1991 LEAF RON DARLING
I spent an idle post-holiday hour thumbing through a 3,000-count box of cards this past Sunday morning.
It was a box of no special report, containing mostly early ’90s junk from a range of manufacturers, picked clean of any Jeter rookies or the like.
But it can be so refreshing to spend time with a big brick of commons like this, as a quick portal back to an age where cards had no intrinsic value to me beyond the pull of the players pictured…
In that vein, my heart skipped a beat when I pushed through a small, sticky stack of 1993 Fleer Ultra singles and exposed a 1991 Leaf Ron Darling. But once the initial thrill passed, I was struck by something slightly uncanny: that number 15.
The uniform numbers of the 1969, 1973, and 1986 Mets squads in particular are imprinted on my brain, and the associations run deep, beyond just the mirror-image retired numbers of Tom Seaver and Gil Hodges.
Jerry Koosman is 36; Gary Gentry is 39; Tommie Agee is 20; Tug McGraw is 45; Jon Matlack is 32; Ed Kranepool is 7; Keith Hernandez is 17; Darryl Strawberry is 18.
And Ron Darling is 12.
Jerry Grote is the real 15. Ron Darling was, is now, and forever shall be 12. (More so than Ken Boswell, even.)
I had forgotten that back in August of 1989, Darling switched his uniform number from 12 to 15. Not sure if he did so on a whim, or whether it was an effort to outsmart the baseball gods and buy his arm a few extra years…
I seem to remember that Darling also flirted with the idea of going with the number 44. He later decided that “44 is a hitter’s number. I don’t like hitters.” Or something along that line.
I have been following baseball all of my life, and this is only the second story involving a player’s number that stuck in the brainpan. So the above could be wrong, but I think it is right.
As a Duffy Dyer fan, I always thought the lionization of Jerry Grote to be curious. I believe he was a good defensive catcher but the idea that he was neck-and-neck with Johnny Bench never held water with me.
It’s hard to judge defensive stats for catchers now and nearly impossible to do it 40+ years ago. The one year that Dyer played more than Grote, he had the better CERA mark. At the end of his career with the Mets, he was no better than John Stearns in this flawed statistic.
All of this is a roundabout way of saying that right now in 2014, when I think of the number 15 and the Mets — I think of Carlos Beltran.
Of course, the big debate is who you think of when you think about the Mets and uniform #7.
DED, Darling actually did wear 44 throughout 1983 and 1984, and I believe he switched for the reason you noted above.
Brian, as much as I loved Reyes, it’s hard to shake the 10 or so formative years I had of watching Kranepool wear number 7…
As a younger Met fan, 7 has to be Reyes in my eyes.