The Sweet And Painful Farewell

The Mets David Wright Was A Baseball Star You Could Believe In

- Lee Jenkins

HE ARRIVED on a prop plane that was so small the pilot made him switch seats during the flight to balance the weight on board. He had only slept two hours, in that fitful sliver of subconscious where dream and reality blur. Growing up in Norfolk, David Wright pestered Mets farmhands for autographs at Tides games. In high school he played for a showcase team called the Mets that traveled along the Eastern Seaboard. And at 21 he circled LaGuardia Airport and gazed down on Shea Stadium, all those empty blue and orange seats waiting for their Jeter.

The Mets are famous for over hyping prospects, and Wright was accompanied by his own breathless backstory. Did you hear about the home run he hit when he was 16, 400 feet over the centerfield fence, smacking so hard into an old oak tree that a six-foot branch flew into a neighbor’s yard? “Just like Roy Hobbs,” said his travel-team coach, Ron Smith.

But Wright was different from Gregg Jefferies and Generation K. He delivered, changing the outlook of a punch-line organization from the moment he touched it. Wright debuted for the Mets in July 2004. Pedro Martínez signed that December, Carlos Beltran a month later. In ’06 the Mets came within a game of the World Series, and Wright really was their Jeter.