3 best Mets bullpen duos of a lefty and righty in team history

3) Armando Benitez and John Franco

One of the most popular players in Mets history was lefty John Franco. And nobody was happier to be a Met than Franco when he came over to the Mets from the Reds to start the 1990 season.

But he wasn’t all too happy when the Mets acquired the hard-throwing right hander Armando Benitez and anointed him as “the closer.” By the time Benitez was brought in, Franco was already 38 years old and, after having nine fairly effective seasons as the Mets closer, he was not the flamethrower teams were looking for to come out of the pen late in a game.

Franco’s soft-tossing screwball was a perfect compliment to Benitez’s hard-throwing, “I don’t know where the hell it’s going” fastball. Franco may not have liked the idea, but the tandem worked, for a while at least.

Benitez and Franco would be a tandem out of the Mets pen for 3 ½ seasons. Franco would be forced to sit out the entire 2002 season due to injury.

During that time period, Benitez would appear in 333 games, winning 18 and saving 160, with a 2.70 ERA. Franco, meanwhile, would appear in 204 games, winning 11 and saving 27, with an ERA of 3.50.

And while the fans always adored John Franco, Armando Benitez, for all of his dominance, became the target of the fans’ ire, as he often faltered in key situations.

Even though they may have been teammates for relatively short periods of time, ya gotta love these lefty right duos the Mets have had over the years.