Sunday School: Forgotten Faces of Flushing #33 :The Day Captain Kirk Went Where No Met Had Gone Before

Welcome back to the 33rd edition of Sunday School: The Forgotten Faces of Flushing, our weekly stroll through the Mets’ attic, where we rummage past the cobwebbed pennants and yellowing scorecards to find the players who made you say, “Oh yeah… that guy!”

Last week, we zigzagged our way through the career of Timo Pérez, the midseason pickup from Japan who went from the Hiroshima Toyo Carp to batting leadoff in the World Series in about the time it takes to binge-watch a Netflix show.

This week, we stay in the outfield but trade in the postseason spotlight for a Citi Field cult favorite: Kirk Nieuwenhuis.

With his flowing locks and penchant for late-inning drama, Nieuwenhuis felt like the baseball version of a garage band that only played encores. He’d spend weeks quietly in the background, then suddenly step to the plate in the 9th and crank a game-tying homer. At his best, he was clutch, scrappy, and capable of feats like becoming the first Met to homer three times in a home game. At his worst… well, let’s just say there’s a reason pitchers occasionally pitched to him with the bases loaded.

Kirk’s Mets career (2012–2015) was a carousel ride of promotions, demotions, and occasional heroics, with just enough magic to keep you believing there might be another big moment waiting around the corner.

Kirk Nieuwenhuis (and yes, every writer triple-checked that spelling) was drafted by the Mets in the third round of the 2008 draft out of Azusa Pacific University in California. He was a football player in high school, a centerfielder in college, and the proud owner of a last name that looked like it belonged on the back of a Dutch cycling jersey.

By 2012, after steadily working his way through the minors, Kirk got his shot. The Mets called him up in April, and for the first couple months, he was one of those pleasant surprises you don’t see coming — hitting .297 by mid-June, making diving catches in center, and looking like he might be the latest in a line of gritty Mets outfielders.

The thing about Nieuwenhuis was that he wasn’t an everyday star… but boy, could he produce a moment. He hit his first career homer off Cliff Lee in May 2012. He had multiple walk-off hits. And he seemed to save his best for the big stage — or at least the big inning.

His defining regular-season highlight came on July 12, 2015. In a Sunday matinee against the Diamondbacks, Nieuwenhuis — who had been traded to the Angels earlier that season, then reacquired by the Mets in a rare baseball boomerang — did something no Met had ever done: three home runs in one game at Citi Field. The crowd gave him multiple standing ovations, and for one day, Kirk was the king of Queens.

Though he was never a locked-in starter, Nieuwenhuis rode the wave of the magical 2015 Mets run all the way to the Fall Classic. He appeared in four postseason games — one in the NLCS and three in the World Series — mostly as a late-inning defensive replacement or pinch-hitter. He went hitless in his four at-bats, but for a player who had been traded away just months earlier, simply suiting up for a pennant winner was a twist ending worthy of its own standing ovation.

He also got to pinch-hit in the World Series, grounding out in his lone at-bat. But if you blinked, you might have missed him — which, in a way, was kind of the story of his Mets career.

After 2015, Nieuwenhuis signed with Milwaukee, played 125 games for the Brewers in 2016, and then drifted between Triple-A and short stints in the majors before retiring.

In the grand tapestry of Mets history, Kirk Nieuwenhuis is a small but memorable thread — the long-haired underdog who could frustrate you for weeks, then suddenly make you leap off the couch. He was the baseball equivalent of finding a $20 bill in an old pair of jeans: you didn’t expect it, you couldn’t count on it happening again, but man, it felt great when it did.