New York's National League baseball franchise, the New York Mets, rose from the ashes of two teams which departed for California in the 1950s. Attired in blue and orange—colors borrowed from the Dodgers and Giants, respectively—the club began play in 1962 at the Polo Grounds in Manhattan. A new home in Queens, Shea Stadium, opened two years later. In contrast to the corporate-run Yankees, the Mets positioned themselves as scrappy, lovable underdogs, and their Keystone Kops style of play was excused as endearing ineptitude. When the team won its first world championship, improbably, in 1969, the "Miracle Mets" took blue-collar New York by storm. The stars of that era, particularly pitchers Tom Seaver and Tug McGraw, became folk heroes. The club fell on hard times in the late 1970s, but returned to baseball's pinnacle in 1986 on the backs on a new generation of stars led by Dwight Gooden and Darryl Strawberry.

Further Reading:

Honig, Donald. The New York Mets: The First Quarter Century. New York, New York, Crown, 1986.

Jackson, Kenneth T. The Encyclopedia of New York City. New Haven, Connecticut, Yale University Press, 1995.