Sports

Mets are finally embracing their rich history

For so long, the Mets tried to mute and muffle their history. This was always a puzzle, because the Mets have some awfully significant history. Think about it: Invariably, when you have a tough year in fantasy football and you’re 1-10 the razzing in the text thread leaps clear out of one sport and into another:

“You’re the ’62 Mets of this league!”

Similarly, if your town slow-pitch team scuffles for years and suddenly you start winning one game after another, some in hard-to-explain fashion, within five minutes of tapping the postgame keg someone will say, “Who do you think you are, the ’69 Mets?” And if you do it while talking a lot of trash, simply sub “’86” for “’69.”

How many organizations have three iconic teams like that, stretching from their sport’s highest highs to its dregs-iest dregs?

Yet the Mets never embraced that. At the start, it was out of respect for carryover fans who began life as Giants or Dodgers fans, adopted the Mets in ’62. At times, it seemed the Mets were intimidated to even broach the subject because across town the Yankees all but constructed a local annex of Cooperstown.

When Citi Field opened in 2009, there was zero Mets history anywhere to be found. No museum. No Shea Bridge. No exterior statues. The ushers wore maroon uniforms that resembled Phillies warm-ups. The Jackie Robinson Rotunda was their only genuine nod to history — and Robinson retired six years before the Mets were born.

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It is why the Mets’ recent spate of catch-up is not only welcome, it is long overdue.

Keith Hernandez and Steve Cohen
Keith Hernandez and Steve Cohen
Getty Images; AP

“We’re about to be 60 years old,” Keith Hernandez said Wednesday. “Think about that.”

It was a day to celebrate Hernandez, the wheel man of the 1986 world champs, one of the most important names in team history. A night earlier, Steve Cohen had dialed Hernandez at his winter home in Florida. Hernandez figured the Mets’ owner might want to discuss the team’s busy offseason, maybe talk about 2022.

Instead, Cohen made Hernandez’s year.

And a lot of his fans’ year, too.

“He said ‘We’re going to retire No. 17 this summer,’ ” Hernandez said, and even in the retelling you could see Hernandez’s face redden with pride. “This is the highest honor an organization can give to a player.”

It should be noted, for the record and out of fairness, that the decision to retire Hernandez’s number was reached by the Mets’ Hall of Fame Committee while the Wilpon family still owned the team, and Jeff Wilpon led that committee (the news was embargoed, even from Hernandez, so Jerry Koosman could enjoy the spotlight solo for a year). So was the decision, however tardy, to commission a Tom Seaver statue, which will also be unveiled this year.

It is a testament to good timing that the new owner, who goes back to the Polo Grounds with his Mets fandom, will be the one who reaps the goodwill of a franchise finally coming to terms with its own long, colorful narrative. Hernandez let slip there will also be the revival of an Old-Timers’ Day at Citi Field, with 50 old ballplayers invited back.

All of this is catnip to fans, and it thrills men like Hernandez who was so integral in building a large swath of the team’s story. It was Hernandez’s arrival in 1983 that signaled a sea change for the ’80s Mets; the first serious piece of the puzzle. He nearly won MVP in 1984. He got big hits all across the autumn of ’86.

Mets Spring training, from St Lucie County Sports ComplexPort St Lucie, Florida. Mets pitchers and catchers workout, #17 Keith Hernandez Special instructor returns to the Mets for first time since he left the 1989 season with Manager Bobby Valentine
Keith Hernandez, seen here at 1989 spring training with manager Bobby Valentine, has long been a Mets fan favorite.
Nury Hernandez

When he left the Mets after the ’89 season, he was honored to see David Cone assume his old number, 17, less enamored when other, lesser strangers began wearing it. He could laugh about that Wednesday.

It wasn’t so funny back in 2004. I’d written a column that May wondering why the Mets had never bothered to retire 17, and why the Knicks had refused to hang No. 30 in honor of Bernard King. The feedback I got was overwhelming, especially for Hernandez. The next time I saw him I told him that. He smiled.

“That’ll have to be posthumous,” he said. “Around here, ‘history’ is a dirty word.”

Not anymore. Hernandez’s 17 will join 14, 31, 36, 37 and 41 this summer. Surely David Wright’s No. 5 won’t be far behind. The Seaver statue is coming. Old-Timers’ Day is back. The Mets turn 60 years old April 11. The New Breed is now the old guard. There is history aplenty in Queens, good and bad, and the Mets are finally willing to savor it. It’s about time.

Artmotion U.S.A

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