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ABOUT US
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 1 April 2022 8:39 am For those who instinctively turn their dial to Channel 9 on Saturday afternoons at 2 o’clock expecting Mets baseball, I feel ya. Old habits are hard to break, particularly in a courageous new world. I know the phrase is brave new world, but after five consecutive division titles and a world championship, enough with everything Brave. And I know televisions no longer come with dials. I’m cognizant of what century it is. I don’t have to acknowledge everything about it all the time.
The coming of cable was a good baseball thing in that it meant pretty much every Met game would be televised. The coming of your cable bill was a less good thing, but at least you got what you paid for. In the beginning, there was SportsChannel, which was a name that told you what you were getting, even if it didn’t mention Fran Healy came with it. The later Met melange of Fox Sports Net-New York, which really rolled off the tongue (they shoulda stuck with SportsChannel) and MSG gave way to SNY and GKR, which, despite initial reservations, we’ve enjoyed wholeheartedly since 2006. This longstanding arrangement, give or take some weekends when Gary Cohen takes a break, has been true value in action. Except for those dates nibbled away by Fox or ESPN. Funny how once you didn’t have Vin Scully on NBC or Al Michaels on ABC calling the action, the “honor” of your team being on national TV began to feel like a burden.
Then came games snatched by Facebook and YouTube, which served some alleged purpose that I’ve been slow to grasp, but they were weekday afternoons and if somebody planted behind a desk somewhere was able to sneak peeks they couldn’t otherwise (because not everybody everywhere is an MLB.tv subscriber), well, it’s a weekday afternoon. Baseball happening on a weekday afternoon is gift enough. If its images are not beamed to us directly from Wrigley Field with Ralph Kiner explaining how the winds are blowing out to Waveland Ave., mainlining the Mets by radio oughta suffice.
Nowadays, though? We still have Fox and FS1 depleting the quality of random Saturdays. We still have whatever ESPN will put us through next on select Sundays. TBS’s forthcoming deal for Tuesday nights isn’t exclusive, but they do pull Ron Darling away from Cohen and Keith Hernandez, and that, as we’d say when the Captain didn’t play, ain’t Wright. Now a stream of streaming — exclusive in nature — aspires to prove itself all wet.
Apple TV+ is taking over Friday nights, or at least the games it chooses to devour, commencing with merely what is slated to be, Jacob deGrom’s right shoulder willing, Max Scherzer’s first start as a Met a week from tonight. Wouldn’t you love to hear what our announcers have to say about this historic outing? We’ll have to savor their perspective when it’s offered only in the past tense. Peacock is poised to pluck its share of Met games, too, swooping in on Sunday mornings, as if ESPN doesn’t do enough to denigrate Sunday evenings. (Amazon Prime is also doing something, but it’s something we don’t much care about, so they can leave it out on the front steps.)
I fear the streaming that will have us screaming is Paramount+ having dibs on whichever Thursday night games it chooses, all of which Rob Manfred has mandated must start at 9:30 PM local time, in deference to MLB’s agreement to vigorously promote the sitcom Ghosts, which airs on CBS Thursdays at nine, streaming the next day on, you guessed it, Paramount+. I’ve seen a few episodes of Ghosts. Parts of episodes, really. As network situation comedies in the present day go, it’s no Young Rock, but it’s OK. I’d like it better if it stayed in its lane.
The worst part of the Paramount+ tie-in, which you may have read about if you keep up on these depressing sports media matters, is difficult to choose, because the more you look at it, the worse it gets.
• There’s the late first pitch. West Coast games will stream live starting at 12:30 AM EDT, more like 12:40 once they do all the folderol. Seth Meyers and James Corden, beware.
• There’s the dreaded exclusivity’s impact on the booth. We won’t be hearing from Gary Cohen. We won’t be hearing from Gary Thorne, who did a decent job filling in for his namesake last summer. We won’t be hearing from Gary Apple, even. The Paramount+ announcers will be Ghosts series stars Rose McIver and Utkarsh Ambudkar, calling the games in character as Sam the writer who sees ghosts and Jay her husband who doesn’t, alongside ubiquitous plague on ears everywhere Matt Vasgersian, on loan from MLB Network (I’d prefer the actors). I don’t wish to prejudge, but broadcasting baseball games, regardless of platform, might work better with baseball professionals behind the mic (including Vasgersian, I count none here).
• Then there’s the rules change. Ohmigod, the rules change. If there’s any good news in what they’re doing to the rule book, it’s that this will only apply to these Paramount+ games. The bad news is these games count.
 Ghosts runners. Now we’ve seen everything. Unless we can’t see them. You think you hate the concept of ghost runners as we’ve seen it in 2020 and 2021 for extra innings? The same ghost runners we thought we’d be spared from after the lockout, then learned were returning to second base to start the tenth in case of a tie after regulation? You ain’t seen nothing yet. Literally. On these Thursday games that run on Paramount+, we’ll have Ghosts runners. The plural is no accident.
Let’s say Francisco Lindor leads off an inning and doubles. You and I and Buck Showalter may all be satisfied with Lindor’s speed, but Lindor has to be automatically removed for a Ghosts runner, meaning one of the supporting characters from the show will go to second in Francisco’s stead. Sam will see it; Jay won’t; Matt will strain to be sardonic; but the cameras will do the great favor of transmitting it…after first futzing around with some fuzziness because, you got it, they’re ghosts. According to a release from MLB, “the identity of the Ghosts runner will be determined by a special algorithm developed in accordance with the personality of the player who has doubled to lead off an inning (or reached second via a two-base fielding error or any defensive miscue that allows the batter to reach second base before the second batter of the inning steps into the batter’s box to begin the next plate appearance) and how well it meshes with the uproarious cast of Ghosts, which airs on CBS Thursday night at nine and streams the next day on Paramount+.”
That, by the way, is how all announcers employed by Major League Baseball rights holders, local and national, are required to explain the rule in their own broadcasts. So far, our beloved Gare has resisted, and I didn’t hear if Wayne Randazzo succumbed this week in St. Lucie, but watching some other teams’ Spring games on MLBN, I’ve heard the whole mouthful. It should come with mouthwash.
So Lindor won’t be on second. Despite doubling. Despite being Lindor. Despite being under contract to the Mets through 2031. The runner (they don’t pay me to call it “the Ghosts runner” at every turn) could be Trevor or Flower or Alberta or Hetty or Thorfinn or Sasappis or Captain Isaac Higgintoot or Pete. Not Pete Alonso, but Pete Martino — no relation to SNY reporter Andy Martino, as far as I know (Andy thinks this change is “just the shot in the arm baseball needs,” by the way; big surprise). Pete, like the aforementioned, is a character on Ghosts. They are collectively the Ghosts in the show title, the Ghosts who live with Sam and Jay. This is information you didn’t think you’d need to know to follow the Mets this season, but here we are.
 Pete, at least, represents the spirit of a Mets fan. Each of the Ghosts has a goofy backstory that works in the context of their sitcom yet has nothing to do with baseball. True, bespectacled Pete was a Mets fan during his pre-Ghosts lifetime, but that doesn’t tell us how well he’ll pick up signs from third base coach Joey Cora (also, he has an arrow lodged in and sticking out his neck). They will be in character and they will appear in costume rather than the uniform of which ever team on whose behalf they spookily materialize. It’s unclear as to whether their names will show up in the official box scores since they’re, well, Ghosts, but the decision to insert them as Ghosts runners is not subject to replay or umpire review.
Even if the given Ghosts have blazing speed — who doubts every one of them will run harder for home than Robinson Cano does to first on a ground ball to second? — there’s no guarantee they’ll score. As you try to wrap your head around this alteration to the tattered remains of what used to be our National Pastime, you might reason there’s never any guarantee that any runner will score from second. Which is fine, except if Captain Isaac Higgintoot (he’s the Ghost who died in the Revolutionary War) doesn’t score, then Lindor in this case or whoever doubled to lead off an inning has to leave the game.
Manfred’s explanation, via MLB’s release:
“Our research indicates ‘desirables’ and other youthful potential baseball-adjacent consumers who are engaged by fantasy, E-Sports and virtual activities will be intrigued by the exclusive opportunity to watch a runner suddenly ‘disappear’ from view, especially when it streams on a platform that requires an additional fee. Thus, any player who reaches second on a fair hit or error to lead off an inning must ‘vanish’ and be replaced by one of the Ghosts, who viewers of all demographics are welcome to watch pull hilarious hijinks every Thursday night at nine on CBS, streaming the next day on Paramount+. The Ghosts runners may have already lost the fight for their own lives, but now they, in conjunction with the team lineups that will attempt to ‘drive them in,’ can battle to keep some of the biggest stars the MLB has to offer in these exclusively streamed games. Truly, this is content in the best sense of the word.”
Gotta love how Manfred is calling his own sport “the MLB” now. And why does he put a baseball term like “drive them in” in quotes? I’m getting the sneaking suspicion Rob Manfred neither likes nor knows that which he commissioners.
Anyway, if the Ghosts runner scores, the hitter stays in the game and goes back to his position for the next half-inning (and is safe from “vanishment banishment” for the rest of the game), but not before McIver, Ambudkar and Vasgersian exclaim, “That’s bed…and breakfast!” Sam and Jay run a B&B on the show, in case you haven’t tuned in. Lest you think the would-be cutesy catchphrase is incidental, think again. Because they’re starting the games so late, Paramount+ and MLB (no the, “Commissioner”) are doing a tie-in with Airbnb. “Getting tired? Next time, reserve more than a room…” Something like that. Aaron Judge and Aaron Boone are supposed to be in the first commercial as “the sharin’ Aarons,” sharing the short-term rental. No doubt that one will run every half-inning of every Mets game Paramount+ hijacks.
Do you believe this nonsense? Do you believe the Players Association agreed to this? The universal designated hitter was bad enough. The extra-inning rule was bad enough. But implementing the Ghosts runner is beyond comprehension. Granted, it’s the reason rosters have been expanded to 28 for the first month of the season, ostensibly in order to give managers more Thursday night flexibility and get used to the vanishing act where leadoff baserunners disappear if their streaming replacements don’t score (Luis Guillorme is advised to stay ready to go in on defense at multiple positions), and that translates to 60 extra temporary jobs and perhaps unlocks a surfeit of service time for the union’s membership, but Tony Clark and whoever else negotiated this wrinkle really should have ironed it out. I already know the owners don’t care. I already know Manfred will allow anything for a buck. I guess the players, already willing to wear advertising on their uniforms (including the Peacock logo suggestively below their belt buckles in those Sunday morning games), aren’t going to make a fuss at this point.
We’re six days from the beginning of the season, but what difference does it make what day it is when Major League Baseball doesn’t give its actual fans a ghost of a chance?
by Greg Prince on 30 March 2022 11:50 am Where do you go after you’ve traded Amos Otis for Joe Foy? Not to the heights of the hot corner, we learned in 1970. As we pick up the thread of our OF-3B/3B-OF series, we shake off the Mets’ decision to swap a promising outfielder who didn’t appear promising at third for a third baseman who didn’t have much left at third, and attempt to reset.
The Mets, as we learned in the first part of this series, practically came into this world eyeing the outfield to solve their genetic third base shortfall. By the end of the second part of this series, we saw that they continued to devote serious consideration to the concept as the 1960s wore on — before entering the ’70s with a bona fide third baseman in tow who didn’t work out. That was Foy, traded to New York for Otis. Otis, as we’ve explored, wasn’t a third baseman, but was a very good player. He was also not a Met when the full discovery regarding his talents was made.
Oh well, said the Mets, back to the drawing board. Having detoured in the third part of this series to the intriguing world of catchers who got caught in the web of OF-3B/3B-OF, we shall return to our drawing board and watch where the quest to spark third base joy after Joe Foy takes the Mets. By 1975, something tells us they’ll be attempting to scale the heights with an uncommonly tall, particularly powerful third-sacker. Or, more specifically, a first baseman-outfielder who will play third base for them.
***Though 1970 was the year it didn’t work out with a veteran 3B, the Mets in 1971 were content to work the same gimmick with a different veteran 3B. Out went Foy, in came Bob Aspromonte. Aspromonte’s “hey, I know something about him” fact is he was the last Brooklyn Dodger to play in the major leagues. The boys one associates with The Boys of Summer were all retired by the 1970s. Even the fellas one doesn’t instantly associate with the legendary squad that left Kings County behind because their biggest moments awaited them in L.A. — your Koufax, your Drysdale, their catcher Roseboro — were done. Aspromonte outlasted them all. The borough native’s Flatbush experience was a single at-bat as an 18-year-old in a 17-2 blowout of the Cardinals in September 1956, but it counted. “My knees were shaking,” he’d recall, but Aspromonte appears in the very same box score as Pee Wee Reese, Duke Snider, Jackie Robinson, Roy Campanella and his future manager Gil Hodges, all putting in just another day of work en route to the Hall of Fame. “Gil took me under his wing in the early days when it was tough,” Bob remembered. “You really didn’t belong, but you had to be there.” Fifteen years later, at the tail end of a solid career for the Dodgers, Colt .45s/Astros and Braves, the Lafayette High School graduate came home again, or close to it.
Returning to pretty close to where it all started had been on Aspromonte’s mind for a while. When the deal that sent Ron Herbel to Atlanta to get Bob went down, Newsday’s Tim Moriarty recalled Aspro, then an Astro, pestering some reporters in the Mets’ traveling party around the batting cage in Houston, “When are the Mets going to make that trade and bring me back to New York?” When it finally happened, his manager in Atlanta, Lum Harris, sent him on his way with what amounted to a half-throated endorsement. “Sure he can play,” Harris said of the 32-year-old who’d batted .213 in 1970. “The reason we can let him go is we have Clete Boyer at third base,” which, in 1970 fielding terms, was like saying you had Nolan Arenado at third base. “The Mets don’t have a Clete Boyer at third base, do they?”
No, the Mets didn’t even have Joe Foy at third base anymore, having let him go to the Senators in the Rule 5 draft. They did, as they had since the suddenly distant but eternally golden year of 1969, have Wayne Garrett, but Garrett was scheduled to serve out his National Guard commitment for more than half of the 1971 season. Like the Washington Senators, that’s something that doesn’t enter a lot of contemporary baseball stories these days.
“When one thinks of Sandy Koufax,” Bill Travers wrote in the Daily News on Christmas Eve 1970 in a lament for Lafayette’s athletics department’s budgetary woes, “he thinks of one of the greatest pitchers in history. When one thinks of Bob Aspromonte, he thinks of the new Met third baseman who might cure their hot corner ills.” The shared alma mater of the two old Dodgers (and Fred Wilpon) would eventually get its baseball program back on sound financial footing, as evidenced by the development of future Met closer John Franco. And Koufax would forever be Koufax in every pitching conversation.
Few think of Bob Aspromonte as having cured the Mets’ hot corner ills. After one underwhelming season of Aspro (.225/.285/.301), the Mets moved on. Bob himself retired, ensuring the Brooklyn Dodger presence on active MLB rosters was history. Garrett, having done his Guard stint, was still around, as were a couple of young infielders who’d reported for duty at both third and in the outfield: former overall No. 1 draft choice Tim Foli and the über-useful Teddy Martinez. But whatever awaited on their respective horizons, none flashed the power a team wishes from its third baseman. Among them, in 682 plate appearances, the trio combined for two home runs in 1971 — or four fewer than Clete Boyer hit in 30 games for the Braves.
***The Mets instead replaced a veteran named Bob at third base with a veteran named Jim at third base. Except veteran Jim wasn’t really a third baseman or, for that matter, an outfielder. And not really a power hitter, either, having topped 20 homers just once since coming to the majors in 1961. This is where we meet Jim Fregosi, who the Mets acquired from California for that Ryan kid.
Actually, it was that Ryan kid plus three others, as if GM Bob Scheffing wanted to tell the Otis-for-Foy trade, “Hold my beer.”
We know about Nolan Ryan blossoming into the greatest strikeout pitcher of all time about five seconds after leaving the Mets. We know that one of the three others dispatched to the Angels to get Fregosi, outfielder Leroy Stanton, went on to a more than respectable career in the American League. We know Jim Fregosi, the American League’s long-running All-Star shortstop, wasn’t the answer at third base for the Mets during what became an ill-fated Shea stopover of less than two years when:
• he broke a thumb in his first Spring Training;
• he ranked by latter-day metrics as the least valuable defensive third baseman in the National League of his day;
• and he hit fewer home runs in his entire Met tenure than Stanton did in his first year as an Angel.
One could have hoped for the best out of Fregosi, turning 30 and coming off an injury-affected season in Anaheim, but one could look at all that was being given up and wondered what the hell? If you had to trade Ryan and all his potential on the eve of his age-25 season, might you not find a surer thing than an aching shortstop who’d have to learn a new position in a new league? And would you have to throw in three other players to make it happen? Steve Jacobson of Newsday predicted the day after the trade was made, “Unless Fregosi has a very good year, it won’t seem like a fair exchange,” which might explain why Steve Jacobson endured as a top-flight baseball writer into the next century.
 One could have hoped for the best even as one wondered what the hell? Of all the things we know about Ryan-for-Fregosi, are we aware that on June 5, 1973, versus the Reds in Cincinnati, Fregosi took a turn in left field for the Mets? If we didn’t, we do now. Cleon Jones was injured and trying anything that might work topped Yogi Berra’s agenda. Fregosi, carrying a .194 average through the games of June 4, had played left seven times for the Angels, all in 1971, his eleventh season in the majors. It was seven times more than he’d played third base prior to coming to the Mets in 1972.
Fregosi-to-left wasn’t a disaster, which is one of the few contexts for which “it wasn’t a disaster” fits anything related to trading Nolan Ryan for Jim Fregosi. The man started, drove in a run, played into the tenth, and was removed for defense once the Mets took a 5-2 lead (which Tug McGraw and Phil Hennigan proceeded to blow). No balls were hit to him, thus he made no catches, but committed no errors. Not convinced of Jim’s utility, Berra never deployed Fregosi in the outfield again, perhaps because with Bud Harrelson also out hurt, Yogi needed Fregosi to reacquaint himself with shortstop. A month or so later, as neither Fregosi’s presence nor performance still wasn’t letting anyone forget the Nolan Ryan deal, the Mets sold the former star’s contract to Texas…the same franchise for which Nolan Ryan would be pitching twenty years later…when Jim Fregosi was managing the Phillies to the World Series. (Win-win for everybody except the Mets.)
***Garrett, meanwhile, was about to do something the Mets’ front office hadn’t envisioned while it was off collecting and eventually discarding Foy, Aspromonte and Fregosi. He established himself as the everyday third baseman the Mets always needed. Wayne was there all along and now, down the unlikely stretch of 1973, the Mets noticed. From the late-August night the Mets climbed out of the NL East cellar to the October afternoon they clinched their second division title, Garrett slashed .320/.405/.590 and proved himself one of the main reasons the club rushed from worst to first in just over a month’s time. In recognition of his abilities, the Mets left third base alone entering 1974. It was Garrett’s to have; to hold; and, alas, to lose.
Across a full season, Wayne saw his batting average sink more than thirty points, his power numbers regress and his defense, which was more than decent (fourth in the NL in fielding percentage at third, for what that’s worth), not make the case for his continued incumbency. “Let Wayne Garrett play every day and he’ll hit .230,” Fregosi had ruefully predicted when he himself was under fire in New York, overestimating the redhead’s average by six points. Almost as soon as ’74 ended, the Mets made another move for a veteran. Unlike Foy, he knew the National League. Unlike Fregosi, he knew third base. Like Aspromonte, he knew the neighborhood.
It was Brooklyn’s own Joe Torre, forever rumored to be en route in one big trade or another. The haul the Mets sent to St. Louis on October 13, 1974, to secure him at last wasn’t really that big — veteran swingman Ray Sadecki and perennial pitching prospect Tommy Joe Moore — but maybe his bat could be. “Right now, I picture Torre for third base,” Berra said, as if staring straight through Garrett. “He has a couple of good years left.” Torre, as a Brave and a Cardinal in a career that dated back to 1960, had socked 240 homers and driven in 1,110 runs. As recently as 1971, while playing third base for the Cards, he hit .363 and was voted the National League MVP. He didn’t even wait for Spring Training to start playing for Mets. The ballclub was making a goodwill tour of Japan in the autumn the Mets got him, so he went along, put on the uniform and got the folks back home excited ahead of 1975.
One fellow may have been less than enthused. “I’m just going to be a utilityman, I guess,” Garrett, entering his seventh season as a Met, said in Spring Training after an offseason when he saw 1969 teammates Ken Boswell, Duffy Dyer and Tug McGraw get traded. Longevity at Shea was no guarantee of a future.
The thrill of veteran Joe Torre at third base — a position he’d eased away from as he transitioned to first his last couple of years as a Redbird — didn’t last long. Turning 35 in ’75, Joe may not have been the most mobile of third sackers. The pop that once produced 36 homers in a season (mostly as a catcher) fizzled. Torre went deep only six times in his first season as a Met, only once more than Fregosi had in ’72. The overriding memory of Torre as a player at Shea became the game when Felix Millan singled four times, only to find himself forced at second four times because Joe Torre, batting directly behind him, grounded into four consecutive double plays. It set a record.
As 1975, like Torre, wore down, we began to see Garrett, still only 27, rise anew and take starts by the bunch at third; his batting average rose to a career-best .266, as he homered exactly as much as Torre and drove in only one run fewer. We began to see the latest infield phenom from Tidewater, Roy Staiger, who led the International League in RBIs, get a shot. And, most tantalizingly, we began to wonder if something too good to be true could enter the realm of the possible. Might it be that the player who had solved the most glaring offensive void that had plagued the franchise almost since its beginning would also be the player to solve the most glaring defensive void that had plagued the franchise absolutely from its beginning?
The answer was embodied within six feet and six inches of intermittent thunder that went by the name of Dave Kingman.
***Dave Kingman loomed as a revelation when the Mets sent a brimming basket of cash to Horace Stoneham in San Francisco in order to obtain Kingman’s services. Kingman, tagged with the “sensitive” label as a Giant, was a bona fide home run threat — which was something no Met had approached being since Frank Thomas swatted 34 in 1962 — and he consistently hit some of the longest home runs anybody had ever seen, even if he was an inconsistent hitter in general. The Mets saw the breathtaking aspect of his game for themselves. In August of his rookie year, 1971, Kingman dinged both the ERA of Jerry Koosman and the roof of a bus parked behind the visitors’ bullpen in left. The Mets won the game and, as the victors, they later got to write the history. In the 1975 yearbook, on the page their new acquisition shared with reliever Jerry Cram, the Mets called that home run “an estimated 500-foot Shea shot”.
 Dave Kingman, preparing to play his best position. When that kind of power can be at your disposal and there’s an array of body shops nearby, why wouldn’t you grab yourself some Dave Kingman if all it takes is 150-grand and tolerance for his perceived shortcomings? When they purchased his contract from San Fran early in Spring Training, the Mets appeared set at all the positions 26-year-old Kingman played, having made a passel of offseason moves after trading for Torre, but a big bat was a big bat, even if it had struck out 422 times in 409 big league games. Dave’s gargantuan wood left mouths agape when it took Catfish Hunter deep into what might as well have been the Everglades in one game televised back to New York from Fort Lauderdale. “I’ve never seen one hit further,” swore Mickey Mantle, who hit more than a few pretty far. So, yeah, that stick of Dave’s would stick somewhere.
“If Yogi Berra’s cast were working in the American League,” one wire story mused in late March, “Dave Kingman would be a perfect designated hitter. But the NL doesn’t have the DH, so Kingman has to bring his baseball glove to the ballpark along with his bat. That’s trouble.” Pirate manager Danny Murtaugh’s measured praise was “Kingman has power, he runs and he throws superbly, and that’s what you look for in superstars. Now he’s got to learn to play ball,” a.k.a. defense. Dick Young chimed in, “He is an exciting outfielder, lending the thrill of uncertainty to the pursuit of a fly ball every so often.” His former San Francisco teammate, Mets coach Willie Mays, was more understanding: “He’s happy and that’s the main thing because everything will come then. He’ll hit and he’s willing to play any place. His best position is first, but I told him wait and see” for, among other things, how well Mays might tutor him in the outfield.
Ah, the good old days, when a glove, too, had to find a place to play.
***Yogi brought his team to Shea and let Kingman feel his way on the field. Early on, with Rusty Staub nursing an injury, Dave Kingman took a couple of turns in right and produced two home runs, winning over the crowd as a whole (“I never played anywhere where the fans are so enthusiastic”) and, noticeably, their spiritual leader. Sign Man Karl Ehrhardt brandished a SUPER WHIIFF! placard when Dave struck out, but switched to KONG! in approval of his first Met swat. Rusty soon returned to the lineup and Dave shifted to left, since 1968 the province of Cleon Jones but temporarily vacant while Cleon dealt with his own knee problems. Dave put his third through eighth homers into orbit as the starting left fielder, the position he claimed as his own more days than not.
By June, Sky King — our announcers informed us that if we had to call the 6’ 6” Kingman by nickname, he preferred Sky King to Kong — was occasionally whiling away the gloved portions of his innings at first base, spelling Ed Kranepool and John Milner. Two of the swings he took during that interlude connected for home runs nine and ten. Shea’s air traffic, however, wasn’t exactly drowned out by the cacophony from Sky King’s connections. As June drew to a close, RF-LF-1B Dave Kingman had totaled a respectable eleven homers. It was a pretty good pace Metwise, considering no Met had hit as many as 25 home runs since 1969, but a Mets fan really had to squint to not notice his .219 batting average nor the 47 strikeouts that had piled up.
Come July, there was no missing what Dave Kingman was doing, no matter that some of it was missing the ball altogether at the plate or in the field, for when he did make contact, it was buses beware. Planes, too.
A home run on July 4.
A home run on July 5.
A home run on July 7.
A home run on July 8.
After the All-Star break, a home run on July 17.
A pair of home runs on July 20 — a three-run job to catapult the Mets back into a game they trailed by six and a two-run bomb that sealed a 10-9 comeback win.
Then some more home runs for the mostly left fielder and intermittent first baseman until Kingman finished July with 13 for the month (the Month the National League named him its Player of) and 24 on the season. A year that increasingly couldn’t get out of its own way at Shea — Jones was disgracefully released and Berra was about to get fired — at least contained a potential highlight four at-bats per game. Dave’s batting average soared to .260, which was nice, if not the statistic upon which you dwelled when balls were leaving the yard. His strikeout sum was up to 84, but that we accepted as the cost of doing Sky King business.
***As Dave brought his power to bear, one couldn’t help but be curious about one element of Kingman’s biography. We’d seen him in left and right. We’d seen him at first. What about third? Wasn’t that on his San Francisco résumé? Indeed, between 1972 and 1974, Sky played 140 games at third and hit 36 homers as the Giants’ third baseman, including one off Ray Sadecki at Shea in ’73. He was the Opening Day third baseman at Candlestick the year before he came to the Mets. Yet after April, he rarely set foot near third in ’74, unless it was on his trot from second to home.
Yogi was asked when the Mets purchased Kingman’s contract in Spring Training whether the position the Mets could never solve was a feasible fit now that they were about to harness the thump they’d sorely lacked. “What I saw of him at third base, I don’t like,” Yogi grumbled. A little later in Florida, the skipper reiterated, “He had 26 errors in 20 games at third base,” not quite nailing Kingman’s 1974 defensive record — it was 12 errors in 21 games — but the crux was understood. “First base I don’t like him too much, either.”
What Berra preferred, though, was no longer salient at Shea once he was dismissed in early August. By that same month there was another factor to consider: Mike Vail, hot-hitting rookie outfielder. Vail, who’d led the IL in batting (.342) took over in left, with he and Staub trusted to flank Del Unser. With Vail’s National League rookie record 23-game hitting streak about to unfurl, it appeared Mike would never be dislodged. Rusty around in right was having a dynamite season, heading for 105 RBIs, while Unser stuck close to .300 and provided the best center field defense Shea had seen since Tommie Agee. The outfield was occupied.
At one corner of the infield, Milner was having a horrible, injury-wracked year that would see his batting average plummet beneath .200 and his home runs dwindle to single-digits. Kranepool, despite a renaissance campaign (batting .318 as a starter) found himself reassigned to his customary pinch-hitting duty as the Mets forged a wishful August push toward their third division title. Kingman was suddenly the full-time first baseman — while Torre was less and less the full-time third baseman. Familiar default resort Garrett received some reps at third, as trusty Red inevitably did. Prospect Staiger was given a whirl, too, but young Roy must have forgotten to pack his lumber upon leaving Virginia (he batted .158 after his callup).
Come the middle of September, interim manager Roy McMillan resisted lingering possibility no longer. Dave Kingman, he of the 44 errors in 140 career games at third base, would play third base. At the time he was pointed to the left side of the infield, Dave was sitting on 34 home runs, having knotted Thomas’s previously unassailable 1962 mark. In his fourth game as the Mets starting third baseman, Kingman dislodged Thomas from the record books, an OF-3B taking over for the Original OF-3B…except by the time Kingman came through with No. 35, which happily happened to be the bottom of the ninth for a walkoff win, McMillan had shuffled his personnel and Dave was technically playing first. Sky had one more 1975 homer in him. That Kingman dinger, a solo shot on September 26, unquestionably came as a third baseman. It also came the half-inning after Dave made an error that led to an unearned run that proved the difference in a 4-3 loss. In all, Kingman tried his glove at third in a dozen games and committed three errors…or three times as many home runs as he hit as the Mets’ third baseman.
So maybe an outfielder whose least worst position was first base wasn’t the answer at third, but he did hit 36 home runs, and that pretty much overshadowed all defensive shortcomings, not to mention his 153 strikeouts (making a prophet of Karl Ehrhardt) and .231 average. Sky King was content in Queens. “I’m very happy,” he said late in his first Met season. “I always wondered would happen if I was given the chance to play regularly. I feel I’ve improved in a number of areas because I’ve been given that chance.”
 He tried. When the 1976 yearbook came out, three-quarters of Kingman’s bio and stat page, graphically speaking, was devoted to Kingman’s defense. There were pictures of him — with scraps of box scores serving as additional evidence — playing some first, some left and some third. “VERSATILITY,” the caption gushed. “Dave Kingman moves glove around in addition to his bat.” The snapshot of Dave at third shows a ball getting by him. Not mentioned in any of the agate type: detailed fielding statistics.
After 1975, Dave Kingman would hit 118 more home runs for the New York Mets…and never play third base for the New York Mets again.
A multiplayer pileup is about to transpire at that ever blazing hot corner, encompassing Met outfielders, Met third basemen and, yes, Met catchers. The next article in our series, endeavoring to sort out who played what and who didn’t want to play where, is coming soon.
THE METS OF-3B/3B-OF CLUB
That ’70s Show Gets Underway (1970-1975)
15. Tim Foli
Mets 3B Debut: September 12, 1970
Mets CF Debut: September 7, 1971
16. Teddy Martinez
Mets 3B Debut: July 6, 1971
Mets LF Debut: September 12, 1971
17. Jerry Grote
Mets 3B Debut: August 3, 1966
Mets RF Debut: July 12, 1972
18. Jim Fregosi
Mets 3B Debut: April 15, 1972
Mets LF Debut: June 5, 1973
19. Ken Boswell
Mets 3B Debut: September 18, 1967
Mets RF Debut: August 19, 1974
20. Dave Kingman
Mets RF Debut: April 8, 1975
Mets 3B Debut: September 15, 1975
Mets who’ve played both at third base and in the outfield represent one of my favorite things. As the new season approaches, Jeff Hysen and I swap a few others we love about baseball at National League Town. Listen here or on your podcast platform of choice.
by Greg Prince on 28 March 2022 10:21 am It got a little lost during Sunday night’s Academy Awards telecast, coming as it did after celebrity Mets fan Chris Rock was so rudely interrupted, but the Oscars aired their annual tribute (such as it was) to those no longer with us, which means, come the Monday morning after, we do the same. Except in our case, we mean it in the baseball transactional sense.
Here, then, for the sixteenth consecutive Spring, is our heartfully produced, hopefully inclusive montage saluting the Mets who have left us — the organization, not this earth — in the past year. At press time, we still don’t know where each of these now former Mets will wind up, but we do know that not long ago, whether for an evening or an era, they definitely Metsed among us.
We will remember you, albeit some more than others.
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LUIS E. ROJAS
Manager
July 24, 2020 – October 3, 2021
I’d suggest Luis Rojas do whatever a manager can do with a compromised coaching staff and drill into his lads a few things about how to compete in every baseball game they play and how to win a bunch more than they have. At the very least, Luis, maybe let Lugo get up to set down more batters when he’s proving himself unhittable.
—August 26, 2020
(Relieved of duties, 10/4/2021; named Yankees third base coach, 11/15/2021)
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AKEEM MAURICE BOSTICK
Relief Pitcher
July 29, 2021
For the silver lining-lovers out there, Miguel Castro continued on his journey back to sharpness with a scoreless sixth; Aaron Loup threw an ale of an eighth; and, making his major league debut, righty Akeem Bostick kept the Braves from inflicting superfluous ninth-inning damage. My scouting report on Akeem Bostick consisted of me learning after I got home from Wednesday night’s game that Akeem Bostick had been situated in the bullpen during Wednesday night’s game, having replaced Jerad Eickhoff on the active roster. Previous Mets to have replaced Jerad Eickhoff on the active roster in 2021 were Thomas Szapucki and Robert Stock. Have you seen Szapucki or Stock lately? Hopefully Bostick won’t be disappeared to wherever it is pitchers who dare to occupy the flip side of Eickhoff’s DFAs. wind up. He was obviously a happy young man when he tweeted, postgame, “I can FINALLY say ‘I’M A BIG LEAGUER!’” Akeem should indeed shout his newly earned status to the heavens. It’s a very special designation to have earned, even among Mets, a team that has habitually enlisted Jerad Eickhoff to start baseball games.
—July 29, 2021
(Free agent, 11/7/2021; signed with Kansas City Monarchs (American Association), 1/24/2022)
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TREVOR SEAN HILDENBERGER
Relief Pitcher
April 17, 2021 – April 21, 2021
[N]ew export Trevor Hildenberger looked pretty good when he arrived and now he’s departed, because middle relievers.
—April 23, 2021
(Selected off waivers by Giants, 5/18/2021)
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DANIEL JAMES ZAMORA
Relief Pitcher
August 17, 2018 – September 29, 2019
We knew Daniel Zamora, called up from Binghamton to replace DL’d Bobby Wahl, was our 54th Met of 2018. As with the 24 runs, this was big-time record-setting, or at least record-tying. The answer to the question some of us have been asking ourselves since 1967 — “Met 54, where are you?” — was finally answered. Knowing this milestone had been touched made us authorities on Daniel Zamora compared to not only Phillies fans but Mets fans in our section, which is understandable. There must have been a flock of Temple Owls in the house because Zamora was greeted primarily with “who? who?” It’s a common refrain at Mets games everywhere these days.
—August 18, 2018
(Selected off waivers by Mariners, 5/22/2021)
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WILFREDO JOSE TOVAR
Infielder
September 22, 2013 – September 28, 2014
May 21, 2021 – May 29, 2021
Games remain scheduled whether or not you come prepared with an optimal assortment of players. It’s not the fault of the journeymen who are populating the roster currently that they were nobody’s first or second choice to be “the Mets” of the moment. They arrived in the organization as depth. They hoped they’d avoid alternate sites and get a call individually, but they didn’t expect to ascend to the majors en masse. I doubt they rallied one another in St. Lucie or Syracuse or wherever they crossed paths and said, “Wouldn’t it be great if all of us among the overlooked, undernoticed and generally dismissed got our chance together?” But they have. Sometimes, as on Friday, it works. Sometimes, as on Saturday, it almost works. Sometimes it’s Sunday, when Johneshwy Fargas doubles, Wilfredo Tovar singles him in and Yennsy Diaz looks good for an inning…and that’s it, basically.
—May 23, 2021
(Free agent, 10/4/2021; currently unsigned)
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FRANKLYN KILOME
Relief Pitcher
August 1, 2020 – September 18, 2020
Franklyn Kilome got twelve batters out in his one outing, yet was optioned to Elba, but that transaction was primarily a function of churn. Go four innings as a reliever one night and you can’t be used for a couple of days, so go ice your arm by the beach, kid. Kilome might be back by Wednesday in time to take what had been Wacha’s turn, which comes after that of Rick Porcello.
—August 9, 2020
(Free agent, 11/7/2021; currently unsigned)
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JAKE WILLIAM HAGER
Utilityman
May 15, 2021 – May 21, 2021
It was the first major league at-bat of Hager’s ten-year professional career and the first time any Met player wore 86, a pair of digits — like the city of St. Petersburg itself — that contains some Amazin’ championship cachet. New No. 86 Jake Hager finally getting this kind of chance was a reason to stay tuned, a reason to remain engaged, a reason to feel good. Hager proceeded to fly out, thus ending the positive evocation portion of our program.
—May 15, 2021
(Selected off waivers by Brewers, 5/25/2021)
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JACOB ANDREW BARNES
Relief Pitcher
April 7, 2021 – June 13, 2021
[…] Jacob Barnes relieved Peterson and gave up a three-run homer on his first pitch delivered as a Met, a badge of insta-futility not donned since John Candelaria’s debut as a Plan H or I starter in the cursed ’87 season. Barnes also settled down, though by now the barn was in flames and the horses weren’t even bothering to flee but insouciantly hanging around to light cigarettes from the embers.
—April 7, 2021
(Traded to Blue Jays, 6/19/2021)
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MASON JORDAN WILLIAMS
Outfielder
May 31, 2021 – June 19, 2021
Defensive replacement Mason Williams defended against a last-gasp Cub rally with a diving grab that made his insertion an instance of brilliant managing by Luis Rojas. The win, our third consecutive, pushed the Mets to ten above .500 for the first time since the end of 2019 and kept us five ahead of the NL East pack. Very nice. And excruciatingly irrelevant versus the only thing anybody is really talking about the day after.
—June 17, 2021
(Free agent, 11/7/2021; currently unsigned)
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WILLIAM LANDIS “Billy” McKINNEY
Outfielder
May 27, 2021 – July 11, 2021
When Billy McKinney distributes his base hits as if from a variety pack — at least one among doubles, triples and homers before bothering with singles — Billy McKinney is my right fielder.
—June 7, 2021
(Traded to Dodgers, 7/21/2021)
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STEPHEN NICHOLAS TARPLEY
Relief Pitcher
April 24, 2021
Perhaps Tarpley should have remained on another plane of existence — he threw 14 pitches and got nobody out, and now sits in the Met record books with an ERA of infinity. Spooky!
—April 25, 2021
(Released, 7/16/2021; currently unsigned
UPDATE: Signed with Long Island Ducks (Atlantic League), 4/22/2022)
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RICHARD HEATH HEMBREE
Relief Pitcher
August 24, 2021 – October 2, 2021
Except there’s another game Wednesday night, and if the Mets win that (it’s possible), they’ll cut a half-game off the idle Braves’ lead. And if they somehow win Thursday night (it’s not over before it’s started), that’s another half-game, with Atlanta mysteriously on hiatus two days in a row. Now we’re 5½ out and the Braves’ schedule toughens, while ours lightens up, and Francisco didn’t look bad at the plate by any means, and Pete is hitting pretty consistently, and Brandon keeps getting on base, and Jeff was pretty good in the outfield in 2019, and nobody can blame the Heath Hembree-enhanced bullpen very much, and the more Carrasco pitches the more he’s bound to find his form, and isn’t Syndergaard about to begin a rehab assignment? It will be all over mathematically eventually and over beyond semantics soon enough. Until then, you never know and can’t help yourself from hoping accordingly. Even if you pretty much know it’s hopeless.
—August 25, 2021
(Free agent, 11/3/2021; signed with Pirates, 3/15/2022)
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DELLIN BETANCES
Relief Pitcher
July 25, 2020 – April 7, 2021
Entering the bottom of the eighth, the Mets were leading, 10-6. No pitchers needed to be pinch-hit for because the National League no longer exists in such a natural state, yet the Mets were on their fourth pitcher of the night, Dellin Betances. In brief, it didn’t go well, and it went on extra long because two replay reviews ensued, neither of them amounting to a reversal of declining Met fortunes and both of them combining to eventually push the game into to its eighth half-hour. Betances left with the Mets’ edge reduced to 10-8 and Braves occupying first and third.
—August 1, 2020
(Free agent, 11/3/2021; currently unsigned
UPDATE: Signed with Dodgers, 4/5/2022)
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CHANCE THOMAS LEO SISCO
Catcher
August 18, 2021 – September 3, 2021
And, for fun, McNeil doubled and Chance Sisco, a Triple-A name that hadn’t crept into our consciousness until the contingency backup catcher’s emergency backup was activated from the taxi squad, doubled on the first pitch he saw as a Met to make it 6-2. Ready to take a Chance again, indeed!
—August 19, 2021
(Free agent, 10/5/2021; signed with Mariners, 3/16/2022)
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RAYMOND THOMAS “Tommy” HUNTER
Relief Pitcher
May 7, 2021 – May 18, 2021
Meet this Met
Meet that Met
Every day we meet more Mets
There’s Tommy Hunter
And his first hit
There’s Khalil Lee
Who can field quite a bit
—May 19, 2021
(Traded to Rays, 7/23/2021)
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BRADLEY RICHARD “Brad” HAND
Relief Pitcher
September 4, 2021 – October 2, 2021
Hell, maybe the front office and its flawed parade of GM types knew what they were doing long enough to bring in the Villars, Pillars and Loups who have levitated the season just enough above sea level so that it hasn’t altogether drowned. Somebody in authority just signed off on bringing in Brad Hand. From a thumb to a Hand and nobody making a fist in a week’s time. That’s progress.
—September 3, 2021
(Free agent, 11/3/2021; signed with Phillies, 3/14/2022)
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JERAD JOSEPH EICKHOFF
Starting Pitcher
June 21, 2021 – July 27 , 2021
Jerad gets us nervous, but mostly because we just met him, we’re not confident we can spell him and we know he wouldn’t be here if we had somebody more obviously qualified to do what he does. He calmed us down eventually, but we definitely had the feeling he and we got lucky. He’s welcome to come back soon. It’s not like we won’t have room for him.
—June 22, 2021
(Free agent, 10/6/2021; signed with Pirates, 11/29/2021)
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FRANK ANTHONY BANDA
Relief Pitcher
July 19, 2021 – July 30, 2021
The Mets cashed in their ghost runner, but with Trevor May and Jeurys Familia and Aaron Loup all gassed, they handed the ball to the briefly aforementioned Banda. To call Banda unassuming would be putting it mildly — he looks like a fan who won a Closer for a Day! contest.
—July 20, 2021
(Selected off waivers by Pirates, 8/2/2021)
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ROBERT ANTHONY STOCK
Starting Pitcher
July 7, 2021 – July 20, 2021
The Mets’ track record of winning first games and not winning second games hung heavy in the air, just like the air hung heavy in the air. Succeeding deGrom as starting pitcher was Robert Stock, the 1,141st Met ever and the first to wear 89. “Just give me whatever the temperature is at first pitch,” Stock presumably requested of clubhouse manager Kevin Kierst.
—July 8, 2021
(Free agent, 10/29/2021; signed with Doosan Bears (KBO League), 1/4/2022)
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NICHOLAS PAUL “Nick” TROPEANO
Relief Pitcher
July 9, 2021
Stock started because, what, ya got somebody else handy? Shallow rotation depth is the soft underbelly of the first-place Mets (and I say that as one who knows from having a soft underbelly). It was either the guy the Cubs decided didn’t fit their needs anymore, or Nick Tropeano — a.k.a. Nicky the Trope; a.k.a. The 27th Man; a.k.a Guy Who Gets to Dress but Never Gets to Pitch.
—July 8, 2021
(Free agent, 8/4/2021; signed with Dodgers, 8/6/2021)
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GEOFFREY THOMAS “Geoff” HARTLIEB
Relief Pitcher
July 20, 2021 – August 15, 2021
Geoff Hartlieb being activated as the extra player for a shortened game whose start was delayed by rain when it wasn’t raining before getting rained out and then being optioned before the next day’s pair of shortened games began may go down as the quintessential 2021 Mets transaction.
—August 13, 2021
(Selected off waivers by Red Sox, 9/4/2021)
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CAMERON KEITH MAYBIN
Outfielder
May 19, 2021 – May 29, 2021
Poor Cameron Maybin set a new club mark for futility to begin a Mets career, going 0 for 27 and so topping (or perhaps the term is limbo’ing under) Charley Smith’s 0-for-26 start in 1964, but then tapped a little swinging bunt up the third-base line to get on base, an accomplishment greeted with rapturous applause from the stands and a flurry of jazz hands from his dugout. Maybin’s smile was a highlight in its own right, starting off low-watt sheepish and then brightening to big and genuine.
—May 30, 2021
(Free agent, 10/4/2021; retired, 1/3/2022)
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COREY EDWARD OSWALT
Pitcher
April 25, 2018 – July 4, 2021
The Mets last week lost a game started by Steven Matz, 25-4. Five days later, because Matz was injured, they started Corey Oswalt in his place. […] Oswalt pitched much better than Matz did last Tuesday. Oswalt also pitches much better than Jason Vargas any day of the week. Yet Oswalt is considered to start only when somebody is injured. Despite Oswalt pitching well, the Mets lost, 5-4. That looks much better than 25-4, but it is still a loss. I wouldn’t discourage Oswalt from continuing to pitch well, nor the Mets from keeping their margins of defeat reasonable, but the real key to success for the team is not losing. This is a fundamental of baseball of which the Mets are likely aware, but given how infrequently they win, posting an occasional reminder seems necessary.
—August 6, 2018
(Free agent, 10/19/2021; signed with Giants, 1/12/2022)
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REINALDO ALBERT ALMORA, Jr.
Outfielder
April 6, 2021 – September 14, 2021
J.D. was not alone in doing great things that involved the Citi Field fence. […] Albert Almora, Jr. took off toward it like Endy Chavez and slammed his body à la Mike Baxter into it, robbing Kyle Schwarber with a flair that was all Almora. Albert with the championship pedigree walked away in one piece unlike Mike from Bayside and will dress for a game again very soon, which unfortunately Endy didn’t following the Endy Catch. Chavez’s team had reached its end when he made his grab in 2006. Almora’s team is just getting going.
—April 26, 2021
(Free agent, 10/6/2021; signed with Reds, 3/20/2022)
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JOSE FRANCISCO PERAZA
Infielder
May 2, 2021 – October 3, 2021
Jose Peraza leaves a team in Cincinnati, detours through Boston, and then without warning arrives in New York. How long does it take Jose Peraza’s second home run of the year to depart Citi Field?
—May 27, 2021
(Free agent, 10/29/2021; signed with Yankees, 11/29/2021)
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RICHARD JOSEPH “Rich” HILL
Starting Pitcher
July 25, 2021 – September 30, 2021
Hill bunted and sacrificed McCann to second, just as NL hurlers have been asked to do for all but one of the past 145 years, or since Rich Hill was a lad. He had done his pitcherly duty, and I leapt to my feet to applaud. Then, armed with a 6-3 lead, he went out to work the fifth, throw his “69 MPH UNKNOWN” (by the scoreboard’s reckoning) and qualify for the decision. He preserved that lead — his lead — and left as the pitcher of record on the winning side. I stood and applauded again. Like autumn’s chill, a generosity of spirit pervaded the air.
—October 1, 2021
(Free agent, 11/3/2021; signed with Red Sox, 12/1/2021)
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BRANDON SHANE DRURY
Utilityman
May 21, 2021 – August 31, 2021
[…] Luis Cessa gave up a walkoff single to Brandon Drury, and the everybody’s-the-hero Mets defeated the Reds, 5-4. Mets fans, I can report with accuracy, went nuts with appreciation. It didn’t appear we were “supposed” to win, but what was Brandon Drury supposed to do other than record yet another humongous hit? After all, Drury’s OPS in July was infinity. I could look up the real number, but I’m a Mets fan. I know pretty incredible statistics off the top of my head.
—August 1, 2021
(Free agent, 10/14/2021; signed with Reds, 3/21/2022)
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EDNEL JAVIER “Javy” BAEZ
Second Baseman
July 31, 2021 – October 1, 2021
We might not remember how Baez helped the Mets in his first ten games in our colors because when he wasn’t sparking us toward a couple of victories, he was weighing us down badly (.171/.216/.343) as we commenced losing chronically. It thus dawned on me Sunday that Javy Baez is something akin to our Howard Cosell. He’s the best player we have on the field when he’s not playing worse than everybody else. He’s Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s little girl with the curl to whom Ralph Kiner was so fond of referring. “When she was good, she was very good,” Ralph liked to say. When she wasn’t, she struck out a lot and threw wide of first.
—August 22, 2021
(Free agent, 11/3/2021; signed with Tigers, 11/30/2021)
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KEVIN ANDREW PILLAR
Outfielder
April 4, 2021 – October 2, 2021
It’s a hit by pitch and a run batted in, yet the scorekeeping is irrelevant. It’s a person down in the dirt bleeding badly, requiring medical attention and in no condition to rise and do something as presumably effortless as jog to first base. Watching on television, also in about a second, your priorities switch from let’s get at least another run here, it’s only 1-0, we need all the help we can get, c’mon Pillar to yikes! or interjections to that effect. You just want the blood to stop and the person on the ground to get up and, if you can find it in your heart to worry about the mental well-being of the pitcher whose fastball got away, the person on the mound to grab a seat and get ahold of himself, whatever form that takes.
—May 18, 2021
(Free agent, 11/5/2021; signed with Dodgers, 3/22/2022)
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JONATHAN RAPHAEL VILLAR
Infielder
April 5, 2021 – October 3, 2021
I was never more home than with the Mets game coming out of my shirt pocket on the boardwalk in Long Beach in 2021. This was me in the summers off from high school and junior high and elementary school. Wayne Randazzo narrating a Jonathan Villar homer meshed with the soft crash of the waves. It sounded like my life. That baseball radio play-by-play was emanating from my person didn’t merit commentary from my wife, who is very used to the sounds my body makes, nor from my old pal Fred, who knows what I’m all about. The first thing I can ever recall Fred and I doing outside of school involved a walk and a Mets game on my transistor radio. I told him I don’t like to miss the Mets when they’re playing, and I never had to tell him again.
—July 15, 2021
(Free agent, 11/3/2021; signed with Cubs, 3/17/2022)
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AARON CHRISTOPHER LOUP
Relief Pitcher
April 5, 2021 – September 29, 2021
Aaron gave up two Pirate hits and hit ex-Met Phillip Evans to begin the bottom of the sixth. That’s what is referred to in certain circles as a sticky wicket. But you know that stuff you see commercials for to resolve stickiness? It’s called Loup. Spray it on the toughest jams and it strikes batters right out! I know, it sounds like a scam, but it works. Loup struck out Adam Frazier, struck out Wilmer Difo and struck out Bryan Reynolds, thus leaving the bases loaded. “Wow,” you might be wondering, “can I get a can of that Loup for my sticky wickets?” Sorry, they’re all sold out.
—July 19, 2021
(Free agent, 11/3/2021; signed with Angels, 11/22/2021)
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MARCUS EARL STROMAN
Starting Pitcher
August 3, 2019 – September 28, 2021
In Sunday’s finale, Marcus Stroman took the mound. Marcus Stroman isn’t Jacob deGrom, and not because nobody is Jacob deGrom except Jacob deGrom. Nobody who isn’t Marcus Stroman is Marcus Stroman, either. We’re not talking about asking for ID. Stroman approaches his outings like nobody I’ve ever seen in more than fifty years of watching Mets baseball. He doesn’t “attack” the batter or the strike zone. He attacks the entire game. If a top rope surrounded the rubber, he’d climb atop it, jump off of it, pin the batter he’s startled and egg the crowd on to chant his name. That’s “his attitude,” Conforto said of his 3-0 teammate in Sunday’s postgame Zoom, “the ultimate confidence in himself, and I think that can be contagious sometimes.” Rooting for our first-place team, we should all come down with a case of that kind of self-belief.
—April 19, 2021
(Free agent, 11/3/2021; signed with Cubs, 12/1/2021)
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ROBERT JOHN GSELLMAN
Pitcher
August 23, 2016 – October 3, 2021
If Gsellman isn’t overpowering, he is effective. And the effect is electric. Instead of woe-is-us’ing the days away, we move up in the standings. What was more unlikely — the Mets being one game out of playoff qualification or knowing who the Gs-hell Robert Gsellman is at all? Given the pallor left behind by the previous 48 hours, focused mostly on Jacob deGrom and his mysteriously barking forearm, how could you not embrace this shaggy incarnation of vintage [Marty] Bystrom?
—September 4, 2016
(Free agent, 11/30/2021; signed with Cubs, 3/17/2022)
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JEURYS FAMILIA
Relief Pitcher
September 4, 2012 – July 14, 2018
March 28, 2019 – October 1, 2021
With no cushion provided, Familia returned to the mound for the ninth with the same 3-2 lead that had been effect since the sixth. His first assignment was retiring the loathsome Chase Utley, who shouldn’t have been wearing any uniform this week other than an orange jumpsuit. Utley gave a ball a ride to right, but then the ball said, no thanks, I’ll get out here, and fell into Granderson’s glove. Met karma intact, Jeurys reared back and struck out A.J. Ellis and then Kendrick. Oh, by the way, that was the 27th out. The Mets had won the game and the series, both by a score of 3-2. The next sight you saw was their entire roster forming a ball of human Silly Putty. The next sound you heard was — for the 18th time in franchise history — the spritzing of champagne over everybody and everything orange, blue and otherwise. The next thought you had was “tonight the Dodgers, Saturday the Cubs.”
—October 16, 2015
(Free agent, 11/3/2021; signed with Phillies, 3/12/2022)
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NOAH SETH SYNDERGAARD
Starting Pitcher
May 12, 2015 – October 3, 2021
For that matter, you only noticed the eleven runs a little, because all your focus was on Noah Syndergaard. Over eight innings, he registered as many strikeouts as the Mets plated runners: eleven K’s to go with no walks and no runs. There were three Pirate singles scattered, one in the first, two in the sixth. By the sixth, when Syndergaard shrugged off the mild threat by fanning Andrew McCutchen looking for Strikeout No. 8, the Mets led, 7-0. There was no danger. There was only Thor, tossing what could be best described as a Thor-hitter. Come the bottom of the eighth, Syndergaard batted, an excellent sign of what he’d be doing in the ninth. Sure enough, in the ninth, we got what we stayed for. We got Thor on the mound for another inning. All he needed was three outs to add to his previous 24. If he could proceed in mussless, fussless fashion, we’d be telling each other on the way out that we had just seen Noah Syndergaard’s first complete game and Noah Syndergaard’s first shutout. We already talk of Thor so much we need new material. We wanted it like he wanted it. We would have accepted simple groundouts or pop flies, though if it were put to a text poll, we would have entered “K” for another round of emphatic door-slamming, Pirate-pounding strikeouts. We wanted him to go out in blazes of glory and flourishes of phenomenal. We wanted Rivera cradling that last 97-MPH fastball, leaping to his feet and embracing his pitcher. We couldn’t wait to tweet that perfect-partnership image and hashtag it #Thorvera. That would have been something, but it will have to be something for another game.
—June 16, 2016
(Free agent, 11/3/2021; signed with Angels, 11/16/2021)
___
MICHAEL THOMAS CONFORTO
Outfielder
July 24, 2015 – October 3, 2021
After I got home and watched the replay, Michael Conforto’s one-on, two-out, ninth-inning drive to left-center proved ordinary. It was a deep fly ball but quite catchable, and sure enough Andrew McCutchen caught it to send Friday’s Mets-Pirates game to the tenth inning, knotted at one. From Row 21 of Section 109, however, it looked perfect. Too perfect, in retrospect. Who wouldn’t want the Mets’ top draft pick of 2014 to deliver a signature blow and add another chapter to 2015’s improbable first-place story? And if you happened to be monitoring the flight of the ball alongside somebody who was wearing a recently purchased CONFORTO 30 t-shirt…somebody who had a few hours earlier posed for a picture with his shirt’s namesake…c’mon, who could ask for anything more? So we — that would be me and Citi Field goodwill ambassador Skid (who swears he never wears shirts with players’ names normally, but on impulse he bought the rookie’s) and Mike, who’s visiting Skid from California — asked for simply that. We asked for Michael Conforto, in his fifteenth major league game and his second pinch-hitting appearance, to provide the proverbial storybook ending. The ball he hit appeared standsbound off the bat. We wished it and we hoped it toward the Party City Deck. We wanted it to be a gala ball. But it wasn’t. It was an out. The rule about not always getting what you want held, just like the 1-1 score, at least until the tenth. […] What is easy to see is that unlike the other new, likely rented faces you had to gawk at twice to recognize fully during BP because they haven’t been Mets very long (and they, too, wore unnumbered warmups), Michael is slated to be a Met for years to come. Conforto will drive other balls to deep left center. A few are bound to keep traveling.
—August 15, 2015
(Free agent, 11/3/2021; currently unsigned)
by Greg Prince on 21 March 2022 9:02 pm Armwise, I’m a righty who hails from a family of natural-born lefties. Sis is sinister by nature. So was Mom. Dad trended to the left side as a youngster, but this horrified his grandmother and he was converted to righthandedness before he was old enough to effectively protest. He lived 87½ years with the illegible penmanship to prove he was a righty trapped in a lefty’s body.
But I’m a righty all the way, save for philosophically. From Seaver to Gooden to deGrom, I’ve always instinctively identified most closely with Mets righties of the starting pitcher genus, yet I have no bias when it comes to the big picture. I recognize a pitching staff is not complete without solid lefty penmanship. Today, even in the wake of righty Mets starter Max Scherzer’s Grapefruit League debut — a juicy 72 pitches thrown over five innings, yielding only a single earned run that doesn’t count — we find reason to salute a few southpaws who gave the Mets as much relief as they could, even if they couldn’t all be Tug McGraw.
You know who could be Tug McGraw? Tug McGraw! (Trick question.) You know why Tug McGraw could be unhittable? Because he had a screwball that confounded the art of hitting. You know who taught him how to throw it?
A righthander named Ralph Terry. See, left and right can work together. So can a pitcher known mostly for having been a Yankee and pitcher who came to prominence as a Met. Neither Tug nor Ralph were enjoying a particularly prominent phase of their lifetimes when their paths crossed as Mets in 1966. Tug’s first big moment, defeating Sandy Koufax after no Met had, was more than a year old. He wasn’t quick to craft a string of encores. Ralph’s big league peak was similarly past-tense, except much longer ago. In 1962, Terry went 23-12 for a world championship ballclub and he was the MVP of their seven-game World Series triumph. It marked a dramatic turnaround from two years earlier when “Game Seven” and “Ralph Terry” added up to “the Bill Mazeroski home run” that needs little elaboration.
By 1966, Terry was hanging on, which was a good description for most Mets who couldn’t be referred to as coming up. The Mets had a lot of hangers-on amidst their up-and-comers. Eleven appearances in ’66 produced a save and a loss for Terry. Two more in ’67 amounted to his big league exit. But in between, during the Florida Instructional League interlude of 1966, Terry and Tug got together. Ralph was around to discern how many competitive pitches might remain in his right arm if only it could figure out how to master a knuckleball — that and golf. Tug simply needed to hone his skills in a circuit designed for “brand new rookies and slightly used rookies like me who are having problems” — that and golf.
Pitchers of all ages and both dominant sides love to golf.
Say, the veteran mentioned to the youngster between juggling knucklers and Titleists, maybe you’d have some luck with the screwball. According to Tug in the helpfully titled memoir named for his signature pitch, Ralph “suggested that I turn the ball over when I pitched it, taking something off my fastball and turning my wrist in toward my body when I released the pitch. He showed me how it would spin, using a golf ball as a prop, and right there my screwball was born — on a golf course in Florida.”
 Terry the teacher knew exactly how to screw up his student. It would take a while for Tug to master his new pitch (and for Met coaches to buy in), but once he got a good grip on it, McGraw and the screwball became synonymous. Consequently, the Mets bullpen blossomed once Gil Hodges planted Tug as the lefty late-innings complement to righty Ron Taylor in 1969, a year the Mets closed in the highest style possible. The Mets went to a second World Series four years later only after McGraw rediscovered his scroogie down the stretch (it had somehow scurried out the doggie door at the height of summer). And we can thank a pretty fair righthanded pitcher and golfer named Ralph Terry, who died on March 16 at age 86, for getting Tug and the rest of us to believe as we did. Deney Terrio billed himself as the man who taught John Travolta how to dance and got the syndicated show Dance Fever out of it. Ralph Terry was just helping out a young teammate as he himself was moving on.
We should also thank Tug’s singing son Tim McGraw for taking to Twitter and sharing the following anecdote on St. Patrick’s Day, because receiving an extra opportunity to think about Tug McGraw in the same week is like finding a four-leaf clover in each pocket of your warmup jacket:
His favorite holiday, really, was St. Patrick’s Day. He was very proud of “McGraw” and bein’ Irish. […] My uncle did a little research into our family and told Tug one day, “I don’t think we have quite as much Irish blood as you think.” It sort of pissed Tug off, and he just said, “[Bleep] you, I’m stayin’ Irish. It’s been good to me!”
However much Tug might have enjoyed March 17, 1968, by Opening Day, despite having pitched for the Mets at least some of each of the preceding three seasons, the 23-year-old would be down in the minors for the duration. “No argument from McGraw,” Tug third-personed in Screwball. “It was a good move, because in all honesty I hadn’t had enough time in the minors yet.” While Tug worked on turning the ball over in Triple-A Jacksonville (where during a previous stint he’d met the woman who gave birth to Tim; he did have some time in the minors), the Mets needed to fill whatever void he left in New York with another lefty. They did so, in part, with the veteran reliever Bill Short.
Apropos of his surname, Bill wasn’t a Met for long, although by recent Met reliever revolving-door standards, Short lasted a veritable lifetime: the entirety of the 1968 campaign. Historically, he occupies a couple of odd places for a franchise that’s always been a little bit out in left field. For one thing, Bill Short, who’d been in professional baseball since 1955, is the only player in Mets history you can’t call anything but a 1968 Met. I might not have bothered to look it up had it not been for what being a 1969 Met means.
I’ve always felt a little bad for Short and the eight other 1968 Mets who didn’t last with the club that one extra year. The rest arrived in Flushing somewhere between 1965 and 1967. Three — Jerry Buchek, Phil Linz and Billy Connors — reached the end of the line in ’68. Five — Dick Selma, Larry Stahl, Greg Goossen, Don Bosch and Don Shaw — found work with freshly minted expansion teams facing the endless miles of bad road the maturing Mets were about to be done with (though Selma would have his standing elevated by April when the front-running Cubs traded young Joe Niekro to San Diego to secure the former Met phenom’s services). It’s not like the 1969 Mets didn’t become the 1969 Mets without the nine 1968 Mets they cast off, and it’s impossible to determine whether the 1969 Mets would have gone as far as they did with them.
Still, talk about bad timing.
Bill Short (sometimes referred to as Billy, as players named Bill might be) resided somewhere in the middle of a cohort neither Bulova nor Armitron would have been anxious to sponsor. The Mets picked him up from the Pirates after Bill spent most of 1967 bringing his left arm back to life in the minors. Injuries had plagued him earlier in a career that never quite took off. His major league experience consisted of 35 appearances spread over four seasons that themselves spanned eight years. Yet here he was, of interest to the 1968 Mets for the reason many pitchers who don’t throw with their right arm are of interest to teams in any era.
“I want to see him in the bullpen,” Hodges said early in Spring Training. “I understand he can get lefthanded batters out.”
The siren song of the lefty reliever was enough to allow the 30-year-old southpaw to rise above stiff competition in a camp populated by young, live arms. Seaver was the known quantity. Nolan Ryan always drew attention. Jerry Koosman pitched his way into the rotation, shaking off his shaky ’67 auditions (Kooz, incidentally, was relieved in his first career appearance by Ralph Terry). But in the shadow of all that obvious talent, Short delivered 10 scoreless Florida innings, made the Mets and endured from April to September, accomplishing a niche that accounts for his second odd niche in Mets history.
 Charter member of the No Homers Club. In sixty seasons of Mets baseball, per Baseball-Reference magnificent Stathead tool, only thirteen pitchers have faced at least 100 batters in a given year and surrendered zero home runs. Zilch. Zippo. The first of these gopherless ballers? Why, Bill Short. One-hundred twenty-eight hitters came to the plate against Billy. None took him deep. Not only was it a franchise first, it would stay a franchise rarity. No Met would be as nimble at not allowing homers again until Paul Siebert in 1977. The roster of other slugger-unfriendly hurlers includes high-profile starters Ron Darling (as a rookie in September 1983), Pedro Martinez and Noah Syndergaard (both in years — 2007 and 2017, respectively — when their appearances were curtailed by injury) and a handful of shooting not-quite-stars (Jaime Cerda, Orber Moreno and Juan Padilla among the early 21st-century contingent). The best Met pitcher at not giving up a single home run, which is to say the Met who faced the most batters in a season without having to stand on the mound and watch his opponent circle the bases?
That it was a Met pitching in 1986 probably wouldn’t surprise you. That it was Doug Sisk might make you rethink the “boo” you just mentally formed at seeing the name Doug Sisk. Say what you will about Sisk, but be sure to add “Doug faced 312 batters, gave up no home runs and the Mets won the World Series.” Context and nuance is your call.
But Bill Short got there first. Interestingly, despite Gil Hodges finding him attractive on the basis of being a lefty reliever who could trouble lefty hitters, Short’s splits in 34 games coming out of the pen indicate a southpaw who came north to get out batters on each side of the plate. Lefties slashed .222/.308/.311 against Bill. Righties posted a line of .219/.307/.266.
Bill, whose February 2 passing at 84 surfaced within the baseball community only in the last few days, proved himself a representative major leaguer in 1968, and maybe he could have contributed to the team that was about to become the 1969 Mets. Alas, the Mets left him unprotected in December’s Rule 5 draft and the Reds snatched him up. Detailed splits of the type cited above were not readily accessible more than a half-century ago. Otherwise, one gets the feeling his new manager, Dave Bristol, wouldn’t have reflexively echoed Hodges from a year earlier. “Short can get out a lefthanded batter,” was Bristol’s limited assessment…because isn’t that what lefthanded relievers do?
Oh, you know who you can ask? The lefthanded reliever whose arm, we can cheerfully report, may very well be deathless. Oliver Perez is back in a big league camp, seeking to resume his MLB tenure as an Arizona Diamondback. Of course he is. We’d last seen Ollie in a Cleveland uniform in April, and then we read over the extended winter that Ollie was going to give it one more go in the Mexican League and then definitively hang it up this year. But why hang it up when you can hang around and get out a lefthanded batter? Ollie’s 40th birthday has come and gone. No reason he needs to.
 It’s hard to not embrace an active player who called Shea home. Why, you may wonder, would we so embrace the idea of a little more professional success for Oliver Perez, considering that when he finished wearing a Mets uniform in 2010 we were collectively founding Uber for the express purpose of giving him a ride to the airport? Because if Ollie — who revived his fortunes by reinventing himself as a lefty specialist when we were still fuming that he wouldn’t consent to set himself right in Buffalo — makes the D’Backs, he automatically doubles the number of big leaguers in 2022 who can say they played as Mets at Shea. And as long Shea Stadium personnel continue to ply their craft on a major league playing field, then Shea lives. There’s Joe Smith, a lad with us in 2007 and 2008, who just signed with the Twins, and there’s Ollie. Ollie of the 2006-2010 Mets preceded Smith on the Mets, ergo Perez is potentially poised to reclaim his LAMSA mantle, which is to say the Longest Ago Met Still Active. We thought Ollie was all done in the majors. Silly us. Giving up is for kids.
Good luck, Oliver (unless you face us, of course). Good luck, Joe, a righty, but vintage Shea is vintage Shea, regardless of theme. And, while we’re dispensing good fortune, good luck to another veteran reliever, Mike Montgomery, signed by the Mets in February of 2021, only to be released in March of 2021. Mike has been granted his second Metropolitan shot via a minor league deal because guess what arm he throws with.
Hope, like lefties, spring eternal.
by Greg Prince on 17 March 2022 4:38 pm Hi again, Chasen Shreve — and you, too, Matt Reynolds and Johneshwy Fargas. The Mets decided to solve their lefthanded bullpen void by rewinding to 2020 and snatching up the perfectly capable Shreve, who by coming back after a season in Pittsburgh gets the chance to break free of his Silent Generation designation. May the cheers at Citi Field ring out for you loud and often without nary a cardboard figure in sight. While we were deprived from December until March of major baseball doings, the Mets slipped minor league contracts to good old Matt Reynolds, the infielder who showed up to watch the 2015 postseason, then fill in quite a bit in 2016 and 2017; and potentially good new Johneshwy Fargas, the outfielder who blazed to at least one sensational catch in 2021, before being dropped in a personnel pileup. We love us some Recidivist Mets (the thus far 53 who’ve come, gone and come back, from Frank Lary in 1965 to Wilfredo Tovar last year), even if love, almost invariably, is less sweet the second time around.
Hi again, albeit with an tinge of sarcasm in our voice, Robinson Cano. Robinson was gone in 2021, sidelined by his own desire to enhance his performance, or getting caught using something to do that. Cano somehow feels like he’s been a Met forever (it’s only since 2019). It also feels like he’s played hardly at all (a not insignificant 156 games, in fact). The surefire Hall of Famer if you overlook the boosters he’s given himself is a hard guy to dislike, even as his continuing presence on the Met scene is difficult to fathom. He’s made a point of saying “my bad” for missing last year and I don’t doubt he’s already dispensing valuable veteran wisdom of the non-PED variety that his younger teammates will be citing soon enough. They’re all younger than Cano, who will turn 40 this October.
Hi for the first time, Chris Bassitt, Adam Ottavino and Travis Jankowski. New signings! New Mets! That’s the stuff! Bassitt will be in the rotation; Ottavino will be in the bullpen; Jankowski looms as an extra outfielder. My familiarity with each of them ranges from “I know that guy” to “I recognize that guy” to “I think I remember seeing that guy.” What the hell, they’re all Mets now. Welcome, fellas. It’s fun to see the Mets trumpeting new players after a winter of blanking out everybody’s faces on the official online roster.
Hi and never leave us, Jacob deGrom. Jake plans to opt out when his contract allows him that opening after this season is over (faint) yet swears he doesn’t really want to leave (cautiously revive). The best pitcher in baseball presumably just wants to be paid as such, and if Steve Cohen doesn’t satisfy his prime asset, our provisional praise for Metsopotamia’s most benevolent billionaire may have to be rethought.
Hi and glad you’re OK, Pete Alonso. Pete’s vehicle was hit by a maniac driver in Florida, where there’s no shortage of maniacs, drivers or a combination thereof. The vehicle rolled over. Pete somehow walked away physically unharmed. Whew, for Pete’s sake and, yes, our sake. Even if it was the doing of somebody else, be careful on the road. That goes for all of us.
Hi, DH. Boo. But you knew that already.
Hi Jeurys Familia of the Philadelphia Phillies, Robert Gsellman of the Chicago Cubs and Jonathan Villar also of the Chicago Cubs. New uniforms for old friends. Good luck, except when we play you (Familia as a Phillie…perhaps a little less luck). Same to Met-for-a-month Brad Hand, whose signing with Philadelphia positions the also erstwhile Marlin and National to join the likes of Todd Zeile, Joe Orsulak and previous most recent inductee Jeff Francoeur in the NL East’s Four-Timers Club.
Hi next year’s schedule that will have us playing everybody and their uncles. Interleague competition will essentially become interconference, like when the Nets or Islanders play San Antonio or Calgary. Baseball is trying to shake off any differentiation it has from anything else, all but killing the idea that the World Series should have a modicum of mystique. (I wonder when we’ll have penalty kicks.) Strangely, I don’t hate the prospective 29-opponent jamboree as much as I hate the DH. I voluntarily watch the Nets play the Spurs and don’t cringe when the Islanders take on the Flames, so at this point, where the rules have flattened out and some American League team is already on some National League team’s schedule somewhere every frigging day, yeah, sure. Let’s make baseball as unspecial as possible (that’s me not hating this as much as I hate the DH).
“Hi, which sleeve do you want me to roll up?” is a phrase I hope certain Mets will be saying to a medical professional in short order. We’ve come too far not to get to this season in the best shape of our lives.
Hi baseball. You’re not as ideal as you could be, but, even in the best of times, you never were. We’re on board for the duration, however. We always are. The Mets start playing pretend games Saturday. Let’s do this thing.
Warm up for the first broadcasts of the preseason by listening to Jeff Hysen and me mull over a few spring things on National League Town.
by Jason Fry on 14 March 2022 6:01 pm Great, there will actually be a season! Which means we have business to attend to — extending a slightly overdue welcome to 2021’s matriculating Mets, who are now in The Holy Books!
(Background: I have three binders, long ago dubbed The Holy Books by Greg, that contain a baseball card for every Met on the all-time roster. They’re in order of arrival in a big-league game: Tom Seaver is Class of ’67, Mike Piazza is Class of ’98, Noah Syndergaard is Class of ’15, etc. There are extra pages for the rosters of the two World Series winners, the managers, ghosts, and one for the 1961 Expansion Draft. That page begins with Hobie Landrith and ends with the infamous Lee Walls, the only THB resident who neither played for the Mets, managed the Mets, nor got stuck with the dubious status of Met ghost.)
(If a player gets a Topps card as a Met, I use it unless it’s a truly horrible — Topps was here a decade before there were Mets, so they get to be the card of record. No Mets card by Topps? Then I look for a minor-league card, a non-Topps Mets card, a Topps non-Mets card, or anything else. That means I spend the season scrutinizing new card sets in hopes of finding a) better cards of established Mets; b) cards to stockpile for prospects who might make the Show; and most importantly c) a card for each new big-league Met. Eventually that yields this column, previous versions of which can be found here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here and here.)
The 2021 Mets employed a stunning 42 new players, smashing the club record of 35 set back in 1967 and coming within three of tying the number of new players used in 1962, when every Met was by definition a newcomer. 1967 was a transition year, one marked by a new GM, a change of organizational philosophy and a restlessness with what had come before, but 2021 was just a perfect storm of weird. Basically, everybody got hurt and the team zoomed through interchangeable players at the margins, hoping to catch lightning in a bottle and just winding up with a lot of bottles filled with water.
You might want to make reading this post a multi-day affair, because that’s sure as hell how I’m going to write it. Let’s go!
Kevin Pillar: So I was wrong. Pillar arrived with billing as a useful late-inning defender if no longer the center-field wizard he was a step or two ago, but after watching his first few weeks in Queens I told everybody who’d listen and a few people who wouldn’t that he was a Jonah, a sink of do-nothingness who’d drag the whole season down with him to hell if not excised from the roster posthaste. Then, one night in Atlanta in mid-May, Pillar took a Jacob Webb fastball to the face, a frightening incident I watched from a San Francisco bar that had me instinctively out of my chair and standing up close to the TV, anxious to glean as much info as I could. Pillar was OK, thank goodness, and showed not just grit but also grace in returning, going out of his way to reassure a distraught Webb that these things happen. Did he have a great year? Not really, but he showed me pretty emphatically he’d never deserved the Jonah tag I’d stuck on him in a fit of April pique, and that’s not a bad lesson. 2022 Topps card in which — appropriately — he’s scaling an outfield wall. Can’t tell if he’s going to catch anything, though.
Francisco Lindor: Why does every highly heralded Met arrival have to get hazed by not only the fans but also fate? Lindor arrived pre-anointed as a superstar, delivered from the backwater that is Cleveland to become an MVP candidate and a million-watt matinee idol, and at least for his first year was neither. (By the way, Cleveland is a perfectly fine town and this well-worn Gotham narrative makes us look like assholes.) There was the deeply weird rat-raccoon postgame Pravda after his contretemps with Jeff McNeil, but more than that there was the fact that Lindor looked lost at the plate — he didn’t raise his average above the Mendoza line until friggin’ June 2. If you want to look on the bright side — and given that monster contract, we all better — he turned things around after that, only to have his season derailed by a nagging oblique injury, because 2021. Even while slumping at the plate, Lindor was the busiest, savviest, most go-go infield captain the Mets have had since Keith Hernandez, and that’s something. A bad year isn’t destiny, but why does this stuff always happen to us? Some 2021 Topps insert using the ’92 design; at least his smile looks MVP caliber.
James McCann: Sturdy catcher came over from the White Sox after a pair of solid seasons and looked more like the guy the Tigers had been happy enough to let go of, hitting approximately 485,912 balls into the ground over the course of a nightmare year. That brought the usual grumblings that Tomas Nido should catch, a fantasy that Nido inevitably squelched once given a run of playing time, as has been true with the Mets’ catching corps basically since Mike Piazza got old. McCann has three years left on his contract; should he falter again, the fanbase will be scouting Francisco Alvarez’s trips to the bathroom and water fountain at Binghamton. 2022 Topps card, since the names of the players on Topps’ 2021 cards were impossible to read without a magnifying glass.
Trevor May: Burly, brainy reliever came over and was OKish in the pen, mixing reliable stretches with streaks in which he gave up way too many walks and homers. At least he was forthright about things when they went awry. He’s a smart guy, but identifying what’s wrong and fixing it are very different things — not just for May but for the entire human race, if you’ll forgive an existential aside. 2021 Topps card. You can’t read his fucking name, so just trust me that it’s him.
Aaron Loup: The Mets’ signing of this veteran lefty elicited mostly shrugs, but he was unhittable out of the pen, finishing the year with an 0.95 ERA (no, not a typo) and actually making people feel fondly towards Busch Light despite the fact that it’s not anything a sensible person should put in his or her mouth. Loup then signed with the Angels, perhaps because the Mets were a rudderless fiasco for a crucial stretch of the offseason, perhaps because he didn’t like New York, or perhaps because he’s wise enough to know that bullpen seasons are strands of spaghetti that tend not to stick to the same wall twice. You’ll see that 0.95 ERA pop up on SNY leaderboards for years and say, “Oh yeah, remember that?” It’s an anticlimax, but he gets a Topps Total card in which he’s a Padre.
Jonathan Villar: Wound up playing a lot more than envisioned after J.D. Davis’s season turned to dust, and acquitted himself well, playing a not-bad third and showing both power and speed. That’s the kind of performance that can be part of a championship season when everything else goes right; unfortunately for the Mets nearly everything else went wrong, so Villar’s 2021 will be remembered in a “well, it wasn’t his fault” way by the hardcore and forgotten by everyone else. Here’s wishing him well wherever he lands. 2021 Topps card in a Photoshopped Mets uni.
Albert Almora Jr.: Always a good defender, Almora had teased Cubs fans with his offensive potential but never delivered on it, walking the forlorn road from prospect to suspect to someone else’s project. His time with the Mets was misbegotten from the jump, as there really wasn’t anything he could do that Kevin Pillar couldn’t. Anyway, he made some fine defensive plays early in the season, didn’t hit a lick, got hurt and that was that. Feels like everybody involved would have been happier if we’d just skipped the whole thing. 2020 Cubs card.
Jacob Barnes: The first pitch he threw as a Met was a 95 MPH fastball over the heart of the plate in Philly that J.T. Realmuto hit to the Azores for a three-run homer. Whoops! Old Topps Heritage card where he’s a Brewer.
Joey Lucchesi: After never finding a place in San Diego and feeling pretty chapped about it, Lucchesi escaped to the Mets and looked like a steal in the early going, showing off a promising “churve” but also exhibiting a dispiriting habit of getting pinata’ed the second time through the batting order. But in late May something clicked and Lucchesi put together an excellent month even as everything was tumbling down around him. His teammates rallied around him too, flashing the churve symbol in an effort to get baseball to recognize the pitch on scoreboards. (Yes, that was the churve symbol and not the sign for “white power,” which was a good thing for the obvious reasons and also because 2021 was enough of a drag as it was.) This feel-good story then screeched to a halt in June when it turned out Lucchesi needed Tommy John surgery. Yeah, it was that kind of year. 2021 Topps card. It’s a horizontal, which isn’t as bad as white-power signs in big-league dugouts but should still be decried.
Taijuan Walker: A rising star with the Mariners not so long ago, Walker’s career followed a distressing but all too familiar pattern: injuries and scuffling followed by repeated changes of address, a character arc that might be called “Didn’t you used to be … ?” The Mets were his fourth organization in three years, and Walker was running out of time. But his arc was about to change: Walker’s elbow had finally healed, he’d used his time in the baseball desert to learn the valuable lessons young flamethrowers don’t yet realize they need to know, and he was ready to remind everyone of who he used to be. When Jacob deGrom turned down a chance to pitch in the All-Star Game, Walker (who’d donned Turk Wendell’s old 99) was a very worthy replacement. A nice story, but alas, the season had a second half. Everything that had come together came back apart, and Walker ended the year with as many wins as he’d had at the break. What happened? Maybe the increase in innings was too much, maybe hitters figured out Walker’s new wrinkles, maybe the first half’s good fortune was balanced by its second-half opposite, or maybe it was a little bit of everything. I’d like to know; the Mets and Walker would like to know too. 2022 Topps card.
Trevor Hildenberger: A side-arming righty who’d mulled being a film critic if this whole baseball thing didn’t work out, Hildenberger got exactly two outings as a Met, posted an ERA north of 15, and saw the credits roll while the butter on his popcorn was still hot. An old Topps Twin card; he has another one specific to a team set that I can’t find and will search for in vain until 2042, when it will cost me a fortune. Grrr.
Sean Reid-Foley: A Clark Gable mustache and a bouncer’s tattoos made Reid-Foley a distinctive sight even before taking his stance on the mound, a vaguely sumo crab stance accompanied by a stare in at the catcher. After replacing Jacob Barnes on the roster he was a strikeout machine, meaning he also instantly replaced Jacob Barnes in our hearts. Alas, Reid-Foley’s early success ended, his elbow began barking, and he wasn’t seen again after June. TLDR version: “He was a relief pitcher.” Some old Topps insert, as a Blue Jay.
Stephen Tarpley: The Holy Books indicate he pitched for the Mets, so I guess he did. Topps Total card as a Marlin. I do remember that part: It was a hasty eBay transaction to keep a Yankees card out of THB.
Jose Peraza: A nomadic utility infielder in terms of both position and address, Peraza arrived at the tail end of April and logged more time than either he or the Mets had expected, showing solid instincts afield and proving a clutch bat off the bench. But he was a better suited there than as an everyday player: He put up a WAR of 0.0, which is a statistical synonym for “overexposed utility guy.” Just got a 2022 Topps Heritage card as a Met, which makes zero sense seeing how he’s now a Yankee minor leaguer, but is a boon to The Holy Books.
Patrick Mazeika: Ended 2020 as a Mets ghost, and between his pedestrian minor-league numbers and the fickle fortunes of backup catchers, I feared his chance to escape ectoplasmic purgatory might have come and gone. But in 2021 Mazeika reappeared and became a cult hero, collecting a game-winning fielder’s choice against the D’Backs in his second at-bat and getting his uniform ripped off in celebration. It was the start of an unlikely and thoroughly wonderful stretch in which Mazeika somehow collected three RBIs, two of them walk-offs, before getting a big-league hit. (We’ll come back to this point later.) There weren’t too many of those hits — the highlight was probably a home run against the Rays on an otherwise dismal day — but who needs those (or uniform tops) if you can supply enough well-timed worm-killers? 2022 Topps card. It might be the only one he ever gets, but it’s one more than I figured he would, and that’s a nice story.
Jordan Yamamoto: A fitfully promising Marlins castoff, Yamamoto was acquired for depth, pressed into service as the starting rotation’s body count climbed, pitched OK in a couple of cameos, and then got hurt and tossed on the IL discard pile himself. This capsule biography could be copy-pasted quite a bit. 2020 Topps card as a Marlin.
Tommy Hunter: You know storm clouds are gathering when guys like Hunter appear on the roster. I say that not with malice but with a veteran fan’s sad wisdom, and I doubt Hunter would disagree: A husky hurler in his mid-thirties, Hunter is in the autumn of his career, riding waiver wires as a wise head attached to a potentially useful body, to be called on in a team’s hour of need. That time came for the Mets in May, and Hunter did well before (inevitably) getting hurt: He turned in eight scoreless innings and collected a long-awaited first big-league hit. His delight in that hit will stay with me long after I’ve forgotten the rest. 2021 Topps Heritage card as a Phillie.
Jake Hager: Hager made his big-league debut with the Mets on May 15, got his first hit on May 21, and was designated for assignment on May 22. If that sounds like a lot, consider Hager’s recent transaction history: Signed a minor-league deal with the Mets on Jan. 9, 2020; lost a season to the pandemic and became a free agent on Nov. 2; resigned with the Mets on Nov. 4; turned in the week recounted above; claimed off waivers by the Brewers on May 25; designated for assignment on June 18; claimed off waivers by the Mariners on June 22; designated for assignment on July 27; claimed on waivers by the Diamondbacks on July 30; appeared in nine games for Arizona while being sent down twice; outrighted to Triple-A on Sept. 12; became a free agent on Nov. 7; resigned with Arizona on Dec. 1. So many W-2s! 2019 card as a San Antonio Mission.
Johneshwy Fargas: A good spring training turned this minor-league speedster into a fan cause celebre ahead of the 2020 season, but COVID happened and then Fargas entered 2021 behind both Kevin Pillar and Albert Almora on the defensive-outfielder depth chart. Come May, though, the Mets had become a MASH unit and the roster was just a few transactions away from “first 26 fans get to play,” so enter Johneshwy at long last. His week in orange and blue was a successful one, with hits in five of seven games, but a collision with the Citi Field wall put him on the shelf (2021, oof) and when he returned it was as a Cub. Represented by one-quarter of a minor-league Stolen Base Leaders card, because his cheapest standalone card is somehow $15 on eBay and even my fanaticism has its limits.
Khalil Lee: A Royals prospect turned suspect, Lee came to the Mets in one of those three-way transactions that’s generally more interesting to parse than to see play out. After an early-season stint as a ghost, Lee made his debut during May’s rosterpalooza and the NOT READY signs were flashing red: He struck out in his first eight big-league plate appearances. This cruel stretch ended in dramatic fashion, though, as Lee’s first big-league hit was a double roped into the corner in extra innings in Miami, the decisive blow in one of those trench-warfare Mets-Marlins games that should be prohibited by the Geneva Conventions. Lee then struck out a whole bunch more and was returned to Syracuse, but cut down the Ks and had one of the better second halves in the system. He’s not yet 24, so he still has time. Got a 2021 Topps Update card capturing him celebrating a victory; as a bonus, it shows Johneshway Fargas jogging in next to him. Hey! I can just buy another copy of that one!
Cameron Maybin: Well-traveled veteran arrived during rosterpalooza and collected one hit in 33 plate appearances, perhaps hampered by the giant fork sticking out of his back. 2020 Topps card as a Tiger.
Brandon Drury: Nine of 2021’s new Mets had previously logged time with the Blue Jays, which is a little weird. Drury was one of them, a depth piece called upon during rosterpalooza and one of the year’s success stories. He was deadly as a pinch-hitter, hitting .367 in 30 ABs, rode a few hot streaks and was a lot better in the field than we’d been led to expect. Drury moved on near year’s end to make room for Robert Gsellman, but if every transaction had worked out that well we might have tarted up the blog design with bunting and trophies and other good shit. 2020 Topps card as (you guessed it) a Blue Jay.
Yennsy Diaz: Former Blue Jay arrived without a card available for The Holy Books, so I drew my own — complete with a smile and a word balloon saying Hi! — and posted it on Twitter, a moment of whimsy that Diaz retweeted approvingly. Because of this, no one is ever allowed to say anything bad about him. Walked 12 in 25 innings, which helped contribute to a 5.40 ERA and a -0.2 WAR. Now has a real card as a 2018 Midwest League Top Prospect.
Billy McKinney: It was a tumultuous year for the former Blue Jay, who got off to a hot start with the Brewers before cooling off and winding up with the Mets during rosterpalooza, which worked out pretty well at first and then inevitably less so. The Mets designated McKinney for assignment and he wound up playing in the postseason for the Dodgers. A guy you’ll miss on future roster quizzes. 2021 supplied a lot of those guys! 2020 Card as a Blue Jay.
Mason Williams: Genial-looking once-upon-a-time Yankees prospect helped hold the fort for a stretch in June, which is all you can fairly ask of someone who’s settled into life as a Quad-A player. Does anyone remember Wilfredo Tovar returned to get a paycheck as a 2021 Met? No really, that happened. 2021 Syracuse Mets card.
Travis Blankenhorn: Designated by the Twins for assignment on May 8, by the Dodgers after three Triple-A ABs on May 21, and by the Mariners after a minor-league stint at the end of May, Blankenhorn emerged from this Hageresque odyssey to find himself a Met come June. He only hit .174, but his first career homer was a comeback-accelerating three-run blast against the Pirates in the weirdo game where Taijuan Walker kicked a fair ball out of bounds, and that ought to count for something. Topps then granted Blankenhorn a 2021 Topps Update card, leaving me equal parts grateful and puzzled.
Jerad Eickhoff: With the Mets’ rotation options down to plans requiring Greek letters, the team turned to Eickhoff and kept giving him the ball despite increasingly horrifying results — four starts and an ERA of 8.69. It reminded me of Tommy Milone’s 2017 metronome of suck, except for reasons that are possibly not scientific I loathed Milone and just felt sorry for Eickhoff. None of it was his fault, but it still wasn’t any fun to watch. 2021 Syracuse card.
Tylor Megill: Rose from the “and other names” section of the prospect rankings to a spot in the rotation when everything went to hell, and he looked like a godsend at first. But the regression was painful: Megill’s ERA climbed from 2.04 after seven starts to 4.52 at season’s end. This is pretty much Exhibit A in being asked to do too much; besides being a rookie, Megill had never thrown so many innings before, and was asked to do so after the lost season of 2020, whose effects on minor-leaguers will be debated for a baseball generation. In a universe governed by justice, Megill would start 2022 at Triple-A and proceed on his timetable rather than the Mets’. I don’t need to tell you the universe isn’t usually cooperative in such things, so I’ll remind you that it’s our job as informed fans to mind the gap. 2022 Topps insert card in the ’87 style.
Thomas Szapucki: After a Biblical run of injuries delayed his ascent to the bigs, Szapucki finally made his debut against Atlanta and allowed six runs in 3.2 innings as the Mets lost, 20-2. Oof. Adding injury to insult, he then landed on the IL and needed ulnar-nerve transposition surgery. That means he’s flushed a lifetime’s worth of bad luck out of his system, right? RIGHT? He’s only 25, which is either hopeful or ominous depending on how you see the world. Some ancient Bowman card.
Robert Stock: A ham-and-egger, Stock made a spot start for the Cubs at Citi Field in mid-June and was roughed up by the Mets, taking the loss. Three weeks later he made a spot start for the Mets against the Brewers; it didn’t go quite as badly but he still took the loss. Stock was good-humored about the whole thing, which is a useful skill as a baseball player, given that the alternative is to stare into the howling void until the light is stripped from one’s soul, leaving behind a shadowy vestige fated to wander the cosmos demanding WHY? and never receiving an answer. A long-ago Topps card as a Padre.
Nick Tropeano: The record shows he threw two innings for the Mets on July 9 in a 13-4 win against the Pirates, which I will take on faith, as I have no memory of them or him. An old card as an Angel.
Anthony Banda: This guy I remember! A lefty with glasses and a vaguely worried mien, he made his debut in the 10th inning of a hellacious game in Cincinnati with the Mets ahead 10-9 and both teams’ fanbases hiding under their beds, gave up singles to the first two hitters to leave the game tied and the Mets on the verge of defeat, somehow escaped further damage and then walked away with the win as the beneficiary of a five-spot in the top of the 11th. That was basically a season’s worth of middle-reliever angst packed into a single night. Banda’s Mets career was over before two weeks were out, during which time I bellowed “BANDA MACHO!” at the TV whenever good things happened involving him and/or as an attempt to stop bad things from happening, which a) exactly one of you will recognize as a reference to a classic album by the Figgs; and b) mostly didn’t work. Old Topps Heritage card as a Ray.
Geoff Hartlieb: Posted a 7.71 ERA with the Pirates, somehow parlayed that into a go-round with the Mets, and doubled his ERA, which seems both tough to do and ill-advised. I had to look all that up, as I wouldn’t know Geoff Hartlieb from Adam’s off ox. Given the above numbers, that’s for the best. Indianapolis Indians card snatched up on eBay.
Rich Hill: No, he won’t make Cooperstown, but goddamnit Rich Hill is everything great about baseball. He just turned 42, 2021 was his 17th season and the Mets were his 11th team. (He’ll pitch for the Red Sox again this season.) His stat line looks like it must reflect wars or hostage dramas, as he was basically MIA for 2010-11 and 2014-15, felled by a torn labrum, Tommy John surgery and other woes. When he couldn’t get any other offers in the summer of 2015 he became a Long Island Duck, struck out 21 in 11 scoreless innings and was almost immediately back in the bigs, point more than proven. Nothing he does looks particularly impressive, but he takes the ball when asked and gives his team a chance to win — a cliche, sure, but one that exists because of how hard it is for a big-league club to achieve that baseline with pitchers who are too young, too old or too far from figuring stuff out. Hill made 12 starts for a desperate team and only won one of them, but put up a 3.84 ERA and gave his team space to worry about the other four days. That was more than enough. 2021 Topps Heritage card as a Twin.
Akeem Bostick: If you put him in a lineup (real or police, doesn’t matter) with Stephen Tarpley, Nick Tropeano and Geoff Hartlieb I’d stare at the four of them uncomprehendingly until someone took pity on me. 2021 Syracuse Mets card.
Carlos Carrasco: Sigh. The man they call Cookie — a leukemia survivor, fan favorite, clubhouse leader and a pretty damn good pitcher — was supposed to put the 2021 Mets over the top, with many of us marveling that the team had managed to pry him away from the now-Guardians along with Lindor. But his year was a nightmare that made Lindor’s look like mild insomnia. A sore elbow and a torn hamstring kept him on the shelf until July, when the Mets’ freefall was already under way; then Carrasco’s first pitch as a Met became a Jonathan India home run … and to be honest things didn’t get a whole lot better after that. He ended up with a 6.04 ERA, chronic trouble with the first inning, and a whole lot of questions going into 2022. A 2021 Topps card in which he’s smiling, indicating he has no idea what lies ahead.
Javier Baez: Baez arrived at the deadline and was very Javier Baez, hitting mammoth home runs, fanning spectacularly, playing superlative infield defense, doing inexplicable things for reasons known only to him, and making a couple of his patented CGI-assisted impossible slides around or possibly through catchers. As a sideshow, there was the dopey “thumbs down” controversy, a spot of minor PR bother that Sandy Alderson inflated with some performative harrumphing borrowed from John Lithgow in Footloose. Baez’s time in Queens was thrilling and maddening at the same time, as Cub fans could have told us it would be. It also turned out to be brief: He’s now a Detroit Tiger and his Mets tenure feels like a weird dream, which I suppose it kind of was. 2022 Topps Opening Day card as a Met, which is also weird.
Trevor Williams: Hirsute and amply tattooed, Williams arrived along with Baez and pitched pretty well in three starts, though I confess by then I was pretty deflated about everything and no longer paying much attention. As a minor aside, in 2021 the Mets went from zero Trevors on their all-time roster to three, perhaps making the most of a heretofore unnoticed market inefficiency. 2020 Topps card as a Pirate.
Jake Reed: A sidearmer, right? Send him out to stand alongside Tarpley, Tropeano and Co. if you want to torture me further. An old Rochester Red Wings card.
Chance Sisco: Inventively monikered former Orioles catching prospect arrived in mid-August and doubled in San Francisco for his first Mets’ AB. It gives me no pleasure to report that was his only hit for the team. 2022 Topps Heritage card.
Heath Hembree: His actual first name is Richard, which is an interesting choice. He soaked up innings in garbage time when the rest of the bullpen was on the IL or in the witness protection program, which seems like faint praise but is a lot better than the alternative. By the way, his 2021 game log records him as starting the year with the Mets and seeing action on April 11 against the Marlins before going to the Reds and returning to the Mets in August. This didn’t happen, though it would have been a logical year for such a thing — the April 11th game was suspended, made up late in the season with a largely new Mets cast, and its stats retroactively attached to the earlier date. Centuries from now perhaps members of rival sects will murder each other over which day is claimed for Patrick Mazeika’s first big-league hit. Baseball is so weird. Topps Total card as a Red Sock.
Brad Hand: OK, so this turns out to be kind of funny. With Cleveland opting for a fire sale at the end of 2020, the Mets wanted to pluck Hand off the waiver wire. Which made sense: He’d spent years being about as reliable as a middle reliever can be. But the Mets were being sold and there was no, um, hand on the tiller, so Hand wound up with the Nationals instead, accompanied by wailing and gnashing of teeth in Queens. And then, for whatever reason, he had a horrible year, one bad enough to get him traded to Toronto and then put on waivers by the Blue Jays. The Mets grabbed him at the beginning of September … and he was lousy for them too. Y’know what? Don’t try to make it make sense — it was that kind of year. 2020 Topps card in Cleveland togs, before everything went wrong.
by Greg Prince on 13 March 2022 9:06 pm I’ve been thinking about one of my best friends from college lately. I do every year as February becomes March. I think of him intermittently regardless of month, but especially around now because now is his birthday. Mike Manning was born on March 13.
I became aware of this fact sometime prior to Spring Break 1983. Mike and I were in a couple of classes together the previous fall. I don’t remember what drove us to strike up an initial conversation. Probably some mutual dissatisfaction with a particular professor. We chatted some, palled around before and after class, even went out for end-of-the-semester beers with another classmate when the term was over. Mike and I each liked to emote and we each liked that somebody would absorb what we were going on about. We were a good audience for one another. That makes sense. The class where we began to hit it off was Public Speaking.
Spring Break in ’83 where we went to school, at the University of South Florida in Tampa, ran the second week of March. He let me know that with his birthday coming up on the 13th, it would be great if I could come by his apartment on Saturday night the 12th for a party. He’d be turning 21. I was impressed that he considered it a big enough milestone to celebrate. Basically, everybody turns 21 when you’re in college. But Mike made a thing of it, and I was touched to be invited. I made sure to be back in town in time for it (and it gave me a good excuse to hit the road from my parents’ place down in Hallandale a day sooner than I would have normally).
The occasion of Mike’s 21st birthday made for a perfectly lovely party. I met some perfectly lovely friends and family members of his, even if small talk is a skill that eluded me then as it does now. I wore my Mets jacket. Mike saw it and tried to remember which famous baseball player he was a distant cousin to. One of his siblings reminded him: Gaylord Perry. Mike was a little tipsy, but what the hell, he was home and on the verge of a significant number. The clock eventually struck midnight. Those of us who hung in there toasted him. However close we were before March 13, it seemed we got closer after. Like I said, Mike was one of my best friends.
Mike turned 21 nine-and-a-half months before I did. It was a process that would repeat annually. I always got a kick out of catching up to him agewise and then shrugging that it was only temporary. He was a year ahead of me in school and about a generation wiser. He didn’t need to turn 21 to be an adult. I suspect I wasn’t in that much of a rush to fully grow up. Mike had not had an easy upbringing and compensated for it by getting a head start on being in the real world. Me, my priorities were pretty much what they’d always been.
On April 2, 1984, I dragged Mike ever so briefly into one of them. To Mike, it was a Monday; on Mondays we had one class together late morning and one after lunch. We’d usually spend the interval together. To me it wasn’t just any Monday. It was Opening Day, and the Mets for the first time I could remember were in the Opening Day game, at Cincinnati. What made it particularly resonant was, because the Reds trained in Tampa, an AM station carried their afternoon games locally (the station was daytime-only). Listen, I asked, would you mind if we stopped by my dorm room between classes? I explained this serendipitous confluence of Mets, Reds and radio that never otherwise happens and I can’t believe I actually get to hear the beginning of the season!
Mike was very much, sure. We get to my room, I turn on the radio and…WHBO AM 1050 is playing a song. And then another song. The station had changed formats recently and dropped the Reds games entirely. I was very apologetic for wasting Mike’s lunch hour and felt embarrassed my media-savvy credibility had been undercut by the erstwhile Reds affiliate. Mike was very much, that’s all right. He continued to trust my instincts, even if they once in a while went awry. We got up and headed to class. The Mets lost, 8-1, at Riverfront. Darryl homered in the losing cause, but I wouldn’t find out any of that until the Six O’Clock News.
 A couple of college friends. Mike’s the one dressed better than that day’s graduate. Mike graduated in ’84, me in ’85. For his graduation, I bought that week’s No. 1 single — “Against All Odds” by Phil Collins — and mounted it in a frame, which he hung up in living room. For my graduation, he and his girlfriend brought me back a couple of baseball tchotchkes from their recent trip to Chicago: an oversized White Sox button, which I got a huge kick out of (Seaver was a Sock then), and a Cubs pennant, which I accepted politely despite absolutely fucking hating the Chicago Cubs following the 1984 pennant race. Yet I still have the pennant because the gesture was far more thoughtful than it was clueless…even though it was more than a little clueless…which is absolutely understandable because my friend and his girlfriend literally didn’t have a clue about who a Mets fan might hate at a given moment, but they knew I loved baseball, and they were very thoughtful people.
I moved back to New York. I would make a couple of March trips back to Tampa as the ’80s rolled on — Spring Break was apparently still in my system — and we’d get together, but usually I’d settle for calling him come March 13. Hey, we’re no longer the same age, one of us would say and the other would laugh and we’d catch up. Mike married his aforementioned girlfriend, a woman different in manner and accent from him — she was a New Yorker with all that implies (I can say that as a New Yorker); he was a courtly Southerner at heart — but they were fully compatible in their warmth and decency. I was a groomsman at their wedding, having flown down in November of ’86, resplendent in that same Mets jacket I wore to his 21st birthday party. Why shouldn’t you be wearing it? he asked when he picked me up at the airport, overlooking the fact that November in Tampa didn’t necessarily require an outer layer. Your team just won the World Series.
Mike and Maria had a beautiful wedding ceremony. Then they shared a beautiful first dance to “Nobody Loves Me Like You Do,” the Anne Murray/Dave Loggins duet. Then, as they and their dozens and dozens of guests rightfully went about reveling in their nuptials, I receded into a sulk from which even the knowledge that my team had just won the World Series could not extricate me. Not the happy couple’s fault, nor the caterer’s. I was attending their wedding stag after a potential date fell through and I was becoming sure I’d never find anybody the way they’d found each other. A wedding was not the place to be in that state of mind. I sought them out, wished them well and left. They managed to work a concerned phone call into their honeymoon to see if I was OK. Warm and decent, indeed. (I met Stephanie six months later and became a more reliable wedding guest thereafter.)
Mike and Maria settled down in Tampa. Hardly anybody was actually from Tampa. Mike grew up there. They eventually had a son who died in infancy, which of course was horrible. Stephanie and I visited them shortly after the tragedy. I approached Maria gingerly. It’s OK to hug, she assured me, I won’t break. The Mannings were indeed made of strong stuff. Blessedly, they were soon able to adopt a boy who it turned out was the same age as the son they lost.
Somewhere along the way, the three of them moved to Atlanta, where Mike established himself in his profession. The birthday calls became birthday cards. The birthday cards became birthday e-mails. Then those faded. Mike was always mentioning how busy he was. He was never curt about it, but I picked up a vibe that time was tight and he couldn’t be the audience he used to be, and maybe he didn’t need me to be the audience I used to be. I didn’t want to be a bother, so I stopped reaching out. Occasionally I’d search online a bit, just out of curiosity, to see if he was on social media. He wasn’t. That didn’t seem like his scene. Mike was too serious for most of that nonsense. He took himself right up to the edge of too seriously, but inevitably knew how to pull back (says the man who bolted from a wedding reception in a self-pitying snit despite carrying the honor of groomsman and the Mets being world champs). I knew him well enough to know how he was doing even if I wasn’t up to date on what he was doing.
We’d lost touch, but somehow I never felt like we hadn’t remained friends in absentia. I figured Mike and I existed on plane that wasn’t defined by time. Our conversations, when they had transpired, didn’t more than dabble in remember when we…? nostalgia. If they had, Mike would have been overmatched. I was driving him around Tampa on some pre-wedding errand when “Maneater” came on the radio. Mike randomly exclaimed, “high school!” as if he’d decided some splendid twelfth-grade or earlier coming-of-age moment was soundtracked by this particular Hall & Oates number. I couldn’t let it stand. Mike, I said, “Maneater” came out in the fall of 1982. We were both in college. It was when we met in that speech class. He stood amiably corrected. These days, I usually let people make their connections as they see fit, unless the Mets are involved.
I hear “Maneater” and I think of Mike and I smile. I hear any number of things and I think of Mike and I smile. The word “woods,” for example. We were driving around once in some section of Tampa that had been built up since his childhood. “This used to be woods,” he said as we passed strip mall after strip mall. I told him I’d never heard of a retail chain called Woods. No, he said, they were actual woods out here. I laughed. He continued to give me the tour of the town he knew better than most. Stuff like that. For years I’d think of some random exchange from forever ago and smile at what Mike said or how he reacted to what I said. So what if we hadn’t had any of those types of talks lately? He’s out there somewhere, was my conclusion. I know I could call him and we’d pick up wherever we left off.
Except I can’t do that because, as his 60th birthday approached here in March of 2022, I got curious and slightly ambitious and searched a little harder and discovered that my good friend Mike Manning died in February of 2011. He was 48, a little more than a month shy of 49. Lung cancer, if I read the death notice correctly, which reminded me that, oh yeah, Mike smoked in college. Was apologetic about it, knew it wasn’t a good idea, but, well, that was something he did. I suggested he quit, but I never had it in me to berate him about it.
So Mike’s 60th birthday arrived today without Mike. Same as had been the case for his 50th. I still thought about him every March 13th, how his age retook the lead on my age. I guess I caught and passed him somewhere back there. I really would have preferred not to.
The last time I heard from Mike was after USF had climbed to No. 2 in the college football rankings in the fall of 2007. It was in an e-mail in response to one I sent him full of amazement that our Bulls were stampeding. USF didn’t have a football team when we were there. Mike wasn’t much of a sports fan, but he lived outside Atlanta. Georgia’s into college football, I figured, so Mike must have stumbled across this data point. We could bond anew, laughing at the absurdity that our heretofore obscure alma mater was listed behind only Ohio State and ahead of everybody else. It would give us an excuse to catch up. Except Mike’s e-mail on the subject was of the “been busy” variety. Not rude, but not looking to talk Bulls football or anything else. “I haven’t had much time for news from home lately” is the line that stays with me. I let it go. I let him go. Not much later, he’d be gone.
Still with me, at least, are all the bits and pieces that added up to one of the best friendships I was ever a part of, even if it did lapse. Also still with me: one final greeting card. It was from Mike to me, April of 2007. The picture on the front is of a few dozen pencils of many colors. The envelope it’s been in for fifteen years is yellow. Not only did I save it, I’ve kept it in a small pile of books and notepads that have sat next to my bed for ages. I’m not quite sure why it, among countless pieces of paper, earned its specific pluckable place. I don’t have any other cards in that particular pile. When I learned of Mike Manning’s passing, I knew exactly where to lay my hands on it and read it again.
Hey Greg —
So, it’s opening week for baseball — GO METS! Thanks so much for the b-day card & sorry for the long response pauses. I feel like I’m always working & traveling — maybe because I am. I was working in EU for a couple of weeks a couple of months ago. How about you — how’s consulting & writing going? How’s Stephanie doing? Maria is great & so is Charlie — who just turned 17! Can you believe my nephew Franco (altar boy @ my wedding) is a month away from being a dad…and his sister Michelle is about to get married? I chose this card as a reminder of all the times I could have written colorful notes to you!
I am six weeks away from completing my four-year theology class. Maybe then I’ll have time. No matter what, I would love to see you guys next time I’m there — maybe summer in DC & Boston until then. Thaw out, enjoy the spring air in Shea Stadium.
Always know we think and talk about you all when we are out and about doing our routines! See you soon…
Your friend,
Mike
He had me at GO METS! He had me long before that.
by Greg Prince on 10 March 2022 6:02 pm “Number Twenty Twenty-Two!”
“I’m Twenty Twenty-Two.”
“Your order is ready.”
“What’s this supposed to be?”
“It’s the baseball you ordered.”
“I asked for it by March 31. You made me wait an extra week. I suppose I should be happy you didn’t make me wait a week or more beyond that!”
“It’s the baseball you ordered.”
“Hell, I suppose I should be grateful you bothered to make it full-size.”
“It’s the baseball you ordered.”
“You apparently screwed around all winter before getting it ready.”
“It’s the baseball you ordered.”
“Do I smell universal DH? Because I have serious trouble digesting that.”
“It’s the baseball you ordered.”
“And it has these extra playoff teams I specifically mentioned I’m allergic to.”
“It’s the baseball you ordered.”
“Does it at least come without the seven-inning doubleheaders and unearned runners in extra innings? I swear I still have a bad taste in my mouth from the last time I waited longer than I should have. No, I don’t see it. Like you taking out what shouldn’t have been included in the first place constitutes some kind of bonus.”
“It’s the baseball you ordered.”
“What the…uniform advertising? Well, that’s just gross someone would even think to put that on there.”
“Look, pal, you want the baseball or not?”
“Of course. Gimme.”
 The Lockout apparently couldn’t end until the latest episode of National League Town took MLB to task. You can listen to Jeff Hysen and me kvetch effectively here.
by Greg Prince on 8 March 2022 7:32 pm When last I dwelled on the Brooklyn Nets in this space, I was crushed by their seventh-game playoff loss in overtime to the eventual NBA champion Milwaukee Bucks. Had they beaten the Bucks, they surely (I’m sure) would have beaten the Hawks in the Eastern Conference finals, and then they would have sat four wins from the crown that has eluded them since they played with a red, white and blue ball. Given how close the Nets seemed to come to ultimate glory last spring, this season loomed as prelude to reaching the heretofore unreachable star this spring.
And, for a while, it was. The Big Three even played together two or three times, I think. But de facto MVP Kevin Durant missed a chunk of the schedule with a sprained knee; and Kyrie Irving couldn’t be persuaded a vaccination against COVID-19 was something he should take for his (and the team’s) own Barclays Center good; and James Harden suddenly remembered how much he really wanted to play in Philadelphia; and all kinds of other mishegas that can derail a season that once looked so promising oozed onto the hardwood. At this moment, the Nets — who led their conference for a spell and whose composition implied the 82 games on their 2021-22 agenda constituted a mere formality — are hardly a sure thing for a playoff spot.
I’m not crushed. If anything, I’m invigorated. Not by the results, which have been a letdown, but I’m invigorated that several nights a week I have the Brooklyn Nets playing basketball, with multiple storylines overlapping and an evolving cast of characters introducing and reintroducing itself. I have a team I root for. I haven’t given up on their potentially going far. Given all the mishegas, I don’t really believe they will, but I’ll take what there is to be had from my favorite currently active team.
What I’ve rediscovered in this season of general Nets discontent is I’m content to keep company with them. When they win, I’m happy. When they lose, I’m less so, but it mostly passes. As they drop in the standings…well, stop doing that, Nets. But if you can’t, I’ll try to be understanding. Sometimes I slam the remote into the couch cushions. I’m not that understanding.
I’m processing the Nets this way in the shadow of baseball’s ongoing hiccupping negotiations. Nothing to be content or invigorated about there. Nobody talks for weeks on end, then there’s a flurry of noise, then nothing. Hopes rise modestly only to be dashed instantly. Wrapping my head around individual issues — beyond the overriding reality that the owners locked the players out and would like to squeeze their union tighter and tighter — doesn’t strike me as a productive use of my gray matter. Yet I have managed to absorb the desire by the party doing the locking out to host 14 teams in the MLB postseason; and reports that the party being locked out might agree to bloat the postseason if it wins them a more substantial increase in the CBT, an acronym I’m disappointed I’ve bothered to learn.
Fourteen teams in the postseason, with twelve teams in the postseason as the fallback position. Thirty teams continue to operate, or would if operations were underway as they usually are come March, so it’s not like the addition of postseason teams is commensurate with overall expansion plans. No, rather it’s been determined that the postseason is where the real baseball action is, and the owners (and probably the players, if they can make it work for them) want more action, which is to say more postseason revenue, which is to say stacks of money are blocking the entrance to a ballpark near you.
More playoffs! More money! We’ll let you know when you can pay us for the privilege.
Like you, I love when the Mets make the playoffs. I loved it when they were one of four teams in one of two LCSes, one of eight teams in four LDSes, one of ten teams to qualify for October, even when they were merely one of four teams playing in one of two Wild Card Games with no promise there’d be any Mets games beyond it (there weren’t). Nine times the Mets have gone to the playoffs, and nine times I’ve gone to the moon before the first pitch has been thrown. The stakes are elevated, the excitement is amplified, the thrill is present for however long Metropolitan participation lasts. Mentally, I’m wearing a tux when the Mets are in the playoffs.
Yet while my annual goal as a fan is to experience my team winning a World Series, it’s not why I’m a fan. It would be great. It would be greater than great. Having had the tingle of a last out of a World Series captured by the New York Mets race through me twice, I know how it feels. I’d love to feel it again. I’d love all of us to feel it, especially those among us who weren’t around in 1969 and/or 1986.
But winning it all isn’t what it’s all about. It can’t be. It’s impossible. And it misses the point. The point is the season. The point is the company we keep with the season. The storylines. The cast of characters. The joy that comes from the mundane. The days and nights with the Mets. Pulling for positive outcomes on a pitch-by-pitch, batter-by-batter, game-by-game basis. Finding a way to be certain the next pitch, the next batter, the next game will give us what this one didn’t if it didn’t give us the preferred outcome. Never abandoning ship altogether because, win or lose, a baseball season is tantamount to 162 party cruises. Some tours of the harbor wind up a little more sullen than the others, but they were all worth their salt the second we climbed aboard.
Metaphors are running as wild here as the ’85 Cardinals on artificial turf. The point for which I’m groping is I care deeply about the Mets winning a lot and winning as much as there is to be won. But it’s not all I care about when it comes to the Mets. The regular season is the trophy. That’s the hunk of metal we all yearn to lay our hands on and grip for six months. Should our team be marvelous enough to extend our common commitment into a seventh month, huzzah! If our boys can’t do it, we’ll gather our recriminations and hunker down in hopes of moving up next year. I can deal with angling for a division title or one of two Wild Cards. I don’t need to have extra slots dangled before me as if the only credo a fan adheres to is October or Bust. It’s never October or Bust from the perspective of March.
OK, now and then, it feels like October or Bust, but those are rare and special intervals when you know your team is really, really good. Yet there are still no guarantees. Most seasons, it’s take your journey and earn your tourney, and even if you don’t get the payoff you anticipated, at least you can claim the journey. The Nets work on a different calendar, but they’ve reminded me the journey is the primary reward for a fan and the destination is inevitably up for grabs — and that’s in a league where sixteen teams make the playoffs.
The baseball season is not the appetizer for the postseason. The baseball season is the main course. If you’re good, you get dessert. I can live with that arrangement. I’ve lived with it forever. Baseball has lived with it forever. It’s plenty filling.
by Greg Prince on 4 March 2022 2:22 pm The year is 1970. Or it should be. That was the plan as we approached the third installment of our OF-3B/3B-OF series. We spent one segment focused mainly on 1962, because you can’t begin to understand the Mets’ signature position shuttle without delving into the start of something absurd; and we spent the next segment traipsing across the rest of the Sixties, even extending a toe over the decade line to recognize the fallout from miscasting young outfielders as third basemen. Once we saw what became of ex-Met Jim Hickman and ex-Met Amos Otis (All-Star berths as outfielders), it felt safe to move ahead in time.
Yet we can’t leave the 1960s just yet, because the Mets OF-3B/3B-OF paradigm isn’t whole without a detour into a variation on the form, as if the form of continuing playing players out of position required varying. Within the OF-3B/3B-OF universe we’ve explored once, twice, now about to be thrice, there is a hardy strain of versatility it wouldn’t occur to a person exists: the C-3B-OF. The Mets have used a dozen of them.
Mind you, unlike the conversion of third basemen to the outfield or outfielders to third base, most of the alternative deployment of catchers by the Mets has been anecdotal, maybe accidental. Not everybody who has caught for the Mets has been a catcher by trade. For all their attempts to twist outfielders into third basemen and third basemen into outfielders, pretzeling someone who played a lot of both and a little of the other and directing him to crouch behind the plate hasn’t been something the Mets specifically planned on much, save for conceptually foreseeable contingencies.
One night in Los Angeles, however, several seasons before the Sixties were done, the Mets went there — albeit for an unforeseeable contingency. Hence, for a little while longer, the year is not yet 1970.
***You don’t carry one in the trunk of your bullpen cart, even if the term implies you wouldn’t want to be caught by the side of the foul line without one. You carry one on your roster on the off chance you will be caught short. You don’t primarily identify one for what he will be should you need him to be it, because he has other things to be the rest of the time. He may never get to be that thing. You mostly hope he won’t. Maybe you hope a little he will, because curiosity can’t help but get the best of you when the phrase “emergency catcher” is tossed around.
Curiosity, unintended as it was, got the best of the Mets on July 27, 1967, when they had to turn to Tommie Reynolds to catch. Most every opponent got the best of the Mets in those days, so why not curiosity?
Tommie Reynolds, not considered a catcher as late as July 26, 1967, became the epitome of a Mets emergency catcher the very next night because, although the Mets were carrying three catchers on their 25-man roster, none was available to catch from the eighth inning forward at Dodger Stadium. To borrow a phrase from what was then the future, that’s so Mets. By 1967, five years had passed since the 1962 Mets went into the history books as the one, the only, the Original Mets who landed at 40-120 on merit, verve and panache. The Polo Grounds hadn’t stood since April of 1964. It had been just over two years since Casey Stengel presided definitively over the double-edged Amazin’ nature of the Metropolitan Baseball Club of New York. And rookie Tom Seaver, the leading edge of the narrative-altering professionalism that would soon take hold in Flushing, was already a 10-game winner in the major leagues. Yet, even with so much of what defined the Mets as the ditziest franchise ever known receding into their rearview mirror, the Mets were still very much capable on any given evening of being so Mets.
July 27, 1967, was one of those evenings.
“The New York Mets have lost 603 games in their turbulent six-year career,” Joe Durso wrote in the Times after the 7-6 loss of July 27, “but No. 603 may live longest in Met annals and Wes Westrum’s memory.”
***Annals have a funny way of expunging information or at least depositing it in a storage locker, so for the benefit of those who’ve forgotten or never heard, Wes Westrum was managing the Mets’ Friday night contest of 7/27/67 versus the Dodgers aggressively if not outlandishly. In the top of the seventh, with two out, a runner on first and the Mets trailing longtime tormentor Don Drysdale, 3-2, starting catcher John Sullivan singled. To enhance the threat the Mets were building, Westrum pinch-ran for Sullivan at first with Jerry Grote, a catcher for a catcher. Westrum, an old catcher himself, then went to his third catcher, Greg Goossen, to pinch-hit for reliever Danny Frisella, who had just made his major league debut. It was a perfectly reasonable move even if it didn’t work out…which it didn’t once Goossen — who was 21 with a chance to be 30 only nine years later — took called strike three.
Goossen left the game. Sullivan was out of the game. Grote was the new catcher. Grote was the Mets’ catcher most of the time. Like third base, catcher had been a difficult position for the Mets to fill since ’62, but 24-year-old Grote represented a Seaverean harbinger regarding the talent and determination that would eventually transform expectations at Shea. The Mets outright stole him from the Astros in advance of the 1966 season, sending pitcher Tom Parsons to Houston on the heels of a 1-10 campaign (which encompassed one more win than Parsons ever notched as an Astro). Grote didn’t yet hit much, but he began to harness his defensive gifts in New York and provide the Mets with the stability they’d lacked behind the plate from about the minute the Mets drafted Hobie Landrith with their very first expansion pick. Landrith’s Met legacy was twofold: Hobie was the catcher to whom Stengel alluded in his remark about the necessity to have a catcher in place lest the team find itself facilitating passed balls; and Hobie wound up designated as the “player to be named later” once the Mets had to compensate the Orioles for the acquisition of M.E.T. himself, Marvin Eugene Throneberry (whereas Throneberry was almost immediately named Marvelous Marv).
Hobie Landrith, Choo Choo Coleman and Chris Cannizzaro headlined the cast of a dozen-plus receivers Stengel and Westrum employed between 1962 and 1965. Some were better than others at preventing passed balls. None truly excelled at multiple aspects of the game. Well, Yogi Berra did, but that had been in his past life, the one that stretched from 1946 to 1963 in the Bronx, the one he thought he was through with once he removed his mask and chest protector; turned his cap around; and signed on to manage the Yankees in 1964. He won a pennant, yet got fired anyway, finding refuge in Flushing soon after. Berra came to the Mets to aid the former skipper who held him in the highest of esteem. “My assistant manager,” Casey labeled Yogi when Yogi was in the process of winning three MVPs, almost too many World Series rings to count and “a place in Stengel’s affections that no other ballplayer ever quite matched,” per Durso’s 1967 biography Casey: The Life and Legend of Charles Dillon Stengel. “I never play a game without my man in the lineup,” Stengel said of Berra when Berra caught.
 The spiritual godfather of Mets OF-3B-Cs, never mind that he was hired to mostly coach. Now Berra — whose playing career included 262 games in the outfield and one at third base (on Closing Day of the 1954 season, which was also the last time the Philadelphia Athletics ever took the field; you could look it up) — was set to coach. Mostly coach. Maybe catch. As if the public relations benefit of grabbing recently dismissed and eternally lovable Yogi Berra from the coldhearted Yankees wasn’t enough to further boost the Mets’ image — grabbing recently dismissed and eternally lovable Casey Stengel from the coldhearted Yankees is what put the Mets on the PR map in the first place — they brought into their fold another Cooperstown-bound character ahead of the 1965 season, all-time winningest lefty Warren Spahn. The imagination ran wild at the thought of the heretofore helpless Mets trotting out an immortal battery in their fourth season, never mind that Spahn at 43 and Berra at 39 weren’t exactly jibing with the Youth of America movement Stengel liked to herald.
Spahn was going to pitch and coach, in that order. Yogi came to the Mets to coach and maybe…maybe…catch. “Put him out there,” the thinking went in St. Petersburg, per Phil Pepe’s accounting in 1974’s The Wit and Wisdom of Yogi Berra. “He couldn’t hurt the Mets.” And, indeed, “Yogi gave it everything he had. He trimmed down, got in shape, and went through a tortuous spring training.” The season opened with Spahn in the rotation and Berra assisting Stengel as hitting instructor and first base coach. That was April. In May, with none among the Mets’ catching corps in what you’d call a hitting groove, Yogi was coaxed to strap on his gear again. He caught a pair of games shortly before his 40th birthday. One was a 2-1 routegoing victory for Al Jackson in which Berra recorded 12 putouts (11 on Ks, one on a play at the plate). He even singled twice. But it was less a comeback than a hill of beans, and by the time to blow out those forty candles rolled around on May 12, 1965, Yogi was once more a full-time coach. When it came to catching for the Mets, Berra wasn’t built for the long haul.
Grote was developing into a different story. He had talent. He had a temper, too. You might love his skills, but lovability wasn’t about to show up on his scouting report. “Orneriness,” is what Art Shamsky labeled as the catcher’s defining character trait in After the Miracle: The Lasting Brotherhood of the ’69 Mets, the 2019 book he wrote with Erik Sherman. “Grote was a bitch,” Cleon Jones affirmed in the same volume, at least when it came to preparing for and playing the game. But if the players were getting together with their wives and kids? The Grote who took part in those affairs was a totally different Grote in the left fielder’s eyes. “The nicest guy you’d ever want to meet,” according to Cleon. “He was gentle.” Jerry Koosman, who regularly shared rides to work with Grote (not to mention a notable World Series-winning embrace), agreed: “He’d be as nice as could be until the ballpark came into sight. Then he really changed personalities. He’d get the red ass.” Or as one reporter of the era pegged the catcher, per Shamsky and Sherman, “Will Rogers never met Jerry Grote.”
But Bob Hendley, one of his 1967 veteran batterymates, reflected decades after the fact for author Bill Ryczek that despite his youth and less than lengthy fuse, Jerry came across as “an experienced, take-charge guy” and appreciated that “he had some fire about him”. By 1968, Grote would be an All-Star. By 1969, he’d be a world champion. Before he left Shea in 1977, he’d catch 1,176 games for the Mets, 350 more than anybody else ever has. In 1992, Seaver would stand before a sun-drenched throng in Cooperstown and group Grote with Johnny Bench and Carlton Fisk as the trio of catchers integral to the success that led to the occasion of Tom’s Hall of Fame induction. And, somewhere along the way, Jerry Grote — “about whom we could never figure out what or who he liked” as Shamsky described him some 50 years later — would tame the fire about him enough to make it manageable.
July 27, 1967, however, was not that evening.
***In the top of the eighth, with the Mets hoping to make up their one-run deficit, Grote got himself ejected. Jerry wasn’t batting. He wasn’t on base. He wasn’t even on-deck. But he did make his displeasure with home plate umpire Bill Jackowski apparent regarding both Jackowski’s judgment — Grote “was grunting and groaning about balls and strikes,” said Ed Sudol, who was working first base — and the umpire’s enforcement of warmup rules. Dodger reliever Ron Perranoski was granted a few extra pitches to loosen up after an unexpected call to duty, unexpected because Drysdale had to exit due to a baserunning mishap in the bottom of the seventh. To convey disdain for the latter, Grote didn’t let his tongue do the talking. He expressed himself instead with a throw. Grote’s throwing was world-class; Lou Brock swore Jerry was the catcher versus whom he found it toughest to steal. But in this case, sitting in the dugout, all Grote could throw was a towel, onto the field. That caught the attention of third base ump Harry Wendlestadt, who “came scampering in gleefully,” George Vecsey reported in Newsday, “holding up one finger on his right hand and five on his left, signifying that No. 15 had done the throwing.”
When you’ve drawn the ears and eyes of three men in a four-man umpiring crew, you’re stacking the odds against your staying in the game. Sure enough, Jackowski dismissed Jerry summarily. The Mets started the night with three catchers. They were down to none, with the game not quite finished. Those aren’t good odds, either.
Westrum, a scoop of vanilla to Stengel’s bottomless tutti-frutti sundae, at least had colorful instincts. “I thought of me or Yogi” to catch. Wes, a two-time All-Star in his New York Giant playing days, hadn’t caught since 1957, his first base coach Berra not since that 1965 cameo. Yogi, being Yogi, asked Sudol if he could catch the eighth and ninth despite not appearing on the Mets’ active roster.
“No chance,” Sudol answered Berra, according to Durso. “It takes 24 hours for you to get reactivated by the commissioner. If you do that, though, you can catch all nine innings.” Sudol was the umpire behind home plate when the Mets played 23 innings in the second game of a doubleheader in 1964 and would go on to officiate similarly extensive Met affairs in ’68 and ’74, so perhaps Ed had an inkling that more than a couple of frames lay ahead.
Sure enough, the Mets rallied in the eighth, scoring three times to take a 5-3 lead. Whether they were in a righteous mood to wreak revenge because Jackowski left them without a legitimate catcher or they simply took advantage of a lukewarm Perranoski is not certain. What became clear as the top of the eighth unfolded was who would be taking Grote’s place. It would be Reynolds, who batted in Jerry’s spot (he was intentionally walked). Reynolds was neither in the starting lineup nor begin the inning on the Mets’ bench. He was in the bullpen, warming up pitchers.
 A happy Grote, not yet in game mode. But don’t take that as an occupational obligation. Tommie, 25, was an outfielder by trade but, being a good team man, would help out now and then by crouching down as needed and offering his glove as a handy target. “I warm up pitchers sometimes,” he clarified, “but I never caught behind the bat before.” Other eligible Mets had, if not lately. Tommy Davis as a junior in high school. Ed Kranepool as a senior in high school. Ron Swoboda’s experience was limited to limited to catching a round of BP in Puerto Rican winter ball once, but that didn’t stop him from snapping on a shinguard. They all stirred from the bench and volunteered to go behind the plate. Westrum, however, opted to call out for help.
“The phone rang in the bullpen,” Reynolds said. “They said Grote was out of the game. They called me in.”
***Westrum tutored his emergency catcher on the fly. Reynolds: “He told me not to look at the bat. He said to just pretend I was out in the bullpen.” Westrum: “He called all the pitches. He even called for a pitchout. Sure, he knew the signals. He’s been around baseball.” And he’d be around this game for more than the eighth and ninth. The Dodgers took a 6-5 lead in the home eighth (with a stolen base part of their attack), but the Mets tied the score in the visitors’ ninth. The clubs were off to extras, where the game would end for the Mets as it was destined to end: on a passed ball charged to Tommie Reynolds.
Actually, it wasn’t that simple, at least from the Mets’ viewpoint. Bob Bailey was batting in the bottom of the eleventh with runners on first and third and one out. Bailey, by Reynolds’s reckoning, foul-tipped a ball off of Tommie’s mitt and out of play. The umpire saw it differently. So, not surprisingly, did the batter.
Jackowski: “The batter swung right over the ball.”
Bailey: “It never hit my bat.”
Reynolds” “It hit the bat, then it hit the glove.”
Reynolds must have been pretty sure, given that when the ball trickled away, he made no move to chase it down. It’s worth noting Bailey didn’t motion for the runner at third, Nate Oliver, to start running, indicating perhaps that he knew it did hit his bat. Jackowski, though, would only tell the new catcher, “I didn’t say it was a foul tip.” Suddenly Reynolds was in pursuit of the ball and Oliver was on his way home.
Jack Fisher, usually a starting pitcher, took the loss after following five of his fellow Met hurlers to the mound (Reynolds caught three different pitchers in all). Jerry Grote wound up fined a hundred bucks for leaving Westrum high and dry. Plus he was “sternly” lectured via long-distance call by club president Bing Devine. “I have nothing to say,” was Grote’s postgame reaction. “Nothing at all.” Bill Jackowski’s night finished with the Mets screaming at him and reporters questioning him. “Lay off me, fellas,” he pleaded to the press. “It’s been a tough four hours.”
 Tom(mie) already had the helmet. All he had to do was flip it around and get behind the bat. And Tommie Reynolds? For four innings of major league catching experience, he received his stripes — “I can’t think of anything tougher to try in baseball”; he received a pain somewhere south of his rear end — “my legs are killing me”; and, for our purposes, he received membership in a secret society within a a slightly less secret society within a society that’s never been much of a secret inside Met circles. When Tommie Reynolds — often spelled Tommy in the papers, portrayed (amid apparently murky circumstances) by Topps as Tom — entered the game of July 27, 1967, to catch, he became only the second Met ever to have played outfield and third base and catcher.
On Opening Day, Reynolds, a Rule 5 selectee from the Kansas City A’s during the preceding offseason, pinch-ran for Tommy Davis and took his spot in left field. Before April was over, Westrum gave him a whirl at third, moving Tommie in from right to give Ken Boyer a few innings off. At that point, Reynolds had become the 31st third baseman in Mets history and the franchise’s eleventh OF-3B/3B-OF. In early May, Westrum started him at third to provide a 1-for-31 Boyer a breather. Tommie caught a pair of popups and “got a hit,” Larry Fox reported in the News, “which could prolong his tour at third another day” (it didn’t). When Grote inadvertently paved the way for his unplanned cameo behind the pate, Reynolds was thrust into becoming the second Met you could call an OF-3B-C.
Yes, there was one who preceded him, and yes there’d be more than a few after him…including one fellow whose occasionally testy company we’ve already shared quite a bit of in this essay. We’ll get back to him down the road a piece. Before we do, though, let’s meet the OF-3B-C/3B-OF-C who started it all.
***John Stephenson, like Landrith and Goossen, can flash a fairly recognizable calling card to the history-conscious Mets fan. You probably thought some paraphrased version of “…you’ll have a lot of passed balls…” as soon as you saw Hobie Landrith’s name and you likely thought “…and in ten years has a chance to be thirty” at the sight of Goossen’s. There’s a decent chance you recognized Tommie Reynolds as the Met emergency catcher among Met emergency catchers. Stephenson, I imagine (or hope), struck a chord with you as well. John Stephenson, sometimes known as Johnny, pinch-hit with two outs and nobody on in the bottom of the ninth on June 21, 1964. It was the first game of a Father’s Day doubleheader versus the Phillies and it was likely as wrong a moment as has ever existed to ask a rookie to get on base. No Met had gotten on base for the first eight-and-two-third innings and Stephenson wasn’t about to change that pattern.
“Casey said, ‘Johnny go up there and get a base hit for us,’” is how Mets reliever Bill Wakefield remembered it for Ryczek. “John kind of looked at me and rolled his eyes, as if to say, ‘I’m not sure what I’m supposed to do in this situation.’” No wonder. Stephenson, in his first major league season, was batting .074 as a bench player. The opposing pitcher was Jim Bunning, the Mets’ daddy that Father’s Day, throwing merely a perfect game at Shea Stadium. Thus, if you know Johnny Stephenson for anything, it’s for making the final out of a most historic Mets defeat. If you’d like to know anything else, it’s that after playing some third base and outfield in 1964, he reverted to his natural position of catcher for the rest of his big league days, mostly putting his other positions behind him. On June 19, 1965, after his recall from Triple-A Buffalo, Stephenson went behind the plate for the first time in the majors, catching the final three innings of the Mets’ 2-1 loss to the Giants.
Stephenson, who played until 1973 and would go on to manage and coach in the Mets’ system from the mid-1990s to the early 2000s, had always been a catcher more than he’d been anything else. Playing multiple positions became baked into his skill set once he broke a finger; not wanting to be sidelined, he inserted outfielding into his repertoire and kept working his way up the Met chain. As the lefty-swinging John aspired to make the big club in the Spring of ’64, Dick Young noted in the Daily News that the kid had the inside track on the third catcher’s slot, behind Jesse Gonder and Hawk Taylor, “because he can play center as well”. (Pre-Tommie Agee, the Mets were forever in the market for center field solutions.)
The third base segment of his Met career was born, as was much with the Mets in the early years, of desperation. In an April loss at Pittsburgh, Stengel burned through a plethora of pinch-hitters to tie the game late, compelling the manger to quickly “remake the infield,” in Young’s words, with “John Stephenson, a catcher-outfielder, given a crack at third.” The remake crumbled, in part, because “Stephenson fluffed [Manny] Mota’s tough bunt,” which set up the losing run. Young, however, cut the youngster a break, noting John had “worked out at third and looked good enough to get a try there. The bunt he tried to barehand was tough to make a play on.”
But Stephenson was first and foremost a catcher. He caught Nolan Ryan in the young fireballer’s major league debut as a Met and he caught Nolan Ryan when Ryan was fanning batters at a ferocious rate for the Angels. (Of Ryan’s major league record 5,714 strikeouts, Stephenson handled 212 of them.) Everybody who can claim time as a Mets third baseman, Mets outfielder and Mets catcher, with the glaring exception of Tommie Reynolds, would have self-identified as a catcher all of, most of, or little of his respective MLB career, even if it was only in a “you might make yourself more useful if you learned to catch” utilityman role or the “stay ready just in case” realm of emergency catcherdom. The 3B-OF/OF-3B detours during their Met stays were just that. The Mets needed somebody to fill in here and/or there. Sometimes it was a catcher. Sometimes it was at third base. Sometimes it was in the outfield.
 You could call him John. You could call him Johnny. You could call him a C-OF-3B, too. The times when it was most prevalent postdated the Met tenures of Stephenson and Reynolds, both of whom were gone from Shea well before 1969. You might even say there was a golden age for the triad of Met versatility. Let us, then, in the next installment of OF-3B/OF-3B, visit the decade when the Mets attempted, more than at any other time in their first sixty years, to triple down on certain players’ ability or willingness to play wherever asked…when that was only part of the positional paradigm that continued to plague/propel the Mets.
We’ll dive deep into the 1970s, and a little into the 1980s.
METS WHO PLAYED THIRD, PLAYED OUTFIELD AND CAUGHT
JOHNNY STEPHENSON
Mets Debut as 3B: April 26, 1964; 14 G as a Mets 3B
Mets Debut as LF: May 16, 1964; 11 G as a Mets OF
Mets Debut as C: June 19, 1965; 98 G as a Mets C
TOMMIE REYNOLDS
Mets Debut as LF: April 11, 1967; 72 G as a Mets OF
Mets Debut as 3B: April 29, 1967; 6 G as a Mets 3B
Mets Debut as C: July 27, 1967; 1 G as a Mets C
JERRY GROTE
Mets Debut as C: April 15, 1966; 1,176 G as a Mets C
Mets Debut as 3B: August 3, 1966; 18 G as a Mets 3B
Mets Debut as RF: July 12, 1972; 2 G as a Mets OF
JOHN STEARNS
Mets Debut as C: April 16, 1975; 698 G as a Mets C
Mets Debut as 3B: June 28, 1978; 29 G as a Mets 3B
Mets Debut as LF: August 18, 1979; 6 G as a Mets OF
ALEX TREVIÑO
Mets Debut as C: September 11, 1978; 172 G as a Mets C
Mets Debut as 3B: October 1, 1978; 43 G as a Mets 3B
Mets Debut as LF: September 16, 1981 (Game 2); 2 G as a Mets OF
CLINT HURDLE
Mets Debut as 3B: September 12, 1983; 9 G as a Mets 3B
Mets Debut as RF: October 2, 1983 (Game 2); 11 G as a Mets OF
Mets Debut as C: April 24, 1985; 17 G as a Mets C
GARY CARTER
Mets Debut as C: April 9, 1985; 566 G as a Mets C
Mets Debut as RF: June 26, 1985; 6 G as a Mets OF
Mets Debut as 3B: July 22, 1986; 2 G as a Mets 3B
MACKEY SASSER
Mets Debut as C: April 10, 1988; 261 G as a Mets C
Mets Debut as RF: April 19, 1988; 31 G as a Mets OF
Mets Debut as 3B: May 11, 1988; 2 G as a Mets 3B
JEFF McKNIGHT
Mets Debut as 3B: June 10, 1989; 13 G as a Mets 3B
Mets Debut as RF: September 27, 1992; 1 G as a Mets OF
Mets Debut as C: April 21, 1993; 1 G as a Mets C
JIM TATUM
Mets Debut as C: April 6, 1998; 4 G as a Mets C
Mets Debut as LF: April 27, 1998; 4 G as a Mets OF
Mets Debut as 3B: May 16, 1998; 3 G as a Mets 3B
MIKE KINKADE
Mets Debut as 3B: September 8, 1998; 4 G as a Mets 3B
Mets Debut as LF: April 6, 1999; 17 G as a Mets OF
Mets Debut as C: April 15, 1999; 1 G as a Mets C
ELI MARRERO
Mets Debut as CF: June 11, 2006; 7 G as a Mets OF
Mets Debut as 3B: July 2, 2006; 1 G as a Mets 3B
Mets Debut as C: July 8, 2006 (Game 2); 2 G as a Mets C
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