Just a quick update here to tell you something all of us already know: The Brett Baty thing was a thing, and it couldn’t have gone better. He wore No. 22 which I also had associated with him because as noted in the comments below by Gene (and confirmed by Matt), he wore 22 in Binghamton and knew also that finding him assigned 2 in Syracuse seemed unusual to me, but only because I didn’t know how recently he’d been assigned there but it was much less that I thought. I also knew he was considered something like Wright but seemed to have been surprised then to find he batted lefthanded. I can adjust for that a little and say he also resembles a young Robin Ventura.
The other thing I’ll mention here is that I’m old and decrepit enough to have a specific memory that Benny Ayala became the first Met ever to hit a home run in his first at-bat and that means I actually have been alive and paying attention to all five.
| No. | Player | Date | Details | Fun Facts |
| 18 | Benny Ayala | Aug. 27, 1974 | Solo HR 2nd inning off LHP Tom Wilson at Shea. Mets 4, Astros 2 | Ayala was traded to St. Louis on March 30, 1977 for a minor league infielder Dog Clarey, a day after it was revealed that GM Joe McDonald had been driving while intoxicated when his car collided with a bus a few days earlier. McDonald said he hadn’t been drinking prior to the accident but had drinks the night before. He said he was out to pick blueberries to put on breakfast cereal when the accident occurred the following morning. |
| 20 | Mike Fitzgerald | September 13, 1983 | Solo HR, 2nd inning off RHP Tony Ghelfi at Veterans Stadium. Mets 5, Phillies 1 | The pitcher who surrendered Fitzgerald’s mighty blast, Tony Ghelfi, never pitched in another MLB game. It was only his third appearance in one. |
| 25 | Kazuo Matsui | April 6, 2004 | Solo HR, top of the 1st off RHP Russ Ortiz at Turner Field. Mets 7, Braves 2 | Matsui knew how to enter a room. Not only was his first hit a home run, his first pitch he saw he put over the fence. He’d twice more hit a home run on opening day, including in 2005 (2-run HR off ex-Met Paul Wilson of the Reds) and the following year, an inside-the-park home run off Jake Peavy in Petco Park. |
| 27 | Mike Jacobs | Aug. 21, 2005 | Pinch-hit for Juan Padilla, 3-run HR, bottom of the 5th, off Esteban Loiaza at Shea. Nationals 7, Mets 4 | Jacobs’ home run saved his place on the roster and he would hit .310/.375/.710//1.085 through the end of the year. He’d later be a key piece in the Carlos Delgado trade. |
| 22 | Brett Baty | Aug. 17, 2022 | 2-run HR, top of the 2nd off Jake Odorizzi at Truist Park. Mets 9, Braves 7 | Baty was a 12th-overall pick. His parents and sister had driven from Texas to be in the park and were on camera as he hit it. Be on the lookout for a MLB “Enjoy The Show” commercial like they made from this one. |
Oddly, I remember only two of them: Carreon (whom I liked-who didn’t?) and Marrero (who I remember, because he was all we had to show for all the energy wasted in the entire Kaz Matsui Saga). Mitchell was only that September, and me, I’d just moved away from radio range, had no TV, the internet didn’t exist, and there were 18-22 year-old girls everywhere I looked: I had just started college. And Pecota. Still out of the local TV market, plus a) sour on Jeff Torborg’s Mets before it was cool and so, b) more of a Mets fan with a paper bag on my head then.
Tonight the Mets travel to Denver to take on the Rockies and second baseman 
The sad Met saga of Kaz Matsui has come to an end. The Mets traded the dislocated second baseman, along with a sack of cash, yesterday to the Colorado Rockies for veteran utilityman Eli Marerro, thus ending one of the more regrettable and confounding stories in recent Met history. Acquired with great fanfare in the 2003-04 offseason, Kaz was presented with the No. 25 jersey and proclaimed “I love New York,” but the city — and his team — didn’t much love him back. An incredibly poor decision in ’04 to use him at shortstop did no favors for him, the Mets or displaced teammate Jose Reyes, and managed to turn the fans, particularly the mook contingent at Shea, against him. Since then he seemed to have frustrated his manager with frequent injuries and subpar hitting, and thoughout appeared unable to overcome a massive cultural and communication gap, yet remained respectful and sportsmanlike until the end and that — along with his opening-day homers — is something we’ll always admire about him. And while we take no pleasure in seeing him go, his most recent struggles, and Jose Valentin’s emphatic claiming of the second base duties, left him a man without a second country and called out for the kind of versatile backupityness that Marerro can provide. Though the Rockies have relagated Kaz to their AAA team in Colorado Springs, we hope he kicks all kinds of butt down there and salvages what he can of a stay in the states more difficult than anyone might have imagined.