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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 Greg Prince on 11 April 2021 6:49 pm People don’t ask us what we do in spring when there’s baseball. They know what we do.
We stare out the window and we hope it’s not raining.
You didn’t have to be Rogers Hornsby early Sunday afternoon to know there might not be baseball this soggy April day and that it was a rainy day in the greater Metropolitan Area. It was raining out the window. It was raining on the Weather Channel app, especially if you had it set to ZIP Code 11368. It was raining up the yin-yang. The data and the sky suggested it figured to keep raining. You could hope it wouldn’t, but hope doesn’t necessarily yield desired results. In 2021 to date, it’s gotten us two wins, three losses and four postponements.
Hope, like newly designated six-hitter Michael Conforto, needed to be dropped in the order. Maybe bat Open Eyes first. If it looks like rain, maybe wait ten minutes beyond scheduled first pitch before attempting to play ball. Then hope it doesn’t rain.
Yet it did. It began raining minutes into Sunday’s game at Citi Field versus the Marlins. It kept raining. There was one on, one out and one tarp ready to roll. Roll the tarp did seven minutes after Marcus Stroman threw the first of his nine pitches. Stroman could have told you starting was a bad idea. Stroman did, in fact, tell us via tweet that starting was a bad idea (“those conditions put everyone at risk”), expressing him informed opinion during the rain delay that, after two hours and ten minutes, became a postponement that’s actually a suspended game, which itself is a new twist.
For a century and then some, baseball liked to pretend contests that commenced but never reached the fifth inning never happened. All the stats in a game that wasn’t official didn’t officially exist. That was odd. Now the Marlin who singled and stood on first when the grounds crew emerged, Corey Dickerson, will return to that base in the top of the first on Tuesday afternoon August 31. Unless Dickerson happens to be traded between now and then.
It will still be the game of April 11 a mere 142 days from now. That’s even odder, as is the reality that the continuation of the suspended game in which all of nine pitches were thrown, will go nine innings, yet the second half of that day’s split doubleheader is slated to go seven innings. Odd is the baseball watchword of the 2020s.
Forecasts are called forecasts because they attempt to project what will happen based on the best available information. Forecasts aren’t always dead-on balls accurate (it’s an industry term). Luis Rojas was left to explain to the media after the ghost was given up on Sunday’s delay that the Mets had consulted with “an exclusive forecast expert” before opting to attempt to play. We don’t know if he was referring to a leftover operative from the Wilpon administration or if Steve Cohen gave him the private number of “my rain guy”. Either way, they attempted to play, and they couldn’t get through three batters, let alone nine innings.
Even if you think you are in the possession of the exclusive correct forecast, you can’t count on everything you wish to happen happening. Witness Randolph and Mortimer Duke — tycoons who presumably could have afforded a major league baseball franchise— and the frozen concentrated orange juice forecast in Trading Places. The Dukes had their exclusive forecast expert on retainer, yet it was Eddie Murphy and Dan Aykroyd who got the last laugh. At least nobody got stuffed into a gorilla costume and shipped to Africa and the end of Sunday’s rainout.
Not so far as we know.
Preseason forecasts regarding the fortunes of the formidable 2021 New York Mets are proving cloudy after five games, but GOTCHA! It’s five games! They’re 2-3? It’s five games! I don’t even care that six times the Mets have made the playoffs after starting 2-3 (winning four of their five pennants and both of their world championships from such a humble launch). It’s five games! This season is the 25th in Mets history in which the club has lost three of their first five. The only thing we could say for sure after five games in each of the preceding 24 of those seasons was, “It’s five games!”
Nevertheless, the Mets’ inability on Sunday to properly discern cloudy from clear provides us a pretty good metaphor for the way they’ve conducted their on-field business, especially when at bat, but as you may have read in a recent paragraph, it’s five games. True, they can’t make the most of Jacob deGrom’s starts; they can’t make the most of runners in scoring position; and they can’t even make the most of what could have been a serene rainy reprieve, but like the gray skies above Flushing, they’re bound to look all right soon enough. Forecasts aren’t perfect, but they’re not usually dead wrong, and these Mets, like the aforementioned metaphor, project as pretty good.
Long seasons have been known to manufacture breaks in the symbolic weather. But keep an umbrella handy. It’s supposed to rain a lot this week.
by Jason Fry on 11 April 2021 2:43 am That’s the way Keith says it, a remnant of his California roots that’s one of his more endearing quirks, and a label worth plastering all over Saturday’s matinee against the Marlins.
Jacob deGrom needed just nine pitches — all strikes — to take down the Marlins in the top of the first, blitzed through the first two Marlins who came to the plate in the second, and put Jazz Chisholm Jr. in an 0-2 hole with 99 and 100 MPH four-seamers. DeGrom threw Chisholm another four-seamer, hitting 100 at the top of the zone — a pitch that’s almost impossible to get around on. Chisholm got around on it and how, poleaxing it deep into whatever the Pepsi Porch is called these days. (After the game, by the way, he said he was looking for something off-speed, which makes the whole turn of events even more startling.) Within a couple of seconds, the Marlins had gone from looking like deGrom’s Washington Generals to having the lead, turning one of those “well maybe” days when you cross your fingers into a painful slog in which your shoulders never unslump.
The Mets did their part, to the extent they did anything Saturday, to ensure it was painful. They started off the bottom of the first with a Brandon Nimmo double and a Francisco Lindor bunt that turned into a second baserunner, giving them first and third with nobody out. But though we didn’t know it yet (and there’s a small mercy), that was the offensive high point of the game. Lindor was caught stealing and Trevor Rogers fanned Michael Conforto and then Pete Alonso, leaving the Mets with nothing.
And they’d get nothing the rest of the way. Rogers struck out 13 Mets in six innings, including Conforto once again with a runner on third and less than two out, and the Mets failed to scratch against a trio of Miami relievers. DeGrom struck out 14 over eight — tying a career high — and gave way to Edwin Diaz, who added fire to the dry tinder in the stands by giving up two thoroughly unnecessary insurance runs. (He’s probably aware that this is a storyline no Mets fan needs revived right now.)
The Mets might be rethinking that whole “we missed you fans and having your energy in the stands” thing — there was energy in the park, all right, but it was the kind borrowed from a pirate ship whose crew has decided a few members of their fraternity ought to step overboard with their pockets full of rocks and sharks waiting to greet them. Conforto was booed with increasing vigor — there was a very Beltran ’05 vibe to the whole thing — and while predictions of his demise are obviously exaggerated, it would be a good idea for him to spend a game as a spectator, thinking about as little as possible. Conforto has the look of a ballplayer who’s getting in his own way, and the game’s difficult enough even when that isn’t true.
Fortunately, the forecast suggests every Met is likely to get a day off Sunday, without the need for tampering with sprinklers. (Who’d channel Crash Davis if tampering were required? I’m thinking J.D. Davis — he’s halfway there already namewise and seems like a man who could engineer a natural disaster, perhaps not always on purpose.) If it rains as vigorously as expected, I’d suggest the Mets not spend Sunday thinking about the truly astonishing statistics that follow deGrom around. You probably saw this already (and you’ll be seeing it ad nauseum until the narrative changes), but deGrom has a 2.06 ERA since the start of 2018, a blaze of excellence that the Mets have somehow converted into a 36-42 record.
That’s just ludicrous. It’s the stuff of Greek tragedy, or perhaps of the fingers of the monkey’s paw curling up after a hasty wish. (If a lone simian digit got left outstretched, I think we can guess which one.) Why has it happened? There isn’t an explanation that’s any better than a Just So story, not with the ever-shifting cast of characters around deGrom — any more than there’s an explanation for a generation of Twins’ teams turning to ash with playoff bunting in the park, or than there was for a half a century’s worth of San Diego Padres starters taking the hill without throwing a no-hitter. (Congratulations on that no longer being a thing, at least.)
Baseball’s just strange and flukey and confounding. Fuhstrating, one might even say.
by Greg Prince on 9 April 2021 8:30 am Sure, if you slow down video of somebody sticking his protectively guarded elbow in the general direction of a baseball passing otherwise untouched through the strike zone, it’s gonna look bad.
So don’t do that.
Instead, live in the moment of Michael Conforto’s right elbow instinctively jerking ever so slightly within the flight path of Anthony Bass’s 83-MPH slider as it zips barely interrupted into the mitt of Chad Wallach. That’s what home plate umpire Ron Kulpa did Thursday afternoon at Citi Field’s Mets Home Opener. Only to inured connoisseurs of radar gun readouts does 83 miles per hour register as “offspeed”. It’s plenty fast in the civilian sphere. Yet Kulpa is trained to distinguish pitches that would get pulled over by most state troopers as balls, strikes or hit batsmen. Sometimes his charge is to sort between a couple of those categories.
Kulpa knew the slider flecked equipment affixed to Conforto’s body ever so slightly. Kulpa also knew the slider was a strike from Bass to Wallach. Kulpa, in the moment, knew the Conforto part maybe a microinstant sooner, or it just took precedent as the data he mentally absorbed flowed through his head en route to his official pronouncement. That type of thing happens in the course of a baseball game in the course of a baseball season — as do bases-loaded, score-tied situations in bottoms of ninths. That this particular thing took place in the first game a team was playing in front of a representative sample of its acolytes in more than eighteen months likely made it seem substantially bigger than just one of those things.
The ump called the one-two pitch a hit-by-pitch even as responsible announcers in the vicinity described it as a called strike three. A called strike precludes a hit-by-pitch. There’s a rule that says so. The ump ultimately gets the call over those who make the call from the broadcast booth, just as his view in the moment takes precedence over the rest of us watching from home. Maybe the camera never blinks, but its jurisdiction, no matter how much replay has been regulated into the game, doesn’t reach the airspace directly atop home plate. A judgment call of this ilk — an HBP in the K zone — can’t be changed by video. Slow it down, play it back, be certain of what you saw and Kulpa didn’t. It doesn’t matter. Conforto was safe at any speed.
Michael, arms conveniently akimbo, took his good fortune and carried it to first while quietly processing his good fortune (“there may have been a little lift to my elbow just out of habit, out of reaction…” was his explanation afterwards). Three Met runners in front of him advanced ninety feet apiece, most notably Luis Guillorme, who traveled from third base to home with the winning run. The bases, remember, were loaded. The score, however, was no longer tied.
Mets win. Marlins lose. I don’t believe what Ron Kulpa just saw, I thought as I applauded through my disbelief. Gary Cohen couldn’t believe it on SNY. Howie Rose couldn’t believe it on WCBS. I can’t speak for the more than 8,000 Metsian pilgrims who’d returned to the Promised Land after being certified as thoroughly vaccinated or COVID-negative. They were spaced out through the stands and, I presume, blissed out as they departed them. They got not only a day at the ballpark but an ending to remember.
Keith Hernandez is fond of reminding us that every bloop and bleeder looks like a line drive in the next day’s paper. The addition to the win column next to “New York” wherever you check your standings has the same effect. Did the Mets come by their W heroically? Or did it drop in their lap because somebody in authority in the heat of the moment forgot to properly interpret a rule about a strike being a strike, even if a fraction of an elbow wanders in its way?
The correct answer is it’s a win, earned in good or at least adequate faith on the field of play, if aided slightly at the tail end by a hiccup of inaccuracy.
Fred Brocklander got suitably flustered when Keith Hernandez shouted “safe!” to seal a critical double play in the 1986 playoffs against Houston. Rick Reed (not the pitcher) didn’t see Paul Lo Duca briefly fumble a tag at home plate in the 2006 opener. Adrian Johnson saw a ball Carlos Beltran slashed to left plop foul one night in 2012. The camera saw it hit the line fair. Beltran was a Cardinal at the time. Johan Santana was a Met bidding for his franchise’s first no-hitter. I don’t remember a rush to give back any of these outs.
“This sort of thing happens” may be the last refuge of a questionable conclusion, but people with the fate of the Mets (and our Mets-related happiness) in their hands make mistakes. It’s the human element. Or the human elephant in the room. Mistakes by umpires occasionally conspire against our ballclub, too. We are free to rail against them as if we are Don Mattingly believing Anthony Bass has just recorded the second out of the ninth inning of a game that remains tied. We are also free to accept that within the rules of the day railing is futile.
Chase Utley still hasn’t touched second. Todd Zeile still hasn’t interfered with Chuck Knoblauch. Ray Fosse still hasn’t laid a mitt on Bud Harrelson. Chris Jones once very clearly pinch-hit a game-tying ninth-inning home run that was called foul. It left us as mad as Mattingly. Fuming we wuz robbed blind! by sight-impaired umpires is a sensation that never totally goes away, no matter that the scales more or less balance over the decades. I understand and respect the ire of the Marlin manager. Let it out, Don. You’re entitled.
But whoop it up, Mets fans. We’re entitled, too. We made it to the Home Opener, chronologically and, for those lucky fillers of the 20% of Citi Field seats made available to genuine fan fannies, literally. I imagine one of the safety precautions implemented was a no-bonfire rule, but in my mind I could see those goddamn corrugated figures that sat in people’s places last year going up in ebullient tailgate flames. The most sublime aspect of this Mets Home Opener wasn’t the final score of Mets 3 Marlins 2, though, yeah, that was great. The most sublime aspect is it looked and sounded very much like a Mets Home Opener.
A chunk of the traditional pomp had to be curtailed. No Shea family members at home plate presenting a good luck floral horseshoe to Luis Rojas. No Howie Rose welcoming the National League season to New York. No introductions of coaches, reserves and support staff (no roar of approval for Jacob deGrom). The national anthem was performed from behind center field. The ceremonial first pitch was delivered virtually. The entire presentation leaned a little to the Home Opener Lite side, much as Michael leaned a little toward home plate with the bases loaded, but it was so much better than last year’s empty shell of a lidlifter that it could be taken as a giant step in the march of potential post-pandemic progress. Mets fans cheered at the Mets. There was distance and there were masks, but there was noise that only the likes of us make. There was “LET’S GO METS” live and in living audio.
And there were reasons to make a joyful noise beyond the mere ability to do so. There was starting pitcher Taijuan Walker unwrapping his significant mound presence and dialing it up close to the 99 on his uniform, flirting with his own Santana for four-and-a-third and going six very solid in his Met debut, allowing only two earned runs. There was Brandon Nimmo, renewing his sublet on the basepaths (it’s his summer home) and staying with a deep fly ball he was losing in the wind in center until he found it as he crashed back-first into the outfield wall. There was Dom Smith not getting a hit with runners in scoring position but doing the next best thing, belting a would-be double to deepest center with the bases loaded and less than two out. Starling Marte’s spectacular combination of legs and leather prevented Dom’s blast from being a RISP-buster, but a sac fly is sac fly, and it put the Mets on the board in the fifth.
Walker’s more-than-pedestrian effort led eventually to the bullpen, which led to tranquility rather than trauma. Miguel Castro was perfect in the seventh. Rover T. Yam turned around his first couple of outings and emerged the Trevor May we’d heard so much about in the eighth. Heretofore heels-cooling closer Edwin Diaz didn’t have a lead to protect in the ninth but he kept the deficit at 2-1 without incident.
The bottom of the ninth would have incidents enough. It would have incidents galore. It would have Jeff McNeil and his batting average of absolutely nothing (0-for-10) leading off. The Squirrel, celebrating as best he could his .029th birthday, blew out the BABIP candles good and hard with a sock that didn’t unspool until it reached the foreground of carbonation ridge. No boycott of Coca-Cola Corner for Jeff. It was the ohfer pause that refreshed the score, from Marlins 2 Mets 1 to Marlins 2 Mets 2. Ahhh…
A 408-foot home run that knots everything up in the ninth inning in front of the first fans to watch the home team in person since a pandemic prevented a single person’s attendance since forever should rightly constitute the primary dramatic arc of our program, yet there was so much more to come. After Bass retired James McCann for the frame’s first out, the Marlins went into a clever shift against pinch-hitter Guillorme. But Luis cleverly grounded a ball toward right that couldn’t quite be converted into a forceout at first regardless of how many cards how many Marlin infielders fished from their back pockets. Miami attempted to pull that shift against Nimmo — a more severe version — but Brandon simply smiled and basically said, shoot, if you’re gonna give me the whole left side, I’m just gonna take it. Our preternaturally giddy on-base machine thus cranked out his second double and third hit of the day, pushing Guillorme to third. The wise Marlin move next was to intentionally pass Francisco Lindor; “so ordered,” declared Mattingly. Lindor, in turn, wisely urged on Conforto as he jogged to first (what a leader!).
As long as Michael, batting .176, avoided a double play, we weren’t doomed to extra innings; its surfeit of anything-goes automatic runners on second; and the general haunting nature of low-rent dark Marlin magic. Indeed, Pete Alonso was in the on-deck circle to salvage the rally should the responsibility fall on Polar shoulders, and wouldn’t Pete being Pete be a whale of a way to finish welcoming the National League season to New York? But Michael surely preferred to row this boat ashore himself.
By any means necessary.
During the solemn segment of the pregame ceremonies, public address announcer Marysol Castro dutifully read some thoughtful words in memory of Tom Seaver, who threw the first pitch of the National League season in New York eight times. Talk about significant presence on the Met mound. That’s where Tom belonged on Opening Day. I had seen a wistful sentiment expressed earlier Tuesday that maybe Tom was Up There somewhere far above Promenade watching his Mets. However you choose to ponder the afterlife, I doubt that would have been the case. When Tom stopped pitching, Tom stopped watching. In his later years, when his attention turned mainly to winemaking, Seaver said he got his fill of baseball from picking up the paper in the morning and poring over box scores. That’s all he needed to do to know what was going on in the game he used to dominate nine innings at a time.
When his writer friend and fellow fireballer Pat Jordan visited him in October of 2013, Tom was up in arms at what he saw in that morning’s paper.
Tom screeches like a girl. “Why’d they take Scherzer out?” I say because he’d reached his 109-pitch count. He screeches again, “Pitch count? Pitch count? Baseball’s not brain surgery. You don’t look for a reason to take him out. You look for a reason to leave him in!”
If Tom were still with us, in Napa Valley, maybe he’d be checking the box score this morning. What he’d see (perhaps after manfully muttering that almost nobody goes more than six anymore) is Michael Conforto was hit by a pitch with the bases loaded to drive in the winning run for the New York Mets. He wouldn’t know without delving into any accompanying details that Conforto got his right arm up where a legitimate strike was taking shape. He’d just know it was a win, just one game of 162, which is what we as fans usually say when our team loses but rarely bother to mention when our team wins.
“Obviously, it was not the way that I wanted to win the ballgame,” Michael said later, acknowledging that the sequence of events that netted the Mets the win was less than ideal, maybe not perfectly square. But he expressed no remorse for a portion of his person being in what turned out to be the right place at the right time. Kulpa admitted he blew the call, but that was after the game as well, and as Conforto confirmed, “a win’s a win.”
You don’t look for a reason to be disturbed by a win, especially a Home Opener win. You look for a reason to celebrate it. Mets 3 Marlins 2 — signed off on by the entire umpiring crew amid thousands of living, breathing fans — seems a pretty reasonable reason.
by Jason Fry on 7 April 2021 11:47 pm If a team starts the season 1-1, the third game is a Rorschach test. It usually determines whether you’ve won or lost your first series. It always determines whether you’re 2-1 or 1-2.
It’s undeniably true that the third game also determines whether your winning percentage will be .667, which is the stuff of awestruck recollections a generation later, or .333, which calls for a self-protective case of amnesia.
You probably see the flaw in the logic — that the difference between .667 and .333 means everything after 162 games, most everything after 150, a fair amount after 100, and so forth and so forth, until you get all the way down to three games, at which point it means zero. Nothing. Nada. Zilch. Bupkis. Fuck all.
You see the flaw in the logic, but plenty of people on talk radio and in the comments sections and on Twitter don’t, or more charitably do but were left so overwrought by a lousy Wednesday afternoon that their forebrains short-circuited long enough for them to dial a phone or tap at a keyboard and vomit up some bile. It’s always this way — this is the time of the season when you can remember every game easily and every at-bat if you furrow your brow, when everything seems absurdly magnified, and the smallest thing is a harbinger of gigantic shapes taking shape in the mist. These games and series are Rorschach tests, and after an ill-spent afternoon whose verdict is .333, everything looks like a skull and crossbones.
The beverage that left these particular tea leaves prophesying doom went down like this: David Peterson looked overamped in the first inning, giving up four runs, but then did a commendable job harnessing his emotions, settling in and pitching effectively. (If you’d like to plot the location of horses vis-a-vis their barn, please do, but know that your findings will not be a revelation to your chronicler.) The Mets drove Aaron Nola‘s pitch count steadily up and booted him from the game after four innings, but couldn’t collect the big hit that would have got them back in the game. Any chance at doing so evaporated when Jacob Barnes relieved Peterson and gave up a three-run homer on his first pitch delivered as a Met, a badge of insta-futility not donned since John Candelaria‘s debut as a Plan H or I starter in the cursed ’87 season. Barnes also settled down, though by now the barn was in flames and the horses weren’t even bothering to flee but insouciantly hanging around to light cigarettes from the embers. Dellin Betances made his 2021 debut and looked pretty much exactly like he did in 2020, then mercifully left further duties to Joey Lucchesi, who looked fairly impressive, though by then if you were watching with more than fitful attention I salute you as a better fan than me.
Not the way anyone wanted to spend a warm spring afternoon, but the Mets will be fine. Promise.
They’ll be fine because they’re getting reinforcements, with Carlos Carrasco and Noah Syndergaard and Seth Lugo not so far from returning and pushing whichever pitchers prove marginal off the roster. (Including, if need be, Betances — given Steve Cohen’s source of income, he’s one owner who ought to understand the sunk-cost fallacy.) They’ll be fine because luck evens out, and often does so with a vengeance. (Jeff McNeil, for instance, will go something like 11-for-16 after the BABIP gods forgive whatever they think he’s done.) And most of all, the Mets will be fine because that lineup is deep, talented and relentless. They arrive on a given night with the likes of Brandon Nimmo and James McCann hitting eighth, they work counts and spoil pitches, and they zero in on balls they can damage. That’s a recipe for devouring other staffs’ 3-4-5 starters and the soft underbelly of bullpens, and it will be a path to success on plenty of nights. How many? Couldn’t tell you, but it will be a lot more than one out of three.
Those better nights will come. You know better than to let three games convince you otherwise. Tomorrow we get a new cup and new tea leaves we can study after whatever happens. Stop screaming about hemlock, take a sip, and let the game come to you.
by Greg Prince on 7 April 2021 2:36 am Tuesday night’s Mets triumph in Philadelphia may have been the least convincing 8-4 victory in the history of 8-4 victories, but the key words here are “triumph” and “victory,” both of which the Mets achieved. The win column greets them with no hesitation.
Fortunately, the Style Council is not authorized to award points within the National League East standings even if our never changing mood insists something feels off despite results being right on. If you don’t like the Mets’ methods in achieving their means, take it up with the East German judge.
This game still gets scored a win, albeit on an admittedly askew line of 8 runs, 5 hits and 2 errors. Significantly, two of the hits were two-run homers, one in the fourth from the extra-rested Dom Smith, one in the ninth from Comeback Player of the Week Pete Alonso. The two errors were largely inconsequential, no matter that consistent defensive crispness thus far eludes a team that was impelled to while away three unscheduled off days and went a week playing nobody other than each other. But that comes under the heading of style points and, again, those don’t count.
The sixteen times four Mets stood by in the seventh inning while Vince Velasquez threw them balls certainly didn’t hurt the cause. A bases-loaded walk produced one run. A double-steal that unfolded in slow motion produced another (with Kevin Pillar pilfering home plate, the first time a Met has swiped that particular base in seven years). A good old-fashioned sacrifice fly extended the Mets’ lead further between home runs. If you were waiting for the club and its 1-for-6 with RISP to binge on every opportunity in sight, you were still waiting even as the Mets’ advantage stretched in the seventh to 6-1. Yet if you’re the type to embrace streaming offense with good cheer, this was a night for you.
It was also a night for Long Island’s Own Marcus Stroman, returned from his 2020 opt-out and presumably ready to earn something more than a qualifying offer next offseason. LIOMS courted touches of trouble here and there in the time-honored role of Season’s Second Starter but ultimately steamed through six innings (85 pitches) about as effectively as Jacob deGrom had the night before. Of course Stroman isn’t deGrom, which means it wasn’t a slap in the face of competitive valor when Marcus exited after six. Not being deGrom also means a starting pitcher might have a decision to show for a fine evening’s work of three hits, two walks and one run allowed.
Even when the bullpen gets involved.
The bullpen always gets involved. When the bullpen gets involved, we get a little unhinged. Maybe more than a little. The bullpen is why 8-4 wasn’t fully convincing. Mind you, none among Miguel Castro in the seventh (3 hits, 1 run); Trevor May in the eighth (2 hits, no runs) and Jeurys Familia in the ninth (2 hits, 1 walk, 2 runs if only 1 earned) actually let the game slip into genuine danger. Perceptual danger, perhaps, which is enough agita for us at present. You can’t blame our collective psyche for sensing trauma when there’s barely trouble.
Castro was a well being gone to two straight games — was it one game too many?
Rover T. Yam (my anagram of choice for Trevor May) helped blow the game the night before, and he’s back for more?
Holy crap, is that Aaron Loup warming up, too? Are we really gonna ride this “get back on the horse” aphorism directly off a cliff?
Jeurys Familia? He’s still here?
High anxiety would have its moments. It had to. We were 0-1. We were getting Edwin Diaz up and down and up, just daring him to enter the action and make us forget all the springtime propaganda about how he’s really found himself. We were…
We were comfortably ahead. And we stayed comfortably ahead. Nevertheless, we required in advance a shred of evidence that we could remain comfortably ahead — or at least ahead; and we couldn’t have it until we had it; and by then, we weren’t dead certain we actually did. You mean the game is over? You mean the game went unblown?
Mock all you want the 0-162 doomsayers. Bullpen jitters (and everything else we get nervous over) are a chronic condition around here. Steve Cohen can secure for us the world’s grandest shortstop, but even Daddy Metbucks can’t cure us so quickly of our dime-store late-inning heebie-jeebies. Once bitten, forever shy. So let those who complain like the world has ended after exactly one aggravating loss have their hour of angst. Consider it akin to a side effect you might detect after taking the COVID vaccine. Experts say you should let the fever run its course, then you’ll be fine.
And as we saw Tuesday night, getting a couple of two-run shots has the power to immunize you against the worst that you fear, which in our case was plunging into an 0-2 hole with 160 to play.
by Jason Fry on 6 April 2021 1:22 am Well, those were some complicated feelings to open with.
Your capsule summary: Jacob deGrom was terrific, the Mets’ offense looked like the kind of patient, relentless machine that will chew opponents up, and the team even played some solid defense. Well, until the offense whiffed on multiple knockout blows, deGrom departed having thrown just 77 pitches, the new and supposedly improved bullpen coughed up the lead in part because the defense turned shoddy, and the Mets’ hitters tried to come scrambling back only to have the game end with a Pete Alonso bullet that we all tried to will up and over the fence but that wound up thudding into Bryce Harper‘s glove.
Yeah, that was a lot.
I get being careful with your franchise pitcher, what with the long layoff since last he pitched, the desire to skip a fifth starter before the next time he pitches, and most of all the shadowy uncertainty about workloads and stresses in the wake of 2020. I get it, yet the outcome was an all too familiar script: a lead too small that became a lead lost, and the best pitcher of his generation sitting numbly in the dugout trying not to fume. Funny how the Mets can change the calendar and their ownership and their attitude and yet we all wind up sighing again about watching them take an errant step and then THWAP! grimace at a pratfall that became a cliche years ago. The Mets being the Mets, of course they had to follow the slapstick with a plucky but doomed attempt at a comeback, one that left you feeling simultaneously better and worse about the whole thing. That’s another movie we’ve seen before.
And of course baseball will remind you that only a fool thinks he has it solved. The Mets brought in Miguel Castro to relieve deGrom, the same Miguel Castro who made you mutter and pace after his acquisition in 2020, and he acquitted himself perfectly well. Then they turned to Trevor May and Aaron Loup, veterans brought in to show that Things Are Changing Around Here, and neither man could get out of his own way. Last year the Phillies’ bullpen was as merry a band of arsonists as ever burned down a season; this year a pen that looks no more promising on paper keeps running through the rain without getting wet. Middle relief is spaghetti against a wall, but the whole thing was ridiculous nonetheless.
But you know what? Opening Day is its own reward, even an agonizingly delayed Opening Day that ends with an irritating loss. Win or lose, it’s the day life settles back into its familiar contours, the rhythms and routines of fandom get happily rediscovered, and we once again let ourselves live and die — in miniature, mind you — based on the outcome of an exhibition we can’t control. It’s a crazy thing to do, but it’s so much fun that we return year after year, signing up to do it again.
The Mets lost, and I had more fun watching them lose than I had doing the vast majority of whatever the hell I did during the usual forgettable smudge of winter. I mean, did you see Kevin Pillar field that ball off the top of the fence and fire it to Jeff McNeil who fired it to J.D. Davis just ahead of a very surprised Rhys Hoskins? Did you see Francisco Lindor glide across the grass as he made that flip to McNeil at second? Did you have fun guessing along with deGrom and James McCann as they sized up Harper for deGrom’s final pitches, showing him that slider and then moving his eyeline out and out until he was lunging for a fastball he couldn’t catch? Did you hear Alonso connect and think maybe, just maybe … even if it was only for that split-second before you knew better?
It was agonizing. It was also great fun. When it ended, my first thought was: My heart can’t take 162 like that.
And then, right on its heels, came another thought: When’s the next one?
by Greg Prince on 5 April 2021 4:11 pm What do we want out of Opening Day?
1) For it to arrive.
2) For the Mets to win.
3) For the Mets to homer.
The first is essential, whether we’re talking wishing for the season to start sooner than possible (when Spring Training inevitably drags) or start at all (see 2020…or just the other day). The second speaks for itself. The third? It’s just better when a Met hits a home run in the first baseball game of the year. It’s not necessary to win, and it doesn’t completely redeem the day if we lose, but how can you not love an Opening Day home run? The Opening Day home run is the loudest of home runs. It announces Mets baseball’s presence with authority. If it’s launched at the home of the Mets, the volume is deafening. If it’s launched on the road, as it will have to be tonight in Philadelphia, it hollers over a crowd we wish to quiet down.
Plus, it’s a home run. Home runs are highlights that don’t have to be explained. Boom, as Warner Wolf liked to say.
The Mets are famous for their Opening Day record of success since 1970, going like a million and four. “Like” a million and four translates literally to 40-12, which includes the Second Season Opener of 1981 (clarifying that asterisky point is truly my OCD). In those 40 wins, sometimes the Mets didn’t homer. No longballs in 2015, 2017 or 2018, to cite three recent examples of happy Opening Day recaps. Was our ebullience detracted from because we didn’t blaze a path to victory four bags at a time? Not really. But “Yoenis Cespedes homered and the Mets won!” (2020) or “Robinson Cano homered and the Mets won!” (2019) is so simple, satisfying and powerful. And on a chilly Opening Day like that of March 31, 2014, losing certainly sucked, but the three Mets hit homers and that loudly if briefly raised spirits right out of the box.
You’d rather win and not homer than lose and homer a lot. You’d rather it take fourteen innings — without a runner on second to start every extra half-inning — to win on Opening Day, 1-0, with the one run poked through the infield with the bases loaded in the bottom of the fourteenth. That’s how the Mets won on March 31, 1998, a.k.a. the Alberto Castillo Game, so named for the backup catcher who did the fourteenth-inning poking. No homers, no problems. The recap couldn’t help but be happier than in 2014. It was also a whole helluva lot warmer.
No two March 31s are alike (except that March 31 is too early for baseball) just as no two Opening Days are alike, save for the part that Tom Boswell said about time beginning, however delayed time might find itself. This here 2021 Opening Day/Night is the ninth Mets opener that is taking place later than initially scheduled.
• In 1962, it rained in St. Louis, which was OK, because it gave the Mets extra time to emerge from their stalled hotel elevator; the Mets started existing a day later.
• In 1966, cats and dogs came down on Cincinnati, catapulting the Mets from the honor of contesting the traditional opener at Crosley field on a Monday to starting their season at Shea on a Friday.
• Two years later, in 1968, the funeral of Martin Luther King compelled baseball to push back its openers, including the Mets’ at San Francisco, by a day (though the process was hardly smooth).
• The first modern in-season players’ strike lopped the first week of the season off the schedule in 1972.
• Snow got the best of the Mets and Phillies at the Vet in 1982 (somehow the last time the Mets opened in Philadelphia until tonight), but the carpet got cleared off within a couple of days.
• A lockout forced the sport to scramble a bit in 1990, with openers everywhere coming almost a week late; unlike in ’72, the missing April games were made up rather than simply cancelled.
• The dreaded strike of 1994 had morphed into the dreaded strike of 1995, meaning a late-April start to baseball in the latter year, touching off a shortened schedule of 144 games.
• You likely haven’t forgotten that baseball in 2020 didn’t begin until the end of July…or that the Mets of 2021 cooled their heels this past weekend in D.C.
So yes, start a season. And win the game. And homer! It’s fun!
The Mets have hit 59 homers in their 60 openers to date (or 58 in their 59 openers to date if you insisting on being a Second Season 1981 killjoy). The Mets are 23-14 in openers when they opener and 17-6 when they don’t. The presence of a home run doesn’t always portend a win, and the absence of a home run certainly doesn’t guarantee a loss. But as long as we’re on the subject, what might an Opening Day home run mean in the long term once that first burst of fun evaporates?
For that, I turned to my friend Herbert Hindsight Harbinger to fill me in. Herbie Harbinger has splendid hindsight and can explain in great detail what something means after the fact. When not breaking down decades-old Opening Days for me, he appears regularly on several cable news channel panel shows.
Here’s some of what Herbie Harbinger told me vis-à-vis Opening Day home runs as harbingers of Mets developments to come.
1) The first Mets Opening Day home run qualifies as a hellacious harbinger. It — obviously the first homer in Mets history — was hit by Gil Hodges. Gil Hodges would go on to become one of a handful of the most important figures in New York Mets history. Was managing the 1969 Mets to their world championship and winning universal acclaim for his role in molding heretofore hopeless sad sacks into kings of the baseball universe directly traceable to Gil’s fourth-inning home run from seven-and-a-half years earlier? Let’s say that in the telling of the Hodges Mets story, it’s a fun tidbit. And we did say that home runs on Opening Day are fun.
The Mets lost their first Opening Day, 11-4, despite the homer from Hodges and one an inning later from Charlie Neal. The loss itself was more the harbinger of things to come in 1962.
2) Ron Swoboda homered on Opening Day in 1968 at Candlestick. The Mets lost. The Mets always lost on Opening Day back then. No exaggeration. Swoboda would go on to hit 11 homers in all in The Year of the Pitcher. By the title of the campaign in question, Rocky’s clout clearly wasn’t a harbinger of a Met power surge in general. The Mets hit 81 as a team in ’68, or five fewer than the 2020 Mets hit in sixty games.
3) Duffy Dyer delivered a pinch-home run on Opening Day 1969. It couldn’t have been more dramatic. There were two outs, there were two on, it was the bottom of the ninth inning, and Duffy’s blast put the Mets…one behind the newborn Expos. All right, so it could have been more dramatic. Dyer’s homer ramped up the Mets’ attack impressively, but they went from losing, 11-7, to losing, 11-10, which is what they lost by. Ol’ Duff would hit two more homers all year and the Mets would lose only 61 more times, so you might say this shot, no matter how exhilarating in the moment, was as unharbingery as imaginable.
Yet exhilarating just the same.
4) Ed Kranpeool’s home run in the strike-delayed 1972 opener represented a milestone, marking the first time a Met ever homered in a Mets Opening Day win. It only took eleven Opening Days for the two events to coincide. As with chocolate and peanut butter, you didn’t ask the Reese’s folks what took so long to put them together. You just enjoyed that they had combined forces and you asked for more.
5) On Opening Day 1973, Cleon Jones went deep not once but twice, the first time a Met had homered more than once on Opening Day. Four Mets would do the same on later Opening Days, also sparking wins. And Cleon would do it again on September 19, homering twice to help pulverize Pittsburgh en route to the Mets swiping first place out from under the Buccos. Herbie Harbinger casts Cleon’s moves as excellent foreshadowing.
6) It’s 1975! Dave Kingman has arrived! And homered on Opening Day! He’s going to hit 36 this season! He’s going to set the franchise record! Herbie Harbinger — having brought his kiddies, brought his wife — is hollerin’ and cheerin’ and jumpin’ in his seat because there was, at last, a Met really sockin’ the ball.
7) It’s 1979. Richie Hebner has homered on Opening Day. And we all remember both the season and the player’s production therein as sexy. Or the farthest thing from it. But on Opening Day 1979, as Rod Stewart had been noting on the radio in the weeks prior, who right here was complaining?
8) The Mets didn’t homer on Opening Day 1980. The Mets homered hardly at all in 1980, knocking those home runs over the wall 61 measly times. Who right here was complaining about this, either? It was still fun to win on Opening Day and it was definitely fun to change ownership before Opening Day.
9) The first Mets Opening Day of 1981 featured home runs from two different Mets on Opening Day for the first time since the first Mets Opening Day at all in 1962. Filling the shoes of Messrs. Hodges and Neal nineteen years later were Lee Mazzilli and Rusty Staub. The Mets would win the game in Chicago, then lose a lot of games for a couple of months, then go on strike with their colleagues. Herbie isn’t impressed.
10) The second Mets Opening Day of 1981, introducing the split season concept to a grateful nation (well, me), featured a home run from Kingman, who, like Staub, was a Recidivist Met that year(s). Sky had fourteen before the strike, eight after. Herbie Harbinger wishes he’d hit a few more following the split.
11) Snow week in Philadelphia in 1982 culminated in something the Mets had never done in the City of Brotherly Love and surfeit of live shots of cheesesteaks sizzling in Philadelphia on SNY (though those would air later). Joe Christopher had homered at Connie Mack Stadium on Opening Day 1964, but the Mets lost. No Met homered on Opening Day at Veterans Stadium 1974, and the Mets lost. Here in the ballpark with the jail and the recently revealed secret apartment, the Mets did everything we wanted them to do. They won an opener in Philadelphia and one of them homered. Even better, the homerer of the day was George Foster, who was acquired that February exactly for this purpose.
It wasn’t much of a harbinger. Even still.
By the by, how odd is it that the Mets haven’t opened a season in nearby Philadelphia in 39 years and are doing so this year only because the Nationals couldn’t control their COVID tests? We play the Phillies nineteen times annually most seasons. We’ve played in the same division since 1969. How have we not been scheduled to start our year there since 1982?
As potential near-term harbingers go, the Mets set a franchise record for most home runs in one game at Citizens Bank Park with seven in 2005, and broke that record with eight home runs in one game in 2015 in the same red-bricked facility. In the past two seasons, the Mets have homered at least once in fourteen of their past sixteen visits to CBP covering 2019 and 2020. So?
So maybe bet the homer over tonight.
12) Tom Seaver returned to the Mets in 1983. The Mets won without homering — and, as every Mets triviot knows, with Mike Howard singling in the winning run on what turned out to be his final swing in the major leagues.
But you had us at Tom Seaver returned to the Mets.
13) The Mets got blown out of Riverfront Stadium on Opening Day 1984, finally getting that honor they were rained out of at Crosley in 1966. They lost, 8-1. Some honor. Ah, but in the second inning, in his first Opening Day plate appearance, reigning National League Rookie of the Year Darryl Strawberry homered to right. It was the 27th of a career that would see 252 launched in Met threads and 335 in all. Herbie says that’s pretty Harbingeriffic.
14) Gary Carter won Opening Day 1985 with his first Met home run, struck in the tenth inning off former Met Neil Allen. Gary Carter would hit 32 home runs in 1985, 24 more in 1986 and a couple in the World Series, which the Mets won. Herbie’s still kvelling from Gary Carter.
15) No homers for the 1986 Mets on Opening Night in Pittsburgh. A win, but no homer. In 1969, you’ll recall, they had a homer, but no win. Therefore, we can safely say that the Mets have never managed to homer in their opener; win their opener; and win the World Series in the same season. This season would be a fine season to change that fact. Or just win the World Series.
16) What’s that Darryl’s doing on Opening Day 1987? Swatting a three-run homer in the first inning, leading the Mets to a 3-2 win on a day that would have otherwise been a monumental drag given Dwight Gooden’s drug suspension? And what was that Darryl would do before the season was over? Hit 39 home runs for a new Mets record? Herbie Harbinger approves.
17) SIX HOME RUNS ON OPENING DAY IN MONTREAL! TWO FOR DARRYL, INCLUDING ONE THAT FLEW TO THE ARCTIC CIRCLE! TWO FOR McREYNOLDS! METS WIN! DARRYL TIES HIS FRANCHISE HR RECORD! METS GO 100-60! UPPER-CASE HARBINGER ALERT!!!!
18) Howard Johnson quietly hits a home run as part of a 1989 Opening Day win at Shea. Howard Johnson quietly goes on to hit 36 home runs that season. Howard Johnson quietly made a lot of noise as a New York Met. Herbie heard him.
19) Hojo would do it again on Opening Day 1990, and he’d be joined by starting catcher Barry Lyons. We’re going to be quiet about Hojo because Lyons is the anti-harbinger here because the Mets would demote Barry in the middle of the year and release him in September. Guy hits a homer on Opening Day and he doesn’t last the season. In a sense Barry became a harbinger, because he became the first of three Mets to homer on Opening Day yet be sent packing before long. Oh, and the Mets lost, so all in all not the most unblemished of memories for Barry Lyons.
20) Bobby Bonilla homered twice on Opening Night in St. Louis in 1992, including mashing the game-winner in the tenth, validating the enormous contract the Mets gave him as a free agent the previous winter. Obviously everything’s going to work out great between the Mets and Bobby Bo.
21) Bobby Bo homers in the Mets’ win over the inaugural Rockies at Shea in 1993. See? Told you it was all going swimmingly.
22) The wind’s blowing out at Wrigley on Opening Day 1994. It’s certainly at the back of Jose Vizcaino, Todd Hundley and Jeff Kent, each of whom homer and contribute to a rousing Mets win. The season would be truncated in August by that nasty strike, but all three players had many years in front of them, with Hundley and Kent having many home runs in front of them. Herbie votes yea that this game was a Harbinger, even if Kent would be powerful mostly for other teams.
23) On Opening Day 1995, Rico Brogna hits the first homer ever to ever exit Coors Field. You know, I do believe other homers have flown out of that park since.
24) Hundley, who homered at Wrigley on Opening Day 1994 and Coors on Opening Day 1995, homers at Shea on Opening Day 1996 to commence an epic comeback over the Cardinals. Todd is the OD OG, eh? Not only that, but he winds up breaking Strawman’s single-season franchise mark in 1996. And not only that, but Bernard Gilkey homers for the first of thirty times this season and Rey Ordoñez makes that breathtaking throw home from his knees, hinting at what kind of shortstop he’s going to be.
The Mets win, which is not a harbinger for 71-91 1996, however.
25) Todd is back at it in 1997, homering on Opening Day for the fourth season in a row, this time at San Diego. He’s gonna hit 30 this year, which is great. And the Mets are going to win 88 games and compete for the Wild Card, which is even better.
Never mind that Pete Harnisch and a hundred relievers give up eleven Padre runs in the sixth (only one of those numbers is an exaggeration). A new era is at hand. Sadly, it will have little to do with Todd Hundley, but you can’t have everything.
26) No Hundley on Opening Day 1998, which is why we had Tim Spehr starting and Bambi Castillo heroing if not homering in the aforementioned 1-0 thriller. Maybe the Mets will have another catcher who can homer soon.
27) Beautiful John Olerud homers on Opening Day 1999 in Miami. The Mets lose. But John Olerud is always beautiful. So will be 1999.
28) Say, the Mets got that power-hitting catcher, Mike Piazza. He homers in a Met loss on Opening Day 2000, but it’s in Japan, so that must count for something extra.
29) Piazza homers on Opening Night 2001 in Atlanta, which you’d figure would be the big story considering the era we’re in where we hate the Braves (kicking off a bandwagon that’s gathering steam of late), but it would be Robin Ventura who’d steal the home run thunder by blasting a pair. One of them is off John Rocker to take a lead in the eighth, the other is off Kerry Ligtenberg to win the game in the tenth. As for it being a harbinger, I had to admit to Herbie that I walked around the next day convinced 2001 was going to be another 1986.
Herbie chuckled at my youthful naïveté of twenty years ago.
30) Jay Payton homered as part of a balanced Met attack that vanquished Pittsburgh on Opening Day 2002. The Mets spun that 1-0 start into Wild Card contention gold (gold, Jerry!) by the end of July. So shimmering were the Mets’ chances in the eyes of Steve Phillips that the GM pulled a Barry Lyons and dispatched Payton off the team. Jay was sent to Colorado where he discovered players could still hit home runs out of Coors Field and hence thrived. The Mets got in exchange for Payton John Thomson, a pitcher who was not part of a fierce Wild Card charge. Actually, the Mets stormed off in the other direction. I mean really in the other direction. Like not winning a single game at Shea Stadium in August. And Thomson, who didn’t help, left as a free agent and said some grouchy things about not wanting to pitch here. Herbie couldn’t bear to track down exact quotes.
31) Kaz Matsui homered on the very first pitch he saw in North American in 2004, an Opening Night win at thoroughly unmourned Turner Field. It wasn’t a harbinger of a very good Met career, but it was a harbinger of what Kaz Matsui would do on first pitches he saw during the next couple of seasons to come.
32) Matsui homered. Carlos Beltran homered. Cliff Floyd homered. Pedro Martinez was dynamite. The Mets lost Opening Day 2005 at Cincinnati anyway. It wasn’t a harbinger and, despite the fireworks, it wasn’t that much fun.
33) In 2006, David Wright hits his first Opening Day home run in his second Opening Day. David Wright participates in his first Opening Day win. Herbie hasn’t checked the archives, but I assume David Wright said something to the effect of the home run is nice and all, but the important thing is we won…which is why we loved, love and will always love David Wright.
34) One Met homers on Opening Day 2009 after all Mets skip the Opening Day four-base course for a couple of years. The Met who homers is Daniel Murphy. He’ll hit twelve all year. He’ll lead the Mets. Get a sense of what kind of year 2009 is going to be?
35) David contributes another homer to another victory on Opening Day 2010. He’s going to hit 29 this year, a very nice change of pace after plunging to 10 in 2009. The year won’t be very good for the Mets, but Wright is back! Herbie hasn’t checked the archives, but I assume David said something to the effect of home runs still being nice, but winning…and so on. Still love ya, Captain!
36) Collin Cowgill ices Opening Day 2013 with a grand slam that everybody at Citi Field, no matter how raucously we greet its materialization, understands is a harbinger of absolutely nothing. He’s Collin Cowgill. We know he’s another Tim Spehr, except in the outfield. We’re shocked that he isn’t released by the time we climb the steps to the 7. We can be knocked over with a feather when he’s shipped off to Lyons-Payton territory, traded to the Angels in June.
37) Andrew Brown takes Stephen Strasburg over the wall in the first inning on Opening Day 2014. Strasburg makes it safely back. Brown disappears soon enough. Herbie says he saw it coming.
38) The Mets don’t homer for four consecutive Opening Days from 2015 through 2018, winning three of them. On Opening Day 2019, new Met Robinson Cano homers at Nationals Park, where the Mets really need to stop scheduling openers. Cano convinces nobody that this is a harbinger of a superb season ahead.
Cano, despite a decade or two remaining on his contract, will not be available tonight in Philadelphia. Or anytime this year.
39) Yo! He’s back! For a minute, anyway, appropriate enough for a season that barely lasts half an hour, even if every games runs about 4:23. Mr. Cespedes missed all of 2019 but he was on hand to DH at Citi Field on Opening Day 2020, July 24, in front of no fans (tell me you saw those specs coming a year-and-a-half or so ago). Everything was weird during the last Opener we played, except for Jacob deGrom dealing and Yoenis Cespedes slugging. Then Yo, like the 2021 All-Star Game, hoofed it out of Atlanta and, before somebody could Barry Lyons him, opted out of 2020. Herbie insists the whole thing was a bizarre dream.
40) “Whatever you think is going to happen during the season is definitely not going to happen. Or at least not in the exact way you think. Opening Day is fun and exciting and might be a sign of things to come. Or it might just be a snapshot of how people play in April when it’s mostly too cold to function.”
That’s not from Herbie Harbinger. That’s from ex-Met Ty Kelly, writing for the Metropolitan newsletter. It’s a pretty good take and from a real person. Ty made one Opening Day roster as a Met, in 2017, the same season another real person, Stephanie Pianto, wouldn’t miss Opening Day for anything.
Ty Kelly can continue to lay claim to the most recent base hit in Met postseason history, one of very few the Mets garnered versus Madison Bumgarner in the 2016 Wild Card Game. I’m sure Ty won’t mind if he knows we’re rooting for somebody to take that distinction away from him in about six months.
41) Let’s end the way we’ve begun so many Mets Opening Days, with 41. Tom Seaver never hit a home run on Opening Day. He didn’t have to. But maybe tonight somebody wearing a patch commemorating Tom’s unparalleled impact as a Met will homer and we’ll win and we’ll be on our way to genuinely Terrific things.
Or, as Ty suggests, it might just be a snapshot. Write down the stats, though. It’ll last longer.
by Greg Prince on 4 April 2021 5:45 pm The Mets are about to begin their season and we Mets fans are about to begin it with them. I know we thought we’d be three games deep into this new year by now, but better late than never.
What will 2021 bring? In terms of wins and losses, we’ll see. In terms of what stays with each of us over the long haul, probably a lot more than we realize. Everybody processes these seasons personally and continually. I’m pretty sure two of the main reasons we keep coming back is for what it connects us to in the past and for what it will connect us to in the future. I got a renewed sense of that eternal baseball truth from a message sent our way recently by a lifelong Mets fan named Stephanie Pianto. She’d recorded some thoughts a while back about her fandom, specifically as it pertained to the relationship she treasured with her late father Salvatore. I asked if she’d permit us to publish them and she was kind enough to agree.
For everybody who’s loved the Mets…and for everybody’s who’s loved loving the Mets with somebody else who’s loved the Mets…we proudly share Stephanie’s essay.
***
Baseball starts again soon with a meaning that changed for me four years ago. That season, the 2017 season, began with the death of my father directly after Opening Day weekend. It was the first year I made the leap to becoming a season ticket holder for the first and, as it turned out so far, only time. That decision was made the previous September when the Mets were heading into the postseason for the second year in a row. It was also around then I made the decision to move out on my own and for the first time live completely independently without a significant other or spouse; no kids, no siblings, no parents. That season ticket included access to the 2016 postseason plus every Sunday home game and a few other choice games during the next season. I could see far into the future a life where I spent every spring and summer Sunday at Citi Field in rain or shine.
You see, my love of baseball was a gift that had been handed down to me by my father and my cousin. I felt a part of something when we talked ball. It especially cemented a bond between me and my father — a bond that included carpentry, auto mechanics and bar life. A little blonde petite girl I was, but to him I was “his boy,” being the oldest of two daughters. So, feeling a great sense of accomplishment, I plunked down my $1,500 to sit amongst the diehards and the naysayers and truly become a part of the season ticket universe. At 54 years old, it was a sort of retirement in my mind.
October 2016 came around and the Mets blew their one-chance Wild Card game, ending that season as they had almost every other season: defeated (though I did keep my ultimately unused World Series tickets and the box they came in). Yet I couldn’t be totally let down, because I was graduating to a new identity, as a season ticket holder — with a VIP card and everything come April! Trade talks and rumors abounded just like every year, but it held a new significance now, as if I were on the payroll or the board of directors or something. I had arrived at a point in life where I could say I was in control of my destiny and part of that destiny was spending as much time as I wanted to watching the Mets from my own personal reserved seat. It was exhilarating.
But we all know how life is.
Crushing news came that winter when my father was diagnosed with stage 4 pancreatic cancer. Baseball really wasn’t on my mind at this time, and I began to summon up the fortitude for the most difficult role I’d yet to play, to be the hand of strength and guidance to my dad. He was “my boy” now.
Cancer is a terrible disease. I’m sure I don’t need to go into detail. Everyone has been around someone who has suffered its pitiless, marauding rampage. Watching my father become a helpless child, sometimes calling out for his deceased mother in his sleep and at other times trying to defy the strict bounds that the disease had placed on his freedom, made me realize how much I don’t have control over anything. I kept a poker face so I could keep him from reading the fear in my heart, telling him next summer I’m going to bring him to one of the games. I navigated him through well-wishing friends and relatives with their miracle cures and their sometimes obvious grief when they came to visit him toward the end and saw his obviously withering life. Everyone’s intentions were pure, but there was no simple way to accept death’s inevitable knocking on the door.
In the spring of 2017 my sister and I held his hands on his hospice bed as his pulse and breath halted. We let him leave this earthly realm to hopefully reunite with the loved ones he had been dreaming about every night toward the end.
So, now my story turns back to baseball and why it means so much to me.
***
The Mets’ opening weekend of 2017 was the last weekend my father was in his home, the last time I spent with him in his nest, surrounded by our memories. I forfeited going to every game that weekend except for Opening Day because that was the tie he and I shared. He was proud of me, “his boy,” going to the stadium all by myself, something he himself had done in his youth, and carrying on the tradition of something we loved together. Growing up, I idolized my dad. He was always the “coolest” guy and had a lot of that Italian swagger. He grew up in Brooklyn and Queens and was originally a Dodgers fan but adopted the Mets since they played right in his backyard (and he would never, never be a Yankees fan). From as far back as I can remember, wherever he was was where I wanted to be. On Saturdays and Sundays when I was growing up in the 1960s, that meant our Long Island home, when he was right in front of the TV with my uncle and my grandfather watching the Mets on Channel 9.
My two cousins Tom and Barbara, who were older than me, and I loved to sit around with the old guys and listen to their animated critique of every player, every play and every umpire’s decision. One minute they’d be calling everyone a bum, and then in another minute they’d be jumping up out of their seats in the den and beaming with joy at the incredible talent and good judgment of the whole lot of them. It was funny to hear the nicknames or attributes my father and uncle would come up with. For instance, Eddie Kranepool “runs like a baby elephant” (sorry Eddie, if you’re reading this, we love you and you’re a treasure). Or, overemphasizing the vowels in “Cleooooooon Jones” when he’d make a great catch or deliver a run. But we never touched Seaver or Koosman. Those guys were always given the utmost respect.
In the 1970s there was no chance I’d ever get to play baseball on a team, being female. And softball was out of the question. Nevertheless, I would spend hours talking technique with my dad and he’d give me pointers on how to judge a strike as he lobbed ’em in slowly to me on the front lawn. He even taught me to throw righty because as a lefty I would catch the ball in my left hand and drop my mitt to throw the ball. He said you can’t do that, so pick which hand you’re gonna do what with. I have to say I had a pretty good arm, and when I played catch with the neighborhood kids, they were impressed at how hard I could throw…and with considerable accuracy!
Even after I had moved out of the house and married in the 1980s, the phones would immediately be ringing between me, my dad and cousin when the Mets scored a run or made a stupid play. No matter where we were, we were always connected if there was a game on. If any of us was fortunate enough to be at a game, we’d call each other from the stadium and report on what was going on in the crowd.
So when I left from his house that Opening Day four years ago to get on the LIRR and head for Flushing, I was taking my dad with me in spirit because I knew how helpless he felt being bedridden at that point.
And I did something else which I knew was meaningful to him. I wore my cousin’s 1980s-era royal blue satin jacket with the embroidered Mets logo to the game. My cousin Tommy, one of our original gang of weekend warriors, was my first baseball hero, playing TriVillage Little League in Huntington at shortstop when we were kids. He was the “catch” partner to my father and me whenever we constituted a trio. Tommy had passed away at the age of 33 from cancer. After his death in 1993, I didn’t watch baseball for a very long time. For years. It wasn’t the same knowing he wasn’t also watching from somewhere and calling with updates on the score or to tell me to put the game on because they have a rally going. It wasn’t until I was dating a guy who was a Mets fan and started taking me to games in 2010 that I began to get back on the horse. By 2017 it was my duty to show my dad that things will go on. Things will be remembered. He will be remembered.
Baseball definitely hasn’t stopped for me without my dad as it did when my cousin Tommy died, even though I’ve moved away from the immediate Metropolitan Area and haven’t been back to Citi Field since the year I had those season tickets. I still watch and listen to the games (sometimes with my two-year-old grandson who has a particular leaning to the colors of orange and blue). My dad left an indelible stamp on me. I still celebrate every strikeout, every error and every home run as testimony to our enduring love.
To my daddy, and to baseball.
by Greg Prince on 2 April 2021 6:13 pm The pencil manufacturers of America have been enjoying boom times these past two baseball seasons, what with the folly of penning in ink anything that hasn’t happened yet becoming ever more evident. Or have you seen the Mets open the past two baseball seasons as originally scheduled?
Last year is last year, but this year’s still got a little too much 2020 juice to it, what with an entire series of baseball games — merely the ones the Mets were going to use to open 2021 — postponed by positive COVID-19 tests among unidentified Washington Nationals. You hope everybody concerned is healthy. You wish there was a viable alternative to shutting everything down. A year ago was worse. A year ago we waited four months rather than four days. A year from now figures to be better. A year from now vaccinations figure to have taken hold. For the moment, contact tracing’s gotta do its thing, even if it dares to dampen our weekend.
So instead of marking down the dandy Opening Night pitching matchup of deGrom vs. Scherzer in your scorebook Thursday night and then proceeding with best laid Metsian plans Saturday and Sunday, our season won’t come until Monday night in Philadelphia, Jake still listed as probable pitcher (“probable” proving a very viable word) for us, Matt Moore doing the honors for the Phillies, though it’s unlikely the Phillies will feel particularly honored. They’ve already opened their season. For them, the Mets’ first game will be just another Monday night at the office. Hopefully the Mets will be festive enough for both clubs. Also, Matt Moore isn’t Max Scherzer, which is not a putdown of Matt Moore nor a troll of the baseball gods. Two different pitchers is all.
• Max Scherzer, a righty, is one of the best to ever oppose the Mets on Opening Day or any day, as his vintage 17-strikeout no-hitter attests.
• Lefty Matt Moore’s career ERA is over four-and-a-half and the Mets have spanked him each of the three times they’ve faced him.
• Scherzer’s been a Nat in our side since 2015.
• Moore pitched in Japan in 2020.
• Scherzer’s very likely going to the Hall of Fame.
• Moore can buy a ticket.
But one steamy night in 2013 they were teammates in different uniforms. Scherzer of the Tigers started, Moore of the Rays relieved. Neither gave up a run. That was the All-Star Game at Citi Field. Matt Harvey started for the National League. He’s of the Orioles now. Time drags when you don’t have the series of games you think you have but otherwise flies, eh?
After deGrom vs. Moore, Marcus Stroman and David Peterson are slated to go at Citizens Bank on Tuesday and Wednesday before ol’ No. 99 Taijuan Walker starts the National League season in New York on Thursday. But these days that’s getting way ahead of ourselves. Let’s get to Monday. Let’s get to Philadelphia. Let’s get the ball into the business hand of Jacob deGrom.
And let’s keep an eraser handy, just in case.
by Greg Prince on 1 April 2021 11:52 am A lifetime spent staring at the Mets’ skyline logo inevitably draws the eye to the bridge in the foreground. As the franchise’s official explanation details, the span “symbolizes that the Mets, in bringing National League baseball back to New York, represent all five boroughs.” It’s a helluva Met-aphor, and fairly close to geographically accurate from a Flushing-honed perspective. There are bridges that will carry a person between Queens and the Bronx, Queens and Manhattan, and Queens and Brooklyn (including the Kosciuszko Bridge, a.k.a. the Mientkiewicz). Getting from Queens to Staten Island by bridge, however, is like getting the Moderna or Pfizer vaccine: it’s gonna take you a couple of shots.
 The eye inevitably meets the bridge. Yet thanks to the Mets’ decision to play part of their schedule on (in?) Staten Island this season, you might say Queens and Staten Island will be like Johnson & Johnson. If anything, they’ve grown closer. Or as the old saying goes, you’re gonna win a third of your games, you’re gonna lose a third of your games and some games you’re gonna play somewhere you’ve never played before…maybe even Staten Island.
The convenience factor is selective, but after a year-plus of our lives being upended by COVID-19, I guess it’s not too much of an imposition to have approximately one-sixth of all Mets home games played in (on?) Staten Island until further notice. It’s great news for the Mets fans on, in or near Staten Island. I’m not one of them, but I’m not all the way home in terms of being fully vaccinated, either, so it won’t really matter to me personally. Except that it’s the Mets doing it, so of course it’s personal, if only from a distance.
Make that Francisco Lindor and the Mets doing it. Still can’t get over that deal, even with E-ZPass.
Given that New York City and New York State have expressed concerns about maintaining vaccination momentum at supersites like the one established at Citi Field, I understand why authorities don’t want to take such an ideal locale totally off their map. And Major League Baseball, despite the danger the Rangers may be courting in Texas, is right to be legitimately concerned about sanitization in its facilities. Having close to 10,000 Mets fans not in the building about once per homestand certainly won’t hurt the greater good.
Thus we’ve received the joint announcement that home Saturdays will be known in 2021 as Staturdays with the Mets, Presented by Statcast, Powered by Google Cloud. Each Saturday game the Mets host this season — or at least until vaccination penetration reaches that elusive herd immunity level — will take place not at Citi Field but at Richmond County Bank Ballpark at St. George. (Props to the financial institutions for working out the naming rights niceties.) The first time the Mets ferry to Staten Island will be a week from Saturday, on April 10 at 1:10 PM vs. the Marlins. The rest will be day games, too, either at ten after one or ten after four, depending on whether Fox intrudes. Otherwise the Staturdays with the Mets, Presented by Statcast, Powered by Google Cloud games will air on WPIX, Channel 11 in New York and stream, unsurprisingly, via Google Cloud. It’s unclear whether Gary, Keith, Ron or Steve Gelbs will travel with the team or conduct their business from the Citi Field booth or SNY studios.
Per the regulations put in place for public safety, I won’t be going to a game for a while. Maybe a while longer depending on my own comfort level with crowds. Not that the crowds in (on?) Staten Island will be that voluminous. Density is another story. Capacity at the former minor league ballpark is normally 7,171, but normal remains up for grabs. The Mets are capping SI tickets sold to 5,010, which is, appropriately enough this time of year, quite the Easter egg, as 5,010 represents 69.86% of RCBB@SG capacity.
Nice touch, Mets, as, in theory, is the mandate that all fans attending games on (in?) Staten Island must wear Mets-branded masks, even if they must be purchased cashlessly directly outside the ballpark. The Mets are masking their mandate as an anti-COVID measure, citing studies that show bringing previously purchased masks across bodies of water limits their effectiveness. One of the professional curmudgeons at the Post called it the Staten Island Stimulus, and not approvingly. Whatever. Staten Island residents who show three forms of ID will be exempt from having to buy new masks directly from the Mets, but will, of course, still have to wear a Mets-branded face covering. Just as at Citi Field the rest of the week, fans will also have to show proof of a negative COVID test or full vaccination.
Knowing Governor Cuomo and Mayor de Blasio shared concerns about altogether diminishing Citi Field’s efficacy for vaccinations (about the only thing they share, it seems), Steve Cohen volunteered the Mets to move out of Queens on what amounts to a bi-weekly basis. It may not be as community-minded as it sounds, however. The city and state are each going to give the Mets special “financial considerations,” reminding us that Steve Cohen didn’t get to be Steve Cohen just on Twitter charm. And goodness knows Rob Manfred, whose “Minor Your Own Business” program was going over like a lead balloon, was no doubt pleased to find an otherwise vacant baseball factory up and running again. Should you choose to be a cynic, this can also be framed as a dry run of sorts for the proposed proposed Tampa Bay-Montreal arrangement, though the Mets are at least staying in the same city not to mention country. With Cohen being so accommodating, word is the commissioner is ready to exempt a certain baseball team from certain luxury tax thresholds for having, well, played ball. More incentive to pay Messrs. Conforto, Syndergaard and Stroman what they want, I’d like to believe, though — Mr. Lindor’s compensation notwithstanding — that may be not how Steve Cohen got to be Steve Cohen, either.
The Staturdays with the Mets, Presented by Statcast, Powered by Google Cloud task force was led by Staten Island borough president James Oddo, a huge Mets fan, and recently appointed board of directors member Chris Christie, a former Metropolitan Area governor who Cohen cited as “having special expertise in places many people, including Mets fans, reach by bridge, whether it’s the Verrazzano-Narrows, the Bayonne, the Goethals or the Outerbridge Crossing.” It’s unclear whose idea it was to temporarily rename exit ramps off those bridges Lindor Extensions, but, again, nice touch. Former owner and current board chairman emeritus Fred Wilpon was also cited by the new owner for his input on the intermittent relocation, which figures. Wilpon clearly remembers the Brooklyn Dodgers playing select home games at Roosevelt Stadium in Jersey City before bolting the Tri-State altogether for Los Angeles. The irony may be lost on Fred, but he and his son recently cashed a pretty big check from Steve, so the gain may be his, too. (Geez, I hope this isn’t a stalking horse for a new ballpark far from Flushing. That would be a bridge too far.)
 Let’s get a little more orange going around here. Listen, I wasn’t exactly painting my WELCOME CHRIS CHRISTIE placard for Banner Day — coming to Staten Island on June 12 when the Mets play the Padres, incidentally — when Cohen brought the ex-gov shall we say aboard. I could almost hear M. Donald Grant cackling devilishly that this was one board member he’d be proud to chair. Yet, honestly, this Staten Island outreach, whoever hatched it and whoever’s executing it, isn’t a bad idea, not for a franchise whose own logo is explicitly about bridging gaps. Perhaps you saw the Seatgeek map tweeted recently, the one breaking down MLB loyalties by county across the continental United States. The Mets definitely have Nassau (yay!) and Queens (natch). I had to squint to make out if we have Brooklyn, too. Let’s say we did. That’s the extent of extant orange on the East Coast. If we have to fight this fandom battle one borough at a time, so be it. Taking over the former home of the Staten Island Single-A Whatchamacallits and converting Richmond County to orange/blue figures to go a long way in spreading the Metropolitan Gospel. Today, Staturdays with the Mets, Presented by Statcast, Powered by Google Cloud.
Tomorrow? Hopefully back to Queens full-time, but maybe with some traffic heading eastbound. You’d have to ask Christie.
Historically minded Mets fans can’t help but feel a tingle amid all this because we know about the rich Richmond history of the Mets name. Maybe not the Mets since 1962, but the Mets of 1886 and 1887 for sure. Those would be the New York Metropolitans of the American Association, spiritual forebears to our very own Amazins. As Bill Lamb outlined in the essential David Krell-edited book New York Mets in Popular Culture, the Mets of those bygone days “had their moment, highlighted by the capture of an American Association pennant. That achievement notwithstanding, the Mets were mostly an afterthought to the Metropolitan Exhibition Company.”
 Home again, you might say. Those Mets, like our Mets, started in Manhattan, but unlike our Mets they had no permanent home awaiting them in Flushing Meadows. Instead, when things went awry uptown, those AA Mets vamoosed downtown and across Upper New York Bay to take up residence at the St. George Cricket Grounds. The AA Mets had been a powerhouse when they were based primarily at the oldest of several sites known as the Polo Grounds, going 75-32 in 1884, led by righthanded starters Tim Keefe and Jack Lynch. Each hurler won 37 games, preemptively using all the run support Met ace righties would need for the rest of time. Two years later, as ownership got tangled up in a bundle of conflicting interests, and with the National League’s former New York Gothams gaining traction as the Giants and essentially taking over the territory, the Mets sort of beat it out of town.
Sort of, because the Mets moved from Manhattan to Staten Island. This was before 1898, meaning Staten Island wasn’t officially part of Greater New York, but it was close enough. The Mets, however, weren’t close to the force they’d been. Situated in the future freestanding borough, the American Association Mets pretty much floated out to sea. As Lamb notes, playing outside the borders of what was then considered NYC left them uncovered by the media of the age. What there was to track wasn’t particularly uplifting. The 1886 Mets went 53-82 and finished seventh in the AA. In ’87, their record dipped to 44-89. The Metropolitans came, the Metropolitans went. The St. George Cricket Grounds hosted them for a total of 125 games. In 1889, the Giants briefly set up camp while another Polo Grounds was under construction, playing ball on the Island for 23 games.
So it’s been a while since major league ball had its moment in Richmond County. But that day is coming back. That day will be Staturdays with the Mets, Presented by Statcast, Powered by Google Cloud. Even if all it provides is a port in the remnants of a quarantine storm (another Staten Island echo from the distant past), it’s a legitimate historical bridge to the 19th century. And let us not forget that before the NHL skated to Long Island, one of the names that competed with “just plain Mets” to be what the National League expansion team of the 1960s would be called was the Islanders, a nod to the fact that the Mets would settle on (not in) Long Island. In a slightly westward prism, that little nugget can be seen as setting the stage for this heretofore unseen return to semi-ancestral Metsian roots.
 All in the Staten Island family. You can’t say the Mets aren’t planning on making the most of this promotionally and maybe sentimentally. The family of late manager George Bamberger, a Staten Island native, will present a replica of the traditional Shea-delivered floral horseshoe at the Staturdays with the Mets, Presented by Statcast, Powered by Google Cloud opener on the tenth. Relatives of the late Larry Bearnarth, a graduate of St. Peter’s Boys High School, are also expected at some point. Jack Egbert, the only Met player known to have been born on (let’s say “on” already) Staten Island, will be throwing out the first pitch, and I understand celebrity Mets fan Judd Apatow will be bringing cast members of his 2020 comedy The King of Staten Island for some crossover event. The only thing wrong with that otherwise excellent movie was Bill Burr taking Pete Davidson to a Staten Island Yankees game. Maybe they can digitally edit the next version of the Blu-ray to fix that. Among the necessary upgrades to RCBB@SG itself will be installation of a strikeout board that will notch “HelloFresh Kills” of opposing batters, with every “Kill” punctuated by the PA blasting the refrain to Carly Simon’s “Let the River Run” from Working Girl, a film whose protagonist, it will be remembered, commuted daily on a certain ferry.
Come, the new Jerusalem, indeed. To paraphrase Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart, we’ve taken as home boroughs Manhattan, Queens and, now, Staten Island. And let’s not forget Brooklyn, home of the Cyclones and our 2020-2021 alternate site. All told, that’s pretty nifty bridgework.
It’s exciting enough that the Mets have secured the services of Francisco Lindor for the ten years after this one. It’s exciting enough that the Mets are planning on playing a full season this year after what we’ve been through the last year. As for the Staten Island part of the plan, you could be tempted to write it off as utter foolishness. But read the calendar. It’s Opening Day almost everywhere. Anything goes — even the Mets to parts previously unknown.
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