But everything changed when the Mets arrived. Then 14, Gold was hooked, even if this New York team was incredibly awful.

He started a newsletter about the team’s travails called Mets Maze. With a tape recorder he received for his bar mitzvah, he recorded Mets radio broadcasts, including the team’s first spring training game. He rode the subway to the Polo Grounds, where he sat alone in right field keeping score as the team proceeded to lose a record 120 games in 1962.

“Can you imagine rooting for a team that lost 75 percent of its games?” Gold asked.

Sitting in his local synagogue during the High Holy Days, he would pass slips of paper with baseball trivia questions on them to Stuart Sternberg, a family friend and the current owner of the Tampa Bay Rays.

“He has the most amazing recall and facts,” Sternberg said. “It’s mind-boggling.”

Indeed, all these years later, Gold spits out data about players like Joe Christopher, Tim Harkness and Rod Kanehl — mainstays on those early, overwhelmed Mets teams — the way the current crop of fans might obsess over Michael Conforto’s wins above replacement, or Matt Harvey’s strikeout-to-walk ratio. The only difference is that Conforto and Harvey are good.

As his own children grew up, Gold often took them to Shea Stadium and then later to Citi Field. Gold’s Horseradish also became a Mets sponsor, so he was able to work with team executives to deliver mustard to the stadium while producing promotional bobbleheads.

Yet through it all, Gold never had the time to make it to Florida.

“I’ve always been encumbered,” Gold said as he walked to a training field on Friday to watch David Wright cut off throws from the outfield.