NEW YORK — Three years ago, I roamed a pregame locker room during the New York Mets’ improbable sprint to the playoffs and World Series. The game was hours away, and several Mets were playing cards and joking and snapping on one another, and Wright, already hurting, already past his prime, joined in their jokes and laughter.
I asked Wright what he had missed the most when he was away rehabbing his body. This, he said, pointing to the game, to the room. This camaraderie, the messing around, the baseball life is what I miss.
Have you, I asked, thought of managing?
He scrunched his face. “Maybe, someday; it’s too early to say. What I love is this, and I want to extend that as long as I can.”
Wright’s playing career ended Saturday night, run up on shoals less of age than of too many painful injuries. He had spent 28 months engaged in the most painful of rehabilitations, his neck a taut, tangled mess, his back so sore that at times, his wife had to tie his shoes.
In the end, the game itself became painful for this natural. Swinging strained his fragile and damaged spinal column. His surgically repaired shoulder reduced a once-strong arm to making Terry Leach-style submarine throws.
But before it all ended, at age 35, Wright ran out into a packed stadium by Flushing Bay to play third base for one last time, as applause washed over and enveloped him.
A melancholy attended to that moment, an irresolvable sense of what-if. This, many of us thought, was a player who had been deprived of too many at-bats and one who left before his anointed time.
That is romanticism, not the least because baseball is a grueling sport, and no career comes with a set expiration date. Three decades ago, the New York Yankees saw spinal stenosis, the condition that afflicts Wright, deprive their brilliant first baseman Don Mattingly of his cobra-sting power swing.
Like Wright, Mattingly’s best years had passed by the time he turned 26. And even during this abbreviated return, Wright acknowledged the pain in his body.
“I can’t sit here and tell you I’m good with where I’m at right now,” Wright said. “That would be a lie, and that would be false. But to play this last game, it meant the world to me.”
Wright’s eyes turned watery and red Saturday, but his leave-taking was not mournful. If he lost his athletic prime to injuries, he nonetheless had a fine career, hitting lots of home runs, displaying catlike skills at third base and finally playing in a World Series — and hitting a home run there, despite his enveloping infirmities.
He earned close to $200 million. He has a wife and two daughters, and their 2-year-old, Olivia Shea, threw out the first pitch Saturday — her father motioning, gesticulating, urging her to throw in his general direction.
“Hey, she threw it well, and I gave that about a 10 percent chance,” Wright said. “I thought I’d end up chasing her around the outfield.”
He grew up a Mets fan in Norfolk, Virginia, where the team’s Class AAA franchise played at the time. He recalled playing T-ball as a 5-year-old with his dad, hitting balls into a fish net in the backyard: “It was the World Series, I was on the Mets: two outs, bottom of the ninth, and I was at the plate. Thwack!”
Now he ran about the field a final time. He waved and waved again to fans who had come many hours early to cheer him on; he hugged Miami Marlins coaches and former teammates like Cliff Floyd and Michael Cuddyer; he worked the fan rope line behind the batting cage and got down on his knee to talk baseball with a 9-year-old from Georgia, asking about the kid’s favorite position in Little League. Then he walked to the batting cage and practiced his bunts and hit towering batting-practice home runs that sent the bleacher rats to sprinting and yelping and tossing elbows.
In the first inning, he shook hands with the umpire at third base. In the fourth inning, he pursued a groundskeeper who was pulling a sweeper, for a handshake and a hug.
“All these fans thanking me?” he said. “I feel like I should be thanking them for 14 great years.”
If Willets Point could have a mayor, Wright was it Saturday.
That the Mets, owing to uncertainty about his health and perhaps to their bred-in-the-bone cheapness, did not spend months planning Wright’s comeback/retirement lent a welcome spontaneity to this celebration. In contrast to similar events with the Yankees, who specialize in choreographed Mausoleum Retirement Tours, this night unfolded in a joint packed with men, women, children and grandparents clad in No. 5 Wright jerseys amid a rollicking street-party vibe.
Wright came to bat in the bottom of the first, and walked. In the fourth, with nearly everyone at Citi Field figuring this would be his last at-bat, Wright attacked a pitch and got just under it, sending a towering pop-up toward the stands beside first base. The Marlins’ first baseman, Peter O’Brien, glided sideways, and then glided some more and caught the ball as he reached the stands.
It was, under normal circumstances, a nifty catch.
But under these circumstances, in front of these fans, it registered as a cardinal sin, and they showered O’Brien with relentless boos when he came to bat, when he trotted out to first base, whenever he touched the ball. Wright confessed he dug the nuttiness of it. “That’s that fan passion I was talking about,” he said. “That was cool.”
The Mets pulled Wright from the game in the fifth inning. There was a final, thunderous ovation from the fans, the Mets’ bullpen pouring onto the field to applaud him, the Marlins themselves standing and clapping.
Perhaps more revealing were those moments in the second and third inning, when Wright stood alone at third base, on his accustomed turf. He kept turning around, pounding his glove, kicking the dirt, looking about the stadium, as if to say to himself:
Remember. Remember this.