New York Mets

The New York Mets are in the National League East and are based in the New York City borough of Queens.

They were one of baseball's first expansion teams. The Mets were founded in 1962 to replace both of New York's departed NL teams, the Brooklyn Dodgers and the New York Giants. The American League team in New York City is the New York Yankees who are based in the borough of the Bronx. The team's colors combine the Dodgers' blue and the Giants' orange.

The nickname "Mets" was adopted as a shorthand to the club's corporate name, "The New York Metropolitan Baseball Club, Inc."

The name also recalls the "Metropolitans" which was a former New York team in the American Association from 1880 to 1887. The shorter form worked better in newspaper headlines.

After the 1957 season, the Brooklyn Dodgers and New York Giants relocated from New York to California to become the Los Angeles Dodgers and San Francisco Giants. That left the country's largest city in the United States with no National League franchise.

There was a threat that a New York team joining a new third league, so the MLB the National League expanded by adding the New York Mets following a proposal from William Shea.


For the first two years of its existence, the team played its home games at the historic Polo Grounds in Upper Manhattan.

In 1964, they moved into newly constructed Shea Stadium in Flushing, Queens, where the Mets played until the 2008 season.

In 2009, the club moved into Citi Field, adjacent to the former Shea Stadium site.

Tom_Seaver_at_Shea_Stadium_1974
(Delaywaves CC BY 2.0, Link)

In their inaugural season, the Mets posted a record of 40–120, the worst regular-season record since MLB went to a 162-game schedule. The team never finished better than second-to-last until the "Miracle Mets" beat the Baltimore Orioles in the 1969 World Series. The win is considered one of the biggest upsets in World Series history.

In the years since the Mets have played in four World Series. These include a dramatic run in 1973 that ended in a seven-game loss to the Oakland Athletics and a second championship in 1986 over the Boston Red Sox. The "Subway Series" ended in a loss against their cross-town rivals the New York Yankees in 2000. Their last Series appearance resulted in a five-game loss to the Kansas City Royals in 2015.

At the end of the 2019 season, the team's overall win-loss record was 4448–4808, a .481 win percentage.