The Captain and The Kid
It's only fitting that Brandon Nimmo is well-positioned to become the Mets' longest-tenured connection to David Wright.
Because I’m exactly the person you think I am, in September of 2018 I started work on my senior honors thesis in Nonfiction Writing, a magnum opus about life as a young, obsessive Mets fan that eventually came in a hair under 100,000 words. It was completely comprehensive, or, less charitably, unfeasibly long: there were stories about Bar Mitzvahs (chapter 7) and Valentino Pascucci (chapter 8) and girls I’d spoken to but never met (chapter 12) and Kevin Plawecki (chapter 17).
I was a senior in college who couldn’t stop reading “Hub Fans Bid Kid Adieu” and carried Zinsser around in my backpack, so I knew a good story when I saw one. And in Queens, I saw the ending of my book playing out in real time. David Wright, my favorite player ever and a central character in three different chapters, was clawing his way back to the field for one last game. He’d come back from broken fingers, pulled hamstrings, and a years-long battle with a spine that could barely hold him up. I was a Mets fan with a case of pediatric sleep epilepsy that refused to quit. I’d been leaning on Wright’s resilience coming back from injury for years. The ending was as good as written.
There was a wrinkle, though: my favorite player had changed. Now that Wright was on his way off the field, while he would continue to hold an emeritus distinction, I would need a new Met to root for in the long term, and I was pretty sure I’d found one. An outfielder playing in his first full season at age 25 and dominating the OBP leaderboards, a former first-round pick out of Wyoming. Brandon Nimmo.
He was young, perpetually enthusiastic, sprinting everywhere he went while refusing to do anything but smile. Everything that’s great about baseball; certainly everything I looked for in a baseball player. An OPS in the high .800s didn’t hurt either.
They were two very different players. Wright was a superstar: before his injuries had started in 2009, he’d been on track for the Hall of Fame, with 130 home runs, two Gold Gloves, three All-Star appearances, and a 30/30 season in 2007, which should have earned him an MVP award, all by age 25. Nimmo didn’t have Wright’s power to all fields or his superb bat speed. They had two things in common. At the plate, they walked a lot — but in the rest of the field, they were deeply averse to walking when they could run.
Indeed, the prime of Wright’s career had come to a sudden end that, frankly, seems more like something that would happen to Brandon Nimmo. On August 2nd, 2013, in a 2-2 tie against the Royals, Wright led off the bottom of the 10th inning with a slow groundball. He sprinted down the first-base line, looking for an infield hit that could start a game-winning rally. He got the hit — but strained his hamstring as he crossed first base.
Assuming he plays out the length of it and the Mets don’t trade him, the eight-year, $162 million contract that Nimmo agreed to on Thursday night, sending me into squirms of joy at a pub trivia night before an embarrassing loss in the Final Jeopardy round, will make him a Met through at least 2030. He’s already played in over 600 games as a Met, and figures to play in hundreds, if not thousands, more. His eight-year deal matches the eight-year contract Wright got after the 2012 season.
With all the games they played as Mets — Wright’s 1585, Nimmo’s 608 and counting — Nimmo and Wright took the field together as starters exactly once. It was September 29, 2018, Wright’s long-awaited return date, and I was at Citi Field watching the ending of my book unfold in front of me.
I gathered plenty of material. Wright signed my magazine. He took two plate appearances, walked in the first to reach base for the first time since 2016, and left in the 5th to a three-minute ovation. The game was eternally, unbearably scoreless. Jack Reinheimer tried his best to carve his name in Mets history as the hero, but the rest of the team couldn’t do its part. Austin Jackson finally won it with a walk-off hit in the 13th.
They played a little video; Wright came out and talked for a few minutes; then we all went home. I had all the material I needed for my ending. The season ended the next day.
Here’s the upshot of that game: one is enough. With that game in his ledger, Nimmo’s new contract makes it overwhelmingly likely that he will retire as the last Met to have taken the field with David Wright. Jeff McNeil is the only other possibility — and a worthy one — but until McNeil gets a new contract, Nimmo is a prohibitive favorite.
Much as Mets fans keep track of the dwindling supply of still-active Shea Stadium Mets (there were two in 2022, Joe Smith and Óliver Pérez — would you believe it?), the group of active Mets who took the field with David Wright will become so small that it’s noteworthy. In fact, it’s almost there already. From that last game in 2018, five position players remain active, and only two are Mets: McNeil, Nimmo, Amed Rosario, Michael Conforto (sort of), and Kevin Plawecki. Dominic Smith made a pinch-hitting appearance; Steven Matz got the start; Drew Smith is still with the Mets, and there’s always the chance of one of the relievers the Mets used that day making a surprise return in six years or so, the way relievers do. Would anyone really be surprised to see a 36-year-old Tyler Bashlor show up on a minor league deal in 2029 with a devastating cutter/changeup combo?
But until proven otherwise, Nimmo has the inside track. He’s in position to be the last Met to have played with the captain, and, indeed, to eventually be the captain himself. Perhaps the Mets’ last tie to David Wright, chronologically and spiritually. For the first time since Wright, the Mets seem to have found their guy, their lifer. The one we’ll know from start to finish, about whom we’ll reminisce years from now: “Remember when he was young? Yeah, he first came up, wasn’t jumping off the page in the beginning but definitely looked good. Just a really solid ballplayer. Man, I remember he used to make jokes…he once got really sick, turned out to be a virus but for a while we thought he’d undercooked his chicken! And didn’t he have a goatee for a while?”
The 2030 season, assuming he gets that far, will be Nimmo’s 15th. Maybe he’ll go even farther. And maybe, one day in 2033 or thereabouts, some 21-year-old kid who’s never without a Roger Angell collection will make a trip out to Citi Field for the last game of Brandon Nimmo’s career, looking for the story to wrap up the book about the first 21 years of their fandom.
If they do, I hope they get the ending that I did.
There I was, in a packed, emotional Citi Field, already putting words on the page in my head, getting way too grandiose and literary and trying to figure out how to tie it all up perfectly. David Wright, my favorite player, my introduction to baseball, my lifelong symbol of resilience and recovery, was playing his last game ever. Brandon Nimmo, a new favorite who had a lot in common with the old one, was just getting started. There were a few different ways to go — “it’s a good problem to have,” a pundit sitting next to me might have said — but I still had to figure out which one I wanted.
Then, all of a sudden, the ending hit me like Chase Utley sliding into second.
It was 0-0. Brandon Nimmo led off the bottom of the seventh. On the third pitch he saw from Trevor Richards, he lined a single to right field — and pulled his hamstring as he crossed first base.