Reflecting on the Mets' midgame 'trade' of Wilmer Flores from 2015

Even a decade later, the texts, the tweets, the tears remain vivid snapshots from a surrealistic late July night at Citi Field.

The texts came first. As I was there covering the game for Newsday that evening, with the clock ticking down to the trade deadline, the wide net cast for industry chatter was reeling in some intel regarding a potential Wilmer Flores-for-Carlos Gomez swap that seemed to be gaining momentum.

Before long, the Mets had agreed on a deal, according to sources, that would indeed send Flores and a wild but promising 25-year-old righthander named Zack Wheeler to the Brewers for Gomez, who had blossomed into a two-time All-Star centerfielder since being shipped out of Flushing in the multi-player Johan Santana trade on Jan. 29, 2008.

Of course, those texts included the magic words “pending physicals” and with Wheeler still rehabbing from Tommy John surgery, there remained hurdles to clear. Of course, nine times out of 10, the handshake deal sails through, and it’s only a matter of hours before the team gives an official announcement.

Little did I know, this was one of those 10th times, but the way this crazy mess of a night got there was unlike anything I’ve experienced in this business — before or after. As many of us worked furiously to write quick accounts of the trade going down while the Mets were getting thumped on the field by the Padres, well, that’s when the tweets took center stage.

Twitter, now X, had been in existence for nine years when the Mets decided to trade Flores to Milwaukee. And it was the first place that reporters went with breaking news in 2015. But until the seventh inning of that July 29 game, we hadn’t witnessed the real-time impact on current surroundings, and in this case, Flores got a standing ovation — first when he stepped to the plate, and even louder after a routine grounder to short.

By then, most if not all of the 24,804 cell phone-holding fans at Citi knew Flores was ticketed out of Flushing, but apparently not manager Terry Collins, who sent him back out for the top of the eighth inning. For those of us watching, that was a head-scratcher. How could Flores continue to play and risk an injury scuttling the deal? We just chalked it up to the Mets doing more Mets-ing, a baffling organization practicing more deadline negligence, another episode of #LOLMets.

One glance at Flores, however, and it was hard not to feel sympathy for a player who had been a Met since signing at the age of 16. Upon trotting out to shortstop, you could see Flores’ eyes welling up. Then the tears began flowing.

Flores repeatedly wiped his eyes on his jersey — he was wearing a glove, after all, trying to field the position — and the whole thing just got more ridiculous by the minute. It wasn’t until the ninth inning, when Collins finally sent up Ruben Tejada to bat for Flores, that the on-field drama mercifully drew to a close.

“Somebody came to me and said, 'Wilmer's crying,' " Collins said that night, clearly agitated. “I said, ‘Why?’ Well, he got traded. To who? For what? I didn't know.”

That’s because Collins never got a phone call from the front office telling him a trade was in the works, which is standard procedure to have a player removed from the game. But the deal was never finalized, of course, as sources relayed to members of the media that it was Gomez who didn’t pass the Mets’ medical scrutiny — right on Newsday’s print-edition deadline, forcing some frantic, last-second back-page juggling.

Regardless, Collins didn’t appreciate being left in limbo, and as a result, being an accomplice to having a crushed Flores fight back tears on a baseball field.

“How would you react?" Collins said. “You think these guys are stone-cold robots? They're not. They're human beings who have emotions. And this kid's upset.”

Collins was, too, and went on a tangential rant about fans staring at their cell phones rather than watching the game. The manager wasn’t wrong. But the Flores Fiasco was the perfect storm: a swirling combination of trade-deadline hysteria, social-media saturation and the Mets’ persistent knack for self-sabotage.

As general manager Sandy Alderson later said, “Unfortunately social media got ahead of the facts . . . It’s one of those things that happens today with modern communications."

But it hasn’t happened since. Not to the degree of Flores nearly sobbing as he stood at shortstop, the camera zooming in on his face. Players still get traded midgame, which is what coined the term “hug watch” — the dugout goodbyes with teammates as the ex heads for the door. But I highly doubt we’ll ever see someone subjected to the same emotional whiplash, stoked by a Twitter-savvy crowd and the manager’s unwitting participation, that Flores went through that July 29 night at Citi Field a decade ago.