The Jester-King of Mets Twitter

He's mocked by Noah Syndergaard, commended by Todd Frazier, and retweeted by thousands. So who exactly is Richard Staff?

Correction: an earlier version of this article said that Bradford William Davis described Staff’s humor as “out of that bête noir.” In fact, he said “out of that reservoir.” Shea Bridge Report regrets the error.

For a professional baseball player with 1.2 million Twitter followers, most of Noah Syndergaard’s Twitter timeline is pretty ordinary stuff. He makes jokes about beat reporters and fellow ballplayers; there’s the occasional tweet advertising a product; he tweets about the book club he started this spring. But among those typical ballplayer Tweets, Syndergaard is also participating in a strange Twitter narrative that probably leaves most Mets fans mystified. He’s relentlessly roasting an account named Richard Staff.

“If this is SAFE, then Rich’s wife might actually come back,” Syndergaard tweeted on April 11th,  accompanied by a video of Alec Bohm of the Phillies scoring a controversial go-ahead run in that night’s Phillies/Braves game.

“And my parents naming me Dick Staff,” Syndergaard tweeted, after Staff shared a picture of his vaccination card with the caption “The only things that can hurt me now are Noah Syndergaard’s tweets and the Mets.”

“I see everything, Richard,” Syndergaard tweeted on February 21st. “Including your future, minus your wife.”

It’s a confusing scene: why exactly is Noah Syndergaard on Twitter relentlessly bullying a Mets fan whose profile picture is Keith Hernandez, who appears to be a middle-aged divorced man? Well, he isn’t. But the true story is, if possible, even stranger. It’s the story of a young Twitter comedian, a confluence of viral forces, and a baseball player with lots of time on his hands.

Richard Staff is not a 47-year-old divorced man: he is 22, and he’s never even been married. He is a writer for the Mets blog “Amazin’ Avenue.” When Spring Training began in 2020, he had around 1000 twitter followers; by the end of the 2020 season, that number had doubled to about 2,000. He now has 11,300 followers, and that number is growing every day. Several of his tweets have garnered over 20,000 likes. He regularly interacts with national baseball writers, among whom his tweets have taken on a life of their own. And yes: he is regularly bullied by Noah Syndergaard over a completely fictional Twitter backstory. 

“I think I’ve known Staff about a year,” said Bradford William Davis, until recently a sports columnist at the New York Daily News. “I remember in his bio, it said ‘Noah Syndergaard said that my wife isn’t coming back.’ And I’m like...uh, aight.”

“I recall hearing other writers bring up his Tweets,” said Marc Carig, deputy managing editor and occasional baseball writer at The Athletic and also a former Mets beat reporter. “I remember thinking that they weren’t just funny. They were smart.”

“He comes up in group chats that he has nothing to do with,” said Jarrett Seidler, a senior prospects evaluator at Baseball Prospectus and a longtime friend of Staff’s. “My mother has sent me his tweets.”

So how has Staff done it? How has a 22-year-old Mets blogger gained a cult following as a sort of Jester-King of Mets Twitter?

Staff is from Carle Place, Long Island, and he grew up in a household divided between Mets and Yankee fans. Fortunately, his grandfather Floyd was a Mets fan, and Floyd knew how to bring Richard into the fold. 

“There’s Mike Piazza,” Floyd would tell a young Richard. “You’ve got to watch. Just watch Piazza.” Staff started watching when Piazza batted. Then he started watching the innings around Piazza. Then he just started watching the Mets. By 2004 or so, Staff said of his grandfather, “all of his brainwashing had worked.”

One early moment that set the tone for his Mets fandom, he remembers, came on September 22nd, 2005, when the Staff family went to Shea Stadium. It would turn out to be notable game in Mets history: it was the game that Jeff Wilpon forced Pedro Martinez to pitch while injured, prolonging his recovery and dealing a blow with cascading detrimental effects to the Mets’ rotation health. But in the short term, Staff’s focus was different: Mike Piazza’s contract was ending, and the Mets had made clear that they wouldn’t bring him back. So Staff was excited to see his favorite player in orange and blue one last time. This was before Twitter and the MLB app, of course, so the Staff family didn’t know the lineup until they got to the game. When they arrived at Shea Stadium, they got unfortunate news: Piazza was getting the day off.

The game wasn’t all bad: Piazza finally came in to pinch-hit in the seventh inning. However, Staff said, “Dontrelle Willis struck him out in about eight seconds.”

Staff got hooked, of course, on the 2006 Division Champion Mets, and even got excited about the 2007 and 2008 teams before their back-to-back collapses. But as the 2009 team fell apart in a 90-loss season, and the 2010 team barely looked any better, he found himself thinking about turning away. At that point, though, he remembered his grandfather. “There’s Piazza...just watch Piazza.” As the team lost one game after another, rooting for individual players, especially David Wright and Jose Reyes, carried Staff through six losing seasons. There were also the more obscure favorites that every Mets fan has, like Jason Pridie and Damion Easley. There was Alex Cora, “who I liked watching for some reason, up until he tore both thumbs sliding into a base, and that was the end of him.”

Eventually, though, as they always do, the Mets turned fun again. In 2012, 2013, and 2014, Matt Harvey, Zack Wheeler, and Jacob deGrom made their debuts. In 2015, of course, the Mets went to the World Series. In 2012, meanwhile, something else happened. Richard Staff joined Twitter.

“I signed up in late summer 2012, a month or so after Harvey debuted,” he said. “I sort of just left it there for a while.”

He followed some Mets accounts and kept up with the news, but hard as it may be for Staff’s fans to believe, for a long time at the beginning of its life, his twitter account wasn’t saying much of its own. “I never actually tweeted at all, for about five years after I made the account,” he said. He described his mindset: “Anything I have to say, someone’s probably saying either smarter or better.”

That changed in December 2017, when he joined Amazin’ Avenue. He wrote pieces here and there for the blog, and gained a few followers who read his work. But he remembers a very distinct point at which his Twitter account started becoming a phenomenon.

It was late 2019, and Seidler was hanging out in the Amazin’ Avenue slack. He’d written a few pieces for the blog in the past, which had gotten him into the Slack, and Amazin’ Avenue rarely kicks writers out of their Slack. In the chat, people were mad about one tweet or another, and Staff made an offhand remark: “I’m glad I’m in a spot where if I write something, people will read it, but there aren’t enough people who will read it to get mad at me.”

Seidler decided to change that. “If you want anyone to get mad at on Twitter, follow Richard Staff,” he tweeted, including a link to Staff’s Twitter handle. The tweets continued: “Follow @Staff7998 for great jokes like these,” or “if you like good baseball puns, and who doesn’t, follow @Staff7998.” Staff has since changed his handle: it’s now simply @RichardStaff.

At that point, Staff’s online following wasn’t much. He had about 400 followers: he called about 150 of them “detritus...porn bots and spam accounts that want to offer me a job staying at home for $30,000 a year.” But once Seidler started tweeting, that started to change.

“It became a running thing,” Staff said. “I would just sort of exist, and Jarrett or people at Amazin’ Avenue, they would keep flooding people my way.”

“Whenever he would tweet something funny, I would quote tweet it with ‘follow Rich,’” Seidler said.

Staff’s Twitter profile

Something big had also happened earlier in 2019, although Staff didn’t know it yet. On March 25th, Syndergaard announced an impromptu Twitter Q&A. Staff jumped in with a joke.

“Will my wife ever come back?” he wrote.

“Doubtful,” Syndergaard responded a minute later. The joke wouldn’t resurface for a while, but the seed had been planted.

Staff hit 1000 followers around Spring Training 2020. With all these new eyes on his work, he started to think. “There’s more people,” he thought to himself. “I should put out more stuff.” In March 2020, one of his tweets went viral. It was shortly after Michael Bloomberg had suspended his presidential campaign.

“If Mike Bloomberg wanted to dump a billion dollars into a disappointing failure,” Staff wrote, “he should’ve just bought the Mets.” The tweet got 12,200 likes: on New York sports radio station WFAN, Joe and Evan, the midday show hosts at the time, read it live on-air and mentioned Staff’s handle. His follower count ticked upwards again.

Then there was perhaps his most famous — or infamous — tweet. It was June 21st, 2020, and then-President Trump had just held a rally in Tulsa. It had been underwhelming: expected to sell out, the arena hadn’t come close to filling up, and the overflow events had been canceled. Later that night, Trump was photographed walking towards the White House from the Marine 1 Helicopter looking defeated: a grim frown on his face, his top button undone, his tie untied, a red hat in his hand. 

The Atlantic ran a story about the photograph entitled “Trump looks like a loser.” Staff had a different take. He tweeted the picture and wrote his own caption.

“People heading for the 7 train after a 12-1 loss at Citi Field,” he wrote. That tweet racked up more than 2,600 retweets and 23,300 likes, including one by “The Lincoln Project” co-founder George Conway. His follower count continued to grow — and it was growing faster than before.

Then, a few months later, came Staff’s crowning moment: Trump caught COVID. It was early October 2020. Less than two months before, Reds play-by-play announcer Thom Brennaman had been widely mocked for using a homophobic slur on a hot mic, then stopping in the middle of his apology to announce a Nicholas Castellanos home run. 

Staff put it simply. “A little bit after Trump made his announcement,” he said, “I did the thing.”

“Tonight, @FLOTUS and I tested positive for COVID-19,” Trump tweeted. “We will begin our quarantine and recovery process immediately. We will get through this TOGETHER!”

“Tonight, @FLOTUS and I tested positive for COVID-19,” Staff tweeted. “As there's a drive into deep left field by Castellanos and that'll be a homerun. And so that'll make it a 4-0 ballgame. We will begin our quarantine and recovery process immediately.”

By now, it was a familiar story. The tweet got 3200 retweets and 22,900 likes. In just the few days Trump spent in the hospital, Staff said, he gained 600 to 700 new followers.

“That Trump week was the first explosion,” he said.

The second explosion would come soon afterwards. Ironically, though, it didn’t happen while the Mets were on the field.

Two things were happening. The first was that election season was heating up, and Staff’s formula — current events plus gallows Mets humor — was resonating perfectly. At one point, he did face an unexpected obstacle. On January sixth, as rioters stormed the Capitol, Staff wrote a Tweet.

“I tweeted a two-second clip of Trump telling the rioters ‘we love you, go home,’” he said. He paired it with an anodyne caption about what a third base coach tells a runner rounding third. But Twitter didn’t see it that way. 

“I did get thrown into Twitter jail for election interference,” Staff said. He was suspended for 24 hours.

The second thing was different. As Staff said, “Noah Syndergaard started bullying me online very viciously.”

It had been a while since Staff and Syndergaard had interacted on Twitter. But on November 25th, 2020, Syndergaard tweeted out two emojis: a rabbit, representing NBA free agency, and a turtle, representing MLB free agency. Staff was ready.

“Noah, do you have an emoji to describe my wife coming back?” he wrote. Syndergaard responded immediately with a red X.

That was it for another few months: things quieted down. But then Syndergaard struck again. When Syndergaard and Trevor Bauer were bantering back and forth on Twitter, after Syndergaard wrote “you bring a drone and your mixtape and it’s a deal,” Bauer responded “you’ve got yourself a date.” Staff knew exactly how to respond.

“But he isn’t even your agent!” he wrote. The tweet got 1,500 likes. Syndergaard saw it too.

“Well played...” he wrote. “She’s still not coming back.”

From there, the floodgates were open. Syndergaard, it seemed, barely had any purpose in logging onto Twitter other than to tell Staff that his wife wasn’t coming back.

“I can probably tie about half the followers I’ve gotten to him,” Staff said. “Things...I can’t think of a better word than ‘snowballed.’”

Now, it’s almost like Syndergaard has an alarm set for Staff tweets: he responds to them even when Staff doesn’t mention his name. When Mets owner Steve Cohen solicited Mets fan questions on Twitter, Staff responded “will my wife ever come back?”

“These are not billionaire type concerns,” Syndergaard responded, unprompted. “I’m offended you went over my head here, Dick. And she won’t ever come back.”

When Syndergaard tweeted about Luis Guillorme’s 22-pitch walk against the Cardinals during Spring Training, Staff responded, “is murdering opposing players permitted? I figured you were only allowed to murder me, digitally.”

“Your wife already took your soul, so is it really murder?” Syndergaard responded.

“These last few months, that’s pretty much the only reason he logs on is to reply to me,” Staff said. “At this point, I don’t even have to tag him in anything.”

On April Fool’s Day, Staff tweeted out a simple message: “my wife came back.” Syndergaard didn’t respond immediately, but a few days later, he came calling.

“I gave you this day, Dick,” Syndergaard wrote. “I am empathetic of your loss. But April Fools is over, just like your marriage.”

There are two burning questions. First, what keeps bringing Syndergaard back? Why has he gotten so enmeshed in a nonsensical, albeit funny, Twitter narrative? And second, how does Staff do it? What’s the incredible, elite comedic process that has allowed him, in a matter of months, to go from a small account to a cult following and regular interactions with Noah Syndergaard?

As far as the first question goes, we may never know. A Mets spokesperson declined to comment on Syndergaard’s behalf; a request sent to his agent did not receive a response. Readers of his Twitter account are left to guess his motivations for themselves; perhaps it’s just something that Syndergaard finds fun, in which case he’s in the same boat as many Mets fans on Twitter.

Staff said he thought the pandemic might have something to do with it. “Whether you’re a baseball player making 20 million dollars a year, or some early 20s dude stuck at home like me,” he said, “you’re both stuck at home online.”

“Much like Rich, Noah is a born poster,” said Nick Stellini, a freelance baseball writer. “Noah Syndergaard, as great a pitcher as he is, has a severe case of poster’s brain, and I mean that as a compliment.”

As to the second question, about his process, Staff has a simple answer: there isn’t one. 

“This is the one almost no one ever believes me on,” he said. “There is no process.”

The way Staff tells it, this is just the way his mind works. He sees something happen, and he starts to think about it, and eventually, his mind spits out a joke that thousands of Mets fans find funny.

A prototypical example came in March, when the Mets announced one Friday afternoon that Chris Christie would join their Board of Directors. At this point, it was almost as if Mets twitter was waiting with bated breath: What would Richard Staff have to say about this?

Somehow, though, Staff exceeded the sky-high expectations. He didn’t make a fat joke or a bridge-gate joke. He did something completely different. 

“The Mets hiring Chris Christie seems bizarre,” he wrote, “until you remember that he has prior experience with building back after the devastation of Sandy.”

As usual, the replies reflected a sort of stunned disbelief that anyone could think of something like this. “RICH!” was typical; Stellini simply replied “my god.” Brian Salvatore, the deputy editor at Amazin’ Avenue, said that in their Slack chat these days, the only way Staff’s name is mentioned is “RICH.”

“That’s both to symbolize how everyone’s usually yelling at Rich for saying something horribly inappropriate,” Salvatore said, and also because Staff “has really developed his own voice that’s really unique.”

Readers, Salvatore said, “want the Rich experience.”

“It’s that kind of connection that he makes that’s really special,” Stellini said. “I’ll admit he’s connected point A to point B a lot better than I ever have.”

So how did Staff come up with this typical inexplicable masterpiece? He just thought about it. He thought about Chris Christie, and remembered that he’d been governor during Hurricane Sandy. He realized that Sandy Alderson was back with the Mets. The joke basically wrote itself.

“He must have incredible poisoned online irony brain,” Seidler said. “We all do to some extent, but he’s much better at turning it into content than the rest of us.” 

However he comes up with them, Staff’s tweets are certainly resonating. Asked to name his favorite, Carig named four.

“This one had me laughing,” he said, pointing out the picture of Trump after the Tulsa rally.

“This one made the rounds,” he said of Staff’s parody Trump COVID announcement.

“This one was perfect,” he said of a 2020 Staff tweet reading “If you thought that Mookie Betts catch was cool, wait until you see the Red Sox’s payroll flexibility.”

“Another writer sent me this one. Brilliant,” he said, linking to Staff’s tweet of a screenshot from one of Governor Andrew Cuomo’s COVID vaccine briefings.

“We want needles in arms,” Cuomo’s briefing said. Staff had captioned it, simply, “Bud Selig (1998).”

“He has a very simple formula,” Davis said. “It’s toying around with Noah Syndergaard, and Noah dragging him, or making current event jokes that involve someone in politics, often Donald Trump, plus the Mets, usually being kind of bad or embarrassing.”

Asked to name his favorite Staff tweet, Davis said “Oh man, that is a difficult choice. He has so many bangers.” Eventually, he cited a recent one that came after several Mets had drawn criticism for refusing to commit to getting vaccinated, and then had started the season slow.

“Wish the Mets were as afraid of losing games as they are vaccines,” Staff wrote.

Davis compared Staff to Jason Concepcion, who became an award-winning podcast host after being discovered due to his Twitter jokes about the Knicks. Concepcion went on to host the Emmy Award-winning digital series “NBA Desktop,” as well as the podcast “Binge Mode.”

“The humor comes from a deep understanding of what is very wrong with the team he loves and a deep understanding of what is very wrong with the country he lives in,” he said. “It’s out of that reservoir.”

“I covered the Mets for a while,” Carig said. “Their fans have put up with so much bullshit over the years. The experience seems to lend itself to a kind of gallows humor that they wear like a badge of honor. Mets fans are intense. But they’re also hilarious. Richard really taps into that vein.”

One thing that Carig struggles with? Staff’s age. “I legit can’t believe that I got ballcaps older than this fucking guy,” he said.

Salvatore has a different favorite tweet, one that exemplifies the detail that goes into Staff’s jokes. It was September 11th, 2020, and the Mets were playing the Blue Jays at their alternate home for the season in Buffalo. A few months before, police officers in Buffalo had pushed 75-year-old Martin Gugino to the ground; Gugino had suffered brain injuries and spent weeks in the hospital, and the police had been roundly criticized. 

As is Mets tradition, on September 11th, they wore caps representing various first responder agencies. Jacob deGrom, the Mets’ starting pitcher, wore an NYPD hat. deGrom, of course, was brilliant: he pitched six innings, allowing one run while striking out nine.

“HEARTBREAKING,” Staff tweeted. “Decorated NYPD officer brutalizes 9 men in Buffalo.”

“It’s the perfect Rich Staff joke,” Salvatore said, “because it requires you to be aware of super-specific Mets minutiae. He has a lot of tweets like that.”

Salvatore likewise chalked some of Staff’s success on Twitter up to the enduring absurdity of Mets fandom.

“The Mets are an absurd franchise,” he said. “They’re an absurd franchise to root for. Name another sports team whose ownership was busted as part of the Bernie Madoff Ponzi scheme. Name another franchise that has had such uniformly bad luck in public relations. And I think all Mets fans realize to a certain degree just how silly being a Mets fan is.”

It also helps that even on Twitter, it’s clear that Staff is a nice guy, rolling with the punches and not taking himself too seriously. Salvatore agreed. In-person, he said, Staff doesn’t always come across the way his Twitter presence might make you expect.

“When you first meet Rich, he is not at all who you’d expect him to be,” he said. “He’s quiet, he’s unassuming, he’s a very sweet person. We have a pretty tight-knit community at Amazin’ Avenue, and everybody who writes for the site really loves Rich. He’s a genuinely great and very warm person, and I desperately hope his wife returns.”