Sunday School: Forgotten Faces of Flushing #50 : Randy “Moose” Milligan The Mets Minor League Monster Who Helped Discover David Wright

Welcome back to Sunday School: Forgotten Faces of Flushing, our weekly rummage through the Mets attic, where we brush the dust off the bubble gum cards, flip through the yearbooks that still smell faintly of pretzels, and rediscover the players who made you pause mid potato knish and mutter, Hold on, he was a Met, right?

Last week, we took a sentimental stroll through Shea Stadium’s old organ loft and revisited the legacy of Jane Jarvis, the musical magician who could turn a rain delay into Gershwin and a bases-loaded jam into a lounge act. She barely touched the stat sheet, yet her influence could still power half the bulbs in the old Big Apple Home Run sign. This week, we stay with that theme of tiny official footprints and outsized impact, but we’re heading in a very different direction. Our subject this time logged three games for the Mets, stepped into the batter’s box twice, never recorded a hit, never put a ball in play, and barely made enough noise to wake the guy sleeping in Loge. And yet Randy “Moose” Milligan somehow played a role in shaping the future of the franchise in a way that would make your head spin if you weren’t already dizzy from decades of Mets baseball.

Milligan’s Mets career on the field was the baseball equivalent of a Stan Lee cameo in a Marvel movie. Blink and you missed it. Turn to grab a pretzel and you missed it twice. But before he became the scout who discovered a polite, baby-faced kid from Virginia named David Wright, Milligan was one of the most dangerous minor league hitters the Mets ever developed. The organization signed him as a 19-year-old in 1981, a stocky first baseman with a sweet right-handed swing and an even sweeter sense of the strike zone. And he didn’t just hit. He torched. He scorched. He put up numbers that made otherwise rational baseball men start checking to see if the scorekeepers in Lynchburg and Jackson were inflating stats as a practical joke. He hit .291 with a .408 on base percentage over six minor league seasons, walked so often pitchers threatened to file complaints, and posted a 1987 season in Tidewater that looked like something printed on a Wheaties box. Twenty-nine homers, 103 runs driven in, an OPS north of 1.000, and by the time he picked up his International League MVP trophy, Mets fans were already daydreaming about the first baseman of the future.

Then he got the call. And his entire Mets career came and went in a single very short sentence. Three games. Two plate appearances. One walk. One strikeout. Zero official at-bats. Poof. Gone. If you listened closely, you could almost hear Shea Stadium whisper, Wait, was that Moose Milligan? Was he just here? But the Mets of 1987 were a crowded house, the kind of roster that made young first basemen feel like they were standing outside Studio 54 hoping the doorman liked their shirt. So Milligan headed off to other cities and other lineups and carved out a perfectly respectable big league career in places where the depth chart was less of a traffic jam.

But here’s where the plot swerves. Because Randy Milligan wasn’t done with the Mets. Not by a long shot. Fast forward to the early 2000s. Milligan was back with the organization, this time as a scout covering the Mid-Atlantic region. And down in Chesapeake, Virginia, was a high-school third baseman with a smooth swing, a good head on his shoulders, and posters on his wall of, of all people, Randy Milligan. David Wright admired Milligan before he was even old enough to legally ride the Cyclone without a parent. And once Milligan laid eyes on the kid, the admiration became mutual. Milligan pushed hard for Wright. He didn’t just recommend him. He advocated him into existence as a Met. He pounded the table. He insisted this kid was the real thing. That the swing was real, the strike-zone judgment was real, and the maturity was so off the charts you half wondered if he was actually 30 and just really moisturized.

The Mets listened. And with the 38th pick of the 2002 draft, they selected David Wright. You know the rest. Captain America. Face of the franchise. Future number-retired guy. The heart and soul of an entire era of Mets baseball. And somewhere behind that story, like a quiet but important footnote, is Moose Milligan, the man who saw the future before most of the organization even knew where to look.

So yes, Randy Milligan’s playing career with the Mets was so brief it barely qualifies as a cup of coffee. It was more like the steam rising off the cup. But what he left behind is impossible to ignore. He was one of the most productive hitters the Mets ever developed in the minors. He was a patient, powerful first baseman who simply arrived at the wrong time in Mets roster history. And he became the scout whose conviction helped bring David Wright into the Mets universe. Some of the Forgotten Faces of Flushing leave you with a funny anecdote. Some leave you with a stat line that makes you grin. Randy Milligan left the Mets with a cornerstone. Not bad for a guy who technically retired from the franchise with a perfect zero batting average.