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ABOUT US
Faith and Fear in Flushing made its debut on Feb. 16, 2005, the brainchild of two longtime friends and lifelong Met fans.
Greg Prince discovered the Mets when he was 6, during the magical summer of 1969. He is a Long Island-based writer, editor and communications consultant. Contact him here.
Jason Fry is a Brooklyn writer whose first memories include his mom leaping up and down cheering for Rusty Staub. Check out his other writing here.
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by Jason Fry on 8 September 2024 9:35 am LOOK WHO’S NO. 6
OK, maybe that message isn’t inspiring enough to make a September scoreboard in Queens, but it’s true: At this writing the Mets are a game ahead of the Braves for the third National League wild card, which is a fancy way of saying sixth in a league that now grants playoff spots to its top six teams. Moreover, they’re just a half-game behind the Diamondbacks for the second wild card (less fancy: fifth) and two games behind the Padres for the first wild card, AKA fourth.
Nine-game winning streaks will do a lot.
Saturday’s game against the Reds was one of those contests that might not be particularly interesting in the details but still says a fair amount about the mindset of team and fans. The Mets couldn’t scratch against Jakob Junis, who’d apparently gotten a deal on sliders at Costco; they hit ball after ball that looked mildly interesting off the bat but settled into an outfielder’s glove. They didn’t have a base runner until Mark Vientos walked in the fourth and lacked a hit until Jose Iglesias doubled in the fifth, all Junis gave up in five innings of work.
Meanwhile, Jose Quintana was mixing up his pitches and hitting his spots in his bid for a 100th career win, and he was helped out by some remarkable defense, with Iglesias starting a 4-6-3 double play to erase a leadoff walk in the second and Francisco Lindor initiating a twin killing in the third. The first of those looked like a magic trick: Iglesias smothered a Ty France grounder moving to his left, pivoting on his knees to wind up in perfect throwing position, and then Lindor caught his feed low and to the outfield side of second, continuing his motion to throw to Pete Alonso for the second out. The second was nearly as good, with Lindor snagging a Jonathan India grounder to deep short on the backhand and somehow pivoting smoothly to hit Iglesias at second, with his double-play partner wasting not so much as a nanosecond on the pivot to nip India on the back end.
Both plays started with a combination of perfect instincts and muscle memory — Iglesias rolling just so to be able to hit Lindor at second, Lindor converting his momentum heading into the hole into the energy needed to throw — and were completed thanks to economy of motion against a pitilessly ticking clock. The Mets will miss Jeff McNeil‘s versatility, and I’ll miss McNeil’s perpetual outrage at the slightest misfortune, but those two plays were reassurance that the Mets should be just fine up the middle.
With Junis excused further duty, the Mets wasted no time against Sam Moll: Harrison Bader broke a oil-well-deep slump with a solo homer, followed by a walk from Lindor (extending his on-base streak to 35, which is a new single-season Mets record, though his hitting streak was stopped at 16) and a Brandon Nimmo HBP. Exit Moll and enter Carson Spiers, who I perhaps once knew is long-ago Met Bill Spiers‘ nephew. Spiers the Younger was greeted rudely, with RBI singles by Alonso and a two-run double from J.D. Martinez.
That was the ballgame, pretty much: Adam Ottavino got the last out of the seventh, Danny Young turned in a spotless eighth and Edwin Diaz wobbled a bit but found himself to secure the ninth. Being sixth-best never felt so good.
by Jason Fry on 7 September 2024 10:53 am The Mets’ ebullient recent narrative showed a couple of cracks Friday night against the Reds.
Francisco Lindor continued his hitting streak and made a nifty play at shortstop, but he didn’t walk off the Reds or solve the Middle East conflict in an idle moment between innings, somewhere between surprising and shocking given how he’s been playing. In the bottom of the ninth, with Tyrone Taylor on first and one out, Lindor popped out on the first pitch he saw against Alexis Diaz (appearing opposite his brother for the first time in a big-league game), and it somehow felt mildly sitcommy, like seeing the protagonist slip and fall off a gantry two strides before disarming the armed nuclear device at the heart of the villain’s secret lair.
Similarly, Sean Manaea was good but not quite his dominating self of late, missing just a tad on the edges and corners. Manaea only made two truly regrettable pitches all night, but the first became a two-run homer for Elly De La Cruz and the second became a two-run homer for TJ Friedl. Both tied the game; the latter pushed Manaea to a slightly earlier than expected exit in the seventh.
But these are pinch-yourself times for the Mets — they haven’t been behind on the scoreboard since Game 1 against the White Sox a week ago, and that deficit lasted a couple of eye blinks. So after Manaea wasn’t quite indomitable, Reed Garrett stepped in to retire four batters, Edwin Diaz struck out the side in the ninth and Jose Butto shrugged off the Manfred Man to work a 1-2-3 10th.
Mark Vientos started the scoring in the first with a sizzling two-run homer off opener Fernando Cruz; the Mets regained the lead following De La Cruz’s homer thanks to an odd sequence in the sixth. With two outs, Pete Alonso hit a drive down the right-field line that spent a considerable amount of time in Jake Fraley‘s glove, only to come free after Fraley tumbled to the ground. Looked odd but that’s the rule; Jose Iglesias followed Alonso with a sharp single to left, with Alonso beating a not particularly good throw from Spencer Steer, and then Iglesias came home on a single by J.D. Martinez. Destiny stuff, until Friedl barged into the story with a twist of his own and made all that supplementary material.
One thing that is fairly predictable in post-modern baseball, however: The team that fails to convert its Manfred Man in the top of the 10th is up against it in the bottom of the 10th. With Brandon Nimmo handed second via let’s-get-this-over-with rulebook largesse, Vientos’ job was to advance him to third so that Alonso could hit a walkoff homer or a drive over the no-deeper-than-they-can-throw outfielders or a clean single or a ground ball with eyes or pretty much anything. Not a guarantee, not with the Polar Bear’s heartbeat accelerating to unwise tempos in RBI situations, but time-honored.
Vientos, of course, entered the season looking like he’d been nudged out of the prospect column and into the suspect one, sent to Syracuse after Brett Baty was given third base and Martinez arrived to designate-hit hit designatedly DH. Instead it’s Baty whose scouting report has turned into the stuff of sighs and shrugs: Given another chance, Vientos has mashed at the plate and looked surprisingly adequate bordering on actually just fine in the field.
The 10th-inning AB was a tidy little made-for-video showcase of his growth: Vientos went to work against old friend Justin Wilson, looking cool and controlled in fighting off alternating cutters and four-seamers. Wilson’s eighth pitch was better than most of the ones that had preceded it, on the inside corner and designed to yield a swing and a miss or be pulled to the left side, ahead of Nimmo’s station.
And the latter did, in fact, happen — except Vientos pulled Wilson’s pitch 401 feet into the seats for a walkoff win capped by a joyous home-plate scrum, baths of Grimace-colored Gatorade, and curious Mets fans Googling tattooed Hebrew. (“Be anxious for nothing; but in every thing by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be made known unto God.”)
Request heard and answered — and in discussing his turnaround, Vientos did indeed thank his celestial skipper. Asked about magic, our drenched protagonist replied, “I don’t know if I believe in magic, but we have the energy and the right mindset going into this month because we’re hungry. September is the right time to get hot.”
No lie detected, as the kids possibly still say. Magic is an excellent tactic to deploy, should it be available to you; failing that, energy and the right mindset make for a pretty good Plan B.
by Greg Prince on 6 September 2024 9:01 am An ideal off day for Mets fans includes each of the three teams slightly ahead of our team in the Wild Card standings losing. Take what happened Thursday: the Padres lost; the Diamondbacks lost; the Braves lost. That last one is especially delicious, as it dropped Atlanta into a tie with us for the last playoff spot, so now we’ve got only two teams slightly ahead of us.
Next time the Mets are scheduled to be off will be this coming Thursday, September 12. None of the National League Wild Card contenders will be playing, so, naturally, you’re wondering how you’re going to fill the void in your life.
Fortunately, I have a suggestion.
 Should you be in the general vicinity of Levittown on Long Island at 3:30 PM, you are cordially invited to the Levittown Public Library to a program the folks there titled Mets Talk With Greg Prince. It will be a chat about rooting, writing and reading baseball, and you won’t have to hear just me talk. Joining me to add some excellent albeit non-Met insights on the subject(s) will be my friend and fellow Long Islander Gary Mintz. Gary recently published a most charming memoir called Baseball From 3,000 Miles Away about devoting his life to being a San Francisco Giants fan on the most inconvenient of American coasts for that sort of thing. I’ve gotten to know Gary through our shared affection for the legacy of our dear, departed New York Giants, a history that comes alive just about every week through the Zoom sessions Gary organizes as president of the New York Giants Preservation Society.
 I root for the National League team that came to be in New York. He pulls for the team that stayed the Giants. Between us, we have this continent covered.
We’ll each get into our love of the game, our passions for our respective ballclubs, and why baseball is such a good fit for the printed/pixelated page. It may not be as stirring as an actual ballgame with postseason stakes, but I believe you’ll come away from it deciding it was better than nothing.
Levittown Public Library is located at 1 Bluegrass Lane, a bit south of Hempstead Turnpike. More information on the program is here. Hope to see you Thursday.
by Greg Prince on 5 September 2024 2:10 pm After giving injury rehab his best shot among a flock of Toronto Blue Jay minor leaguers, native Ontarian and lifelong Cincinnati Red Joey Votto announced his retirement on August 22. Johnny Cueto, who made his season debut one day earlier for the Angels, pitched exactly once more in L.A. of A garb. The Halos considered his 7.15 ERA and DFA’d him on August 30; one is tempted to say “serves him right” for his participation as a Kansas City Royal in the 2015 World Series, but we’ll try to let that go. Three-time Cy Young Award winner Max Scherzer began the year on the injured list; he made eight starts for Texas between late June and the end of July before shoulder fatigue returned him to the IL. Three-time Cy Young Award winner Clayton Kershaw’s recent trajectory eerily mirrored Scherzer’s: seven starts spanning late July to the end of August, with a toe issue compelling the Dodgers to sideline him. David Robertson’s campaign has gone uninterrupted, allowing him to make 54 healthy appearances, but there’s one place he hasn’t appeared, as his Rangers have followed a road schedule that didn’t direct them to Queens.
Two surefire Hall of Famers in Scherzer and Kershaw. One with very good Cooperstown odds in Votto. Two others in Cueto and Robertson whose careers can be described without dispute as distinguished. Five players spanning ages 36 to 40 who spent as much of 2024 as possible being what they’d always been since they stopped going to school — professional ballplayers. How long have or had Votto, Cueto, Scherzer, Kershaw, and Robertson been around? Long enough so that each man’s Career Splits page on Baseball-Reference includes a line reflecting what he did at a ballpark that ceased operations on September 28, 2008.
Yet only one man in this season can say he played a game there way back when and played a game next door right here in a present that’s as current as can be as we speak. Yet it was none of the above who pulled off the twin-thrilling. Not until Wednesday night, September 4, did a real, live Shea Stadium veteran cross into fair territory at Citi Field and spring into 2024 action. No spring chicken he, perhaps, but when it comes to major league longevity, he’s both cock of the walk and king of the hill.
Make that Hill. Rich Hill. Rich Hill of the Boston Red Sox, as he has been frequently in a big league journey that began nineteen summers ago and now encompasses eight discrete signings with the Sawx. The eighth came following what could have been interpreted as his final season, 2023, when he was a Pirate and a Padre. At the stage when this Met season was young and hopeless, Jason sent me a list of the five active players he knew of who could claim Shea experience, wondering if there was anybody he’d missed. I e-nodded back that I didn’t know of any others who met the criteria of being under contract to somebody at that instant, but later thought to do a quick search to see how Rich Hill was spending his days.
Hill wasn’t pitching anywhere when 2024 began, but he wasn’t exactly not pitching. The New Englander had let it be known he preferred to spend the spring watching his son play Little League. Then, should the opportunity arise, he’d listen more closely to the offers he was still getting. Rich Hill may have turned 44 in March, but he had a left arm that threw curves capable of getting batters out on occasion. Of course he heard offers.
The Red Sox made another in August, and there he was, tuning up for Triple-A Worcester after signing his eighth contract with the Boston organization. Soon enough, he was in a Boston uniform, and Boston’s road schedule just happened to direct the Red Sox to Queens. The stakes weren’t as high as the first time the Red Sox visited the Mets for games that counted (Rich was 6 in 1986), but they mattered to both teams. The Sox are barely hanging on in the American League Wild Card race; the Mets are pounding at the door of being one of the leaders of the NL’s.
Only the Mets had been playing like a team that planned to turn September into October, having won six in a row before jumping out to a 4-0 lead in the first on Wednesday in the clubs’ series finale. Jumping? More like slamming, once Jesse Winker stepped up with the bases loaded and got hold of a Tanner Houck delivery, transporting it just high enough above the left field fence so it could it be of optimal use to the home team. We’d already taken the first two from Boston, and we were well ahead from the get-go in this one, so unless something went terribly wrong, a Mets fan with Shea on the brain simply had to sit back and look forward to a possible Rich Hill appearance at Citi.
Did I mention Tylor Megill was pitching for the Mets? Yeah, probably should have noted that. Megill enabled the Red Sox to creep to within 4-3 while Houck shut down the Mets after Winker’s slam. Who knew games in September aren’t always a breeze? Interest in linking Shea and Citi had to take a back seat to more vital matters. Megill departed in the fifth. The relievers of most relevance were any Mets who could throw double play ground balls. As it happened, we had three of them. Alex Young in the fifth, Huascar Brazoban in the sixth, and Danny Young in the seventh each escaped a jam by coordinating with his infielders on lead-preserving GIDPs.
Three different pitchers. Three different innings. Three double play grounders. Somebody disseminated the info that that had happened once before in Mets history. At Shea, of course. I say “of course” out of affection for Shea as the kind of place where all the fun things happened. Like 1986. Like 1969. Like the trio of happy ground balls that were elicited on August 7, 1966, in the first game of a Banner Day (fun!) doubleheader versus the St. Louis Cardinals. The pitchers who disentangled then were Gerry Arrigo in the fifth, Larry Bearnarth — in his final Met appearance — in the sixth, and Darrell Sutherland in the seventh. Maybe because the game was a Met loss in a season when the Mets finished ninth, the names Arrigo, Bearnarth, and Sutherland haven’t carried any extra resonance from their combined feat over the past 58 years. Or maybe people weren’t quite so impressed by randomness in 1966. Yet should September 4, 2024, become recognized as one more essential step on a championship trail, let’s not forget how two fellows named Young bracketed a Huascar named Brazelbon to keep a 4-3 game 4-3.
When he was Montreal’s pitching coach, Larry Bearnarth would regularly get play from Bob Murphy in that way Murph would talk about Mets who’d been around from almost the beginning. That’s how I learned good ol’ Larry Bearnarth, a Met from 1963 to 1966, was a standout at St. John’s. What a wonderful guy. In my mind, Larry Bearnarth’s Met Equity measures at least a 5 out of 10. If Bob Murphy could sound delighted well after the fact about somebody who went 13-21 across four second-division seasons, he must have been important. Using that same scale — 1 to 10, with your Ed Kranepools and Mookie Wilsons at 10 and whatever reliever we released after no more than two innings in July a 1 — I’d slot Rich Hill’s Met Equity at about a 3.
That’s right: Rich Hill was a Met. Almost a half-season in 2021. Came to the Mets for the same reason he came back to the Red Sox, to help along a team with postseason aspirations. It didn’t work that well for Hill and the Mets, either. Amiable gentleman as far as I could tell. Tried his hardest throwing his softest. I don’t doubt Bob Murphy would have said nice things on his behalf. But there was a here-and-gone quality to Hill, just as there was a here-and-gone quality to the 2021 Mets as a whole. Though it’s stayed with me, his status as likely the last pitcher to ever lay down a sacrifice bunt at home have probably endured in the collective consciousness as long as the ground ball-getting exploits of Messrs. Arrigo, Bearnarth, and Sutherland.
Yet in the eighth inning on September 4, 2024, I was overjoyed to see Rich Hill take the mound at Citi Field. I was already joyed, if you will. That 4-3 lead that had been protected so carefully by so many Met bullpen arms (including Phil Maton’s), was now growing. The Red Sox had developed a new strategy to avoid home run balls like the one Winker sent for a ride. They apparently took that “cock of the walk” stuff to heart and decided to walk everybody. No complaints here. A walk, a single, and a walk loaded the bases with one out. Another walk pushed in a run to make it 5-3, Mets. It also pushed Alex Cora out of the third base dugout to remove Kenley Jansen and bring in Hill.
Here came living history! Here came somebody who played at Shea Stadium! Rich Hill pitched for the Cubs on August 5, 2005. Started and didn’t make it out of the second. It was so long ago that he was succeeded to the mound by Glendon Rusch, who pitched for the 1999 Mets. His right fielder was Jeromy Burnitz of the 1993 Mets. On TV that night, I distinctly remember Ralph Kiner comparing Cub first baseman Derrek Lee to 1941 Brooklyn Dodger phenomenon Pete Reiser before Fran Healy interrupted him. Pete Reiser! My mother would talk about Pete Reiser like Bob Murphy would talk about Larry Bearnarth. Shut up, Fran, I thought, just as I’d been thinking since first getting cable in 1985.
All of that happened around Rich Hill at Shea Stadium in 2005, the same Rich Hill who entered the game at Citi Field on Wednesday night in 2024. When was the last time you heard anybody bring up Pete Reiser? Or Fran Healy?
Hill had one more Shea outing, May 16, 2007. The game, which I also distinctly remember, started three hours late because of rain (can’t blame everything on Healy). Jose Reyes was dealing with a tight hamstring, which we believed was the worst thing that could happen to the Mets at the time. Reyes proved OK…and we learned much worse things could happen to the Mets in 2007.
 Places where Rich Hill has been known to spend the night, still. Distant, tangible memories of a ballpark I’ll never forget. They had nothing to do with Rich Hill at the moment they were generated, but Hill has survived in uniform to embody them. Pending what becomes of the handful of active players who stopped by in 2008 as youngsters, Rich looms as the last player to play at Shea Stadium to play at Citi Field. I wouldn’t put it past any among Scherzer, Robertson, or Kershaw to find his way to Flushing next year, but I also wouldn’t doubt Hill getting another contract or eight from the Red Sox. Pete Rose played against the Mets at the Polo Grounds in 1963 and against the Mets at Shea Stadium in 1986. An ageless left arm could take a pitcher clear to 2031 if handled with care.
The Mets, it delights me as much as Hill’s mere presence at Citi Field did, handled their venerable opponent with care, which is to say they stood by and let him do what was being done before he came in. He walked Jeff McNeil with the bases loaded. He walked Francisco Alvarez with the bases loaded. Slumping Harrison Bader, who could have really used a base hit, made sufficient contact for a sacrifice fly. Rich Hill exited with the score Mets 8 Red Sox 3, soon to go final.
“Shea Stadium lives” is the tempting conclusion to our Rich Hill interaction, but Shea Stadium has been alive in our hearts this whole time. Of more concern now that Hill and the Red Sox have moved on is that the team that plays 81 games a year at Citi Field couldn’t be more alive or well. The 2024 Mets have now won seven in a row. The third Wild Card remains a Brave hiccup away. The record for consecutive Met victories is eleven, established in 1969 and matched four times since. No eleven-game winning streak in Mets history has occurred in a season’s second half, but being hot in September is not without precedent. The 1969 Mets won ten in a row, then another nine in a row.
“1969 Mets comparisons don’t seem altogether inappropriate” is therefore today’s coda of choice. It has the benefit of being true.
by Greg Prince on 4 September 2024 12:40 pm These days…
I’m tempted to offer no notes on what feels, now that it’s been put in the books, like a perfect win. The Mets never trailed. When the score grew close, the Mets added on eventually. When the score grew close again, the Mets prevented it from becoming even — then added on immediately. The starting pitching was spectacular. The relief pitching was effective. The offense picked its spots to be timely. The defense made every play it had to.
You might feel a shaft of light make its way across your face…
Except one, maybe. So I do have a note.
And when you do, you’ll know how it was meant to be…
It’s the eighth inning Tuesday night at Citi Field. The Mets are leading the Red Sox, 3-1. Whatever’s gone swimmingly to this point needs to go another couple of laps. Mark Vientos’s homer in the seventh provided breathing room. Deep breaths are in order, nonetheless. Jose Butto, he of the nine pitches for three quick outs the frame before, dips into trouble. Two walks to the Sox. One walk to the phone with an urgent message: “Reed Garrett, please report to the pitcher’s mound.”
See the signs and know their meaning…
Reed Garrett can worry you. Every reliever can worry you. Every starter has worried us at some point in 2024. There was a time David Peterson didn’t seem like a sure thing. He’s sure reliable now. Six innings, one run, eleven strikeouts, very little trouble. Butto, as mentioned, was wonderful in the seventh, not so much in the eighth. Garrett wasn’t touched at all over the weekend when he last worked, but those were other Sox. The Red ones are capable of unspooling a good night’s work. The Red ones have Rafael Devers coming to the plate with runners on first and second and nobody out.
It’s true…
Devers grounds a ball toward short. No tailor has been involved in its production. If it’s going to turn into a much-needed double play, the stitching will have to be handled in ad hoc fashion. The shortstop is Francisco Lindor. Who else is it going to be? Francisco Lindor took his position on Opening Day and has yet to have left it. Francisco Lindor makes so many plays, it is reasonable to assume he will make all of them, including a double play on a slow grounder that is by no means tailor-made for DP purposes.
You’ll know how it was meant to be…
Lindor hesitates in the simultaneous act of deciding and fielding just enough to let you know a) the Mets aren’t going to get the runner at second via Lindor’s toss; b) the Mets aren’t going to get the runner at first on the ensuing relay; c) the bases are loaded and still nobody is out; and d) contrary to emerging conventional wisdom, Francisco perhaps can do it all but doesn’t always manage to do everything every time.
Hear the signs and know they’re speaking to you…
Lindor coming up shy of constituting a one-man team is all right, however, because the man does have teammates, and they are pretty helpful to his, their and our cause. Garrett gets the next Red Sox batter, Emmanuel Valdez, to fly to medium-right. Another right fielder — like strong-armed Starling Marte, who’d just been taken out for defense — might have fired home to attempt to nail the lead runner. McNeil, who doesn’t play a ton of right, judged himself better served by getting the ball back into second. He couldn’t prevent the run that trimmed the Mets’ lead to 3-2, but he did keep a runner from advancing to third. A few pitches later, Garrett teased another ground ball. Not tailor-made, but Iglesias-assisted in meeting its double-play destiny: 4-6-3, with Lindor square in the middle of the rally-snuffing.
To you.
Clinging to a 3-2 lead in the top of the ninth loomed as the Mets’ job if they did not expand their edge in the bottom of the eighth. “OMG” may be the theme of the year, but “TCB” still has some utility in Flushing. The Mets’ offense took care of business ASAP. McNeil singled to where he’d just been standing and throwing in right. Francisco Alvarez, one of the Mets seemingly forever mired in a 3-for-30 slump (we have a couple in every lineup), also went to right field via a convenient hole in the infield. Who should be up next but Francisco Lindor? It was as predictable as finding him at short in the top of the inning. Lindor is up just about every time we need him and comes through practically regularly. That lead Peterson was able to protect? That was Lindor’s doing on a two-run homer in the third. Lindor’s always doing something. David Stearns, who doesn’t have to worry about inflating his value since his contract was signed and sealed long before he showed up to run baseball operations, suggested before the game that Lindor not only bears a striking resemblance to what an MVP looks like, he’s also quite possibly putting together the “greatest individual position player season” any Met has ever crafted. Talk about tailor-made foreshadowing.
 Our team, our theme (one of them). Lindor, whose impact on the Mets’ fortunes in 2024 is roughly equivalent to that of Kelly Leak’s on those of the Bad News Bears in 1976 (save for the second-hand smoke), doubles home McNeil with the insurance run to restore the Mets’ lead to two. Then Brandon Nimmo brings in Alvarez with a sac fly. And, in case you’ve forgotten we have a Polar Bear roaming the premises, Pete Alonso socks a ball out of sight to make the game both 7-2 and a foregone conclusion. Alonso’s home run was his 31st. Lindor’s home run earlier was his 30th. Mighty generous of Francisco to leave a category for some other Met to lead.
When Steve Gelbs co-hosted his nightly edition of The Francisco Lindor Show in the moments following the final out, the star of the game and just about every game allowed his praises to be sung out of courtesy to the fellow holding the microphone, but mostly he wanted to acknowledge he didn’t make that play on that ground ball in the eighth and that his teammates picked him up. That, I thought, is how you contend for Most Valuable Player honors in this league, by not settling for doing almost everything right — and almost always expressing the most valuable of sentiments.
The win was the Mets’ sixth in a row. They are eleven games over .500 for the first time this season and eleven games over .500 for the first time in any season in which they’d previously fallen eleven games under .500. I wouldn’t have given you a plug nickel for their chances to get as high as .500 when they were wallowing, thereby suggesting my predictive powers aren’t worth a plug penny. Nevertheless, I will allow this: I now have a feeling about this team I haven’t had all of 2024. They’re not yet in a playoff position, but I believe they will be. They most definitely haven’t clinched anything, but I believe they are bound to. There is no telling what might happen in the postseason, but I’m envisioning what I’m envisioning. To elaborate would be to predict, and we’ve already established my predictions are worthless.
 But these are days when my feelings for this team are off the charts.
by Jason Fry on 3 September 2024 12:43 pm These days, you don’t have to be in the New York area — or the outer limits of AM radio range — to keep up with the Mets. You just need an MLB account and a certain amount of cell service.
Well, and a little luck.
The beginning of the Mets’ game against the Red Sox found me in the southwest of Washington State, where a handful of roads skirt vast tracts of wilderness and eventually emerge to run along the Pacific. Most of this is timber country, with the scars of logged areas giving way to acres of newly planted pines and then to sections of old forest, huge and dark and mossy. It’s gorgeous, though a little intimidating for someone who grew up on Long Island without mountains.
Lots of trees, not many cell towers.
This affected a number of things about my improvised trip — I wanted to see a new bit of the world — starting with the route I’d carefully programmed in Google Maps. When service disappeared so did my map, leaving me to feel my way using road signs and memory — and remembering with a smile that this was the way we always did it before the Internet. (At least those of us who didn’t have a road atlas in the car. Remember those?)
The MLB feed was a little easier to access than Google, for whatever reason, so Howie Rose and/or Keith Raad would be chattering away through my car speakers and then vanish, leaving me contemplating mountains and trees until they returned. MLB Audio generally picks up where it left off, so delays accumulate until you’re several minutes (or more) behind the actual game, something important to remember should someone else in the car glance at GameDay. (I was by myself, so there was neither peril nor opportunity there.) When the feed’s available, you can advance it 30 seconds at a time and so catch up, but I decided it was more important to not drive into trees than do that.
And anyway, I don’t really mind. The game may not quite be live, but it’s live for me, and a certain tension gets added to the proceedings if the feed cuts out with a pitch on the way to a hitter with a 3-2 count and runners that need driving in. During these silent lacunae you wonder what’s going to happen, consider the fact that it’s already happened, and go down other quietly philosophical rabbit holes.
(Less amusing: My dumb rented Audi would not play nice with my phone, taking CarPlay away randomly and sometimes silencing everything until I could get to a town and put things temporarily right again.)
In fits and starts I heard Luis Severino set Red Sox up and knock them down, aside from a run that scored after a Brandon Nimmo misplay. I heard Francisco Lindor‘s heroics and the Boston defense refusing to let the Mets get too far ahead. I heard the Citi Field crowd, a welcome change after all this time on the road. I heard Howie and Keith speculating about Sarah Sze Hat Night, which delighted me because Sarah is my college classmate, and it’s quietly amazing (amazin’, even) to flash back to freshman year and then forward to now and the unlikely development that someone I know making a Mets giveaway item. (A pretty neat one, too!)
Anyway, in time I left the forests and the seashore behind and passed by Olympia (with its signs for Sleater-Kinney Road, another unexpected touchpoint) and returned to Tacoma. As I checked into my hotel Phil Maton was grappling with a last trio of Boston hitters. I hit something as I was juggling pens and credit cards and phones and so saw on another screen that the game was a FINAL — no surprise given how many delays had accumulated.
Good final or bad final? The Mets weren’t so far out in front that a Boston uprising and a failed Mets counterattack was impossible. But I had a good feeling about it — the Mets are playing some of their best ball of the season right now, and while that’s only as good as the next game, when it’s happening you can see it and hear it and feel it. (Pick two out of three depending on your current media consumption.)
Maton got the last hitter and confirmed what I’d devoutly hoped and mostly believed: good final. Better final, even, what with the Braves idle and so now just a skinny half-game ahead of the Mets. Cue a quiet little celebration in the hotel lobby — a delayed one, sure, but live for me.
by Greg Prince on 2 September 2024 10:43 am Without knowing what they paid, I’d say the Mets got an excellent rate on their weekend spa treatment. They’ve rarely entered a Monday appearing more relaxed and ready to face whatever awaits them. In this case, it’s a playoff chase in September.
The 2024 White Sox will make anybody look and feel fantastic. The 2024 White Sox have elevated the 1962 Mets into a position the 1962 Mets have never been in: well ahead of competition in any standings. The 1962 Mets lead the 2024 White Sox by four games pacewise, 35-103 to 31-107. I do believe the Worst Ever record we’ve treated as treasured will belong to another before the month is over. This makes me happier than I would have imagined when I began to fathom another team could actually win fewer and/or lose more than 120 games. The 1962 Mets haven’t played since 1962. It’s about time they passed somebody in some standings.
The 2024 Mets have more pressing aspirations and tangible potentialities. Last Wednesday, which feels like five months rather than five days ago, the Mets of the current year blew a lead and game in horrific fashion and fell four lengths behind their perennial bête noire the Braves. Several August leads and games had been blown in horrific fashion, and the result was our Wild Card chances receding in size in Atlanta’s rearview mirror. The only thing we might have had going for us was the Braves were about to visit first-place Philadelphia, while once we finished licking our Arizona wounds, we had that spa weekend reserved on the South Side of Chicago. Despite the name on the front of the joint, three games at the Sox’ place held no guarantees. Relying on ourselves to start winning while our bête noire somehow starts losing hadn’t worked particularly well through the years, but there’s always a first time, we might have told ourselves.
If we did, we were on to something. We beat the Diamondbacks on Thursday to rekindle our hopes (despite the Diamondbacks all but extinguishing our hopes the night before) and the Phillies — who I believe we hate more viscerally than we do the Braves but with not nearly as much depth — began doing us an extended solid. Checking in at Guaranteed Rate Spa didn’t hurt, either.
As the deeply detested Braves commenced the process of losing three of four to the viscerally loathed Phillies, the Mets relaxed and went about sweeping the one series a fan would say absolutely needed to be swept to be considered an adequate showing. Other than in a three-out-with-three-to-play type situation, you can’t pout and stamp your feet with a straight face if your team doesn’t sweep a three-game set. Yet had the Mets dropped the third game of their series with the White Sox after taking the first two, pouting and stamping would have constituted socially acceptable behavior.
The scoreboard indicates it could have happened. Mets 2 White Sox 0 ultimately did the trick, though the gap between our first and second runs ran uncomfortably long. Perhaps there was no way Chicago’s contemporary Hitless Wonders were ever going to produce anything but zeros, but we couldn’t be sure. As was, Francisco Lindor’s homer to lead off the fourth wove all the cushion Sean Manaea would require. Manaea, to that point, was matching everything Garrett Crochet was throwing in terms of result if not flair. Each starting pitcher retired his first nine batters. Crochet struck out the first seven Mets he faced, three shy of tying Tom Seaver’s consecutive K’s record, normally the one standard in this world I deem immune to records being made to be broken — I’m still sore it was tied in 2021 — but as September dawned and I was making September deals in my head, I decided I could cope with Garrett Crochet being this September’s Steve Carlton. You set a record, we conjure a win. Plus the karma of rooting for a team that wasn’t the Braves or Phillies (or Yankees) to go 39-123 or worse probably earned me a statistical love tap where it could hurt most.
Then Luis Torrens made fair contact with one out in the third; and Lindor did his characteristic thing in the fourth; and Crochet took a powder at his organization’s future-thinking behest; and Manaea kept being splendid for seven innings. His bid for perfection fell away, but he was more than adequate to the task at hand. The White Sox didn’t push a runner into scoring position until the seventh. The ninety feet from third to home remained their bridge too far once Sean shook off the only threat they manufactured all day.
Reed Garrett, who makes us nervous, threw an eventless bottom of the eighth. Pablo Reyes, who was new to us, took first base with two out in the top of the ninth after J.D. Martinez walked. Starling Marte rose from the annals of past achievement to deliver a ringing double to center, and pinch-runner Pablo took off, leading me to discover “C’MON REYES!” is one of those things you never forget how to yell at your television. This Reyes scored his first Met run, leaving him only 884 behind Jose for Reyes franchise leadership (Argenis Reyes totaled 13 runs during his 2008-2009 stay; 2023 pitcher Denyi Reyes ran smack into the adoption of the universal DH and was never invited to test his speed on the basepaths).
A two-run ninth-inning lead entrusted to Edwin Diaz was once upon a time insurmountable for Met opponents. Has that time returned? Sugar’s rushed back to dominance all of a sudden, fastballs setting up sliders and batters finding only air for their efforts. If you were worried he’d revert to the Diaz of the previous Wednesday, he wasn’t and didn’t. Edwin struck out the side swinging, completing the Mets’ spa weekend with an “aaahhh, that felt Amazin’…do we really have to leave?
Alas, they did. A Braves loss to the Phillies on Sunday night (in eleven innings, no less) made the reality of facing the rest of the schedule enticing rather than a chore. Recriminations over August leads and games blown in horrific fashion now belong to our fickle friend the summer wind. One game out of a postseason berth with twenty-five to play. One month of meaningful games in September even Fred Wilpon wouldn’t feel compelled to explain. Meteorological summer is over. Metropolitan autumn brims with the possibility a fan lives for.
This really does feel Amazin’.
by Jason Fry on 1 September 2024 10:34 am The Mets beat the White Sox behind back-to-back homers from Pete Alonso and Jesse Winker, with Jose Butto surviving a decidedly shaky ninth to secure the save.
That’s the brief, pertinent-facts-only recap of a game I absorbed in fits and starts — I’m out here in Tacoma getting my kid moved back into a dorm room, so we were back and forth between campus and the storage locker, then between the parking lot and the room — a lather rinse repeat I wager many of you will remember from either moving kids in and out of rooms or from your own college days.
The Mets did what they did and the White Sox did what they did, and even though a fair number of individual plays eluded me amid the to and fro, I got the gist. The White Sox had scored a run, but it wasn’t a big blow; the Mets had scored again to push them back; the details were shifting but things were pretty much as they were after the initial ambush of poor Davis Martin.
This vague baseball osmosis made me think of something, and I’ll ask you to grade my terminology on the curve, as it’s early morning on the West Coast and I’m a writer, not a scientist: The badness of teams like the 2024 White Sox is a gas, expanding to fill whatever volume is available to contain it.
The Mets have taken the first two games of the series from Chicago, hopefully on their way to a sweep, and as Met fans we’ve of course instinctively compared the White Sox to the ’62 Mets, whether we remember them from the Polo Grounds or just from absorbing team lore.
But it’s not like the White Sox have been engaged in the kind of hideous baseball slapstick made famous by those Mets, or blown a pair of gigantic leads. They haven’t made every play, but their defense hasn’t been glaringly inept. The pitching hasn’t been great, but it hasn’t been obviously incompetent. The hitting … well, OK, they simply haven’t hit.
This is what led me to the gas thing: The White Sox have supplied the amount of badness required to lose by four runs, and then to lose by two, because that’s what bad teams do. They’ll come apart in spectacular fashion if need be, but mostly they just groan and grind and fail.
I say this with zero animus and in fact considerable sympathy, as the White Sox remind me of Mets teams I’ve endured: They look like the Mets of red-giant-stage Roberto Alomar and Jason Phillips, like the Mets of Tommy Milone and Neil Ramirez. And suspect they’re a lot like the ’62 Mets, whose misdeeds are a curated lowlight reel by now, one that ignores a lot of dull three- and four-run defeats that came without quips in Stengelese or funny stories.
Those Met teams just lost and lost and lost, until all you wanted was for them to go away and leave you in whatever passes for peace when you’re a fan of a bad ballclub. Whatever Chicago’s record winds up being, their fans have my sympathies. I’m a Mets fan; I’ve been there.
by Greg Prince on 31 August 2024 11:05 am The authors of this book are drawn to baseball’s great losers. Not to individuals, but to entire teams. We prefer our calamities as the product of collective effort, a shared culpability not unlike Watergate. […] Besides, to err is human, to screw up royally requires a team effort.
—George Robinson & Charles Salzberg, On A Clear Day They Could See Seventh Place: Baseball’s Worst Teams, a 1991 volume in urgent need of updating
Parachuting into an opponent’s ongoing storyline can inject a person with presumptuousness. Good team you’re seeing for the first time all year after hearing how good they are? If they beat your team, man, they really are good. Bad team you’re seeing for the first time all year after hearing how bad they are? If they lose to your team, man, they really are bad. Historically bad team whose record would seem to say it all?
Just don’t lose to the White Sox, OK?
The Mets didn’t lose to the White Sox on Friday, which was OK. More than OK. It was the best-case scenario. The Mets scored five runs and upped their record to 71-64. The White Sox scored one run and fell to a record of 31-105. Did the Mets outplay the White Sox at a magnitude reflecting a 40½-game gap in their seasons to date? In the course of nine innings, that would be difficult to achieve.
It would also be irrelevant. Just win the game against a team it is universally agreed you can’t lose to. You lost two of three to the woebegone Angels and so-so Athletics. Those kinds of stumbles happen. A stumble here can’t, not if your playoff aspirations are genuine. We’re never sure if the Mets are, but let’s lean on the side of them being in the race and believing they can remain there.
 Benintendi, get me rewrite. The White Sox have won 31 times in 2024, so they are capable of beating somebody now and then (more then than now, apparently). Based solely on Friday night’s evidence, I can’t definitively say that I just watched the worst major league baseball team of my lifetime. They didn’t take advantage of early opportunities to score often off Tylor Megill — who seems ripe to be left unprotected in an expansion draft or a compensation pool or whatever avenue might grant his career a fresh start — and then stopped creating opportunities. They kept the Mets from crossing home plate intermittently but not enough. Their fielding looked a little logy in spots, including one that allowed an inning-ending double play to become a run-scoring fielder’s choice upon further review, yet no errors were charged. J.D. Martinez’s key home run notwithstanding, both sides lofted a ton of fly balls that failed to generate much excitement.
From the small sample size, and if I didn’t know what the record said in advance, I doubt I would recognize the White Sox as any worse a team than any team that loses on a given evening. The important thing in the present is they lost, 5-1, keeping the Mets apace with the Braves, who won. If you’re tracking the current White Sox versus the Mets of our beginnings, it was, depending on your perspective, reassuring or disturbing to see the ’24 Pale Hose grow a little more wan vis-à-vis our Originals. After 136games in 1962, those Mets were 34-102, or as many games ahead of these White Sox as the Braves of today are ahead of the Mets of today.
We know we want the Mets of today to catch the Braves of today. As you can read in this article Tim Britton wrote for The Athletic on Friday, feelings among those who’ve immersed themselves in Met history aren’t unanimous on the matter of who oughta hold the crown as worst (a crown which would be made of what…wurst?). You’ve got fans like me who are like, yeah, be my guest, Chisox, yet unperverse pride is also prevalent in the 1962 Mets not only having been THE 1962 Mets, but continuing to epitomize shorthand for all that can go wrong going wrong…yet going wrong in a manner that never raised a critical mass of ire. You’re gonna get mad at people known as Marvelous Marv, Choo Choo and Vinegar Bend? There’ve been plenty of crummy teams since the 1962 Mets, but nobody’s established a brand name so readily recognizable for a certain order of ineptitude. Crummy? Yes, but adorably so. The 1962 Mets could have sold Entenmann’s.
Imagine a world where somebody else serves as the flagship for a baseball team being the worst a baseball team can be. That world doesn’t seem far off. While I didn’t see anything obviously glaring in the performance of the 2024 White Sox in their 136th game that screamed WORST! TEAM! EVER!, I could definitely infer that their Friday night output seemed practiced and seems repeatable. Horrible teams might get blown out disproportionately relative to other clubs. They mostly lose lifelessly by scores like 5-1. Come to think of it, the 1962 Mets’ 120th loss occurred in the city of Chicago by the very score of 5-1. Joe Pignatano killed the year’s last potential rally by hitting into an eighth-inning triple play and then retired. Before long, he’d be coaching the very same franchise in a World Series and growing tomatoes in its bullpen. Let’s see Andrew Benintendi match that life path.
Incomparable flair for defeat may forever belong to us, but “they’re the 2024 White Sox of…” is poised to enter the language of lazy comparisons, meaning the legacy of the 1962 Mets will likely revert fully to family ownership. Maybe everybody else will have a new comp for lousiness. We will know who the 1962 Mets are. So be it, I figure. Records are made to be broken, even if the records have to be tripped over, crashed onto, and shattered by accident. Teams that have attempted to tank never lost 105 of their first 136. What the White Sox are doing has taken some ingenuity, but they’ve probably benefited from quite a bit of luck, too.
There’s a variety of luck, you know.
Should the South Siders surpass us in the wrong all-time direction, we will still hold the modern National League mark for futility. That’s no small detail. We exist because in the gaping void that encompassed 1958 to 1961, New York yearned for National League baseball. Leagues were separate and not at all equal. National League fans considered National League ball better. So glad to have it back, they didn’t wholly mind they were getting the least skilled version of it available (save for the teams that visited the Polo Grounds — they all seemed quite good). The circumstances that created the Mets wouldn’t exist today. Differentiation between National League and American League baseball is mostly in the mind’s eye. Hell, we’re in the midst of playing an American League team right now. Somewhere, George Weiss harumphs in disgust.
One caveat to that diminished distinctiveness, however. The 1962 Mets lost 120 games. Then the 1963, 1964, and 1965 Mets went out and lost 111, 109, and 112 games, respectively, proving one year is a fluke, four years is a trend. Since 1965, the competitively balanced National League has produced exactly four teams to as much as tour the subterranean neighborhood the Mets established. Two, the 1969 Expos and 1969 Padres, had the excuse of being expansion teams, which is an excuse we know well. Each went 52-110. The Expos ascended to the heights of 73 wins in their second year, and their losing records hung around mundanity for the most part as the 1970s progressed. The Padres stayed lousy for quite a while, but not 52-110 lousy.
The only two other National League teams to prove themselves 1965 Mets (if not 1962 Mets) dismal were both Diamondback squads. In 2004, three years after winning the World Series, Arizona went 51-111; three years later they were division champs. In 2021, the D’Backs plunged to 52-110 just four years after a playoff appearance and two years after winning 85 games. Two years later, they were NL champions. Maybe the roof was malfunctioning.
 Since 1965, hardly anybody in this league has been what we once were. The 2024 White Sox are about to become the ninth American League team since the season Casey Stengel hung ’em up to lose at least 109 games, with the infamous 1988 Orioles of 0-21 notoriety just missing the cut at 54-107. The woefully misshapen AL gave us not only the 2003 Tigers (43-119) we remember making a run at our standard, but the 1996 Tigers (53-109) and the 2019 Tigers (47-114). Lest it appear this is only a Tiger problem, the 2021 Orioles went 52-110 three years after Buck Showalter led them to 47-115 in 2018. The Astros were getting so bad that the National League kicked them out following 2012 (55-107), and as a new American League entry in 2013, they got only worse (51-111). The 2023 Oakland A’s were starved by an indifferent ownership into 50-112 territory. And pour out a Labatt Blue for the 1979 Blue Jays. They went 53-109, which was somehow not the worst record Canada ever produced. (That would be Paul Anka’s “(You’re) Having My Baby”.)
The American League has kept coming at history with a slew of 1962 Mets wanna-bes, but none has had what it takes to lose 120 games. The 2024 White Sox just might and then some. It could be that after this season no team will again be tracked for their pursuit of the worst record ever because no team could possibly be as bad as the 2024 White Sox, suggesting the 1962 Mets won’t be casually invoked outside of Metsopotamia any more than, say, the 1916 A’s (36-117) or 1935 Braves (38-115)…except by those who relish a good story well told. After 62 years, if somebody else insists on being the new avatar of abysmal, so be it. The 2024 Mets over the next two games should be happy to help the 2024 White Sox on their way to whatever winds up worse than 40-120.
Just remember: it was one of ours who didn’t touch first base first. We’ll always have that. And he didn’t touch second, either.
by Greg Prince on 30 August 2024 11:32 am I liked it better when ballplayers talked about “turning the page” on bad days. Sometime in the past decade or so, turning the page morphed into flushing, and not the charming village in Queens whose northwestern edge we know so well. “You gotta flush it” became the page-turning mantra of choice. Maybe nobody reads printed material enough to know from turning pages. Maybe Mickey Callaway irreversibly coarsened the culture. However the de rigueur phrase to articulate a wish to send the surrendering of a game-losing grand slam swirling through the municipal waste-disposal system became prevalent, the sentiment is immediately understandable in any vernacular.
“I just flush it” is indeed what Edwin Diaz said he does to get past nights like Wednesday. Had he been holding a periodical, perhaps he might have invoked page-turning. Had any of us been holding anything when he threw his fateful slider to Corbin Carroll (the one that was “floating in the zone” like something you’d definitely want to flush), we likely threw it as hard as we could. It wouldn’t have traveled as far as Carroll’s 396-foot four-run homer, but we probably would have launched our object at an exit velocity greater than his dinger’s 102.5 MPH.
But that was Wednesday. Thursday came along. In The Old Ball Game, Frank Deford reminded readers a hundred years after the fact that in 1905, “days of the week in the United States were designated for the appointed household chores.” Monday, he noted, was Washing Day. We can confidently confer upon at least one Thursday in 2024 the designation of Flushing Day. If not for the sticky residue Wednesday left in the Wild Card standings — and within our collective psyche — the Mets played on Thursday afternoon as if Wednesday night’s debacle had surged out to sea with a million tons of raw sewage.
With the first pitch Thursday, the Diamondbacks were no longer the victors from Wednesday. They were a new day’s opponents. The Mets were no longer defeated. The score was even from the get-go. Scoring got going only when Pete Alonso declared it did, at the say-so of his bat, which swatted his 221st career home run in the second inning. With that one swing, the Mets moved one run ahead of Arizona and the Polar Bear moved one homer ahead of Mike Piazza on the franchise’s all-time list. Another swing, this one from Randal Grichuk with Geraldo Perdomo on first, changed the immediate order of things in the third: Snakes 2 Mets 1.
Lucky for us, we’ve got Francisco Lindor and nobody else does. The pitching duel between David Peterson and Ryne Nelson proved unbudging until Lindor led off the top of the sixth by taking three balls, fouling off many a strike and, on the eleventh delivery he saw, smacking a home run to right, not far from the spot Carroll torpedoed his the night before, but who remembered that anymore? In the present, Lindor tied things up at two. Our season all but ended on Wednesday. On Thursday, we were right back in it.
Peterson lasted seven without giving up anything else. David and Sean Manaea are lately Koosman and Matlack for a new century, two lefties you can count on to complement a Seaver (we have a Severino if not a Seaver; you can’t have everything). Nelson was similarly impenetrable, save for the two solo homers belted by the two Met sluggers. Bullpen zeroes were swapped in the eighth, Jose Butto dealing ours, helped by Luis Torrens nailing Joc Pederson trying to steal second with two out amid a three-one count…and Joc Pederson putting his mind aside long enough to attempt such dubious thievery.
In the ninth versus Justin Martinez, Jesse Winker doubled with one out. Tyrone Taylor ran for him. J.D. Martinez shot a liner to deep right that allowed Taylor to tag and advance to third. Do you like where this is going? Jose Iglesias sure did. Iglesias sent a sizzling grounder up the middle that Lindor might have gotten to, but he plays for us, not them. They had Perdomo. If we’d learned anything in this series to this point, beyond the value of turning and flushing, it was that the best place to hit a ball if you can’t hit it over a fence is in the vicinity surrounding Perdomo. The Diamondbacks’ shortstop’s glove made a sweet clanking sound as Iglesias’s ball trickled into center, scoring Taylor with the go-ahead run.
Great, a 3-2 lead to carry into the ninth for our closer.
I said “great.”
No, really.
Our closer was back from Wednesday and ready to be somebody else on Thursday, or at least throw different pitches. Wednesday’s were sliders that didn’t go where we he or we wanted. Thursday he had fastballs. If it were as easy as changing repertoires, every Met in 2012 would have followed R.A. Dickey’s lead and thrown a high, hard knuckleball. For Diaz in 2024, a mechanical flaw was reportedly repaired between Wednesday and Thursday. Will it remain under warranty? That’s for Friday and beyond. On Thursday, Edwin Diaz didn’t generate flashing red lights, screaming sirens and the robot from Lost in Space warning of DANGER! DANGER! That’s what Wednesday felt like even before Edwin made it to the mound. On Thursday, the erstwhile All-Star struck out his first two batters and popped up the third, saving the win for Butto and the season for the rest of us.
Later, the Braves lost to the Phillies, so we’re three out of the six-seed, a pursuit we are compelled to again take seriously now that Flushing Day has passed and Momentum Day has hopefully arrived.
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