In a 1971 column about baseball player Ron Swoboda, New York Times sportswriter Red Smith went for a bit of linguistic razzle-dazzle. On the subject of the outfielder’s recent trade to the Yankees, Smith described some of the outfielder’s past work—namely, an incident in which he had gotten locked in a batting cage right when he was called to be ready to pinch-hit—as “superbly Metsian.”
The Mets had existed as a franchise for less than a decade at the time. They had not had a singular on-field identity during that span—in fact, they’d famously had the opposite, going from worst to first as they won the 1969 World Series.