Patching Things Up

“What a break,” the player said. “Wow! This is great. I can hardly believe it. Imagine going to a club like the Phillies. I feel like I’ve been born again.”

The player was Buddy Harrelson, on the occasion of his trade from the Mets in Spring Training 1978. The Mets were founded in 1962 and were headed into their seventeenth season. Harrelson had signed with them in their second and had never been associated with anybody else. Born again? He was practically born a Met. How does somebody like that take such glee in assuming another identity?

“I kinda wondered about all that family stuff I’d been hearing for years. I thought I was a member of that family, but they didn’t have the decency to let me know they were getting someone to take my place.”

That quote is also Harrelson’s, uttered on the same occasion. During the preceding winter, the Mets dealt for Tim Foli, himself an ex-Met. Harrelson, 33 and oft-injured, understood the last-place Mets were going in a different direction. He didn’t understand why he couldn’t have been given a heads-up about Foli taking his spot while he was still on the roster. Thirteen seasons in a Met uniform didn’t mean much in the wake of 1977.

“If the Mets said I could have a lifetime contract to be a coach, I’d be crazy not to.”

The proprietor of that particular limited ambition? Mets coach Buddy Harrelson, August 1988. Buddy had filled in briefly for Davey Johnson and the Mets won the series he skippered. By then, Buddy had been back in the Met fold since the fall of 1981. A new Mets management structure recognized who Harrelson was and what he meant to the franchise. He’d been delighted to have been sent to a contender in Philadelphia, but “I never stopped being a Mets fan,” Buddy admitted when he came back the first time, “even when I was traded.” He also knew his baseball, and the Mets were smart enough to put what he’d accumulated to good use. He coached for George Bamberger. He announced over SportsChannel. He managed at Little Falls. He was in the third base box to urge Kevin Mitchell to bolt for home when a pitch got away from Rich Gedman and, a couple of moments later, he shadowed Ray Knight down the line. Now he was Davey’s right hand in the dugout. He wasn’t bucking for a promotion.

“The team was going to Philadelphia and I was going home to Long Island. I could have finished the week. The writers would have asked, ‘What about Harrelson?’ and they could have said they were deciding. In the winter they could have said, ‘He’s going to be a scout.’ That’s what hurt. They knew the heart of who I am and how I am. I earned better treatment than that.”

That’s Buddy Harrelson reflecting in 2000 on how the managing gig he wasn’t seeking in 1988 ended with seven games remaining in 1991. Frank Cashen was giving way to Al Harazin in the GM role, and it was decided somewhere upstairs that it would provide a fresher start for Harazin if he didn’t have to make his first official act the firing of Harrelson. Buddy had taken over for Davey in 1990 and led the perennially underachieving Mets’ charge into the thick of an ending era’s final pennant race. No, Buddy wasn’t gonna be back in 1992, nor, if you experienced 1991’s Met crash to earth, would have you thought he should be. But did they have to cut him loose with a week to go?

Between 1992 and 2000, Harrelson had been back to Shea plenty, no hard feelings evident, though “that’s what hurt” indicates some feelings remained harder than others. He’d even been enlisted, alongside Mookie Wilson, as a Mets community outreach representative after the disastrous 1993 season, when if any Mets were known for reaching out, it was so they could get better rotation on the firecrackers they were throwing. What more positive faces could you put on the Mets at any time than those of Mookie and Buddy?

“I never really wanted to manage. I’ve moved on.”

Harrelson’s direct association with the Mets was over by 2000, which was when he added the above thought. He was helping to start up and run the Long Island Ducks, an independent professional baseball team technically operating within the same Metropolitan Area where the Mets sold tickets, but the Ducks stressed they weren’t intending to take a bite out of any big league entity’s box office. Ticket prices were lower out in Suffolk. “We’re competition for the movies,” Buddy said. He had stayed on Long Island, and now he was doing something for his community. The Mets were his past. “This” — the Ducks — “might end up being my baseball legacy.”

Due respect to the pretty ballpark in Central Islip and the four Atlantic League championship teams to which it’s been home and however many kids who were introduced to baseball there because of the affordable tickets and cozy atmosphere, but no, that’s not Bud Harrelson’s baseball legacy. It’s great that Buddy had an enormous hand in creating, popularizing and sustaining the Long Island Ducks, but we know Buddy’s legacy is what he did as shortstop for the New York Mets, particularly the year the Mets first won it all and the year the Mets almost did that again. We might also add that the arc of his baseball life past those peaks of 1969 and 1973 speaks well for the idea that in this sport that begins again today in Flushing, you can go home again. You don’t have to be an alert third base coach to know the object of baseball is to go home.

Buddy Harrelson belonged in a Mets uniform, at the Mets’ ballpark. When the circumstances allowed it, he returned. Not only after he was traded as a player, not only after he was fired as a manager. When his calling card read Ducks, he’d still slip into something orange and blue and come home. In 2000, the same year the Ducks were first flapping their wings, Harrelson took a Sunday off to join his long-ago teammates at Shea Stadium. The occasion was the unveiling of the Ten Greatest Moments in Mets history, as determined by an online vote of the fans. When Buddy’s name was announced amid a slew of ’69ers, I had the sense (from his closeup on DiamondVision) that he was a little uncomfortable on the premises, as if someone in a suit might have intimated he was siphoning off business with that new Long Island team of his. But he showed up. He showed up on the final day of Shea Stadium, hopping atop home plate during the postgame ceremonies, and he was as special a guest as any alum during the 2009 and 2019 reunions of the 1969 champs at Citi Field.

And in 2024, the Mets will wear a memorial patch with his nickname and his number to commemorate his life and his legacy, because while a lot of things happen in baseball that don’t go down well in the moment — like being traded or being fired or being suspect — some people ultimately withstand and transcend those rough patches. Buddy Harrelson, No. 3, New York Mets. That’s who we remember. That’s how we’ll remember him.

Eleven of the Mets who will wear the uniform that will feature the BUDDY 3 insignia, per the announced 26-man roster, will be brand new to the ballclub: starting pitchers Luis Severino, Sean Manaea and Adrian Houser; relievers Yohan Ramirez, Jorge Lopez, Jake Diekman and Michael Tonkin; infielders Zack Short and Joey Wendle; and outfielders Harrison Bader and Tyrone Taylor. A twelfth new Met, J.D. Martinez, will join them once he swings himself into shape. Martinez will be depended on to hit and to mentor, notably Mark Vientos, the promising youngster whose prospective job J.D. was signed to take. Vientos won’t be one of the Mets wearing the BUDDY 3 patch on Opening Day, either, as he’s been sent down to Syracuse. He figures to be back soon enough, and Martinez says he’ll be available to talk hitting with him or any teammate. “I’m an open book,” he said in St. Lucie. “That’s my passion. That’s what I do.”

The Mets are our passion, which is why we mope when our scheduled Opening Day is rained out, and we brighten when we realize tomorrow was only a day away. Citi Field, I can attest from a visit there last week, waited capably through the endless offseason and will be there to welcome our flock anew (plus it now has dancers!). What we do is revel in baseball’s arrival. That’s the theme entering today.

Then, at the first signs of adversity, perhaps before today is done, we grow antsy. It’s very likely in this ongoing era of roster churn that we won’t have to wait long to learn somebody among those ten new Mets has become an ex-Met…and his name will barely ring a bell months, maybe weeks later. It’s just as likely that one of the new Mets who sticks won’t succeed and mention of his name will wind up striking an unpleasant chord years from now.

Hopefully not the guy who sat on the market for months despite posting one overwhelmingly positive OPS+ after another for the past decade unless a pandemic happened to be shortening a season. Once March grew late, J.D. Martinez was simply too available to pass up, no matter the winter’s prevailing “let’s see what the kids can do” philosophy. May he bring to the (regrettable) DH role the kind of production and stability the Mets have lacked since the National League consented to have its rules bastardized. And if he can offer valuable insights to his designated successor, all the better.

“It’s part of the baseball tradition. They come up with new things in baseball, nowadays swing path and different things. There are things I can’t teach him. But at least I have experience. There are things I’ve lived and done. I definitely can share my experiences and knowledge with him. I can tell him what has worked and what hasn’t.”

What a gracious thing for 36-year-old J.D. Martinez to say about how he plans to relate to 24-year-old Mark Vientos. Except that quote isn’t from Martinez and it isn’t about Vientos and it’s not even from 2024. It was 35-year-old Adrian Gonzalez in 2018 looking forward to guiding 22-year-old Dom Smith. Different baseball players, yet similar baseball elements and sentiments, expressed a mere six years ago. When was the last time you thought about Adrian Gonzalez of the New York Mets? Or marveled at how well Dom Smith was doing?

It’s not the most hopeful of notes to scrawl across the clean slate of a new season, but we know how one minute you’re delighted that the only clouds on the horizon are puffy and cumulus, and the next minute a tarp is covering the infield. New Mets are offed in favor of newer Mets. Accomplished veterans impart only so much wisdom and have only so much left physically. Prospects fizzle. Franchises inevitably let legends leave in unseemly fashion — still. But like Bud Harrelson, who had every reason to remain disenchanted with his former employers, we never stop being Mets fans and we never stop coming back. All that family stuff proves real to us, season after season.

Happy new year. May you someday recall it well and recall it fondly.

A new episode of National League Town greets the new year. Listen to it here.