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Faith and Fear in Flushing made its debut on Feb. 16, 2005, the brainchild of two longtime friends and lifelong Met fans.
Greg Prince discovered the Mets when he was 6, during the magical summer of 1969. He is a Long Island-based writer, editor and communications consultant. Contact him here.
Jason Fry is a Brooklyn writer whose first memories include his mom leaping up and down cheering for Rusty Staub. Check out his other writing here.
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by Greg Prince on 9 February 2022 11:34 am Look at Dan Napoleon
And you might notice
The last name’s the first name
Just like Amos Otis
Like Ed Charles, Frank Thomas
Charlie Neal
Or Kevin Mitchell
But not Rod Kanehl
—Dick McCormack
On May 11, 1969, the New York Mets woke up in as good a situation as they’d ever enjoyed after 28 games: 13-15, a mark they’d reached previously only in 1963, good for third place in the newly carved National League East. Tom Seaver had just beaten the Astros, 3-1, to raise his record to 4-2 and lower his ERA to 2.08. Cleon Jones, having smacked his fifth homer of the young season, lifted his batting average to .402. Historically speaking, even without the benefit of 1969 hindsight soon to come, things were unquestionably looking up.
Yet to Red Foley in the Daily News, not much had changed since 1962. In that Sunday morning’s edition, Foley dwelled on the one constant that hadn’t budged since the Mets’ founding. They were still sorting through third basemen. “For the Mets, who’ve gone from A to Z trying to populate it,” Foley wrote, “third base has been a headache, the kind for which the boys at Excedrin don’t even have a number.”
If you watched enough television in the late 1960s, you got the reference. If you’d watched the Mets during their first decade, you understood the malady Foley was diagnosing. “If there’s a bromide for this lingering cranial pain,” Red elaborated, “you can bet your aspirin that managers Casey Stengel, Wes Westrum and Gil Hodges haven’t heard of it. They’ve tried a total of 40 brands and haven’t gotten to first base, let alone third, in the antidote league.”
Foley went on to giddily list all of the remedies that had purportedly failed, from “that memorable spring evening in St. Louis, when Don Zimmer became the foundation sire for the lengthening line of Met third basemen,” through all those “third basemen who conjure thoughts of those past days and nights when the Mets celebrated rainouts as moral victories” and up to the quartet that had thus far attempted to man third in ’69. “Now,” Foley concluded without giving an inch to the possibility that things maybe were turning a corner, “seven years and 1,163 games after Zim launched the hot corner odyssey, Rusty Garrett, Ed Charles, Amos Otis and Kevin Collins are helping extend the string that for too many has stretched from here to oblivion.”
Forty third basemen in just over seven seasons? Yikes! That sounds like a lot! But was it? Or was it just one of those Met myths that took hold in the earliest days and couldn’t be shaken? Thanks to Baseball-Reference, we can do some comparison shopping. Between 1962 and 1968, spanning all those tenth- and ninth-place finishes, here are how many third basemen each National League franchise employed.
Cubs: 14
Cardinals: 14
Giants: 16
Reds: 17
Pirates: 17
Phillies: 21
Braves: 22
Astros: 27
Dodgers: 27
Mets: 39…with 1969 rookie “Rusty” Garrett (also known as Red, more commonly as Wayne) making it 40
So yeah, the Mets used a lot of third basemen. Certainly a lot more than everybody else. A few amid those growing-pains campaigns were bound to wander in from the outfield.
***The first time Casey Stengel gave up on Don Zimmer as his Original third baseman, benching him for six of eight games in late April and early May of 1962, the Ol’ Perfesser turned to Felix Mantilla to start, whether he had conviction about the former Milwaukee Brave or not. Mantilla recalled once having his starting status determined by whether he or Rod Kanehl looked better catching pregame popups hit to them by coach Solly Hemus. “Stengel,” George Vecsey wrote in 1970’s rags-to-riches tale Joy in Mudville, “seemed to have less patience with Mantilla than any other player, once benching him after he made four hits in a game.”
Maybe Casey missed the best the Mets’ first Felix had to offer. According to Mantilla, the legend of the manager maybe not keeping both eyes on every game was more than myth. “People used to ask me if Casey Stengel used to go sleep in the dugout,” the 1961 expansion draftee told journalist Danny Torres in 2019, “and I said that was the truth.” One day versus the Phillies at the Polo Grounds, Mantilla swore innings one through seven went blank on Casey’s scorecard: “The guy was taking a big-time snooze […] God’s truth.”
It’s probably also true that anyone paid to watch the 1962 Mets every night and day might need to briefly escape to dreamland now and then.
However groggily decisions might have been made sometimes, Casey didn’t fully shut his eyes on what Felix — a man of “lusty good humor” in Vecsey’s estimation — could give him. After the Mets altogether gave up on Zimmer by trading him for Cliff Cook; after Stengel gave up on Cliff Cook by replacing him at third with Frank Thomas; and after Stengel gave up on Thomas as a third baseman and sent Frank back to left field, the manager turned again to Felix Mantilla. Nine Mets in all played third base in 1962. Mantilla was as close to a regular occupant of the Hot Corner as the club could claim. He put in 95 games at third, starting 88 of them and gave the Mets 141 games of baseball in all. The Opening Night shortstop in St. Louis settled in at third as well could be expected, finishing with a solid batting average of .275 and rating sixth among third basemen in double plays turned. It’s an esoteric stat, but considering 120 games were lost, it has to represent a feather in the 1962 Mets’ cap.
At bat, Mantilla was “drilling line drives in every direction,” Vecsey wrote, “but his fielding was a problem. Mets fans liked to imitate him, crouching forward, then rocking back on their hells, waving their left hands casually at the imagined baseball. That was Mantilla playing a hard grounder.”
Perhaps Mantilla, the first Puerto-Rican Met (more than a decade before kids coming upon his name in book’s like Vecsey’s did a double-take and thought, “doesn’t he mean Felix Millan?”) could have found his third base groove and slowed the door already revolving at the position had his services been retained for 1963, but Felix’s strong bat represented enough of a trade chip to land three players from the Red Sox in December of ’62: Tracy Stallard, Al Moran and Pumpsie Green. Two, Moran and Green, were about to become Mets third basemen. But neither was sent to play the outfield. Here in the land of OF-3B/3B-OF, that disqualifies us from saying much more about them.
As we roll like a 38-hopper into the second part of our series on players maybe not playing the position for which they were best suited, we’ve already said more than we planned about Mantilla, who somehow never played outfield as a Met despite seeing 155 games’ worth of action between left, center and right as a Brave, a Red Sock and an Astro in a career that lasted until 1966. He earned a World Series ring for Milwaukee four years before becoming a Met and made the AL All-Star team three years after leaving the Mets. “Mantilla,” Lenny Shecter wrote in his own fond post-1969 look back at the newly crowned champs’ humble beginnings Once Upon the Polo Grounds, “told the world that leaving the Mets was like being ‘pardoned from the electric chair’. He also said that the Mets were the worst team he had ever played on,” professionally or otherwise.
“He may have been right,” Shecter allowed, “but one of the reasons they were so bad was the way Felix Mantilla played the infield.” And Shecter may have been right, but Mantilla, the second player the Mets ever sent up to bat, turned 87 last July. That one year in New York losing all those games certainly didn’t kill him. Perhaps it made him stronger.
Not much strengthened the Mets as they entered their second season, and the third base door continued to spin. Charlie Neal, the primary second baseman from ’62, was tabbed to open the franchise’s sophomore season at third. He didn’t last there or at the Polo Grounds (like Zimmer the year before, he was traded to Cincinnati). Ted Schreiber became the tenth third baseman in Mets history as the Mets were losing their 125th game ever — falling to 0-5 en route to starting 1963 0-8. Ted’s Met highlight would come at year’s end when he grounded into the double play that ended the final National League baseball game the Polo Grounds ever hosted. In between, he’d conclude, “Casey didn’t want me.”
Chico Fernandez, acquired from Milwaukee in May, gave third a brief whirl. Larry Burright put in one inning at third, though Burright admitted in an interview many years later that “I’d never played third base before,” but Casey asked him to, so he tried it (after which, Casey told him, “go pinch-hit for Snider,” despite Burright already being in the game). Moran, mostly a shortstop, had his 3B cameo in May, the same week Ron Hunt commenced to moonlight at third. Hunt’s bright future, however, was mainly at second.
***All of this brings us to the Met Stengel selected to try out at third base in June. He was discovered in the outfield, playing what he usually played. Yet once you’ve gone through 14 would-be third basemen in a little more than eight months of existence, you’re gonna seek solutions wherever they might be found.
When the Mets chose Jim Hickman in the expansion draft, he had just completed a six-season hitch in the Cardinal chain. From 1957 through 1961, he’d played nothing but the outfield. When he made his major league defensive debut on April 14, 1962, it was in center. Because Opening Night CF Richie Ashburn’s wheels had only so much tread left on them, it would be Hickman who would eventually emerge as the closest thing Stengel could call an everyday starting center fielder. By Baseball-Reference’s reckoning, at no point in the minors nor in the majors entering 1963 had Hickman played third base.
So why not try him there? What did the Mets have to lose? More games? Please. The Mets were 25-42 on June 19 when the OF was first shifted for a couple of frames to 3B. As for Hickman, he was still pretty young (27) and still pretty promising (13 home runs in 1962) if not yet fully formed. Jim led ’62 team with 96 strikeouts, too many of them of the called variety for his manager’s liking. “Oh, you can’t improve your average,” Stengel felt compelled to remind him via ditty (per Vecsey), “with your bat upon your shoulder.”
The Mets improving their record with Hickman upon third base became the idea of the month after the Tennessean tested out the left side of the infield during an in-season exhibition versus their top farm club. “I know some of our players were a little afraid they were going to be left in Buffalo,” Casey cracked about the trip to the shores of Lake Erie. The stopover wasn’t only about maintaining healthy minor league relations and stoking major leaguers’ anxieties. Dana Mozely reported for the Daily News that Hickman “handled everything that came near him flawlessly and revealed a super arm. Everything he threw was a swift strike.”
Mozely may have been breathless in his assessment, but Stengel was circumspect. “I’ll think it out,” Casey said. “I’ve got to try ways to get more long-distance hitting in our lineup. Putting Hickman at third might help. Of course, we don’t know yet how he’ll do when they put on the bat play.” Either “the bat play” has since gone out of style, or Stengel actually said “the bunt play” (time spent with a Newspapers.com subscription indicates Daily News typographers of the day would have fit right in with the 1963 Mets’ defense).
When Stengel became game, Hickman had little choice but to do the same. A stiff upper lip went hand-in-glove with where he was taking his leather. The center fielder from April and May, who detoured to left and right much of June, got his first start at third on July 7. A month later, after he’d produced the first cycle in Mets history, he answered in the affirmative when Newsday’s Stan Isaacs asked him if playing third base was making him a better hitter.
 Early Mets had to be on the lookout for someone sending them to play third. “Well,” Jim reasoned, “I have been hitting a lot better in the last couple of weeks. I like third base. It [doesn’t] seem like I get as tired as I do playing the outfield. What takes it out of me in the outfield isn’t the playing, but the running back and forth between innings.” Stengel more or less shook his head at his OF-3B’s thought process: “He wasn’t tired when he knocked in all those runs earlier in the year.” But the Ol’ Perfesser theorized that if Hickman learned to properly shift his feet in the batter’s box, “he can make a living here as a third baseman. We been looking for a third baseman who can hit .260 and knock in 75 runs.”
Roger Craig was looking for anybody at any position to get him a big hit, and two days after Jim singled, doubled, tripled and homered in support of Tracy Stallard, Hickman did his ace pitcher teammate a solid. Craig was riding an eighteen-game losing streak. Good-luck totems fans sent him didn’t help. Counterintuitively switching his uniform number to 13 didn’t help. What — or who — helped was third baseman Jim Hickman lofting a walkoff home run to deliver Craig from a nineteenth consecutive loss. No 3-20 pitcher was ever so happy.
“The first thing I had in mind,” Craig said, “was to make sure he touched home plate. I’d have tackled him to make him do it if I had to.”
Over time, you likely would have had to have tackled Jim Hickman to keep him at third base when the Mets were in the field. Despite his brave words to Isaacs, he wasn’t really cut out to play third, possibly because he was an outfielder. “There are often drawbacks to that type of scenario,” none other than Frank Thomas averred in 2005 when asked to remember his and Hickman’s attempts to convert from the outfield. The numbers Casey wanted out of Jim weren’t there in 1963, with a .229 average and 51 RBIs his final totals. No Met homered more (17), but no Met struck out more (120). Despite not being sent to third regularly until July, Jim made the sixth-most errors in the National League at the position (though, like Mantilla in ’62, he ranked among the league leaders in double plays turned by a third baseman, which perhaps will happen when you play for a team that allows more than its share of baserunners).
More than four decades after Jim Hickman gave third base his best shot, he remembered for Bill Ryczek in The Amazin’ Mets, 1962-1969 that “they stuck me over there and it was tough. Heck, I was half scared to death. I wasn’t a natural third baseman and I just didn’t know what to do over there.” By Spring Training of 1964, Frank Thomas was again being talked up in the papers for third base and Pumpsie Green was getting a long look of his own. Jim moved back to the outfield as the Mets moved into Shea Stadium, and except for occasionally filling in, was done as a third baseman. Before he’d be done as a Met, he’d pile up the most home runs and runs batted in in Mets history — 60 and 210, respectively, over the franchise’s first five seasons, preceding his trade to Los Angeles.
***Once Stengel became certain Hickman wasn’t his third baseman, somebody was going to have to be, and it was neither Thomas (stationed in left or sometimes at first until his trade to Philadelphia in August) nor Green (sent to Buffalo, never to return to New York). Hunt started Opening Night in Philly, but that was a temp job; he’d be back at second before the paint dried at Shea. Rod Kanehl was granted a few starts, but utility demanded Hot Rod stay ready to play anywhere. The answer came in a swap with the White Sox. The Mets sent Chico Fernandez to the South Side in exchange for Charley Smith. Charley didn’t have to convert, at least not by 1964. He’d been a shortstop in the Dodger system before shifting a few yards to his right. Smith had been playing primarily third in the majors since 1961, first for L.A., then Philadelphia, then the Pale Hose.
 Card-carrying Charley (or Charlie) Smith gave the Mets a fair shake at 3rd BASE. The man was a pro on a team often accused of being stocked with amateurs. In 1964, Charley socked twenty homers, the most by a Met since Thomas in ’62 (and the most until Tommie Agee in 1969). He also surpassed Hickman for the team strikeout lead and placed fourth in the NL in 3B errors. “Streaky” was how Vecsey described him, and it couldn’t have been surprising that, after hitting fewer homers and striking out even more (123 times) in ’65, Smith would be sent to his fifth club. Charley’s Met legacy, for our purposes, was Topps initiating him as a card-carrying member of the 3B-OF club in 1965. Charley played left field thirteen times in 1964; he played short in seventeen games. Maybe the Topps photographer dropped by Shea on one of those relatively rare LF instances and made sure to tell somebody back at the office that a “3rd BASE-OF” designation was in order. However it happened, Topps didn’t bother to print Smith’s first name in line with his preference. They had him as “Charlie” (then again, this is the same company that kept labeling Roberto Clemente “Bob”).
Smith was traded after the ’65 season with Al Jackson to the Cards for the quintessential “real” third baseman: Ken Boyer, barely a season removed from his MVP campaign for the ’64 Cardinals and with five Gold Gloves in his trophy case. Boyer, 34, was the essence of an accomplished veteran…which basically meant he was old, or at least baseball old. “Shopworn” was Vecsey’s descriptor. The Mets had gone the accomplished veteran route plenty since their founding. This is not to say Ken didn’t give the Mets an honorable year-and-a-half. In 1966, only Ron Santo made more assists among NL third basemen. Maybe the most valuable element Boyer gave the Mets was stability. For the first time, the Mets had a third baseman who finished in the top five in games played at the position…and for the first time, the Mets finished in a place above tenth.
The smattering of accomplished veterans the Mets brought in elevated the Mets to ninth place, but they weren’t long-term solutions. Neither, come to think of it, was the manager who steered them out of the basement. Wes Westrum had replaced Casey Stengel in the summer of ’65 after one of Casey’s 75-year-old hips gave out. Westrum went from interim to permanent to resigned in a little over two years. By the time Boyer was traded to the White Sox on July 22, 1967— and despite both Smith and Boyer having lent third base a hint of dependability for more than three seasons — the all-time meter on Met third basemen was up to 34. Before 1967 ended, by which time Salty Parker briefly replaced Westrum in the dugout and Gil Hodges could be heard driving up from Washington, the count had reached 38. Thirteen of those fellows had also seen outfield action as Mets.
The thirteenth among them would go down as the most misassigned Mets OF-3B yet…and probably ever.
***Time was to reveal that in 1969 the Mets had the exact right platoon to cover third base. They had a veteran, righty-swinging Ed Charles, acquired from the Kansas City Athletics in 1967, two months before Boyer was sent to Chicago. They had a freshman, lefty-batting Wayne Garrett, snatched from the Braves in the 1968 Rule 5 draft. Together, like pairs of Mets at half of the positions Hodges filled in depending on the arm with which the opposing club’s pitcher threw, it worked. The Glider and Red combined to function as a world championship third baseman.
Who’da thunk it? Probably not anybody who’d been watching the Mets for the seven seasons prior to Spring Training of 1969, not even the positive-thinking Hodges. Before it became clear Charles had a year of sheer poetry left in him and that 21-year-old Garrett might be more than prosaic in alternating with the 36-year-old, the Mets thought deeply of turning to another youngster to fill what was still considered their lingering hole.
Meet Amos Otis, the product of what could have gone down as one of the best moves the Mets ever made. On November 29, 1966, the Mets casually plucked young Otis, then a lad of 19, from the Red Sox farm system in the minor league draft. Much as the Orioles took Paul Blair from the Mets in the 1962 draft of first-year pros and then made the Mets regret the oversight while Blair piled up Gold Gloves and postseason appearances, the Mets could have filled the Red Sox with remorse.
In high school, Otis — who like Cleon Jones and Tommie Agee hailed from Mobile, Ala. — had played every position (“I was a jack-of-all-trades”), but primarily shortstop. For the Red Sox, he was tried at first, third, short along with the outfield. As a Met callup late in ’67, he’d get a fleeting glance at third, six days after Joe Moock got his. By 1968, at Triple-A Jacksonville, the Mets used Otis mostly as their center fielder. He flourished in all facets of his game, batting .286, swatting fifteen homers and stealing twenty-one bases.
By the spring of 1969, the Mets were committed to Agee as their center fielder. Agee endured a seasonlong slump in ’68, but Hodges believed in him, so much so that he vehemently disagreed with player personnel director Whitey Herzog’s brainstorm that Agee should move to right to clear space for Otis in center. “Jim McAndrew recalled that was the only time he ever saw Hodges and Herzog argue,” Mort Zachter noted in Gil Hodges: A Hall of Fame Life.
What Hodges believed about Otis, who’d earned All-Star accolades in the previous fall’s Florida Instructional League, was that the youngster could become the third baseman that would hush Red Foley and his army of skeptics. Not necessarily on board with the plan? Otis himself. When asked during Spring Training what was giving him trouble as he tried to learn third, this kid didn’t kid around: “Everything.” The player reasoned the Mets “made me an outfielder. They thought with my speed I’d be more of an asset in the outfield.” Then again, as Jack Lang pointed out in the Sporting News, Hodges was “up to his elbows in outfielders,” with Jones, Agee and Ron Swoboda each already penciled in as starters in March.
 Amos Otis with fellow Mobile major leaguers Tommie Aaron, Cleon Jones and Tommie Agee. If only the kid could have stayed in the Shea picture. Otis’s talent, minor league track record and assumed potential at more than one position attracted outside interest. The Braves dangled veteran catcher Joe Torre, a New Yorker with the kind of heavy bat the Mets were always lacking. Atlanta asked for a package of Nolan Ryan, Jerry Grote and Otis. GM Johnny Murphy demurred. “Otis,” he said, “is one of our untouchables.”
The response led to a bit of snickering that the Mets, whose 89-loss campaign in ’68 represented their high point to date, had untouchables — plural — but management sensed all that Youth of America the organization had been developing with a straight face since the days of Stengel was on the verge of paying off. And 1969 was about to prove them right.
But wrong about third baseman Amos Otis, at least when it came to what to do about him in the immediate future. Hodges carried the rookie north and started him three times in a row in April at third base. Dick Young snarked he was “the untouchable who finally became playable”. In what amounted to an abbreviated audition, Otis handled seven chances, made one errant throw to first, was credited with three assists…and then never again saw third base, except as an infrequent baserunner. “Third base,” Young concluded from scant evidence, “was strange for him.”
Amos received less and less playing time anywhere as the season wore on, fading from Hodges’s plans as the Mets otherwise shocked baseball with eptitude and competence. His average fell below .200 by mid-June, at which point he became the odd man out to make room for Donn Clendenon, acquired from Montreal for four Youths of America now deemed expendable; one of them was now erstwhile Met third baseman Kevin Collins. Otis spent the summer at Tidewater (batting .327), and wasn’t recalled until September, by which time his status as an extra outfielder was hardly a matter of primary concern for a band of miracle workers headed for the playoffs.
Garrett had a huge NLCS to help secure the pennant. Charles was the sparkplug of what proved the winning rally in Game Two of the World Series. Neither had posted dynamite numbers during the regular season — neither of them hit as high as .220 — but they were sure-handed enough, steady enough and ultimately the epitome of clutch. Just as nobody saw the Mets going all the way months earlier, it would have been tough to guess that the minor leaguer the Braves gave away and the old man who was viewed as hanging on would meld into the answer at third base for a team that never had an answer at third base.
Old habits, however, died hard. The world champion New York Mets, wrote Leonard Koppett in the revised version of his essential team history The New York Mets, still weren’t satisfied: “There just didn’t seem to be much future in filling third base with a Garrett-Charles platoon.” They released Charles. They invested minimal faith in Garrett. And they traded Amos Otis for Joe Foy.
Foy won a pennant with the Red Sox in 1967 and led the expansion Royals in RBIs in 1969. Kansas City nonetheless decided he wasn’t a building block, just as the Mets had deemed Otis a replaceable part. The Mets wanted an experienced third baseman who could hit and the Royals salivated at tapping Otis’s potential. Some deals prove win-win. This wasn’t one of those deals. Save for a 5-for-5 afternoon in San Francisco that he capped off with a tenth-inning, game-winning home run, Foy fizzled miserably for New York. Joe would be gone from the Mets following 1970.
Otis would make an impression in his new home right away and stick around for a very long time. “Incredibly underrated, and accomplished in all facets of the game: hitting, baserunning, and fielding,” Rob Neyer, a Royals fan from childhood, wrote in 2003’s Big Book of Baseball Lineups of the man who came to be known affectionately in K.C. as A.O. He made the American League All-Star team in his first Missouri summer, tipping his cap at the same Midsummer Classic as none other than Jim Hickman, who’d been reborn splitting time between left and right field for the Cubs when not spelling aging Ernie Banks at first. In the twelfth inning, it was Hickman who singled to center with Pete Rose on second, and it was Otis who fired home to Ray Fosse, only to see his throw rendered immaterial once Rose barreled over the catcher. The play is remembered for the baserunner and the backstop, but it was two Mets third base refugees who put the action in motion. After leaving the Mets, they’d each been stationed where they could be most comfortable and they had reached the spotlight, having succeeded at the sport’s highest level.
For Hickman, 1970 was the high point of a big league tour that wound through 1974. “Hickman was a youngster with a lot of potential in 1962, and he did a good job for us in the outfield,” Frank Thomas reflected in 2005. “He struck out a lot and made occasional errors in the field for which the fans sometimes got on him, so it was tough on Jim because he was only 25 or so years old. Casey tried to nudge him to improve with not-so-subtle hints in the dugout, and it would get to Jim, but Casey was just trying to help him develop. I think Casey’s methodology eventually got through to Jim because he went on to a nice career.”
Gil Hodges and Casey Stengel didn’t seem much alike, but Hodges, too, had great success getting through to the players he managed. The 1969 world championship and the testimonials that have rung through the corridors of time tell us Gil, in his quiet way, was a master communicator. Otis, though, was immune to Hodges’s motivational methods, however they manifested themselves. After Hodges, as manager of the National League All-Stars in 1970, crossed paths with Otis and extended his best wishes, Otis remarked, “That was half as much as he talked to me during my whole time with the Mets last year.”
No longer asked to play a defensive position outside the outfield, Otis lasted with the Royals through 1983 and then played part of another year for Pittsburgh. He made five All-Star teams, won three Gold Gloves, earned MVP votes in five separate seasons and went to the playoffs five times, thrice under Royals manager Herzog. He’d finish up with 2,020 hits, 193 homers and 341 steals. Bill James, a Royals fan before taking a front office job with the Red Sox, rated Amos Otis the No. 22 center fielder of all time in his 2001 Historical Baseball Abstract, terming him “strong, quick, fast, extremely graceful, and smart.”
Indeed, Otis was smart enough to wonder in an interview with Baseball Almanac in 2006, regarding his stint with the Mets, “I was one of the fastest players on the team, so why did they want to put me at third base?”
The Mets wouldn’t send one of their third basemen to the All-Star Game as a third baseman until nearly twenty years after Hickman and Otis first made it there as outfielders…and before long, they’d send that third baseman to the outfield. But that’s a ways off. In our next installment of OF-3B/3B-OF, we do meet a couple of other future All-Stars: the slugging outfielder whose awesome power was a fit in theory — but only in theory at third base; and another outfielder the Mets spent another spring pushing to third base only to have the outfielder push back.
THE METS OF-3B/3B-OF CLUB
The Ill-Advised Tradition Continues (1963-1969)
5. Jim Hickman
Mets CF Debut: April 14, 1962
Mets 3B Debut: June 19, 1963
6. Johnny Stephenson
Mets 3B Debut: April 26, 1964
Mets LF Debut: May 16, 1964
7. Charley Smith
Mets 3B Debut: April 24, 1964
Mets LF Debut: August 17, 1964
8. Danny Napoleon
Mets 3B Debut: April 24, 1965
Mets LF Debut: May 22, 1965
9. Chuck Hiller
Mets RF Debut: August 14, 1965
Mets 3B Debut: August 22, 1965 (Game 1)
10. Gary Kolb
Mets LF Debut: April 21, 1965
Mets 3B Debut: September 1, 1965 (Game 2)
11. Tommie Reynolds
Mets LF Debut: April 11, 1967
Mets 3B Debut: April 29, 1967
12. Phil Linz
Mets 3B Debut: July 19, 1967 (Game 1)
Mets LF Debut: August 8, 1967
13. Amos Otis
Mets 3B Debut: September 7, 1967
Mets CF Debut: September 8, 1967 (Game 2)
14. Jerry Buchek
Mets 3B Debut: April 23, 1967 (Game 2)
Mets LF Debut: June 11, 1968
by Greg Prince on 7 February 2022 1:35 pm If you’re up on your Met lore, you know that you could just as easily be up on your Meadowlark lore had Joan Payson foisted her first choice for a team name on the new National League ballclub she was bankrolling. Mrs. Payson liked Meadowlarks and who are we who are native to the Flushing Meadows region to say we wouldn’t have enjoyed the avian identity? When baby names were being weighed sixty-one years ago — time, like the meadowlark itself, really tends to fly —The Sporting News reasoned one prism through which to view Mrs. Payson’s pet pick was that “everything’s a lark” for “New York men-about-town,” a.k.a. presumed ticket-buyers prowling the Metropolitan Area.
Whatever the team was about to be called (and the media fix was pretty much in for Mets, Mrs. Payson’s personal preferences notwithstanding), all concerned understood the town in question was a National League town. There wouldn’t have been much ado about naming an expansion team had there not been a need to expand. And, oh, was there a need to expand. New York went from two National League teams to none in a veritable blink. For four seasons, former fans of the Giants and former fans of the Dodgers were left to make like ex-Giant and future Met hitting coach Rogers Hornsby: stare out the window and wait for spring. Except in this case, spring was metaphorical. It had been endless winter since the fall of 1957. Baseball needed to come back to town in National League form. No substitutes, no matter how conventionally successful they appeared from a distance, were to be accepted.
You know the basics of the rest. The National League expanded into New York, a town it never should have departed; the Mets took the field as the Mets in 1962; and, save for the occasional management lockout of players/middle finger to fans, we’ve been entranced by the Mets ever since.
 A lark for those native to the Flushing Meadows region. All of which is my way inviting you to have a listen to a new Mets podcast I’m a part of called National League Town, a celebration of Mets Fandom, Mets History, Mets Life. Mets podcasting, richly populated by talented talkers as it is, may not have needed an expansion franchise, but my friend and fellow Mets devotee Jeff Hysen and I created one anyway. Well, he created it. Jeff also produces it; edits it; engineers it, emcees it; and puts it where people can hear it. I named it — and I think out loud about the Mets into the general vicinity of a microphone until Jeff presses pause on his end.
We’re still tweaking the format.
It’s a lark of sorts for this New York man-about-blog. Hopefully, as we go along, you’ll feel like you’ve grabbed a seat next to Jeff and me in Promenade some sunny Saturday afternoon as we go on about that season or that game or that moment that has suddenly leapt to mind. We’re in the midst of a several-part series on who we’d add to the Mets Hall of Fame. The short answer is basically everybody, but perhaps you’ll enjoy listening in on the details. We’ll probably veer into the present-day Mets once there are present-day Mets. Honestly, it’s the tangents you’ll want to stay tuned for.
Episodes of National League Town, with Long Island’s Own Greg Prince and Jeff Hysen, is searchable on all your favorite podcast platforms and accessible via this link.
by Greg Prince on 1 February 2022 5:48 pm If you’ve ever met me outside Citi Field to go to a game, I’ve probably added a minute or two to our entrance because I always insist on detouring to check on my brick, the one that reads:
OUR FIRST DATE
METS 8 GIANTS 3
MAY 15, 1987
The brick commemorates the first time my future wife and I went anywhere on purpose. We’d met four nights earlier on the Upper West Side, unplanned. It went so well that by the end of the evening, I heard myself asking her to Friday night’s game. Nearly 35 years later, we’re still going to games in Queens.
I wasn’t counting on meeting Stephanie in the middle of May 1987 and I wasn’t counting on meeting Jeff Innis the very same week. Technically, I never met Jeff Innis in the “Hi, my name is…” sense, but as fans, we don’t let niceties such as an actual introduction get in the way of us feeling familiar with our players.
Jeff Innis had been pitching in Tidewater the first half of that month and during the month before, making the tour we recognized as necessary to becoming a Met. Since 1983, he’d been in Little Falls, Jackson, Lynchburg, Jackson again, then Mecca’s waiting room: Tidewater. If all went well, you’d think, a 24-year-old Triple-A reliever carrying an ERA barely above 2 might be pitching for the defending world champions soon. Actually, all had to not go well for Jeff to get his chance. The gleaming trophy earned the October before was already losing a bit of its shine. The Mets were losing more than they were winning by mid-May and their DL contingent was growing. Sometimes things have to go wrong at large to go right for one individual.
Terry Leach is recalled by Mets fans on the scene in ’87 as the savior who picked up miles and miles of slack for all the pitchers who got hurt. It wasn’t until I looked it up that I was reminded Leach himself got hurt in ’87, absorbing a line drive off his right knee the night before I took Stephanie to Shea. So while we were engaging in that first date at Shea Stadium the brick next to where it used to stand commemorates, Jeff Innis was about to have plans made involving the same destination.
“It was the evening of May 15,” Jeff would remember for Zak Ford, curator of Called Up, a marvelous collection of stories from major leaguers focusing on the moment they became major leaguers, “and I had been pitching really well.” Yet it didn’t occur to the righty with the amazing, disappearing earned run average — even as “the Mets had two or three injuries happen all at once in their pitching staff” — that he was on the parent club’s radar. Jeff hadn’t gone to big league camp. I could have told him his name wasn’t bandied about among Mets fans as a prospect of note up in New York. Nothing personal, it’s just that in the aftermath of 1986, we weren’t too worried about minor league bullpen depth.
But, like Jeff told Zak, the Mets were getting pelted by injuries, like the one to Leach and another to Sid Fernandez, a knee sprain Stephanie and I witnessed chase El Sid from the mound with a no-hitter in progress (a situation I Metsplained to my date was kind of a big deal). All Jeff Innis knows, as a Tide in a motel room in Columbus, is if he’s called to see his manager Mike Cubbage, it must be bad news.
For Al Pedrique it was. Pedrique was the little-used backup infielder who was getting sent down to make room for Jeff Innis. For Innis, from Cubbage, the news was, “You’re going to the big leagues.”
On May 16, one night after my first date with Stephanie, I was back to doing things guys without dates do on a Saturday night. I was out in a bar with my buddy Joel and his buddy Rich and some girl I think Rich knew. It was loud. Jody Watley’s overplayed hit single “Looking For A New Love” was on the jukebox. “Ooh,” the girl with Rich blurted, “that’s my song!”
“You can have it,” I assured her.
On a muted TV, of more interest to most occupying our booth, were the Mets and Giants. We noticed a close game. Given the ambient noise (“I’m looking for a new love, baby, a new love, baby…”), we couldn’t follow it in detail and probably didn’t try, so I’m pretty sure we missed the major league debut of Jeffrey David Innis. Innis, naturally, remembered it very well.
The bullpen phone alert was “the loudest phone ring ever”; the bullpen coach yelling his name “scared me to death”; he couldn’t feel the ball in his hand as he warmed up because “I was numb”; and when Davey Johnson assigned him the ninth inning of a 4-4 game with more than 48,000 in attendance, “the lights were so bright.” Oh, and his first major league catcher is about to be somebody he might’ve seen in a few All-Star games, World Series games or commercials, Gary Carter.
Yet Innis settled down, settled in and pitched a scoreless ninth. The Mets didn’t take the lead in the bottom of the inning, and a storybook finish eluded Jeff. His second batter in the tenth, Jeffrey Leonard, took him deep, and if there’s a commemorative brick outside Citi Field marking the occasion, the score wound up being not as superb as the one etched into Stephanie’s and mine.
JEFF’S FIRST GAME
GIANTS 5 METS 4
MAY 16, 1987
It was just the first of many nights for Jeff Innis of the New York Mets. “Even though we lost the game and I got this loss,” he told Zack, “I thought it was an incredible night. I thought, ‘I’ve got this. I can do this.’”
For 288 major league games spread over seven seasons, Jeff’s vision proved accurate. Innis’s entire MLB career was a perfect circle overlaying his entire Mets career. He pitched only for us. Us and Tidewater until 1990, as Jeff, for a while, became the guy who’d get sent down when there was a roster squeeze — he was first optioned to make room for Doc Gooden’s return from drug rehab — but he inevitably got called back. His sidearm or submarine delivery (I’m still hazy on which is which) was fairly unique. The Mets had Terry Leach pitching like that and now they had Jeff Innis pitching similarly. The Mets would send Leach to Kansas City in 1989. They’d keep Innis.
 Jeff Innis needed a horizontal card to truly capture his delivery. One manager after another relied on Jeff. Johnson. Buddy Harrelson. His old minor league skipper Cubbage for a week. Jeff Torborg. Dallas Green. He’d be a small part of some good clubs and a bigger part of, truth be told, some dreadful clubs. Yet you never looked around as the Mets fell out of contention after 1990 and thought the problem was Jeff Innis. If anything, you breathed easily as he trotted in from the bullpen. “This may not be a competent organization”, you could hear yourself analyze, “but this will be a competent outing, because Jeff Innis is a competent relief pitcher.” It wasn’t something you found yourself believing often during Mets games in 1991, 1992 and 1993. If he was the guest pregame or postgame in those years, you paid attention. Jeff came across as friendly, thoughtful and a touch sly. Also, if a middle reliever was getting airtime, it probably meant he’d been pitching well.
When John Franco was inducted into the Mets Hall of Fame a decade ago and various teammates of his were introduced as part of the ceremony, I was moved to hearty applause when the name “Jeff Innis” was announced almost from out of nowhere. No Mets public address system had perked up with his name in nearly 20 years at that point. Innis worked his most when the Mets were at their worst, averaging 70 appearances per season during the darkest years. As you get older, you tend to appreciate those who showed up every day when the nights weren’t much to look forward to. I’ve developed a bizarre soft spot for the 1993 Mets in particular. Not their record (59-103) and not those whose antics made for a string of unbearable months — but contemplating those who plied their craft as best they could without making us cringe sometimes causes me to form a smile as wide as that unnecessary tail they wore under the word Mets on their jerseys that year.
Also, last place notwithstanding, I was happy sharing the Mets, bit by sometimes atrocious bit, with my bride. When I was in the process of writing something about 1993 for my Mike Piazza book a few years ago, I read a passage aloud for Stephanie. She heard the names: Jeff Kent, Bobby Bonilla, Anthony Young. I thought she might nod and tell me, uh-huh, that’s nice. Instead, she said it really brought her back…which, in turn, really brought me back. Good year for us, 1993. They’ve all been good years for us, but the summer of ’93 was a moment in time. Cohabitating since the spring of ’90 and wed in the fall of ’91, we had, consciously or otherwise, settled down and settled in, just like Innis once he warmed up on May 16, 1987. Driving around in the first car we bought together. Coming home to the first apartment we’d found together. Doting endlessly on our first pair of adorable kitties. And, in the realm of what was once novel about to become constant, many, many pairs of tickets to see the Mets squad that was about to become the sequel to The Worst Team Money Could Buy. The tickets had been my thirtieth-birthday present from my loving family who didn’t pay attention to the standings and wouldn’t have guessed that as 1993 approached — as much as I appreciated the gesture and especially relished the Opening Day ducats that were the veritable bow on the box — I wasn’t necessarily aching to make regular trips to Shea…not after 162 games of The Original Worst Team Money Could buy, the 1992 Mets (for whom, incidentally, I’ve yet to develop a soft spot).
But of course I used those tickets, no matter how often the Mets lost and inspired bad press in the process. The more I went, the more they lost, yet the more I went, the more I realized I couldn’t stay away. Before 1993, I was a Mets fan who went to Mets games intermittently or on special occasions, like maybe if I had a hot date. From 1993 forward, you knew where to find me if I hadn’t driven home in that car to be with my wife and those cats in that apartment. Somewhere, inevitably warming up amid all of that early 1990s living and rooting I was doing, was the sidearmer/submariner regularly coming out of the bullpen to pitch competently, then speak thoughtfully. He evolved from first Met demoted to a staple of Shea. Jeff Kent. Bobby Bonilla. Anthony Young. Jeff Innis. It used to be his town, too.
The Mets would move on from Innis after 1993. When 103 games get lost, Shea is bound to get shaken up. The club would mercifully turn its fortunes upward a few years later, perhaps diminishing the compulsion for anybody to mention Mets who were no longer Mets from when coming to see the Mets hardly guaranteed a heckuva day. By 2008, you could kind of understand that when the Mets were bringing back players from almost every era to “Shea Goodbye,” nobody other than Franco from those anni horribili was summoned to the field — and Franco didn’t really count as their representative, because Johnny endured long enough to win a pennant and have himself associated with better days. But as much as I understood the editorial choice the Mets were making, I quietly resented their de facto excision of history. I was here in 1973 and 1986 and 1999 and 2006, I thought, and I cherish the results and the Mets who brought them to be, but I was here a whole helluva lot in 1993, too, and, per the guy who in July played the last concert in this ballpark, I would not be here now if I never had the hunger.
We didn’t have a chance to clap once more for Jeff Innis at Shea. Our loss. Good for John including Jeff on his Hall of Fame night at Citi. Good for the Mets making Jeff a part of Fantasy Camp festivities since then. Good for Jeff Innis for making a wonderful impression on so many who did make his acquaintance in his years in baseball and years after baseball. When word spread last week than Jeff was terribly ill, it was a shock to those of us who only knew him from afar. When the news hit on Sunday that Jeff Innis had died from cancer at 59, all of us who were keeping the faith when he pitched so often felt we’d lost a constant in our lives. Never mind if we hadn’t seen him lately. Jeff Innis stayed with us.
***Nobody gave me tickets for Opening Day 1975 the way I was given tickets for Opening Day 1993. Hence, to see the Opening Day I can honestly say I looked forward to like I’d never looked forward to an Opening Day before, I had to make an executive decision. On April 8, I had to cut Hebrew School. I wasn’t going to be a rabbi and I was secure that I’d accrued enough points to merit a Bar Mitzvah the following January.
Because we had a very cool sixth-grade teacher, our class in shall we say regular school was treated to a glimpse of the first inning. That taste, however wasn’t sufficient to sate me for the balance of the afternoon. “I’m not going to Hebrew School today,” I said to my easily persuadable companion and fellow Mets fan Jeff Mirrer as I convinced him to stop at my house when we were supposed to be walking from the bus stop to the temple. “This is Opening Day.” We sat down in front of my parents’ recently purchased color television (the first one we ever had), changed the channel to 9, and lived the dream. Let those schmendricks conjugating verbs in another language find out the score on the 6 o’clock news. We have reached The Promised Land! We are inside The Baseball Season
Aiding my boldness immeasurably was my mother not being home to rescind my executive decision.
Missing Opening Day 1975, from my 12-year-old perspective, would have been a shonda, specifically after the offseason that preceded it. Nineteen Seventy-Four was the first irredeemably crummy year I’d ever experienced as a Mets fan. Once its 91st loss was in the books and its final ember was extinguished, that winter’s Hot Stove had to start flickering ASAP. New GM Joe McDonald got to work so quickly, that he made trades reflected in the following year’s Topps set.
Unlike ’74 and ’76, Topps didn’t have TRADED cards in ’75, but they did have some ace airbrushing interspersed throughout what collectors call the base set. If you gave Topps’s artists enough lead time, they’d account for new destinations. On October 22, 1974, the Mets made a trade with the Pirates. We gave them Duffy Dyer, our stalwart backup catcher who’d been our stalwart backup catcher for as long as I could remember us having a backup catcher, and in return they gave us Gene Clines. Thus, when we opened packs that spring, there was every chance we’d pull from within Gene Clines already dressed and identified as a New York Met.
 Airbrushed into actuality, having Gene Clines identified as a Met. That and all it indicated, no offense to stalwart Duffy, was refreshing. I was aware of Gene Clines as a Pittsburgh Pirate and I was in something approximating awe of Gene Clines as a Pittsburgh Pirate. He didn’t play all that regularly for them, loaded as they were with outfield talent, but when he did, he showed himself to be the kind of player we never seemed to have. “Clines has tremendous speed and a hitting history,” McDonald said when he made the trade, further promising Gene “will get the chance to play”.
My assessment of Clines probably had more than a little to do with his hitting Met pitching very successfully — between 1970 and 1973, he batted .333 and on-based .426 versus us — and with whom he’d been breaking in and breaking through during that stretch. The Pirates were postseason regulars in the first half of the 1970s. Except for 1973, you could count on them being in the playoffs, yet despite being a division rival, they never wore out their October welcome, at least not with me. I won’t say I loved that team, but I liked them as much as I could with having to face them 18 times per year. Roberto Clemente until his humanitarian mission ended in a plane crash. Willie Stargell pounding so many homers that one summer I’d take swings in my backyard pretending I was vying with him for the league lead (he wound up with 48 to my 35, but I quit swinging by August). Manny Sanguillen with the strong arm and the big grin. Al Oliver eternally overlooked as a hitter. Bob Robertson owning the 1971 NLCS. Steve Blass before he lost the strike zone, nailing down that World Series. Dock Ellis didn’t strike out batters the way Tom Seaver did yet still won as many as 19 games in a season. Even Richie Hebner seemed no worse than a benign presence from a distance.
And now we could have one of those Pirates? Wow!
Clines, despite his ability to hit and run, could win only so much playing time in Pittsburgh. Power-hitting Richie Zisk was on the premises. Dave Parker was on the way up. Clines’s status stagnated with the almost-perennial NL East champs. In his 2021 memoir Cobra: A Life of Baseball and Brotherhood, written with Dave Jordan, Parker revealed Clines’s clubhouse nickname was Angry. It was bestowed with affection, but it had more than a patina of honesty to it. Gene was not happy not getting into games.
The trade to New York could change all that. “Ol’ Angry would at last be getting a real chance to start,” Parker exulted on behalf of his friend and roomie. “Clines was thrilled to tears about leaving the Pittsburgh outfield log jam.” Gene was a young veteran by the time Dave was promoted in ’73 — Clines’s stint on the DL opened up a spot for Parker — but a veteran nonetheless. “He was a good teammate, a great roommate on the road, and someone who taught me stuff like which room service items wouldn’t get cold on the trip up the elevator.”
Unfortunately, the elevator stalled at Shea Stadium, where Gene envisioned putting his defensive skills to good use in center. The winds could be tricky. The acreage was expansive. But Clines had the credentials to take on the challenge. Except the Mets acquired another center fielder that same offseason, a very good one named Del Unser, giving up Tug McGraw to get him (in a package that also brought John Stearns to New York). The deal for Del transpired during the Winter Meetings, after Topps could have airbrushed Unser into his proper clothing. Nonetheless, he was in a Mets uniform on Opening Day, same as Clines, and I was excited to see them both.
Cutting Hebrew School was totally worth it, even if I couldn’t translate that sentence into Hebrew without the help of Google. With the newcomer outfield of Clines in left, Unser in center and Dave Kingman in right — Rusty Staub was out with a sore thigh — the Mets topped Unser’s old team from Philadelphia, 2-1. Kingman homered. Brooklyn’s own Joe Torre, brought over from St. Louis after years of rumors that he’d experience a homecoming, drove in the winning run in a walkoff, delivering the W for incumbent ace Seaver. All these terrific new Mets joining forces with Tom Terrific and several favorites who weren’t traded away — it was the Opening Day fruition of a winter’s worth of dreams.
Gene batted leadoff that afternoon, walking to commence the National League season in New York and instigating a balk from Steve Carlton to move to second. The Mets left him on third. He was 1-for-1 fielding fly balls in left. The Mets won. He was a part of it. Those of us watching on TV instead of being elsewhere were elated. Gene Clines and the Mets appeared ready for big things.
To borrow a phrase Parker enjoyed invoking in Cobra, not gonna lie — 1975 didn’t really work out that great for the Mets and not at all for Clines. He got even less playing time in Flushing than he did in Pittsburgh, batting .227 and making little impact in the outfield or on the basepaths. The culture he encountered was disappointing, too, different from what he encountered previously and different in ways a 12-year-old fan on Long Island who didn’t have to think about these things might not have comprehended. On September 1, 1971, Clines was part of a lineup for the Pirates that consisted of nine players who were either African-American or Latin-American. It had never happened in the National League or American League before. It shouldn’t have been remarkable. It figured it would happen in Pittsburgh, where players of all backgrounds were warmly welcomed beyond lip service. There was “a spiritual mission” to the way those Pirate teams were constructed and operated, according to Parker, “and I’m not just talking about one game in ’71.” GM Joe Brown and manager Danny Murtaugh ran an outfit that “had our backs all the way.”
At the end of the decade, when the Pirates were on the verge of their next world championship, Parker took stock of the Bucs as they departed Spring Training: “Pops Stargell was leading nine brothers, eight white dudes, three Panamanians, a Dutchman, a Mexican, a Dominican, and [Phil] Garner in a cowboy hat. It was a damn general assembly of baseball.” That’s the way the Pirates rolled throughout the ’70s. If you step back from your baseball allegiances, you can’t help but adore that ethic, and you can’t blame somebody for missing being subject to that vibe. When Clines visited with his former teammates on a road trip to Pittsburgh in ’75, Gene confided in Dave, “I was sitting in the dugout today, and I saw you boys across the field laughing and having a good time. No one’s helping the rookies in New York. They treated Cleon like shit. It’s just me and Milner and Tom Hall. They don’t talk to us at all. No one’s lookin’ out for anybody. No one.”
Topps printed an official Mets card for Clines in the 1976 set, but that owed to the trade that sent him away from Shea happening too late to fit the company’s production calendar. Our erstwhile extra outfielder stayed with the Rangers for a year, then went to the Cubs for three. His playing career ended in 1979, but his career as a respected baseball man went on and on, instructing and advising for a half-dozen organizations. Gene mentored a couple of budding Hall of Famers in Seattle (Ken Griffey and Edgar Martinez) and was the hitting coach in San Francisco when they reached the World Series in 2002.
Gene Clines died on January 27 at the age of 75, three days before Jeff Innis. Proximity in passing is the reason they share this column. Their lives in baseball and their times as Mets are why a Mets fan is moved to remember them a little. That’s all right. There are worse reasons to remember people.
by Greg Prince on 27 January 2022 2:54 pm After the Major League Baseball lockout ends; after Spring Training goes through its motions; once the regular season begins; and whenever Eduardo Escobar takes the field at third base in 2022, he’ll achieve a Met milestone instantly recognizable to viewers of An Amazin’ Era, the videocassette that commemorated the franchise’s 25th-anniversary. Pending unanticipated roster moves and managerial prerogative, Escobar projects as the 179th man on third in Mets history, or 100 beyond the total as it stood when the ballad “79 Men on Third for the Mets” lit up the celebratory VHS the Mets released in 1986. As a refresher, Dick McCormack’s ditty went a little something like this:
Well, the Mets are really rockin’ that ball
But they can’t keep a man on third at all
Like Drake and Chacon
Fernandez, Ramirez
Pfeil and Graham
Maddox, Martinez
It’s a brilliant composition, albeit reflective of a less than sparkling heritage. The Mets had their problems keeping a man on third — not to be confused with their problems getting a man to third — and for the better or perhaps worse part of a quarter-century, they were regularly groping for solutions. For example, the 79th man on third for the Mets was Tim Teufel, who despite not really being a third baseman, was given a whirl at the hot corner on April 12, 1986, three games into what became A Year to Remember (speaking of classic video productions). Kudos to McCormack for staying alert to Met box scores and having the quantity current for when An Amazin’ Era screened for the press on July 8 of the Mets’ 25th annum.
The Mets being the Mets, even in their most spectacular season, rendered McCormack’s cataloguing out of date within two weeks. On July 22, the Mets deployed their 80th man on third, a fella named Gary Carter. Bright-eyed observers will recognize the occasion instantly. A clip of Carter playing third has made the social media rounds of late because it’s an example of the defensive handiwork of the finest first baseman the Mets have ever called their own and the holder of the most recently retired number in Mets history, Keith Hernandez. No. 17 got himself up in the face of Reds batter Carl Willis. Willis, a pitcher, had been called on to bunt. Bunting to Hernandez was rarely productive for the team on offense. Keith fielded the ball, flung it to third baseman Carter, who effected a forceout where he was stationed for the second time in his big league career, and relayed it to Teufel, second baseman covering first. Score it 3-5-4, with a Hall of Fame catcher manning the middle of a double play that kept a twelfth-inning tie knotted tightly.
Two innings earlier, Carter became the 80th third baseman in 24½ years of Mets baseball amid what manager Davey Johnson called “the strangest game I’ve ever been involved in,” and Davey managed the Mets a year earlier through a 16-13 19-inning jaunt to daylight in Atlanta. As you likely remember or have had mentioned to you at some point in your Met-loving life, July 22, 1986, was one of those nights (there were four) when the 1986 Mets got into a fight and a night when they experienced multiple ejections. With the bench depleted, Kid had to defend a spot he hadn’t visited as anything but a baserunner since August 8, 1975. Plus Jesse Orosco played right field and Roger McDowell played right and left field, in addition to both of them pitching.
But we’re getting a little off the track here.
The point, to the extent we need one in the middle of a lockout, is Eduardo Escobar is likely to be the 179th man on third base for the Mets. But will he be the 81st member of another subset of Mets third baseman? A club of which Carter is a member? A club of which Carter might be a card-carrying member had his card been printed to reflect his particular accomplishment in this realm? Not too many of those 80 guys got cards.
I’m talking about Mets third basemen-outfielders. And Mets outfielders-third basemen. It probably makes a difference which position you place before the hyphen. For many years while the Mets were trying to keep a man on third, they’d look all over the diamond for a solution. Even to the outfield…though sometimes they’d have holes in the outfield and seek help internally…even from third base.
***Welcome, then, to the first part of the multipart Faith and Fear in Flushing series, OF-3B/3B-OF, which will set out to examine the Mets’ intriguing history of assigning outfielders to third base and third basemen to the outfield. I’ve assigned myself this topic because I couldn’t help but notice the surfeit of Mets who’ve been asked to be good at what feel to me to be — after all my years of watching the game — a pair of incompatible positions.
The similarities between third base and any of the three outfield positions appear fleeting at best. According to a reputable-looking coaching website, here are what high school third basemen should feature:
• A very strong arm
• Excellent reflexes
• Great defense, if not with as much range as a shortstop
• Power
The reflexes are the first thing that occur to me. Balls come at a third baseman, if he’s not in a shift (in which case all assumptions are inoperable), fast and at tricky angles. Line drives are somehow both common and total surprises. Diving to one’s right is a must. The arm needs to unleash clothesline throws to first. Range requirements depends on who’s batting. Power has nothing to do with defense, but, yes, third base is often where we look for slugging when our team comes up to bat.
Not that much of it sounds like the outfield. A strong outfield arm has different utility than a strong infield arm. The ball tends to be in the air longer (and higher) if it’s headed for left, center or right. Defense relies more on speed out there. Power, of course, is swell, depending on other assets and the rest of your lineup.
In high school, a player may still be finding his position. In the majors, you’d figure you’d have your expertise boiled down to suitability with a given outlet. Shortstops can slide over to second. Second baseman can trot over to third. A right fielder oughta be able to play left. An aging catcher, given his experience with a mitt, might later settle in at first. And in a pinch, almost anybody should be able to give you an inning almost anywhere. Pete Rose played all three bases plus the corner outfield spots, and you can bet it was for more than an inning.
Yet I can’t wrap my head around the OF-3B/3B-OF paradigm, not as a way of life.
This has fascinated me at a low level for as long as I’ve been a Mets fan, which is a long time, but isn’t quite as long as there have been Mets, which may explain the fascination. Between 1962, our founding, and 1969, when I started rooting, outfielders and third basemen doubling as third basemen and outfielders seemed to be normative. Upon my introduction to the game, I grasped quickly that every team sent nine men into the field. But why were the Mets less than secure about who they sent to play third?
I understood, thanks to Lindsey Nelson, Ralph Kiner and Bob Murphy regularly touching on it, that it was more than a fleeting concern. From the earliest days of my fandom, I got that the Mets hadn’t been satisfied with their third base situation from their earliest days. The first trade I remember was for a third baseman: Joe Foy, in the offseason following 1969. We’d traded Amos Otis to get him. Amos Otis became an All-Star center fielder in 1970, my first full season as a fan. It was mystifying to my seven-year-old mind that somebody considered among the best players in the game was also somebody the Mets gave up on despite perhaps needing somebody considered among the best players of the game. More mystifying was learning the Mets had tried to make Amos Otis a third baseman.
But that (an episode we’ll dig into in a future installment of this series) was hardly the first time they attempted to pull the OF-3B conversion, nor the first time it didn’t take. You can go back to practically the beginning of the Mets to find dissatisfaction on third and an outfielder being tabbed to make it go away.
***The very first third baseman in Mets history was, rather famously, Don Zimmer. Here’s Casey Stengel’s detailed Spring Training 1962 take on why Zimmer would be his third baseman:
“Well, now you’re gettin’ down to Mister Zimmer. Mister Zimmer’s been handicapped five or six times in life because he was injured, but he never gives up. He’s a boy that don’t die. Now ya gotta have that spirit and ya gotta have somebody that won’t give up and plays ’til the ninth inning. If they’ll play ’til the ninth inning, then ya just beat a team six to five, instead of gettin’ beat five to four. Now if you can win six to five, you’re better off than losin’ five to four. Now if I can get the teamwork now, to go with those men that are on that infield, we oughta find some method in which we can come out winning a number of games that otherwise their records will not stand. We don’t care what their records were last year. It’s what’re ya gonna do when we ring the bell Opening Day.”
The above was Casey’s response to Lindsey Nelson’s query, posed during Channel 9’s season preview show, “Now what about third base?”
There’s no denying it’s better to win, six to five, than it is to lose, five to four. Alas, by the time the Mets achieved their initial 6-5 victory, over the Cubs in thirteen innings on May 15, Don Zimmer was no longer the Mets third baseman. Casey started Zim the first nine games of the year, all of them losses. Don’s batting average slipped below .100, part of an 0-for-34 skid that cost him his starting assignment as well as his roster spot. On May 6, the Mets traded Zimmer — a 1961 National League All-Star — to the defending NL champion Reds for Cliff Cook. Zimmer’s final totals as a Met: four hits, three errors and another fifty-plus years in baseball to exude that “spirit” even an .077 batting average couldn’t extinguish.
Cook was acquired to take Zimmer’s place at third base and, if the position wasn’t to his liking (or Cook wasn’t to the position’s liking), make a little history of his own as the first card-carrying member of the Mets OF-3B/3B-OF club. Let us distinguish card-carrying from those credentialed only by experience. The first third baseman-outfielder the Mets ever harbored was one of the signature players of their first team, Hot Rod Kanehl. The scrappy Mets utilityman who would create the template for all scrappy Mets utilitymen to come first played third base on April 21, in relief of Zimmer after a pair of pinch-hitting substitutions led to no runs, and then debuted in left field late in the April 29 doubleheader opener, a game the Mets were winning by eight runs after six innings. With Hot Rod showcasing his versatility, the Mets maintained their 8-0 lead and Al Jackson notched the very first shutout victory the Mets ever had
 INF-OF Kanehl was too versatile to be pigeonholed. So why doesn’t Rod Kanehl rate a card for being a 3B-OF? Two reasons:
1) He was doing his utilityman job. Utilitymen who followed in Hot Rod’s fast footsteps — a cohort encompassing the likes of more than two dozen Mets spanning Rick Herrscher later in 1962 to Jack Reinheimer toward the end of 2018 — played third base and the outfield as asked because it’s what they were on hand to do. Teddy Martinez in the ’70s. Bob Bailor in the ’80s. Chico Walker in the ’90s. Heir to the Kanehl legacy Super Joe McEwing in the 2000s (“That was my life. That was my career. That was my job. I took extreme pride in that, being prepared for every situation,” McEwing told me in 2020 when I asked him about various facets of his utilitarianism.) You need a guy who can fill in at third base and somewhere within the outfield if you’re going to succeed. In 2016, the last year when the Mets made the postseason, the team had, depending on your yen for categorization, three or four of those guys: Eric Campbell; Kelly Johnson; Ty Kelly; and Matt Reynolds. The Mets’ recent signing of Reynolds to a Recidivist Met minor league deal may indicate, as much as the contracting of Escobar, Starling Marte, Mark Canha and Max Scherzer, that happy days will be here again soon.
2) I don’t issue the cards. Topps does. Several years ago, when I first began pursuing my OF-3B/3B-OF curiosity, I checked with Faith and Fear’s keeper of The Holy Books, my blog partner Jason Fry, and asked him to tell me how many among the thousand-plus Mets who had played as Mets to that point could claim Topps cards that identified them as Mets and labeled them as a third baseman-outfielder or outfielder-third baseman. Jason kindly perused his albums and answered me: four Mets as of 2016.
 Cook carried his glove to right and carries his 3B-OF card to this day. The first of them was Cliff Cook. His card is No. 566 in the 1963 set. He was a 3B-OF by Topps’s reckoning. That wasn’t necessarily the idea when he became a Met. After the Mets shipped Zimmer to Ohio and hoped for the best (not anticipating their hopes would be dashed by their new acquisition’s bad back), Cliff got his share of reps at third, starting 16 times in a 31-game span. He batted .216 as a third baseman, .208 overall. It was better than Zimmer. Low bar, but it was vaulted.
Even the 1962 Mets aspired higher from their hot corner and they looked up the line for their next solution. Left fielder Frank Thomas became third baseman Frank Thomas on June 17 against the Cubs, which meant third baseman Cliff Cook was almost simultaneously becoming right fielder Cliff Cook. The latter transformation impressed Topps more than it did the Mets, because by the latter half of July, New York’s Cliff Cook, who batted .207 in his new role, became Syracuse’s Cliff Cook. The Mets may not have been attached to their second 3B-OF — they gave up only an .077 hitter to get him — but Thomas was another matter.
Frank Thomas, flashing the power that would earn him 2022 induction into The Casey Stengel Vestibule of the New York Mets Hall of Fame, was already the Original Mets’ preeminent slugger, having knocked 13 homers over various walls in the Mets’ first 36 games. By comparison, Roger Maris had socked only eight balls out of yards after 36 games in 1961. Maris, en route to 61 home runs, mashed alongside Mickey Mantle, who would go on to 54. Stengel’s new kids in town didn’t have a companion slugger to take advantage of the Polo Grounds’ dimensions the way Thomas did, let alone the distances over fences elsewhere in the National League. As long as Thomas’s bat got its swings, maybe it didn’t matter where his glove wound up.
In the bottom of the first, following Thomas’s transformation into the first Met outfielder to become a Mets third baseman in the top of the frame, Lindsey Nelson broke the defensive decision down for Mets fans listening over WABC:
“And Frank Thomas is coming up, Frank Thomas, who is playing third base today in the lineup for the New York Mets. During his major league career, Frank Thomas has seen a great deal of action at third base. Pittsburgh Pirates used him there a great deal. Cincinnati Reds used him there. So this is not exactly a new position for him, though it’s the first time he’s played it for the New York Mets.”
Honestly, Lindsey seemed a little surprised that Thomas had been playing third for half-an-inning and maybe was trying to convince himself that this was a positive development. True enough, Thomas did have some experience at third base. As he told it in his 2005 memoir Kiss It Goodbye! The Frank Thomas Story, Frank’s first transition to third, in 1956, represented quite the to-do in Pittsburgh. The Pirates, for so long the doormat of the National League, had just moved into first place. Their stay was brief, but it was a much-needed jolt to the club’s self-esteem. Within two years, the Pirates would finish second in the NL, and two years after that win the pennant. Intrinsic to Pittsburgh’s rise was finding a full-time slot in the outfield for this kid the Buccos had drafted from Brooklyn following the 1954 season, a youngster named Roberto Clemente. Thomas, the everyday left fielder, essentially volunteered to break the logjam but removing himself from it.
One early June afternoon at Wrigley Field, “I played a position other than outfield for the first time in my career,” Thomas wrote, but the change didn’t come without warning. Manager Bobby Bragan had tried to persuade Frank to try third. The incumbent left fielder’s response: “At 320 feet out, I’m as close to those batters as I want to be.” Eventually, Bragan convinced Thomas he was natural born third base material. Frank had a knack for making barehanded catches (ask Willie Mays), and “anyone who can do that,” his manager told him, “is cut out to be a third baseman.”
Confident that his hitting wouldn’t suffer, Thomas agreed to try his hand — both of them — at third. Not only was a spot for Clemente opened up, but maybe a hole in the infield would be plugged. Presaging the situation that would surround him as a Met, Thomas recalled, “We had been having trouble all season finding a suitable third-sacker, and I was the tenth player to play there up to that point in the year,”. It was June 5, mind you. The Pirates even tried Clemente there once. “I was ready to make the switch if [Bragan] thought it would help the team.” In his memoir, Frank remembered the Pirates and himself playing well after he took on the new challenge, with none other than one of the all-time third base greats, Pittsburgh’s own Pie Traynor, going on local radio to praise his defense.
The record indicates third base may not have been Frank’s forte, certainly not upon manning a brand new position. Despite not taking over third until the season was more than forty games old, Thomas finished second in the National League in most errors committed by a third baseman. Somewhat established at the hot corner, he led the circuit in that dubious department in 1958. He could still hit, though, with 35 homers in ’58 forgiving his 29 miscues. After the Mets arranged to acquire Frank from Milwaukee, Stengel was happy to ink him into his batting order — and plant him in left field. With the 1961 Braves, who had Eddie Mathews, Thomas didn’t play third at all.
But this was 1962 and these were the Mets and best laid plans rarely remained undisturbed. Prior to June 17, the Mets had employed five different third basemen. Not ’56 Pirates-level, but close enough. Also, unlike in 1956, Thomas wasn’t concerned with his fielding getting in the way of his hitting. The man who’d go on to set the franchise’s single-season standard for home runs was wandering through a power desert, going homerless since May 25 and losing more than 40 points off his batting average in the process. And there was a personnel glut unfolding in the Met outfield, with the club having just acquired an old Stengel favorite, Gene Woodling, who, unlike Clemente in Pittsburgh six years before, was at the end of the line, but he needed a place to play regardless.
 Thomas wasn’t acquired to play third, yet there he found himself. Around this time, Joe King offered several observations in The Sporting News that seemed to capture the plight of the Mets in their third month, when neither a stop in Texas to take on their fellow expansioneers the Colt .45s nor a taste of home cooking could rouse them from their recent losing ways.:
• “Casey had hitting for a few weeks, but Frank Thomas recently went 22 games without a homer and team run production sagged woefully.”
• “Then there was a time when Stengel felt that he had achieved a reliable, although modest defense. The Mets were not kicking the ball around at the start. This, too, was an illusion. The fielding crackup commenced in the finale at Houston and continued as the June home stand opened.”
• “No one summed it up better than Stengel: ‘I tell myself that it can’t be getting any worse, but it is.’”
• “If the Mets had a crew of kids with a year’s experience in the minors, it might be refreshing to play ’em for the remainder of the season. However, they do not have the men to achieve this renovation.”
And, the kicker:
• “Cliff Cook developed a strikeout seizure on the trip.”
So why not ask Frank to dig his third baseman’s glove out of storage? The man himself was willing and got himself ready. “To come in and play the infield,” he told the Crane Pool Forum in 2005, “you have to learn a lot of new things. I used to take 150 ground balls a day in order to improve myself there, and for the most part I feel like I did a good job.” In the first game the Mets put Thomas at third, he handled everything hit at him. Here’s Ralph Kiner describing all of it:
“Lefthander with a curveball, it’s hit down to third base. Frank Thomas there, up with it, over to first base in time for out number two. Frank Thomas, handling his first chance successfully at third base. Gene Woodling was put in left field, and Casey Stengel, in order to get more power in the lineup, moved Frank into third. He has played there before. He was originally converted to third base while playing for the Pittsburgh Pirates.”
Ralph sounded less incredulous about the switch than Lindsey had. Perhaps it was an ex-Pirate thing. Either way, that third-inning grounder Ron Santo hit to Thomas was it for third base opportunities in that June 17 doubleheader opener. If it didn’t go down as a momentous moment in early New York Mets history, it might be because it was a wee bit overshadowed by a couple of other developments that occurred in the same game. Lou Brock, then a Cub center fielder one day from turning 23 years old, launched a home run to the center field bleachers at the Polo Grounds. You may have heard about it from the oft-asked trivia question that has a pretty brief answer. Hardly anybody had ever gone that deep in that ballpark, nearly 500 feet from home plate. Those bleachers might as well have been in Yankee Stadium, across the Harlem River. But Brock reached them on June 17, 1962. As did Hank Aaron for the Milwaukee Braves on June 18, 1962. Before such a thing as Met opponents existed, only two players — Joe Adcock and Luke Easter — had done it. Now it had been done twice in two days.
While this was a noteworthy baseball achievement, that’s not the main reason the opening game of the June 17, 1962, resonates in Met annals. No, we remember that particular date because it was the day Marv Throneberry tripled in two runs off Cubs starter Glen Hobbie only to be told he hadn’t tripled at all because he hadn’t touched first base (or second) on his way to third. When one of your announcers — Nelson — has reason to inform you, “Hobbie comes off the rubber and throws over to first base,” leaving umpire Dusty Boggess no choice but to call Marv “OUT at first base on an appeal play!” and your momentarily heroic baserunner has to trot off of third and back to the dugout, you tend to forget everything else that happened.
The Mets lost, 8-7. Frank Thomas also started at third base in the nightcap, with Cliff Cook in right field. Thomas made an error that led to an unearned run in a game the Mets lost, 4-3. Frank started the next three games after that at third. After those five in a row, he’d be back in left field mostly, at first base occasionally, with only five more starts at third, none after July 8. His homerless drought ended in late June. Frank would finish the season with 34 longballs, most in a Mets campaign by anybody until Dave Kingman came along in 1975. The record also shows four errors in ten games at third base in 1962, plus one in one game when he played two innings at third in 1963, a year the Mets would be on to their next evanescent OF-3B solution.
In the next installment of OF-3B/3B-OF, we meet the next outfielder who wasn’t the answer at third; the next third baseman who carries a card that said he could play the outfield; and the youngster who preferred not to be blessed with versatility.
THE METS OF-3B/3B-OF CLUB
Founding Members (1962)
1. Rod Kanehl
Mets 3B Debut: April 21, 1962
Mets LF Debut: April 29, 1962 (Game 1)
2. Frank Thomas
Mets LF Debut: April 11, 1962
Mets 3B Debut: June 17, 1962 (Game 1)
3. Cliff Cook
Mets 3B Debut: May 8, 1962
Mets RF Debut: June 17, 1962 (Game 2)
4. Rick Herrscher
Mets 3B Debut: August 2, 1962
Mets RF Debut: August 7, 1962
by Greg Prince on 25 January 2022 10:22 pm David Ortiz is in the Hall of Fame, which is great for David Ortiz and, I believe, splendid for baseball. Big Papi was a big star with big numbers who came through in big situations. That’s a Hall of Famer in my mind. Everybody else on the just-revealed Baseball Writers Association of America ballot isn’t in the Hall of Fame, a result which is a matter for debate. I know it is because MLB Network filled hours with debate over their exclusion. I’m not that invested in any particular player’s absence, but at least the announcement gave those of us marooned on Lockout Island something to talk about. Kudos to Billy Wagner, Gary Sheffield, Jeff Kent and Bobby Abreu for logging check marks on more than 5% of votes cast. None came close to going in and none will “go in as a Met” should any of them go in at all, but it’s always nice to be reminded of good players who wore the Mets uniform.
Especially when the Mets uniform was new.
I’ve been thinking for a while now that what the New York Mets Hall of Fame really needs is a Casey Stengel Wing, though for a space that’s already physically compressed, a wing would have to be more figurative than literal. Instead, allow me to welcome one and all to The Casey Stengel Vestibule, an anteroom designed to lead us into our Hall with affection for and attention to a few of those who made the Mets the Mets in the first place…even if first place couldn’t have been further from where those first few sets of Mets finished. We could also dub it Casey’s foyer, which via British pronunciation rhymes with oy vey (my mother liked to say foy-ay), but in the United States rhymes with lawyer and thus might be mistaken for a player acquired in a trade that turns out even worse than the one that cost us Amos Otis. “Getting Joe Foy was a misstep, but this deal? It’s even Foyer.” So let’s go with vestibule. It’s a word classic enough to be compatible with a namesake who first drew breath in the Nineteenth Century.
What building material are we working with here? Let’s say The Casey Stengel Vestibule will be constructed from context. Our aim is to provide an opportunity to pay tangible tribute to Mets who came to prominence in the earliest days of the franchise; Mets who achieved some feats that live on in legend all these decades later; Mets who did the best they could under trying competitive circumstances; Mets who fomented a legacy and loyalty from which everything we as fans embrace stems; and Mets who the Mets Hall of Fame process has, to date, ignored.
The Mets Hall of Fame was founded in 1981. The first several classes of inductees mostly recognized figures associated with the beginnings of the Metropolitan Baseball Club of New York, yet skipped over the players who composed said ballclub. Once that first wave was properly recognized and our HOF commenced looking at the fellers on the field, it implicitly dismissed the first few Met years. Ed Kranepool, whose Met career began in 1962, is in, but he’s honored for his longevity in general and his contributions to 1969 and 1973 specifically. Cleon Jones, whose Met career began in 1963, is in, but the story his Hall plaque tells is similar. It’s understandable to a certain extent that when it came time to certify players as Met-immortal, the instinct was to put the losing years in the rearview mirror the way the ’69 Mets did under Gil Hodges.
Bud Harrelson and Rusty Staub were the first persons enshrined as players in 1986 (Hodges was inducted in 1982 for his managerial magic); Tom Seaver followed in 1988; Jerry Koosman had his day in 1989; then Kranepool in ’90, Jones in ’91, Jerry Grote in ’92 and Tug McGraw in ’93 before NYM HOF inductions came to focus mainly on later Met successes — after which HOF inductions tended to vanish. Yet 1969 wouldn’t be 1969 as we know it had 1962 not been 1962 as we know it. The distance scaled between 40-120 base camp and the 100-62 mountaintop represents an unforgettable journey. The individuals who traveled its first steps, despite the stumbles, ought not be forgotten.
Especially with that context we’re building with. It’s a vestibule to the Mets Hall of Fame I’m proposing, not the College of Cardinals. I’ll give you a “small Hall” for Cooperstown if you insist. I don’t understand being exclusionary for the one adjacent to the Jackie Robinson Rotunda. We decide what is sacred to us. The embryonic and infant Mets qualify. Their status transcends standings. They formed the mythic foundation of all we root for. Those who succeeded a little when succeeding at all was precious deserve to be treated as Met success stories.
Should the actuarial tables be on your side, return to this space or one similar to it in another sixty years and 1969 will likely appear chronologically indistinguishable from 1962. Should the Mets endure to a 120th anniversary (assuming MLB resolves its lockout by then), I’d guess everything that spans the 25th anniversary patch worn in 1986 will casually constitute “the early days” of the Mets. Maybe we don’t have to wait for 2082 for precision of perspective to diminish. Maybe anything that happened before you were born or became a fan is all one big garble of “Then” to you. But we are fortunate in 2022, as we commemorate the Mets’ 60th anniversary, to still be alive in a time when 1962 lingers on within the parameters of collective living memory. True, you have to go back a ways to claim you made your way to the Polo Grounds or tuned into WABC or Channel 9 for any of the frequent defeats or cherished victories, but as ancient history goes, it really wasn’t that long ago. Not as many Mets who played in Manhattan are with us as there used to be, but a bunch remain. The same can be said for the players who came along as Shea Stadium opened and the Mets began to tentatively find their Flushing footing.
From the vantage point of 2022, Casey’s days shimmer. Never mind the long-term basement rental. We who grew up on the tales of the ’62 Mets and the ’63 Mets and the ’64 Mets and the ’65 Mets — teams already in the past when we jumped on the bandwagon, yet ever-present in the Metsian conversation to which Lindsey, Ralph and Bob invited us regularly — relished grasping where we had come from. If we didn’t necessarily miss a world in which the Mets winning a World Series was unimaginable, we nevertheless knew we’d missed out on something special. We missed out on 452 losses in four years, but we also missed digging in our heels and determining not only were we gonna be fans of this loopy outfit, but we were gonna stay fans and become bigger fans.
Hail to the fans who took a look at what those first four seasons yielded and asked, “Where can I get more of this?” It was after the unused National League Town receipts generated by expired Giant or Dodger fealty had been cashed in. It was after the irony of pulling for the worst ballclub ever had run its course. By the end of 1965, it was after Casey himself had carried the Met Mystique has far as he personally could. Casey’s number was retired that September. Casey’s likeness was committed to a bust when the Mets Hall of Fame was inaugurated sixteen Septembers hence. Tales of Casey’s wizardry — with people, with baseball, with English — captivate us to this day. Despite the institutional amnesia that plagued the organization prior to the spasm of Cohen-instigated, Showalter-blessed historical awareness currently and delightfully permeating Seaver Way, the Casey Stengel aura has never been fully filed away in a drawer somewhere.
But he alone didn’t create the Met Mystique. Joan Payson, George Weiss, Bill Shea…they’re all in the Mets Hall of Fame, too, same as our first trio of announcers, and all were worthy picks, but what these most valuable non-players gave us was the infrastructure. It was the players who had to do the heavy lifting of filling it in, even if sometimes what got lifted also got dropped. There were myriad Mets who sent the New Breed scurrying to its bedsheets before a single banner fluttered within a mile of a pennant race. The absence of their ranks from the Mets Hall of Fame makes the joint feel like one has entered the Banner Day contest with a blank placard.
Thus, The Casey Stengel Vestibule, dedicated to the players who got our foot in the door and kept it there until all of us together, Mets and Mets fans, could grow formidable enough to kick it in.
The National Baseball Hall of Fame selected five players for its first class in 1936. We can humbly start with the same quantity. My five selections for the first class of The Casey Stengel Vestibule of the New York Mets Hall of Fame, ideally inducted amid the franchise’s 60th-anniversary celebration during Old Timers Weekend this August, are, in alphabetical order:
JOE CHRISTOPHER
Outfielder, 1962-1965
The first Met to hit .300 as a true everyday player, achieving his milestone over 154 games and 543 at-bats in 1964, when Joe led the club in doubles, triples, total bases, runs batted in and runs scored.
ROGER CRAIG
Starting Pitcher, 1962-1963
Threw the very first pitch in New York Mets history, having been named Opening Day starter in 1962, an honor Roger would earn again in 1963 after becoming the first Met to compile double-digit victories in a single season.
JAY HOOK
Starting Pitcher, 1962-1964
Posted the first win in franchise history, a complete game triumph at Pittsburgh on April 23, 1962. Jay followed it by starting the first home win in Mets history on April 28 and notching the Mets’ second route-going road win on May 8.
RON HUNT
Infielder, 1963-1966
The first Met to start an All-Star Game, manning second base for the National League at Shea Stadium in 1964, the first of Ron’s two Midsummer Classic selections. Dueled Pete Rose for Rookie of the Year honors in 1963, finishing as runner-up in BBWAA voting.
FRANK THOMAS
Outfielder, 1962-1964
The premier slugger of the Original Mets, belting 34 home runs, establishing a standard that would last for 13 seasons. While placing sixth in the 1962 NL home run derby, Frank drove in 94 runs, another club record that would stand until the following decade.
There’s more to be said for each of the above, no matter that whatever was said about them during their Met tenures was uttered against the backdrop of the second division. Acknowledging shortcomings and circumstances is part and parcel of revering the early Mets, or the Mets of any less than brilliant stretch. They lost a lot? They survived. You might even say they flourished, taking turns as genuine fan favorites. It says something for our tribe that we threw ourselves into embracing players who could win only so much on our behalf. It says something about the players that they inspired the amount of adoration they did.
The Mets of those first few years may have lost more than their share of games, but the hearts they won are still being counted.
All five Vestibuleans are still with us. I will admit a bit to prioritizing the living for immediate induction when the living are currently in their eighties and nineties. I’m also in favor of honoring Mets from the Casey Stengel Era who have left us, squaring our historical account and giving their descendants a day to remember once the Vestibule establishes itself and the Mets tend to their Hall of Fame annually. But this summer, let’s take care of those players who have a chance to experience it and enjoy it. Hopefully each gentleman among our plaqueworthy pack — they shall carry the same status as everybody previously inducted in the Hall, from Payson and Stengel in ’81 to Alfonzo, Darling and Matlack in ’21 — can join the long overdue Old Timers festivities at Citi Field this summer, accepting our appreciation and tipping their cap. If they can’t be there physically, they can know their team and their fans haven’t forgotten how they helped build this thing we love, win or lose.
by Greg Prince on 21 January 2022 4:46 pm Meat Loaf’s baserunner protagonist in the middle of “Paradise By The Dashboard Light,” this kid who really makes things happen out there, was probably helped along by his third base coach. Maybe not as he was rounding first and trying for second, because it’s on the runner to pick up the center fielder bobbling the ball, but you’d have to think he was given a steal sign — or at least not given the stop sign — when he got that jump (“what a jump”) and took third. And the batter who followed him had to have read a sign for the suicide squeeze for it to have been executed as seamlessly as it was. Not that we know for sure if the runner beat the play at the plate. “Holy cow,” broadcaster Phil Rizzuto breathlessly opined, “I think he’s gonna make it,” but instant replay wasn’t available as the song moved along to other action.
Aside from invoking the 1978 epic hit single in tribute to Mr. Loaf, who died Thursday at the age of 74, we bring up “Paradise By The Dashboard Light” here because the coaches in the song not only go unnamed but unremarked upon. It’s hard to imagine this boy who could really fly wasn’t paying attention in the heat of the moment to the signals he was getting, nor could we fathom that he’d ever have gotten up to bat in such a pressure cooker of a situation had he not been coached thoroughly as he was coming up the chain to be ready for his moment.
Even in baseball as metaphor (because the play-by-play Meat Loaf drafted the Scooter to do didn’t show up in any box score, wink-wink), the coaching is implicit. Most of the time, when viewed from a distance, it’s barely that.
Today, the Mets announced the composition of their coaching staff for 2022. Some of these names had made the rounds weeks ago, but now they’re official. Welcome aboard some highly qualified professionals you probably won’t hear about let alone think about again until something goes wrong or everybody’s dissatisfied.
• Bench coach Glenn Sherlock (a coach in these parts a few years ago)
• First base coach Wayne Kirby (a 1998 Met)
• Third base coach Joey Cora (brother of a 2009-2010 Met)
• Bullpen coach Craig Bjornson (who seems to enjoy the camera)
• Hitting coach Eric Chavez (we’ll forgive him previous place of employ)
• Assistant hitting coach Jeremy Barnes (formerly the Mets’ Director of Player Initiatives, a key component of the Department of Euphemisms)
Buck Showalter will remind reporters now and then that when a good play is made or a player gets on a hot streak that somebody who otherwise goes about his business quietly has been working hard with so-and-so and it’s really paying off. Sherlock gave Showalter a great suggestion. Kirby positioned the fielders just right. Cora took a chance that paid off. Chavez or perhaps Barnes has spent hours in the cage with somebody who’s no longer in a slump. Bjornson meshes well with pitching coach Jeremy Hefner, the lone holdover from the Rojas regimelet (it wasn’t much of a regime) and maybe he keeps the guys in the pen loose. If we pay attention, we’ll take note of these brief notices and feel good about these coaches between pitches.
Then we’ll forget about them almost completely until a runner is thrown out or a slump doesn’t end or an error is committed by a fielder who was standing there rather than there. Why didn’t Sherlock warn Showalter? How come Cora sent or didn’t send that leadfoot/speedster? What does Bjornson do around here anyway? What we don’t see we don’t see. What we think tends to be influenced by what do see or hear, and usually we won’t see or hear much from Buck’s brain trust.
Then, likely when we’re fuming about Met things in general, they’ll be gone from the Citi Field scene, damaged collaterally by a little too much losing, hopefully after an ample amount of winning. Like Jeremy Accardo, who is no longer assistant pitching coach; or Ricky Bones, who is no longer bullpen coach; or ex-first base coach Tony Tarasco; or ex-bench coach Dave Jauss; or ex-third base coach Gary DiSarcina; or Brian Schneider, who you might remember as a catcher for the Mets for a couple of years a while back but you probably have already forgotten coached catchers and coordinated otherwise just last year. The only reason we knew Hugh Quattlebaum — still in the organization but no longer the hitting coach — was because Chili Davis was let go. Davis received more than a modicum of attention for the reason coaches do: by serving as sacrificial lamb. The rest of the 2021 coaches, not all of whom were mentioned in this paragraph, were swept out with the Rojas tide, as if they all suddenly misplaced their savvy simultaneously.
All these new guys who are replacing them no doubt know their baseball. In the end, it won’t save them when somebody has to go.
by Greg Prince on 11 January 2022 8:11 pm Keith Hernandez filled the hole between the two and four spots in the batting order for seven Met seasons. He filled holes between himself and either the first base line or the second baseman on balls that seemed destined for the outfield. He filled the hole in the knowledge base of one promising young pitcher after another before there was an All-Star catcher on the premises to guide them. He filled in who knows how many teammates on what to look for, what to think, how to be. Although it hasn’t been in uniform, he’s long filled a seat in baseball’s best booth with a proprietary blend of élan and absurdity. And now, finally, he fills a gaping void in Mets history.
Keith Hernandez’s No. 17 will be retired on July 9. With its official removal from circulation and its elevation above the left field stands, the 1986 New York Mets, the winningest team this franchise has ever known, will be represented at the highest level of consecration an organization can bestow.
It was strange that Keith’s 17 went unretired for more than three decades because, well, he’s Keith Hernandez. He transformed the Metropolitans upon his arrival and we view an entire decade for the better largely because of his impact. No number ceremony for Keith and none for anybody associated with 1986 was equally bizarre. Six members of our last world champions have been inducted into the Mets Hall of Fame along with their manager and general manager — Keith received his bust in 1997 — but not a soul responsible for the 108 regular-season victories had his digits totally and completely immortalized in the 35 years that followed their World Series celebration. Hell, Keith was the 17th-most recent Met to wear 17, which is to say 16 Mets have worn it since Keith, and that’s with nobody wearing it after Fernando Tatis in 2010.
The non-retirement of 17 and its continual random assignment made for a pretty dependable running gag in the SNY booth. Show the Mr. Koo clip (there’s only one) and Keith might let out a harumph. But after a while, fun was fun. How on Bill Shea’s green earth was 17 one of those numbers that any Graeme, Dae or Lima might take the mound in? Even Tatis the elder, a legitimate major league hitter during his Flushing residency, was a stretch. Keith Hernandez had to watch No. 17 in action on the back of anybody who wasn’t Keith Hernandez? While 1986’s hole went unfilled?
Enough of that, at last. We got Keith Hernandez in 1983. Keith Hernandez gets his number retired in 2022. Time lapse notwithstanding, it’s almost a good a deal as that June night we sent Neil Allen and Rick Ownbey to St. Louis in exchange for one of the best things that ever happened to us.
by Greg Prince on 4 January 2022 1:25 pm “There’s gonna be a lot of talk tonight,” Oscar Madison warned his audience during his tryout as a sports talk radio host in 1974. “Some of it you’ll like and some of it you won’t.” This was after he heeded his roommate Felix Unger’s advice and altered his style to reflect the hostility, sarcasm and venom that Felix identified as his strong suits.
Well, we have a few of those qualities warming up in the bullpen any given night, but we’ll save ’em for the next three-game losing streak. All the talk we’re about to tune in for is talk you should sincerely like because most of it reminds us how much fun the Mets can be when we come across them out of context and with no competitive implications.
It’s Oscar’s Caps time! For the tenth consecutive year, we review the previous twelve months’ worth of sightings of our New York Mets in the popular culture — television, movies, novels, basically anywhere you don’t necessarily expect to discover the Mets…and we don’t mean the postseason, ya wiseacre.
“The good news is it’ll be available again during the playoffs.”
—Wiseacre Seth Meyers, Late Night, January 13, 2021, on Citi Field being used as a 24/7 COVID vaccination facility…after which he acknowledged the Mets have a new owner but that he’ll keep making these stale jokes until the standings dictate otherwise
Seth Meyers announced early in 2022 that he tested positive for COVID. Because he’s vaccinated and boosted, he says he’s feeling fine, and we’re glad, even if he takes one too many shots at the Mets (FYI, Seth, Oscar’s foray into insult radio wasn’t a ratings-grabber).
Meyers’s jab might fall into the category of talk you won’t like. We’ll also throw in this scene from a 2021 episode of Showtime’s American Rust, which takes place in a downbeat town in Pennsylvania. The cranky dad played by Bill Camp is watching what looks like a Fox News report about immigration. His half-Mexican daughter who moved to New York is watching with him.
DAUGHTER: Do we have to watch this? Is there a Pirates game on?
DAD: I thought you would have become a Yankees fan by now.
DAUGHTER: At least it’s not the Mets.
DAD: That’s my girl.
Those two probably still carry NL East bitterness from 1973 and 1988.
Anyway, back to talk we do like.
As ever, the Oscar’s Caps, named for the Mets cap Jack Klugman wore in so many episodes of The Odd Couple (and Tony Randall put on for effect a couple of times), are awarded for whatever we noticed in 2021 if it’s something that was brand new; something from a previous year that we’d never seen before; or maybe something that we vaguely remembered from ages ago but were only lately able to flesh out. Although our internal staff is as vigilant as possible, it has limited shall we say bandwidth and can’t possibly monitor everything beamed or streamed. Thus, this project has become a manifestation of generous Metsopotamian crowdsourcing, and we extend our thanks to all who alert us when they see something or hear something relevant to our eternal quest to document every last Mets cap, Mets jersey or Mets murmur.
 A great example of how the Oscar’s Caps works when it works best came at the end of 2020, when we presented the ninth annual edition of this feature and multiple readers piped up to let us know about Soul, the Pixar movie that had just debuted on Disney+, and why it was right up our alley. Sure enough, within the narrow window when I had access to a subscription, I was able to see for myself that, in a flashback scene, our hero Joe Gardner wears a 1980s-style Mookie Wilson jersey, replete with racing stripe (although designed with buttons, which weren’t a part of the racing stripe uni motif until 1991). Mets posters are visible on the wall of Buddy’s Barber shop as well.
Edward Burns’s 2021 Epix series Bridge and Tunnel definitely dispensed a flavor worthy of its Mets fan creator. Set in 1980, a Rusty Staub poster is visible, as is one of Burns’s own 1970s-era Mets road jerseys (worn by Pags, played by Brian Muller). Audio of Bob Murphy announcing a Mets foulout contributed to the soundtrack. In the third episode, Burns, as Artie Farrell, says of Tom Seaver, “I swear to Christ, it breaks my heart to see him in that Cincinnati uniform.”
If it breaks your heart to see another noteworthy righty in another uniform, maybe you couldn’t have imagined that on the night Pete Alonso won his second Home Run Derby (July 12, 2021), when Noah Syndergaard visited Late Night with Seth Meyers and discussed his book club, his ice baths and other aspects of his ongoing rehab from Tommy John surgery, he’d be trying on Angel togs by November. Yet because he hadn’t been anything but a Met by the time Jeopardy aired on December 28, 2021, we’ll count this, too, as Oscar’s Capworthy. It’s from the category “Noahs” for $600.
“With Scandinavian roots and a hammer of a curveball, pitcher Noah Syndergaard got this nickname. The hair helps.”
“Who is Thor?”
“Did you type up that Tom Seaver interview?”
—Oscar to a distraught Myrna (Sheldn — not Sheldon — has left her), “Rain in Spain,” The Odd Couple, Season 5, Episode 1, September 12, 1974
Tom, of course, was in a Mets uniform the night Myrna and Sheldn — real-life couple Penny Marshall and Rob Reiner — got together for good; on the night after, Tom would shut out the Cubs (on the night before, the Mets lost in 25 innings to the Cardinals).
 Garry Marshall, who executive-produced The Odd Couple during its 1970-1975 run on ABC, wrote in his memoir Wake Me When It’s Funny that he always liked to cast character actor Hector Elizondo in his movies because Elizondo lent a sense of maturity to the business at hand. Perhaps it’s appropriate that Elizondo picked up Klugman’s — or Oscar’s — cap over the past year. In the November 4 episode of B Positive (Season 2, Episode 4 — “Baseball, Walkers and Wine”), Drew (Thomas Middleditch) takes Harry (Elizondo) to a Hartford Yard Goats game, where Harry wears a Mets cap, one with a blue rather than orange squatchee (implemented 1997) and no MLB logo (implemented 1992) on the back, indicating that, like Harry, the cap has been around, or is perhaps is a non-licensed knockoff.
Harry continues to wear the cap in the next episode (“Novocaine, Bond and Bocce,” S. 2, E. 5, November 11, 2021) while playing bocce, potentially making the Mets cap a running character trait à la Oscar Madison.
“All right, H.B. If you’ll play ball with me, I’ll play ball with you.”
—Darrin Stephens (Dick Sargent), “The Phrase is Familiar,” Bewitched, January 15,1970 (S. 6, E. 17) — as soon as he spouts this cliché (per Endora’s spell), Darrin and the client to whom he’s speaking are suddenly wearing Mets uniforms. Darrin’s is No. 9, with the MLB patch from the 1969 season, à la J.C. Martin.
In Perilous Gambit: A Mike Stoneman Thriller by Kevin Chapman (2021), the titular New York City detective visits Las Vegas and stumbles across a January 2020 reunion of former Met farmhands who played for the Las Vegas 51s. Mike is pleased to exchange pleasantries with Dom Smith a couple of chapters after hearing “Takin’ Care of Business,” revisiting late-period Shea Stadium in his mind and declaring to his companion that the song “always makes me think about a Mets win”. (In Mike’s previous adventure, the football-themed Fatal Infraction, our baseball-first crimefighter took time out to take his godson to a Mets game.)
Mario Reyes (Luis Figueroa) is a Cy Young Award winner who has just signed a $175 million contract with the Mets and is buying a waterfront mansion in Connecticut in the 2014 film And So It Goes.
The third-season premiere of FXX’s mostly animated anthology series Cake (July 9, 2020) had a short showing the Miracle on the Hudson from the perspective of the geese, prominently featuring the soon-to-be demolished Shea Stadium.
In the 2021 novel Out of a Dog’s Mouth by McNally Berry (who’s never been seen in the same room as Mets non-fiction author Matthew Silverman), there are dogs not coincidentally named Choo Choo, Turk and Kooz, plus a person named Robert Person.
The induction of the Beastie Boys into the Rock ‘n’ Roll Hall of Fame nearly ten years ago, on April 14, 2012, reminded their fans that as the Beasties were rising to superstardom, Adam Horovitz, a.k.a. King Ad-Rock, regularly showed his Met loyalty. One of the portraits of the trio that was projected while LL Cool J and Chuck D inducted them featured Horovitz in his mid-1980s pose, which meant it was topped by a Mets cap. After Adam “MCA” Yauch died on May 4, 2012, the Mets played nothing but Beasties Boys songs as starting lineup walkup music in his memory during their home game of May 5. “Fight For Your Right,” whose video is where Horovitz’s Mets cap got its most play in 1986 and 1987, started up Ike Davis’s trek to the plate.
“Do you remember the ’86 Mets-Red Sox World Series? Bill Buckner let a ground ball go between his legs and the Sox lost the game and eventually the World Series. Very few people remember who was on the field that day, but everyone remembers that Buckner missed the ball. And a baseball’s a lot smaller than your ball, which is not dropping.”
—Mr. Buellerton (Matthew Broderick) stressing to Claire Morgan (Hillary Swank) the importance of fixing the ball supposed to drop in Times Square in the movie New Year’s Eve (2011)
“I’m a big Mets fan to this day. The ’86 Mets was right like when I was 12, 13, this huge team […] I had a big crush on Tim Teufel because he seemed like a wallflower to me. He platooned at second base with Wally Backman and had chipmunk face, and I was just like ‘us!’ I had a very elaborate fantasy that I was married to Gary Carter, who was the star catcher, but that Gary Carter was mean to me and that Tim Teufel would be the guy who sort of wooed me. I fantasized about having a bad marriage to Gary Carter. And he was the kind of guy who was like, ‘Where’s a pen?! Is there a pen in this house?!’ And I’d go into the other room and Tim Teufel would take me out.”
—Jessi Klein, who would later perform as Jessi Glaser and serve as consulting producer on the Mets-friendly Netflix show Big Mouth, doing standup at Joe’s Pub, December 23, 2009
 As long as 1986 has come up, let us note the back-in-the-day releases of the twelve-inch singles “Get Metsmerized” and “Let’s Go Mets” along with the visit of Roger McDowell and Lenny Dykstra to the MTV set, where Dykstra hit on VJ Martha Quinn, a little more than 35 years ago. All of this was featured in the Nick Davis opus Once Upon a Time in Queens, the Mets Pop Culture event of 2021. It was written about in some detail here.
Now for some more 1986-related content…
David Brenner invited a pair of world champion Mets on his ABC late night show Nightlife on consecutive Mondays in 1986, Ron Darling on November 24 and Keith Hernandez on December 1 (each airing followed a New York team playing on Monday Night Football). Brenner, a Philadelphia native, wore a Mets sweatshirt for the Hernandez show. Keith recalled the NLCS vs. Houston as a better postseason series than the World Series and told the already legendary story about retiring to Davey Johnson’s office with two out and nobody on in Game Six against Boston. He also explained he didn’t smoke in the offseason, only at the ballpark to relax. His take on Mets fans, no more than about 2,000 of whom would be at Shea when he came in with the Cardinals, is that they deserved this because they’d waited a long time, 17 years. (Hernandez would return to Brenner’s show the first week of the 1987 season.)
In the 2021 documentary Street Gang: How We Got to Sesame Street, a 1968 commercial that was part of the “Give a Damn” campaign from the New York Urban Coalition is cited as the primary inspiration for the look of the landmark children’s educational program. In that commercial, excerpted in the documentary, actor Lincoln Kilpatrick suggests viewers “send your kid to a ghetto for the summer” and leads a world-weary tour of what underprivileged city youth faced every day. Among other things, we see kids trying to play stickball in the street while having to dodge cars. Kilpatrick turns toward the camera and shrugs, “It’s not Shea Stadium, but it’s exciting.”
In the credits to Street Gang, the show’s cast and crew provides the chorus to a respectable rendition “Put Down the Duckie,” with one of the women singing quite visible in her white 1986 World Champion Mets sweatshirt. Mookie Wilson and Keith Hernandez were not on hand for this singalong, though they did appear on Sesame Street twice in 1987 — with the Count on April 15 and with Snuffleupagus on May 11 — and take part in a celebrity “Duckie” extravaganza that aired on PBS on March 7, 1988.
November 30, 2016 Wahlburgers (Season 7, Episode 4 — “Take Me Out to the Paul Game” on FYI): in the process of preparing to throw out the first pitch at a Brooklyn Cyclones game, Donnie Wahlberg meets Mookie Wilson, which inflicts Game Six flashbacks from 1986 on the Massachusetts native actor/singer.
“So anyway, Vlad, it’s 1986, and I’m at Studio 54 with Tommy Lee and Wally Backman. Bad guy, nasty guy, nice to me, though. He was in a platoon with Tim Teufel, do you remember Tim Teufel?”
—Seth Meyers, imagining Donald Trump riffing during a previous summit with Vladimir Putin, Late Night, June 17, 2021 — and not taking a shot at the Mets, so we’re cool with it
On July 4, 1989, CBS aired a pilot for a sitcom version of the hit film Coming to America, this iteration starring Tommy Davidson as Prince Tariq (younger brother of Eddie Murphy’s character from the movie). Tariq wore a period-appropriate satin Mets Starter jacket, festooned with pins, just as Prince Akeem did in the movie when he decided to blend in with common New Yorkers. Though the pilot was not picked up, the sitcom NBC showed the very next night, The Seinfeld Chronicles, starring another standup comic who worked the Mets into his show, would eventually find a spot on its network’s prime time schedule and within Mets Pop Culture legend.
On February 25, 2021, life imitated art as Francisco Lindor wore the same Mets jacket Eddie Murphy wears in Coming II America as he arrived for that day’s Spring Training activities. The team’s Twitter account captured him greeting nobody in particular, “Good morning, my neighbors!”
 At the 44:45 mark of the 2021 Netflix movie MOXIE!, a 1989 Topps Record Breaker card hailing Kevin McReynolds for setting a new standard for stolen bases without being caught in a season (21) appears as part of a zine…except the card has been doctored to cover McReynolds’s face with a sad-face emoji and cowboy hat.
When not stuck in a traffic jam in Harlem that’s backed up to Jackson Heights on Car 54, Where Are You? Toody gets jealous when Muldoon becomes friendly with an intellectual rookie cop. Feeling left out of suddenly elevated cop car conversation, Gunther finds himself partnered with Leo Schnauser and tries to conjure up a sophisticated level of dialogue himself, leading to this exchange:
TOODY: I hear they’re tearing down the Met.
SCHNAUSER: They’re tearing down the New York Mets, the new baseball team? How can they tear them down, they haven’t even been built up.
— “How Smart Can You Get?”; Season 1, Episode 23; February 25, 1962
This may have been the first Mets mention in the popular culture. The Original Mets were still stretching in St. Petersburg when the officers on Car 54 were talking about them. Truly, New York couldn’t wait one half-hour longer to get back to being a National League town.
The Mystery of the Mets by Kevin Mahon, published in 2019, is a murder mystery whose action is set at Shea Stadium. Released in 2021 as The New York Mets: A Shea Stadium Mystery.
Clips of Stone Cold Steve Austin, in his Mets jersey (No. 3:16), chatting with GM Steve Phillips from Austin’s first-pitch appearance at Shea Stadium, July 10, 1999 (the Matt Franco Game), show up in the Austin edition of Biography: WWE Legends that premiered on A&E April 18, 2021 We see the wrestler exchanging greetings with Derek Jeter and signing a baseball while GM Steve Phillips hovers nearby.
On Gilligan’s Island, “The Hunter,” (Season 3, Episode 18; loosely based on The Most Dangerous Game; January 16, 1967), Gilligan, the Professor, the Skipper and Mr. Howell are tuned in to a radio broadcast announcing that the Dodgers shut out the Mets 4-0, meaning the Skipper owes Mr. Howell “three-hundred thousand twelve bananas,” which the Skipper tells Mr. Howell he can subtract from the “nine hundred and sixty mangos you owe me from playing gin”.
“A fan rushed the field at the Mets-Giants game last night and stood on the pitcher’s mound. Thankfully, he was only able to strike out a few Mets before he was apprehended. Sorry, everyone on the crew.”
—Seth Meyers during his Late Night monologue, August 17, 2021 (we feel your pain, Late Night crew)
A subway station advertising billboard featuring Lee Mazzilli, Neil Allen, Joel Youngblood and Craig Swan using Gillette Foamy (with the message, “This year we’re getting back into the thick of it”) appears in the 1982 movie Smithereens.
On the June 1, 1989, episode of Classic Concentration, a drawing of a Mets player tipping his cap constituted a third of a puzzle whose answer was “Captain Kidd” (the other illustrations were of the ten of hearts and a couple of goats).
John Leguizamo wore his omnipresent Mets cap in the 2021 filmed production of the play Waiting for Godot, presented in the form of a Zoom call in these lingering pandemic times.
Visible behind Michael Che as he guested via Zoom with Howard Stern in 2021: a Darryl Strawberry poster of yore.
In the Wiseguy episode “Last Rites for Lucci” (Season 1, Episode 10 — or 11, depending on how you count the pilot; November 19, 1987), Nick Lucci (James Andronica) tells Vinnie Terranova (Ken Wahl) of his current state, “I get a check every week, a few beers every Friday. If the Mets win, I’m happy. I’m not aimin’ high anymore, Vinnie.”
“I see ya forgot about the ’69 Mets. They didn’t have the hitting or the fielding of the other teams, but they won the World Series. And you know why? Showers.”
—Coach Morris Buttermaker (Jack Warden), convincing his team they need to clean themselves up after games, in the sitcom version of The Bad News Bears, “Nakedness is Next to Godliness” (Season 1, Episode 3; April 7, 1979).
“First of all, uniforms do not a baseball team make. I mean, in order to have a good team, you gotta have determination… gotta have hustle…and skill…look at the New York Mets.”
“They have uniforms.”
—Chet Kincaid, unsuccessfully attempting to persuade his Little League team, the Tigers, that uniforms are not intrinsic to their potential success once a plan to purchase uniforms falls through The Bill Cosby Show, “The Worst Crook That Ever Lived” (Season 1, Episode 18; January 25, 1970).
The fact that the 1969 Mets took showers and wore uniforms may or may not have influenced guitarist Brian Bell’s decision to wear a Mets cap while performing with Weezer at Citi Field on the Hell Mega Tour, August 4, 2021.
“I looked at the building there in L.I.C., where all the Mets live.”
—One of Wally’s college buddies, musing over local real estate, Awkwafina is Nora from Queens (“Shadow Acting,” Season 2, Episode 8, September 29, 2021)
In the 2021 Netflix documentary Untold: Deal With the Devil, a photo of boxer Christy Salters Martin (the film’s subject) and Jason Isringhausen in his Mets uniform briefly appears.
Rapper Fred the Godson wore an orange Mets cap with a blue bill in his 2014 video for “The Session 4,” which was incorporated into the story of his death from COVID-19 in the first part of Spike Lee’s NYC Epicenters 9/11 —> 2021½, which first aired on HBO on August 22, 2021.
In the 2019 film Ode to Joy, lead character Charlie (Martin Freeman) — who has problems coping with joy — wears two different Mets t-shirts and a Mets cap
On Brooklyn Nine-Nine in “Renewal,” Season 8, Episode 8 (September 2, 2021), Jake Peralta (Andy Samberg) finds himself with no battery power in his phone because he used it “mining for MetsCoin. It’s the first cryptocurrency that is also the Mets.”
British comedy team Tony Hendra and Nick Ullett performed “The Agony of a New York Mets Fan” on The Ed Sullivan Show, August 7, 1966. Hendra donned a Mets cap and became not just an American, but a prototypical New Yorker. Ullett portrayed “an unintelligent, inquisitive, twittering Englishman — in other words himself”. Sitting on stage as if at Shea Stadium, Hendra’s Mets fan suffers both the Mets’ mishaps and his grandstand neighbor’s clueless queries. Key exchange:
“I don’t know anything about the game.”
“You and the Mets both.”
For a handful of performances in 1981, Paul Dooley donned a Mets jacket and portrayed the lead character in The Amazin’ Casey Stengel or Can’t Anybody Here Speak This Game? at the American Place Theater. Frank Rich did not care for the production, or as he ended his review in the New York Times, “Can’t anybody here write a play?”
In 2021’s dystopian novel The Body Scout by Lincoln Michel, baseball teams are owned and operated by big pharma. Fighting for the pennant? The Monsanto Mets. Their best player, JJ Zunz, dies while batting in a playoff game (but at least these Mets made the playoffs).
“Quick favor — could you look up all the Mets scores for me for the last 37 years?”
“Again, the Mets?”
“Just tell me how many RBIs Keith Hernandez had in ’87? Give me something!”
—Pete, the scoutmaster with an arrow lodged in his neck since 1985, Ghosts, “Viking Funeral,” Season 1, Episode 3 (October 14, 2021), beseeching the new owner of the haunted house where he and the other spectral title characters reside to put her laptop to good use
For the record, Pete, Keith Hernandez drove in 89 runs in 1987.
In “Fortunate Son,” the third episode of Season 3 of The Sopranos (March 11, 2001), Johnny Soprano, in a flashback, is shown reading a newspaper sports section on October 25, 1969. A partial headline says “Mets Decision,” likely alluding to the Mets having given Ed Charles his unconditional release the day before.
An animated version of Shea Stadium appears in Willie Mays and the Say-Hey Kid, which aired on October 14, 1972, as part of The ABC Saturday Superstar Movie series. In it, Willie has a guardian angel named Casey. Willie provides the voice to his character.
“You’re so desperate to stay relevant, to stay in the game, you can’t see that the game has passed you by. Willie Mays in center fielder for the Mets, misunderstanding the dewy eyes in the crowd for love.”
“You just never understood me or the Say Hey Kid. You play until your feet break. And they carry you off the field in a box.”
— Chuck Rhoades and Chuck Rhoades, Sr., Billions, “Victory Smoke,” Season 5, Episode 11, September 26, 2021
Richie Zyontz, an NFL producer for Fox and longtime friend of John Madden’s, appeared in the All Madden documentary that he was instrumental in shepherding to reality — it debuted on Christmas Day 2021 — and recalled, “I’m just a street kid from New York hired to be a broadcast associate…” while a photo of him in a Mets cap with Madden in the late 1980s pops up. Zyontz’s reverence for legends was apparent earlier in 2021 when he had a “Whack Back at Vac” note to Mike Vaccaro published in the New York Post calling for the Mets to retire 24 in honor of Willie Mays.
Heading from the sublime Say Hey Willie Mays to a let’s say less sublime New York National League icon, in the rebooted version of The Wonder Years (“The Club,” Season 1, Episode 3, October 6, 2021), Dean looks forward to getting to school and swapping baseball cards, especially the opportunity to “unload my Marv Throneberry card”.
It wouldn’t be a year in Mets Pop Culture without somebody sporting one very familiar head repeatedly sitting in front of us.
• In “Mothers and Other Strangers,” The Simpsons, Season 33, Episode 7 (November 28, 2021), Homer tries out a therapy app called Nutz that, among other things, promises “CBD gummies in the shape of your version of God,” with four icons appearing on his phone: Buddah, Jesus, a question mark and a pretty good Simpsonian rendering of Mr. Met.
• On the January 27, 2021, edition of Full Frontal, Samantha Bee explained getting a COVID-19 vaccine at a sports venue would be an issue for her since she’s “not allowed within a thousand feet of any professional sports stadium in this country” after “I tried to take off Mr. Met’s baseball and I realized it was his real head.” The gag was accompanied by a what we’ll call a disturbing image.
• On September 20, 2021, to welcome Mayor Bill de Blasio — who played himself on TV for eight years — to Queens Borough Hall for hizzoner’s week of conducting the city’s business from Queens, borough president Donovan Richards presented de Blasio with “a little mascot [of] the New York Mets. We hope to continue to try to convert you,” which the mayor accepted graciously: “Yeah, this is cool. This could do it right here.” The Red Sox-rooting mayor kept the miniature Mr. Met by his microphone for his further media appearances at Borough Hall. (A montage of Queens scenes behind him included a Mets logo with the message LET’S GO METS!!!!!)
In “Hello, It’s Me,” the premiere episode of And Just Like That…, the reboot/revival of Sex and the City (released on HBO Max, December 9, 2021), Carrie asks Big, “How was your day?” and he replies, “Perfect. The Dow and the Mets — both up.” Carrie’s reply: “Very nice.”
(Big, alas, doesn’t get to experience any more Mets games after that exchange.)
On the premiere of The Jerry Lewis Show on ABC, September 21, 1963, Lewis, from behind a desk, calls for a pack of L&M cigarettes as prelude to a live commercial read. Somebody off camera tosses him the pack, which hits Lewis in the chest, eluding his grasp in the process. As the host picks the cigarettes up, Lewis not quite good-naturedly remarks to the unseen person whose attempt an assist went awry, “You should play with the Mets.” On that very Saturday, the last-place Mets indeed committed three errors, yet prevailed over the Giants at Candlestick Park, 5-4.
 Mets Pop Culture headliners Yo La Tengo promoted/commemorated their 2021 Chanukah residency (“I Am Curious Yo La”) at the Bowery Ballroom with a poster featuring animated figures very close in form to Mr. and Mrs. Met…minus the uniforms, if you will.
“I think the Mets are going to all the way this year.”
—“Glass half-full kind of gal” MJ displaying the “relentless optimism” Peter Parker loves in Spider-Man: No Way Home (2021)
“On Sunday Hugh attended a Mets game with his old friend Jeff Raen. He called yesterday to announce that he now loves baseball and tried to sound all butch about it. ‘Jeff’s son had a soccer match so we had to leave in the sixth inning,’ he said. ‘I watched the rest of it on TV and then read the review in this morning’s paper.’
“Review?”
—April 29, 2003 entry in A Carnival of Snackery: Diaries 2003-2020 by David Sedaris (2021)
Sharon Grote, wife of Jerry, “a catcher with the New York Mets baseball team,” is a contestant on the August 22, 1967, episode of Password, winning neither game, but attracting the admiration of guest Skitch Henderson, who avows he is both a National League fan and a Mets fan. The other guest, Arlene Francis, when asked by host Alan Ludden, “What does a catcher do?” replies, “He’s in the rye.” Indeed, in a sandwich vein, Sharon Grote would go on post-1969 to appear with her family in commercials for Gulden’s Spicy Brown Mustard.
Let’s stay with “Game Shows” for a thousand.
During the 1973-74 television season, the same year Bowling for Dollars with Bob Murphy premiered locally, the Sign Man, Karl Ehrhardt (and two masquerading as him), appeared as the object of guessing on the syndicated version of To Tell The Truth, pegged to the mystery man’s prominence during the 1973 World Series. Bill Cullen was the only panelist to correctly pick Ehrhardt — No. 2 — out of the crowd.
With that, we’ll hold aloft our sign that shouts HAPPY NEW YEAR! on one side and IF YOU SEE SOMETHING, SAY SOMETHING on the other. Thank you again for passing along your entertainment, media and literature scouting reports for our detailing delight.
by Greg Prince on 2 January 2022 3:56 pm The Mets turn 60 this year. They’re as old as the American League was when the Mets were first signing players in 1961, including their very first, a young feller named Bruce Fitzpatrick (Casey called him Fitzgerald) who not long ago told his story of being the original Met prospect. Bruce never made it to the big leagues, but the Mets did, and they’ve stayed, somehow.
 We don’t feel a day over 1962. One is inevitably reminded, whenever a commemorative logo sees light, that as your franchise keeps on keeping on, it can’t help but grow further and further from its roots. The people who created the Mets are gone. The players who constituted the Original Mets are ever fewer. The people who made the Mets something special in the first (or tenth) place were never going to last forever, except in legend, where their place oughta be secure.
Dan Reilly recently passed away. His name may not be instantly recognizable to hardcore Mets fans the way we always knew Jane Jarvis was our organist or Karl Ehrhardt was the Sign Man, but his persona became a global phenomenon that lives on to this day. Dan was the original Mr. Met. He worked in the ticket office and handled multiple responsibilities when in 1964 he was asked to take on — or put on — one more. Please wear this head was the request from his supervisors. It was made of papier mâché, it had stitches drawn into it and it was topped by a Mets cap. Dan donned a baseball uniform and a baseball head and radiated baseball cheer. The Mets sent him out onto the field at Shea Stadium now and then. He caught on. Dan brought Mr. Met from concept (he existed first as an illustration) to a reality.
“Once I saw the reaction of everybody in the room,” Dan remembered, “I knew Mr. Met was going to be a hit with the fans.”
 When it came to mascots, the Mets were ahead of the game. Mr. Met has evolved over the decades, but Dan was ahem ahead of the game. The head he wore is on permanent display in the Mets Museum at Citi Field, a magnet for snapshots like the Apple out on the Plaza. The first time I saw it up close was at a press luncheon to introduce the Amazin’ Era 25th-anniversary cassette in 1986. Even then it seemed startling to realize the Mets were as old as they were. They were the new kids in town just the other year. How were they having a significant milestone anniversary? Dan had brought his signature noggin to Jimmy Weston’s in midtown to help promote the VHS. I spotted it as it sat on a shelf in a foyer as Dan stopped to use a pay phone.
You don’t forget a sighting like that.
Mr. Reilly published a book some fifteen years ago, The Original Mr. Met Remembers, with Bill Curreri. It’s a wonderfully engaging memoir about life at the beginning of this thing of ours. Not just the low-tech unveiling of a mascot, but the close-knit vibe of the Mets family in the 1960s, when baseball might have been a business, but it didn’t seem all that imposing. Dan himself went in on the renting of a house in Whitestone with Ron and Cecilia Swoboda. The Swobodas, he wrote, had more room than they needed. If you knew this, you weren’t surprised that when Jay Horwitz passed along the sad news of Dan’s passing, Jay said he heard it from Ron, who’d stayed friends with Dan all these years.
 Dan Reilly was first to fill the costume, but there’s a little bit of all of us in Mr. Met (and vice-versa). It’s also fitting that when Jay Horwitz succumbed to all the “you oughta write a book” suggestions he received when he ran Mets PR, he appropriately titled it Mr. Met. All of us who inadvertently take on the personality of our team have been tagged “Mr. Met” or something in a more honorifically appropriate ballpark. I’ve been “Mr. Met” to several well-wishers (and maybe ill-wishers) in my time. I’m sure you’ve been “Mr. Met” or “Mrs. Met” in your time. We take it as the ultimate compliment given that we each fill our heads like we fill our hearts with what it means to love the Mets. Dan Reilly was the first to make a suitably big thing out of it.
He wore it well.
by Greg Prince on 31 December 2021 4:24 pm The following scene occurred at Caledonian Hospital in Flatbush on this very afternoon in 1962. Or so I’ve decided 59 years after the fact.
I know ya might be in th’ mood t’ wail yer lungs out, young feller, what seein’ ya just got yerself born, but no need t’ be spooked. It’s just yer ol’ friend on a scoutin’ trip. Well, we ain’t ol’ friends yet, but we’re gonna be. It’s never too early t’ start gettin’ t’ know one another, I figger.
It’s all frank an’ earnest. I got in here with one of them keys t’ th’ city, so I’m legitimate. This key is what ya get if ya live long enough an’ maybe stay in one place without being removed from yer place of high-profile employment, which I was a couple of years ago, but not until after I won that other team a whole bundle of flags an’ titles. They showed their gratitude by dismissin’ me when I won one but not th’ other. That taught me t’ start turnin’ seventy. Keep it in mind fer when ya start gettin’ old.
 This feller could talk a newborn’s ear off. I don’t mean t’ disturb yer sleep. Yer gonna need it after gettin’ born in th’ dead of winter, which is what a lotta men my age are at th’ present time, but commencin’ livin’ now is a good plan ’cuz ya get yer nappin’ in an’ not on th’ bench because we’re gonna need ya t’ start makin’ noise in April when we commence our second season. It’s gonna be yer first, which is why I come all th’ way t’ Brooklyn t’ have a chat with ya.
Ya don’t know me yet, but I wanna get t’ know ya an’ yer little chums. I guess ya don’t have any yet, but ya will. Ya need t’ come out t’ th’ Polo Grounds an’ help us as soon as ya can. I don’t think yer ready t’ take grounders, but maybe ya can get in th’ grandstand an’ start shoutin’ encouragements at my players. Between you an’ me, kid, they could use th’ help.
Here’s th’ truth, pal. We weren’t very good last year. Have they shown ya a sports page yet? We finished at th’ bottom of th’ league an’ even though th’ season ended three months ago, they’re still talkin’ about my Amazin’, Amazin’ Mets. I’ll let ya in on a secret, kid. I made up that “Amazin’” bit t’ keep th’ press’s an’ th’ public’s eyes from watchin’ my ballplayers too close. It caught on all ironical like.
Yer chart here says ya won’t be stickin’ around Brooklyn fer long. I got relocated from here myself an’ went t’ manage up in Boston. That didn’t work so good neither. Them Braves was so bad, they changed their name t’ th’ Bees. Losses found us irregardleess of identity. I didn’t get t’ be a genius until they got me some players. Life is like that, kid. Maybe ya should start writin’ this stuff down, as soon as ya can pick up a pencil.
Says on th’ chart yer gonna be takin’ up residence in Long Island. Oh, excuse me, on Long Island. Never met an infant that corrected my usage my burping at me. Well, yer in luck, pal, because we’re buildin’ a bee-YOO-tiful new ballpark out there near where yer gonna live. Ya can take one of Mr. Moses’s bright an’ shiny freeways, or maybe use th’ locomotive.
My players ain’t gonna be much better this year than last year. We’re gonna have some new players. Got this boy Hunt from Milwaukee, which used t’ be Boston. I’m gonna give him a shot when we get t’ camp. An’ this Bright feller…a very Burright feller, he’s comin’ over from th’ Los Angeleses with Darkness. Or Harkness. I can’t keep ’em straight. That’s why I didn’t want any more Bob Millers or Nelsons or whatever their name was. Th’ point is, son, my Amazin’ Mets won’t be Amazin’ fer th’ wrong reason f’rever. Mrs. Payson, th’ nice lady who owns all those horses an’ paintin’s an’ us, is preparin’ t’ fund a very generous payroll, my old friend George Weiss is hirin’ some first-class scouts an’ we’ve got that ballpark that’s gonna have escalators an’ clean restrooms when it opens an’ no pillars or posts. I’m hopin’ t’ not have t’ watch from a box seat just yet.
I used my key t’ th’ city t’ enter this here maternity ward t’ tell ya how Amazin’ it’s all gonna be an’ if yer lookin’ fer a ballclub t’ call yer own as soon as ya can talk an’ buy a ticket, ya oughta consider my Amazin’ Mets an’ make ’em yer Amazin’ Mets. I got this idea that we’re gonna be th’ Youth of America on th’ field an’ have th’ Youth of America pullin’ fer us in the new stadium, because even though we’re not world-beaters by any means yet, we’re gonna give everybody a chance, like that young Kranepool feller who ain’t as young as you but ain’t much older, an’, by th’ by, if yer thinkin’ of any other teams on th’ local baseball scene, yer not gonna be as comfortable as ya are in that blanket if ya go in another direction. That other team looks good now, but I know their farm system from th’ inside. It’s about run dry.
Look, I know ya prob’ly got a big night ahead a’ ya, bein’ born on New Year’s Eve an’ all. Fer me, every night is New Year’s Eve, except I don’t need t’ see a big droppin’ of th’ ball because my first baseman last year Mr. Throneberry dropped enough balls an’ when it came time fer a birthday party in our clubhouse, I preferred we didn’t give him no cake because he was prob’ly gonna drop that, too.
Hey, is that a smile on yer face? Look at that, yer a born Mets fan. I oughta be goin’. Just do me one favor, kid. Make yer first word “mama” or “papa”. Th’ parents in this here city are givin’ me grief how all th’ toddlers are goin’ around sayin’ “Metsie, Metsie” instead of “mama” or “papa”. They say “Metsie, Metsie”.
There’ll be plenty of time fer that. I’ll see ya at that ballpark soon enough.
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