The Luck of the Unlucky

In the Mets’ first four seasons, the club twice lost home games by a score of 13-6. The first of them, on May 30, 1962, marked the coming out party for a chant you might hear enthusiastically when the Mets are coming on strong or ironically when the Mets pausing from going down meekly: “a full, furious, happy shout of ‘Let’s go, Mets! Let’s go, Mets!’” This explosion of emotion, captured by Roger Angell in his first season occasionally covering baseball for the New Yorker, burst into the Polo Grounds atmosphere after Gil Hodges led off the bottom of the fourth with a home run that cut the home team’s deficit to 10-1.

Ironically enthusiastic? Enthusiastically ironic? Maybe more than a little defiant, given that the opponent was daring to show its face again in the city of New York after abandoning our town for better weather and better parking. Whatever the mechanism of the motivation, Mets fans were into it and the Mets went on to lose to the Los Angeles Dodgers of no longer Brooklyn, 13-6.

The second of such losses occurred three seasons later, this time at Shea Stadium against the Reds, on September 14, 1965. If Angell attended this particular defeat, he did not incorporate into any of the essays that constituted his breakout book The Summer Game. Summer was effectively over in New York by mid-September of ’65. Cincinnati’s pennant hopes were still alive. The Mets’ chances of playing meaningful games in September weren’t yet as much as a gleam in the eye of even the most anticipant fan. Not that patience was altogether in abundance. Chanting wasn’t the story at Shea that night. According to the not yet villainous Dick Young in the Daily News the next day, the pertinent sentiment of evening could be found on a two-sided banner.

Side A
GIVE US A TEAM, NOT A DREAM

Side B
PROMISES, PROMISES

The Mets entered play at 46-100, ensuring a fourth consecutive season of triple-digit losing. It’s hard for the hardiest of crowds to not come prepared to express dismay when the novelty of cheering anything and everything that isn’t consistent winning begins to wear off. A 13-6 loss, even to a contender, is a kick in the teeth of good nature, even if your team is down only 8-5 heading to the ninth.

Especially if your team is down only 8-5 heading to the ninth.

Much would happen between the Mets falling to 46-101 on September 14, 1965, and the Mets waking up to a record of 17-17 on May 7, 2023. The Mets have never otherwise been 46-101 (praise be) nor 17-17 (quite curious, considering they’ve been 18-16 eleven times and 16-18 six times). They also had lost only once at home in that span by that score of 13-6.

I know. I was there.

The date was August 12, 1982. I was two weeks from returning to college for my sophomore year, so I was intent on cramming as much Mets into my system as I could before departing. Tuesday night the Twelfth was going to be the first of three games for me over the course of five days, attendance frequency not at all unusual in the seasons to come, absolutely unprecedented in my life when I was nineteen.

Also unprecedented: standing on the ticket line outside Shea and being approached by somebody looking to get rid of a pair. He was a reverse scalper. Had two tickets — plus Diamond Club passes! — and simply needed to dump them. He’d give them to my friend and me for five bucks each, or two dollars less than the face value of a Field Level box seat in 1982. Although it seemed a little good to be real, we accepted the hard bargain. The tickets were real. First base side, very good view of the Mets and Cubs.

We didn’t avail ourselves of the Diamond Club passes (the fine print indicated we would have had to have dressed for a session of the General Assembly at the United Nations to have passed muster at the door), but the game was enough. The Mets were trailing, 3-1, until a sixth-inning rally punctuated by a John Stearns double that pulled the Mets to within a run. George Bamberger proceeded to send up Rusty Staub to pinch-hit for Ron Gardenhire after Dallas Green ordered Dickie Noles to intentionally walk Hubie Brooks to load the bases and one out. National League strategy; there was nothing like it. Green was angling for a double play ball. Rusty had a different, better idea, slamming a double to right and clearing those bags. The Mets led, 5-3. Jubilation reigned. I can’t swear “Let’s Go Mets!” arose from all the box seats, but I’m pretty sure it did from mine.

Swearing, however, would follow in short order, as the top of the seventh brought on a Cub rally that dwarfed the one Rusty capped. Chicago scored eight runs off four Met pitchers. Staub’s clutch double grew smaller and smaller in the rearview mirror. What was developing into the greatest Shea Stadium experience I’d ever had to that point dissolved into familiar angst. Just one run after another scoring off one pitcher after another. Orosco replaced Scott. Leach replaced Orosco. Falcone replaced Leach. Misery replaced ebullience. Two drunk business types a few rows down thought it was hilarious in that way people automatically laughed at the Mets. One biker type sitting closer told the business types to cut it out, but in language and with menace that I believe convinced the business types to call it a night before the seventh-inning stretch.

The Mets went on to lose, 13-6. I returned as planned Thursday night and Saturday afternoon. The Mets lost those, too. But never again at home by that same score.

Until Sunday, May 7, 2023, a day that at its start had only one obvious element in common with August 12, 1982. I was there. I’ve now been there for exactly half of all Mets home losses of 13-6 in their 62-year history.

Unlucky score. Lucky me.

No, really. I’m sitting here 41 years since 1982 and recalling at no additional harm to my psyche what it was like watching the Mets dramatically grab a lead and then be assaulted a half-inning later for all their lunch money. Yet I’ll never forget the victory of the seven-dollar box seats costing only five bucks, nor the righteous anger of the biker type, nor Rusty doing what Rusty did in a pinch.

The 13-6 loss I could have done without, but you can’t have everything. Or sometimes get saddled with a little too much.

You need a gargantuan scoreboard to fit a combined 19 runs.

From the game of 41 years later, I could do without the 13-6 loss the 2023 Rockies pasted on the 2023 Mets. I could do without Joey Lucchesi no longer being a pleasant surprise. I could do without the march of mediocrity the Mets’ bulging middle relief corps represents almost daily of late. Even when Buck Showalter’s veritable Lotto drawing pulls up an occasional solid inning among your Hunters, your Brighams, your Leones and your Yacabonii, we’re playing those numbers far too often. Lucchesi, who was removed from a so-so outing in Detroit on Wednesday to make sure he’d be available to provide a so-so outing in New York on Sunday, lasted four innings (felt like three).

Admission to Sunday’s 13-6 loss cost me five dollars less than admission to the one from 1982. I was a guest at a Party Deck soiree, courtesy ultimately of a friend of a friend whose company was having an outing far better than Lucchesi’s. Also courtesy of my friend’s wife who opted not to take in beautiful weather and iffy baseball, thus the empty bar-style stool just waiting for me to top it. No stuffy business types in evidence. These are the seats in right and right-center where children — and adults briefly taking on the behavioral patterns of children — wave their arms to get the attention of outfielders who might be convinced to throw a baseball their way between innings. Every time Brandon Nimmo was entrusted with that opportunity, he sought out a genuine child and made an accurate toss. For that, Brandon Nimmo is my player of Sunday’s game.

Don’t know if you can make it out from this angle, but if you focus, you can see a bonehead play developing.

No other Met garnered much consideration, despite the three-run bottom of the first that immediately erased a 1-0 Rockies lead off Lucchesi. The Mets were reaching base so routinely (and I was sitting so far from the infield) that I began to lose track of who was where. For example, when the Mets were up, 3-1, and Luis Guillorme had singled to right with two out, I was sure he had driven in Brett Baty from second. You know who wasn’t? Rockies right fielder Kris Bryant, who threw purposefully to second, as purposefully as Nimmo did to the kids in the stands. A “4” did not go up on any of the scoreboards, including the enormous one over my left shoulder. A groan of discontent went up from all seating sections.

“What happened?” I asked my friend. “Did Canha get tagged out at second?”

“No,” he told me. “Vogelbach.”

Like I said, there had been so many baserunners that I briefly lost track of who was where. Canha had made an out before Vogelbach reached first. Vogelbach made an out after reaching second, rounding the bag — with Bryant more alert to it than he was — before Baty could cross the plate with that fourth run. Vogelbach was tagged out first.

Score at the end of one: Mets 3 Rockies 1.
Score at the end of nine: Rockies 13 Mets 6.

So forgive me if I gloss over the details of the trajectory of the game from the second inning forward and share with you instead a few other observations from my first trip to Citi Field this season.

• The main video board, which swallowed dainty little Citi Vision, is indeed gargantuan, but once you get used to it, it’s seems the right size for baseball, what with baseball being the biggest thing in our lives.

Nothing’s sacred.

• While I needed a few innings to just adjust my senses to watching the infield from all the way out in the outfield, I pretty quickly noticed that one of the ribbon advertising boards that wraps the seating bowl flashed a logo for New York-Presbyterin. That’s their typo, not mine. It was spelled “Presbyterian” in every other iteration across the ballpark, but “Presbyterin” on the one above and behind home plate. Make a sleeve patch out of that, why don’t you?

• Basic ballpark food is included with a Party Deck affair, but unlike those obnoxious car ads that deride basic, I’m here to tell you, per Humphrey Bogart, that a hot dog on the Party Deck beats roast beef at the Ritz, and I don’t need to know from the Ritz to assert this truism. I know from Citi Field. That was one of the venue’s better hot dogs, and it was accompanied by an even better box of chicken tenders.

• I learned at least one genuine coupon good for one Carvel Ice Cream Sundae in 1984 still exists in mint condition because it was not “redeemed at the appropriate station” at Shea by 3 PM on its day of issuance. Another friend of my friend who invited me produced a photo on his phone of said Strawberry Sunday voucher, issued to celebrate Darryl’s Rookie of the Year campaign the year before. He’s willing to donate it to the Mets Hall of Fame. I say he should take it to a Mr. Softee stand at Citi — before 3 PM, of course — and see if it will be cross-honored à la the MTA when something’s up with the subway and/or LIRR.

Is it ever too late to celebrate Strawberry Sunday?

• Arithmetical skills notwithstanding, I also learned that it’s been 40 years since Darryl Strawberry was a rookie.

• I also learned there’s a limit to my Mets fan patience when eleven losses have piled up in fourteen games. Perhaps extending himself past second base for no helpful reason whatsoever moved me to articulate it, but I told my friend, “I’ve never said this out loud, but I [bleeping] can’t stand Daniel Vogelbach.” I don’t think I said “hate”. I hope I didn’t say hate. There’s nothing hateful about Daniel Vogelbach except he’s such a [bleeping] DH, and I still [bleeping] hate the DH, and I can’t believe he so thoroughly personifies the position I [bleeping] hate so thoroughly, right down to rounding second on an obvious RBI and then not getting back to the bag in time to let the runner score.

• When Vogelbach later hit one of those Estée Lauder home runs that altered the blowout loss no more than cosmetically, I theatrically applauded and cheered because I felt kind of bad about admitting the unkind thoughts I’d been harboring for weeks. “Let’s go, VOGEY! Let’s go, VOGEY!” Also, it was a Met home run and I’m not made of stone.

• My friend who invited me, who wouldn’t quite join me in my animus for Vogey, suggested quite sincerely that slumping Pete Alonso be sent to Triple-A for seventeen days to a) preserve another year of service time; and b) get Mark Vientos up here to play first, which would c) set up Alonso to DH, which I suppose would take care of my Vogelbach problem. When you’re en route to losing, 13-6, and falling under .500, there are no sacred cows. Or Polar Bears. Or the spellings of leading religions.

• Fantastic weather. Brought a jacket. Didn’t need it. The weather shares Player of the Game honors with Nimmo.

First game of the year in The Log I keep of every home game I’ve ever attended. Hopefully not the last. First 13-6 loss in The Log in 41 years. Hopefully the last ever.