Mr. Met

Mr. Met
Mr. Met at the Mets workout at Citi Field April 5, 2009.
Team	New York Mets
Description	Man with a baseball for a head
Origin of name	Paramount Pictures' Mr. Met
First seen	April 11, 1962
Website	mlb.com/nym/fan_forum/mrmet.jsp

Mr. Met is the official mascot of Major League Baseball's New York Mets. He is a man with a large baseball for a head. He can be seen at Citi Field during Mets home games, has appeared in several commercials as part of ESPN's This is SportsCenter campaign, and has been elected into the Mascot Hall of Fame. On April 30, 2012, Forbes Magazine listed Mr. Met as the #1 mascot in all of sports.

Mr. Met was first introduced on the cover of game programs, yearbooks, and on scorecards in 1963, when the Mets were still playing at the Polo Grounds in northern Manhattan. Comic book artist Al Avison was at least one of the artists who contributed to the character's design. When the Mets moved to Shea Stadium in 1964, fans were introduced to a live costumed version, portrayed by team ticket office employee, Daniel J. Reilly. Mr. Met is believed to have been the first mascot in Major League Baseball to exist in human (as opposed to artistically rendered) form. He was also the first person on the Mets to be represented by a bobblehead doll.

In the 1960s, Mr. Met occasionally appeared in print with a female companion, Mrs. Met (originally called "Lady Met"), and less frequently with a group of three "little Mets" children; the smallest was a baby in Lady Met's arms. Mrs. Met was debuted in a short lived live costumed form in 1975 before being reintroduced in 2013.

In the mid-1970s, the Metropolitans franchise began to dissolve the Mr. Met mascot. In 1976, he appeared on the cover of the New York Mets Official Yearbook. After that time, he was not utilized in their advertising and he remained absent for almost 20 years. He was phased out prior to the upsurge in mascot popularity caused by The Famous Chicken and the Phillie Phanatic in the late '70s. In 1979, after the Mets discontinued use of Mr. Met, the team briefly experimented with a new mascot named "Mettle the mule" that was a living animal that would parade along the foul lines prior to a game.