This went over very well last week, when The Common Man put up the transactional family trees of Chuck Knoblauch and Glenn Davis, so it’s going to become a regular feature here on The Platoon Advantage. Today, we reach far back into baseball history to find a Mets draft pick that is still incredibly important to the team today.In 1967, with the 4th overall pick in the amateur draft, the Mets chose a big, 17-year old, Pennsylvania lefty named Jon Matlack. Matlack worked his way up through the system and debuted in July of 1971, throwing seven innings of two-run ball in a Mets loss. That was the first of 199 starts that Matlack would ultimately make for the Mets, for whom he’d win 82 games with a 3.03 ERA and 27.0 Wins Above Replacement. That’s good value. But Matlack wasn’t done.
The Mets slowly deteriorated through the mid-1970s, until they finally caved in to a proper rebuilding effort and sent away Tom Seaver and Dave Kingman on June 15, 1977, in what became known as the Midnight Massacre. As The Common Man has previously written, it actually wasn’t all that bad of a day for the Mets in the long run. After the season was over, the Mets continued to purge, and dealt away their only real remaining players of value in Matlack and John Milner in a complicated four-team deal. They really didn’t get back a lot. Willie Montanez was a former Wunderkind who was a pretty bad 1B, Ken Henderson was a former star on his last legs, and Tom Grieve (Ben’s father) was a decent 4th outfielder. But from that deal would spring forth an abundance of players, some of whom would lead the Mets to glory, some to ruin, and one of whom is still leading the team today. Observe:
