Meet The Deans

I got a huge kick out of leafing through the 1967 Mets Yearbook years after it was published and finding that even then Ed Kranepool, a mere 24 yet the only Met left from the Mets’ first year of 1962, was referred to as “The Dean” of the Mets in terms of continuous service with the Mets. Until Ed Kranepool ceased playing for the Mets, I had never known a time when Ed Kranepool couldn’t be identified by some phrase indicating that status. He was longest-tenured Met. He was the elder statesman (or statesMet). He had the most seniority among Mets. He was Ed Kranepool and all that implied.

Yet it only seemed like Ed Kranepool was The Dean forever. There was a time before the 1967 yearbook went to press that Eddie’s steadiness may have been noteworthy, but it was yet to be remarkable. Payson Tech had a few The Deans before Ed earned his tenure. There’d be even more in the years beyond the Krane.

Let’s go back to the beginning, to the very first game, to the very first starting lineup. Of the nine men Casey Stengel penciled in that night in St. Louis, April 11, 1962, none would last as long as Casey did in a Mets uniform. Stengel managed his final game on July 24, 1965, whereas the longest-laster among players turned out to be the same gentleman who stands today as the longest-living Met: 93-year-old Frank Thomas. Cleanup hitter Thomas was the only original Original Met from that initial batting order to play for the Mets as late as 1964, specifically through August 5 of the Mets’ third season, until he was traded down the Turnpike to the beef up the Phillies’ pennant drive (a drive that famously careened into a ditch).

Replacing Thomas as The Dean…well, we have to inflict the first of several explanations here, because there was one 1965 Met, post-Thomas, who saw action in the first Met game: Bob Moorhead, who came out of the bullpen in the fourth inning. Moorhead’s claim to fame, certainly to me, is his emergence as the very first Met to make his major league debut as a Met. Bob’s last game of the Mets’ inaugural season was certified as such when he punched a clubhouse door in St. Louis. Moorhead was frustrated with his pitching that September 1 and wound up doing damage to a couple of the fingers on his right hand. In the immortal words of Pete Campbell, “Not great, Bob!” And in the words of the immortal Casey Stengel, “If we were in first or second place, Moorhead would be fined. But we aren’t, so what’s the use?”

Mind you, we’re dredging up Moorhead’s burst of temper here because Moorhead became the only Met to have played in the Mets’ first game and play for the Mets as late as 1965. That makes Moorhead our next The Dean, right?

Not so fast there, Bob. The Dean has to have served continuously within the Mets organization from his Met debut. We’ll allow for stints on the injured list or detours to the minors or other business that can’t be prevented provided that the player in question stayed within the Met realm without interruption. It’s a little murky where Moorhead is concerned. His Baseball-Reference page indicates no transactions casting him out of the Met organization. He pitched for no other major league team besides the Mets. Yet — and it’s a big yet — Moorhead spent all of 1964 pitching for affiliates of the Milwaukee Braves. Even then, it’s not so simple to figure out whether Bob Moorhead altogether stopped being what used to be termed “Met property” and ultimately gets marked down as a Met Once Removed.

I surveyed as many reliable sources as I have at my fingertips and couldn’t nail down a specific trade or sale that connected Bob’s time in the Met system in 1963 (when he was demoted all the way down to Single-A Raleigh) to his sudden shuffle through the rosters of Denver, Toronto and Austin, each of them links in the Brave chain. I found a deal sending Moorhead from Double-A Austin to the Mets’ Triple-A outpost in Buffalo in August of ’64 (a bout of mononucleosis prevented him from reporting ASAP), but it was never quite clear to me how he had found his way to the Braves’ organization in the first place. Nothing in the papers, even in those broadsheets that dutifully printed practically everything that came across the wire. Nothing in The Sporting News, which reported everything of this nature in those days. Nothing by way of expository background in New York media-generated game stories when Bob pitched his way back to the Mets with a newly developed knuckler in ’65 after having “drifted” through the minors for nearly three solid years. Plus it all seemed a little too convenient that this pitcher just happened be traded to Buffalo after a bunch of months away from the Met organization with not even agate-type fanfare to accompany his Brave-tinged stint. It was not wholly uncommon for teams to make arrangements to loan minor leaguers to one another, far from the bright lights of their big league ballparks, but what amounted to practically an entire season of pitching under somebody else’s mortarboard would seem to disqualify Bob Moorhead from assuming his title as The Dean. He can take it up with the academic credentials committee.

If Bob Moorhead doesn’t succeed Frank Thomas as The Dean, who does? We have two worthy candidates in the starting pitcher and starting catcher from the Mets’ third game ever, on April 14, 1962. Al Jackson started that game against the Pirates at the Polo Grounds, throwing the very first pitch to his receiver Chris Cannizzaro. By definition, Jackson (1 in your scorecard) experienced the very first action of that game, just ahead of Cannizzaro (2 in your scorecard). This slicing and dicing of who came first and who came second is relevant in our discussion because, wouldn’t ya know it, Jackson and Cannizzaro also played what appeared to be their final games as Mets on the same date.

But let’s get into appearances. Jackson, the 21st Met overall, gets the nod because he went into the Met annals a few seconds before Cannizzaro, the 22nd Met overall. But Jackson’s apparent final Met game was in the first game of the doubleheader on the final day of the 1965 season, October 3. Cannizzaro took his final Met bow in the second game of that same Sunday, part of a twinbill necessitated by the Mets and Phillies going eighteen scoreless innings at Shea until a city curfew demanded an end to the Saturday night/Sunday morning affair the day/night before (itself the nightcap of a doubleheader). Cannizzaro played one game later than Jackson in 1965, though it’s not like Jackson wasn’t still on the team during what was, when two ties are taken into account, Game 164 of a season that yielded 112 losses.

The fates were penurious with Met wins in that era, so let’s be generous with honorifics and call Jackson and Cannizzaro co-The Deans. And let’s note that while both Al and Chris went on their respective merry Metless way following the 1965 season, Jackson didn’t stay away forever, coming back to the Mets from St. Louis after two years with the Cardinals. As much as we respect the Recidivist Met concept, Jackson, having been a Cardinal in 1966 and 1967, meant he couldn’t resume being The Dean or even co-The Dean. This will come up in our travels through the decades. In the most stark example we can access, Tom Seaver was the only 1983 Met who could say he was a Met as long ago as 1967, but there are pictures offering evidence that Tom was a Cincinnati Red from the middle of 1977 to the end of 1982 (I know, we don’t believe it either). We’ll happily distribute gold stars in the shape of asterisks to Recidivist Mets who went back longer on the calendar than any of their Met teammates despite an interruption to their service, but it wouldn’t be fair to those who never left to rip the cap and gown from their personages.

Tom Seaver is everything to the Mets. But he was never The Dean.

MEANWHILE, there was one more Met who inscribed his name on the all-time roster on April 14, 1962, technically after both Jackson and Cannizzaro, who not only endured to the final games of 1965 but to end of 1966. If we weren’t such sticklers for starting points, we could just say Jim Hickman, who preceded Seaver as the most accomplished of Mets, succeeded Thomas as The Dean, but Hickman didn’t make his Met debut until pinch-hitting in the seventh inning in that third Met game ever, and boy, are we sticklers. Still, Jim got his reward once Al and Chris bolted. He was the last of the truly Original Mets from the very first 28-man roster in April 1962 to stay a Met as late as 1966, playing his fifth and final season for New York before being traded with Ron Hunt to Los Angeles. That swap brought Tommy Davis to the Mets and, as we never tire of pointing out, Davis’s superb 1967 enabled an even more consequential trade: Tommy Davis for Tommie Agee. Most consequential in the context of our discussion is that Hickman’s departure eased the road to The Deandom for Ed Kranepool, who the aforementioned 1967 yearbook noticed had been around since September 22, 1962, when he was a lad of 17, and was already making a habit of never leaving.

I think we’re all pretty familiar with Ed Kranepool’s reign as The Dean. It lasted thirteen full seasons. We won’t hold his 1963 and 1964 optionings for further seasoning nor the brief 1970 demotion to Tidewater manager Gil Hodges thought would snap him out of a mid-career funk against his longevity. It’s not like he was honing his craft with a bunch of Braves prospects à la Bob Moorhead. Ed Kranepool was a Met all the way.

Nonetheless, we come to the end of Eddie’s The Deanship on September 30, 1979, because no Met remains on the active roster forever (though if anybody could, it would be Kranepool) and in 1980 we begin the term that was destined to belong to Ron Hodges, called up to the Mets on June 13, 1973, fortifying a catching corps both banged and bruised. Hodges held his own and presented a professional target for some elite pitchers while Jerry Grote worked his way back from injury. Ron’s highlight was the night he tagged out Dave Augustine on perhaps the most memorable defensive play at the plate in Met history (the ball off the top of the wall, you might know it as) and then drove in the winning run, all of this in the thirteenth inning, all of it in the searing heat of a pennant race so hot that Casey Stengel definitely would have fined a pitcher who chose that evening to bust his fingers punching a clubhouse door.

That night of September 20, 1973, remained Ron’s highlight for a dozen years. Hodges didn’t play all that much from 1974 to 1984, but he was a constant, which really helps a Met become The Dean. The Mets never made a move to get rid of him for an entire decade, so he should indeed have the title for his trouble. And, really, it’s pretty remarkable to realize Ron’s staying power carried him from one of the peaks in the Mets story — the 1973 pennant — to another of the peaks in the Mets story — the 1984 revival and all that ensued — and he had to endure so much valley in between. Well done, The Dean!

The year Ron became The Dean, you wouldn’t have guessed who would ultimately inherit his title, because in 1980, that the future The Dean was down at Jackson after a stint that wasn’t altogether promising once he first dipped his toe into Met waters beginning April 5, 1979. Yet Flushing Meadows remained patient, and once Jesse Orosco returned to town in the second half of 1981, his longevity wouldn’t be far behind. You gotta remember, the Mets had gone through a lot of flux, most of it for the best to get to surefire contending status in 1985. That meant churning through a surfeit of early-’80s players in whom management saw little future and holding onto a precious few while it cultivated its top minor leagues and made savvy trades. Once stalwarts Ron Hodges, Craig Swan and John Stearns had left (all of them in 1984), the only current Mets who dated from the ’70s were Jesse and Rusty Staub. Staub was a Recidivist Met, and as indicated above, continuity is key to The Dean. Orosco’s time as a Tide was essential in finding his groove, and it counts as continuity.

Jesse continued straight through the final strikes of the 1986 National League Championship Series and World Series, and would pitch clear to 2003, but only until the end of 1987 as a Met. After Orosco followed the path of Hickman and was traded to the Dodgers, the torch of The Dean would be passed to one more survivor of the bad old days, Mookie Wilson, who debuted as a Met and major leaguer on September 2, 1980 — same game as Wally Backman, but Mookie led off in L.A., while Wally batted eighth. Further, Mookie outlasted Wally, all the way to the trade deadline of 1989, when the Met whose career was most emblematic of the entire 1980s (he’s the only one to have played as a Met in each year of the decade) moved on to Toronto and another playoff date, because if Mookie is anything, he’s a winner.

In Mookie’s place would come a series of The Deans who barely knew, if they knew it at all, the struggle of being on lousy Mets teams. Darryl Strawberry was promoted to the big club on May 6, 1983, when the Mets could be found at their usual basement address, but in less than a year’s time, they were bona fide contenders. Say, that might have something to do with the presence of Darryl Strawberry! No doubt, whatever the Mets accomplished in the way of a seventh consecutive year of fairly plenty in 1990 (91-71 and another race almost down to the wire) was carried on Darryl’s broad shoulders (37 HRs, 108 RBIs) in what became his walk year.

Darryl indeed walked to his hometown Dodgers, leaving open the slot of The Dean, which brought another upper-case D into the picture: Ron Darling. Ronnie debuted on September 6, 1983, four months after Darryl, and one day in early 1991, he might have turned around and noticed he was the last Met left from the altogether putrid final month of the dismal Met epoch of 1977-1983. Well, Hubie Brooks was at Shea in 1991, but that’s the Recidivism talking. Darling accomplished a lot as a Met, but longevity as The Dean wasn’t on that list. The Mets traded Ron to Montreal in July, which meant there’d be yet another new The Dean in town. It would be somebody who, it was hard to reckon, could be defined by the concept of seniority.

It was Dwight Gooden, forever 19 and 20, in the mind’s eye, but by the second half of 1991, an eight-year veteran, and a Met all eight years, beginning on April 7, 1984. Doc would turn 27 in the coming offseason. Old Man Gooden? For term of continuous service purposes, absolutely. Unfortunately, the teams on whom Doc would elderly state in 1992, 1993 and 1994 would resemble the teams good ol’ Jessie, Mookie, Wally, Hubie, Darryl and Ronnie broke in with more than those on which Doctor K earned his medical degree. Far more unfortunately, a second positive drug test meant a suspension and an abrupt end to Doc’s Met career before the ’94 strike kicked in.

This meant the next The Dean was somebody who you had no problem picturing being the old guy in the clubhouse. We didn’t meet John Franco as a Met until he was 29, and when we did meet him, he wasn’t shy about telling us how he grew up idolizing the likes of Seaver, Koosman and McGraw, so it already felt like he’d been part of the team since at least 1969. Johnny’s career as a Red closer had already been decorated, too, thus he wasn’t an unfamiliar figure by any means when he first took the ball from Davey Johnson on April 11, 1990…and yes, John Franco was here so long that he pitched for the same Davey Johnson we don’t at all associate with the several eras associated with John Franco.

It was a long run as The Dean for Franco, longer than anybody’s after Kranepool’s. No matter what we might have grumbled to ourselves following a save that got away, Johnny wasn’t going anywhere. He was one of us, from Brooklyn and all that. When he finally did leave after the 2004 season, he pitched briefly for Houston, and the sight of it was too weird to wish he’d hung around in another uniform any longer. If anybody who didn’t commence as a Met should have concluded as a Met, it was John Franco.

Fittingly, the All-Star pitcher who came to the Mets and put on No. 31 in 1990 was succeeded as The Dean by a catcher who came to the Mets and put on No. 31 in 1998, the digits courtesy of eventual team captain John Franco. Along with everything else we can say about the great Mike Piazza, we can say he was The Dean in 2005. It was just one year, and it was clearly going to be Mike’s last year, but he was the last direct link to not only the Mets of the 20th century, having debuted in our togs on May 23, 1998, but the last of the Met-hicans from the glorious 1999 and 2000 clubs to still be Metting it up in a decidedly new era. Mike played out his bargain of a seven-year contract on October 2, 2005 (the least official but perhaps most resonant of several Mike Piazza Days), and gave way in the longevity department to somebody most suited to taking one’s time.

Yes! Steve Trachsel! Why the exclamation points? Irony, I suppose. Trachsel came aboard in the fifth year of what this correspondent considers the most gripping five-year period in Mets history, on April 7, 2001, and was still here the next time the Mets ran roughshod over the National League, in 2006. Steve, who pitched our first division-clincher since 1988, would wait out a batter or an umpire or his catcher or the elements between pitches. We would wait with him. We waited six fairly productive if not altogether thrilling seasons with him. It only felt like eighteen years from pitch to pitch.

After not helping the Mets very much in their seven-game NLCS loss to the Cardinals, torpid Trachsel moseyed along and gave way to a The Dean synonymous with speed: Jose Reyes, who raced onto the Met scene on June 10, 2003, or nine months after Pedro Feliciano on September 4, 2002. Famously — in our circles, at least — Perpetual Pedro pitched as a Met as late as 2013 and never pitched for any other MLB team in official competition, but he regularly passed through other organizations (including the Fukuoka Daiei Hawks for all of 2005), so while we appreciate Feliciano’s de facto loyalty to the orange and blue, the continuous service bugaboo that bit Moorhead’s case gets its teeth into Pedro’s situation as well.

Thus, Jose, and he seemed a good bet to keep on The Dean-ing to a ripe, old age considering he came up on the last day he was 19 and he was, you know, Jose Reyes. Except the folks who owned the Mets in the fall of 2011 weren’t Steve Cohen and didn’t have Steve Cohen money and it’s all a Mets fan can do to retcon Steve Cohen into Mets history and have him not only keep Jose a Met his entire career but placate Tom Seaver in 1977 and take on Jim Palmer’s contract as well. The time machine is not currently operable, so we’ll simply acknowledge that young Jose Reyes was the senior Met for five years before moving on (and eventually coming back).

With Jose having gotten a lead off first in New York and sliding into free agency second base in Miami, David Wright took over as The Dean, and who better? “Who better?” in so many ways is a question that can be answered with David Wright. Wright joined the Mets on July 21, 2004, and even through his lengthy injury rehab, never departed. David was named The Captain in Spring Training 2013, he remained The Captain until his final days in 2018 and, as far as I’m concerned, he will always be The Captain. Retiring No. 5 goes without saying. Retiring The Captaincy would work for me, too. There is only one David Wright.

But there would need to be another The Dean once Wright effectively retired with two years remaining on his contract, and the title would go to his fellow Gold Glove-awardee Juan Lagares, a Met since April 23, 2013, and, these eyes here say, the best defensive center fielder the Mets have ever featured (all respect to Messrs. Agee, Beltran and small sample size/large impression Pat Howell). Lagares’s glove was not only where extra-base hits went to die; he robbed Jeurys Familia of The Dean status. Well, not so much Juan but the trade the Mets made in the middle of 2018 to send Familia to Oakland for what amounted to a semester abroad. The Mets picked up Familia at the airport to begin the 2019 season, resuming a Met career that began on September 4, 2012, but being an Athletic, or anything other than a Met for even one game (let alone the 70 Met games Jeurys missed while he wore the green and gold), will derail anybody’s ambitions for being The Dean.

Likewise, Lagares could only serve as The Dean through the 2019 season because he not only tested the free agent waters, he did more than wade in them, signing with San Diego for 2020. Ah, but that’s 2020, and we probably still remember 2020 was a year unlike any other in major league (or contemporary human) history. Bottom line is Juan never actually played for the Padres or any Padres affiliate, the latter impossible, anyway, given that no affiliates were playing anywhere in the COVID season. Somehow, Juan wandered back to the Mets for a dash of Recidivist pinch-running and a couple of cameos in center. It wasn’t the same — they gave him Nos. 87 and 15 rather than the 12 with which he was identified, for cryin’ out loud — and it didn’t renew his tenure as The Dean, for that title had already passed on to…

Jacob deGrom. Or BOO! as I’ve come to think of him when I think of him, which I’m trying not to do, especially since watching his introductory “I’ve always wanted to be a world champion Texas Ranger ever since they paid me to want that” press conference. Before Jacob jilted us, I, like most Met fans, had willingly and lovingly soaked up every inning of his Met career, which began with such promise on May 15, 2014, and continued with such promise all the way to the second game of the 2022 National League Wild Card Series. Someday I won’t be sore when I think about the fella I used to call Jake.

Besides, who can be sore when thinking about a much brighter expression of human emotion, namely smiling? Who isn’t smiling now that we know who the new The Dean is gonna be for as many as the next eight years? Ladies and gentlemen I (and Steve Cohen) give you Brandon Nimmo! That exclamation point is not ironic. I, like most Met fans, am ecstatic that Brandon has been re-signed for 2023 through 2030, even if there’s no knowing what anything beyond today brings. Today we know who our center fielder will be next year, all non-injury, non-pandemic, non-goodness-knows-what things being equal. Conversely, nobody on the market equaled the relatively sure thing Brandon Nimmo represents as our center fielder and leadoff hitter. Since he arrived as a New York Met on June 26, 2016, he’s grinned and he’s grinded (ground in English, grinded in baseball) and he’s gotten better and, when he’s been healthy, he’s crafted himself into a one-of-a-kind OPS threat, particularly the O part from getting on base as he does. I love to watch him play defense. I love to listen to him exude anything. I love that I’ve watched him grow up into the veteran he’s become, definitely coming off as someone who’s been through the Met wringer, but never not happy to be here. He just proved how happy being a Met makes him. One-hundred sixty-two million dollars didn’t hurt, but what a gamer to get “162” in there.

Brandon will play his games, get his walks and his hits and hit-by-pitches, steal his handful of bases, track down his catches, be a fine Met and, most importantly, continue the legacy of The Dean. The Dean is the institutional memory of the clubhouse. The Dean will be able to tell the stories no other uniformed personnel on the premises knows or remembers. When new-for-2023 Mets Justin Verlander, Jose Quintana, Brooks Raley and David Robertson alight in Port St. Lucie, Brandon will take each new face under his wing and show him the ropes. At least that’s what I’d like to imagine will happen. I rather doubt Justin Verlander requires much rope-showing. These other veteran acquisitions, too, but you know if there are questions to be asked, Nimmo will be available in Met colors to answer them.

Seriously, if you have any issues, take them to The Dean. He knows the ropes, he hits the ropes, he flags down the ropes. He’s been around here a while.

THE DEANS: Senior Mets By Continuous Service
Frank Thomas: 4/11/1962; 8/5/1964
Al Jackson: 4/14/1962; 10/3/1965 (1)*
Chris Cannizzaro: 4/14/1962; 10/3/1965 (2)
Jim Hickman: 4/14/1962; 10/2/1966
Ed Kranepool: 9/22/1962; 9/30/1979
Ron Hodges: 6/13/1973; 9/30/1984
Jesse Orosco: 4/5/1979; 10/4/1987
Mookie Wilson: 9/2/1980; 7/31/1989
Darryl Strawberry: 5/6/1983; 9/27/1990
Ron Darling: 9/6/1983; 7/14/1991
Dwight Gooden: 4/7/1984; 6/24/1994
John Franco: 4/11/1990; 10/3/2004
Mike Piazza: 5/23/1998; 10/2/2005
Steve Trachsel: 4/7/2001; 10/14/2006
Jose Reyes: 6/10/2003; 9/28/2011*
David Wright: 7/21/2004; 9/28/2018
Juan Lagares: 4/23/2013; 9/29/2019**
Jacob deGrom: 5/15/2014; 10/8/2022
Brandon Nimmo: 06/26/2016; TBD

First date is player’s first game as a Met. Second date is player’s final game (or final game of his first stint, in the case of Recidivist Mets* or Mets Once Removed**) as a Met, after which the next player on the list takes over as The Dean.

The latest episode of National League Town was recorded before Nimmo laid claim to becoming the nineteenth The Dean in Mets history, but rest assured it revels in the signing of Verlander; ponders the effectiveness of Quintana; and gets something in about Raley. You can listen here or on your podcast platform of choice.