Sometimes you really have to marvel at how the Mets keep finding new ways to step in it. Yesterday was a classic example.
Here’s the deal: The Mets have two costumed mascots — Mr. Met and Mrs. Met — each of whom has their own Twitter account. Does any mascot other than Gritty really need a Twitter account? Probably not, but whatever — it’s harmless enough, and it gives the team’s social media intern something to do.
But the intern must have been overextended lately, or something like that, because Mrs. Met announced yesterday that she’ll no longer be tweeting from her own account. Instead, she’ll be tweeting from Mr. Met’s account:
My content is moving!
For all of my updates going forward, please follow @MrMet. pic.twitter.com/2uN07pdoaD
— Mrs. Met (@mrsmet) May 6, 2024
As I’m writing this, Mrs. Met’s tweet has generated 166 replies (I’m sure it’ll be more by the time you read this), most of which break down into the following categories:
- “This is sexist, women’s voices shouldn’t be silenced.”
- “Dump him, Mrs. Met. I’d never treat you this way!”
- “Mrs. Met, are you okay? Blink twice if you’re okay.”
- “Was Mr. Met cheating? A shared social media account always means someone was cheating!”
- “Mrs. Met, are you moving over to OnlyFans?”
- “Are the Mets so fucking lame that they can’t maintain a separate account for each mascot?”
Okay, so some of those responses are just the usual performative social media silliness. But seriously, why would they need to shut down one mascot’s account? And while I don’t really think of Mrs. Met as a major force for feminism or girl power, I can imagine that an eight-year-old girl might view her that way, so it does seem a little fucked up that the female mascot’s voice is just getting folded into the male mascot’s account. I mean, what kind of message does that send?
Sigh. Only the Mets.
As long as we’re talking about Mrs. Met, it’s worth noting that the team’s original female mascot character was called Lady Met. I don’t believe there was ever a live/costumed version of her — just a cartoon character, as seen on this old pennant, circa 1970:
The team turned Lady Met into a live mascot in 1975 and also changed her name to Mrs. Met. The girl playing her was a 17-year-old high school student named Lynn Farrell, who I interviewed in 2011. In those days, Mr. and Mrs. Met would spend a few innings of each game roaming through the stands and signing autographs:
Amazingly, the guy playing Mr. Met was Lynn Farrell’s real-life boyfriend at the time. They later got hitched and remained married for 25 years. They really were Mr. and Mrs. Met!
Fortunately, there was no such thing as social media in those days.
At least they changed the profile name to “Mr. & Mrs. Met”.
This is the first time I’ve noticed that the Mr. Met mascot and the Mr. Met logo/cartoon image have seams facing different directions. I wonder if there is a world where Mr. and Mrs. Met mascots’ behavioral health can be assessed based on whether it’s a “4 seam fastball” or “2 seam fastball” kind of day.
“Was Mr. Met cheating? A shared social media account always means someone was cheating!”
“Are the Mets so fucking lame that they can’t maintain a separate account for each mascot?”
HA!
I mean this misstep was worth it just for these responses.
I would suppose there simply isn’t enough content to populate two mascot social media accounts, because, as you said, why does a mascot have one to begin with. Just shut them both down and document the antics of Mr & Mrs Met on the team’s regular social media account. As I understand it more content is always better, so having the mascot related content on team’s singular account just helps drive traffic and is better than sparser content spread out across multiple accounts.
I’m not a Mets fan but I’d hate it if they used the regular social media account. They need a serious account for game updates, player movement, actual news. I can’t imagine sorting through mascot updates to get that news.
I don’t follow any of my own teams mascots. Just Gritty for the pure performance art of it
Feels like there are two reasons for this:
1) Probably not enough content to justify both accounts and the audiences overlapped on both that it wasn’t bringing anything new by maintaining it.
2) Trying to spare whoever is working in the marketing department from what have to be the filthiest DMs and replies on MLB Twitter. It’s bad enough Twitter can’t filter out porn bots, but do we have to have people pretending to be edgy when it comes to the team mascot? Sheesh.
Seems reasonable, and I’d also add:
3) The decline in service usability and post reach makes Twitter a rapidly decreasingly useful platform for regular businesses. Account consolidation permits staff to spend more time on work for other platforms.
4) Twitter all but requires enterprises to pay a fee for an account to be effective, which again tends to push enterprises to reduce the number of accounts they maintain.
I think Mrs. Met tweeted something about Cincinnati chili being a staple of Cleveland cuisine. You can’t recover from that. Her account had to go.
I’ll say this for Mrs. Met, I’ve never seen Mr. Met with a blue ball.
I heard she went on Rogan, got high, and mimed some edgy shit in response to his questions. The consequences were inevitable.
I think I read somewhere that Mrs. Met admitted to shooting an untrainable dog. If you see it on the internet, it must be true.
Mrs. Met was hit with a gag order.
Love the responses, hilarious.
Your “days remaining at Uni Watch” countdown reminds me of being 14 with summer break coming up, haha. It’s also that time of year, the summer of Paul!
Lots of “companies” are leaving Twitter/X and attempting to reduce their footprint there as users migrate. FWIW, looks like the Dodgers are the only MLB team to embrace Bluesky so far. More should probably expand their social media there…
Social media management has been a full-time job for years now. Major brands don’t give interns the password.
Exactly. I know that half of all social media is being sneery about other people on social media, but those are real writing jobs — I know a few aspiring writers who’ve had them — and Paul knows first-hand that there’s not as many of those as there used to be.
Yeah, that rubbed me the wrong way too
Yeah I agree his comment felt a little dismissive to professionals in that line of work
The user experience got so bad that I deleted my account there months ago. About the only unique account I miss is the Oilers Day by Day, looking back on Edmonton’s NHL journey 40 years back each day (and other related minutiae). That account will be hitting the 1984 Finals on Friday.
I love that story about the Mr and Mrs Met couple who were a real couple. Hope that Mrs Met will relax: no more pressure to produce stupid content on her account, time to chill out and enjoy life a little more.
Why is she Mrs. Met and not Ms. Met? Mrs. requires that she be married to Mr. Met, and therefore that they’re a couple, and her identity centered on his. How do you get to be Mrs. Met? You marry Mr. Met. Ms. Met can exist independently of Mr. Met; Ms. Met could be Mr. Met’s sister, or just a fellow Met ultra-fan with no relationship to Mr. Met. Mrs. Met also implies that prior to marrying Mr. Met, she had some other name and identity. Was Mrs. Met née Ms. Dodger or Giant?
That question rankles me much more than her Twitter account being rolled into a shared account. I don’t much use Twitter other than opening links here and a couple other sites, but I would find it odd for teams with multiple mascots like the Racing Sausages to have independent accounts for each mascot.
Agree. This rankles me every time I see the two Mets mascots.
So, Mr. & Ms. Met became the Mets. Better than the Metses.
Very sexist of the team. Cancel the female account and blend it with the male account. Guess the Mets aren’t for womens rights.
perhaps not as interesting but the sum of the digits in the final score of the wolves/nuggets game (106 to 80) is also the same as the sum of the digits in 5280 (15)
Breaking: NY Mets support repeal of 19th amendment. Says spokesman: “One household/ballpark, one vote.”
As a thought experiment, what would have happened if they closed Mr. Met’s account and rolled it into Mrs. Met?
Probably, the other half of the internet would have got angry instead. There’s a reason I don’t use TAFKATwitter anymore.
Maybe this is a little late Paul but maybe you should have your time remaining countdown in the form of a uniform number. Today could have been Steve Yzerman, tomorrow could be Peyton Manning and so forth.
Excellent idea. Thank you!!
The Mrs. Met thing is like those couples who share an email address, which is to say: weird.
Dang, you could’ve riffed on Johnny Cash and counted down your favorite uniforms of all time, one each day for the last three weeks.
“Their showing the Citi Connects outside my cell, I’ve got 23 uniforms to go…” You can still do it!
It’s a well known fact that the Phanatic slept with Mrs. Met somewhere around 2009. I’m not sure if that’s considered “cheating”, because there’s no woman on the planet that could resist the Phanatic’s advances, so it pretty much counts as a hall pass. The pictures are on the ‘net (I’m pretty sure it was a Conan or Fallon sketch).
We won’t need Maury to tell us who the father is, if Mrs. Met has a half green fur baby!
FWIW, Mrs. Met’s Twitter account made news last year for, um, reasons.
Can’t help but wonder if that played a part.
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