When Charlie Samuels managed the equipment for the Mets, he made certain that a promising if low-drafted young Virginian would get uniform number 5. Samuels just sensed what the rest of us would have to wait to see, that this young man was going to solve a dilemma as old as the franchise itself.
Among the running gags around the Mets since their birth was their seeming inability to develop or find third baseman who were liable to stick at the position without hiccups. At long enough last, they found one. And the only thing that kept David Wright from sticking longer than eleven full seasons, portions of three more, and completing a Hall of Fame resumé, was his body.
"There was nothing that I could do to do the thing anymore," Wright told the Citi Field throng that came out to celebrate him Saturday. "It took a while for my brain and my heart to kind of match up with that. But I think that very, very few athletes get the ending that they want — that storybook ending. I certainly wouldn't call mine a storybook ending, but it's better than 99% of what athletes get, and I'll forever be thankful for getting that opportunity."
Samuels handed Wright number 5 not because the kid reminded him of the last Met to wear the number (World Series-winning manager Davey Johnson, their still-winningest-ever skipper) but because he thought the kid would prove to be at least as good as the Hall of Fame third basemen who wore it, Brooks Robinson and George Brett. Wright wasn't quite the defender Robinson was, but almost like Brett he was no pretender at the plate.
Wright's neck, shoulder, and spine put paid to his playing career but not before he had a moment or three that transcended even the dozens he'd given Met fans during his career. When he managed somehow to return to duty later in the 2015 season, the Mets' last team captain parked one into the second deck of Citizen's Bank Park in Philadelphia.
Then, Wright and his Mets made it to the World Series at last. After losing the first two to a rapacious collection of Royals, Wright in the bottom of the first picked up where Mets Game 3 starter Noah Syndegaard left off in the top in bringing Citi Field to ecstasy.
Syndergaard opened the game by dropping Royals shortstop Alcides Escobar to his butt after Escobar spent the first two games playing fast and loose crowding the plate. With Curtis Granderson aboard on a leadoff single, Wright drove Royals starter Yordano Ventura's 0-1 service well into the left-field seats, launching the Mets toward their only Series win, 9-3. (Their porous 2015 defense, almost none of which was Wright's doing, made their5-game loss almost inevitable; Wright augmented the bomb with a 2-run single in a 4-run sixth.)
Statistically, it turned out that Wright didn't miss finishing his Cooperstown case by too much. But he retired as the Mets's greatest position player by WAR, his 49.3 well ahead of the next most prolific position player in the team's history, Darryl Strawberry's 36.6. Come Saturday, Wright wasn't half as interested in his statistics as he was in what it meant for him to be the first Met to have his uniform number retired after spending his entire major league career with them. Not to mention his same-day induction into the team's own Hall of Fame.
The reception he received almost brought him to tears. "You're going to make me cry," he said, "don't do that."
Wright wasn't interested in what caused him to come up short. He was more interested in showing his own appreciation, with his wife and three young children next to him. Especially getting to play for the team he rooted for growing up, since the Mets still had a Triple-A team in Tidewater, Virginia at the time.
"If you would have told a young David Wright to close his eyes and imagine this day," said Captain Wright, "I would have said you're crazy, no way, impossible. And then I would have went out in my backyard in Virginia and hit off a homemade tee with balls that were falling apart at the seams until it got dark outside to prove you right. Thank you so much for allowing me to live out my dream in front of you each night. I love you so much. Let's go Mets."
He got to do more than that. He might not have wanted the ending that he got, but he certainly did leave the way the best of the greats and not enough of them do, such greats as Joe DiMaggio, Jackie Robinson, Sandy Koufax, and Mike Schmidt. Wright left Met fans wanting more. Come Saturday, they got something that almost meant more than any home run, any clutch hit, any clutch assist (he may not have the best there ever was with the leather, but he did lead the National League in assists three times) he ever delivered.
They got the full measure of the man behind the Captain, and that measure was almost infinite. And Wright still left Met fans wanting more.
Almost as if the Master of the Elysian Fields ordained it, the moment Citi Field staffers unveiled Wright's number 5 along that upper structure rim of retired Mets numbers, next to Strawberry's number 18, an airplane lifting off out of La Guardia Airport flew up past the ballpark near the numbers. It was too poetic for even Marianne Moore's words.
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