Richie Hebner
On a day like today, there are any number of Opening Day highlights we can chose. There is Gary Carter‘s walk-off homer. There is Alberto Castillo‘s and Joe Torre‘s walk-off hits. There is Anderson Hernandez‘s diving catch. There is Cleon Jones‘s two home run game, or the game Richie Hebner went 4-for-5.
There are a few pitcher’s duels between Tom Seaver and Steve Carlton. There are many, many highlights for a Mets team who has the best Opening Day win percentage out of every Major League team. However, there is only one first time the Mets won on Opening Day, and as luck would have it, that game is actually available:
Looking back at it, it is funny to think the Mets actually won a World Series before they won on Opening Day. The Mets would start the game where they left off with first inning RBI singles from Jones and Art Shamsky. Eventually, this game would go extras with reigning World Series MVP Donn Clendenon once again playing the part of the hero with a two RBI single in the 11th.
All things great have a beginning, and it was 1970 which began the Mets Opening Day winning ways. We can at least watch this game until we can get back to 2020 baseball with Jacob deGrom, perhaps the Mets best pitchers since Seaver, toeing the rubber for the Mets.
For the second straight year, Seth Lugo has the best Player’s Weekend jersey with “Quaterrican.” Seeing that jersey as well as some others we will see over the course of this weekend coupled with the color players from Mets past, it does not you wonder which jerseys Mets players from years past would have selected. On that front, the Mets bloggers offer some of the jerseys we would have like to have seen.
Michael Baron (nym.news)
Tom Seaver. “THE FRANCHISE.”
Second place is Gary Carter. “KID.”
Mark Healey (Gotham Baseball)
Metstradamus (Metstradamus Blog)
Franklin Gutierrez, who was a Met for ten minutes, was nicknamed “Death to Flying Things”. I’m sorry but the only two things that could top that would have been Richie Hebner using a middle finger emoji, or anything Willie Montanez would have come up with.
Also, did you know that George Foster‘s nickname was “Yahtzee”? I would buy that.
Greg Prince (Faith and Fear in Flushing)
I like seeing the nicknames we don’t learn about as matter of course, the ones that are personal or known more in the clubhouse than in the public. So ideally, Tom Seaver would have been SPANKY, Willie Mays BUCK and Howard Johnson SHEIKH.
Also, though it would have been hard to resist CHOO-CHOO for Clarence Coleman, I’d like to believe the catcher of few words from the 1962 Mets would have gone with BUB. And given that it was 1962, I could only hope everything was properly spelled.
James Schapiro (Shea Bridge Report)
Mets Daddy
Looking back, a Darryl Strawberry “Straw” jersey would have been hilarious for the noted coke problems of that team. It would have been funny to see Paul Lo Duca wear a “Captain Red Ass” jersey. Funny, but not likely to happen.
Ultimately, the jersey I would have liked to have seen could have been done this year. After all, what would have been better than seeing Jacob deGrom opting to chose “Sidd Finch” for his jersey?
The answer to the rhetorical question is reading the blogs from the writers who are so generous in contributing their time. Certainly,t hey all have stories to tell about these and many more players. In fact, they may have some nicknames all of their own, but to find that out, you will have to visit those sites.