. PAUL SEWALD, 2017-2019
Paul is here for Paul, but also for Pill (Tyler, that is). Paul is here for the Jacob who wasn’t deGrom (Rhame, that is). Paul is here for both Chasen and Chase Bradford. Paul is here for Kevin McGowan, for Jamie Callahan, for Gerson Bautista, for Stephen Nogosek. Paul is here for every vaguely promising righty reliever promoted between 2017 and 2019 whose good impressions were, shall we say, fleeting. Paul takes the ball for Eric Hanhold, for Tyler Bashlor, for Drew Smith and Drew Gagnon and anybody else who drew the short end of the pen’s straw. Mostly, though, Paul Sewald is here for 120 appearances of his own and the one win he garnered in his 119th, which followed fourteen losses over three seasons. Paul was the first of this cohort to make it to Flushing. Paul’s still here. Many of the pitchers he represents, like the pitches they threw, are gone. Such staying power is not to be underestimated.
98. RONNY PAULINO, 2011
97. PEDRO BEATO, 2011-2012
96. CHRIS YOUNG, 2011-2012
Chris Young the pitcher (not to be confused with Chris Young the outfielder) started a game on Sunday night, May 1, 2011, that would have been easy enough for a nation to ignore when it began on ESPN, yet it turned into at least an irresistible sidebar to larger events before it was over. Young threw seven innings and gave up a single run at Citizens Bank Park, dueling Cliff Lee before handing matters over to the bullpen. By the time the game was meandering into extras — during which rookie Pedro Beato would hold the fort for three scoreless innings — the world learned the U.S. Navy’s SEAL Team Six had stormed the Pakistani hideout of Osama bin Laden, who had engineered the terrorist attack on the World Trade Center nearly ten years before, and killed him. It was a moment of national catharsis, acknowledged as much in the stands in Philadelphia as anywhere else. The connection for Mets fans was obvious: the one recreational interlude associated more than any other with the aftermath of September 11, 2001, took place ten days later, Braves at Mets, Mike Piazza going indelibly deep. When Ronny Paulino, making his first start at Mike’s old position, delivered his fifth hit of this game about a hundred miles south, producing the go-ahead run in the top of the fourteenth, it felt as if an emotional circle had been excavated and squared. Beato had been in high school in Brooklyn in 2001, Young in college in New Jersey. They had very specific memories of that awful day. So did everybody, of course. Come May 1, 2011, those who were lost on September 11, 2001, were still lost. The war fought in the name of preventing another such attack of epic proportions was (and is) still in progress. Yet, for what it was worth, the Mets were on the field again, winning a ballgame in the shadow of seismic global events.
95. LUIS HERNANDEZ, 2010
Leading off the home fifth inning of the seventeenth game of Luis Hernandez’s seventeen-game New York Mets career — in the ninth of nine consecutive starts he made at second base — Luis fouled the second pitch he saw from the Braves’ Tim Hudson off his right foot. Hernandez was in obvious pain, but stayed in the box. The third pitch he saw from Hudson he sent over the right field wall at Citi Field. Somehow he limped around the bases. When the half-inning was over, Joaquin Arias replaced the injured infielder, for Luis Hernandez had broken his foot with that foul. Though he’d compete for a roster spot the following spring (and briefly return to the majors with the Rangers in 2012), that break, that swing and that homer ended Luis’s Mets tenure. Talk about going out with a bang.
94. JUAN CENTENO, 2013-2014
The first time Juan Centeno caught in the major leagues, on September 18, 2013, the other team’s catcher — the Giants’ Buster Posey — stole a base. It was the second of Posey’s season and the sixth of the defending MVP’s career, a record that had established Buster wasn’t in there for his speed. So maybe Centeno would like a mulligan. In the callup’s next time behind the plate, at Cincinnati on September 25, after Jay Bruce had already swiped two bags, Billy Hamilton singled with two out in the fifth inning. Hamilton was already something of a legend, having stolen 75 bases at Triple-A Louisville before his promotion. At two minor league outposts in 2012, Billy totaled 155 that’s not a typo steals. In his first thirteen attempts in the bigs, Hamilton was 13-for-13. Factor in that he shared the same name as a nineteenth-century speedster who pilfered more than 900 bags in his time, it seemed there’d never be any stopping this Billy Hamilton. That was until he took off from first against Juan Centeno, and Juan Centeno stopped him cold, a critical moment in an eventual 1-0 Mets win. Perhaps another legend, the Story of Centeno, was born that Wednesday afternoon at Great American Ball Park. Actually, Juan, who’d leave the Mets after 2014 and earn a World Series ring as a backup on the 2017 Astros, owns an unremarkable caught stealing percentage as a catcher, having nailed only seven runners in fifty-two attempts. But he was the first to halt Hamilton, and Hamilton is one steal shy of 300 entering 2020.
93. COLLIN McHUGH, 2012-2013
As the Mets plummeted from sight in the second half of 2012, as they were prone to do post-All Star break in the first half of the 2010s, Collin McHugh did everything a callup from Buffalo could possibly do to reverse the familiar trajectory. In his first major league start, on August 23, the righty scaled the Rockies at Citi Field: seven innings, two hits, one walk, no runs, nine strikeouts. Coming within a month of Matt Harvey’s similarly eye-opening debut at Arizona, McHugh gave Mets fans a reason to dream of a pitching-laden future whose second halves wouldn’t take annual dives. Alas, in the present of August 2012, the Mets lineup did nothing against the Rockies, and New York lost again, 1-0, with Collin getting no-decisioned. That maiden voyage turned out be the only highlight of McHugh’s Met tenure (not counting the genuinely thoughtful blog he’d been writing since 2008). He’d appear in eleven games across 2012 and 2013, none of them a Mets win, before being traded to Colorado. His own Met record was 0-5 and, truth be told, little of the losing after his debut could be attributed to pitching in hard luck. A trade to the Rockies didn’t much change his fortunes, but the Astros recognizing something special in him did. Collin posted 43 wins across three seasons between 2014 and 2016, and like ex-Met Juan Centeno, a 2017 World Series ring awaited him in Houston.
92. VIC BLACK, 2013-2014
Every decade has its closer of the future. The ’80s had Wes Gardner, the ’90s Derek Wallace, the ’00s Eddie Kunz. In the 2010s, Vic Black was gonna throw hard and shut doors. Picked up from Pittsburgh late in the 2013 season, the righty showed flashes, notching almost a strikeout per inning in 56 games over two Met years. In 2014, only one of the 26 runners on base when he entered scored. Perhaps all Black had to do to ensure his future was stay healthy. In the spring of 2015, however, just prior to Opening Day, Vic went on the DL with right shoulder weakness. He never pitched for the Mets or in the majors again, the closer of the future leaving behind a total of one save in his wake.
91. KEVIN PLAWECKI, 2015-2018
Kevin Plawecki started behind the plate for the Mets 192 times. Rarely did the Mets indicate Plawecki’s place in the lineup was their idea of ideal. The former first-round draft choice was generally pegged as Travis d’Arnaud’s backup, but d’Arnaud had a hard time staying in one piece, thus Plawecki now and then took on the status of regular, most notably during d’Arnaud’s 2015 absences, a year when the Mets scrapped to stay viable in their first playoff race in seven years. Kevin helped keep the Mets afloat, though it was Travis who took over as their surge toward a pennant got serious. Plawecki was the only to Met to stay active on the postseason roster through all three rounds without seeing a speck of action. In 2017, he’d see the battery from both sides now, pitching in a pair of blowouts. His Met ERA of 12.00 went into the books alongside a four-season batting average of .218.
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