Highest Five

It’s the 242 home runs, it’s the 1,777 base hits, it’s the seven All-Star appearances, it’s the matching pairs of Gold Gloves and Silver Sluggers, it’s the 30-30, it’s the Captaincy, it’s the four RBIs in his first postseason series, it’s the four RBIs in his final postseason series nine years later, it’s the electric slash lines that sliced through his team’s consecutive notorious Septembers, it’s the 2004 debut that was hotly anticipated when he was fresh and twenty-one because you gotta see this kid, it’s the necessary 2018 au revoir when he was compromised and thirty-five drawing 43,928 into a group hug tight enough to make you forget that an appreciative squeeze of the object of affection was best handled with care, given the condition of his spine.

A figurative embrace for the literal love of our 21st-century lives as Mets fans was how it ended. It was as appropriate a response on our part as it was a reluctant farewell on his part. But it was always gonna be au revoir rather than farewell, because David Wright was never going to stay away. He had been here too much and too long to let a little detail like concluding his playing career get in the way of his ever present presence.

Up above the left field seats at Citi Field is where you’ll find him from July 19 forward, his retired number 5 representing a body of Mets work that is as singular as the digit deemed ready to take its Wrightful place alongside, suddenly, so many others. Long ago, 37, 14 and 41 sat eternally undisturbed by other numerical homages to icons who’d graced the orange and blue. The icons came, went and hovered. The homages were absent. Seemed kind of lonely and chilly in the tangible Metsian stratosphere. 37. 14. 41. Yoo-hoo, is there anybody else up here? The ice broke with 31, and within a few years, the pond of overdue recognition had altogether melted. 36. 17. 24. 16. 18.

Now 5 makes it ten.

Yes, it’s the statistics, the accolades, the longevity and the one-and-only-one uniform — no arrival from St. Louis; no leaving for Los Angeles; no tearful homecomings, because Flushing was always home — to go along with the one number David wore on his front and back while carving his name atop so many columns of the Met record book that contributed to the inevitable becoming a reality. The ceremonial retirement of 5 could have been penciled in as a TBD event under “when” rather than “if,” same as Wright’s presumed eventual induction into the club Hall of Fame, while David was riding his considerable pre-stenosis peak. Both rituals could have been rubber-stamped the night he bowed out as an active player. Both, we learn in the wake of another joyous offseason bulletin, are happening on one Saturday afternoon in 2025, seven seasons after Wright’s final swing. Only Tom Seaver, barely a year beyond calling off his would-be comeback in 1987, was ushered into utter franchise immortality sooner, his number unveiled and his sculpture (before they replaced HOF busts with plaques) presented on the same summer day in 1988. David therefore joins Tom as the only Mets to receive what amounts to a divine daily double.

Historically, the Mets have been glacial about bestowing finishing touches to their fairly obvious masterpieces. Jerry Koosman retired after the 1985 season. His 36 waited 36 years to be hung, getting rafterized in 2021. Keith Hernandez’s 17 (1990; 2022) waited almost as long. Willie Mays’s 24 (1973; 2022) waited way longer. Doc Gooden’s 16 (2000; 2024) and Darryl Strawberry’s 18 (1999; 2024) waited long enough. Mike Piazza’s 31 (2007; 2016) was veritably fast-tracked, but had to be co-signed by Cooperstown before previous Mets ownership would act. Let’s be glad somebody in charge has figured out you shouldn’t make house legends wait forever.

David’s credentials for the tiers of honor where his legend will now officially reside stack quite handsomely — analytically, anecdotally, absolutely. Yet it’s one more thing, gleaned observationally, that I believe directed David decisively to the Mets Hall of Fame and elevated 5 to the rafters.

From July 21, 2004, to September 29, 2018, David Wright reigned as King of the Grind. For 1,585 major league games, David just kept on grinding. For the hundreds of games that constituted 2009 to 2014 in particular, rooting for the Mets was a grind. You did it, probably, because you’d conditioned yourself to at a tender age. You hoped those years, their stagnation already in progress, wouldn’t grind your spirit for your team to dust. They came awfully close. But there was, whenever physically available, David Wright. David Wright never emitted any sense that playing for the New York Mets was less than a blessing, regardless that watching the New York Mets he fronted bordered on chore.

You chose baseball. You chose the Mets. You didn’t choose it for the relentless mediocrity that set in roughly the same time hired trucks carted away the last debris of Shea Stadium. Fortunately, they left behind a gem. They left Wright. Diamond Dave sparkled all he could in the dross years. Sometimes the surest sign of a star is the ability to show up and keep going. Except for acceding to the realities of a conk on the head in 2009 and a grab of the back in 2011, David grinded and grinded at Citi Field and wherever the string the Mets were playing out took them. David grinded ceaselessly into the promising year of 2015, then grinded to make sure it would be a pennant year. He grinded out of view in 2016 and 2017 and 2018 until we insisted we have our one last look at him. He grinded until he could grind no more. Never ceased serving as face of his franchise, whatever state his franchise found itself in through no fault of his own. Kept hitting, kept running, kept fielding, kept smiling within reason. If he didn’t exactly grin, he never grimaced. David Wright was the essence of happy to be here, quietly but clearly ecstatic to be a New York Met every day he was a New York Met, which, not coincidentally, was every day.

There were too many Met seasons in the midst of David Wright’s career when the Mets didn’t contend. There was a lot to suggest “same old Mets” in those seasons. If you came out to the park and you focused on No. 5 at third base, you knew there was at least one reason to be thankful they were.