Dave Kingman was one of the most fascinating players in Mets’ history. Because he played in one of the Mets’ major down periods – the mid ‘70’s to early ‘80’s, you  don’t hear his name mentioned much in Mets’ retrospectives, but for a while, he was clearly the Mets’ biggest star and one of their very few drawing cards, at least at home. If remembered at all, it’s as a low-average power hitter, but Kingman [...]

With all the posts I’ve done on the early days of the Mets, I never once mentioned the name of Rod Kanehl, who in his way symbolized the 1962-64 Mets as much as anyone else. If Marv Throneberry and Choo Choo Coleman represented Mets’ ineptitude, then Kanehl was the embodiment of the every-man quality that helped to popularize the Mets. For those of you too young to remember Kanehl, he was the all-purpose utility man for the [...]

When you think about some of the really good trades the Mets have made, the Cone and Hernandez deals quickly come to mind first. But the Mets have made some other pretty good trades in their history and I’ll take a look at them in this new series of posts. Following the 1983 season, the Mets traded a middling relief pitcher, Carlos Diaz, and the veteran utility man Bob Bailor to the Dodgers for a [...]

Greg Goossen may have been the first “big time” catching prospect the Mets ever had. He just looked like a catcher and had some pretty strong hitting credentials. Yet today, he is probably best-remembered as the subject of Casey Stengel’s famous quote “We got a young catcher right here, he’s 20 years old and in 10 years, he’s got a chance to be 30″. Goossen came to the Mets on a first-year waiver claim from [...]

With all the posts I’ve done about pitching prospects of the early years, I’m a little surprised I completely overlooked Larry Bearnarth. But then again, based on his 2-13 record with a 6.67 ERA in his only minor league season, it was hard to even consider him as a prospect. The Mets signed Bearnarth out of St. John’s and sent him to their AAA Syracuse farm club in 1962 where he had, at least statistically, [...]

Continuing this series of posts on the best trades the Mets ever made, if Bernard Gilkey was the only hitter to have a career year after being traded to the Mets, then Bob Ojeda was clearly the first, last, and only pitcher to similarly have a career year after coming to Flushing. Ojeda had been a decent, if unspectacular starting pitcher for the Red Sox for a few seasons. The Mets had been impressed with [...]

Jon Matlack’s career record of 125-126 may be as mediocre as you can get, but Matlack was a much, much better than average major league pitcher. In fact, he was one of the very finest lefthanded pitchers ever developed by the Mets’ organization. His other career marks – 3.18 lifetime ERA (better than Steve Carlton, who was considered the best lefty of his generation), 97 complete games, and 30 shutouts attest to the fact that [...]

Ask any Met fan under 40 with a sense of the past about Tommie Agee and he’ll probably tell you that Agee was the terrific center fielder who helped the Miracle Mets win the 1969 World Series. And he’d be right. But, as trades for centerfielders go, after his first season with the club, Agee was right up there as a failure with his predecessors, Cowan, and Bosch. The Mets traded Tommy Davis, probably their [...]

In the 1973 Amateur Draft, right after the Texas Rangers selected the highly regarded and ultimately ill-fated David Clyde with the first pick, the Phillies used the second selection to take catcher John Stearns out of the University of Colorado. The next two picks both turned out to be hall-of-famers, Robin Yount and Dave Winfield. Since Bob Boone was just starting what would turn out to be a long tenure as the Phillies’ #1 catcher, [...]

Although he spent just one season with the team, 1967, Tommy Davis was a principal in 2 of the biggest trades the Mets made in their formative years, the one that brought him to the Mets and the one that sent him away. Prior to the ’67 season, the Mets sent two of their top players, Ron Hunt, the first genuine Mets all-star and arguably their most popular player and the talented but flawed regular [...]

Warren Spahn was one of the greatest lefthanded pitchers of all time. Warren Spahn also pitched for the Mets. Unfortunately, those two facts are mutually exclusive. Spahn was a great pitcher for the Braves for many years, a perennial 20-game winner and a real workhorse, regularly logging over 250 innings and 20 complete games a year. In an era when most pitchers called it quits at around age 35, Spahn was still a big winner, [...]