Meet the Mets, greet the Mets, collect the Mets?
This site is dedicated to documenting the history of the New York Mets as seen in baseball cards. The immediate focus will be on the many types of uniforms that have been worn by current and former Mets players and made their way into cardboard. Yes, it is as silly as it sounds. The intersection between these three elements – Mets, cards, and uniforms – does yield some interesting information about both the sport of baseball and the hobby of card collecting. And it’s a great way to learn about some of the “talent” in the 2001-2005 period during which I stopped following the Mets (Roberto Alomar and Mo Vaughn? That’s how you fix a dismal follow-up to an NL championship season???). But I digress (as I will many more times here, because that’s kind of the point).
History is one of those funny things that is always changing depending on your perspective. It’s kind of like a kaleidoscope, in that some people look at it in the intended way and see a bunch of ever-changing pretty patterns while others look at the outside to admire the craftsmanship and others just start cutting it up to see what’s inside. If that last one is you, well, you’ll be in good company here. There’s no logical reason to look at the world this way, which is exactly why someone needs to do it. Having already done much of the grunt work over the last few years, I guess I’ll take the case.
So what do we get out of this? First, a bunch of pieces of Mets uniforms. More importantly though, a full accounting of every player who has ever had a piece of a Mets uniform released in a baseball card, plus every Mets player who has had a piece of any other uniform released in a card. This gets us to the subject of what it takes for a player to get a memorabilia card issued and how things have changed over the years. It also gives us an interesting picture of prospects that didn’t pan out and former stars who signed on with the Mets long after their useful playing days were over. And finally, we get to the fabric itself and the subject of how the colors and styles have changed over the years; pinstripes are particularly interesting in this regard and the samples found in cards can give us a fairly complete (except for the Pirates) accounting of the use of pinstripe uniforms in baseball since the mid-20th century.
Content will be updated occasionally as I get around to scanning the thousand or so cards that will become the bulk of this site’s content. It’s going to be a long road, so please bear with me as I get through this in the spare time I don’t have. Comments are appreciated; I am always finding new pieces to this puzzle, but I’m getting to the point where extra help is needed. Enjoy the site.
Wanted: 29 like-minded individuals to do for the other MLB teams what I’m trying to do for the Mets.
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