No one a Met more through and through than Ed Kranepool

Mets legendary lifer Ed Kranepool, who passed away after suffering from cardiac arrest while watching his beloved Mets on Sunday, recently recalled his first plane trip and big-league game.Only 17, he’d just signed with the Mets as a bonus baby for $85,000 out of James Monroe High School in The Bronx, and team higher-ups put him on an airplane to join the inaugural 1962 Mets team out in Los Angeles, where they were playing the Dodgers.Club honchos hoped he would pick up things from the pros.

Instead, it nearly scared him and scarred him.Wouldn’t you know it? In his first game under contract, Kranepool watched Sandy Koufax, the greatest pitcher of that generation and maybe any generation, no-hit that terrible Mets team.Which spurred the teenaged Kranepool to turn on the bench to manager Casey Stengel and remark, “What have I gotten myself into?”Kranepool, ever the competitor, was the one 1962 Met who told me a month ago that he was pulling for the fantastically inept White Sox to break that Mets team’s record of 120 defeats.

Even 62 years later, he was hopeful to lose what small association he had with professional baseball’s version of the Bad News Bears.To be fair, Kranepool never should be linked as any sort of historical, hysterical loser because he was anything but that.Beyond that, he wasn’t even old enough to vote when he first donned his Mets uni, played only three games for that dreadful ’62 team, and batted only six times.Kranepool was merely summoned to LA to learn, and good for him that he never picked up bad habits.

The most famously terrible player on those ’62 Mets was Marv Throneberry, and while Kranepool was also mostly a first baseman throughout his admirable 18-year career — all with the Mets — he knew better than to emulate the ironically named Marvelous Marv.Kranepool by all rights should be recalled not as an occasional observer to early history and buffoonery but for his association with the Miracle 1969 Mets, and also ...