I've enlisted Todd Hundley and Gregg Jefferies here to help celebrate the 9th birthday of Mets by the Numbers. (see a broken-linked proto-page from our rookie year of 1999 here. Go, Terrence Long!)

As I've recounted previously, the site when it launched was sort of a personal project to see whether it was possible for a fan (me) to remember the uniform number of every player who ever played for the Mets. Of course, it wasn't. I in fact wasn't even close to rememering every player who played for the Mets.

Fortunately for me, right around the time I was putting together this page for the first time, the Internet had sprouted another data-driven Mets site, the Ultimate Mets Database. Subsequent discussions with UMDB's creator indicate our sites couldn't have launched more than a few weeks apart at the most. With help from that starting point, and later, a small audience of devoted followers, we eventually got our act together, but as Wes Westrum might say, it was real cliff dweller.