Megdal: David Wright was the ultimate Met
From SABR member Howard Megdal at Vice Sports on September 14, 2018:
For the moment, leave aside the insidiousness of how it came to pass Thursday that David Wright, franchise icon for the New York Mets, announced tearfully that he would be playing his final game in the major leagues on September 29.
Ignore that he gets just one day because the Mets, a team Wright was loyal to in every possible way—from taking a discounted extension, to serving as the face of the franchise through the very worst of the Bernie Madoff-related financial issues that plague them to this day—spent weeks publicly impugning the two-year comeback Wright has been authoring, delaying his return.
Forget that the Mets a franchise that seems to always rush players back from injury (or have them play through it), instead did everything possible to keep Wright off the field, seemingly because it would ruin the chances of insurance paying off 75 percent of Wright’s salary while the Mets could claim all of it for public consumption of their inflated, yet still chronically underfunded payroll number.
This is the essence of David Wright’s tenure with the Mets, which began with such promise in 2004, will end a decade and a half later short of the Hall of Fame track Wright once trod upon, but remains the greatest everyday career in team history.
Read the full article here: https://sports.vice.com/en_us/article/yw4gaj/david-wright-was-the-ultimate-met
- Related link: Get your free copy of SABR’s Met-rospectives: A Collection of the Greatest Games in New York Mets History
Originally published: September 14, 2018. Last Updated: September 14, 2018.