This was at a particular bad time, one of those Met moments so horrid that the good ole days could have included the collapses of 2007 and ’08. Because at least there was something to collapse from.
Because this wasn’t just losing. A lot of teams lose. The Marlins have never won a division title; neither have the Rockies. The Nationals and Brewers have never won a World Series. Neither have the Mariners, who last made the postseason in 2001 — the year in which the Mets used the 38th pick to take a third baseman from Hickory High in Chesapeake, Va.
This was more than losing. This was losing amid humiliation and dysfunction and the hopelessness that forms when the ship has no rudder and the first step is always a stumble and the initial comments from the titular leadership on any issue are always deaf in tone and dumb in content.
David Wright was sitting near his locker, another Met season slipping toward despair as the second half of 2012 ebbed on. We were chatting. No notebook out. I liked chatting with Wright. He had that rare ability to reveal his thinking — cliché-free — without ever offending an employee or teammate or a reporter’s intellect.
His contract had just one more full season to go in 2013, and I mentioned that maybe the grass isn’t always greener elsewhere, but there are certainly a lot of places that it was greener than it had been in Flushing. He was the kind of serious, excellent player who in his prime should experience a place where players were not put on planes to the thin air of Colorado while still enduring the wraths of a concussion. He would have been better served without any more days as the spokesplayer discussing why his manager was made to fly 3,000 miles just to be fired the next day at 3 a.m. Eastern time.
He listened to this theory. Wright is polite. He absorbed. Wright is bright. He nodded, smiled and dismissed. Because above all, Wright is a Met. For better or worse.
A few months later he would be signing the seven-year, $122 million extension that would assure he would never leave — and he never did. This weekend — with two years remaining on the deal — Wright will play his final game in the majors, all with the Mets, all with the team for which he grew up rooting due to the geographical happenstance of being raised near where the Mets’ then Triple-A team, the Tidewater Tides, played.
Wright represented the best hope for fans: not just a talented player, but one invested as fully as them in their team. The average fan would be surprised how little some players care about the city or team for which they play or how detached they could be from the process. I stopped being shocked long ago when a player would ask me which team his club was playing in the next series or who the starting pitcher was the next day — or even that day.
Wright was a Met, not just by uniform, but by DNA.
So much of life, sports included, is transactional. In fact, because playing careers are brief even when they are long, maximizing salary is embedded into the game’s fabric, so allegiance is to a portfolio, not a uniform. But Wright only wanted to be a Met, never wanted to leave. He didn’t retreat or hide from all the unprofessional and inexplicable atmospherics and theatrics that were part of his Met days. Instead, he often brought what little accountability and dignity a lost franchise could muster.
It meant something deep and profound to him to be a Met. He didn’t run because he didn’t want to run. He wanted to stay and fight. For this team.
It could be forgotten to time now, especially because the ongoing contract — even with insurance protections — became a Met albatross. But Wright would almost certainly have received more if he were willing to leave.
Through age 30, he was on a Hall of Fame track. I covered three brilliant players who needed back surgery: Dave Winfield, Don Mattingly and Wright. Through age 30, their stats were remarkably similar. In 5,497 plate appearances through his age-30 season, Mattingly had an OPS 34 percent better than MLB average factoring in league and parks. In 5,549 plate appearances, Winfield was 35 percent better. In 5,945, Wright was 37 percent better.
But by age 30, Mattingly and Wright already were feeling the ramifications of their back problems and already had played their best seasons. Winfield had another six years as a run-producing metronome before he needed the back surgery that would cancel his 1989 season. It is why Winfield actually ended up getting to Cooperstown and Mattingly and Wright won’t.
Like Mattingly, though, Wright belongs to just one New York franchise. Mattingly could never be the best Yankee, considering their great lineage. But Wright is the best player to have only played for the Mets — though the previous bar was Ed Kranepool, not Lou Gehrig, Joe DiMaggio or Mickey Mantle.
I suspect, however, that Mets fans will long cherish Wright not just for being better than Ed Kranepool. He was one of them. He didn’t vanish on the worst days. He stood and defended a franchise that was so often letting him down as surely as it did any diehard from Bayside or Babylon. He navigated the difficult path of availability and honesty with reporters while never betraying teammates — in a way akin to Mattingly. He was third baseman, goodwill ambassador, dysfunction counselor, crisis spokesman.
Personally, I will always appreciate not just enjoyable baseball conversations, but the talks we had about spinal stenosis as I explored ways to help a father who endures the same problem.
Mainly, though, when I think of Wright, I will think of the Mets. The two are intertwined. Just as he always hoped. Just as it will now be forever.
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