There are plenty of ways in which Sean Manaea, left-handed starting pitcher for the New York Mets, is not like you or me. He's 6-foot-5, he can throw a baseball 90 miles an hour and make it spin and curve in fascinating ways. Also 40,000 people watch him do his job live every time he's at work.
But in one crucial way he is in fact just like you and me: he rides the subway to the office.
"On the train, my routine is grab a coffee, sit down, or stand up if there's no seats," he told Streetsblog on a recent ride-along on the 7 train from Grand Central to Citi Field. "I love playing chess, so, it's a good time to be on my phone and play chess or browse Reddit or something like that. Because when I'm at the field, I'm barely on my phone, so it's the last thing I do before getting into work mode, baseball mode. For me, [the subway is] a nice and relaxing way to start my day, and then on the way home, kind of do the same thing, just unwind a little bit."
Manaea, who signed a one-year contract with the Mets for the 2024 season and then re-upped with the team on a three-year deal starting this year, takes the 7 train to Citi Field on most game days, and even around the city when exploring his recently adopted home. He said that for him and his wife, it made sense to experience the city the way everyone else does, which meant when he found a place near Central Park in 2024, and then when he moved before the 2025 season, he also wanted to make sure it had easy subway access.
"When we signed here it was like, 'What's unique about New York?' I'd taken the subway before when I was playing on other teams, to go to Citi Field or Yankee Stadium. [When] I'm in a new city or a new town, I want to experience what it's like. So last year when we were looking at apartments, it was like, 'Can I take the train [to Citi Field] if I wanted to?' And it was super easy. It became part of my routine and I loved it."
Athletes riding public transportation wasn't always considered a newsworthy phenomenon. Jackie Robinson lived in East Flatbush and Gil Hodges lived in Midwood when they were stars for the Brooklyn Dodgers. But as salaries spiked and players became bigger celebrities, the siren song of the suburbs called out to more and more local stars and broadcasters.
But some players stuck with the city and the train. Ron Darling, the SNY color commentator and pitcher for the 1986 World Champion Mets, told me that he doesn't understand how anyone gets around the city without the subway.
Nonetheless, Manaea's transportation choice stands out — not that he's a transit nerd (he's never heard of NUMTOTs and didn't realize the MTA had a very useful app). He's just a working guy who likes riding the train, unlike so many members of the city's political and cultural class who consider their business entirely too important to ride the train. As more and more politicians and right-wing news outlets beat up on the MTA to score points, Manaea shrugs off the fearmongering.
"Yeah I've gotten that a lot. But so far, taking a majority of [the lines], and I haven't obviously been everywhere, but I haven't had really bad experience in all the time I've taken the train," he said. (In fact, Manaea says he is working up some real courage: to play chess with the hustlers in Bryant Park or Washington Square Park or to ride the Cyclone in Coney Island.)
And when mass transit and cities in general are taking lumps from a rising strain of anti-urban politics, it's also just cool to encounter someone whose line of work puts them in front of crowds and on television, but sees living in a city and taking the train (delays included) as part of life's adventure.
"There's been a couple times where the trains got delayed, stops don't happen or I miss a stop, but it's what I signed up for. For me, I consider like a little adventure, and I feel like I've gotten pretty good at reading the map and being like, all right, we're here, and I gotta go here, so let's take this downtown. For me, that's pretty cool," he said.
Shortly after Manaea said those very words, our Flushing-bound 7 was indeed delayed, sitting at Vernon Jackson Boulevard for three or four minutes. On the bright side, we got to show Manaea the official MTA app works, which should make future train rides so much less stressful for the pitcher (so when the Mets win the World Series this year, you're welcome).
Unlike a previous generation of Mets and Yankees in the early aughts who took the train, Manaea didn't seem to be taking special care to ride in the front car by the conductor, he just walked on to the closest door when we got on the platform. But, like those players, he went basically unrecognized the whole ride. On a subway ride with Newsday last year, Manaea told the paper that he wasn't recognized on the train, which made some amount of sense since he did that interview before he became the staff ace of a team that captured the city's imagination.
It's still the case, something I found kind of unbelievable until actually riding the train with him and watching a guy in a Mets hat squeeze by Manaea to get off the train without even giving him a second glance. One person later in the ride did yell, "Let's go Mets" to us, but otherwise Manaea was simply a tall guy in a white t-shirt, black jeans and black Chucks who was being filmed by someone for some reason. I can only hope our fellow straphangers didn't think we were podcasters.
Instead we were just, well, New Yorkers.
At the end of the journey, Manaea gets to do one thing that his car-using teammates don't get to do: pay his respects at the statue of Tom Seaver that's just down the steps from the 7 train entrance on the Citi Field side of Roosevelt Avenue.
"Pay respects to the G.O.A.T.," he said of the statue to pitcher known as The Franchise.
In that way, he's connected to the way the average Met fan walks into a game. So maybe Sean Manaea really is just like you and me and every other New Yorker we know.
"How I view myself anyways is as just another human being, I just happen to play baseball. Taking the train is just what New Yorkers do, and I want to be that," he said.
