[Merkle923]

No, this isn't Harry Chiti forcing a smile at the 60-year old joke about him: Who was the only "Player To Be Named Later" in a trade who turned out to be his own "Player To Be Named Later"?

It's sorta true. The Mets bought him from Cleveland on April 26, 1962, got (as he noted bitterly afterwards) only 43 at bats for New York, and was assigned to the Cleveland farm at Jacksonville on June 15, 1962. As the Mets' writer of The Hackensack Record, John Ryan, put it: "This completed an earlier deal with Cleveland for guess who? Harry Chiti."

They returned him. There was no "Player To Be Named Later" in the original transaction.

A more bizarre truth about the Mets in '62 that gets buried behind the Chiti exaggeration, is that the Mets inexplicably used seven different catchers in 1962. They began with two: Joe Ginsberg and Hobie Landrith. Ginsberg was released on May 1 and Landith, who had been their first choice in the expansion draft, was sent to Baltimore as an actual PTBNL for Marv Throneberry on June 7. They traded for Sammy Taylor on April 26, Chiti, and Joe Pignatano on July 13. They also kept bringing up and sending back Chris Cannizzaro and Choo Choo Coleman from/to the International League. The season was barely over when they bought Norm Sherry from the Dodgers, and on July 1, 1963, traded for Jesse Gonder.

237 games into their history and the Mets had used nine different catchers. That the Mets were all kinds of different disasters on the field through 1967 is well documented. That their front office under George Weiss (and Casey Stengel) had no idea what it was doing, and no familiarity with the National League personnel, is less recognized.

Anyway, Harry actually did have the last laugh. In 2023 the Mets' bullpen coach was... his son Dom.