The original misguided left field experiment of the New York Mets: Todd Hundley.

Screen: MLB/Fox. Clips from New York Daily News. Good Fundies illustration.

As Mets first base prospect Dominic Smith continues to look both not particularly awkward and wildly out of place in the outfield, Met fans have shown their age with their analogues to this situation. Gen Zs recall Lucas Duda hanging out there in the beginning of this decade. Millenials recite Daniel Murphy and his infamous losing battle with the Miami sun. I am either a crusty ancient Millennial or baby faced Gen Xer depending on which publication you consult, and I find your examples adorable.

Old school defensive metrics aren’t reliable measures: if Todd Hundley was so slow that he only got to one single fly ball and caught it he would technically have committed zero errors and retired with a 1.000 fielding percentage. But the fancy and clearly very necessary measurements such as Outs Above Average and UZR/150 weren’t around back in Hundley’s very far away time of 20 years ago. Also, look at this:

Hundley had one of the lowest fielding percentages in all of MLB in 1998 among outfielders. He was dead last out of anyone who logged more than 130 innings there.

My only memory of watching Hundley for those 216.2 innings during the summer of ’98 is not reliable at all: it’s just him stressfully catching a fly ball that would be considered a routine play for anybody else. The SportsChannel New York emblem is on the upper right hand corner. Cable didn’t broadcast virtually every game back then, so I have to give those high flyers at SportsChannel credit for successfully advertising itself in my brain almost two decades after it ceased existing.

It was a little surprising to discover there was seemingly no footage of Hundley’s misadventures. You’d think there would at least be a mean-spirited collection on YouTube, or one of its lessers. TiVo wouldn’t debut for another year, but VCRs were still around; I am almost certain I didn’t imagine those machines. After asking the beautiful souls who I believed would have archived this and came up empty, I asked a bunch of Met fans for their recollections. Here are some of those:

David Roth, Deadspin:

I don’t even know if I have any recollection of it, but what I have is almost certainly some really Mandela Effect shit. I have a faint memory of him coming in on a ball and running like he was wearing a parking boot, but also that would be the memory I’d have, wouldn’t it. As with all things having to do with Vintage Mets Shit, I highly encourage you to reach out to Greg Prince. If it happened, he’ll remember it.

Greg Prince, Faith and Fear in Flushing; Piazza: Catcher, Slugger, Icon, Star:

Todd fought the ball and the ball won.

Jesse Spector, The Score, Dealbreaker, Rockies Magazine:

My big memory of it is kind of like a Vine. I want to say it was Mike Lieberthal who hit the ball, and when it was hit, the stadium kind of drained of air for a moment. It wasn’t gonna be a homer but the ball was smoked to left. Hundley started running in, and it was just like WHERE IS HE GOING???? It wasn’t like he was gonna play the carom, he thought he was gonna catch it. And the ball got to where he was, and he jumped, and it went way over his head because of course it did. Then he had to turn around and chase the ball, and I just had the thought that this was what I must have looked like as an outfielder before getting moved to catcher, but Hundley had the good fortune to be at Shea Stadium, with a fence, rather than Red Hook or Prospect Park, where I chased down so many balls I had similarly misjudged onto neighboring fields. The other part I remember is that nobody seemed upset at Hundley. It was just like, yeah, this is what happens when you put a catcher there. LOLMets before LOLMets was a thing, I guess, but really it was feeling bad for him because he was stuck out there and they kept hitting balls to left field, and at least in my memory it was a disaster every time, although I imagine he did make at least a couple of plays out there.

Andrew Lowden:

I feel like he did well that first night. I seem to remember him having to make a diving catch, and he didn’t mess it up. But, I was 8. It’s fuzzy. I just remember being excited to be seeing him play after owning a fake jersey of him, and him being in my crappy baseball video game.

Hector Perez:

My recollection is he didnt know how to go back on balls and threw like a catcher from left field.

Mike McCarthy:

He would do the death circle under the fly ball — later that year Chili Davis (with Yankees at the time ) was pressed into outfield service after a long stint at DH and said something along the lines of “ i may be a little rusty but I’m not going to pull a Hundley out there.”

Josh Eppard, Coheed and Cambria drummer:

I vividly remember Todd having fun with the fact that he was awful. After a routine fly ball that he actually caught he threw his fists in the air as the crowd sarcastically cheered. He was laughing. It was funny. I felt bad for the guy in a way.

Joe Pontillo:

I remember him and Piazza hit home runs in the same game and that was pretty exciting at the time.

Mets Daddy:

More players ran on him in LF than they did in his entire catching career.

@metssouthfla:

He made Murphy look like a gold glove out there

Mike Silva, Talkin’ Mets

He made a diving catch at Wrigley Field.

@JoeH0518

I remember he butchered a fly ball at Wrigley Field that was somehow even worse than Murph’s effort that day in Miami. Also felt bad cause he was one of the only bright spots on those awful 94–95 teams. Wasn’t his fault they brought in a HOF at C.

@itstrichy

I see your Hundley in LF and raise you a HOJO in CF.

Nights_King

It was slightly worse than Piazza trying to play 1st

Bishop_kate

I remember that he was on steroids.

Selftitle

I remember when he tried outfield. I rooted for him, but sort of knew it wouldn’t happen. Piazza also was a supernova that took the sting away pretty quickly. Not everyone can be a hero like sensational Mets outfielder Jay Payton, but I’ll be damned if Hundley didn’t try…

@danieldioguardi

I have a vague memory of a flyball hitting him in the head. Did that happen?

As I’ll grandly reveal below, some of these recollections were absolutely dead on. Definitely not the last one though. Had Hundley actually been clonked in the noggin we would have seen it every single day to the point where it lost all meaning. Him and Jose Canseco would have toured the country signing autographs. They would have called themselves something like The Knuckleheads even though that would not make sense. But I did have to think for a second before realizing all of this and following the logic, which tells you something about how bad he must have been and about the limitations of memory.