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Mets Bring It Home

Greenwich is where the heart lies for many Mets players, who just may never leave

Marc Levine

Carlos Delgado’s workday won’t officially begin for a couple of hours, but as he sits on a green canvas tarp just outside Shea Stadium’s first base line, he begins his usual routine, stretching his calf muscles.To his left, behind a cage of metal and netting where Delgado’s New York Mets teammates take batting practice, knots of people stare at him. Newspaper reporters listen for scraps of conversation, video operators train their lenses, and special-needs children wait in line for a promised chance to shake Carlos’s hand.

Behind him, above the roof of the Mets dugout, a throng of fans six-deep call out Delgado’s name. Some wave photos, others lift up their children, everyone pleading for a moment’s eye contact, perhaps a scrawl to sell on eBay.

“Carlos, you’re amazing,” one man keeps yelling from the crowd behind. “Great game last night.”

Carlos turns his head and nods momentarily in the guy’s direction, his bald pate gleaming bronze under a late-afternoon sun. An imperturbable grin crosses his face. Thoughts of home perhaps? And is that his native Puerto Rico or that other home, the one where Delgado gets away from the daily grind at Flushing Meadows with his wife and newborn son?

Does Delgado have Greenwich on his mind?

Jeff Wilpon certainly does. The Mets’ chief operating officer and son of team owner Fred Wilpon not only has lived in town since 1993 but also, of late, has been touting it with the zeal of a real estate agent. When Wilpon signed relief ace Billy Wagner in 2005, he took him to Mediterraneo restaurant on Greenwich Avenue to seal the deal. At least four Mets live here at present: Wagner, Delgado, Tom Glavine and Scott Schoeneweis.

“These are all guys I helped recruit for the Mets and showed them Greenwich because that’s where I live,” Wilpon says. “It’s a very easy commute to the ballpark, coming and going. These top guys don’t necessarily want to live in New York City. Schoeneweis just came here; we got him over the winter. He said: ‘Where should I live?’ I said: ‘Well, check out Greenwich.’ ”

Not just getting good players but also keeping them happy is critical to Wilpon’s mission of having the Mets stay competitive year after year. Greenwich is key, he says. He and his wife Valerie decided to move here fourteen years ago and frequently show Greenwich off to Mets players and their wives.

“What I sell them on is you’ve got accessibility to the city, but you can get away from it all,” Wilpon explains. “I usually take them to Mediterraneo and give them a little taste of Richards also, so they know they can find some good clothes.”

For Delgado, Greenwich is more than tasty fish dinners and sweet threads. “We lived in the city last year,” he says. “Having a little privacy, being a little more relaxed and having a parking spot is nice.”

That’s one common denominator for all four of the Greenwich Mets, who otherwise come to Greenwich from the four points of the American compass: North (Glavine, born in Boston), South (Wagner, from the Appalachian outback of western Virginia), far South (Delgado, from Aguadilla, Puerto Rico) and West (Schoeneweis winters in Arizona though he was born just down the coast in Long Branch, New Jersey).

All four come across as down-to-earth and fairly quiet, enjoying their celebrity like a trip to the dentist but putting their best face forward. Teammates bring out the contrast. In the clubhouse, shortstop Jose Reyes readily courts a crowd, not caring who’s watching as he mocks an outfielder’s fumble. Reliever Aaron Heilman explains the intricacies of his job to a reporter with the earnest loquacity of a future Tim McCarver. You hardly have a chance to notice catcher Paul Lo Duca before he has pumped your hand and said hello.

The Greenwich Four are a bit different. “Family guys,” Wilpon calls them, and attention junkies they’re not.

Wagner strolls into the clubhouse wearing long plaid shorts and twirling a golf club between the fingers of his nonpitching hand. He moves quietly past the members of the press to his locker, where he changes into his uniform. It’s a low-key entrance for someone whose job entails facing high-pressure, game-ending situations to the accompaniment of thousands of screaming fans and, if at home, the blaring strains of Metallica’s “Enter Sandman.”

Low-key is how Wagner likes it, though, and that goes for his summer home of Greenwich. “It’s kind of laid-back, easy-going, not that hustle-bustle,” he says. “People leave you alone.”

Wagner was encouraged to move to Greenwich not only by Wilpon but also by teammate and old friend Tom Glavine. “Yeah, I dragged Billy out here,” Glavine says. “Billy’s a guy from the country, not a big-city guy, and I’m the same way. At least it isn’t where I’d want to live with a family.

I kept telling him: ‘Come out here. You’re not going to feel the city one bit.’ ”

Glavine is the most recognizable member of the Greenwich Four, a forty-one-year-old who has been a baseball superstar since the early 1990s. His hard-eyed stare, captured on television screens thousands of times over the years as he peers into a catcher’s signs, gives him the aspect of a gunslinger, and his steely gaze is the first thing you notice up close. Yet his manner turns out to be frank and friendly. Glavine is not the first pitcher to win 300 games, but he could turn out to be the nicest.

“There’s not a lot not to like about Greenwich,” notes Glavine, who has maintained a season-long residence in town with wife Christine since joining the Mets in 2003. “The beautiful homes, the beautiful neighborhoods. You have the beach nearby, the Avenue where you can shop and eat. It’s a pretty easy commute into the city, and there’s the airport factor. It’s pretty centrally located for a lot of things that are a part of my life. You couldn’t ask for any better.”

Glavine and his three teammates aren’t the first to discover Greenwich. You can say Greenwich has been part of the Mets story even before there was such a thing as the Mets baseball team.

It began in February 1961, when a phone rang inside a home on Old Church Road. George Weiss, the former general manager of the New York Yankees who had been forcibly retired the year before, picked it up and found himself talking to M. Donald Grant, a white-shoe stockbroker trying to organize a new baseball team, then dubbed the Meadowlarks, on behalf of his friend Joan Payson.

Jimmy Breslin recounts the conversation in his 1963 book Can’t Anybody Here Play This Game?: “I could talk to you all day, and it still would come down to one simple question,” Grant said. “If we wanted somebody to run our organization, would you be available and would you be interested?”

Weiss was, especially as his wife Hazel wasn’t enjoying his retirement, either.

“I married George for better or for worse, but not for lunch,” she had famously remarked. So the Mets got their first operational leader: Weiss served as team president of Payson’s club from opening day of the inaugural 1962 season through 1966.

There was another Greenwich person in the Mets mix from the beginning, Wall Street financier Herbert Walker, a minority shareholder who lived nearby on North Street. A member of the extended Bush clan, Walker would sometimes bring his young nephew George W. Bush to Mets games, stoking youthful fantasies of running baseball teams and other things in years to come.

Over the years, others from the Mets organization have moved to town. Ralph Kiner had been broadcasting Mets games since 1962 when Weiss invited him to Greenwich for a golf tournament. Kiner, a Hall of Fame slugger, liked what he saw. He has maintained a residence in town for years and now splits his time between Florida and Greenwich Country Club.

There are yet other Mets players with a Greenwich connection: George Foster, the Mets’ first major free-agent signing in 1982, made Greenwich his full-time home, even to the extent of coaching the Brunswick baseball team when his playing days ended. Bobby Bonilla had two rocky stints with the team in the midst of an otherwise stellar career, yet Greenwich has been the one part of Bonilla’s Mets experience he has held onto ever since.

When the Mets won their second world championship in 1986, a key player was Greenwich-born second baseman Tim Teufel, alumnus of St. Mary High School on North Street. Another Met on that year’s team, Game 7 hero Lee Mazzilli, would make Greenwich his home, too.

Still, when it comes to Mets who lived here, the name on most local minds is the one who came first. When Tom Seaver arrived in town, it was 1970 and he was fresh off a Cy Young–winning season and the Mets’ first miraculous world championship. Seaver lived in Greenwich for twenty-five years with his wife Nancy and their daughters and often could be spotted dressed down and performing low-key errands at Avenue stores like Marks Brothers and Greenwich Hardware.

“I’d fill up with whatever I needed and say write me up for this, this and this,” Seaver recalled during a recent visit back to the Avenue. “They’d say ‘Gotcha, see you later.’ It was that real small-town charm. Everyone knew you. Time marches on. Things do change.”

For Seaver, the initial attraction of the community was not simple ambience but its real-estate value, proximity to the city and the absence then of a state income tax.

“We found it on our own,” Seaver recalls. “We didn’t want to move to Long Island, with the thought of only one way in and out. We looked north, and we just kept going and ended up with a nice little cottage house over by the Greenwich Country Club.”

A few years later, the Seavers moved to another house off Round Hill Road. “It was a matter of a pregnant wife and we needed more room,” he says, laughing. “We house-shopped and found this other place, a former horse barn at the old Sabine Farm, a beautiful piece of property, a great area. It was a nice commute.”

As the 1970s went on, Seaver won two more Cy Young Awards and led the Mets to another World Series, defining the team throughout that decade by his presence, and after an infamous 1977 trade that sent him to the Cincinnati Reds, by his absence. Seaver lived here throughout his playing career, whether it was pitching a no-hitter for the Reds, winning his 300th game with the Chicago White Sox, or playing for the American League champion, the Boston Red Sox, in 1986, his last season.

Seaver moved to California about ten years ago. Leaving Greenwich was part of a larger journey. “You come to a crossroads,” he says. “Are you going to be in the same industry your entire life or do you want to chase another dream? That’s pretty much what I did.”

Since then, he has cultivated an interest in gardening that sprouted into a full-blown second career at Sabine Farm, fed by having a nice spread of land in the Napa Valley. “I’m growing grapes, not making wine,” he says. “I have a winemaker, who is a professional.” A new wine, Seaver, is scheduled to debut next year.

Throughout his Mets years, “Tom Terrific” sometimes brought teammates up to Greenwich Country Club for a round of golf, like fellow pitcher Craig Swan.

“It was probably 1975–1976, and there were about ten people watching us because it was Tom Seaver,” Swan recalls. “I was pretty nervous. At the first tee, I took a divot about a foot and a half long. The ball went about three feet. The divot came out of the ground and like a Frisbee floated in the air and landed on this bush. I had to walk over and pick it up. Seaver was on the ground, rolling. He couldn’t stop rolling.”

A tough introduction, but Swan kept coming back before finally moving to Greenwich for good in 1980, by which time he was the Mets’ top pitcher and the first signed to a seven-figure contract by the team.

After his 1984 retirement from baseball, Swan became a local businessman, helping hard-driving residents alleviate their sore backs and necks with an intense form of physical therapy called “rolfing,” performed at his Old Greenwich office. For eight years, Swan was also pitching coach for the Greenwich High baseball team. “I would never have taken the head coaching job,” Swan says. “Those parents can get a little rough.”

Swan’s time in Greenwich has given him perspective on the connection between the town and his former team. “From what I’ve heard, there’s a larger contingency of Yankees and possibly Red Sox fans than there are Mets fans,” Swan says. “There are certainly a lot of Mets fans, but it seems more of a Yankees town, I don’t know why.”

“I don’t think it’s one or the other,” Wilpon contends. “When the Yankees are doing well, you get a lot of Yankee fans, and when the Mets are doing well, you get a lot of Met fans.” He thinks the last two seasons have brought a lot of new Greenwichites into the Mets fold.

When Gabrielle Schoeneweis first arrived in Greenwich last spring, it was just the Mets flags and Mets caps she noticed, but maybe that was because she was looking for them. Being that the Mets were husband Scott’s new team, she was wondering how the experience would compare to other Major League stops Scott has made in recent years, like Anaheim, Toronto and Chicago. Now she has no doubts.

“I love it here, absolutely,” she says.

While Scott spends his off-time with their two oldest children, bicycling to Tod’s Point and visiting the turtles at Binney Park, Gabrielle, a former model from Dallas, has been getting acquainted with the community. “When Scott comes home, we don’t talk about how the game went or how he pitched,” she says. “When we’re home, we want to get away from that kind of stuff. And people are good about that in the neighborhood. They know what he does, but that’s it. They all have their careers, too. When Scott’s away, the neighbors actually come over to talk to me.”

It’s a common thread among the Mets players — while each has his own favorite stores, restaurants and special hangouts, all uniformly appreciate the people in Greenwich, saying they add to an overall nice experience.

Wagner and Schoeneweis claim they are hardly ever recognized. “Everyone expects me to be about six three,” Wagner says. “But I’m a normal, average Joe.”

For Glavine and Delgado, the situation is a little different, but not unpleasantly so. Certainly Delgado doesn’t find himself running the same gauntlet at home in Greenwich that he does at Shea.

“I do what I need to do, go grocery shopping, go to the post office,” Delgado says. “People don’t bother me. Fans will say: ‘How’re ya doing? Have a good game tonight.’ Or ‘Had a good game last night.’ Or ‘Not such a good game last night.’ But very respectful. They’re not bothering me, by any means.”

Glavine concurs: “I don’t get a whole lot of people saying stuff to me. People give me the look, the double take, ‘Is that … ?’ That kind of stuff. For the most part, I can’t say I have been what I consider to be bothered. People have been respectful.”

For one moment this season, the Greenwich Mets courted the local limelight, a special charity event put on by Wilpon’s New York Mets Foundation and the fractional private-airplane business NetJets that was held at Richards in June. Each of the four players, as well as teammates Reyes, Carlos Beltran and David Wright, manager Willie Randolph and general manager Omar Minaya, were on hand to meet fans and raise money for targeted charities. Even Tom Terrific was back in Greenwich, along with another Mets hero from the 1973 World Series, Rusty Staub. Wilpon was there, too, letting others make the speeches and enjoying the evening from the back of the room.

“It’s a nice group of people,” Wilpon says. “We’re going to share the money with their designated group of charities. My funds are going to go to the Greenwich Boys & Girls Club.”

It turned out to be a banner day for the Mets’ second home: Not only did the event raise over $500,000, but the team also followed it up by getting off a losing streak and winning eight of their next nine games. Could this event become a yearly occurrence on the Mets’ schedule? “We’ll definitely consider it,” Wilpon says.

What about Greenwich as a future home for the Greenwich Four? That’s probably unlikely for Delgado, who plans to return to Puerto Rico when his playing days are through. “Winters here are a little too cold for me,” he says.

Glavine, though, seems to be weighing the idea of sticking around when his playing days are done. “I wouldn’t see it being out of the question,” he says. “I could easily see myself at some point in time saying ‘Yeah, I have my summer house up here.’ Absolutely. It would certainly be one of the first places I would think about, absolutely.”

Wife Christine sees Greenwich in her future, too: “When the season starts, everyone’s in tears, because we’ve got to let go a little bit. The children right now are saying: ‘Dad, I want you to play next year.’ I have my hand on my hip, thinking: ‘Where was this six months ago? When the season started, you guys were just bawling!’ But they just love being here.”

Somewhere between Greenwich and Flushing, Jeff Wilpon is smiling.