A reminder of how Mets fell asleep at the Wheel’
JUPITER, Fla. — This was the nascent age of free-agency in all sports, so there was nothing to compare it to. All we had was this: John Riggins had become the first player in Jets history to gain 1,000 yards in a season in 1975. His contract was expir- ing. He had been paid $63,000 that year. He wanted more.
“Joe Namath Money,” was the term his rep, an attorney named Bob Billings, used.
The Jets were already paying Joe Namath Joe Namath Money and weren’t inclined to match that for anyone, even an elite bell-cow running back. They offered a fifth of that — $100,000 — and dared him: Go see what you can get elsewhere. So Riggins took a tour all across the spring of 1976: to Houston, to Minnesota, to New Orleans.
The Jets said they’d sweeten the pot, bump him up based on incentives; Riggins knew with Namath still ruling the Jets’ backfield, the Jets were never going to be a ground-and-pound team. He resumed his tour: to Los Angeles. To Washington.
And that, at last, is where Riggins wound up, signing with George Allen’s crew for five years and $1.5 million on June 10, picking Washington over the Vikings and the Rams. The Jets never even got a call-back, and the way things were structured in those years they received zero compensation.
“He is replaceable,” Jets coach Lou Holtz said. “We have options.” That option turned out to be free-agent running back Ed Marinaro, a hell of an actor on “Hill Street Blues” in 1982 but someone who gained exactly 312 yards as a Jet in 1976.
For years, that has stood the test of time as a gold standard of sorts, a New York team that didn’t know what it had, figured it could do better, and figured they’d take a few shots at that player on his way out the door. Riggins wound up with a Super Bowl ring and a Hall of Fame bust. The Jets have mostly gone bust, for each of the last 48 years.
Zack Wheeler, though.
He makes you think.
Right now, he’s got as good a chance as anyone to finally supplant Riggins’ kiss-off of the Jets as the worst decision one of our teams has ever made when it comes to failing to recognize what they have, then allowing him to wander away for pennies on the dollar.
The Phillies doubled down on their decision to pry Wheeler away four years ago, handing him a three-year, $126 million extension on Monday that’ll take Wheeler through his age-37 season, likely the rest of his prime.
“This is a first-class organization, and I wouldn’t want to be anywhere else,” Wheeler said Monday. Understandably, he seemed a smidge happier than when the Mets decided to let him flee south after the 2019 season. Back then, you may recall, Wheeler said he’d circled back to the
Mets to see if they wanted to make a best, last offer and revealed: “It was just crickets when I did.”
Brodie Van Wagenen, chief architect of that page retorted: “We helped him parlay two good half-seasons over the last five into $118 million.”
All Wheeler has done with the Phillies is go 43-25 with a 3.06 ERA and three top-12 Cy Young finishes in his four years. The fact that he clearly preferred to stay — and was just as clearly trending up his final years as a Met after enduring two Tommy John surgeries — just adds to the sting.
And it goes up on a limited-edition shelf, up with John Riggins, up with Daniel Murphy also fleeing to Washington, D.C. (“I’d like to have that one back,” Sandy Alderson admitted eight years too late), up with Bernard King, another New Yorker exiled to the District. King went on to average 22 points a game as a Bullet; his replacement, Sidney Green, played two underwhelming seasons as a Knick, averaging 7.
It happens. Hell, it even happened once to the Yankees. George Steinbrenner called letting Reggie Jackson go to the Angels “my biggest regret” when he let Reggie leave as a free agent, though in the moment he called Reggie “mostly a singles hitter now.”
Wheeler has had some nice outings against the Mets, though he has yet to have the signature payback moment Reggie did, on April 27, 1982, when he hit the facing of the upper deck off Ron Guidry his first game back at the Stadium; fans alternated chants of “RegGIE!” with “Steinbrenner sucks!”
But Wheeler still had four more years to get there.