New York Mets

The New York Mets are a professional baseball club based in the borough of Queens, in New York City, New York. The Mets are a member of the Eastern Division of Major League Baseball's National League. From 1964 to the present, the Mets have played in Shea Stadium. more...

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The "Mets" name originates from the New York Metropolitans, an 1880s baseball club.

An expansion franchise, the club was founded in Manhattan in 1962. Then based in the historic Polo Grounds, the Mets shared the venue with the New York Jets for two years, until Shea was completed.

Franchise history

In 1957, the Brooklyn Dodgers and New York Giants abandoned New York for California, leaving the largest city in the United States without a National League franchise. Two years later, on July 27, 1959, attorney William Shea announced the formation of a third major baseball league, the Continental League. He tried to get several existing clubs to move, including the Philadelphia Phillies, the Pittsburgh Pirates, and the Cincinnati Reds, but no National League club was interested.

One of the CL's five charter members was a team in New York City. Joan Whitney Payson and her husband Charles Shipman Payson, former minority owners of the Giants, as the principal owners, along with George Herbert Walker, Jr. (uncle of future President George H. W. Bush), who served as vice president and treasurer until 1977. Former Giants director M. Donald Grant became chairman of the board. Grant and Joan Payson had been the only members of the Giants board to oppose the team's move west.

The existing leagues, who had considerably more autonomy at the time, responded with plans to add four new teams, two in each league. One of the new National League teams was to be in New York. The NL offered this new franchise to the CL's New York group, provided that they commit to building a new park. Shea told New York Mayor Robert Wagner, Jr. that he had to personally cable every National League owner and guarantee that the city would build a new facility.

The new team required a new name and many were suggested. Among the finalists were "Bees. "Burros", "Continentals", "Skyscrapers", "Jets", as well as the eventual runner-up, "Skyliners". Although Payson had admitted a preference for "Meadowlarks", the owners ultimately selected "Mets" because it was closely related to the club's already-existing corporate name "New York Metropolitan Baseball Club, Inc.", it hearkened back to "Metropolitans", a historically significant name used by an earlier New York team in the American Association from 1880 to 1887, and because its brevity would naturally fit in newspaper headlines. The name was received with broad approval among fans and press.

From the first, the Mets sought to appeal to the large contingent of former Giants and Dodgers fans as well as presumably those New Yorkers who disliked the New York Yankees. The Mets' team colors reflect this--orange for the Giants, blue for the Dodgers, although not precisely the same shade of those colors as used by the two former residents.

Read more at Wikipedia.org