Facebook™ is a time-sucking drag. If you’re reading this on Facebook, you see the irony. But today it was not so useless because it was there that I saw proof that the Mets Hall of Fame actually exists.
Jon Matlack, Edgardo Alfonzo, and Ron Darling, two of the most unsung Mets and one of the most visible, respectively, are to be inducted in the Mets Hall of Fame this summer. They will be the first Mets inducted since Mike Piazza in 2013.
Alfonzo was treated pretty shabbily when the Mets did not bring him back after he led the Brooklyn Cyclones to the first league title in club history. I gave him his proper respect in a profile on Rising Apple last spring. I always loved him, even though he nearly broke my hand with a line drive hit right at me when I was playing hooky from work one afternoon. I saw Edgardo a few times as I worked for a rival New York-Penn League team. We never spoke, but I thought we experienced some telepathic communication. Me: “Let’s Go, Fonzie!” Him: Imperceptible head nod. I even saw him sign an autograph for a kid between innings—of a playoff game he was managing!
Jon Matlack was working for the Astros organization back in the days when that team was routinely losing 100 games but was scandal free. He came from a spring training workout and spent an hour talking to me on the phone about 1973 for Swinging ’73. Let me tell you, there is not a detail he did not recall and provide insight for, whether it was getting clonked on the noggin by a liner by Marty Perez or surrendering a mammoth home run in Game Seven of the ’73 Series to Reggie Jackson. If you go by Wins Above Replacement (WAR), he is a top 10 Met (as is Fonzie). Get this, 26 of the big lefty’s 82 Mets wins were complete-game shutouts. Sid Fernandez is a beefier version of Matlack, and El Sid needs to go Mets Hall next!
Ron Darling has been a Mets announcer as well as national broadcaster, but he really was a tremendous Met. Like the aforementioned Fernandez, he walked too many batters, but he was a Yale man who could pose on the cover of GQ and then go out and whip the Phillies—like he did to clinch the 1988 division title. Ron and Kevin Burkhardt came to the Mets Booster Club in Port St. Lucie for an event where I was signing. Ron (and Kevin) not only stayed through my little speech, but Ron cited a couple of my books and afterward we had a drink at that bar/bowling alley. Like Matlack, he is the only Met to start three times in one World Series, and all of us hope Mr. P will one day get to call the club “the defending world champions.”
Well done, gentlemen. And after rave reviews of the Mets Fan Fest, that’s two historically inclined moments by the Mets in one week. Keep up the good work, Metropolitans!
Your fans are counting on you. They always have.