The 2021 Oscar’s Cap Awards

“There’s gonna be a lot of talk tonight,” Oscar Madison warned his audience during his tryout as a sports talk radio host in 1974. “Some of it you’ll like and some of it you won’t.” This was after he heeded his roommate Felix Unger’s advice and altered his style to reflect the hostility, sarcasm and venom that Felix identified as his strong suits.

Well, we have a few of those qualities warming up in the bullpen any given night, but we’ll save ’em for the next three-game losing streak. All the talk we’re about to tune in for is talk you should sincerely like because most of it reminds us how much fun the Mets can be when we come across them out of context and with no competitive implications.

It’s Oscar’s Caps time! For the tenth consecutive year, we review the previous twelve months’ worth of sightings of our New York Mets in the popular culture — television, movies, novels, basically anywhere you don’t necessarily expect to discover the Mets…and we don’t mean the postseason, ya wiseacre.

“The good news is it’ll be available again during the playoffs.”
—Wiseacre Seth Meyers, Late Night, January 13, 2021, on Citi Field being used as a 24/7 COVID vaccination facility…after which he acknowledged the Mets have a new owner but that he’ll keep making these stale jokes until the standings dictate otherwise

Seth Meyers announced early in 2022 that he tested positive for COVID. Because he’s vaccinated and boosted, he says he’s feeling fine, and we’re glad, even if he takes one too many shots at the Mets (FYI, Seth, Oscar’s foray into insult radio wasn’t a ratings-grabber).

Meyers’s jab might fall into the category of talk you won’t like. We’ll also throw in this scene from a 2021 episode of Showtime’s American Rust, which takes place in a downbeat town in Pennsylvania. The cranky dad played by Bill Camp is watching what looks like a Fox News report about immigration. His half-Mexican daughter who moved to New York is watching with him.

DAUGHTER: Do we have to watch this? Is there a Pirates game on?
DAD: I thought you would have become a Yankees fan by now.
DAUGHTER: At least it’s not the Mets.
DAD: That’s my girl.

Those two probably still carry NL East bitterness from 1973 and 1988.

Anyway, back to talk we do like.

As ever, the Oscar’s Caps, named for the Mets cap Jack Klugman wore in so many episodes of The Odd Couple (and Tony Randall put on for effect a couple of times), are awarded for whatever we noticed in 2021 if it’s something that was brand new; something from a previous year that we’d never seen before; or maybe something that we vaguely remembered from ages ago but were only lately able to flesh out. Although our internal staff is as vigilant as possible, it has limited shall we say bandwidth and can’t possibly monitor everything beamed or streamed. Thus, this project has become a manifestation of generous Metsopotamian crowdsourcing, and we extend our thanks to all who alert us when they see something or hear something relevant to our eternal quest to document every last Mets cap, Mets jersey or Mets murmur.

A great example of how the Oscar’s Caps works when it works best came at the end of 2020, when we presented the ninth annual edition of this feature and multiple readers piped up to let us know about Soul, the Pixar movie that had just debuted on Disney+, and why it was right up our alley. Sure enough, within the narrow window when I had access to a subscription, I was able to see for myself that, in a flashback scene, our hero Joe Gardner wears a 1980s-style Mookie Wilson jersey, replete with racing stripe (although designed with buttons, which weren’t a part of the racing stripe uni motif until 1991). Mets posters are visible on the wall of Buddy’s Barber shop as well.

Edward Burns’s 2021 Epix series Bridge and Tunnel definitely dispensed a flavor worthy of its Mets fan creator. Set in 1980, a Rusty Staub poster is visible, as is one of Burns’s own 1970s-era Mets road jerseys (worn by Pags, played by Brian Muller). Audio of Bob Murphy announcing a Mets foulout contributed to the soundtrack. In the third episode, Burns, as Artie Farrell, says of Tom Seaver, “I swear to Christ, it breaks my heart to see him in that Cincinnati uniform.”

If it breaks your heart to see another noteworthy righty in another uniform, maybe you couldn’t have imagined that on the night Pete Alonso won his second Home Run Derby (July 12, 2021), when Noah Syndergaard visited Late Night with Seth Meyers and discussed his book club, his ice baths and other aspects of his ongoing rehab from Tommy John surgery, he’d be trying on Angel togs by November. Yet because he hadn’t been anything but a Met by the time Jeopardy aired on December 28, 2021, we’ll count this, too, as Oscar’s Capworthy. It’s from the category “Noahs” for $600.

“With Scandinavian roots and a hammer of a curveball, pitcher Noah Syndergaard got this nickname. The hair helps.”
“Who is Thor?”

“Did you type up that Tom Seaver interview?”
—Oscar to a distraught Myrna (Sheldn — not Sheldon — has left her), “Rain in Spain,” The Odd Couple, Season 5, Episode 1, September 12, 1974

Tom, of course, was in a Mets uniform the night Myrna and Sheldn — real-life couple Penny Marshall and Rob Reiner — got together for good; on the night after, Tom would shut out the Cubs (on the night before, the Mets lost in 25 innings to the Cardinals).

Garry Marshall, who executive-produced The Odd Couple during its 1970-1975 run on ABC, wrote in his memoir Wake Me When It’s Funny that he always liked to cast character actor Hector Elizondo in his movies because Elizondo lent a sense of maturity to the business at hand. Perhaps it’s appropriate that Elizondo picked up Klugman’s — or Oscar’s — cap over the past year. In the November 4 episode of B Positive (Season 2, Episode 4 — “Baseball, Walkers and Wine”), Drew (Thomas Middleditch) takes Harry (Elizondo) to a Hartford Yard Goats game, where Harry wears a Mets cap, one with a blue rather than orange squatchee (implemented 1997) and no MLB logo (implemented 1992) on the back, indicating that, like Harry, the cap has been around, or is perhaps is a non-licensed knockoff.

Harry continues to wear the cap in the next episode (“Novocaine, Bond and Bocce,” S. 2, E. 5, November 11, 2021) while playing bocce, potentially making the Mets cap a running character trait à la Oscar Madison.

“All right, H.B. If you’ll play ball with me, I’ll play ball with you.”
—Darrin Stephens (Dick Sargent), “The Phrase is Familiar,” Bewitched, January 15,1970 (S. 6, E. 17) — as soon as he spouts this cliché (per Endora’s spell), Darrin and the client to whom he’s speaking are suddenly wearing Mets uniforms. Darrin’s is No. 9, with the MLB patch from the 1969 season, à la J.C. Martin.

In Perilous Gambit: A Mike Stoneman Thriller by Kevin Chapman (2021), the titular New York City detective visits Las Vegas and stumbles across a January 2020 reunion of former Met farmhands who played for the Las Vegas 51s. Mike is pleased to exchange pleasantries with Dom Smith a couple of chapters after hearing “Takin’ Care of Business,” revisiting late-period Shea Stadium in his mind and declaring to his companion that the song “always makes me think about a Mets win”. (In Mike’s previous adventure, the football-themed Fatal Infraction, our baseball-first crimefighter took time out to take his godson to a Mets game.)

Mario Reyes (Luis Figueroa) is a Cy Young Award winner who has just signed a $175 million contract with the Mets and is buying a waterfront mansion in Connecticut in the 2014 film And So It Goes.

The third-season premiere of FXX’s mostly animated anthology series Cake (July 9, 2020) had a short showing the Miracle on the Hudson from the perspective of the geese, prominently featuring the soon-to-be demolished Shea Stadium.

In the 2021 novel Out of a Dog’s Mouth by McNally Berry (who’s never been seen in the same room as Mets non-fiction author Matthew Silverman), there are dogs not coincidentally named Choo Choo, Turk and Kooz, plus a person named Robert Person.

The induction of the Beastie Boys into the Rock ‘n’ Roll Hall of Fame nearly ten years ago, on April 14, 2012, reminded their fans that as the Beasties were rising to superstardom, Adam Horovitz, a.k.a. King Ad-Rock, regularly showed his Met loyalty. One of the portraits of the trio that was projected while LL Cool J and Chuck D inducted them featured Horovitz in his mid-1980s pose, which meant it was topped by a Mets cap. After Adam “MCA” Yauch died on May 4, 2012, the Mets played nothing but Beasties Boys songs as starting lineup walkup music in his memory during their home game of May 5. “Fight For Your Right,” whose video is where Horovitz’s Mets cap got its most play in 1986 and 1987, started up Ike Davis’s trek to the plate.

“Do you remember the ’86 Mets-Red Sox World Series? Bill Buckner let a ground ball go between his legs and the Sox lost the game and eventually the World Series. Very few people remember who was on the field that day, but everyone remembers that Buckner missed the ball. And a baseball’s a lot smaller than your ball, which is not dropping.”
—Mr. Buellerton (Matthew Broderick) stressing to Claire Morgan (Hillary Swank) the importance of fixing the ball supposed to drop in Times Square in the movie New Year’s Eve (2011)

“I’m a big Mets fan to this day. The ’86 Mets was right like when I was 12, 13, this huge team […] I had a big crush on Tim Teufel because he seemed like a wallflower to me. He platooned at second base with Wally Backman and had chipmunk face, and I was just like ‘us!’ I had a very elaborate fantasy that I was married to Gary Carter, who was the star catcher, but that Gary Carter was mean to me and that Tim Teufel would be the guy who sort of wooed me. I fantasized about having a bad marriage to Gary Carter. And he was the kind of guy who was like, ‘Where’s a pen?! Is there a pen in this house?!’ And I’d go into the other room and Tim Teufel would take me out.”
—Jessi Klein, who would later perform as Jessi Glaser and serve as consulting producer on the Mets-friendly Netflix show Big Mouth, doing standup at Joe’s Pub, December 23, 2009

As long as 1986 has come up, let us note the back-in-the-day releases of the twelve-inch singles “Get Metsmerized” and “Let’s Go Mets” along with the visit of Roger McDowell and Lenny Dykstra to the MTV set, where Dykstra hit on VJ Martha Quinn, a little more than 35 years ago. All of this was featured in the Nick Davis opus Once Upon a Time in Queens, the Mets Pop Culture event of 2021. It was written about in some detail here.

Now for some more 1986-related content…

David Brenner invited a pair of world champion Mets on his ABC late night show Nightlife on consecutive Mondays in 1986, Ron Darling on November 24 and Keith Hernandez on December 1 (each airing followed a New York team playing on Monday Night Football). Brenner, a Philadelphia native, wore a Mets sweatshirt for the Hernandez show. Keith recalled the NLCS vs. Houston as a better postseason series than the World Series and told the already legendary story about retiring to Davey Johnson’s office with two out and nobody on in Game Six against Boston. He also explained he didn’t smoke in the offseason, only at the ballpark to relax. His take on Mets fans, no more than about 2,000 of whom would be at Shea when he came in with the Cardinals, is that they deserved this because they’d waited a long time, 17 years. (Hernandez would return to Brenner’s show the first week of the 1987 season.)

In the 2021 documentary Street Gang: How We Got to Sesame Street, a 1968 commercial that was part of the “Give a Damn” campaign from the New York Urban Coalition is cited as the primary inspiration for the look of the landmark children’s educational program. In that commercial, excerpted in the documentary, actor Lincoln Kilpatrick suggests viewers “send your kid to a ghetto for the summer” and leads a world-weary tour of what underprivileged city youth faced every day. Among other things, we see kids trying to play stickball in the street while having to dodge cars. Kilpatrick turns toward the camera and shrugs, “It’s not Shea Stadium, but it’s exciting.”

In the credits to Street Gang, the show’s cast and crew provides the chorus to a respectable rendition “Put Down the Duckie,” with one of the women singing quite visible in her white 1986 World Champion Mets sweatshirt. Mookie Wilson and Keith Hernandez were not on hand for this singalong, though they did appear on Sesame Street twice in 1987 — with the Count on April 15 and with Snuffleupagus on May 11 — and take part in a celebrity “Duckie” extravaganza that aired on PBS on March 7, 1988.

November 30, 2016 Wahlburgers (Season 7, Episode 4 — “Take Me Out to the Paul Game” on FYI): in the process of preparing to throw out the first pitch at a Brooklyn Cyclones game, Donnie Wahlberg meets Mookie Wilson, which inflicts Game Six flashbacks from 1986 on the Massachusetts native actor/singer.

“So anyway, Vlad, it’s 1986, and I’m at Studio 54 with Tommy Lee and Wally Backman. Bad guy, nasty guy, nice to me, though. He was in a platoon with Tim Teufel, do you remember Tim Teufel?”
—Seth Meyers, imagining Donald Trump riffing during a previous summit with Vladimir Putin, Late Night, June 17, 2021 — and not taking a shot at the Mets, so we’re cool with it

On July 4, 1989, CBS aired a pilot for a sitcom version of the hit film Coming to America, this iteration starring Tommy Davidson as Prince Tariq (younger brother of Eddie Murphy’s character from the movie). Tariq wore a period-appropriate satin Mets Starter jacket, festooned with pins, just as Prince Akeem did in the movie when he decided to blend in with common New Yorkers. Though the pilot was not picked up, the sitcom NBC showed the very next night, The Seinfeld Chronicles, starring another standup comic who worked the Mets into his show, would eventually find a spot on its network’s prime time schedule and within Mets Pop Culture legend.

On February 25, 2021, life imitated art as Francisco Lindor wore the same Mets jacket Eddie Murphy wears in Coming II America as he arrived for that day’s Spring Training activities. The team’s Twitter account captured him greeting nobody in particular, “Good morning, my neighbors!”

At the 44:45 mark of the 2021 Netflix movie MOXIE!, a 1989 Topps Record Breaker card hailing Kevin McReynolds for setting a new standard for stolen bases without being caught in a season (21) appears as part of a zine…except the card has been doctored to cover McReynolds’s face with a sad-face emoji and cowboy hat.

When not stuck in a traffic jam in Harlem that’s backed up to Jackson Heights on Car 54, Where Are You? Toody gets jealous when Muldoon becomes friendly with an intellectual rookie cop. Feeling left out of suddenly elevated cop car conversation, Gunther finds himself partnered with Leo Schnauser and tries to conjure up a sophisticated level of dialogue himself, leading to this exchange:

TOODY: I hear they’re tearing down the Met.
SCHNAUSER: They’re tearing down the New York Mets, the new baseball team? How can they tear them down, they haven’t even been built up.
— “How Smart Can You Get?”; Season 1, Episode 23; February 25, 1962

This may have been the first Mets mention in the popular culture. The Original Mets were still stretching in St. Petersburg when the officers on Car 54 were talking about them. Truly, New York couldn’t wait one half-hour longer to get back to being a National League town.

The Mystery of the Mets by Kevin Mahon, published in 2019, is a murder mystery whose action is set at Shea Stadium. Released in 2021 as The New York Mets: A Shea Stadium Mystery.

Clips of Stone Cold Steve Austin, in his Mets jersey (No. 3:16), chatting with GM Steve Phillips from Austin’s first-pitch appearance at Shea Stadium, July 10, 1999 (the Matt Franco Game), show up in the Austin edition of Biography: WWE Legends that premiered on A&E April 18, 2021 We see the wrestler exchanging greetings with Derek Jeter and signing a baseball while GM Steve Phillips hovers nearby.

On Gilligan’s Island, “The Hunter,” (Season 3, Episode 18; loosely based on The Most Dangerous Game; January 16, 1967), Gilligan, the Professor, the Skipper and Mr. Howell are tuned in to a radio broadcast announcing that the Dodgers shut out the Mets 4-0, meaning the Skipper owes Mr. Howell “three-hundred thousand twelve bananas,” which the Skipper tells Mr. Howell he can subtract from the “nine hundred and sixty mangos you owe me from playing gin”.

“A fan rushed the field at the Mets-Giants game last night and stood on the pitcher’s mound. Thankfully, he was only able to strike out a few Mets before he was apprehended. Sorry, everyone on the crew.”
—Seth Meyers during his Late Night monologue, August 17, 2021 (we feel your pain, Late Night crew)

A subway station advertising billboard featuring Lee Mazzilli, Neil Allen, Joel Youngblood and Craig Swan using Gillette Foamy (with the message, “This year we’re getting back into the thick of it”) appears in the 1982 movie Smithereens.

On the June 1, 1989, episode of Classic Concentration, a drawing of a Mets player tipping his cap constituted a third of a puzzle whose answer was “Captain Kidd” (the other illustrations were of the ten of hearts and a couple of goats).

John Leguizamo wore his omnipresent Mets cap in the 2021 filmed production of the play Waiting for Godot, presented in the form of a Zoom call in these lingering pandemic times.

Visible behind Michael Che as he guested via Zoom with Howard Stern in 2021: a Darryl Strawberry poster of yore.

In the Wiseguy episode “Last Rites for Lucci” (Season 1, Episode 10 — or 11, depending on how you count the pilot; November 19, 1987), Nick Lucci (James Andronica) tells Vinnie Terranova (Ken Wahl) of his current state, “I get a check every week, a few beers every Friday. If the Mets win, I’m happy. I’m not aimin’ high anymore, Vinnie.”

“I see ya forgot about the ’69 Mets. They didn’t have the hitting or the fielding of the other teams, but they won the World Series. And you know why? Showers.”
—Coach Morris Buttermaker (Jack Warden), convincing his team they need to clean themselves up after games, in the sitcom version of The Bad News Bears, “Nakedness is Next to Godliness” (Season 1, Episode 3; April 7, 1979).

“First of all, uniforms do not a baseball team make. I mean, in order to have a good team, you gotta have determination… gotta have hustle…and skill…look at the New York Mets.”
“They have uniforms.”
—Chet Kincaid, unsuccessfully attempting to persuade his Little League team, the Tigers, that uniforms are not intrinsic to their potential success once a plan to purchase uniforms falls through The Bill Cosby Show, “The Worst Crook That Ever Lived” (Season 1, Episode 18; January 25, 1970).

The fact that the 1969 Mets took showers and wore uniforms may or may not have influenced guitarist Brian Bell’s decision to wear a Mets cap while performing with Weezer at Citi Field on the Hell Mega Tour, August 4, 2021.

“I looked at the building there in L.I.C., where all the Mets live.”
—One of Wally’s college buddies, musing over local real estate, Awkwafina is Nora from Queens (“Shadow Acting,” Season 2, Episode 8, September 29, 2021)

In the 2021 Netflix documentary Untold: Deal With the Devil, a photo of boxer Christy Salters Martin (the film’s subject) and Jason Isringhausen in his Mets uniform briefly appears.

Rapper Fred the Godson wore an orange Mets cap with a blue bill in his 2014 video for “The Session 4,” which was incorporated into the story of his death from COVID-19 in the first part of Spike Lee’s NYC Epicenters 9/11 —> 2021½, which first aired on HBO on August 22, 2021.

In the 2019 film Ode to Joy, lead character Charlie (Martin Freeman) — who has problems coping with joy — wears two different Mets t-shirts and a Mets cap

On Brooklyn Nine-Nine in “Renewal,” Season 8, Episode 8 (September 2, 2021), Jake Peralta (Andy Samberg) finds himself with no battery power in his phone because he used it “mining for MetsCoin. It’s the first cryptocurrency that is also the Mets.”

British comedy team Tony Hendra and Nick Ullett performed “The Agony of a New York Mets Fan” on The Ed Sullivan Show, August 7, 1966. Hendra donned a Mets cap and became not just an American, but a prototypical New Yorker. Ullett portrayed “an unintelligent, inquisitive, twittering Englishman — in other words himself”. Sitting on stage as if at Shea Stadium, Hendra’s Mets fan suffers both the Mets’ mishaps and his grandstand neighbor’s clueless queries. Key exchange:

“I don’t know anything about the game.”
“You and the Mets both.”

For a handful of performances in 1981, Paul Dooley donned a Mets jacket and portrayed the lead character in The Amazin’ Casey Stengel or Can’t Anybody Here Speak This Game? at the American Place Theater. Frank Rich did not care for the production, or as he ended his review in the New York Times, “Can’t anybody here write a play?”

In 2021’s dystopian novel The Body Scout by Lincoln Michel, baseball teams are owned and operated by big pharma. Fighting for the pennant? The Monsanto Mets. Their best player, JJ Zunz, dies while batting in a playoff game (but at least these Mets made the playoffs).

“Quick favor — could you look up all the Mets scores for me for the last 37 years?”
“Again, the Mets?”
“Just tell me how many RBIs Keith Hernandez had in ’87? Give me something!”
—Pete, the scoutmaster with an arrow lodged in his neck since 1985, Ghosts, “Viking Funeral,” Season 1, Episode 3 (October 14, 2021), beseeching the new owner of the haunted house where he and the other spectral title characters reside to put her laptop to good use

For the record, Pete, Keith Hernandez drove in 89 runs in 1987.

In “Fortunate Son,” the third episode of Season 3 of The Sopranos (March 11, 2001), Johnny Soprano, in a flashback, is shown reading a newspaper sports section on October 25, 1969. A partial headline says “Mets Decision,” likely alluding to the Mets having given Ed Charles his unconditional release the day before.

An animated version of Shea Stadium appears in Willie Mays and the Say-Hey Kid, which aired on October 14, 1972, as part of The ABC Saturday Superstar Movie series. In it, Willie has a guardian angel named Casey. Willie provides the voice to his character.

“You’re so desperate to stay relevant, to stay in the game, you can’t see that the game has passed you by. Willie Mays in center fielder for the Mets, misunderstanding the dewy eyes in the crowd for love.”
“You just never understood me or the Say Hey Kid. You play until your feet break. And they carry you off the field in a box.”
— Chuck Rhoades and Chuck Rhoades, Sr., Billions, “Victory Smoke,” Season 5, Episode 11, September 26, 2021

Richie Zyontz, an NFL producer for Fox and longtime friend of John Madden’s, appeared in the All Madden documentary that he was instrumental in shepherding to reality — it debuted on Christmas Day 2021 — and recalled, “I’m just a street kid from New York hired to be a broadcast associate…” while a photo of him in a Mets cap with Madden in the late 1980s pops up. Zyontz’s reverence for legends was apparent earlier in 2021 when he had a “Whack Back at Vac” note to Mike Vaccaro published in the New York Post calling for the Mets to retire 24 in honor of Willie Mays.

Heading from the sublime Say Hey Willie Mays to a let’s say less sublime New York National League icon, in the rebooted version of The Wonder Years (“The Club,” Season 1, Episode 3, October 6, 2021), Dean looks forward to getting to school and swapping baseball cards, especially the opportunity to “unload my Marv Throneberry card”.

It wouldn’t be a year in Mets Pop Culture without somebody sporting one very familiar head repeatedly sitting in front of us.

• In “Mothers and Other Strangers,” The Simpsons, Season 33, Episode 7 (November 28, 2021), Homer tries out a therapy app called Nutz that, among other things, promises “CBD gummies in the shape of your version of God,” with four icons appearing on his phone: Buddah, Jesus, a question mark and a pretty good Simpsonian rendering of Mr. Met.

• On the January 27, 2021, edition of Full Frontal, Samantha Bee explained getting a COVID-19 vaccine at a sports venue would be an issue for her since she’s “not allowed within a thousand feet of any professional sports stadium in this country” after “I tried to take off Mr. Met’s baseball and I realized it was his real head.” The gag was accompanied by a what we’ll call a disturbing image.

• On September 20, 2021, to welcome Mayor Bill de Blasio — who played himself on TV for eight years — to Queens Borough Hall for hizzoner’s week of conducting the city’s business from Queens, borough president Donovan Richards presented de Blasio with “a little mascot [of] the New York Mets. We hope to continue to try to convert you,” which the mayor accepted graciously: “Yeah, this is cool. This could do it right here.” The Red Sox-rooting mayor kept the miniature Mr. Met by his microphone for his further media appearances at Borough Hall. (A montage of Queens scenes behind him included a Mets logo with the message LET’S GO METS!!!!!)

In “Hello, It’s Me,” the premiere episode of And Just Like That…, the reboot/revival of Sex and the City (released on HBO Max, December 9, 2021), Carrie asks Big, “How was your day?” and he replies, “Perfect. The Dow and the Mets — both up.” Carrie’s reply: “Very nice.”

(Big, alas, doesn’t get to experience any more Mets games after that exchange.)

On the premiere of The Jerry Lewis Show on ABC, September 21, 1963, Lewis, from behind a desk, calls for a pack of L&M cigarettes as prelude to a live commercial read. Somebody off camera tosses him the pack, which hits Lewis in the chest, eluding his grasp in the process. As the host picks the cigarettes up, Lewis not quite good-naturedly remarks to the unseen person whose attempt an assist went awry, “You should play with the Mets.” On that very Saturday, the last-place Mets indeed committed three errors, yet prevailed over the Giants at Candlestick Park, 5-4.

Mets Pop Culture headliners Yo La Tengo promoted/commemorated their 2021 Chanukah residency (“I Am Curious Yo La”) at the Bowery Ballroom with a poster featuring animated figures very close in form to Mr. and Mrs. Met…minus the uniforms, if you will.

“I think the Mets are going to all the way this year.”
—“Glass half-full kind of gal” MJ displaying the “relentless optimism” Peter Parker loves in Spider-Man: No Way Home (2021)

“On Sunday Hugh attended a Mets game with his old friend Jeff Raen. He called yesterday to announce that he now loves baseball and tried to sound all butch about it. ‘Jeff’s son had a soccer match so we had to leave in the sixth inning,’ he said. ‘I watched the rest of it on TV and then read the review in this morning’s paper.’
“Review?”
—April 29, 2003 entry in A Carnival of Snackery: Diaries 2003-2020 by David Sedaris (2021)

Sharon Grote, wife of Jerry, “a catcher with the New York Mets baseball team,” is a contestant on the August 22, 1967, episode of Password, winning neither game, but attracting the admiration of guest Skitch Henderson, who avows he is both a National League fan and a Mets fan. The other guest, Arlene Francis, when asked by host Alan Ludden, “What does a catcher do?” replies, “He’s in the rye.” Indeed, in a sandwich vein, Sharon Grote would go on post-1969 to appear with her family in commercials for Gulden’s Spicy Brown Mustard.

Let’s stay with “Game Shows” for a thousand.

During the 1973-74 television season, the same year Bowling for Dollars with Bob Murphy premiered locally, the Sign Man, Karl Ehrhardt (and two masquerading as him), appeared as the object of guessing on the syndicated version of To Tell The Truth, pegged to the mystery man’s prominence during the 1973 World Series. Bill Cullen was the only panelist to correctly pick Ehrhardt — No. 2 — out of the crowd.

With that, we’ll hold aloft our sign that shouts HAPPY NEW YEAR! on one side and IF YOU SEE SOMETHING, SAY SOMETHING on the other. Thank you again for passing along your entertainment, media and literature scouting reports for our detailing delight.