No one a Met more through and through than Ed Kranepool

Mets legendary lifer Ed Kranepool, who passed away after suffering from cardiac arrest while watching his beloved Mets on Sunday, recently recalled his first plane trip and big-league game. Only 17, he’d just signed with the Mets as a bonus baby for $85,000 out of James Monroe High School in The Bronx, and team higher-ups put him on an airplane to join the inaugural 1962 Mets team out in Los Angeles, where they were playing the Dodgers.

Club honchos hoped he would pick up things from the pros. Instead, it nearly scared him and scarred him. Wouldn’t you know it? In his first game under contract, Kranepool watched Sandy Koufax, the greatest pitcher of that generation and maybe any generation, no-hit that terrible Mets team.

Which spurred the teenaged Kranepool to turn on the bench to manager Casey Stengel and remark, “What have I gotten myself into?”

Kranepool, ever the competitor, was the one 1962 Met who told me a month ago that he was pulling for the fantastically inept White Sox to break that Mets team’s record of 120 defeats. Even 62 years later, he was hopeful to lose what small association he had with professional baseball’s version of the Bad News Bears.

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To be fair, Kranepool never should be linked as any sort of historical, hysterical loser because he was anything but that. Beyond that, he wasn’t even old enough to vote when he first donned his Mets uni, played only three games for that dreadful ’62 team, and batted only six times.

Kranepool was merely summoned to LA to learn, and good for him that he never picked up bad habits. The most famously terrible player on those ’62 Mets was Marv Throneberry, and while Kranepool was also mostly a first baseman throughout his admirable 18-year career — all with the Mets — he knew better than to emulate the ironically named Marvelous Marv.

Kranepool by all rights should be recalled not as an occasional observer to early history and buffoonery but for his association with the Miracle 1969 Mets, and also for his loyalty, his consistency and his adaptability. Still only 24 for that great ’69 season, Kranepool hit 11 home runs for history’s darlings but accepted a part-time role after the Mets acquired star first baseman Donn Clendenon. He wound up staying another decade in Flushing.

That was long enough to boost his batting average considerably to become a .280-plus hitter in most of his later years (and .261 overall). Free agency came in the middle of Kranepool’s second decade in Queens. But through so many managers and management teams, Kranepool remained the constant.

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“If there’s a Mr. Met, it’s Eddie Kranepool,” his saddened longtime teammate, friend and 1969 hero Ron Swoboda told The Post. “He was through and through a New Yorker, and a New York Met.”

Tom Seaver will always be The Franchise. But Kranepool is the forever Met, a legend for his longevity and his loyalty. Like Seaver, Kranepool was a very smart guy who also had strong opinions and couldn’t stand losing. But he was born and bred a New Yorker who Swoboda recalled “showed up everywhere [in New York]” and stayed to the end even if it was occasionally bitter.

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The entrepreneur Kranepool kept busy since retiring half a lifetime ago. He was a stock broker, a restauranteur (he and Swoboda were partners in The Dugout restaurant in Amityville) and a credit card business operator. He helped form a group that tried to buy the Mets about a decade ago, and although he didn’t get the team, he never lost his loyalty.

He lived in Jericho for years, and even in the last few years, as his health started to fail and he wintered in Boca Raton, Fla., he kept a boat off the Hamptons. Kranepool suffered from diabetes, but thanks to a campaign with the team, found a kidney donor several years back — no surprise, a very generous Mets fan. The new kidney, transplanted at Stony Brook University Hospital, kept him off dialysis for all his remaining years. His heart finally gave out while watching the Mets fall to the Reds.

Kranepool is the lifelong Met who never got orange and blue out of his blood. He still sounded like a ballplayer when I talked to him a month ago, and he kept that competitive fire. He was the ’62 Met (and barely a ’62 Met at that) who badly wanted the team known for losing out of the record book. Of the startlingly bad White Sox and the possibility they could outdo those first-year Mets for ineptitude and wrest away the record, Kranepool told me, “Let them have it. It’s not a record I’m proud of.”

It’s a shame Kranepool didn’t make it to see that mark fall (the South Siders appear well on their way). But fairly, he was barely more than a witness to bad history. Kranepool’s real legacy was as a team-first, clutch Miracle Met and a loyal New Yorker who stayed through legendarily good times and bad even though he could hardly stand the losing.

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