For 12 years, David Wright was the face of a franchise going nowhere, and that isn’t a good thing to be when you play your baseball in New York. The superstars get all the glory when things go well, and wear the blame when they don’t. And in the years Wright played third base for those Mets teams that never went to the World Series, the fault would largely be his.
Now finally in the year the Mets make the last week of October, the face of the struggling franchise was struggling in the biggest moments. After New York lost the first two games of this series to the Kansas City Royals, the talk shows buzzed with demands that Mets manager Terry Collins replace him at third. In the overreaction to a long-awaited World Series drifting away, the last thing New York seemed to want was the symbol of so much losing swinging helplessly and hitting little.
“I had that suggested to me,” Collins said, chuckling.
Instead Wright played Game 3 on Friday night. And he hit a two-run home run then drove home two more runs and the Mets won 9-3 and for a night the nightmare was over, the Series had been saved.
And the face of the franchise going nowhere was the smiling hero. Like Collins, Wright laughed as he sat at an interview table long after the game. He has been around New York and the Mets long enough to know how fickle the role of being the franchise face can be.
He talked about all the things a player basking the adoration of his home fans in a city like New York can feel when they drive in three runs in their first World Series game at home. He said he was “floating” around the bases after his home run. He said it was hard to describe the joy of hitting a World Series home run. He said he looked up after slapping hands with his teammates and saw “people going absolutely nuts.” He said the feeling “will stick with me for the rest of my life.”
He did not complain about the fans on the radio who said he should have been benched. That is not part of being the face of a franchise that has been going nowhere. Instead he glowed in the biggest Mets moment so far in his career. Then again, all of this has seemed so much.
The first World Series game in Queens since the start of the millennium came unexpectedly. This was not supposed to be a great Mets team. This was not supposed to be the Mets year. But their young starting pitchers blossomed at once and suddenly they found themselves in a postseason no one could have imagined. The price for this sudden success in their $900m ballpark was astounding.
One ticket broker offered a pair of upper deck seats in left-center field that afforded not only a panoramic – albeit distant view – of the field but also an unobstructed look at the scrapyards and metal shops stretching unpleasantly from the parking lots below. Asking price? $1m. Others were more modestly marked at $20,000 each.
Presumably those prices dropped to more manageable, if still not extravagant, amounts like $1,000. One fan said he had flown in from his home in Los Angeles on Friday and that many of the people on the flight were doing the same thing as him – scrambling to New York to see the Mets in the World Series. He said he paid $1,000 for his game ticket. The Mets might have been the city’s underdogs for much of this century but their first World Series game in the 2000s was an event for the wealthy.
The 44,781 crammed into Citi Field roared all night. They chanted their familiar “Let’s Go Mets.” They sang, as always, to Billy Joel’s Piano Man, released in 1973, another improbable Mets World Series year and they roared for the player who has belonged to them for better or for worse for the last 12 years.
In many ways Wright has been the ideal hero for the Mets. He has dutifully played through injuries and has been anything but glamorous when compared to the dazzling stars who played those same years for the Yankees. He was always the good star: dependable, accommodating, patiently nice and nothing exciting. Even on Friday, Collins thought he was probably offering the highest praise a manager can give when he said Wright had arrived to the ballpark at 1.45pm for an 8pm game.
Wright said this is what he needed to do to get ready. He worried that if he didn’t arrive at a ridiculously early time the afternoon might get away from him as he watched video of his swings from earlier games trying to deflect a flaw that might have affected his World Series.
His teammate, Curtis Granderson, sitting beside him, laughed.
“I got here at four,” Granderson said.
On the side of the room, several feet away, an enlarged copy of the Mets 2014 yearbook cover was pinned to the wall. On the front were Granderson and Wright sitting in the same order as they did at the table – with Granderson on the left and Wright on the right. Both men were smiling, staring into a bleak future that must have seemed so far away nearly two years ago.
Chances are, neither of them could have imagined the first Mets World Series game in this century. Back then, David Wright, the face of the franchise going nowhere grinning through the disappointment. Friday night, he soaked in the joy of the biggest moment of his baseball life.
