Sunday School: Forgotten Faces of Flushing #53 : The Other Joe Frazier: The Mets Manager Who Won More Than You Remember

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 curling pages of old yearbooks, and rediscover the players who once made you pause mid potato knish and mutter, “Hold on… he was a Met, right?”

We closed out 2025 by revisiting one of the strangest detours in Mets history, when Tom Seaver, Ron Swoboda, Ralph Kiner and Yogi Berra paid a visit to Sing Sing prison, a reminder that Mets history rarely moves in a straight line and is far more comfortable wandering off into side quests.

Now, as we flip the calendar to 2026 and kick off the fifty third installment of Forgotten Faces of Flushing, we are staying in the neighborhood of overlooked impact, but shifting from visitors to the warden’s office to a man who actually ran the place, at least for a little while. This week’s subject is a Mets manager whose name rarely comes up in barroom arguments or talk radio debates, which is strange, because by one very inconvenient metric he outperformed several skippers who are remembered far more fondly.

Joe Frazier managed the Mets to a better winning percentage than Terry Collins, Dallas Green, Joe Torre and Art Howe. Read that again slowly. Let it sit. You can check the math. I did. Twice. And yet, if you mention Joe Frazier at Citi Field, most fans will assume you are either talking about the boxer or asking for directions to the nearest cheesesteak.

So before we dig into how this happened, why it happened, and how it somehow slipped through the cracks of Mets memory, class is now in session. Because Forgotten Faces is not just about the guys who barely played. Sometimes it is about the guys who did the job better than advertised and were still quietly erased anyway.

Joe Frazier was a baseball lifer in the purest sense of the phrase, the kind of guy who did not so much choose baseball as simply never leave it. Long before he ever sat in the Mets dugout, he had already lived several baseball lives as a player, a grinder, a pinch hitter, a minor league star, a manager, a scout, and the kind of steady presence organizations leaned on when they wanted someone who understood how the game actually worked. He played briefly in the majors in the forties and fifties, mostly as a left handed bat off the bench, led a league in pinch hits once, homered in his final big league at bat, and then kept going when the spotlight moved on without him. Baseball was not something he did. It was where he lived.

By the time the Mets came into his life, Frazier had already paid every imaginable due. He had managed at seemingly every minor league stop that involved a bus ride and bad coffee, won championships, taught fundamentals, preached hustle, and earned a reputation as a man who expected players to care as much as he did. When he took over the Tidewater Tides in 1975, he dragged a last place team into a pennant, a playoff run, and a Junior World Series appearance, earning Minor League Manager of the Year honors and the kind of quiet respect that does not come with billboards. He promised effort, and he delivered it. The Mets noticed.

So when the Mets fired Yogi Berra late in 1975 and handed the team to Roy McMillan for a 53 game interim audition, they did not exactly get the spark they were hoping for. McMillan, who could easily qualify for his own Forgotten Faces installment someday, guided the club to a perfectly Metsian 26 and 27 finish that inspired neither panic nor confidence and mostly confirmed that the organization still had no idea where it was headed. Looking for stability in an organization that rarely recognized it when it walked into the room, the Mets landed on Joe Frazier. He arrived without flash, without slogans, and without the aura of celebrity that usually comes with the job in New York. He talked about fundamentals. He talked about hustle. He talked about teaching. It was not sexy, but in a strange way, it worked. In 1976, amid injuries, ownership headaches, and an offense that often felt optional, Frazier guided the Mets to an 86 win season, quietly posting a better winning percentage than several managers whose names loom far larger in franchise lore.

Players respected him. Some even loved him. Joe Torre, who would eventually take his job, was one of his biggest supporters, saying Frazier always knew when to offer encouragement and when to apply a well placed kick. Frazier was old school without being cruel, demanding without being distant. He believed if you did not hate losing, you had no business being there. He also believed in trying everything he could to win with what he had, which led to constant lineup changes and a reputation for tinkering that frustrated some players and made perfect sense when you looked at the roster he was handed.

By 1977, the wheels came off, not because Frazier forgot how to manage, but because the Mets forgot how to function. Ownership pinched pennies during the dawn of free agency, the lineup had holes you could drive the Shea Stadium grounds crew through, and frustration seeped into every corner of the clubhouse. Frazier juggled lineups, tried to hold the room together, and absorbed the blame that almost always lands on the manager when the people upstairs refuse to look in the mirror. After a brutal start, he was fired and replaced by Torre, beginning a stretch of Mets baseball that would spiral far beyond anything Frazier could have stopped.

History has been kinder to the Mets managers who came after him, even though the numbers suggest Frazier deserved better. He managed parts of two seasons, posted a winning record, and left behind no scandals, no sound bites, and no signature moments for highlight reels. What he left instead was evidence that competence once existed here, briefly, quietly, and without applause. He stayed in the game afterward as a scout, because of course he did, and because baseball was never going to let him go even if it tried.

Joe Frazier died in 2011, still remembered by those who knew him as fiercely competitive, deeply loyal, and allergic to losing in any form, including chess games with his kids. He was not flashy enough to become a Mets folk hero, not tragic enough to become a cautionary tale, and not famous enough to demand nostalgia on command. Which is precisely why he belongs here. Forgotten Faces of Flushing has always been about the people who mattered more than we remember, and Joe Frazier mattered a lot more than history ever bothered to note.