Anomaly

Face it, in 50 seasons now, there hasn’t been much to cheer about. We’ve had 2 world championships, 2 other pennants, 5 division championships, a pair of wild cards, and mostly misery. So when I log onto retrosheet.org or baseball-reference.com, I’m not looking for a host of legends or hall of famers; I’m looking for anomalies and strange occurrences that involve the Mets.

From a personal standpoint, my personal Mets anomaly was that the first two Mets games I attended at Shea, both in 1978, were both started by a 6’6” righthander named Mike Bruhert from Jamaica, Queens who was 4-11 with a 4.78 ERA- his only season in the Major Leagues. The first Met hit I saw was an infield single by Lenny Randle and the first to homer in a game I was at occurred on June 11, 1980 and was hit by Claudell Washington.

When I research, I notice for instance that in major league baseball history, only 30 men have hit 3 triples in a game. The list has names like Clemente, Mays, Dimaggio, Banks, and Jim Bottomley. The list also contains the name Doug Flynn who did it in a 11-5 loss to the Montreal Expos on August 5, 1980 in a game in which Frank Taveras also had 4 hits and drove in 3 runs.

However, the sweetest anomaly was the one that occurred on August 30, 1999, when perhaps the most underrated player to ever wear a Mets uniform, Edgardo Alfonzo scored 6 runs in a game- to go along with his 6 hits, 3 homers and 5 RBI in a 17-1 rout over the Astros.

We don’t know if the Venezuelan born Fonzie was really 21 years old when he came up in 1995, and god knows he looked clueless at the plate in some of those early games, but by the middle of 1997 he was a threat, by 2000 he was arguably the best all-around second baseman in the game, and just as quickly, by the middle of 2001, specifically a cold April night at Shea swinging a weighted bat in the on deck circle he felt the pop in his back, he was finished.

Unlike Steve Chilcott and Nolan Ryan, Ken Singleton and Amos Otis, Lenny Dykstra and Jeff Kent, we saw with our own eyes what Edgardo Alfonzo was going to be, and more importantly, we saw it in the blue and orange of the Mets (or the black, blue, orange, white, Mercury Mets, or the color of the week of the late 1990’s, early 2000s). He was a .900-plus OPS presence in the middle infield capable of hitting 25 homers, hitting .300, and driving in 95 runs who got to shine away from the bright lights focused on Mike Piazza, Al Leiter, Robin Ventura, and Bobby Valentine . That’s not to mention his defensive prowess, postseason performances and unassuming demeanor that reminds me of what David Wright has become—nothing short of professional, a stand up guy who was going to take one for the team in front of the media.

I remember spending 2001 hoping the pop in his bat would come back, 2002 also, and was unhappy when the Mets let him go to the Giants after that season.

There are many things I blame for the demise of the Mets after the mini-success of 1997-2000 which ended with the subway series loss. Many of them occurred before the 2000 series- trading Melvin Mora for Mike Bordick,  one was the stubbornness of not improving a flawed 2000 pennant winning team which lost Mike Hampton by instead tried to replace him with Kevin Appier and Steve Trachsel and not pursuing Alex Rodriguez. Another was the miscalculations of whether guys like Glendon Rusch, Todd Zeile, and Robin Ventura would maintain their production and/or decline. The failure of farm system-  the drafting of an injured Billy Traber, the non-development of Grant Roberts, Pat Strange, Neal Musser, and Alex Escobar, and tragic death of Brian Cole in April of 2001- a top prospect who may have been ready to fill the outfield wasteland that summer or be traded for solid pitching. But the immediate was Alfonzo’s back which combined with all of those ushered in the era of Mo Vaughn, Jeromy Burnitz, Shawn Estes, and Roger Cedeno… As it turns out, his 2-plus great years may have been the anomaly…