Best Gifts for Mets Fans: 22 Picks for the Orange & Blue Faithful

Three of these four signatures are retired numbers: Gooden's 16, Hernandez's 17, Strawberry's 18. Nothing else in this price range puts three of the eleven on a single object.

The fourth is the one that makes it interesting. Ray Knight was the 1986 World Series MVP and scored the winning run of Game 6 on the Buckner play, and the Mets let him walk that winter over a reported two hundred thousand dollars. He never played for them again.

Knight and Hernandez both had two-out RBI singles in the tenth inning of that game before Mookie Wilson's grounder went through. The comeback was three singles, a wild pitch and an error, in that order, with two out and nobody on.

That club won 108 games, still the franchise record and the most by any National League team between 1975 and 1998.

Two right-handed sluggers a generation apart, and a franchise record that passed from one to the other in stages.

Alonso broke Piazza's Mets rookie home run record on his way to 53 in 2019, which also broke Aaron Judge's major league rookie record of 52. He then passed Piazza's 220 Mets home runs in 2023 and David Wright's 242 in 2024. Only Strawberry's 252 is still ahead of him.

Piazza got to the majors at all by accident. He was drafted in the 62nd round in 1988, 1,390th overall, as a favour from Tommy Lasorda to Piazza's father. He remains by a distance the latest-drafted player in the Hall of Fame.

Alonso won the 2019 Home Run Derby and split the million dollar prize publicly with the Wounded Warrior Project and Tunnel to Towers. He also paid out of pocket for the September 11 tribute cleats the whole roster wore that year, after the league declined to fund them.

An edition of five is unusually small even for Fanatics Authentic, where limited normally means twelve, twenty-five or a hundred. This is number one of the five.

Pillbox is a Kansas shop that hand paints full size maple bats as art objects rather than printing them, so no two in the run are identical.

The two inscriptions bracket his Mets career exactly. 83 NL ROY and 86 WS Champs: Rookie of the Year at twenty-one, World Series champion at twenty-four. He was an All-Star in eight consecutive seasons after that, from 1984 to 1991.

His 252 home runs are still the franchise record forty years on, and 18 went up on June 1, 2024, seven weeks after Gooden's 16.

The cap tip is from September 29, 2018, his last game, and his first major league appearance in 869 days. He came out in the fifth to an ovation that would not stop.

He is the franchise leader in almost every counting category there is: 1,777 hits, 970 RBI, 949 runs, 390 doubles, 762 walks, total bases and wins above replacement.

The spinal stenosis diagnosed in 2015 is degenerative and incurable. He played seventy-seven games total across 2016, 2017 and 2018 with roughly twenty-seven million dollars left on the contract, most of it insured.

He homered in his first World Series at bat, Game 3 at Citi Field on October 30, 2015, off Yordano Ventura. Number 5 went up on July 19, 2025, thirteen months before Beltran's.

September 21, 2001 was the first professional sporting event held in New York after the attacks. The home run came in the bottom of the eighth off Steve Karsay and turned a 2-1 deficit into a 3-2 win over Atlanta.

The Shea parking lots had been a staging area for relief supplies for ten days. The players spent that week loading trucks rather than taking batting practice.

Piazza wore an NYPD cap in that game. It stayed in private hands for years, sold at auction in 2016 for around $365,000, and the buyer donated it to the Hall of Fame.

The league fined the Mets for wearing first responder caps during the game rather than official league caps, having approved them for pregame only. The Mets paid the fine.

His 15 goes up at Citi Field on Saturday, September 19, 2026, before the Phillies game, which makes this the only item in the guide attached to something that has not happened yet.

He was elected to Cooperstown in January 2026 on his fourth ballot with 358 votes, 84.2 percent, and inducted on July 26. His plaque wears a Mets cap, making him the third player in the Hall in one, after Seaver and Piazza.

The thing that made him a $119 million free agent was not a Mets season. It was October 2004 with Houston: eight home runs in twelve postseason games, tying Barry Bonds for the single postseason record. The Mets signed him that January after the Yankees passed.

In July 2011 they traded him to San Francisco for a Single-A pitcher named Zack Wheeler, which is arguably the best return in franchise history.

The cheapest way into the signed section of this guide, and it belongs to the man who still holds the franchise home run record at 252, four decades after he set the pace.

That is the number people get wrong. Wright finished with 242 and Piazza hit 220 in Queens. Alonso has passed both and is still chasing Strawberry.

He and Gooden won Rookie of the Year in consecutive seasons, 1983 and 1984, which is the only time the Mets have done that.

On Opening Day 1988 in Montreal he hit a ball off the roof girder at Olympic Stadium, roughly 525 feet, one of the longest ever struck in that building.

1985 is the season this points at, and it is arguably the best year any pitcher has had since the mound was lowered: 24-4, a 1.53 ERA and 268 strikeouts. The pitching triple crown, at twenty years and ten months, which still makes him the youngest Cy Young winner there has ever been.

That 1.53 is the lowest ERA by any pitcher aged twenty-five or under since 1969, and it has now stood for forty-one years.

As a nineteen year old rookie in 1984 he struck out 276 and broke Herb Score's rookie record, including sixteen in consecutive September starts.

He missed the 1986 championship parade. He has said since that he was in a Long Island housing project using cocaine while the floats went down Broadway, and his 16 did not go up until April 14, 2024, thirty-eight years later.

A cream Cooperstown name and number tee cut for a woman, with no pastel and no rhinestones anywhere on it.

Piazza's 396 home runs as a catcher are still the record at the position, and he hit 427 overall. He caught more games than almost anyone while doing it, which is the part that never gets said.

The Marlins owned him for five games in May 1998 before flipping him to the Mets on May 22 for Preston Wilson, Ed Yarnall and Geoff Goetz. Five games.

Number 31 went up on July 30, 2016, and it was the first Mets player number retired in twenty-eight years. Seaver's 41 in 1988 was the one before it.

Eleven consecutive Gold Gloves at first base, from 1978 to 1988. It is still the record at the position and he won the last one at thirty-four.

He is also the only co-MVP in National League history, sharing the 1979 award with Willie Stargell, which is a thing that simply cannot happen under the current voting rules.

The Cardinals traded him to the Mets on June 15, 1983 for Neil Allen and Rick Ownbey. Whitey Herzog later conceded the return was thin, and Hernandez initially considered refusing to report to a last place club.

He watched the bottom of the tenth in Game 6 from Davey Johnson's office. He had made the second out of the top half, went inside, and stayed there through the entire comeback and the Buckner play. Number 17 went up on July 9, 2022.

Shea Stadium is named after a lawyer who never owned a baseball team. William A. Shea forced National League expansion back into New York by organising the threatened Continental League in 1959, and Major League Baseball killed it by promising New York a franchise. The building is the receipt.

It opened April 17, 1964 and closed September 28, 2008, and the Mets lost 4-2 to Florida that afternoon and missed the playoffs on the final day for the second year running.

It was designed to convert to a football configuration, which is why the Jets played there through 1983. In 1975 it became the only stadium in history to host four professional teams in one year: the Mets, the Yankees, the Jets and the Giants, all at once, while two other buildings were being worked on.

Home plate and the bases are marked in the Citi Field parking lot where the old field stood.

The interlocking NY on this cap is not the Mets' own design. It is lifted directly from the New York Giants, and the blue and orange are Dodger blue plus Giants orange. The 1962 expansion team was deliberately built as a memorial to two clubs that had left for California four years earlier.

Which is a strange founding idea when you say it out loud: a franchise whose visual identity is entirely borrowed from the teams whose absence created it.

Casey Stengel managed that first club to 40-120, still the worst record in modern baseball history, and his 37 was retired in 1965, before the team had ever finished higher than ninth.

'47 was started in Boston in 1947 by twin Italian immigrant brothers, Arthur and Henry D'Angelo, selling caps on the street outside Fenway.

The black alternate this reproduces arrived in 1998, Piazza's first year in Queens, and the Mets wore black on and off until 2012. Steve Cohen brought it back in 2024 after a fan campaign.

Which makes this a rare thing in kids' merchandise: a colourway that is both a throwback and currently on the field, so a child wearing it is not obviously dressed as the past.

The 2000 pennant winners wore black in both home games of the Subway Series, and the September 21, 2001 home run was hit in this jersey.

A retired number is also the safest bet in children's clothing. Nobody is trading 31.

The closing ceremony after the final game brought forty-three former Mets back onto the field, including Seaver, Piazza, Koosman, Hernandez, Strawberry, Gooden and Mookie Wilson.

It ended with Seaver throwing a last ceremonial pitch to Piazza, and the two of them walking out through the centre field gate together as it closed behind them. Both were still active Hall of Fame candidates at the time and neither had a retired number yet.

The game itself was a 4-2 loss to Florida that eliminated them on the season's final day, for the second consecutive year, so the ceremony happened in a building full of people who had just watched a collapse.

Shea also hosted the Beatles on August 15, 1965, in front of 55,600 people. It was the first stadium rock concert ever staged and the band could not hear itself play.

Seaver reached the Mets by lottery. In 1966 the commissioner voided his Braves contract because Atlanta had signed him after USC's season began, and the three clubs willing to match the $51,500 bonus, the Mets, Phillies and Indians, had slips drawn from a hat. The Mets' slip came out.

His 1992 election was 98.84 percent, 425 of 430 ballots, the highest share anyone had ever received. It stood as the record for twenty-four years until Ken Griffey Jr. in 2016.

July 9, 1969, the Imperfect Game: perfect through eight and a third against the Cubs at Shea before a rookie named Jimmy Qualls, who finished his career with thirty-one hits, singled to left centre.

He died August 31, 2020 at seventy-five of complications from Lewy body dementia and COVID-19. Number 41 went up in 1988 and then no Mets player number was retired for twenty-eight years.

Shea's blue and orange exterior panels, the ones everybody called the toothpicks, went up in 1980 as part of the same rebrand that produced the original Home Run Apple.

That first apple was nine feet tall and rose out of an enormous top hat in centre field. It now sits outside Citi Field near the Bullpen Gate, and the replacement inside the new park is roughly four times its volume.

Willie Mays finished his career in that building. The Mets brought him home in May 1972 and he played his last game in 1973 at forty-two, which is the entire reason 24 hangs at Citi Field.

For thirty-five dollars this is the cheapest thing in the guide that would look deliberate on a wall.

Madden covered Seaver for the Daily News for decades and wrote this in the months right after his death in 2020, which makes it the first full biography published with the whole arc known.

The best chapter is the Midnight Massacre, the June 15, 1977 trade to Cincinnati. It was a feud between Seaver and chairman M. Donald Grant about free agency that finally broke when Dick Young wrote a column dragging Seaver's wife into it.

It also covers the second career almost nobody knows about. Seaver became a Calistoga winemaker, cleared a 116 acre hillside largely himself, and made Cabernet at GTS Vineyards from 2005.

Elected to Cooperstown in 1992 with 98.84 percent, a record that stood for twenty-four years.

Hodges hit the first home run in Mets history, on April 11, 1962, as a thirty-eight year old expansion draft pick from Brooklyn. He was on the team that went 40-120 and he managed the one that won in 1969, which nobody else can say.

He died of a heart attack on April 2, 1972 in West Palm Beach, after a round of golf during the players' strike, two days before his forty-eighth birthday. Number 14 was retired the following year.

Cooperstown took fifty years. He was finally elected by the Golden Days Era Committee in December 2021 and inducted in July 2022, which is the same window in which the Mets themselves started clearing their own backlog.

He was a Marine at Okinawa and Tinian and came home with a Bronze Star. Zachter interviewed surviving members of his unit and the war chapters are the most original reporting in the book.

Creamed spinach pizza is a genuine regional oddity: a white pie with mozzarella, garlic and creamed spinach that essentially does not exist outside Nassau County. Somebody who grew up in the Five Towns will recognise it instantly and somebody who did not will have never heard of it.

Mother Kelly's has been a Long Island institution since the 1970s and has been written up in both the Wall Street Journal and Newsday, which is an unusual pair of outlets for a pizzeria.

It ships vacuum sealed rather than boxed, which is why it survives the journey better than most New York pizza sent through the mail.

Two fourteen inch pies, four to six servings total.

Umberto's in New Hyde Park is generally credited as the birthplace of grandma pizza, and it opened in 1965, three years after the Mets did.

It started as a staff meal. Umberto Corteo and his brothers made it the way their grandmothers had at home, in a rectangular pan, and it stayed almost entirely inside Nassau County for two decades before spreading across Long Island in the 1980s.

The technical difference from Sicilian is that grandma dough is unproofed and thin: it goes straight into the pan and into the oven, so it never rises.

Four pies, roughly ten inches square each: classic cheese, meatball, pepperoni and sausage.

Utopia is on Utopia Parkway in Whitestone, Queens, about four miles from Citi Field, and it is the only food item in this guide that is genuinely from the Mets' own borough.

They still hand roll and kettle boil, and they bake in an oven built in 1947, which predates the shop itself by thirty-four years.

Grub Street named them the absolute best bagel in New York, and BuzzFeed's Worth It picked them as the most worth it bagel in the city, which is a rare case of two very different outlets agreeing.

Ten bagels in a flavour of your choosing, half a pound each of nova lox, cream cheese, capers, and tomato and onion. It serves about ten people.

Saturday, September 19, 2026, 4:10 in the afternoon. Carlos Beltran's 15 comes down out of circulation before the game, along with his induction into the Mets Hall of Fame.

The cheapest pair was showing at nineteen dollars a seat with fees already included. Nineteen dollars to watch a number get retired is the best value in this entire guide and it is not close.

There is a reason it is that cheap, and the guide should say it. The Mets are 57-70, last in the National League East, and their playoff odds are effectively zero. Demand for the ceremony is real and demand for the baseball is not, which is a combination that almost never happens.

Beltran will be the ninth player with a retired Mets number and his plaque in Cooperstown already wears a Mets cap, making him the third player in the Hall in one, after Seaver and Piazza.