The moments that made being a Mets fan weird.

A crowd of 48,736 watched the formal opening of Shea Stadium. Willie Stargell recorded the park’s first hit with a home run off Jack Fisher, and Pittsburgh held on for a 4–3 victory.

The result fit the early Mets, but the building changed the scale of the franchise. Shea became the home of two championships, four pennants and generations of noisy, complicated Mets memories.

Shea was packed because the young Mets were chasing the first-place Cubs and finally looked like a real contender. Seaver gave the crowd something even bigger to chase. He retired the first 25 hitters, mixing power with total control while every out made the building louder and the possibility more real.

With one out in the ninth, lightly used rookie Jimmy Qualls lined a clean single into left-center. The perfect game was gone, but Seaver retired the next two hitters and finished a one-hit shutout. It was painful for a second. Then the crowd understood what it had just watched: the Franchise announcing that the 1969 Mets were no joke.

Chicago had spent most of the summer in first place, but by September the Mets were closing fast and the Cubs looked exhausted. During the game, a black cat wandered onto the field, crossed in front of Chicago’s dugout and paused near manager Leo Durocher. Shea did not need an invitation to treat it like a message from the baseball gods.

The Mets handled the baseball part too, winning 7–1 behind Jerry Koosman. One night later they moved into first place for the first time in franchise history. The cat did not cause Chicago’s collapse, of course. But try telling that to anyone who watched it choose a side.

Tommie Agee was already having a brilliant World Series, but Game 3 turned him into a piece of Mets folklore. In the first inning, he raced deep into center and made a running catch that robbed Elrod Hendricks of extra bases. Later, with the bases loaded, Agee sprinted in and made another impossible grab to save at least two runs.

The Mets won 5–0, and Nolan Ryan finished the game, but the score never explains the feeling in the ballpark. Agee’s glove changed the shape of the afternoon before Baltimore could put pressure on the young champions. It was the sort of defense that made a team believe it was meant to win.

Baltimore led 3–0 in the sixth inning, which was exactly the sort of hole the old Mets would have disappeared into. Instead, Cleon Jones reached on the famous shoe-polish call, Donn Clendenon hit a two-run homer, Al Weis tied the game, and the Mets took the lead in the eighth. Jerry Koosman then had to finish the job against an Orioles lineup packed with stars.

When Davey Johnson’s fly ball settled into Jones’s glove, Shea Stadium erupted. The Mets had beaten the Orioles in five games and completed the most astonishing rise in modern baseball. The players sprinted toward Koosman; fans poured into the field; and a franchise built from leftovers became New York’s team.

Tom Seaver did not simply dominate San Diego; he made the hitters look like they were guessing at invisible pitches. He struck out 19 Padres, including the final ten batters he faced, a stretch of command and movement that still feels unreal when you read the line score.

Jerry Grote caught the entire performance, framing pitch after pitch while Seaver kept climbing the ladder. The Mets were not in a pennant race yet, but Seaver made the franchise feel important whenever he took the mound. On his best nights, a ticket to Shea was a front-row seat to baseball history.

Willie Mays was no longer the Say Hey Kid by 1972, but New York still knew exactly who he was. In his Mets debut, against the Giants of all teams, he played first base and stepped into a 4–4 game in the fifth inning. Then he hit a home run that put the Mets ahead for good.

Rusty Staub had already hit a first-inning grand slam, yet the afternoon belonged to Mays. It was too neat to sound real: the greatest New York Giant returning to the city in a Mets uniform, facing his old club, and providing the winning run. For one day, the baseball calendar folded in half.

Everything about Game 2 felt unstable: bright sun turned routine fly balls into adventures, both starting pitchers struggled, and the lead changed hands over and over. The Mets and Athletics played four hours of anxious, messy baseball before New York finally scored four times in the twelfth inning.

Willie Mays collected the final hit of his career and later scored the go-ahead run. Rusty Staub, battling through a shoulder injury, kept making plays in right field. It was not a clean classic. It was better than that: a strange, exhausting Mets game where every player seemed to be carrying a different piece of the story.

On June 15, the Mets traded Tom Seaver to Cincinnati and Dave Kingman to Chicago. The moves came after a public contract fight, and the timing made the message impossible to miss: ownership was willing to break the team rather than lose an argument. Seaver was the franchise’s greatest player and its identity. Kingman was the lineup’s biggest power threat. Both were suddenly gone.

Steve Henderson arrived in the Seaver trade and had a strong debut, but no return could make the night feel fair. The Mets went on to lose 98 games, Shea grew quiet, and a generation of fans stopped trusting the people running the club. The wound lasted longer than the season.

The game lasted six hours and ten minutes, not counting two rain delays. The Mets kept taking leads and Atlanta kept finding a way back. In the bottom of the eighteenth, with the Braves down to their last strike, relief pitcher Rick Camp—a career .060 hitter—somehow hit the only home run of his career to tie it.

New York finally scored five times in the nineteenth and survived one last Atlanta rally. Ron Darling, normally a starter, recorded the final outs. The scheduled holiday fireworks still went off after the game, at nearly four in the morning, for whoever was awake enough to notice.

Ray Knight tagged Eric Davis at third in the tenth inning and the two started a fight that emptied both benches. Knight and Mitchell were ejected, leaving Davey Johnson with a badly scrambled defense and almost no conventional options. So Roger McDowell and Jesse Orosco began switching between the mound and the outfield depending on the hitter.

The strange arrangement worked. Neither pitcher had a ball hit to him in the outfield, and Howard Johnson broke the tie with a three-run homer in the fourteenth. Five hours after the first pitch, the Mets had another win and Johnson had managed the sort of game that could only belong to the 1986 team.

Houston led 5–4 entering the bottom of the ninth, and Game 3 was about to slip away. Wally Backman opened with a bunt single. Two batters later, Lenny Dykstra stepped in against Dave Smith with the game—and the mood of Shea—hanging in the balance.

Dykstra drove a pitch into the right-field seats and threw his helmet before he reached first. The celebration looked reckless because it was: this team played with the confidence that every impossible moment belonged to them. Darryl Strawberry’s three-run homer had erased an earlier deficit, but Dykstra delivered the swing everyone remembered.

Houston led 3–0 through eight innings with Mike Scott waiting to pitch a possible Game 7. The Mets wanted no part of that. They scored three in the ninth, traded runs with the Astros in the fourteenth, then pushed across three more in the top of the sixteenth.

Houston answered with two runs and put the tying run on base. Jesse Orosco finally struck out Kevin Bass with a slider, ending a four-hour, forty-two-minute fight and sending the Mets to the World Series. It was not tidy. Nothing about that October was.

Boston was one strike from the championship in the tenth inning. The Mets had already looked beaten, but Gary Carter singled, Kevin Mitchell singled, and Ray Knight tied the game. Mookie Wilson fouled off pitch after pitch against Bob Stanley, turning one at-bat into a test of patience and panic.

Then came the ground ball. It went through Bill Buckner’s legs, Knight scored, and the Mets were suddenly alive for one more game. The play is often reduced to an error, but Mets fans remember the entire inning: the refusal to quit, the noise rising with every foul ball, and the feeling that the team had grabbed the series back from the edge.

Boston jumped ahead 3–0, but the Mets had already learned during Game 6 that a deficit did not have to become a verdict. Ron Darling settled down, the lineup kept pushing, and New York scored six runs in the sixth inning to take control. Ray Knight’s two-run single and steady presence captured the whole series.

Jesse Orosco threw the final pitch, then tossed his glove into the Shea stands. Knight won the World Series MVP award, but the title belonged to a roster full of personalities: Hernandez, Carter, Strawberry, Gooden, Darling, Wilson, Mitchell, and the players who made every inning feel combustible.

Dwight Gooden carried a 4–2 lead into the ninth inning. After John Shelby walked, Mike Scioscia—who had hit three regular-season home runs—drove a Gooden pitch over the right-field wall to tie the game.

Kirk Gibson doubled home the winning run in the twelfth. Instead of taking command of the series, the Mets were tied 2–2 and eventually lost Game 7 to Orel Hershiser.

After forcing a tie for the National League Wild Card, the Mets sent Al Leiter to the mound in Cincinnati. He allowed only two hits, walked four and struck out seven in a complete-game shutout.

Edgardo Alfonzo homered in the first inning, giving Leiter a lead before he threw his first pitch. The win sent the Mets to the postseason for the first time since 1988.

With Mike Piazza injured, Todd Pratt was catching the biggest game of the season. In the tenth, he drove Matt Mantei’s pitch toward the deepest part of center field. Steve Finley raced back and jumped at the wall, close enough to make everyone at Shea hold their breath.

The ball cleared Finley’s glove and cleared the fence. Pratt rounded the bases into a mob, and the Mets had their first postseason series win since 1986. The hero was not Piazza, Alfonzo or Ventura. It was the backup catcher, because October has a sense of humor.

After fifteen innings, the Mets loaded the bases and brought Robin Ventura to the plate. He launched a ball over the right-field wall, which should have been a game-winning grand slam. Instead, teammates swarmed him between first and second base before he could finish the trip around the bases.

The umpires ruled it a single, so the official final was 4–3. Mets fans did not care about the box-score technicality. They cared that a five-hour game had ended with a celebration so enormous the hitter could not even complete the home-run trot. Todd Pratt scored, Ventura was carried away, and the “Grand Slam Single” became a phrase only baseball could invent.

Atlanta led 8–1, and the first two Mets in the eighth inning made outs. Then the inning stopped obeying normal rules. Hits, walks and defensive mistakes kept piling up until the Mets had tied the game and Mike Piazza came to the plate for the second time in the inning.

Piazza crushed the first pitch into the left-field seats for a three-run homer and an 11–8 lead. Shea went from half-empty resignation to total noise in the space of one endless rally. Ten runs had scored after two outs. No sensible person would have predicted even one of them.

Mike Hampton gave the Cardinals nothing. He threw a three-hit shutout, worked quickly and never allowed the clinching game to become nervous. The lineup gave him an early lead, then Todd Zeile broke it open with a bases-loaded double that nearly became a grand slam.

When the final out settled into Benny Agbayani’s glove, Shea celebrated its first National League pennant in fourteen years. The next opponent would be the Yankees, turning a great Mets night into the start of a city-wide argument.

The Mets returned to Shea ten days after the September 11 attacks. The ballpark was full of emotion and uncertainty; nobody knew what it would feel like to cheer again. Atlanta led in the eighth inning when Mike Piazza stepped in with a runner aboard and drove a Steve Karsay pitch deep into the night.

The sound after the ball cleared the wall was not ordinary baseball noise. Players, fans, and the city all needed one small piece of normal life, and Piazza gave it to them. Armando Benítez closed the game, but the image that stayed was Piazza rounding the bases while Shea remembered how to be loud.

With the score tied in the sixth inning, Scott Rolen lifted a ball toward the left-field wall with a runner on base. Endy Chávez took off, reached the warning track, and leaped at the last possible second. He caught the ball at the top of the wall, landed, and fired back toward the infield before Shea could finish gasping.

The catch saved two runs and gave New York a chance to come back. The Mets eventually lost 3–1, and the defeat remains painful because the 2006 team was good enough to win the pennant. That is why the play matters: even in heartbreak, Chávez created a moment so perfect it feels like a victory preserved inside a loss.

Delgado entered the day under pressure after a rough first half. Then he tore through Yankee Stadium. He hit a two-run double, a grand slam and a three-run homer, finishing 3-for-5 with a franchise-record nine RBI.

The Mets won the opener of a two-stadium doubleheader by nine runs, and Delgado supplied the cleanest possible answer to weeks of questions about his bat. Sometimes a season turns gradually. Sometimes a great hitter knocks in nine before dinner.

The Mets had existed for fifty seasons without a no-hitter. Johan Santana was only a few starts removed from shoulder surgery, and the pitch count climbed into dangerous territory, but he kept finding another fastball, another changeup, another way through the Cardinals lineup.

Mike Baxter crashed into the wall to save the bid in the seventh inning, and Santana finished with eight strikeouts and five walks on 134 pitches. When the final out arrived, teammates mobbed him near the mound and Citi Field sounded like a stadium that had been waiting half a century to exhale.

On Wednesday, Wilmer Flores had stayed in a game after word spread that he had been traded. He cried on the field, only for the deal to collapse. On Friday he was still a Met, Yoenis Céspedes was on his way to New York, and Citi Field greeted Flores like family.

Flores drove in the first Mets run, then led off the twelfth inning with a walk-off homer. He touched the crest on his jersey as he rounded the bases while the crowd chanted his name. It was too emotional and too perfectly timed to feel scripted, even though every detail looked like a movie.

The 2015 Mets had waited years to play October baseball, and Game 5 against Los Angeles felt like every rebuild was sitting in the dugout. Jacob deGrom battled through six difficult innings, the bullpen protected every inch, and Daniel Murphy continued his impossible postseason run with another huge hit.

New York never led by much, which made every pitch feel enormous. Familia closed the door, the Mets celebrated on the infield, and a team that had been dismissed as too young suddenly had a ticket to the NLCS. The win was not as famous as the next series, but it was the proof that this group belonged.

Daniel Murphy homered in the eighth inning, extending his major-league record to six consecutive postseason games with a home run. It was his seventh homer in nine playoff games that October.

Lucas Duda supplied five RBI, the Mets completed a four-game sweep, and Murphy was named NLCS MVP. Fifteen years after their last pennant, New York was back in the World Series.

Michael Conforto became the first Mets rookie to hit two World Series home runs in one game. The first was a line drive that turned Citi Field electric; the second gave New York a 3–2 lead and made the championship feel close enough to touch.

Kansas City rallied in the eighth and won, which is why this entry belongs in the complicated part of the Mets memory. Conforto’s night was brilliant, but the bullpen could not hold the lead and a ground ball that slipped under Daniel Murphy’s glove helped turn the game. Sometimes a favorite performance lives inside a defeat.

Bartolo Colón was 42, had never homered in the majors and was known for swings that sent his helmet flying. James Shields gave him a fastball. Colón drove it into the left-field seats for a two-run homer and stood near the plate just long enough to make sure reality had not changed its mind.

His trip around the bases took more than thirty seconds. The dugout tried to give him the silent treatment and failed almost immediately. Lost inside the celebration was the fact that Colón also pitched 6⅔ innings and earned the win, because of course he did.

The Mets entered the night having won thirteen of fourteen, but Washington took a 6–3 lead into the bottom of the ninth. J.D. Davis and Wilson Ramos singled before Todd Frazier sent a Sean Doolittle pitch into the left-field second deck to tie the game.

The inning kept moving until Michael Conforto lined a two-out single to right for the walk-off. Pete Alonso tore Conforto’s jersey off during the celebration, Citi Field shook, and a summer hot streak suddenly felt like a real playoff chase.

Lindor’s first Mets season had been frustrating, but this game did not leave room for complaints. He homered from both sides of the plate, then hit his third of the night in the eighth inning to break a 6–6 tie. No player had ever hit three home runs in a Subway Series game.

The night also included a benches-clearing argument after Giancarlo Stanton appeared to whistle toward the Mets’ dugout during his home-run trot. It was loud, petty and dramatic in exactly the way a rivalry game should be. Lindor got the last swing and the last word.

Tylor Megill handled the first five innings before Buck Showalter turned the game over to the bullpen. Drew Smith, Joely Rodríguez and Seth Lugo carried the no-hitter into the ninth, where Edwin Díaz struck out the side with Citi Field standing for every pitch.

This was not a smooth masterpiece like Johan Santana’s. It was tense and crowded with baserunners, the sort of no-hitter where every walk starts a new emergency. James McCann caught all 159 pitches, and five pitchers shared the second no-hitter in Mets history.

Marte singled, Lindor homered and the inning began to wobble. Mark Canha drove in a run, J.D. Davis doubled home another, and Brandon Nimmo’s two-run single tied the game. Suddenly a hopeless night had become a tie game with Marte back at the plate.

Marte doubled off the wall to give the Mets an 8–7 lead, completing the largest ninth-inning comeback by the franchise in twenty-five years. Less than a week after no-hitting Philadelphia, the Mets found a completely different way to make the Phillies miserable.

The Mets entered the makeup doubleheader needing one win to reach the playoffs and trailed 3–0 after seven innings. They erupted for six in the eighth, with Nimmo’s homer putting them ahead. Atlanta answered with four runs in the bottom half, turning celebration into dread in minutes.

Starling Marte singled in the ninth, and Lindor drove a Pierce Johnson pitch over the right-center-field wall for an 8–7 lead. Díaz, after struggling through the eighth, returned for the final outs. The Mets had clinched a postseason spot in the most stressful way available.

Milwaukee led 2–0 entering the ninth inning, and the Mets had spent the afternoon looking for one clean opening. Lindor walked. Brandon Nimmo singled. Suddenly Pete Alonso was at the plate with the season, his future, and every Mets fan’s nerves packed into one at-bat.

Alonso launched a three-run homer to right-center and stood at the plate for a beat before beginning his trot. Starling Marte added insurance, Lindor helped finish the double play, and Howie Rose’s call carried the win back to New York. It was a dramatic chapter in Alonso’s Mets story, no matter what came next.

For most of Game 4, the Mets were stuck in a tense pitchers’ duel with Philadelphia. Citi Field was loud but nervous, the Phillies’ lineup kept threatening, and every empty Mets inning made the margin for error smaller. In the sixth, Francisco Lindor came up with the bases loaded and a chance to turn the whole series.

He drove the ball into the right-field seats. The grand slam gave New York a 4–1 lead and sent Lindor around the bases with the expression of a player who understood exactly what the moment demanded. Díaz finished the game, and the Mets advanced with Lindor at the center of everything.

Alonso lined a Spencer Strider fastball into the visiting bullpen in the third inning for the 253rd home run of his Mets career. Strawberry had owned the franchise record for thirty-seven years. Now the top name belonged to the Polar Bear.

Three innings later Alonso homered again, and the Mets rolled to a 13–5 win. The second shot felt like a release after weeks of counting every swing. A player drafted and developed by the Mets had climbed past every slugger the franchise ever employed.

The Mets scored six in the second and led 8–0 before Miami came all the way back to tie the game in the sixth. New York answered immediately with six runs in the seventh, capped by Lindor’s three-run homer, and eventually stretched the lead to 15–9.

Even that was not safe. The Marlins scored five more and brought the tying run to the plate in the ninth before Tobias Myers recorded the final two outs. Christopher Morel went 3-for-4 with a homer and three RBI after entering for an injured Brett Baty. It was not elegant, meaningful or good for anyone’s blood pressure. It was unforgettable anyway.