The blog for Mets fans
who like to read

ABOUT US

Greg Prince and Jason Fry
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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Fandom in the Shadows

Every baseball fan worth her salt knows it’s one of the fundamental rules of fandom: You extrapolate from Opening Day at your peril.

Collin Cowgill‘s grand slam on Opening Day 2013 didn’t kickstart a 162-0 season and a World Series title, or keep Cowgill in the major leagues until early May.

On Opening Day 1969 Tom Seaver […]

Like a Room Without a Roof

I stumbled into a realization a few weeks ago: baseball is a metaphor for baseball. It’s not a metaphor for life. It doesn’t serve as our symbolic rebirth or any of that folderol. Opening Day means that after too many months without regulation games, we get one, to be followed almost immediately by another, and […]

The Beat Before the Tweet

The headline didn’t have much on The Onion. “Farnsworth,” it reported, “rides bus without being Met.” Well, I thought, that’s too bad. It would have been nice if somebody had picked up Farnsworth, but sometimes you just have to walk home from the bus stop.

Of course it didn’t require much of a double-take to realize […]

Breaking In & Going Out

Someday Spring Training will end, and when it does…what’s that? It’s over? More or less?

Didn’t see that coming.

Hallelujah, the Mets are done with grapefruits and slot machines at last, saving a couple of days here near March’s conclusion for un petit peu de poutine up Montreal way. Nice to pretend the Expos exist again for […]

The Ghost of Ike Davis

There’s a scene in a church in one of my wife’s and my favorite movies, The Commitments. A lady, dutifully scraping away at the hardened wax countless candles have dripped in the name of divine intervention, rhetorically asks, “If ya didn’t do it for God, who would ya do it for?”

We were going to watch […]

Deconstructing Harvey

The infrastructure of a baseball season encompasses a surfeit of components that don’t show up in the box score, including intramural dustups in March that dissolve into the murkiest of memories by May. They are as much part of the National Pastime landscape as the crack of the bat, the flight of the ball, the […]

Holy Smokes!

Thanks to the best blog readers in all of Metsdom, the Faith and Fear in Flushing retired numbers t-shirt has been spotted in ballparks all over America and on a couple of continents besides this one since its introduction during the 2006 postseason.

But we’d never seen anything like this until now.

Not the FAFIF […]

The Greatest Glove of All

Jon Niese must’ve put his glove in front of his pitching arm and stabbed a sizzler of fate, for he has caught a break. He hasn’t caught a debilitating elbow injury at any rate. The presumptive first-game thrower who visits MRI tubes like less wholesome athletes might frequent strip clubs left Sunday’s game with discomfort […]

So I Knew Stan Kasten's Rabbi

Late last season I was moved to recall a childhood friend named Evan Radler. We knew each other for one baseball-laden summer and saw each other exactly once more when it was over. He grew up to be a rabbi who died well ahead of his time, two facts I discovered long after they occurred.

Somewhere […]

This Is No Eighth-Place Ballclub

Leo Durocher would have relished this weekend in Las Vegas. The Cactus League Cubs — the team he managed to its only oasis of success in a nearly 40-year schlep through a desert of futility, and the Grapefruit Circuit Mets — the team that inevitably turned 1969 into a Near North Side mirage, will square […]