As most of you know, I’m a big Mets fan, which means the past month or so has been a pretty rough time for me (or as my brother recently put it in a text message, “This was a very short baseball season”). But it got even worse last night, as I noticed that journeyman reliever Carl Edwards Jr., who was added to the Mets’ active roster a few days ago, does not have a period after the “JR” on his NOB. That doesn’t match outfielder Luis Robert Jr., who’s been wearing the period this season.
While I’m not 100% sure of this, I believe Edwards and Robert are the only two Mets ever to have a generational suffix included in their NOBs. According to the team’s all-time roster, five other Juniors have played for the Amazin’s (Sandy Alomar Jr., Tony Armas Jr., Gary Matthews Jr., John Mayberry Jr., and Eric Young Jr.), but none of them wore the generational suffix. (Update: Reader/commenter Kilo One notes that Albert Almora Jr. also played for the Mets, in 2021. But he didn’t wear the suffix either.)
Of course, generational suffixes don’t belong on NOBs to begin with, but that battle was fought and lost years ago. If they’re going to appear, I strongly prefer that they include the period. But either way, I think we can all agree that a team’s approach to this detail should be consistent. So at the start of this season, when Robert became the first Met ever to wear the suffix and they included the period, that essentially became their team style — or it should have. But then they omitted the period for Edwards’s jersey. This small but telling inconsistency is a pretty apt encapsulation of how the team can’t get out of its own way this year. I mean, if you can’t even get a period right, it’s no surprise that you can’t hit, pitch, or field either.
A few other notes:
Edwards has so far pitched in two games, both of which saw the Mets wearing their home pinstripes. It remains to be seen whether the period will be included on his other jerseys. (Update: Edwards has just been DFA’d, so he’ll never wear another Mets jersey.)
Robert and Edwards have appeared in the same game once — this past Sunday, April 26. (I didn’t watch that game, so I didn’t notice the period issue that day.) Robert hasn’t played since then and just landed on the IL this morning, and
the team’s bullpen roster has become such an endless revolving door that Edwards will probably have been DFA’d by the time Robert returns to action, so there’s a good chance thatEdwards has just been DFA’d, so their mismatched NOBs will never appear in the same game again. Phew.This isn’t the first time that Edwards has been uni-notable. From 2015 through 2019, when he pitched for the Cubs, he was single-digitized. That period included the Cubs’ 2016 championship, making Edwards one of the rare single-digitized pitchers to appear in the World Series. He’s gone on to wear seven different uni numbers in his career. That’s not an MLB record (pitcher Edwin Jackson wore 10 different numbers), but it’s getting up there.
