Commack's Dan Abrams has bringing Mets moments to fans down to a tee

Dan Abrams can’t really watch a Mets game anymore without his brain turning over during every notable moment, as if to say, “What about this one?”

The big wins — huge strikeouts, walk-off hits, loud home runs — that’s when it all goes into overdrive: Pete Alonso’s raised arm transforms into a digital brushstroke on his MacBook. A pithy postgame quote? Sounds as if it could make a pretty good T-shirt.

And if he’s ever short on ideas, no worries: Even from his Commack home, he can hear the hive mind of the Mets' fandom. Of a few fandoms, actually.

“Hey @athletelogos Where’s my 'Throw it again?' Polar Pete shirt?” — a tweet to Abrams after Alonso taunted Atlanta pitcher Bryce Elder after hitting a home run.

Or “do you have a shirt with mark canha doing the butt slap?” — tweeted after Canha christened his colorful celebration.

“Schmid is better please” — another tweet, after Devils rookie goalie Akira Schmid’s stunning playoff performance.

Such is the life of Athlete Logos — a Mets Twitter social media darling who actually is just one guy on Long Island.

Abrams, 40, started drawing up logos and Shea Stadium-style neons in 2015 — a break from his job doing graphic design for gift boxes and user manuals. He didn’t sell anything at first — he didn’t have the rights at the time — but eventually he gained traction. One layoff and more than 30,000 Twitter followers later, Athlete Logos is a full-time job that allows him to be present for his 5-year-old daughter.

Abrams' designs, meanwhile — “LFGM,” “The Baby Mets,” “In Buck We Trust,” the Kodai Senga ghost fork logo and others — have become part of the Mets' ecosystem, worn by fans and players alike.

Senga, in fact, has taken to wearing his ghost fork hat, and a few fans have taken to putting up the ghosts at Citi Field after every one of his strikeouts. It’s all routinely been captured by SNY cameras, quickly making it the sort of tradition reminiscent of the ones that would pop up at Shea Stadium.

“I reached out to friend Dan at Athlete Logos for the image and said I wanted to hang these up every time he struck someone out and it really took off,” said Chris Blumenstetter, the Massapequa teacher responsible for the ghost signs. “The players acknowledged it, and Senga acknowledged it. It was really, really cool.”

Did Senga ever.

After his first home start, he said the goal was “to put up more ghosts” — or get more strikeouts — and after his last home start, he took a moment to put on his ghost fork hat before the SNY cameras clicked on for his postgame news conference.

“Those are always shocking, to be honest,” Abrams said. “There are so many I send out that don’t get seen . . . But I’m watching the game and Senga is pitching well and after the game, he’s wearing the hat and he has another hat in his locker and every time, it’s like being a kid again to see that happen. It never gets old.”

Abrams' first design came in 2015 — an MH for Matt Harvey, designed to look like Batman’s ears — and he began doing neon-style gesture drawings in 2016, capturing a walk-off homer by Yoenis Cespedes in bright, Shea-style brushstrokes.

A few weeks later, online outlet Barstool Sports made a similar design depicting Bartolo Colon, and Abrams — a lifelong Mets fan with an emotional connection to the old stadium’s neons — realized he wanted to stake his claim.

“These mean something to me, so I’m going to do them all the time,” he thought at the time. “So then I’ll be known as the neon guy.”

Abrams eventually was hired by other companies to do sports drawings and, after four years, he expanded his partnership with BreakingT, which specializes in “in the moment” sports merchandise. That meant he now had a sub-license to work with players’ likenesses, as granted by MLB’s players association.

That, along with a 2019 layoff — the result of a company relocation — meant that Abrams was willing to take the leap. He would try to turn a side gig into a job for a few months, and if that didn't work, he'd go back to the grind.

The grind never came back.

Abrams started selling shirts and creating actual neons — made of far less fragile and more tech-savvy LED lights — through third-party manufacturers. He sells them on his website, but the enterprise expanded further: Athletes such as Sauce Gardner, Anthony Volpe and Dee Gordon have reached out to him for logos, and he’s looking to work with more players hoping to personalize their brand in the age of social media savvy. He’s already worked with the NBA, NHL and PGA, and you can even see his signs around Long Island — such as the one lighting up Huntington’s Blue Line Deli.

Abrams' big dream is to get Mets owner Steve Cohen to allow him to design some six-foot neons for the Jackie Robinson Rotunda at Citi Field. (There’s no traction in that regard yet.)

“I would love it,” he said. “I’ve had so many emotional comments from people saying, 'That’s my childhood there.' I wish it would come back and we could make Citi Field look a little more like a Mets stadium. I hope that one day it’s possible, but it’s kind of out of my hands.”

As it stands, you’ll occasionally spy some smaller neons in players’ lockers — a pretty unexpected sight, considering some of them still were in T-ball when Shea shut down. He also sells them as home decor — neons that can be controlled via an app.

The T-shirts, though, are a big seller. The “Baby Mets” — a term coined by Francisco Lindor during a postgame news conference — even did a mini-photo shoot with their Athlete Logo shirts. It was Brett Baty, Francisco Alvarez and Mark Vientos, all wearing the design, sitting in the Mets' dugout in the order they were depicted. That was about a month ago, before Vientos was optioned.

“It was 11 at night [when Lindor made the comment] and I got DMs on Twitter and on Instagram and tweets — ‘When are you going to have Baby Mets?' " Abrams said. “I’m very blessed. I went from having four Instagram followers, who were my family — and I don’t forget those days — to now, when something happens in a Met game, people immediately [are] thinking of me, [saying] what are you going to do with this?”

In fairness, he does the same thing that they do.

“I watch the Mets and every play, it’s like, is this a neon?” he said. “I’m at the mercy of the Mets.”

Any longtime fan will know that’s a precarious place to be — especially during a season that’s been less than inspiring — but for Abrams, it’s one more unpredictable brushstroke on an unexpected canvas.

By Laura Albanese

laura.albanese@newsday.com@AlbaneseLaura

Laura Albanese is a reporter, feature writer and columnist covering local professional sports teams; she began at Newsday in 2007 as an intern.