This category has a listing of New York Mets related memorabilia that I have collected over the course of the past 64 years. My Dad was a die hard Brooklyn Dodgers fan, and with my Mom being born in Brooklyn it was a natural connection. Like many families of that era loyalties were divided among the three MLB teams representing NYC. Other members of the family were die hard Yankees fans, and there were also a few New York Giants fans too. It was always a treat as a boy to listen to my aunts and uncles, and great aunts and uncles root for their teams, and argue about who had the best team in any given year, and who had the best players. When the Dodgers and Giants left New York for sunnier pastures in California in 1957, the Dodgers and Giants fans fell into a very real, deep mourning. MLB was king among sports in those days, and rooting for your favorite team was very serious business. I know my Dad and other Dodgers' rooting family members hated that they moved away from their beloved Brooklyn fans. They were forced to bide their time until 1962 when it was announced that a new franchise was added to the National League, the "lovable losers," the New York Mets. In their inaugural season they set the MLB record for most loses in a season with 120, a record that stood for 62 years until the 2024 Chicago White Sox lost 121 games! My Dad took me to the Polo Grounds in 1962 to see the Mets play the San Francisco Giants. That was the first time I had stepped inside of this hallowed stadium, the former home of the New York Giants, and the New York Yankees played there for a short while. I came to the game that night fully rooting for the Giants who had one of my favorite players of all time, the great Hall of Fame center fielder, Willie Mays. Something strange happened that night though. Mid way through the game, I found myself rooting for the Mets, and I never stopped. I can honestly say that I have been a New York Mets fan since 1962, and along with my best Lyndhurst friend at that time Chic Miles, we remain Mets fans to this day, and still talk about them, and we love to reminisce about the old days when we were probably two of the only Mets fans around. We still mail each other little pieces of Mets memorabilia that we find from time to time. Most of our buddies were Yankees fans, whom I grew to respect greatly, and have rooted for from 1960 when Bill Mazeroski crushed our dreams of winning the World Series with his game winning home run. I had a chance to meet Bill in the 1980's and we had a long conversation about that home run and how he broke the hearts of many 7 and 8 year old New Jersey/New York boys. He took the conversation in stride and in a most empathetic and cordial way and treated me fantastic. RIP Maz, one of the greatest fielding second basemen in MLB history and a member of the MLB Hall of Fame. I still have a ball and baseball card he signed to me in my personal collection.
Funny Mets Story: As both luck and fate would have it, Chic Miles and I were at the Mets vs the St. Louis Cardinals game in September 1969 at Shea Stadium, when the Mets beat Steve Carlton and the Cardinals to clinch the 1969 National League East Championship. That was the first year that MLB had split the league into 2 separate divisions, the East and the West. This was the very first championship of any kind that the Mets had won. The thing that made this situation a thing of destiny was that Chic had tickets to go to a different game earlier in the season with his Dad, but that game was rained out. Chic was able to turn his rain check in to get tickets for a game later in the season, which luckily turned out to be this Cardinals game. Nobody knew the significance that game would end up having when Chic got those tickets. Chic's father was unable to attend so he asked me to go with him instead. We were 16 year old sophomores at Lyndhurst High School at the time, and our parents gave us permission to go to Shea Stadium by bus and subway. That was an entirely different time period when the allusion of safety was taken for granted. We took the 32 bus from Ridge Road to the Port Authority and from there we took the tubes to Shea. I would never dream of doing that today, but back in 1969 it was still considered relatively safe to go on such an adventure at 16 years old.
That was also back in the wild days when the fans rushed onto to the field to celebrate and try and grab any souvenirs that they could. After a few moments of contemplation, Chic and I reluctantly decided to go out on the field too, and we both picked up scoops of dirt from the infield, and put it in our pockets to take home as a souvenir of this fantastic event. I had my dirt in a small box in a drawer in my bedroom for many years. One day my Mom was doing some deep spring cleaning and found this small box filled with dirt. Instead of asking me what the heck this was, and why I was keeping it, she instinctively as Mom's had the habit of doing back in those 1960's days threw it away. I could not believe it, my precious 1969 Mets infield dirt was gone forever! Some 40 years later I mentioned that story to Chic, and after we had a laugh about it, he so kindly sent me some of his dirt so I could add it back into my collection, which I now have safely stored inside of a glass jar with a printed label on it. Oh the things of importance to a 16 year old kid still holds a special meaning to me to this day!
Another thing I distinctly remember was on the ride home on the subway we saw a guy with a torn shirt carrying the 410 foot sign that used to hang on the centerfield fence at Shea. Everything you can think of was looted, home plate, the bases, the dug out phones, outfield signs, and so much more. People were a bunch of hooligans in those days, and there were Chic and I meekly standing in the subway car with our coveted, hidden dirt from the Mets infield safely tucked inside of our pockets!
Oddly enough, MLB teams picked up on our 1969 dirt caper. They now sell historic displays commemorating famous days in baseball history. For example I have in my collection a display of when Derek Jeter became the first Yankee in history to get 3,000 hits. Included in the display is some dirt taken from Yankee Stadium from that game that he set the record. I also have another display when Mariano Rivera became the All Time Saves Leader of MLB, and that too has dirt taken from that game from the Yankee Stadium field. So little did Chic and I know that we set a trend for MLB displays that would become extremely popular in the 21st century!
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