Getting to Know David Wright
David Wright arrived in the Major Leagues in July of 2004. I started MetsBlog seven months earlier.
Mets Hall of Fame third baseman David Wright arrived in the Major Leagues in July of 2004. I started MetsBlog seven months earlier.
Those two facts existed side by side for years, not as measures of the same thing, but as markers of time. His career would come to define an era of Mets baseball. The work I was doing—along with others pushing the boundaries of online coverage—helped shape an era in New York sports media when access, voice, and connection were being redefined.
I interviewed David in January of 2005, a few months after his debut. We spoke by phone for fifteen or twenty minutes. With his permission, I got David’s contact info from MLB.com’s Jonathon Mayo, who covered the minor leagues, and with whom I worked while interning at MLB Radio a few months earlier.
From that point forward, I would see him before and after games —on the field, in passing, in the clubhouse, exchanging brief hellos. Familiar, but still professional. Cordial, but not personal.
During my first spring training in February of 2008, I met my cousin John, who was living in Orlando at the time, and we drove one night to get away from Port St. Lucie. We ended up at a Benihana for hibachi.
It was busy enough that they sent us to the bar to wait.
While we stood there, John leaned toward me and said, “Isn’t that David Wright?”
I looked across the room and saw him standing with one of his brothers and his agent, Keith Miller. Spring training has a way of flattening the world like that, blending baseball life with regular life.
We shook hands. Exchanged a few words. Easy. Familiar enough. And then we went back to waiting. Sure enough, because the place was empty, the host seated all of us at the same hibachi table—me, John, David, his brother and his agent, who used to play for the Mets in the 1990s. We talked football (I’m a Jets fan, everyone else, including David, is a Giants fan, so you can imagine how that went). We talked about life in Florida, places to hang out. Baseball rarely came up.
At one point, David asked how things were going with SNY and whether MetsBlog was “blowing up.” It was a small question, asked casually, but it confirmed that he at least somewhat remembered me and knew of my work.
That was what made the night stand out. It was not about access or novelty. It was about sitting down, eating, talking, and laughing without roles attached. No clubhouse. No media obligations. No expectations.
After that night, the familiarity changed.
From then on, our interactions felt easier. First-name basis. A little more conversation. Not friendship in the traditional sense, but something earned—mutual respect built through years of shared context.
Over the years, that rhythm held. Occasional texts. Check-ins when paths crossed. Enough history that conversations did not feel transactional or forced. At one point he sought my advice on social media, which he chose to ignore in favor of having zero online presence (a move I still respect). He wrote the forward to my book, The NY Mets Fans Bucket List. And time went on…
Wright played his final Major League game in September of 2018. My last post on MetsBlog went up in 2019. He was my first player interview (2005) and my last (in 2018). From his debut through the final seasons of his career, my time writing about the Mets unfolded alongside it—not as the same story, but as part of the same era.
When his career ended, it marked the close of something I had been present for from the beginning. When MetsBlog ended shortly after, it felt like a natural punctuation to that period as well.