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...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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,...
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