Passings Not

Wow, the Mets are in a bad way.  They commemorate the 50^th anniversary of the Amazin’ Mets only to look dumb in the process.  It’s never a good thing to identify former players as dead when they’re not.

 

Yet that’s exactly what the New Yorkers did with pitcher Jesse Hudson and outfielder Jim Gosger.  Granted, neither Hudson nor Gosger made the postseason in ’69 so they may not be part of the collective memory the way Tommie Agee and Ed Kranepool are, but still, all you had to do was go to baseballreference.com and check; most likely, some intern couldn’t get properly motivated when given the job.  Gosger in particular was upset to find out he was listed among the Mets’ dead.

I feel a connection here because I “managed” Gosger back in eighth grade; he was on the 1965 Red Sox, one of my Strat-o-Matic teams.  Good field, decent hitting and speed, with what we call nice column coverage, if I remember correctly.  Anyway, the now 76-year old Gosger says he follows the Red Sox, Mets and his home-state Tigers; the ten-year major-league veteran is a lifelong resident of Port Huron, Michigan.  That’s the other reason I remember him.  Port Huron is where the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) wrote their famous statement, beginning with “We are people of this generation, bred in at least modest comfort, housed now in universities, looking uncomfortably to the world we inherit.”

Gosger’s biggest regret as a ballplayer is not receiving a World Series’ ring from 1969.  That shouldn’t be too hard for the Mets to do, that is, if they can be bothered to get it right.