Among several iconic moments in Mets history, good and bad, stands this weird one: Wilmer Flores caught crying on the field, after apparently hearing he was being traded in a deal for Carlos Gomez at the 2015 trade deadline.
Seems like Wilmer found out the wrong news before his manager did?
“Not a clue; I’m on the bench, and all of a sudden, Wilmer is going in the on-deck circle and I hear the people yelling at him, ‘oh, we're going to miss you, Wilmer,’ and I'm thinking, what the hell are they talking about?” Terry Collins told Joe Benigno and Sal Licata Saturday at the Fanatics Fest in NYC. “So David Wright, who was off that night, comes and sits next to me and tells me (Flores) was traded, and I’m like, what? He said they traded him, that it was all over TV. I said no way, but he said yes, it’s there, that’s why they’re yelling.”
The thing is, Terry hadn’t heard from the source, whom he had a direct line to.
“I said, ‘David, you see that phone right there behind me? That goes to Sandy Alderson and if this guy's been traded, that phone's gonna ring,’ and I said he has not been traded.’ And David said, ‘I'm just gonna tell you he's been traded,’” Collins recalled. “Wilmer comes off the field and he's crying, so I take him down the little runway of the dugout, and said, ‘listen, you gotta straighten up, you have not been traded.’ He asked why this was happening, and I said, ‘Wilmer, I need you, you gotta go out and play.’ He might have been the only shortstop I had back then, and I said, ‘you gotta go out and play.’”
And as soon as that happened…
“So he goes back out to shortstop and he's still crying, and now the phone rings, and it’s Sandy, saying, ‘you gotta get him off the field,’” Terry said. “I asked if he was traded? And he said, ‘no, but he's crying,’ and I asked what he wanted me to do about it. So now I gotta take him out of the game because he was crying.”
As Joe put it, ‘thank God that trade fell through,’ and true for more than one reason – the Mets eventually got Yoenis Cespedes, and as Gomez slashed .242/.288/.383 the rest of the way, Cespedes put up a .287/.337/.604 line, and Flores went .296/.329/.479, so the Mets got the two best players of the three for the stretch run…and perhaps that, too, was by happenstance?
“I was in my office the day of the trade deadline, and my phone rings and it’s Jim Leyland, and he tells me, ‘we’re gonna trade Cespedes today, get him!’” Collins said. “I said, ‘Jim, I don’t have say on that,’ but it so happened Sandy’s sitting right next to me, so I hang the phone up and tell him. Sandy just nodded his head, and sure enough, when the game was over, he walked in and said, ‘guess what, I got Cespedes,’ and I said, ‘you gotta be kidding me.’ I was shocked they made that kind of a trade, because we’d made some moves, but it was the turning point, and Jim was right; this guy was a game-changer.”
“Evan and I were doing a show from Giants camp, and I’m asking right down to the deadline, and we didn’t think anything was going to happen,” Joe shot back. “Boy, when they made the deal, I was delirious.”