[h1]Former New York Mets OF Benny Agbayani coming up big once again[/h1]
By
Anthony Mccarron
DAILY NEWS SPORTS WRITER
Saturday, April 10th 2010, 1:26 PM
Nishimura for News
Benny Agbayani, 38, works as an educational assistant at a high school in his native Hawaii.
[h3]Related News[/h3]
Now that he's retired from baseball and enjoying life in his native
Hawaii,
Benny Agbayani sometimes gets "heat," as he put it, from folks on
Oahu. They kid him about forgetting how many outs there were in an inning in the 2000 game when he famously gave a kid a souvenir ball and had to quickly take it back as Giants raced around the bases because there were only two outs.
When
Bobby Valentine, perhaps Agbayani's biggest supporter in the game who managed him with the
Mets and with
Japan's
Chiba Lotte Marines, appears on
ESPN, friends say to Agbayani, "Hey, it's your dad on TV." Giants' fans - Agbayani says there are plenty in Hawaii - get on him about his clutch home run against
San Francisco in the 2000 playoffs.
Through all the good-natured teasing, Agbayani laughs. And why not? He had, he says, "a great life" in baseball. He doesn't even have any regrets about retiring after last season, the last of his six seasons in Japan. "I did enough in the game to be satisfied," he says.
Agbayani, 38, now has "a whole new life ahead of me," he says. And he's trying to do something with it. In February, he started a new job as an educational assistant at
Mililani High School on Oahu, working in classrooms with teachers and counseling kids. The rest of the time, he says, he spends relaxing with his wife and three children.
"I figured, 'Maybe it would be a good thing for me to give back to the state of Hawaii and the kids here," Agbayani says. "The kids ask me, 'Why are you doing this? Didn't you make enough money?' I tell them I had the opportunity to have such a great life. Maybe I can guide them in the right direction, explain their options after high school. It might not be professional baseball, but something."
Agbayani, a 30th-round pick of the Mets in 1993, was lucky enough to have a baseball career. He played 383 games in the majors - 322 for the Mets - from 1998-2002, hitting .274 with 39 home runs. He played in 119 games for the Mets' 2000 World Series team, batting .289 with 15 homers and 60 RBI.
That season, Agbayani hit an 11th-inning grand slam to beat the
Cubs in
Tokyo in the second game of the year and he homered in the 13th inning of Game 3 of the division series against the Giants. He cherishes a photo of his teammates throwing him into the air afterward. He also helped the Mets to their lone win in the World Series, doubling in the go-ahead run in the eighth inning of Game 3.
"I can't believe it's been 10 years already," says Agbayani, who adds that he'll be at
Citi Field sometime this season with other members of the team that lost in five games to the
Yankees. "The Subway Series, it couldn't get any better than that, just the intensity of the fans, the intensity of the atmosphere, of the games themselves. We had an unbelievable team - great atmosphere in the clubhouse."
Met fans might remember when Agbayani went on the radio with
Howard Stern and said the Mets would win the Series in five games.
"They asked me - I didn't make a prediction," Agbayani says. "What am I gonna say - the Yankees?"
However, Agbayani hopes he's remembered in New York for something else: "I hope Met fans always remember me as a great ballplayer, someone who gave his all, was always there in the clutch."
Read more:
http://www.nydailynews.com/sports/b...i_coming_up_big_once_again.html#ixzz0kmICk94O
