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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 18 June 2025 2:32 pm Fishing around my desk for something or other as I prepared to pen a screed about the absolutely loathsome baseball game I watched Tuesday night, I came across the following document, dated and notarized September 30, 2024:
“I the undersigned agree after today’s baseball game of New York Mets 8 Atlanta Braves 7 at Truist Park, the baseball game that clinched a playoff spot for the 2024 New York Mets and capped a fantastical ride from ‘oh and five’ to ‘OMG,’ I will accept, without issuing vociferous complaint, the outcome of exactly ONE future horrible baseball game between the same teams at the same facility.
“Such a future horrible baseball game may include one or all of the following conditions as they pertain to the New York Mets:
“wretched baserunning;
“wretched pitchcalling;
“wretched defensive decisionmaking;
“wretched defensive execution;
“wretched lead protection;
“and wretched collective offensive performance by a string of players attempting to bat in succession late but failing miserably.
“The disgust and anger associated with this ONE future horrible baseball game and all its wretched Met aspects, even if it and they occur on the heels of a three-game sweep inflicted by some baseball team besides the Atlanta Braves and therefore extends a modest losing streak to a skid encompassing something approximating genuine concern, is to be emotionally dismissed in deference to the absolute joy that emanated directly after the events of this date, the Thirtieth of September, this Year of Lindor, Two-Thousand Twenty-Four.
 They earned one. Just one. “This agreement acknowledges that by punching their ticket to the playoffs in the fashion they did versus the opponent they did and at the venue they did, the New York Mets generated ONE free pass, a pass that may be considered valid, processed, and effective until the first pitch of the next baseball game between the New York Mets and Atlanta Braves at Truist Park following the type of horrible game and wretched aspects described above.
“The New York Mets will be instructed to thereafter not do that again, ‘that,’ referring to the horrible and wretched parts of the ONE future baseball game that will be excused.
“This agreement further acknowledges a Mets fan can only attempt to overlook the disgust inherent in having watched a game like that against an opponent like that at a place like that ONCE, no matter what great thing happened against that opponent at that place the year before.”
I can’t make out a signature beneath the accumulation of blood, sweat, and tears that must have dripped over it, but I’m pretty sure I agreed to it last September 30…or would have had anybody asked me to.
by Greg Prince on 16 June 2025 2:54 pm BAZ was on the back of the jersey of the pitcher on the mound for Tampa Bay on Sunday. For a moment, I let myself believe BAZ was an icon on the level of CHER. Just one name. Just one syllable. All you needed to know was that BAZ was in town. No wonder Citi Field was sold out. People must have been lined up at dawn to get in for an up close and personal glimpse of BAZ. If BAZ was truly as bold-face as all that, it could have been the biggest road show to come to Flushing since Fernandomania was at its height.
Then I remembered BAZ was not a global sensation, not the hottest ticket since The Bird talked to the ball, just a pitcher for the Rays — Shane Baz. Nothing against Shane Baz, the Texas-born righty who turns 26 on Tuesday and came into Sunday’s game with an ERA of 4.97, but unless he had relatives who flew in specifically to see him pitch as a pre-birthday surprise, I don’t think Baz qualified as a marquee attraction for anybody in Flushing.
Unfortunately for the home team, he pitched like one. Maybe not Jim Bunning on Father’s Day 1964 level, but close enough for six-and-two-thirds. Baz and three relievers shut down the Mets, whose starter Griffin Canning elicited no mania and whose four relievers included Jared Young, who you’ll remember from his occasional swings as a designated hitter. All the elements of a 9-0 loss coalesced to take the edge of Hawaiian Shirt Day (which explained the sellout) and make even drearier an overcast Sunday.
The Mets were swept three games for the first time in all of 2025 over the weekend. In case we needed a reminder of how dispiriting a trio of consecutive losses to the same opponent can be, we had it. We didn’t need it. The Phillies swept their three-game series versus their American League East opponent in the same time frame, so our division lead that was 5½ games before we played the Rays and they played the Jays is now 2½.
When your lead grows to substantial proportions by the middle of June, it’s never too early to be gleeful. When it shrinks, it’s too soon to worry. Still, not a great showing from any angle as the Mets head to the general Atlanta vicinity, home of the thirteen-out Braves. Dismiss the records when these two teams meet, right? I don’t know about that. The Braves are still the Braves in the sense that they’re the Braves — a statement that makes all the sense in the world if you know your Mets — but we do lead them by thirteen games, a function of what had been excellent play by the Mets until very recently and all the stopping that has surrounded Atlanta’s attempts at starting. The Braves are always beatable. We just haven’t always beaten them. Last time we absolutely had to, we did. That’s a confidence-booster for the ballclub that leads them by thirteen games.
David Peterson starts us off on Tuesday. I doubt he’s someone baseball fans in other markets plan their ticket-buying around the way they did for Mark Fidrych in 1976, Fernando Valenzuela in 1981, or BAZ in my imagination, but he is, at this moment, the only member of the Mets rotation I metaphorically rub my hands together over in anticipation of him toeing the rubber. Up to last Thursday, that cohort definitely included Kodai Senga, but all we’ve got going where he’s concerned right now is his hamstring strain isn’t considered too bad. I’ll attempt to reboot my faith in the other Met starters, but, honestly, they’re not exciting. David, or “Petey” as his manager and teammates call him presumably to create clubhouse confusion, has grown into his role. He’s Ace Peterson, Met Effective. He’ll deliver the keynote in the series-opener. If it’s anything like the shutout he threw at the Nationals the other night, it will be rousing. Shutouts by complete game are pretty rare, but we’d probably settle for something BAZlike out of Petey.
Short of a CG (never mind the ShO), we will see the Met bullpen in action, and they’ve been, more or less, Met Effective, too, provided this one pitches only this much, and that one pitches only that much, and if somebody is needed two days in a row, all bets are off. You may have noticed amid the general miasma of the weekend that the Mets actually used the same pitcher one day and then the next. Justin Garza, a recent pickup from the Giants, went two innings on Friday night and an inning Saturday. He gave up no runs on either occasion. Handy guy to have around.
Barring some injury we sure as hell prefer not happen, don’t look for a hand from Garza in Atlanta this week, as he was optioned to Syracuse Sunday in favor of Ty Adcock. Was Adcock a better bet than Garza for the long haul? Or was Adcock’s arm “fresh”? You know the answer. You always know the answer these days. The Mets seem to plan their bullpen usage meticulously, but when the real world of baseball intrudes, everything teeters on the brink of hell. Limit Clay Holmes to five innings in deference to his previous start in Colorado taking a bit out of him? That’s fine. Slot in Paul Blackburn behind him to ramp up his innings for when he needs to enter the rotation? That’s wise. Blackburn blows up and needs to be pulled? And Max Kranick ain’t what Max was Kranicked up to be earlier this season?
Suddenly the bullpen’s built on shaky ground, and the only thing that’s going to steady it is Tylor Megill giving the Mets a lengthy outing on Saturday, and…nope, that doesn’t happen. It’s not unlike that Friday night a few weeks ago against the Dodgers. Nobody saw a thirteen-inning game coming, and nobody is Chris Short or Rob Gardner when it comes to going extra deep these days. Hardly anybody is David Peterson. Starters almost never go as long as you wish, and relievers have to be handled with an abundance of caution.
An answer? You want an answer? Besides building outward from the DNA of Turk Wendell so you have relievers who can pitch day after day and not have their arms fall off from slamming the rosin bag? The answer I stumbled upon was visible in the Rays’ bullpen this weekend. Three different ex-Mets who passed through New York only long enough to qualify for our annual Hot Stove and Spring Training features are alive and well in Tampa Bay. We saw Edwin Uceta, Eric Orze, and Cole Sulser. None got more than a glimpse as Mets. Each had to be treated like a shuttlecock (or an Adcock) in order to manage whatever numbers game was weighing on the front office the week he was optioned or waived. We saw something similar when Jose Ureña had one extended outing as a Met. When next we saw him, he was a Dodger, getting Mets out.
None of the aforementioned relievers has blossomed into a stopper, nor might they wind up as anything better than replacement level. But how often do you wish an additional replacement level reliever was available to Carlos Mendoza on a given day? This can’t possibly be a Mets-only problem. Guys like these bounce around, or up and down, because they don’t have options or do have options. Garza did nothing that merited a demotion to Triple-A. Brandon Waddell wasn’t necessarily throwing like a minor leaguer, but he’s there right now. Options exist for a player’s protection as well as an organization’s convenience, but they sure have a way of destabilizing the back ends of bullpens.
My solution, that admittedly just passed through my head à la my image of BAZ, is a larger roster. The 25-man roster was so sacrosanct that it was expanded to 26. On days with previously unplanned doubleheaders, it’s 27. During COVID, it was 28. During September, it’s 28. Enough pussyfooting. Just make it 30. Keep another couple of pitchers on hand. Throw in a third catcher so you’re not wondering what you’ll do in an emergency and, if you’re not blessed by a Luisangel Acuña-type already, a pinch-runner. If you want to create an eligibility system — last night’s starter and two obviously overworked relievers are “scratched” tonight — go ahead. Nobody really wants to see one reliever after another trudge out of the pen until we’re down to DHs willing to give slinging a shot, but that’s what you’ve got, anyway, save for the rare David Peterson complete game. What nobody needs to see is the pitcher who pitches for an inning or two, pitches perfectly well, and is sent down or offered up because, gosh, his arm isn’t fresh anymore. Why pretend an eight-man bullpen is sufficient for contemporary baseball? Why skimp on the fringes of the roster in a multizillion-dollar industry? What’s the cost — meal money and service time? Think how much you’ll save on airfare between LaGuardia and Syracuse.
Or just put on another Hawaiian Shirt Day. Those things really get the fannies in the seats.
by Greg Prince on 15 June 2025 12:02 pm As it’s Father’s Day, allow me this recollection of the night, over dinner, my father decided he needed to read us a poem written by Rudyard Kipling.
What, this type of thing didn’t happen in your kitchen?
This was when I was in seventh grade, so perhaps the impetus was me mentioning, only because I was asked, that we were studying poetry in English class. If so, Dad insisted, I had to go upstairs and find that ancient volume of literature gathering dust in the sloped room. Bring it down, you have to hear this. I did as told. My father opened up the book, found his Kipling, and read aloud, the way he would when he wanted to share something he considered amusing from that day’s Wall Street Journal.
’What are the bugles blowin’ for?’ said Files-on-Parade.
‘To turn you out, to turn you out,’ the Colour-Sergeant said.
‘What makes you look so white, so white?’ said Files-on-Parade.
‘I’m dreadin’ what I’ve got to watch,’ the Colour-Sergeant said.
For they’re hangin’ Danny Deever, you can hear the Dead March play.
The Regiment’s in ’ollow square — they’re hangin’ him to-day;
They’ve taken of his buttons off an’ cut his stripes away,
An’ they’re hangin’ Danny Deever in the mornin’.
It went on as such for another three stanzas. Not a good day to be Danny Deever, obviously. I remember asking my father what a Files-on-Parade was (a corporal, he said). I didn’t ask why he considered this a great poem. He just said it was a great poem, so I accepted it as a great poem. I think I used it for whatever assignment spurred his presentation. “‘Danny Deever’ by Rudyard Kipling is a poem that…” I probably turned in the assignment late. For two years, every grade I received in English arrived with ten points removed for lateness. Perhaps it was a reaction to the fate of Danny Deever. If they can’t find me in the mornin’, I won’t be subject to hangin’. Or maybe I was just an all-district procrastinator.
I’ve rarely thought of the poem since junior high, but I thought of poor ol’ Danny Deever Saturday night in the wake of poor ol’ Tylor Megill getting proverbially strung up by the Tampa Bay Rays at Citi Field. Two reasons, I’m guessing.
1) Tylor’s outing, like Danny Deever’s fate, was pretty sad.
2) My dad would have liked the name “Tylor Megill”.
The name is Megill, not McGill, but knowing my dad, he would have impishly pronounced it with an Irish accent. “Ah, poor ol’ Tylor McGill, strafed for so many runs in so little time.” My dad had a thing about Irish or very Irish-sounding names. When he rallied his baseball consciousness one final instance for the 2015 pennant drive, it was Daniel Murphy more than any Met who got his attention, not because Murph hit all those home runs, I’m convinced, but because he grew up around a lot of Muprhs and the like in Jackson Heights. One of the few Jews in his neighborhood, he became good friends with some of the Irish kids. Some other Irish kids also became his worst enemies. Either way, he seemed to maintain a strand of fascination with those who were or might be Irish.
Until the mid-’80s Mets pulled both my parents into their orbit, Dad generally didn’t watch enough baseball to gather awareness of too many players of any background. Yet he managed to take notice of the emergence of benchwarming rookie infielder Brian Doyle in the 1978 postseason when, unfortunately, the Yankees were too big a story to ignore. Thrust into a starting role after Willie Randolph was injured, Brian hit like crazy for the Yankees the way Al Weis hit like crazy for the Mets in the 1969 World Series. Every time Brian Doyle did something, the announcers would mention that Brian Doyle was the brother of veteran major leaguer Denny Doyle, and with their other brother Blake Doyle, they ran a baseball school in Florida in the winter. My father had never heard of Denny Doyle before all this, but the idea of the Doyle Brothers tickled him no end. “Dinny” Doyle, he called him, as he effected his idea of an Irish brogue, the way he had for Danny Deever: “After the season, Brian Doyle and his brother Dinny Doyle will get together with their brother Blake Doyle and teach others to hit like the Doyles.” It was a running joke in our house that lasted clear to Thanksgiving.
Had Dad lived long enough to know of Tylor Megill, I’m confident he would have conferred honorary Irishness upon Saturday’s losing pitcher…or more of it in case Megill is already Irish. Whether Tylor is or isn’t (I have no idea), he surely didn’t have the luck of the Irish with him versus the Rays. Nor the luck of any ethnic group. Against Tampa Bay’s band of Yandy and Junior and Jonathan and Jake and Kameron with a K and two guys spelled L-O-W-E but they pronounce it differently, Megill didn’t make it through four innings. By the time he could no longer be left to fend for himself, our beleaguered righty received ten well-meaning but ultimately mournful “get ’em next time” taps to the butt.
I counted. Three from the glove of shortstop Francisco Lindor. One from the glove of second baseman Brett Baty. Three from the glove of third baseman Ronny Mauricio. Two from the mitt of first baseman Pete Alonso. And one, ungloved and more of a slap than a pat, from Carlos Mendoza, as the skipper came to ceremoniously remove the ball from Tylor’s glove and Tylor from the game altogether. Megill seemed utterly unconsoled by his infield’s and manager’s ritual show of empathy. The fans in the stands on this gloomy late Saturday afternoon that had become an even gloomier early Saturday evening showed nothing of the kind as Tylor made his long march to the Met dugout. A traffic jam of boos in Flushing was backed up to Jackson Heights.
‘What’s that so black agin the sun? said Files-on-Parade.
‘It’s Danny fightin’ ’ard for life,’ the Colour-Sergeant said.
‘What’s that that whimpers over’ead?’ said Files-on-Parade.
‘It’s Danny’s soul that’s passin’ now,’ the Colour-Sergeant said.
The fight hadn’t exactly gone out of the Mets by then, but they lacked a certain life. They hit Tampa Bay’s starter Drew Rasmussen well, but to not enough avail. Four relievers — one of whom, Cole Sulser, once wore a Mets uniform the way his penmates Edwin Uceta and Eric Orze had (briefly and without distinction) — scattered hits and walks, but no runs. The Mets lost, 8-4, outdoors, after a rain delay, to a team that only recently got the hang of hosting home games somewhere other than indoors. The Rays are always sneaky good. The Mets have chosen this weekend to be openly bad. It had been such a splendid week, too.
Still, with the Mets holding a reasonably robust lead in the National League East, I’m confident my father would have maintained enough whimsy to have gotten a kick out of Tylor Megill, or at least his aura. My mother, on the other hand, would have wanted only to have kicked Tylor Megill for pitching as he did. But it’s not Mother’s Day today, is it?
by Greg Prince on 14 June 2025 9:09 am Except for the top of the sixth inning, Friday night at Citi Field was a pretty good game. The Mets scored five runs versus the Tampa Bay Rays and received five solid innings from Clay Holmes. Gotta like things of that nature occurring.
It’s a shame the top of the sixth, when Paul Blackburn and Max Kranick gave up the six runs that negated the 5-1 lead the Mets had built and essentially undid Holmes’s splendid limited-by-design start, had to happen. Otherwise, though, good game.
Well, maybe the bottom of the seventh inning lacked whatever makes a game good, as the bottom of the seventh wasn’t much of a half-inning from a Mets perspective. Loading the bases was excellent. Leaving them loaded — against Edwin Uceta, an ex-Met you blinked and missed in 2023 — was less excellent. Earlier, the Rays deployed Eric Orze out of the bullpen. You might have blinked and missed Eric when he was a Met last year. Anyway, good game, except for the top of the sixth and the bottom of the seventh.
Actually, the bottoms of the eighth and the ninth weren’t so great, either. In the eighth, Juan Soto rocketed a ball to right that somehow neither went out nor fell in. Looked promising off the bat, but it was just a third out. And the ninth was promising, too, right up to Ronny Mauricio striking out looking with the tying runs on base. Those could have been good innings for the Mets. Real good. But they weren’t.
Friday night wound up Rays 7 Mets 5, with the Mets stranding a dozen and going 2-for-16 with runners in scoring position while middle relief absolutely imploded. So maybe it wasn’t a good game. After winning six in a row, it’s hard to remember the Mets sometimes play games that qualify as less than good.
by Greg Prince on 12 June 2025 7:54 pm All wins are created equal in the standings. Some wins are a little less equal emotionally. Some wins take a back seat to other events surrounding a given game. It doesn’t happen often, but it happens.
Mets fire a manager but win as a going-away present to their suddenly erstwhile skipper? The win doesn’t resonate.
Mets raise a white flag by trading a perfectly good player because their sagging record indicates a diminishing need for perfectly good players the rest of the year? The win gets less of your attention than who we got in exchange for the perfectly good player.
Mets blow a seemingly unblowable lead late but get it back after you’re overwhelmed by so much Sturm und Drang you barely notice that everything turned out OK? Depending on the severity of the nonfatal gag job, the win can feel like an undeserved consolation prize — you’ll take it, but you feel a little skeevy about the whole thing.
Mets suffer an injury while in the midst of everything going well, and go on to win while waiting to announce the nature of the injury? You’re absolutely happy to have the win, especially since you lately find yourself addicted to chronic winning, but the injury rather than the victory rides in the front seat of your thoughts.
The Mets on Thursday afternoon at Citi Field notched one of those back seat wins, topping the Nationals, 4-3. No managers were fired; no players were traded; a lead was nearly blown late but never actually got away, so we’ll let that brush with fallibility slide. Thursday, however, was one of those days when a Met — a key Met, at that — had to leave the game less than healthy, and true solace wasn’t readily attainable from the final posted on the scoreboard.
Oh, we’ll take it. We’ll take Jeff McNeil’s three-run homer in the first and Brandon Nimmo’s solo shot in the fifth and Tyrone Taylor’s Tommie Agee impression in the outfield in the sixth. We won’t overlook, either, that Luisangel Acuña made a very heady play in the top of the ninth to make sure a bullpen meltdown soaring toward Level 7 never reached the stage where you’ll want to avoid locally sourced milk for a generation. When it was over, the Mets do what they do when they win. They gathered in a circle and choreographed a celebratory kick. Having won six in a row en route to mounting, the best record in baseball, they’ve become very practiced in victory celebrations.
 Winning is always a kick, even if a strain to the hamstring is tantamount to a kick in the head. We definitely appreciated all the positives that turned the Mets into Rockettes, but we couldn’t and didn’t stop thinking about Kodai Senga, who was humming along with a shutout in the sixth, reducing his microscopic earned run average to a nearly indecipherable dot, when, in the process of covering first base on a grounder to Pete Alonso, had something happen to his right leg. A cramp? A strain? A what? We didn’t know while Senga knelt on the ground nor when he rose and walked off without assistance to exit the field. The last act of his 1.47 ERA season to date was a leap in the air and a step on the bag after hauling in Alonso’s less than ideal toss of CJ Abrams’s relatively routine groundout. Senga said he’d felt something before exerting the extra effort to reel in Pete’s fling. Pete said he felt “awful” about perhaps exacerbating an injury in the making. Carlos Mendoza reported afterward the early diagnosis is hamstring strain. A trip to the IL and the MRI machine, in that order, are prescribed. Everything else is TBD.
It was a 3-1 putout that overshadowed a 4-3 win. The Met rotation with Senga, even as it’s required the insertion of random sixth starters from time to time, is stronger by multitudes than what we deployed 161 of 162 games last year, and last year’s starting pitching was pretty darn good. It would have been better had Kodai been available before and after July 26, his one regular-season outing of 2024, the one that was also going swimmingly, the one that was also interrupted by the covering of first base, the one that also had us wondering what just went wrong. Eleven months ago, it was a left calf strain that negated his comeback from the shoulder injury he endured in Spring. Never mind the DH. Let’s get this man a designated fielder.
The Mets maintain the depth to deal with a starting pitcher missing a thus far indeterminate period of time. Last season’s anchor, Sean Manaea, is rehabbing. One of last winter’s acquisitions, Frankie Montas, is doing the same. Last summer’s insurance policy, Paul Blackburn, is alive and well and on the active roster. Somebody will pitch and, I’m willing to say while we exist in an era of confidence rather than panic, pitch well. Still, the man we’ll be missing is Kodai Senga. We’ve got a lefty ace in David Peterson. We’ve got a stretched-out Clay Holmes proving the Mets were right to see in him someone who belonged at the front rather than the back of a game. We’ve got Griffin Canning emerging successfully from the alchemy of the Met pitching lab. And we’ve got gritty Tylor Megill forever hanging in there. But it was the right arm of Senga that signaled every day in six could be and usually was something extra special. We scrapped for a playoff spot last year. We are cruising as the best team in baseball this year. I’m not gonna say the definitive difference has been having Kodai Senga, but, boy, has it not hurt.
Losing him hurts. Winning without him around at day’s end didn’t feel as good as if he’d kept pitching, kept fielding without incident, kept within kicking distance of the club’s victory huddle. Yet it was still a win. That never hurts. Nor will getting him back.
by Jason Fry on 12 June 2025 7:54 am In the early days of Citi Field, there was an attempt to start a first-inning Yankee Stadium-style roll call. Thankfully wisdom prevailed and the attempt got shelved — that tradition belongs in the Bronx, just like “Sweet Caroline” belongs in Fenway. But there’s no rule that we can’t do it here.
Juan Soto: I heard Soto’s third-inning blast via the audio feed as I was putting away kayaks down in Brooklyn Bridge Park. Howie sounded excited and impressed, and the footage didn’t disappoint once I finally got to see it for myself — a majestic arc of a home run against his original team that came down to the right of the Mets’ bullpen, with a nifty catch by a young fan on the other end.
Brandon Nimmo: We sometimes judge Nimmo’s performances against our memory of him as the table-setter he was a few years ago, a top-of-the-order slash-and-dash hitter who drew walks and stole bases while chipping in ~10 homers a season. He isn’t that player any more, having traded on-base percentage and average for power while moving from center to left. We should move along with him: Two home runs — the first an opposite-field slice that almost looked accidental, the second a more conventional drive pulled to right — will play just fine.
Tyrone Taylor: It took a weirdly long time for the second-line umps to confirm that Taylor had thrown out Luis Garcia Jr. at home in the eighth, preserving David Peterson‘s shut-out and along with it, most likely, his chance at a complete game. Out in center, Taylor looked serene and unruffled, waiting for Chelsea (it’s now Midtown but so what, Chelsea sounds better) to declare that nothing supported the Nats’ oh-why-not challenge of the call. And why wouldn’t Taylor be serene? He’s not tearing the cover off the ball (no one ever is, come to think of it) but he’s playing impeccable defense, and somehow always does something that gets his name in the recap.
Luis Torrens: One of baseball’s pleasures is that it’s primarily a game of individual endeavors, yet one that adds up to collective victory or defeat. In the middle of that, though, are partnerships, duos that have to work in sync. Pitcher and catcher, for one; outfielder and catcher, for another. No Peterson complete game without Torrens thinking along with him, no Peterson shut-out without Torrens’ smooth tag at home. And note that the play didn’t end there — after tagging out Garcia, Torrens lost the ball on the transfer because he was looking to throw behind an unwary Nats runner. The man knows what he’s doing back there and we’re lucky to have him.
Carlos Mendoza: If Ryne Stanek had come out for the ninth, it would have yielded a postgame question or two for Carlos Mendoza about whether Peterson had wanted to go nine and if he could have. But it would have been a momentary, nostalgic aside and not a serious interrogation: The game has changed and it’s safe to say that Tom Seaver‘s franchise complete-game records (21 in 1971, 171 overall) are safe. Mendoza knew Peterson wanted to try, talked through the plan with Torrens, and gave Peterson his chance.
John DeMarisco: Kudos to SNY for staying with the game after the eighth inning was concluded, letting us see Peterson heading out to the mound alone (nice touch, Mets) and letting us hear the crowd’s jubilant welcome for him. That was the kind of moment those of us watching at home generally miss because of business considerations, and have come to assume we’ll miss. The Mets’ broadcast director gave us a chance to see it.
David Peterson: Well of course. Early last year I had a mild fit about “feckless nibblers” in the Mets’ rotation, a criticism that’s pretty much out of date as the pitching braintrust has encouraged Met hurlers to simplify their arsenals and trust their stuff. On Wednesday Peterson was anything but feckless and anything but a nibbler, throwing first-pitch strikes, pitching aggressively and trusting his defense. It wasn’t so long ago that we’d consigned Peterson to the prospect-turned-suspect column, wondering if he’d ever stop getting out of his own way. Time to abandon that idea: His hip is healthy and he’s made great strides in the part of the game that a starting pitcher wins or loses above the neck. Ron Darling did a good job on the broadcast talking about this element of pitching, referring to a long-ago Mets teammate whom he said had better stuff but less conviction. Darling likes to poor-mouth himself as a pitcher so I didn’t pay much attention to the first part; I did spend the better part of an inning on the second part, reviewing old Mets rosters in my head and wondering whom he was talking about.
Us: The Mets are 26-7 at Citi Field, the best home record in the game. (And the inverse of the poor Rockies’ home record, if you were wondering.) That’s overwhelmingly a result of their being really good, but let’s give at least a rounding error’s worth of credit to the big crowds that have come out all year. In the eighth and ninth my eyes were on Peterson, but also on the stands, where a significant percentage of the rooters knew what was at stake and were determined to give Peterson whatever lift they could. Cardinals fans? Bah. Fenway partisans. Meh. Wrigley rooters? Whatever. Mets fans are a wonderful combination of wary and paranoid, defiant and hopeful, history-haunted and dreamily optimistic. They also always know what’s going on.
by Jason Fry on 10 June 2025 11:07 pm Emily and I watched the first couple of innings of Tuesday night’s Mets-Nats tilt somewhat distractedly. First we were down in Dumbo at L&B Spumoni Gardens, a satellite of the classic ur-Brooklyn Sicilian-pizza joint that’s finally open after a long permitting saga. Then we were walking up the hill for home. We’d peeked at SNY, sans sound, during dinner and then switched to Howie as we strolled through Brooklyn Heights.
Somewhere around Cranberry Street a young man turned around as he passed us and asked, “Mets?”
I nodded and he said, “2-0 Nats I think.”
“3-0 now,” I told him, for we’d just heard CJ Abrams double in a run, with the Nats giving the Mets a break by sending Jose Tena home to be thrown out by a good measure. (Off a pitcher who looked less than sharp? With James Wood coming up? Why in the world would you do that?)
“Plenty of time,” I added as our temporary neighbor took in the updated score. “We’ll get ’em.”
“Plenty of time,” he agreed.
And the funny thing is that this wasn’t fannish bravado on either of our parts. I meant it; so did he. It was 3-0, and that wasn’t ideal, but the Mets had eight frames to make up that deficit. Did I know they would do it? Of course not — baseball doesn’t work that way. But I knew they could — and with so much game left, that was sufficient.
These are strange days, when Mets fans are reflexively confident, even bordering on serene. I could get used to it.
Griffin Canning never looked particularly sharp, but he hung around into the sixth; meanwhile the Mets cut that three-run deficit to two and then one before it edged up to two again, courtesy of an Abrams homer hit too high for Brandon Nimmo to pluck from the sky. The Mets looked frustrated by MacKenzie Gore, who used a sharp curveball as a putaway pitch. But they got into the Nats bullpen while Jose Butto and Jose Castillo and newcomer Justin Garza held the fort.
In the eighth, the Nats got a little unlucky. Starling Marte doesn’t always turn in the most dogged ABs, but he refused to chase against Jose Ferrer‘s sinker and worked out a walk. Juan Soto then smoked a slider to right with a lot of English. Robert Hassell III could have played it on a hop but thought he could catch it. Instead it wound up behind him, scoring Marte and sending Soto to second. (Soto would have been on third but didn’t run hard out of the box, something I thought we’d sorted out.)
The Nats called on closer Kyle Finnegan, whose second pitch was a splitter at the bottom of the strike zone that Pete Alonso somehow sliced into left, past Wood. Soto scored; coming into second with the ball already there, Alonso tried the same switch-hands okie-doke that worked in Colorado … which actually worked again, at least until the Polar Bear came off the base and was tagged out.
Still, the Mets had tied it. Edwin Diaz worked a spotless top of the ninth, Finnegan recovered to do the same in his half-inning, and it was time for a little Manfredball.
The Nats got off on the right foot in the tenth before a ball was even put in play, as the speedy Abrams was their ghost runner. Wood moved him to third, but then Reed Garrett erased Nathaniel Lowe on three pitches and got Andres Chaparro to fly out to Nimmo.
It was the Mets’ turn, and if you came back a little late from the john you missed the whole thing: Jeff McNeil smacked the first pitch over the infield to score Luisangel Acuna, with poor Cole Henry getting the loss in appearance that maybe lasted nine seconds and McNeil grappling Steve Gelbs to ensure they both got a victory bath from the cooler.
“This is a thing now?” asked an amused-because-he-has-to-be Gelbs, with McNeil informing him that yeah, it’s a thing.
Plenty of time, we’ll get ’em.
Strange days, but maybe it’s a thing now.
by Greg Prince on 9 June 2025 4:21 pm Maybe you remember The Game-Ending Unassisted Triple Play Game, or TGEUTPG. If a game earns its name from a particular event within, it stands a pretty good chance of maintaining notoriety, with “notoriety” in this case being used correctly.
TGEUTPG concluded with Luis Castillo on second base, Daniel Murphy on first, and Jeff Francoeur batting in the bottom of the ninth inning at Citi Field in one blink and then all of them out the next. Francoeur shot a liner up the middle. The runners took off. Stepping into the picture was Eric Bruntlett, who, unlike the aforementioned players, wasn’t a member of the New York Mets. The second baseman for the Philadelphia Phillies grabbed Francoeur’s liner; stepped on second to erase Castillo; and then tagged an unelusive Murphy. There we had it: an unassisted triple play to end the game at Phillies 9 Mets 7 on August 23, 2009.
The significance of TGEUTPG nearly sixteen years later is apparent only if you keep the table that I keep. Under the table’s heading LAST TIME THE METS WERE THIS MANY GAMES UNDER .500, I have charted the most recent instance that the Mets were precisely one game beneath the break-even point as a franchise; two games beneath the break-even point as a franchise; three games beneath the break-even point as a franchise; and every juncture on down until I can tell you the last time the Mets were 503 games beneath the break-even point as a franchise. Five-hundred three games below .500 is the low-water mark for this exercise. It was reached on September 25, 1983, at Wrigley Field after the Cubs conked the Mets, 11-7. It had been 11-3 heading to the ninth, but George Foster and Gary Rajsich homered; Wally Backman tripled in Brian Giles; and Junior Ortiz doubled home Backman. That’s a helluva rally under most circumstances.
Most circumstances haven’t reflected well on the Mets’ all-time record. Through that Sunday afternoon in Chicago, the Mets had posted 1,493 wins in their nearly 22 years of existence against 1,996 losses. The Mets had been falling from .500 from the end of the ninth inning on April 11, 1962, first without interruption — the Mets were 0-9 after nine games of life — and then as a rule. That will happen when you don’t win more games than you lose in any of the first seven seasons that you play ball.
And even when you begin to get it together in your eighth season, I mean really get it together as the Mets did in their eighth season of 1969, you still face quite a climb upward. Because you don’t win ’em all, you can register only net gains. The Mets netted +38 in their first world championship year of ’69 when they finished out their schedule at 100-62. The Mets netted +54 after going 108-54 in their second world championship year of 1986. Those are impressive gains. But those great years and the very or pretty good years in their proximity couldn’t make up the torrent of ground that was lost early on when the Mets were going 40-120 (-80) and 51-111 (-60) and so on, especially when you eventually cease to be great, very good, or pretty good, and begin to backslide.
As of August 23, 2009, the Mets were in the early stages of what grew into a substantial backslide. That was the first year of Citi Field, the year when everything that could go wrong did go wrong. The franchise had made net gains via annual won-lost records for the preceding four seasons, the final four seasons at Shea: 83-79; 97-65; 88-74; 89-73. It didn’t always result in postseason opportunity (or postseason satisfaction), but things appeared on the right track for the long term.
On May 31, 2009, a Sunday at Citi, the Mets beat the Marlins, 3-2. There were no triple plays, though the Mets turned one DP and weren’t harmed by hitting into two. When the game was over, the Mets’ record sat at 27-20, a good start to what had been a shaky season to that point. Maybe this team was resilient enough to overcome the injuries that had befallen Carlos Delgado and Jose Reyes, among others, not to mention the distant dimensions of their new home. Too many of the longballs the Mets were hitting at Citi weren’t flying over fences. They hadn’t played that well on the road, either, but here they were, seven games above .500, not to mention a half-game out of first place. Maybe everything would work out for the 2009 Mets.
Nothing worked out for the 2009 Mets. That much was evident by August 23. Delgado was out for the year. Reyes was out for the year. Carlos Beltran had missed the previous two months. Even iron man David Wright was in the midst of sitting out a couple of weeks after he took a Matt Cain fastball off his batting helmet. From the game of June 1 to the moment Bruntlett tagged Murphy for the TP (u), the Mets had gone 30-47. The wrong direction continued to beckon for the remainder of 2009, a season that saw the Mets plunge to 70-92, commencing a six-year run of records when the club never reached 80 wins.
If you view Mets baseball as a vast expanse rather than as a string of anecdotes, ending a game by hitting into a triple play, unassisted or otherwise, turns out not to be the most portentous event to occur on August 23, 2009. Losing to the Phillies that day left the Mets, as a franchise, at 3,642-3,956, 314 games below .500. There’d be bad times ahead. Then good times ahead. Then a mix of bad times and good times. Add them all up, and the New York Mets wouldn’t again be as close to .500 overall as they were on August 23, 2009, for almost sixteen years.
But they got there on Sunday, June 8 of the current campaign, in Colorado.
 The Mets had been working their way back from this moment for nearly sixteen years. When the Mets completed their season sweep of the Rockies by pummeling their asses with baseball bats, 13-5, it brought the 2025 Mets’ record — the one of most interest in the present day — to 42-24. The Mets lead second-place Philadelphia by 4½ and their other traditional nemesis, fourth-place Atlanta, by fourteen. The Nationals, who are in next at Citi, are the division’s third-place team, and their double-digits in back, too. Everything’s coming up Metsie, which you know if you watched them in Denver this weekend, particularly in the finale, which featured six Met home runs and a four-inning save. Two of the Met homers were off the bat of Pete Alonso, which gave the bat’s user 243 for his career, one more than Wright totaled, or second-most among all Mets ever, leaving him within nine of Darryl Strawberry for ownership of a glittering milestone. Veteran Jeff McNeil also hit two, with next-genners Brett Baty and Francisco Alvarez slugging the others. Juan Soto didn’t go deep, but he did reach base six times (three hits, three walks). Tylor Megill went five innings for the win. Paul Blackburn sopped up the rest to earn his first MLB save.
Even if we allow ourselves to remember the 12-53 Rockies are making the 40-120 Mets of 1962 look like the 108-54 Mets of 1986, it was still an impressive showing by an impressive 2025 Mets team. Five and two on the road trip. Twelve and three over the past two-plus weeks. And, in case you’re wondering, 1,216-1,216 following Francoeur’s liner into Bruntlett’s glove (and 4,858-5,172 since Richie Ashburn stepped in to lead off against Larry Jackson 47 years, four months, and a dozen days before that).
For the first time since the close of business on August 23, 2009, the Mets, as a franchise, are precisely 314 games under the break-even point. The losing that picked up steam as the 2009 Mets rolled downhill has finally been nullified. It’s not as if they’d been on a sixteen-year losing streak, exactly, but on a net basis, despite some legitimate spikes in the right direction, they lost more than they won over the course of 2,431 games, at no point winning more than they lost from August 24, 2009, forward and inclusive.
On the 2,432nd day, the Mets got it all back. They weren’t only clobbering the Rockies on Sunday. They were statistically kicking Francoeur’s ball out of Bruntlett’s glove. The ball is tricking into the outfield! The Phillies are phlummoxed! Castillo scores! Murphy right behind him! Here comes Frenchy!
Technically, the unassisted game-ending triple play remains on the books. Cosmically, the call has been reviewed and overturned.
In that table I keep, certain long-term inflection points have stood out, dates when we can see with hindsight that the Mets definitively stopped losing more than they won, or stopped winning more than they lost. The former is preferable to the latter. Both have happened and made their impact felt.
• Once they got it together in 1969, the Mets as a franchise relentlessly gained ground on their dismal beginnings until one day in June of 1972 when they would plateau without knowing it.
• Then, despite a memorable positive blip down the stretch in 1973, losing overtook winning for the long haul. More losing than winning became the overarching trend from June of ’72 through that September afternoon at Wrigley mentioned above as 1983 was winding down.
• From the ashes of 1983, until July of 1991, the trajectory pointed skyward, like it would pierce the clouds and never end.
• It ended; without warning, one loss became another and the historical progress that buoyed us reversed itself until nadiring in April of 1997.
• A long-term bounceback, encompassing high ups and low downs, brought the Mets to May 31, 2009, and that win against the Marlins when everything seemed fine and dandy.
• Time revealed everything in 2009 to be cruddy and miserable. A ten-season net-negative spiral — with two playoff spots and a pennant tucked within — ensued until the Mets had fallen 381 games below .500 on July 12, 2019.
• It may not have always felt like it on a continual basis these past six years, but the Mets have been on the rise ever since, going 456-389 between July 13, 2019, and June 8, 2025, which brings us to the present.
This has been a franchise in search of an enduring era for quite a while. A good era, of course. There have been good seasons since 2009’s darkness set in. There have also been dreadful seasons to make you forget how good the Mets have managed to be in relatively brief bursts. The composite record doesn’t lie. Across 64 seasons and counting, the Mets as a franchise haven’t sustained a winning record. Ever. They’ve never been at, never mind above, .500 as a franchise. It doesn’t matter within the confines of an outstanding individual season, but over time, it tells you something about what you’re spending your years rooting for and contributes to a sense of wondering what it’s all been for.
We are, this year, rooting for a team at the top of its game, a team continuing to rise, a team poised to shatter the grass ceiling of its checkered past. Its past, as illustrated in its all-time record of 4,858-5,172, indicates how hard it is for the Mets to win more than lose and keep winning more than losing. You never know when the losing will begin to prevail anew. You never want to know.
The best way to avoid knowing is to keep winning like the Mets have been winning.
METS LONG-TERM FRANCHISE UNDER-.500 INFLECTION POINTS
Most recently 1 game below .500: April 11, 1962
(Closest Mets have ever been to .500)
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Most recently 277 games below .500: September 3, 1966
Most recently 278 games below .500: June 6, 1972
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Most recently 283 games below .500: July 15, 1972
Most recently 284 games below .500: July 21, 1991
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Most recently 296 games below .500: August 12, 1991
Most recently 297 games below .500: May 31, 2009
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Most recently 313 games below .500: August 22, 2009
Most recently 314 games below .500: June 8, 2025
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Most recently 381 games below .500: July 12, 2019
Most recently 382 games below .500: May 17, 1998
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Most recently 403 games below .500: April 26, 1997
Most recently 404 games below .500: September 15, 1986
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Most recently 503 games below .500: September 25, 1983
(Furthest Mets have ever been from .500)
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NOTE: The longest active span of .500 baseball the Mets have played dates to August 28, 1967. The Mets have played 9,098 games since then and have logged a record of 4,549-4,549, including Sunday’s 13-5 victory over the Colorado Rockies.
by Jason Fry on 8 June 2025 9:27 am There’s a lot one could say about Ronny Mauricio‘s third-inning home run in Denver Saturday night, starting with the fact that it went 456 feet and came down in the third deck.
That’s … a long way. The third deck is a place where fans sit contentedly expecting not to be involved in the proceedings way down there on the field — in the replay from the camera behind home, the spot where the ball came down isn’t even in frame.
It was the longest home run hit by a Met this year … and Mauricio’s teammates, you will recall, include Pete Alonso and Juan Soto. And it’s not the first time Mauricio’s elbowed aside notable personages on the Hitting Superlatives leaderboard: In September 2023, his first big-league plate appearance yielded a 117.3 MPH double at Citi Field, the highest exit velocity recorded for a Met that season.
What struck me was that Mauricio has easy power. He doesn’t look like he’s swinging that hard — he uses his long arms to kind of flick the ball into the air, only to have it come down in another county. There’s a lot still to refine in Mauricio’s game — he chases too much and talk of his defensive versatility is a nice way of saying he’s not ideally suited to any position — but the bat speed and the easy power will carry him a long way.
Mauricio’s drive was the headline, but it had some company as the Mets shoved the Rockies aside: Jared Young and Jeff McNeil also homered, Brandon Nimmo contributed three RBIs, Luis Torrens tallied a pair and Francisco Lindor had three hits and two steals on a broken toe. (Long night for German Marquez, who came into the fifth having given up just one run but then saw everything come crashing down.)
The Rockies, meanwhile, had one of those quietly bad games that contribute to a terrible season without being particularly notable: plays not made, pitches not executed, bases not taken, games not won. Did Clay Holmes show admirable fortitude in allowing nine hits but just one run, or did the Rockies just fail to capitalize? Hey, why not both?
Anyway, the Rockies packed the house and so added bulk to Dick Monfort’s already bulky wallet, which is a Pyrrhic victory. At least they looked better in taking aim at their own feet: Those daiquiri City Connect 2.0s from Friday night are still branded on my retinas.
The Mets moved 17 games over .500, their high-water mark for the season (their high-water mark so far, says the optimist), and expanded their NL East lead over the suddenly flailing, battered Phillies to three and a half games. All good things ahead of one more game with Colorado and then a day off that should give the relief corps (newly expanded with the acquisition of two pitching-lab subjects in Justin Garza and Julian Merryweather) a badly needed breather.
Let’s not get ahead of ourselves, but maybe the Mets too can go a long way.
by Jason Fry on 7 June 2025 1:27 am The Mets played a strange game against the Greater Denver Daiquiri Machine Operators Local nine, who were sure spiffy in uniforms designed to look like the libations they serve so cheerfully. Oh wait, those were the Colorado Rockies, who inexplicably retired the best City Connects in the program and now look like human slushies. Their sub-.250 record is historically bad but my God, so are those uniforms.
The game was really two games in one: six innings of maddening frustration followed by three innings of madness.
The first six innings saw Kodai Senga give up just a solo homer to Mickey Moniak while trying to figure out which pitches he could make work a mile above sea level, though in the fifth he got an assist from Pete Alonso, who made a nifty throw home to nab Ryan Ritter — or at least he did once Chelsea overruled home-plate ump Chris Conroy’s safe call.
But the game went to the seventh with the Mets down 1-0, as they stubbornly refused to drive in runners in scoring position. The sixth was particularly infuriating: The Mets loaded the bases with nobody out against Antonio Senzatela and then Jake Bird on a pair of walks and a hit by pitch, or perhaps it was a near-HBP sold as one by Tyrone Taylor. But Conroy then added an inch or two to the outside corner, turning Brett Baty‘s AB into a farcical strikeout, and Francisco Alvarez and Ronny Mauricio then struck out against Bird without Conroy putting his thumb on the scale.
Seriously, if you can look at that GameDay snapshot and still not be on Team Robot Umps Now, I don’t know what to tell you. And an ABS system with challenges isn’t the answer — that will just slow games down and add another level of NFL-style bureaucracy to a game that used to be refreshingly free of it. Instead, implement a Hawk-Eye-style system and use it for every pitch, not just a selection of the home-plate ump’s most egregious failures. Every single game has ABs that are turned by umpires getting the strike zone wrong; sometimes that leads to tantrums like the one I’m currently throwing, but most of the time we don’t even notice, because we’ve accepted a certain level of inaccuracy and even sentimentalized it as “the human element.”
Which is nonsense. The human element is indeed a wonderful part of baseball, but it should be discussed when we marvel at clutch hits and heads-up plays and gutsy pitching performances, not when we’re hand-waving away the fact that umpires aren’t good enough at a critical part of their jobs.
Anyway, I was mad. Robot umps now.
Still, let’s not put all this on Conroy. He had nothing to do with Mauricio grounding out in the first or Alonso striking out in the third or Jeff McNeil flying out in the third or Alvarez grounding out in the fourth or Mauricio flying out in the fourth or Alvarez striking out in the sixth or Mauricio striking out in the sixth. The Mets were 2 for 15 with runners in scoring position on the night, that came on the heels of Thursday’s galling failure parade in LA, and it’s wearying to say the least.
But let’s talk about those two successes — and about the madness of the final three innings in Denver.
In the seventh the Mets put runners on first and second with one out, with Alonso digging in against slider specialist Tyler Kinley. Kinley had Alonso pulling off sliders off the outside corner but then missed his location on an 0-2 count, leaving a hanger in the middle of the plate. Alonso didn’t miss it, spanking it up the left-field gap to give the Mets a 2-1 lead.
Huascar Brazoban surrendered a run in the bottom of the seventh to let the Rockies tie it and in the eighth disaster seemed imminent: Ryne Stanek gave up a single to Jordan Beck and a double to Thairo Estrada, with Colorado third-base coach Andy Gonzalez inexplicably throwing up a stop sign as Beck came around third. Stanek then walked Hunter Goodman and had to face Ryan McMahon with the bases loaded and nobody out.
So of course McMahon hit a hard liner down the third-base line, seemingly ticketed for the left-field corner and two RBIs, maybe three. Except it thudded into Baty’s glove at third and he lunged to tag out Beck for an unassisted double play. Stanek then struck out Brenton Doyle and the Mets had somehow escaped the hangman. (A fun moment: a still-amped Stanek hugging Baty in the dugout afterwards.)
In the top of the ninth, Juan Soto singled and Alonso walked with one out against Zach Agnos. With two outs, Carlos Mendoza sent Francisco Lindor to the plate, broken pinkie toe and all. Agnos’s second pitch was a cutter that Lindor served down the right-field line, sending Soto home with Alonso chugging along behind him. Alonso looked like he’d be out by three feet, but pulled an okie-doke on Goodman, switching hands as he reached for the plate and getting in just ahead of the tag. (Conroy got that one right.) Lindor trotted off the field in favor of Luisangel Acuna, to be mobbed by his happy teammates, and Edwin Diaz offered a blissfully drama-free one-two-three inning to secure the win.
A classic? Let’s not overdo it, given the scores of runners left on base and the two-thirds of the game that was grinding and frustrating. But the Mets overcame the Rockies, the home-plate ump and themselves to win, and that’s pretty satisfying.
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