By ADAM ECOM
New York had baseball. New York had always had baseball. What New York didn't have — not anymore — was a National League team.
The Dodgers left for Los Angeles after the 1957 season. And so did the Giants. Both traveled west. Two franchises, two fanbases and two borough identities — gone.
The National League fans of New York were left with nothing but the Yankees, and the Yankees were an American League team. For a certain kind of New York baseball fan, that was not good enough. It was never going to be good enough.
These were not Yankees fans. They never were. They were Brooklyn fans, Queens fans, the Bronx fans and others who rooted for the Giants because the Yankees felt like someone else's team — too corporate, too polished, too much about winning and not enough about belonging. When the Dodgers and Giants left, those fans did not convert. Instead, they waited. And for five years, the National League had no presence in the largest city in the country. That is not a footnote. It is an embarrassment. And the people who ran baseball knew it.
The Worst Team That Ever Mattered
In 1962, the New York Mets played their first game. They lost 120 of them. The 1962 Mets finished 40–120–1, the worst record in modern baseball history. Manager Casey Stengel — who had won seven World Series with the Yankees — looked at his roster and famously asked: "Can't anybody here play this game?" On most nights, the answer was no.
But the fans came anyway. They came in enormous numbers, because they finally had their team back. The Mets were theirs. The losing almost did. matter — and that tells you everything you need to know about what kind of fanbase this is. Mets fans are not fair-weather. They are not casual. They are people who showed up for a 40-win team and cheered like it was the World Series, because the alternative was nothing, and nothing was worse.
What happened next is one of the great stories in the history of the sport.
1969: The Miracle
In 1969, the Mets won the World Series. Seven years after the worst season in modern baseball history, the "Miracle Mets" — a team nobody believed in, managed by Gil Hodges, led by Tom Seaver on the mound — beat the Baltimore Orioles in five games. The city lost its mind. It was the kind of championship that doesn't just win a title; it defines a franchise forever. Every Mets fan who has ever lived carries 1969 with them.
Tom Seaver was the soul of it. "Tom Terrific" is the greatest pitcher in Mets history by any measure — 311 career wins, three Cy Young Awards, a 2.86 ERA, and a first-ballot Hall of Fame induction with the highest voting percentage in history at the time. He made Shea Stadium matter. He made the Mets legitimate. When the Mets traded him in 1977, the city treated it like a civic tragedy. When he came back, they treated it like a homecoming.
1986: The Swagger
The 1986 Mets are the other pillar. Dwight Gooden. Darryl Strawberry. Keith Hernandez. Gary Carter. Mookie Wilson. A team that won 108 games in the regular season and then survived one of the most dramatic postseasons in baseball history — including Game 6 of the World Series — the Buckner game — the ball through the legs and the comeback that should not have happened.
That team had an edge to it, and possessed a collective personality, a swagger, that New York recognized and embraced completely. They were loud, they were talented, they were complicated, and they were must-watch baseball every single night. They were also, in many ways, a reflection of New York in the 1980s — raw, brilliant, and occasionally out of control. Queens claimed every bit of it.
After missing the mark during the 1987 campaign, the Mets returned to the postseason the following year. Though a repeat of anything similar to 1986 did not materialize. After dropping the NLCS to the Dodgers in 1988, it was more than their season that came to an end. It was the last time that special group would collectively appear in the postseason. Many say they could accomplished so much more. And it is clear they built themselves for tremendous opportunity. Though they simultaneously stripped it away and ultimately tore it down. Still, as most of us know, life, and baseball in particular, is often unpredictable and complex. In the end, they did not come away empty-handed. 1986 is still well remembered and still celebrated to this day.
The Braves, the Rain, and the Grand Slam Single
There is a villain in every great story, and for the Mets of the 1990s, it was the Atlanta Braves. Greg Maddux. Tom Glavine. John Smoltz. The most dominant rotation of a generation, year after year, standing between Queens and October glory like a wall that would not move. The Mets could never fully get over them. They tried. They came close. And then the Braves were there again.
The 1999 NLCS. The Mets had fought their way in. They had talent — Mike Piazza behind the plate, Al Leiter on the mound, a lineup that believed. And then they ran into Atlanta, and Atlanta was Atlanta, and the series went the way those series always went. The Braves took control. The Mets were on the edge.
Game 5. Shea Stadium. October 17, 1999.
It rained. Not a drizzle — a real rain, the kind that soaks through your jacket in the first inning and refuses to stop. The field was wet. The lights made everything shine. The crowd was drenched and loud and desperate because the Mets needed this game, needed it badly, and the Braves were right there, the way they always were, immovable and infuriating.
The game went to extra innings. Then more extra innings. Fifteen innings total — three hours and thirty-one minutes of tension and rain and Shea Stadium holding its breath. Both bullpens were empty. Both teams were running on fumes. The Mets had come so close so many times and the Braves had held them off every time, the way those evil, magnificent, maddening Braves always did.
Bottom of the fifteenth. Bases loaded. Robin Ventura at the plate.
He hit it over the left-field wall.
Grand slam. Walk-off. The place exploded — 55,000 soaking wet people losing their minds simultaneously, the kind of noise that you feel in your chest before you hear it with your ears. Ventura rounded first and the entire Mets team swarmed him. Mobbed him. Buried him before he could take another step. He never touched second base. He never touched third. He never touched home.
Official ruling: a single. One run scored. The walk-off grand slam was officially a single — the "Grand Slam Single" — one of the most bizarre, joyful, technically absurd moments in the history of the sport. Only the Mets. Only Shea. Only that rain-soaked, fifteen-inning, completely unhinged October night in Queens.
On a personal note, I had scored an infield loge box ticket —the blue seats — to the Grand Slam Single. What an amazing experience it was, watching on television that is. I can only imagine what would have been if I had just picked up the phone and returned my friend’s call a few days earlier. You see, I did not know about the special ticket that was offered to me, until several days had passed after the game!
A free ticket! To Game 5! To Robin Ventura! To the wind and rain! To the Grand Slam Single. To one of the greatest moments in Mets history, live, from inside Shea Stadium, soaking wet and screaming with 55,000 other people who would remember that night for the rest of their lives. Instead, I was in Baltimore. Worse yet, spending time with a guy that turned out to be a POS. And ignoring my phone. That's what it means to be a Mets fan. The moments find you — but they often slip away.
In the end, the Braves won the series. Game 6, Atlanta. Of course they did. That was the 1990s Braves. Majestic and evil in equal measure, and the Mets could never quite slay them.
Shea Stadium: The Noise, the Planes, the Church
Before Citi Field, there was Shea Stadium. And if you never went, you missed something that cannot be fully explained — only remembered.
Shea was not a beautiful ballpark. It was a concrete bowl in Flushing, built in 1964, functional and loud and completely without pretension. What it had was atmosphere. The planes from LaGuardia roared overhead every few minutes — low enough that you could feel them — and somehow that became part of the experience, part of the soundtrack of Mets baseball. The crowd was working-class Queens, multi-generational, passionate in a way that felt personal rather than performative.
When Shea was loud, it was as loud as any building in sports. The 1969 and 1986 championships happened there. The Beatles played there. It was torn down after the 2008 season, and a generation of Mets fans grieved it like a person.
Citi Field and the Wound That Won't Fully Close
Citi Field opened in 2009 in Flushing, right next to where Shea stood. It is a beautiful ballpark — modern, clean, fan-friendly, with good sightlines and excellent food. It is also, to a certain generation of Mets fans, built with a design choice that has never fully landed.
The main entrance facade was modeled after Ebbets Field — the home of the Brooklyn Dodgers. The team that left. The team whose departure created the void that the Mets were born to fill. Building a tribute to the Dodgers on a Mets stadium is the kind of decision that makes sense in a boardroom and lands wrong in the borough. Most fans have made peace with it. Some never will.
What Citi Field got right is the location and the experience. Getting there on the 7 train from Midtown is one of the great commutes in New York sports — the train fills up with Mets fans, the energy builds, and by the time you pull into the Mets-Willets Point station you're already in it. The stadium sits in a neighborhood that is quintessentially near the end of the line. The neighborhood is diverse, unpretentious, real. That fits.
On the downside, automobile, junkyards, and shop shops line the exterior of the outfield parking lot, which on occasion catch fire that can be seen on the baseball broadcasts. And these facilities are far from the bars and restaurants, perhaps even hotels, that would make visiting the Mets more of a destination for the day or evening.
The Queens Fan: Who They Are
Mets fans are not Yankees fans. That distinction matters more than it might seem from the outside.
Yankees fans carry expectation as a birthright. Mets fans carry hope as a survival mechanism. These are people who have watched their franchise win two World Series in sixty-plus years, who have lived through the Buckner game and the 2007 collapse and the Wilpon ownership era and the Bernie Madoff scandal that left the organization financially gutted for nearly a decade. They have seen their team spend big and fail, rebuild and stall, get close and fall apart in September.
And they keep coming back. That's the defining characteristic of a Mets fan — not optimism exactly, but a refusal to stop believing even when the evidence suggests they should. They are Queens people. They are outer-borough people. They take the 7 train and pack the upper deck and argue about the lineup on the way home and show up again the next night.
They do not accept losing quietly. But they accept it — because they've had to — with a kind of dark humor that is uniquely New York and uniquely Mets. You laugh because the alternative is worse.
Mike Piazza and What He Meant
Mike Piazza arrived in New York in 1998 via trade from the Marlins, and within weeks he was the most important player in the city. He was a catcher who hit like a first baseman — a .308 career average, 427 home runs, 12 Silver Slugger awards. He was also, in the years he spent in Queens, exactly what the Mets needed: a star who chose them, who stayed, who made Shea Stadium feel like it mattered on a national level again.
The home run he hit on September 21, 2001 — ten days after the attacks — is one of the most emotional moments in the history of the sport. Baseball had just returned. The city was still in shock. And Piazza hit a two-run homer in the eighth inning that gave the Mets the lead, and Shea Stadium became something more than a ballpark that night. It became a place where New York exhaled for the first time in ten days.
Piazza is a Hall of Famer. He went in as a Met. That was his choice, and Mets fans have never forgotten it.
David Wright: The Standard
If you want to understand what the Mets mean to the people who love them, you have to understand David Wright.
Wright was drafted by the Mets in 2001, came up in 2004, and spent his entire career — every single game — in a Mets uniform. Third baseman. Captain. The face of the franchise for fifteen years. He hit .296 with 242 home runs and 970 RBIs. He was a seven-time All-Star and a two-time Gold Glove winner. He was also, by every account from every person who ever played with him or worked alongside him, exactly the kind of person you want representing your organization.
When Wright gave his retirement speech in 2018 — his body broken down by spinal stenosis, a career cut short by injuries that would have ended most players years earlier — he looked at the Mets fans in Citi Field and said what he meant: You've always had my back.
He was 21 years old when he came up. A kid from Chesapeake, Virginia, dropped into the middle of New York City, into a franchise with enormous expectations and a complicated history. And the fans took him in. They made him feel at home. He never forgot it, and he never left.
That's the thing about David Wright that goes beyond baseball. If we all had someone in our lives who handled themselves the way he did — who worked that hard, communicated that honestly, stayed that loyal when leaving would have been easier — we'd all be in a better place. He was a great player. He was a better person. And the Mets were lucky to have him as the face of their franchise for as long as they did.
2015: The Season That Felt Like Magic
People will tell you that 2015 doesn't count because the Mets lost the World Series to the Royals in five games. Those people are missing the point entirely.
The 2015 Mets were managed by Terry Collins — a baseball lifer who had waited his whole career for a moment like that, who wore his heart on his sleeve and never pretended otherwise, who loved his players and let them know it. The rotation that year was something special: Jacob deGrom, Matt Harvey, Noah Syndergaard, Steven Matz, Bartolo Colón. Five starters who could dominate on any given night.
What people forget is that the offense was a problem for most of the season. One run per game, some nights. The rotation was dominant and the team was winning ugly, grinding through games on pitching alone. Then the trade deadline hit.
Yoenis Céspedes came over from the Tigers. And everything changed.
Céspedes was not a subtle player. He showed up to spring training in a different exotic car every day. He wore his sleeves like a statement. He hit the ball so far over the wall that you had to stop and recalibrate what you thought was possible.
He was cocky in the way that only works if you can back it up — and he backed it up every single night. Most Mets fans put up with the personality because he was a winner and they needed one badly. For the fans who need to like the person before they love the player, he was a complicated figure. But what he did for that team in the second half of 2015 was undeniable.
Juan Uribe came over from the Braves around the same time — quieter, steadier, a veteran who knew how to play small ball and keep a clubhouse together. He was the glue that came first. Céspedes was the explosion. Together they turned a team that was surviving into a team that was believing.
And then there was Johan. Johan Santana will always be the favorite — the ace, the artist, the pitcher who made Citi Field feel like it had a heartbeat. Céspedes brought something different. Something louder. And in 2015, loud was exactly what the Mets needed.
The team went 90–72, won the NL East, swept the Cubs in the NLCS, and went to the World Series for the first time since 2000. As a fan — as someone who watched every inning, who felt every win and every loss, who believed in that team the way you believe in something that feels bigger than sports — 2015 was the best season. Not because of what it won. Because of what it felt like. Terry Collins made you feel like it was possible. The players made you feel like they meant it.
The Royals won. The Mets went home. And 2015 still lives in Queens like something that happened yesterday.
The Wilpon Era, the Madoff Wound, and the Cohen Reset
For nearly two decades, the Mets were owned by Fred Wilpon and his family — and for much of that time, the franchise operated under the shadow of the Bernie Madoff Ponzi scheme, in which the Wilpons lost hundreds of millions of dollars. The financial damage was real and it showed on the field: payroll constraints, missed free agents, an inability to build around the talent they had.
Mets fans watched other teams spend while their ownership pleaded poverty. It was a source of genuine, sustained frustration — not just losing, but losing because the people running the team couldn't or wouldn't invest properly.
That changed in 2020 when Steve Cohen — a hedge fund billionaire and lifelong Mets fan — purchased the franchise for $2.4 billion, the largest sale price in baseball history at the time. Cohen came in with money and with intent. The payroll went up. The infrastructure improved. The era of financial paralysis was over.
Spring Training, the Pipeline, and the Las Vegas Problem
The Mets train in Port St. Lucie, Florida — at Clover Park, a facility the organization has invested in significantly. It's about 1,200 miles from Queens, which makes it a real trip for New York fans, but the Mets have a strong following in South Florida and spring training games there draw well.
The Triple-A situation has not always been straightforward. For years, the affiliate was the Las Vegas 51s — and Las Vegas is not a four-and-a-half-hour drive from Queens. It's a four-hour flight. When the Mets needed to call someone up in a hurry, that player was getting on a plane, crossing time zones, arriving exhausted, and suiting up the next day. Terry Collins talked about it openly — it was difficult. It put the team at a disadvantage that other organizations simply didn't face. There were nights the Mets were a card short, and everyone in the building knew why.
The affiliate eventually moved to Syracuse, which fixed the geography. But for years, the pipeline ran through the desert, and it cost them.
Where They Stand and What Comes Next
Pete Alonso — "Polar Bear" — became the Mets' all-time home run leader during his time in Queens. Two-time Home Run Derby champion, a player this fanbase attached to completely. Then he left. Alonso signed with the Baltimore Orioles in free agency, and Queens had to reckon with another departure — another player who meant something, gone. It's a familiar feeling for Mets fans. It never gets easier.
As of right now, the 2026 Mets are ending a season that has frustrated more than it has inspired. The fanbase is restless — not panicked, but watching closely, the way Mets fans always watch, with one eye on the standings and one eye on history. The boos have come out at Citi Field this year. They always do when the team underperforms, and this year the team has underperformed. The pitching has been inconsistent. The offense has been streaky. The ownership has spent but the results haven't matched the investment yet.
Mets fans are not surprised. They've been here before. What they are is impatient — and impatient in Queens sounds different than impatient anywhere else. It's loud, it's personal, and it shows up anyway.
That's what it means to be a Mets fan. You believe, you wait, you show up, and you believe again. You carry the Grand Slam Single and the 2015 magic and David Wright's retirement speech and Piazza's home run in the rain. You carry all of it — the championships and the collapses, the moments you were there for and the ones you missed because you were in Baltimore not answering your phone.
Queens gave the National League back to New York. That's not nothing. That's everything.
— ADAM I ECOM, Founder and Commissioner, THE BASEMALL
In Our Collection Right Now
Mets inventory moves. Graded cards, signed memorabilia, authenticated pieces from the players who built this franchise — it changes regularly. Piazza. Wright. Seaver. Gooden. Strawberry. If you're not seeing much right now, check back. We're always working the Queens collection.
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Up Next on BASEBLOG: Next time we're back in Queens, we're counting down the top moments, the top players, and the memorabilia that tells the story. Coming soon.
But first — we're visiting three more cities. Here's where they began:
Oakland — A's baseball, the dynasty years, and what it means to win in the shadow of San Francisco. Philadelphia — The Phillies, the Phanatic, and a city that has never once been easy on its teams. Pittsburgh — Three rivers, one heart, and a franchise that punched above its weight for decades.
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