Move over Mr. Met, there’s a new king of Queens.
The amazin’ run of success for this year’s New York Mets — in which the team went from summer cellar dwellers to a berth in next week’s NCLS — has fans of the blue and orange crediting one unlikely purple figure.
Grimace.
The famous McDonald’s advertising mascot has won the hearts of Mets fans since he threw out the first pitch at a June game and the team’s early season bad fortune quickly turned around.
Now the streaking team is on the verge of returning to the World Series, and Grimace Mania is running wild — with the mascot’s face plastered everywhere, from subway cars to t-shirts to ballpark signs.
“With every win from the team, we started to see more and more people connecting the [hot streak] to Grimace,” Trisha Donlin, one of the masterminds behind the team’s brand marketing, told The Post Friday.
“This is who we are. We are fun. We are fan-driven.”
The so-called Grimace Effect started on June 12 when the mascot threw out a first pitch to celebrate his 53rd birthday as part of a marketing campaign with Mickey D’s, the Mets’ long-time sponsor.
Though Grimace’s pitch itself was terrible — the subsequent Mets performance wasn’t, as they slaughtered the Florida Marlins 10-4 and began a five-game win streak.
And as the team made the playoffs, fans embraced Grimace as a good luck charm.
Some edited the Happy Meal maven into videos, while others dressed up like him at games. The notorious The 7 Line Army started serving a purple vodka elixir called the Grimace Punch at their watch parties.
The team branding executives quickly latched onto the fun by bringing the purple monster into the fold.
“From a brand standpoint, when you see people having conversations around your brand and taking the time to make their own videos and make their own content, that’s when you know that there’s something there,” Donlin said
The Mets branding team decided to fan the fire by slowly sneaking Grimace into Instagram posts, its 2025 season calendar and even in the team picture. At one point they even worked with McDonald’s to put his image on No.7 train to the game.
The comments section on the average Mets social media post soon went from chiding at the Mets’ lackluster performance to cheering on the whimsey of the booming team.
Soon, even casual fans were celebrating the purple monster — as Grimace-related social media content earned 13 million overall impressions since he stormed onto the scene.
“Our fans are extremely passionate. They are finding it, so we’ve just kind of tipped our cap to, ‘Hey, if you know, you know,’” Will Carafello, the senior director of the Mets’ social media campaigns, told The Post Friday.
Mets marketing executives made sure to “tread lightly” throughout the four-month Grimace journey so that they didn’t turn their meme-brought-to-life into pure cringe.
“We don’t want to be one of those brands that goes too deep into it and then ruins it for everyone,” said Carafello.
Mr. and Mrs. Mets — the team’s real mascots — were seemingly lost in the mayhem. But Donlin’s team tried to show fans there were no hard feelings as they had the couple bestow Grimace with his own jersey in a ceremony on the field.
The near-constant silliness has always been at the heart of the Mets’ personality. But their post-Grimace success has had the Mets dealing with something that the straight-laced Yankees are more used to — jealous haters.
“It does feel like there’s more of a jealousy of fans saying, ‘Oh, I wish that could be us,’” Carafello said.
Fans can expect Grimace to ride out the Mets Mania wave for the remainder of the postseason — which will hopefully carry the Queens team to the World Series.
The finale — which New Yorkers are dreaming will be a matchup between the straight-laced Yankees and the fun-loving Mets — would likely be the purple giant’s last hurrah, however, making way for the next silly saga to take his place.
“I think we’ll be writing a new chapter next year in our story,” said Donlin.
