The good part of Wednesday night’s game? It was Faith and Fear reunited for the first time since the 2024 postseason, sitting together waaaaay up in the seats where you duck your head to avoid the bellies of planes. We had a grand time taking stock of Andy Green, the Mets’ future prospects, retired numbers, City Connects and all the topics that unspool during the ebb and flow of a baseball game.
The bad part? Everything else. Robert Stock didn’t give up a lot of loud contact but lordy was there a lot of inside-voice contact, which meant a lot of Brewers runs. I like Stock and have been rooting for him to pick up a first win as a Met, but he seems to be unlucky all the time, and it’s probably time for the Mets to move on to some other answer, whether it’s Jonah Tong or Jack Wenninger or some entity who isn’t Robert Stock. Milwaukee’s Dustin May got hurt on the very first pitch of the game, just after I’d remarked that I can’t stand him, which was true but I swear wasn’t an attempt to invoke injury.
And a poor luckless squirrel got loose on the field, scampering about in an escalating panic before darting up the protective screen and hunkering down atop the cable holding it in place. He was still up there at the end of the game, while various groundskeepers peered up at him unhappily, and I’m curious how they decided to get the poor creature down. Hopefully not by having A.J. Ewing tattoo him with line drives, though that had been effective in engineering departures.
It did occur to me that our visitor had to make an exceptionally large number of poor squirrel decisions to wind up where he was — that’s a long way from the nearest tree, and it’s not like Citi Field has an enviable acorn concession. On the other hand, there I was in nosebleed seats watching a last-place team get its brains beat in by a first-place team, so who am I to tell any creature about life choices?
That’s a really great memory – I always think about the feeling of being crammed into those upper levels. It’s amazing how much you see when you’re up there.
Agree about Stock. His 15 minutes of Feel-good story has worn out its welcome here. Hopefully he’ll resurface somewhere as a marginally capable 6th Starter.
It wasn’t a squirrel, it was Jeff McNeil coming back to haunt us. But it sounds like a really fun reunion!
I hope we’ll be seeing the topics of some of your discussions in future columns. At least it seemed to be a nice, late summer night, and you definitely not missing much if you turned away from the game.
What the two of you did miss, however, was three innings of Mike Breen sitting in the SNY booth, and drawing many parallels between this year’s championship Knicks team and the 1969 and 1986 Mets ( especially between NBA Game Four and the unforgettable Game Six of the 1986 World Series). Those games are iconic because they led directly to championships. There is obviously mutual between Breen and Gary, and Keith looked more than a little sheepish when Breen related a story about how Keith did not answer a question asked by 17-year old Breen in his first year of reporting on the Mets. Amusing to watch.
As for Justin Turner -oops, sorry I mean Dusty-sorry again DUSTIN May, I cannot hear his name without immediately thinking about Michigan’s recently departed championship coach, and it was a bit of relief not to hear it hundreds of times. I hope he has a quick recovery.
“mutual respect” between Gary and Breen. I hate autocorrect and miss the edit feature.