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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 Jason Fry on 8 May 2020 2:48 pm I was five months old when the Mets completed their ascent from doormats to destiny’s darlings, and by the time I started collecting cards in 1976, the miracle makers had been largely dispersed. Just six were still Mets. The rest had become Pirates and Astros and Phillies and other questionable things, or started doing whatever people did when they no longer played baseball. Two were no longer with us at all.
In an era before videotapes, let alone YouTube, I learned the saga of ’69 through books, snapping up every quickie paperback I could find about the Miracle Mets. Which turned out to be a terrific education, as a lot of those books were genuinely great reads, thanks to a deep bench of talented New York sportswriters. George Vecsey’s Joy in Mudville, Paul Zimmerman and Dick Schaap’s The Year the Mets Lost Last Place and Maury Allen’s The Incredible Mets were particular favorites, with a special place in my heart reserved for Screwball, written by Tug McGraw with X amount of help from Joe Durso. And there was the peerless Roger Angell, whose meditations on baseball convinced me that other teams were sometimes worth pondering too. But I wasn’t discriminating — I’d read anything about the Mets, or that might be about the Mets.
That was how I learned the gospel. About Tom Seaver refusing to celebrate .500, and Gil Hodges taking the long walk out to speak with Cleon Jones. About the black cat and Leo Durocher and Ron Santo clicking his heels. About Frank Robinson calling Rod Gaspar “Ron Stupid” and the Met wives unfurling a banner in the stands in Baltimore. About the scoreboard saying LOOK WHO’S NUMBER 1 and the shoe-polish ball being brought to Lou DiMuro. I read about Tommie Agee and Ron Swoboda catching balls dozens of times before I ever got to see them do it, and could tell you in great detail how J.C. Martin should have been out but I was glad he wasn’t, despite no visual reference. I’d studied the picture of Jerry Koosman jackknifed in Jerry Grote‘s arms while Ed Charles danced happily nearby so many times that I could draw it from memory.
There was stuff I didn’t understand yet, like the controversy around Seaver and the Vietnam war and a flag that absolutely should or shouldn’t have been at half-mast, or why anyone thought it was significant that the Mets’ black and white players all seemed to get along. And there were random pieces of the adult world that those books lodged in my brain because of their Mets connection. I was foggy on who John Lindsay, Nelson Rockefeller, Jackie Onassis, Ed Sullivan or Pearl Bailey were, but I knew they were part of the tale and that was good enough for me. (I still don’t really know who Pearl Bailey was.) I knew it was funny that Swoboda had yelled, “they’ve sprayed all the imported and now we have to drink the domestic,” and repeated that endlessly despite not knowing why it was funny. Oh, and for some reason I could tell you that Nancy Seaver wore a tam o’shanter. (There it was atop her head in last night’s SNY airing of Game 4, just like the books taught me.)
But there were discordant notes in the saga, things that seemed strange to me but not to adults. Some of the Miracle Mets had retired because they were old, at least for baseball, but others had disappeared before their time — what had become of Gaspar, or Jack DiLauro? As I kept reading and learning, I figured out that Gaspar and DiLauro had been the last guys on the roster, the kind of guys who had to keep fighting for big-league jobs. But that still left one mystery: What had happened to Gary Gentry?
 From Jace’s front hall to this post. He’d been a rookie in 1969, and even I knew he was young for a ballplayer then. Heck, he even looked young to me, for whom everybody was old. One of my favorite Mets photos is of Gentry and Seaver standing on the mound after the Mets clinched the division and security guards wrested the field back from the sod-pillaging mob. Their uniforms are in disarray, as is the field. The photographer caught Gentry while trying to get his bearings in this strange new world, but the first thing you notice is he looks about 12.
I knew Gentry had been a good pitcher — a really good one, in fact, part of the Mets’ front line with Seaver and Koosman. But Seaver and Koosman were still Mets, and Gentry wasn’t. He’d become an Atlanta Brave, grown a mustache that made him look vaguely dissolute, and then vanished. The explanation given by Mets books and the occasional Baseball Digest mention was that he’d hurt his arm, which was both annoyingly vague and raised more questions than it answered. Was hurting your arm really that common? Could it happen to any pitcher?
The answers turned out to be yes, and yes.
I’d learn that eventually — a brutal baseball truth that in my mind will always be bound up with Gary Gentry.
As I got older, I realized that not all of the Mets had actually been baseball gods, and the ’69 championship had been less about destiny than superlative pitching, smart platooning and some good old-fashioned luck. (OK, so maybe there was a little destiny involved.) But Gentry really had been that good. He was a position player in high school, attending the wonderfully named Camelback High in Phoenix, before taking the mound for Phoenix Junior College and Arizona State. As a junior at Arizona State, Gentry went 17-1, fanning 229 in 174 innings; in the College World Series semifinal he went 14 innings against Stanford, striking out 15 and scoring the winning run. He was drafted by the Orioles, Astros and Giants, but his dad — a former World War II and Korean War pilot — refused to let him sign. The offers kept getting better, and after the College World Series Ed Gentry left the decision up to his son. Gary signed with the Mets for $50,000, blitzed through Williamsport and Jacksonville, and made the Mets out of spring training in 1969, when he was all of 22.
Gentry was two years younger than Seaver, but there were a lot of similarities between them. Gentry was smart, a student of the game eager to learn how to carve up enemy hitters. (The Mets put his locker between Seaver’s and Koosman’s, an excellent place to learn this craft.) He was ornery, though sometimes he directed his fire at teammates or management instead of the opposition. And, like Seaver, he had no patience for the dysfunctional romance around the Mets as lovable losers. Gentry’s juco team had won a national championship and just missed another one, he’d won a College World Series with the Sun Devils, and both his minor-league teams had been league champions. He wasn’t overawed by being a big leaguer, and he expected to win.
And he did. Gentry won 13 games as a rookie in ’69 and could have won 20 with better run support and less bum luck. (And, perhaps, with more ability to shake off misfortune — but, again, he was 22.) He won the division clincher, then started the NLCS capper against Atlanta (Shea Stadium’s first postseason game) and Game 3 of the Series, best known for Agee’s two sparkling catches. His performance against Baltimore came as a surprise to both Earl Weaver and Frank Cashen, who knew about Seaver and Koosman but whose scouting reports had badly underestimated Gentry. Years later, Cashen would still grow visibly irritated about the rookie who’d beaten his Birds — and Gentry, when asked, would still be irritated about Cashen being surprised.
(Oh, and he’s one of the most enthusiastic Mets belting out “You Gotta Have Heart” on the Ed Sullivan Show — behind McGraw, of course, and maybe Gaspar. Though nothing in that video will ever be funnier than Nolan Ryan, who can’t be bothered and doesn’t care that it’s obvious.)
After 1969 things went sideways for Gentry — sideways and then south. In ’71 Gentry groused about getting second-class treatment in the rotation and struggled with his emotions on the mound, repeatedly showing up teammates who didn’t make plays. He was still a prized commodity, though — the Angels settled for Ryan as the price for Jim Fregosi after being refused Gentry. In ’72 arm problems that had plagued him since 1970 became worse, and after the season the Mets traded him and Danny Frisella to the Braves for Felix Millan and George Stone.
As it turned out, Gentry had been pitching with a bone chip in his elbow, which the Braves’ doctors found after arm woes derailed his 1973 season. The operation to fix the chip would have been simple in 1970, but now it put him on the shelf for the rest of the year. He came back in ’74, but the highlight of his campaign was standing in the bullpen hoping to catch Hank Aaron‘s 715th homer. (Tom House caught it instead.) After another operation and lost year, Gentry returned for a third try in ’75, but feuded with Atlanta about a pay cut and wound up exiled to the bullpen. After getting shelled in a mop-up assignment despite being given minimal time to warm up, the Braves told Gentry he was being released to make room for younger pitchers. He was 28 and his arm felt fine, but he was done.
Done except for a tantalizing what-if. The Mets’ pitching staff was in tatters and they signed Gentry a month after Atlanta sent him home. He reported to Double-A Jackson with a promise that he’d be called up as soon as he showed the club all was well. Unfortunately, Gentry hadn’t picked up a ball in a month. He was in a hurry when he should have taken it slow. He warmed up for his first game, threw two pitches and heard something rip. Another pitch, another rip. He never so much as recorded an out for Jackson and went home to Phoenix to learn the real-estate business.
Remember when Jason Isringhausen and Bill Pulsipher were about to lead the Mets back to the top of the mountain, with Paul Wilson waiting in the wings? The debate was who was Seaver and who was Koosman and should we maybe be talking about Jon Matlack. But there was another possibility, a disquieting one that nobody wanted to mention. What if they all turn out to be Gary Gentry?
That wasn’t a knock on Gentry, but a knock on wood against the cruelties of baseball — a knock on wood that didn’t work. Only Isringhausen survived to have a notable career, and his top similarity score over on Baseball Reference isn’t Tom Seaver but Bob Wickman. As for Pulsipher and Wilson, they did indeed turn out to be Gary Gentry. Which might also be the fate of Noah Syndergaard. Or David Peterson. Or the next Met phenom you haven’t heard of yet.
What went wrong? You could blame Mets coaches, or Mets doctors, or their counterparts with the Braves, or any of a host of targets. But when it comes to injured pitchers, decades of advances in baseball science and sports surgery have brought us all the way from groping in the dark to groping in the dim. You wait for the pop, the shake of the arm, the visit from the trainer, the uncertainty and rehab and further uncertainty that follows, and it all still boils down to a simple, cosmically unfair truth about the game. Learning that truth was the solution to the mystery of Gary Gentry’s disappearance, a cruel lesson that generation after generation of Met pitchers has reinforced and will reinforce.
He hurt his arm. Pitchers break.
PREVIOUS METS FOR ALL SEASONS
1969: Donn Clendenon
1973: Willie Mays
1982: Rusty Staub
1991: Rich Sauveur
1994: Rico Brogna
by Greg Prince on 5 May 2020 3:24 pm Welcome to A Met for All Seasons, a series in which we consider a given Met who played in a given season and…well, we’ll see.
When Willie Mays returned to New York, many saw it — may God forgive them — as a trade to be debated on the merits of statistics. Could the forty-one-year-old center fielder with ascending temperament and waning batting average help the Mets? To those of us who spent our boyhood, our teens, and our beer-swilling days debating who was the first person of the Holy Trinity — Mantle, Snider, or Mays? — it was a lover’s reprieve from limbo. No matter how Amazin’ the Mets were, a part of our hearts was in San Francisco.
—Joe Flaherty, “Love Song to Willie Mays,” 1972
Maybe it was when I opened to the baseball chapter of the New York Times-branded book of sports records I was given for a seventh birthday present, examined the all-time home run list, and realized the player listed as second was still playing. Maybe it was the cumulative effect of hearing repeated endorsements by announcers — ours as well as the ones who spoke glowingly of him on national telecasts. I could’ve picked it up in the papers during my early, precocious infatuation with sports sections. However the notion embedded itself within my head and heart, by the time the first All-Star Game I tuned into rolled around on July 14, 1970, there was no doubt in my mind.
Willie Mays was the best player in baseball. Maybe not the best at the moment (Johnny Bench seemed to have that title well in hand). Maybe not the best ever (Babe Ruth did have the most home runs). But, nearly twenty years before Tina Turner would make bank off the phrase, and three years before his emotional 1973 retirement choked up the portion of the nation whose pastime would always be baseball, Willie Mays reigned as simply the best. It’s no surprise that leading off in that All-Star Game for the best of leagues, the National, was simply the best player there was.
Of course Willie Mays came first.
Thanks to NBC, I was exposed to a passel of future Hall of Famers that Tuesday night. Twenty players introduced at brand new Riverfront Stadium in Cincinnati fifty summers ago now have plaques in Cooperstown. I lapped up all those gallons of greatness swirling through the portable Sony black & white set stationed in my sister’s room that she rarely watched. At seven years old, my July nights were already about baseball. My days, too. The names — Aaron, Clemente, two Robinsons, Seaver obviously, Bench and Perez from the home team, Carew, McCovey, Palmer and on and on — were already familiar to me. I’d seen them everywhere I’d looked. Baseball cards. Baseball lists. Baseball stories. Now they were all together in one baseball place.
But first and foremost among them was Willie Mays, center fielder for the San Francisco Giants with now more than 600 home runs and the irresistible nickname the Say Hey Kid. He was the best, and as the best, I really wanted his card. Couldn’t get one in 1970, not even in that “Super Series” where the cards were absurdly oversized and incredibly thick. Couldn’t get one in 1971, either. Come 1972, however, my interminable dry spell came to an end (interminable being a relative matter when you’re nine and you’ve been wanting something since you were seven). The very first pack of spring in third grade, purchased at the Cozy Nook on the walk home from East School, revealed his name in a serif font above his smiling face which was framed under a yellow banner from which his team name fairly exploded: GIANTS. I couldn’t believe I had Willie Mays in my hand. I sat in the kitchen, cradled it, marveled at my fortune, and smiled at his smile.
 Make me smile. Then I flipped him over. Even at nine…even at seven, I was always more taken by words, numbers and facts than I was images.
Will ya look at that set of statistics? They start in 1950 in the minors (those don’t really count). A year later, he’s in the majors, where he’s stayed ever since. There’s one year that’s blank when he’s “In Military Service,” but otherwise Willie Mays is always playing and always posting titanic totals. As many as 52 homers in one year. As many as 127 RBIs. Batting averages regularly over .300. Those are the main numbers if you’re a baseball fan of any vintage, though the Topps people are kind enough to list ancillary stats like runs and hits and doubles and triples and believe you me (whatever that means; it’s something people said on TV), Willie Mays has a ton of those, too. The yearly accumulations grew a little lighter as the 1960s were ending and the 1970s were beginning, but that, I infer in the spring of 1972, is to be expected. Willie Mays’s birthdate is listed as 5-6-31, which makes him 40 going on 41. He’s almost as old as my father. Eighteen home runs, sixty-one runs batted in and a .271 average — his totals from 1971 — are pretty good for someone over forty. In 1971, Willie Mays helped lead the Giants to a division title. In 1971, Willie Mays had more home runs and more RBIs than anybody on the Mets.
Funny thing about the back of the 1972 Willie Mays card, No. 49 in the first series from Topps (No. 50 was Willie Mays In Action). Where they list “TEAM” and “LEA” for his first bunch of years in the big leagues, Mays isn’t with San Francisco, which is where I know him from. Instead, from 1951 through 1957, including his military service year of 1953, the card says he played for “New York N.L.” I do a double-take. At the age of nine, I know better than to think there was some sort of secret Willie Mays past nobody’s mentioned regarding a long-ago tenure with the only “New York N.L.” I’ve ever experienced. I know my New York Mets of the National League have, like me, been around only since 1962.
I also know, albeit vaguely, that the San Francisco Giants used to be the New York Giants, the way the Los Angeles Dodgers used to be the Brooklyn Dodgers. It doesn’t come up very often in conversation, but it’s one of those myriad ancient, as in before I was born, baseball lessons I’ve absorbed since entering the game’s thrall as a lad of six. I’m nine now. I’ve been around. I pay attention on Old-Timers Day, I’ll have you know. I even remember getting Hoyt Wilhelm’s card in 1970 (it said he was on the Braves but his cap was disturbingly blank), and on the back he got the “New York N.L.” treatment. It was hard to fathom that anybody who played in the 1950s was still playing baseball in the 1970s, but at least a few of those guys were. A couple played for “New York N.L.” before it meant what I know it means now.
Yet here in the spring of 1972, when one has achieved what may have been his first longstanding lifetime goal, a person can dream. I’m looking at this Willie Mays card I finally have. I’m looking at these credentials of his. I’m looking at “New York N.L.” and how it’s attached to him despite the orange SF insignia on his black cap in his picture on the front, the cap the announcers like to mention flies off his head a lot when he’s running. The theoretical juxtaposition lingers for a moment. Willie Mays. New York. Mets.
Then, within two months, the punctuation changes. Willie Mays, New York Mets.
Willie Mays, New York Mets!
The mind boggled. It remains boggled. I’ve since lived numerous times through the happy shock of learning that big Met trades had been made and that big names were suddenly Met names: George Foster; Keith Hernandez; Gary Carter; Mike Piazza; Roberto Alomar; Johan Santana; Yoenis Cespedes. And regardless of the for-better-or-for-worse impact that rippled out of those respective big frigging deals, nothing — nothing — measures up in my formerly nine-year-old mind to learning that Willie Mays was suddenly of the New York Mets.
Willie Mays, New York Mets!
There was a backstory that made sense as to how and why this could have happened and had to happen, and it was connected to the lines below Trenton and Minneapolis and above San Francisco on 1972 Topps Card No. 49. “New York N.L.” wasn’t just dusty ledgerkeeping. “New York N.L.” was where Willie Mays became Willie Mays. It was about more than a Rookie of the Year award in 1951 or an MVP in 1954. It was about an impression made and an impression left and a heart that couldn’t be transported lock, stock and barrel to San Francisco. Willie Mays hadn’t been a home team player in New York for fifteen years, but when the orange NY, which was now embroidered onto royal blue caps, was provided for him anew, he put it on and it fit perfectly. The trade became official as of May 11, 1972: pitcher Charlie Williams and cash that Horace Stoneham needed, for Willie Mays and a return to the loving arms of Joan Payson and the city that never forgot him. Jim Beauchamp, acquired from St. Louis in the offseason for Art Shamsky, graciously gave up the 24 he’d inherited from Art and handed it over to Willie, because Willie Mays, 24 for the New York Giants, was now going to be 24 for the New York Mets.
The mind boggled some more.
Willie Mays, you likely know, played in his first game as a Met versus the Giants, at Shea Stadium on Mother’s Day, in the Mets’ 24th game of the year. You’d think that would be too much symbolism for one ballgame to hold. In the bottom of the first inning, Willie, starting as first baseman rather than center fielder in deference to his being 41, led off the Sunday affair of May 14 by walking and then scoring on Rusty Staub’s grand slam in the first (getting Rusty Staub from the Expos in April was also pretty mind-boggling). In the fifth, with the score tied at four, Willie led off again. This time he homered for the 647th time in his career. The heavens wept. Technically, it was a little rainy, but c’mon. You didn’t need to go back to 1951 with Willie Mays and the New York Giants to understand that this was transcendent. You didn’t need to know the word “transcendent,” even. You could be nine, a fan since you were six, and soak in the wonder of it all. This was a Foxwoods commercial before there was a Foxwoods.
Willie’s homer won the Mets that game over the Giants, and Willie’s play continued to help the Mets win for weeks to come. They were the best team in baseball with the best baseball player there was, and all it took to get him was a Quadruple-A pitcher, Mrs. Payson’s discretionary funds and unabashed sentimentality. The Mets reeled off eleven wins in a row at one point and were 30-11 as June dawned. Willie reached base in the first twenty games in which he came to the plate. Baseball cards didn’t include on-base percentage in 1972, but had Topps had the capability and foresight to rush a modern rendition out to reflect the first not quite seven weeks of Willie Mays’s second “New York N.L.” tenure, it would have noted his OBP between May 14 and June 27 was .463 and his OPS was .914.
 Coming home and going, going, gone! (Photo by Life magazine) Better from my perspective than a new Willie Mays card was the gander I got at the May 26 issue of Life magazine. It, like me, was sitting in the waiting room of my sister’s orthodontist, a fellow soon to become my orthodontist, lucky me. I’d be bracing myself for life with braces long after Life ceased weekly publication. George Wallace was on the cover. Him I wasn’t too concerned with. Inside, on pages 38 and 39, was a spread that made me say, in so many words, “HEY!” It contained — along with an appropriate headline (“Willie Forever!”); a brief explanation of Mays’s May 14 exploits; and a picture of the Mets first baseman’s glorious swing off Giants reliever Don Carrithers as San Francisco catcher Fran Healy watches helplessly — a reproduction of every Willie Mays Topps baseball card from 1952 through 1972. There was the one I got in that first pack. And there were the 1971 and 1970 ones I opened pack after pack in unanswered hopes of getting. And there were what Willie Mays cards looked like in the years before, not just the years from when I’d had cards, but back to the early ’60s and the ’50s, which was the first time I’d ever seen what a baseball card manufactured prior to 1966 looked like.
Most breathtakingly, there was Willie Mays wearing a black cap with an orange NY over and over, representing the New York Giants, which floored me. It wasn’t the first time I’d seen that cap, but it was the first time it truly hit me what this homecoming was all about — and from whence the Mets sprung in terms of lineage. I knew we were an expansion team. I knew something about Brooklyn Dodgers and New York Giants. But here, in living color, was current New York Met Willie Mays — the best of baseball players — being then-current New York Giant Willie Mays. This array of baseball cards said a million words.
 There was something familiar about that NY. It was then and there that I pledged retroactive fealty to the New York Giants and their orange NY. And it was then and there that I became intractable in my belief that there was nowhere Willie Mays was supposed to be in 1972 and 1973 other than in a uniform that allowed to him to finish his career wearing that orange NY.
Mays didn’t keep up his blistering on-base pace and the Mets didn’t keep up theirs in the winning percentage column. Staub got hurt. Everybody got hurt. The Mets fell from first to a not especially compelling third. Willie was a legend who apparently required a bit of care and feeding regular players didn’t rate. Yogi Berra, the legend who never sought to manage the Mets but had the job thrust on him after the death of Gil Hodges, was put in an awkward position of calculating when he could play him and when he could sit him. After the initial burst of euphoria, Willie Mays in his superstar emeritus phase and the Mets just trying to finish the season didn’t necessarily constitute an ideal marriage.
I didn’t grasp any of that at age nine. I spent the rest of 1972 in a haze of ecstasy that Willie Mays the New York Giant was a New York Met who had hit a home run to win a game versus the San Francisco Giants and that he was — past tense notwithstanding — the best player in baseball. It didn’t matter to me that Hank Aaron passed him on the all-time home run list. I rooted for Aaron to catch Ruth. I liked Aaron from a distance, but there wasn’t nothing particularly New York about him. Mays, as Life made clear, was meant to be ours. Mays was meant to be on my team. Mays was meant to be a Met. It wasn’t that he was the best. It was that he was the best here, for us — for the version of us that preceded us. That orange NY spoke volumes to me.
So he’d stay into 1973 when, save for the occasional reminder of what had made him famous more than twenty years before, he played like a 42-year-old. He was still Willie Mays. He was still named to the All-Star team because he was Willie Mays. He still drew ovations at Shea because he was Willie Mays. He didn’t play like the Willie Mays everybody who’d seen him in 1951 and 1954 swore by. He didn’t play like the Willie Mays I saw for myself in May and June of 1972. He was said to be about as done as the last-place Mets were in the summer of 1973.
But I wouldn’t have traded those two years of Willie Mays for anything or anybody. I wouldn’t have traded him for Hank Aaron, Johnny Bench or any of the in-their-prime future Hall of Famers from the All-Star Game three years earlier. I wouldn’t have asked to have Charlie Williams back had Charlie Williams gone to California and turned into Nolan Ryan rather than remaining Charlie Williams. I had Willie Mays as a New York Met when I was nine and ten. Maybe Willie was too old to play like he did when he was a kid, but I was old enough to get why it didn’t matter. I got the New York Giants connection. I got the meaning behind the ovations. I got why baseball made people not just happy but weepy. It all came together on the night of September 25, when Willie Mays and his 660 home runs — same number Topps would put into its base set of cards over the next few years — said “goodbye to America” in a New York Mets uniform at a packed Shea Stadium. The Mets had improbably scratched and clawed their way into first place. Willie, who’d been hurting and sitting the previous few weeks, gave them his blessing. You gotta believe you me that they won the division and, with Willie pinch-hitting at a critical juncture in Game Five of the playoffs versus the Reds, the pennant.
Perfect ending…except there was that little matter of the Say Hey Kid being pressed into center field action in the literal glare of the Oakland Coliseum in the second game of the World Series and the image of old man Mays being overmatched by fly balls and gravity. By not being as ageless as he had to be (in a game that, oh by the way, the Mets would win in extras on Willie’s RBI single), the best player in baseball became a metaphor for athletes who hang on too long, and Willie Mays’s presence in a Mets uniform would embody something that it was generally decided never looked right. “Mets legend Willie Mays” is supposed to be a guaranteed chuckle-generator on social media, as if coming home to play before appreciative fans who never forgot you somehow factors out to a net negative. Even the stupendous Joe Posnanski, in recently declaring Willie Mays the No. 1 baseball player who’s ever lived — better than Ruth, better than everybody — fell down the well of Willie falling down in center.
Tom Seaver, you may recall, tried to make a comeback with the Mets in June of 1987. The pitching staff was riddled by injuries and Tom was sitting home in Greenwich without a contract. He was 42, but had been solid enough for the Red Sox when he was 41 and, technically, he had never retired. Apparently, though, 41 was the upper limit for 41, because Tom’s comeback attempt lasted only a few weeks and never resulted in his actually coming back. After Barry Lyons roughed him up in a simulated game, Tom definitively announced his retirement at a press conference, admitting his fabled right arm contained no more competitive pitches.
But what if Tom had hung in there a little longer and convinced himself as well as Frank Cashen and Davey Johnson that he had something left? The Mets were sorting through Don Schulze and John Mitchell and whoever that summer. It’s not inconceivable that Tom Seaver could have reached down a little deeper and given the Mets the quality innings they needed to bridge the gap from June to October. So let’s say that happened. Let’s say Tom Seaver helps pitch the Mets to the 1987 division title, then the 1987 National League pennant and, finally, the 1987 World Series. And then, because this is all hypothetical, let’s say Tom Seaver takes the mound at the Metrodome and, figuratively if not literally, falls down on baseball’s biggest stage and that’s how his career ends, forty-two-year-old Tom Seaver, who didn’t know when to quit, implodes with everybody watching.
Someone like me, an adult with precious memories of robust Tom Terrific, might have cringed and wished he’d just stayed in Connecticut looking at proposals for wineries, just as those who went back to the Polo Grounds with their childhood hero didn’t want to see the old Willie Mays of 1973 besmirch the memory of young Willie Mays from 1954. I just now, in 2020, had to invent a hypothetical to get there, but I acknowledge the “Willie falling down in center” trope wasn’t invented in hindsight; there were people who loved Willie Mays who couldn’t bear to see Willie Mays be several levels short of Willie Mays; who couldn’t stand that something as ostensibly sweet as sunshine might get the best of the Say Hey Kid. Yet give me this: had that Seaver scenario played out, there would have been a kid of nine or maybe ten who read stories and saw pictures from 1969 and legitimately tingled from seeing Tom Seaver pitch for the 1987 Mets…and that kid would never forget it. That for that kid, even if Tom Seaver was 42 and no longer fully 41, the Franchise was the Franchise and he belonged on a mound for Mets for as long as he could toe its rubber.
 Looks perfect to me. It’s not a perfect analogy, just as Willie Mays’s time as a Met wasn’t without flaws. But to me, it was perfect. To me, Willie Mays is a New York Met. To me, no other Met should wear 24. I could dive into a grubby argument about what represents a retirable number, one of those chintzy debates that inevitably diminishes everybody whose number is namechecked, but I prefer to lean on what Joe Flaherty, an old Giant fan who had converted to the Mets while waiting for his baseball heartthrob to come home, had to say in the Village Voice in 1972.
“Willie, like Scott Fitzgerald’s rich,” Flaherty wrote, “is very different from you and me.”
He was very different from every player. He started with one “New York N.L.” He ended with the other “New York N.L.” And, in between, he was better than every player.
One more number to consider before saying “hey” to 24: 89, as in happy 89th birthday to Willie Mays. That comes tomorrow (5-6-20), another candle atop all of his incandescent yesterdays. I am honored that I was able to witness a few of them where I did when I did.
PREVIOUS METS FOR ALL SEASONS
1969: Donn Clendenon
1982: Rusty Staub
1991: Rich Sauveur
1994: Rico Brogna
by Greg Prince on 1 May 2020 3:19 pm Welcome to A Met for All Seasons, a series in which we consider a given Met who played in a given season and…well, we’ll see.
“Fuck, 33, too soon.”
“No, dying in thirties is tragic. As is forties. Sympathy dissipates from there. Fifties is ‘such a shame’. Sixties is ‘too soon’.”
“Seventies: ‘a good run’.”
“And eighties, ‘a life well lived’. Nineties?”
“That’s a fucking helluva ride.”
—Axe and Wags, Billions
Where would have the Mets been last year without Pete Alonso? Or Jacob deGrom? Or Jeff McNeil? Or Seth Lugo?
I don’t know. Nobody does. Yet we impose that hypothetical upon the actual regularly as a compliment to any Met we think made a positive impact on our team’s fortunes. I’m not sure what purpose it serves. Why shouldn’t have we had the players who helped the Mets be better than they presumably would have been without them? The Mets secured the services of those players via legally recognized contractual processes. While it’s possible the parties might not have reached a mutually satisfactory agreement and therefore Alonso or deGrom or whoever wouldn’t have worn the uniform of our choosing, that didn’t happen.
Every Met who’s been a Met has been a Met when he’s been a Met. (Got that?) Musing that we would have been worse off had we not had a given Met at a given time seems a fatalistic offshoot of the dreaded “this is why we can’t have nice things” self-flagellation to which we too often reflexively resort when things don’t go as nicely as we’d prefer.
We can have nice things. We can have the players who do nice things. We might not maintain the exact aggregation necessary to achieve our hopes and dreams in this season or that, but let’s enjoy what we get when we get it (whenever we next get anything of a baseball nature). Let’s not assume every Met who performs optimally for us is a clerical error waiting to be rectified by a vengeful karma last seen wearing a Nationals cap.
Where would have the Mets been without Donn Clendenon in 1969? Again, I don’t know. Nobody does. What we do know is that the Mets started 1969 with neither Donn Clendenon nor the slightest track record of success and that they ended 1969 with both Donn Clendenon and a world championship. If you wish to conclude that there is a direct correlation between the presence of the title and the presence of the slugging first baseman, go ahead. Clendenon was, chronologically speaking, the final member of the World Series roster to become a Met. Most of the 1969 Mets who made it to October were Mets before 1969. They didn’t win us any world championships before Clendenon came along, did they? Ergo, all that ticker tape must’ve sprung from Donn’s big bat.
That’s an awfully superficial way of determining a player’s intrinsic value to a ballclub. Still it’s tempting. The 1968 Mets had a whole bunch of their future champions already on board…yet lost 89 games. Plenty of 1969 Mets were 1967 Mets…but the 1967 Mets lost 101 games. Cover one eye, squint with the other and you can convince yourself that all the Mets of the late ’60s needed to transform themselves dramatically was Donn Clendenon donning orange and blue.
It was dramatic enough that Clendenon was traded for on June 15, 1969, in a deal that sent one fairly established major leaguer (utilityman Kevin Collins) and three minor leaguers of varying levels of promise (pitchers Steve Renko, Jay Carden and Dave Colon) to Montreal. It was additionally intriguing because Clendenon, a veteran of eight seasons with Pittsburgh, had rejected an earlier trade, in January, one that would have shipped him off to the Astros from the expansion Expos. Donn had been around long enough to know that he didn’t want to play for Houston manager Harry Walker and, unlike most ballplayers, he had an imminent and appealing career option outside baseball. Clendenon didn’t have to be an Astro when he knew he could be a Scripto (an executive for the pen company, that is). Montreal, which had drafted Clendenon from the Pirates, made other arrangements with Houston — allowing them to keep the erstwhile Astro they wanted, Rusty Staub — and held on to their ex-Buc a few months longer than planned.
The Mets had always angled to trade for a big bat of Clendenon’s caliber. They were just never successful at it. The best they could come up with was a bat that had been big — Ken Boyer in advance of 1966; Tommy Davis ahead of 1967; someone who’d put up some really fine numbers a while back and if he could regain some of that MVP-type form in New York, well, incremental improvement is better than none for a team that had yet to prove remotely competitive. The Mets were never successful enough for any trade to seem all that vital in the moment. The best they could do on the market was trade for what amounted to future considerations: prying loose 23-year-old Jerry Grote from the Astros in 1965 plugged a longstanding catching hole; landing 25-year-old Tommie Agee from the White Sox in 1967 accomplished the same end for center field. In a best-case scenario, both young men served as legitimate building blocks for a team that maybe someday wouldn’t be an automatic bet to finish in the second division, yet neither Grote nor Agee was acquired with an eye on climbing into first place at the very next conceivable opportunity. There was no conceivable first-place opportunity looming for the Mets in 1966 or 1968. Hallucinogenic drugs might have been gaining popularity in certain circles, but Harry M. Stevens didn’t sell them at the Shea concessions.
The exchange of players from June 15, 1969, however, transpired in a whole other beautiful world, one where Mets general manager Johnny Murphy could look at the roster he and his predecessors had been crafting when no one was taking them seriously and realize they were at last at the juncture when that mythic big bat could make a meaningful noise. Enter the strong, long and lanky Clendenon, albeit a couple of years removed from his most muscular production (28 home runs, 98 runs batted in and a .299 average in 1966 — adding up to an OPS+ of 141, not that anyone knew what the hell that was then). But the 1969 Mets, while they craved a legitimate cleanup hitter, didn’t necessarily have to have a superstar; nor were they willing to give up too much of their awesome young pitching to nab one. They needed someone who’d been around the league, someone who could get around on a fastball, and someone who would be OK playing sometimes. They needed a dependable right-handed hitting first baseman to complement their perennially developing lefty-swinging incumbent Ed Kranepool. Kranepool was 24. Clendenon was a month from 34. Between them, they averaged out as a 29-year-old switch-hitter, forging an ideal everyday player within Gil Hodges’s platoon of platoons.
 Strong, long, lanky and just what a growing team needed. The second-place Mets of mid-June 1969 were 30-26, better than they’d ever been after 56 games…and 8½ games behind the first-place Cubs. That only sounds like a large margin until you realize the Mets had never been far enough above .500 or near enough to first place to realistically measure themselves against lofty goals or stiff competition. Finishing in ninth place a couple of times seemed pretty heady stuff. But 8½ games out with more than a hundred games remaining and no one sitting between them and the team at the top constituted a legitimate shot. In 1969, the Mets were taking it. And they were taking Clendenon for the win.
You basically know what happened. I already gave away the ending. Donn Clendenon joined the Mets, and the Mets won the World Series. Clendenon’s impact was most helpful if not quite Cespedesian in its immediacy. Despite Donn delivering the kind of big hits befitting a big bat, the Mets of August 15 were actually farther from first place — 9½ out and in third — than they were two months earlier. But they were carrying a winning record, 62-51. They were unquestionably alive.
Then, in a hurry, they were alive and well and damn near unstoppable, racing up to and past the Cubs in what amounted to a blink. On September 24, with Donn Clendenon belting two home runs, the Mets beat the Cardinals to clinch the National League East. On October 16, with Donn Clendenon launching his third home run of a five-game set, the Mets beat the Orioles to win the World Series. Somewhere between showers of champagne, Donn was informed he had been named the MVP of the Fall Classic.
He hadn’t been a Met a year before. He hadn’t been a Met until four months before. Now he was certified most valuable, with the ultimate “nice thing” of its time, a 1970 Dodge Charger, to prove it. So, yeah, you can argue that for all the critical contributions made by every 1969 Met, they wouldn’t have gotten where they were going without Donn Clendenon grabbing the wheel.
But why would you want to think that we wouldn’t have had Donn Clendenon? Or any of the 1969 Mets?
***On September 17, 2005, the concept of “without Donn Clendenon” became literal when the MVP of the 1969 World Series died at the age of 70. In a way, it represented the second milestone moment Clendenon gave me in my life as a Mets fan. The first was that Thursday afternoon he put the Mets on the board in Game Five versus Dave McNally. I can’t say I would have stopped being a Mets fan had they not won the World Series for me when I was six (and had been a Mets fan not even as long as Donn had been a Met), but it seems safe to infer that once they became champs, I was all in forevermore.
Donn’s death was something else. Obviously, it was sadder. Are there ballplayer passings that aren’t? When we separate the occupation from the humanity, it’s depressingly logical that everybody eventually dies. That’s biology, though maybe it’s chemistry. I barely made it through biology and avoided taking chemistry. But a human who you know as a ballplayer…as a ballplayer from when you were a kid…even if it’s decades removed from when you were a kid and he was playing ball…I can’t say he’s not supposed to die, but it’s at odds with everything you love about loving ballplayers.
Donn Clendenon certainly wasn’t the first ballplayer from my youth to pass on, nor was he the first of the 1969 Mets to leave us permanently, but he was the first to go when I had this platform. We started Faith and Fear in Flushing in February 2005. When I learned Clendenon was dead, it was pure instinct for me to sit down at this very spot and remember him in pixelish print. I can’t imagine it would have occurred to me not to.
That’s been my self-assigned role ever since, sharing a few hopefully appropriate words on behalf of the deceased after a respectful moment of silence. A Met — technically “a former Met,” but once a Met, always a Met — dies, I try to make sure I have something to say on this blog about him. Same for any Met figure and often for others in baseball. But definitely when it’s a Met who shaped what it meant to root for the Mets, especially when it’s a Met whose name evokes the Series from when I was six and the summer from when I was seven. Donn Clendenon hit home runs two of the three times the Mets captured titles in 1969. He spent all of 1970 driving in runs: 97, for a new club record. He was at the core of my formative experiences.
May my science teachers forgive my perpetual difficulties absorbing their lessons, but someone who does that for a kid is not supposed to die, or at least not die so soon. Not that I can pinpoint where 70 falls on the spectrum of too soon. Do 70-year-olds rate the condescending “70 years young” treatment, or does that kick in when a person has made it to 80? I kind of remember that when I sat down to memorialize Clendenon, it felt a little different from what I’d been moved to write in other forums when John Milner, Tommie Agee and Tug McGraw died, to name three other Mets from when I was a kid. Milner was 50; Agee, 58; McGraw, 59. I was somewhere between 37 and 41 when they died. I could tell they were too young to go.
I was 42 when Donn Clendenon died at 70. Seventy, from the perspective of my early forties, seemed maybe (maybe) a little less cruel from an actuarial standpoint, but who was I to say? We the living can be haughty in making such appraisals. I did know that I found it was inherently surprising that the eternally young 1969 Mets had a 70-year-old alumnus. These days every living member of the 1969 Mets is at least 70 — and I’m fifteen years older than I was in 2005.
Without Donn Clendenon, am I quite the Mets fan I am today? I don’t know. But I know Donn Clendenon became the Mets’ big bat when I was six, and here I am, 57 years old/young, and I’m a Mets fan still.
For an in-depth examination of the remarkable life of Donn Clendenon, I highly recommend the SABR biography Ed Hoyt authored. You can find it here.
PREVIOUS METS FOR ALL SEASONS
1982: Rusty Staub
1991: Rich Sauveur
1994: Rico Brogna
by Greg Prince on 29 April 2020 5:26 pm If you’ve ever watched me try to make an eastbound LIRR connection at Jamaica while my intended train is pulling away, you already know I’ve never been any kind of a runner. Nevertheless, I’ve run into a most fascinating box score by way of a game story from 28 years ago, which gives me a good excuse for introducing an occasional series that will “run” here from time to time, The Pinch-Running Files. You know what pinch-running is, but do you ever really think about it? Trust me, I have.
What is a person doing thinking about pinch-running? Better question: what is a person doing reading game stories from 28 years ago, other than seeking any engaging port in a quarantine? For this diversion from baseball-nothingness, I thank a fellow Mets fan on Twitter who goes by the handle of @SportsSightings. The account was initially devoted to pictures of ballplayers in the “wrong” uniform — Mike Piazza as a Florida Marlin, that sort of thing — but lately it’s been dedicated to dutifully keeping day-by-day tabs on the 1992 Mets.
Why the 1992 Mets? Because, @SportsSightings explained a couple of months ago, 1992 is running on the same calendar track as 2020. Their season opened on Monday, April 6. This year, April 6 was a Monday (even if no season has opened). That’s my kind of reasoning. Plus, you can’t beat, for either notoriety or infamy, the 1992 Mets, eventually immortalized as the title subjects of beat writers Bob Klapisch’s and John Harper’s The Worst Team Money Could Buy. Revisiting that veritable car crash of a campaign in detail not as it looked in the rearview mirror but as it slowly grows more and more gruesome is an experience that defies the averting of eyes.
On Friday, April 24, 1992, when we had no more than an intuitive inkling that the 1992 Mets were destined to fester in memory as “the 1992 Mets,” the Mets lost in Philadelphia, 4-3. I’d love to tell you I remember the game. I don’t. For what it’s worth, I remember the 1-0 game of the day before, Thursday, April 23, 1992. That one went thirteen innings at Shea and ended only when, with the bases loaded and zeroes proliferating, Juan Agosto didn’t so much plunk Daryl Boston as gently deposit a pitch inside his uniform top. It was all very genteel, right down to Boston plucking the ball from his shirt and handing it to home plate ump Mike Winters before heading to first as pinch-runner Rodney McCray trotted in with the winning run.
(“Pinch-runner Rodney McCray.” Remember that name and job description. It will come up again and again.)
April 23 was a triumph for fabric, not to mention the cliché about balls getting lost in white shirts. Most importantly, it was the fourth consecutive victory for the water-treading Mets, whose expected dominance of the National League East was taking its sweet time rising above sea level. The chemistry wasn’t exactly right for the 1992 Mets (to put it mildly), but high-priced talent seemed likely to cash in eventually. Following three starts that set his ERA at 13.15, Bret Saberhagen threw his first Cy Young-caliber start in the Daryl Boston shirt game: 9 IP, 0 BB, 5 H, 7 SO and nary a run allowed. Coming directly after wins started by Sid Fernandez, Dwight Gooden and David Cone, Sabes’s resurrection indicated the rotation might live up to its hype. Factor in the 3-4-5 hitting of Bobby Bonilla, Howard Johnson and Eddie Murray that was bound to heat up, and what were the chances that Jeff Torborg’s team wasn’t finally taking off?
On Friday night the 24th at the Vet, projected Met ascent got stuck in flight. Anthony Young started and provided quality. Six innings, three runs, the very definition of a quality start, at least minimally. Young’s luck was establishing itself as such that Klapisch in the News reported Veterans Stadium’s artificial turf aided and abetted each Phillie tally. Get some grass in Philadelphia and maybe AY succeeds Saberhagen’s scoreless line with one of his own. Meanwhile, Danny Cox, better recalled as a vexing Cardinal from the ’80s, yet sighted here in Southeastern Pennsylvania crimson, kept the Mets off the board until the sixth when HoJo, starting in center field for a spell, homered.
Young left after six, trailing, 3-1. The score remained the same into the eighth when the Mets got simultaneously patient and aggressive. Facing future teammate Barry Jones (we’d scoop him up in August), Bonilla walked on a full count. Bobby Bo then had an idea about stealing, which is an interesting impulse because Bobby Bonilla was not signed to a five-year, $29 million contract for his base-swiping proclivities; feel free to insert your own “he’s still stealing money” witticism here. From his debut in 1986 through 1991, the erstwhile Pirate star had stolen 28 bases…and been caught stealing 30 times. If 30 times you don’t succeed and your getting thrown out more than half the time, try, try again, apparently. To be fair to Bobby Bo — which, admittedly, is no fun — he was safe the previous Friday night in Montreal in his only 1992 stolen base attempt.
So, with HoJo batting and taking two balls, Bonilla generates a lead off first. Mitch Williams, who’s replaced Jones, proceeds to pick Bobby off, but the throw gets away and Bobby scoots to third. Now it’s Williams who finds himself taking a Met to three-and-two, and once again a Phillie pitcher gives up a walk. HoJo, a three-time 30-30 man, soon darts for second while Murray bats and chalks up his seventh steal of the season. Eddie’s eyes grow big at a situation ideal for an accomplished RBI collector. The former Oriole and Dodger sends a ball to what Baseball-Reference identifies as “Deep 1B,” though Klapisch in the newspapers.com-generated News clip graciously provided by @SportsSightings said it landed in the right field corner. What was it Becker & Fagen said in “Barrytown”?
“I just read the Daily News and swear by every word.”
Wherever the ball went, it constituted a two-run, game-tying double for Murray. Mets 3 Phillies 3.
The Mets would continue to blend aggressiveness with patience in an effort to grab the lead and their fifth consecutive win. Torborg inserted McCray to pinch-run for Murray. Can ya blame him? McCray was far faster than Murray. Besides, what’s the use of having wheels in the garage if you’re not gonna take them out for a spin? Dave Gallagher grounded to short. McCray, with the play in front of him, lit out for third. As ducks go, you’d seen livelier ones. Rodney was out, Dave was on first.
Patience, Mets. It got you this far. Todd Hundley walked on the third full count of the inning, pushing Gallagher to second. Dave Magadan, always on the lookout for a base on balls, struck out looking. Charlie O’Brien came up to pinch-hit for reliever Paul Gibson. Eschewing patience, the Mets opted to double-steal. It worked! Gallagher was on third, Hundley was on second. Now all the Mets needed was for Charlie O’Brien to replicate Eddie Murray.
Instead, O’Brien grounded to second to end the visitors’ eighth (though Klapisch reported it took a nice play from Mickey Morandini to effect the putout). In the bottom of the inning, Wally Whitehurst came on to pitch, replacing Gibson, who’d replaced Young. Because Murray had been lifted for speed, Bonilla moved from right field to first base. And because he had access to and documented experience with a glove, pinch-runner Rodney McCray stayed in to play right. The Phillies went down in order.
The order would be in the Mets’ favor in the ninth because they’d be batting from the top of it. The table-setters were up: second baseman Willie Randolph and shortstop Dick Schofield. Who would you want up more than your leadoff man and the guy in the two-hole? Alas, Randolph grounded to short and Schofield’s plot to get on by bunt was foiled by a 1-3 forceout.
OK, so table-setting didn’t work. That’s all right, because the main courses were about to be served — the meat of the order. Bonilla singled. HoJo singled, sending Bonilla to third. This is the kind of run-producing meal Murray had been feasting on since 1977.
Ah, but wait a minute. Murray was lifted in the eighth. McCray was batting in his spot. It was news that McCray was batting in any spot. To this point in the 1992 season, Rodney McCray may as well have been Herb Washington, the speedster Charlie Finley placed on the Oakland A’s roster in the 1974 and 1975 seasons despite Herb Washington not being a baseball player. Washington, a track star in college who hadn’t played baseball since high school, was the majors’ only designated runner, pretty much the only pinch-runner anybody thinks about more than fleetingly, save maybe for Dave Roberts in Game Four of the 2004 ALCS. No, “designated runner” was not actually a position, but that was Herb’s role. He pinch-ran and did nothing else for the Athletics.
McCray was capable of doing more than that for the Mets. We knew he was because, as mentioned above, there was documentation. If baseball fans knew Rodney McCray’s name heading into 1992, it was because they had seen The Highlight. In the summer of 1991, Rodney, then a Triple-A Vancouver Canadian, chased a fly ball, one hit by Portland Beaver Chip Hale. The future Mets coach whacked a ball to deep right. McCray didn’t catch it, but it wasn’t for lack of trying. Rodney’s effort took him, literally, through a wall and what coach doesn’t love a player who’ll run through a wall, brick or otherwise? The kid — 27 at the time, but playing with youthful abandon — sprinted straight through Portland’s wooden right field fence, the section emblazoned with an ad for FLAV-R-PAC. The clip immediately became a sensation on SportsCenter, George Michael’s Sports Machine and videotape-going anchors’ sportscasts across North America. CNN, which used to cover sports, declared the wallbuster its play of the year.
Pretty good for a non-catch, but not so good that when the Mets signed him as a free agent that they envisioned the erstwhile White Sox farmhand patrolling the pasture for more than a stray inning here or there. Nor was it so good that he would be encouraged to much follow up on the two hits and one walk he recorded in two brief stints in Pale Hose under Torborg in ’90 and ’91. For the Mets, McCray was going to be, at most, a weapon tactically deployed. He was speed off the bench, something Jeff — a veteran of those go-go Dodger clubs of the mid-’60s — valued more than any Mets manager since, and most every Mets manager before him.
Sure, Al Harazin anted up for Bonilla and Murray in his first offseason as GM, providing on paper (when combined with Johnson) uncommon pop in the middle of the Met order. But Jeff Torborg’s actions said what he really wanted to do was run. What he really wanted to do was pinch-run. He must have. According to Baseball-Reference and my desire to peer deep within its soul, Torborg used pinch-runners 72 times in 1992.
Is that a lot? Historically speaking from a Mets standpoint, it is. Consider that Casey Stengel used 86 pinch-runners the first year there were Mets, in 1962, and then, over the next 29 years, no Mets team used more than 63. The season before Torborg arrived, under Bud Harrelson and Mike Cubbage, the Mets deployed pinch-runners 38 times. In 1993, the year Torborg was bounced in May in favor of Dallas Green, the Mets inserted all of 17 pinch-runners. The total has ebbed and flowed ever since, but no Mets team to come along during the rest of the ’90s or in this century has come close to Torborg’s 72.
Perhaps it was because, for all the hip hooray and ballyhoo attendant to the construction (and subsequent meltdown) of the 1992 Mets, Torborg’s Mets were packed with pinch-running types. You hear “1992 Mets” and you think Bonilla, Murray, Saberhagen and a galaxy of stars in perilous flicker mode. But listen closely and you’ll hear the sound of players lacing up their spikes and stretching urgently, ready to go in at a moment’s notice and hoof it like HoJo had collaborated with Roger McDowell on a hotfoot. Sixteen Mets pinch-ran in 1992. For several, pinch-running amounted to a core competency.
D.J. Dozier (4 pinch-running appearances).
Pat Howell (5).
Bill Pecota (11).
Junior Noboa (12).
And, yes, Rodney McCray.
McCray, on the roster in April because Vince Coleman went on the disabled list (as was his wont), would play in eighteen games as a Met. In fourteen of them, he entered as a pinch-runner, sometimes sticking around immediately thereafter to play the field, sometimes simply sprinting straight back to the bench or perhaps into the clubhouse, his core competency spent, his day undeniably done. Four times he came on strictly for defense, inevitably in relief of big-boned Bonilla. Rodney not only never started for the Mets, he never played between the first and seventh innings. Thus, getting to bat in Philadelphia on April 24 was a big moment for him. It was his first plate appearance as a Met despite it being his sixth game. Should he come through with runners on first and third, it could open Torborg’s eyes. If he gets the base hit that gives the Mets the lead, especially if they hang on to win, his manager might look at him differently. Now McCray isn’t just a pinch-runner. He’s a big league hitter. He’s a clutch RBI man. He’s got more tools than previously estimated by scouts and other professional observers. We know he runs well. We know he runs through walls. Now, if he can get his pitch from Mitch Williams…
Just as Rodney McCray’s baseball career potentially hangs in the balance, who should come rumbling down the line from third base but the man for whom Rodney has been caddying, Bobby Bonilla? Yup, it’s Mr. Gets Thrown Out Every Other Time He Tries Stealing thinking he’s gonna steal home.
Intriguing thought, but not prescient. Williams’s pitch arrived in plenty of time for Darren Daulton to tag Bonilla for the third out. The top of the ninth is over, the game is tied, and left standing at the plate, appearing there yet not officially, is Rodney McCray. That’s how it goes down in the box score. Or doesn’t go down. The agate type of 4/24/92 indicates a pinch-runner/right fielder who never batted. It’s only because of Klapisch’s Daily News story from newspapers.com that @SportsSightings shared that I know McCray’s non-appearance happened.
With two out, Howard Johnson on first and Bonilla on third, the Mets failed in baseball’s boldest play. Bonilla broke for the plate just as Mitch Williams began his windup to Rodney McCray. Bonilla was thrown out, ending the inning.
Baseball-Reference’s line-by-line description for the game confirms this phantom PA in Pa., noting that after Williams ran the count to one-and-one, “Bonilla Caught Stealing Hm (P-C); Johnson stays at 1B.”
And McCray stays out in the netherworld of having batted without having batted. Twenty-nine million dollars wasn’t enough for Bobby Bo. He had to take Rodney McCray’s only official plate appearance to date in 1992, too, McCray’s only official plate appearance as a Met to that point.
To that point. No, there is no solace or redemption or payoff to Rodney McCray’s night on April 24. Not only doesn’t he get to hit or even walk in the top of the ninth, he doesn’t get the team-first satisfaction attached to congratulating another Met for winning the game in extras, let alone get another chance for himself. In the bottom of the ninth, the Phillies loaded the bases versus Whitehurst, setting up Dave Hollins as the hero. The third baseman, gaining traction in what would be his breakout season (27 HR, 93 RBI), delivered a single past first baseman Bonilla to score future Met Jim Lindeman and give the home team the victory, 4-3.
McCray, however will have his moment at the plate eventually. It will take two weeks, another nailbiter, and a soaked Shea. On May 8, a rainy Friday night in Flushing, Torborg will mostly run through his bench against the Dodgers, bringing him to the bottom of the ninth in a 3-3 game and limited options; his last reserve, other than pitchers, is O’Brien, and old catcher Torborg doesn’t want to burn Charlie’s bat and thus lose his mitt, lest the Mets go to extras and something happens to Hundley (the Mets carried a third backstop, Mackey Sasser, but he’d already pinch-hit). Rodney, in his sixteenth game as a Met and the twelfth he’s entered as a pinch-runner, comes up in the order and comes up for real. The bases are loaded. There are two out. It’s the second time he’s stood in against a pitcher all year…but officially the first. As long as Junior Noboa, the baserunner on third, doesn’t try to pull a Bonilla and attempt to steal home, this one will count.
Rodney makes it count. Versus L.A.’s Tim Crews, he makes contact, pushing a grounder past a drawn-in infield. Noboa scampers home. McCray sprints to first. The other runners — Bonilla being one of them — run the ninety feet required of them to prevent a revisitation of Merkle’s Boner. There is no doubt about it. The Mets have won, 4-3, thanks to Rodney McCray, who is now a certified big league hitter, clutch RBI man and walkoff winner before the term is in common use. He’s a 1.000 hitter.
Further, he remains a 1.000 hitter, because Rodney McCray plays twice more as a Met, pinch-running both times and staying in for defense on each occasion. On May 8, he makes us believe that maybe the “1992 Mets” will stand for something joyous. On May 18, his heroics ten days old and a week removed from his last activity, he’s optioned to Tidewater. He’s yo-yo’d later in May, never getting in another Mets game before being dispatched back to Tidewater. On June 11, the Mets, rapidly going nowhere en masse, unconditionally release him from their disheveled organization.
And that’s it. That’s the major league career of Rodney McCray, the guy who ran through that wall in that highlight. His final pro ball stops, in 1993, are with the Sultanes de Monterey in Mexico and the Thunder Bay Whiskey Jacks in Canada. That means he ended his final big league season by batting 1.000, slugging 1.000 and reaching base at a clip of 1.000. It’s kind of perfect.
Kind of.
For while we who engage in Metsian minutiae have long admired McCray for his membership in an exclusive club of a half-dozen Mets who made the most of their lone Met plate appearance by registering a base hit — the other five are pitchers Ray Searage (winning percentage 1.000, for that matter), Eric Cammack (he tripled in 2000) and Buddy Carlyle and catchers Dave Liddell and Gary Bennett — we now must also bemoan that, quite frankly, Rodney got robbed. He had a second plate appearance swiped from him by Bobby Bonilla. Bobby Bo couldn’t steal home, but he could steal this.
And, what of it? The man does have a pair of calling cards that few can claim. Rodney told the Mets Insider blog this past December, in advance of his scheduled coaching stint at the club’s most recent fantasy camp, “A lot of players don’t have things to hang their hats on when they retire. I have two things: the crash and my 1.000 career batting average as a Met.” The Highlight is The Highlight. But The Average? Had McCray really and truly batted in Philadelphia on April 24, 1992, he might not have gotten that big hit the way he did on May 8 at Shea. He’d be 0-for-1 in the interim, no better than 1-for-2 in the semi-knowable universe. We don’t know what all would have played out. Rodney McCray, pinch-running specialist with a .500 average, before being sent down? Rodney McCray, with an .000 average, sent down maybe on April 25 because Torborg, who loved being aggressive with pinch-runners, maybe loses patience with a player he’s decided can’t do anything but pinch-run? Rodney McCray not being spoken of eternally by the likes of Mark Simon and me in hushed trivial tones because he’s not in the 1.000 club and not the only Met to win a game in his only Met plate appearance?
I don’t know, but it seems if you come to the plate, it should state for the record that you appeared. Officially, I mean.
by Jason Fry on 28 April 2020 4:56 pm 1976 was the first year I collected baseball cards.
I’d peruse rack packs — three blisters of cards, the top and bottom player in each blister visible through the plastic — at the local stationery store or McCrory’s at the Smith Haven Mall. I was searching for the maize-and-blue banners that, at least in 1976, denoted the New York Mets. Such searches were often frustrating and sometimes futile. I remember dissolving into tears the night my best friend’s brother somehow pulled a Tom Seaver from his first rack pack and a Mets team card from his second, while I was flipping through yet more Don Hoods and Nyls Nymans and OH BOY YET ANOTHER MIKE ANDERSON TRADED CARD. Then Robert wouldn’t trade me either of those Mets cards. Not for that near-perfect ’76 Johnny Bench I’d found, and in fact not for my entire stack.
The fronts of those ’76 cards were the main attraction, but I soon figured out that the real treasures were on the backs. That’s where my baseball education began. First came the agate type of career stats, which revealed that the current crop of Mets had pasts, some of which were long and complicated. Jesus Alou and Rusty Staub had been playing baseball since 1963, an impossibly long time ago, and they hadn’t always played for the Mets. Alou had been a member of the Giants, the Astros and the A’s, while Staub had played for an outfit called the Colt .45’s, who no longer seemed to exist. And Ed Kranepool had been around even longer than that — he’d been a Met in 1962, which I already knew was the first year there was such a thing as a Met.
That meant Ed Kranepool’s little cardboard rectangle somehow encompassed the entire history of the Mets. That was a mind-blowing idea for a seven-year-old, and one that encouraged further exploration — even if it also created some unrealistic expectations. Kranepool had hit 14 homers and hit .280 in 1971; surely he’d figure out how to do that again. Tom Hall had been around for a long time and had a 3.21 career ERA, which I’d learned was good. Why wasn’t he talked about all the time, now that he was a Met? Skip Lockwood had posted a 1.56 ERA, and not a million years ago but in 1975, and as a Met. Why hadn’t I known this? Lockwood was a superstar, but no one seemed to mention it.
 Herein lies a story. Many stories. The flip side of that idea was that some guys I knew were part of the Mets pantheon didn’t seem to be all that good, at least not when measured by the backs of their baseball cards. Six ’69 Mets remained Mets in good standing in the ’76 card set. The statistical merits of Tom Seaver and Jerry Koosman were obvious, even to a young newcomer. But the cardbacks of Kranepool and Wayne Garrett and Bud Harrelson suggested they were rather pedestrian players, which I knew couldn’t be true because they were Miracle Mets. There was a puzzle here, one I had to figure out.
And there was evidence that baseball was far bigger than I’d guessed. Take the back of Craig Swan‘s card. It showed a baffling progression of career stops: Memphis, Tidewater, Mets, Tidewater, Mets, Tidewater, Mets. What was Tidewater, and why did Swan keep returning there? Mike Vail‘s card was even stranger, beginning with something called the Sar. Cards and moving on to Modesto, Ced. Rap. and Arkansas. What could “Ced. Rap.” possibly mean?
And, as if that weren’t enough, some cards talked about other players and places and impossibly long-ago years. The backs of ’76 Mets cards taught me that Christy Mathewson had hurled (great word, that) three shutouts in the 1905 World Series, that Joe Sewell had fanned only four times in 608 at-bats in 1925, and that Connie Mack had been manager of the Philadelphia A’s for 50 years. That last one came complete with a little cartoon showing a man in civilian clothes. Connie Mack? Philadelphia A’s? There was so much I didn’t know, but it wasn’t intimidating when taken one cardboard slice at a time. It was intoxicating.
I quit collecting baseball cards in ’81, then returned to it a few years later, essentially by accident. That kicked off a slow-motion, decades-long landslide: collecting all the Topps Mets cards; collecting all the Mets cards from any manufacturer; collecting all the Topps cards for players who’d been Mets at one point or another; collecting minor-league cards for Mets who’d never gotten a big-league card; making my own custom cards for the nine Mets who’d never had so much as a minor-league card; and making customs for pre-1987 Mets who’d never had a Topps Mets card, as well as extras overlooked by Topps for various reasons. All of those cards led to The Holy Books, three binders that include everyone to play for the Mets in order of matriculation, as well as ’61 expansion pick and Met-on-paper Lee Walls, the managers (full and interim), and the nine “ghosts” who were on the active roster as Mets but never played for the club.
Over time I became more and more intrigued by the marginal players in Mets history, the third catchers and fifth outfielders, the soon-to-be-discarded long men and Plan D spot starters. What struck me was that their major-league summaries on cardbacks or in MLB databases described brief careers when the reality was often the opposite. Those weeks or days or minutes of big-league life were like icebergs, bright points visible at sea that told you nothing about how much invisible mass was below the waterline.
Take Blaine Beatty, who pitched in two games for the ’89 Mets and five more for the ’91 club. Beatty began his pro career in 1986 as an Orioles farmhand, making his ascent to the big leagues a pretty rapid one. He last pitched in the big leagues on Sept. 30, 1991; that winter the Mets traded him to the Expos for another blink-and-you-missed-him player, Jeff Barry. Beatty never pitched in the big leagues again, but his career wasn’t over. He kept playing until 1997, compiling this post-MLB itinerary: Indianapolis Indians, Carolina Mudcats, Buffalo Bisons, Chattanooga Lookouts, Carolina Mudcats (reprise), Calgary Cannons, Mexico City Red Devils, and the Gulf Coast League Pirates. Those two lines of big-league stats obscured 11 years of baseball, played in nine U.S. states and three countries.
Or take Ray Daviault, lifelong Quebecois and momentary ’62 Met. Daviault’s career path was the opposite of Beatty’s: He started playing pro ball in 1953, when he was 19 and spoke only French. His road to the Polo Grounds included these stops: Cocoa, Fla. (Florida State League); Hornell, N.Y. (Pony League); Asheville, N.C. (Tri-State League); Pueblo, Colo. (Western League); Macon, Ga. (South Atlantic League); Montreal (International League); Des Moines, Iowa (Western League again); back to Montreal; back to Macon; Harlingen, Texas (Texas League); Tacoma, Wash. (Pacific Coast League); and Syracuse, N.Y. (International League again) And then, finally, the Polo Grounds. Daviault pitched in Buffalo in ’63, his third stint in the International League, then hung up his spikes at 29.
And finally, there’s the man who introduced me to the concept of the baseball waterline, and was my first card-collecting white whale.
Rich Sauveur pitched 3 1/3 innings for the Mets in June 1991, racking up a 10.80 ERA. My only memory of him is seeing his name on the transaction wire while working in the newsroom of the Fresno Bee; I don’t think I ever saw him pitch in an actual game. But he possesses one of the odder baseball resumes in the history of the game.
Sauveur made his big-league debut on July 11, 1986 at Candlestick Park as a Pirate and appeared in three games that year. He next turned up as a 1988 Montreal Expo, appearing in four games. Then, three years later, he recorded his six games with the Mets. In 1992, he was a Royal for all of eight games. That was it until 1996, when he appeared in three games for the White Sox. Four years after that, he was back at the age of 36 for 10 games with the A’s.
Six teams and six seasons over 10 years. But that’s only what’s visible above the waterline.
Sauveur made his pro debut as a 19-year-old for the Pirates’ New York-Penn League affiliate in Watertown, N.Y., the first stop on this gloriously Daviaultesque travelogue: Nashua, N.H. (Eastern League); Woodbridge, Va. (Carolina League); back to Nashua; Honolulu, Hawaii (Pacific Coast League); Pittsburgh; Nashua again; Harrisburg, Pa. (Eastern League); Indianapolis, Ind. (American Association); Jacksonville, Fla. (Southern League); Montreal; Indianapolis again; Miami, Fla. (Florida State League); Norfolk, Va. (International League); New York; Omaha, Neb. (American Association); Kansas City; Villahermosa, Mexico (Mexican League); Indianapolis again (this time for a shockingly stable three seasons); Nashville, Tenn. (American Association); Chicago; Des Moines, Iowa (American Association); Nashville again (now a truly far-flung outpost of the Pacific Coast League); Indianapolis yet again; Nashville yet again; Sacramento, Calif. (Pacific Coast League); and Oakland.
(You’ve probably figured out by now that Sauveur is left-handed.)
Sauveur last threw — or lets say “hurled,” like Christy Mathewson did — a pitch in anger in 2000, but he’s still in baseball. Last year he was a pitching coach for the Diamondbacks’ Arizona League affiliate. He’s been a pitching coach for 15 years, and three different organizations. That’s a logical second life for an almost cosmically bizarre baseball career. Consider that Sauveur pitched in three different decades but didn’t lose his rookie status until his sixth and final year in the majors. Or that he’s the only player in baseball history to pitch for six big-league teams without recording a win.
He’s also the unwitting poster child for a misfit era of card collecting.
Baseball cards exploded in popularity in the late 1980s, with Topps and its competitors first saturating and then oversaturating the market with product boasting supposed innovations. The most notable of these was the dreaded insert card. Inserts are rare cards seeded randomly into packs of regular cards. They now include autographs, jersey swatches and even cross-sections of bats, but back then they were a little simpler. One of Topps’ early experiments came in 1992, with Topps Gold, which added gold accents and lettering to the regular cards.
Topps’s dilemma: what to do with the checklist cards? Since no one on Earth wanted a gold checklist card, Topps decided to replace them with cards that hadn’t appeared in the regular set. Today, Topps would just make additional cards for the marquee players, but it didn’t do that for the first three years of the Topps Gold era. Instead, the substitutes were fringe big-leaguers, 26th men on rosters passed up for the regular set. I had no idea Topps had done this until the day I stumbled across a 1992 Topps Gold card of less-than-immortal Met Terry McDaniel. As a Mets completist, I needed that card — and cards for the other checklist substitutes. Even if they weren’t Mets, they might have been Mets earlier in their careers, or might show up on the roster one day in the future.
Skip ahead a year, and enter the 1993 Topps Gold Rich Sauveur. It’s #396, a replacement for Checklist 3 of 6 in the regular set. It’s Sauveur’s lone big-league card, on which he’s a member of the Kansas City Royals.
A 1993 Topps Gold Rich Sauveur isn’t impossible to find in the eBay era — according to the Trading Card Database, its median sales price is 19 cents — but eBay didn’t exist back then. At the time, I collected by making the rounds of baseball-card shows around Washington, D.C., zooming in my little red Honda CRX from Laurel, Md., to Leesburg, Va., becoming familiar with Elks Clubs and armories and third-rate hotels.
I also became familiar with baseball-card dealers, and in the early 1990s there were essentially two kinds.
The first kind were lifers, older men or couples who lived in sagging houses out in the sticks whose cellars and attics and rec rooms were crammed with baseball cards. They were fans of the game and collectors at heart, variously grumpy or sweet but always OCD. At shows they’d be surrounded by stacks of card storage boxes, filled with thousands of common cards they’d hauled to the show in the back of a station wagons or a van. They knew players and they knew cards, and they’d let you look for as long as you needed to amass a stack of cards, which usually cost a couple of bucks. And if they didn’t have a card you were looking for, the best of them would promise to exhume it from their holdings and bring it to the next show.
The other kind of baseball-card dealer? Antimatter to their matter. They were people who’d started selling cards because they were hot commodities. Most of them were semi-employed misfits, the kind of serial, darting-eyed grifters who are always hot to make a fortune but dislike the idea of actual work. Today they’re hawking Purell and N95 masks; back in the day they arbitraged Beanie Babies … or baseball cards. At a show, you could spot their tables from two rows away — they invested in fancy metal cases with black fabric linings and glass tops that could be tipped up at an angle to become displays. They almost never brought storage boxes, because to them common cards were by-catch. They’d stand behind their perimeter of display cases, curating their rainbow of gaudily priced inserts, glossy price guide in hand. Few of them knew baseball or liked it, an opinion they’d share freely if asked and sometimes even if not.
Here was my problem. The baseball-card lifers detested inserts, because they flew in the face of tradition and attracted buyers who didn’t care about cards or the game any more than the price-guide chiselers did. If the lifers had Topps Gold cards, they were either mixed in with the other commons or in a box somewhere back at the house. But the grifters didn’t care about Topps Gold either, because they were too low-end to be rare or valuable. There were five or six random scrubs in that set who’d replaced the checklists? Who knew or cared?
I couldn’t find a 1993 Topps Gold Rich Sauveur in 1993. As winter turned to spring in 1994, it seemed unlikely that I ever would. I kept trying, though, spending hungover Saturdays pawing through boxes of cards and having deeply stupid conversations like this one:
“Hey, got any 1993 Topps Golds?”
“Yeah, right here.”
“These are ’94s.”
“Oh. I’ve got a holographic insert Barry Bonds for $20.”
“No thanks, I don’t collect those. I’m looking for a ’93 Topps Gold, one of the cards that replaced the checklist cards.”
“The what? What player you looking for, buddy?”
“Rich SO-ver. It looks like SAU-vee-UR.”
“Never heard of him. Tell you what, I can go $18 on the Bonds.”
Lather, rinse, repeat. It got old.
Until one Saturday pretty much like every other one. I’m at a card show in a sad hotel in Alexandria, Va., one I’d debated not bothering with. It’s in one of those half-ballrooms, with the accordion divider separating the couple of dozen card-dealer tables from the quarterly meeting of the Northern Virginia Chapter of Actuaries. I pay my $2, walk in, scan the room with my by-now-practiced eye and know immediately that I should have stayed home. There are barely any tables with storage boxes — just the usual tipped glass cases maintained by the price-guide set.
I circle the perimeter anyway, because it’s 40-odd minutes back to Bethesda. At one of the tables, I do a double-take. Clipped to the tilted-up display case is a 1993 Topps Gold card. And it’s … Rich Sauveur. The card I’ve been searching for. The one nobody else seems to know exists.
This makes zero sense — Rich Sauveur’s up there alongside the Griffeys and Thomases and Bondses. I talk with the couple whose table it is and they strike me as typical nouveau card speculators. I keep it casual, because there’s only one possible explanation for the sudden elevation of Rich Sauveur to insert-card glory: these people believe this anonymous checklist-replacement card is worth far, far more than it actually is.
But then I do a little math. Suppose they’re overvaluing their Rich Sauveur card by 100X? If so, it should cost me about $5. Am I willing to pay $5 to stop searching hotel ballrooms for Rich Sauveur? I am so, so willing to do that.
“Hey, Rich Sauveur,” I say casually.
The response is not what I expected: “Oh, you know Rich? He’s our neighbor! Rich is a great guy!”
Huh. Still, baseball players do have neighbors, right? We chat about all things Rich Sauveur for a few minutes, a conversation to which I bring relatively little, and then I ask how much they want for the card.
Dead silence.
“Oh, it’s not for sale,” the man says.
“What do you mean it’s not for sale?”
“It’s not for sale,” he says, and I notice his wife has gone stiff and silent.
“I’ve been looking for that one for a while,” I say. “It’d sure be nice to scratch it off the list.”
“Like I said, it’s not for sale.”
At this point I’m actually dizzy. I seem to have fallen through a rip in the space-time continuum, finding myself in a bizarre dimension that obeys the laws of neither physics nor commerce, and from which it’s possible I’ll never escape. It’s all I can do not to scream at these people. Why would you bring a baseball card that’s not for sale to a baseball-card show, the only purpose of which is to sell baseball cards? Why would you … why would … why why why why why why why.
Desperate, I offer them $10. No sale. In fact, they unclip their neighbor’s card from their fancy display case, put it away, and ask me to leave.
Annnnnd scene.
At the time, that story was a yarn about a weird era of card collecting and an OCD quest gone comically wrong. And hey, it still is, But now it’s also a reminder to me of all that you can find below baseball’s waterline. A single card and a couple of lines of stats can be head-scratching or entertaining or both, but provide scant summary for decades of hard work and perseverance and dogged love for a game that makes no guarantees about loving you back.
The postscript, which I swear is true: A week after the Alexandria debacle, I trudged into an equally unpromising card show in Beltsville or Silver Spring or somewhere like that and almost immediately found not one but two 1993 Topps Gold Rich Sauveurs. The guy said they were a quarter each, but sold the pair to me for a dime.
Read more A Met for All Seasons posts.
by Jason Fry on 23 April 2020 10:39 am My Mets fandom begins with Rusty Staub.
My first Mets memory is my mother leaping up and down in our house in East Setauket, N.Y., yelping “Yay, Rusty!” Though that undersells it, actually — that moment is my first memory of anything that I can connect with an actual person or event, as opposed to one of those vague childhood impressions you suspect your brain cobbled together with an assist from old stories and photos. “Rusty, my mom, the Mets” is the earliest point I can recall in which there’s a me interacting with everything that wasn’t me.
And that’s all I recall. The heroic act that had my mom so worked up is beyond reconstruction, except for an educated guess that it happened in 1973 or 1974. The rest of the memory, I suspect, has been filled out and embellished over time. But I think I recall first being a little worried that something had caused my mother to lose her mind and start gamboling about like some crazed faun, and then keenly interested that such things existed. Whatever it was, I wanted in, because it looked like fun.
“Yay, Rusty!” Maybe I could yell that too. And so I’ve spent most of the next 45-odd years doing just that.
If you start young enough, like I did, a first favorite player can be an odd thing. I remember very little of Staub in his first go-round as a Met — nothing about his arrival in April 1972, right on the heels of Gil Hodges‘ sudden death; or about how a broken hand short-circuited his first season in orange and blue; or about his heroics in the fall of ’73; or about his becoming the first Met to crack the 100-RBI mark in ’75. I know about those things, but any firsthand accounts of them have been erased. I can’t reconstruct his batting stance from WOR broadcasts, or recall a day cheering for him at Shea, surrounded by sketchy ’70s people with mustaches and cigarettes and paper cups of bad beer.
So what do I remember?
Three things.
The first is Staub’s baseball card from 1976, the inaugural year I collected. (Which is why, on some level, the Mets’ colors will always register with me as Michigan maize and blue.) It’s a BHNH photo, which is Topps-speak for “big head no hat,” but a rare worthwhile one, because it showcases Staub’s famous and fabulous mane of red-gold, seemingly molten curls.
 Danger, heartbreak dead ahead. That hair fascinated me, as did the name Rusty. Kids I knew were named Mike or Melanie, Jennifer or John — or sometimes Jon, just to be confusing. I didn’t know anybody with a name as interesting as Rusty, and was intrigued by the Baseball Encyclopedia’s revelation that Staub’s real name wasn’t Rusty but Daniel Joseph Staub. By the way, Daniel Staub is a terrible baseball name, squat and pedestrian, but Rusty Staub is a wonderful baseball name, half fanciful/friendly and half brusque/no-nonsense. It really is the little things.
Anyway, the name was the second thing. How did that work? Had his parents given him the alternate name Rusty? If so, why hadn’t mine given me a wonderful parallel identity? Or — and this was where the foundations of the world really got wobbly — had Daniel Staub named himself that? Could you do that? Maybe you could, if you were brave and audacious enough — if you were a hero. Which Rusty Staub plainly was. He was my favorite Met, after all.
The third thing I remember about my favorite player was the day he was sent away, to a possibly fictional place called Detroit. That was in December 1975. I don’t remember how I found out, but I do remember shock, fury and desolation. How could this happen? How could the people who ran the Mets yet somehow weren’t Mets themselves — and there was a new and disturbing idea — be allowed to do such a terrible thing? Someone should stop them. I didn’t know if that someone was the president, or Batman, or one of my parents, but the need was glaring and obvious and the fact that the world kept on blithely turning in the face of such an injustice struck me as obscene.
I briefly declared that I was a Tigers fan, which didn’t stick — the Tigers played in some other state and in some other league, which meant they might as well have conducted their business on Mars. But I clung to Rusty’s 1976 traded card (“Le Grand Orange Goes to Motor City,” two terms that were likely mysteries to me), and then to his ’77 Tigers card, an action shot with a shouted crimson A.L. ALL STARS banner along the bottom. That shout, it was obvious to me, was directed at M. Donald Grant, the evil man who was ruining the Mets, and I imagined thrusting my well-loved ’77 Rusty into his face, after which he’d tremble and break down and apologize for exiling Rusty and then for his other crimes. Then he’d go away forever.
Rusty might have been exiled, but no one could take away my most prized possession — a Rusty Staub signature baseball mitt, with his loopy but somehow fussy autograph on the thumb. Therein lay a story. There was no signature Rusty Staub baseball mitt on the market — Staub had a contentious relationship with licensing, which is most likely why he’s MIA from the ’72 and ’73 baseball-card sets. Failed by commerce, my parents fell back on ingenuity. They bought a generic kid’s mitt and a leather-burning tool, and carefully copied Staub’s signature from one of my baseball cards. My mother was certain I’d see through the subterfuge immediately — facsimile signatures weren’t normally thin and brown and faintly redolent of burnt cowhide — but I was innocent in such matters, and none the wiser. I loved my Staub glove and used it avidly though ineptly until even I had to admit it no longer fit. Years later, when I finally found out the truth, I loved it even more.
Staub had a second go-round with the Mets, returning for the 1981 season. Unfortunately, what should have been a joyous homecoming barely registered with me. 1981 was when I fell away from the faith, my interest in baseball eroded away by the strike but also by new pursuits. I was glad Staub was back, but I couldn’t tell you anything he did in ’81, ’82 (the year for which I picked him in A Met for All Seasons is a shrug and placeholder for me) or ’83. Luckily for me, though, he was still around in 1984, when Dwight Gooden brought me back into the fold.
The Staub of ’84 and ’85 was a very different player than my childhood idol — “an athlete and a chef, he looked more like a chef,” in the words of the great Dana Brand. He was basically sessile by then, a ZIP code crammed into mid-80s Mets motley and limited to pinch-hitting. But while he had become a player who only did one thing, he did it exceedingly well. You could almost see him thinking in the on-deck circle and at the plate. Physically he was still, almost a statue in the batter’s box, but mentally he was hard at work, arranging the at-bat so that he’d get the pitch he wanted in the count he wanted. Which he usually did.
He also fed my growing hunger to understand everything that went into excellence on the field. I’d learned the basics of Staub’s life and career as a kid, putting it together from the back of baseball cards and Baseball Digest features. But in the mid-80s I began devouring behind-the-scenes books and articles, and he was a powerful presence in them as well. He was Keith Hernandez‘s superego, the man whose disappointment seemed to sting Keith where he’d brush off the reactions of others, and a self-possessed veteran who’d teach any young player wise enough to listen not only about baseball but also about life, particularly life in the big city. I learned about the book he kept on pitchers, his almost supernatural ability to detect their tells, and that he shared his insights not indiscriminately but with players he thought had earned them.
Staub retired at the end of ’85, and for me the fly in the ointment of 1986 was that he wasn’t there to get a ring as a World Champion — if baseball had stayed with 25-man rosters, would that last roster spot have been Rusty’s? But though he’d retired, he never really went away. He was a Mets color guy for a time, and honesty compels me to observe that as a broadcaster he was a helluva ballplayer. After that he was an éminence grise — or, properly, an éminence orange — showing up now and again for broadcasts and stadium events.
I was old enough now to appreciate the sweep and scope of an extraordinary career and life. Staub debuted with Houston in ’63 as a 19-year-old, but he’d been a Colt .45 before the team ever played a game, drafted in the fall of 1961. He’d collected 500 hits for four different clubs — the Astros, Expos, Mets and Tigers. (Plus 102 for the Rangers, for 2,716 in all.) He was the second player to hit a home run before he was 20 and after he was 40, joining fellow Tiger Ty Cobb. (Gary Sheffield and Alex Rodriguez would later join their club.) He almost singlehandedly won the ’73 NLCS for the Mets, hitting three homers in four games, helping calm a bloodthirsty Shea crowd that wanted to murder Pete Rose, and making a superb catch while smashing into the outfield wall. That collision wrecked his shoulder, leaving him unable to throw; somehow he still hit .423 in the World Series.
And he was just as interesting off the field. He’d been an activist for himself and for players in general before the Messersmith-McNally decision, with his outspokenness and daunting intelligence precipitating his departure from the Astros years before it led to his trade from the Mets. Traded to the Expos (another team yet to play a game), Staub found himself frustrated that he couldn’t understand young fans who addressed him in French. So he learned the language, an effort that made him beloved in Montreal. And he loved Montreal back, embracing the city’s culture and love of wine and food. He loved New York with similar fervor, opening restaurants and starting charities, raising millions for food banks and children of police officers and firefighters who’d died in the line of duty.
Rusty also kept popping up in my day-to-day life. In September 2004 I ran the Tunnel to Towers race through the Battery Tunnel to the World Trade Center site, and perked up before the race when I realized Staub was one of the dignitaries called on to say a few words. Afterwards, I spotted a familiar figure walking by himself down West Street. Was that really him? It really was. I froze, then got up my courage and ambled over to him, only to discover I was more nervous than I’d realized. Rusty, no fool, never broke stride as I peppered him with inanities. When I finally managed to say what I should have said in the first place — that he’d been my favorite player as a kid and I’d just had to tell him that — he thanked me and said that meant a lot.
I immediately regretted not telling him the story about the glove, and so was surprised and delighted to catch sight of him a few months later in the San Francisco airport. This was my chance! Before I could close to “Hey Rusty!” range, though, he sensed danger and made a neat sidestep into the men’s room. That was enough to check my enthusiasm; I decided to let Rusty be.
And so I did. He kept popping up anyway — a couple of months after that I was in New Orleans and wound up riding to the airport with a cabbie who’d played high-school ball against him and his brother Chuck, and regaled me with stories about both of them. (One more Rusty factoid: Ted Williams flew down to New Orleans to recruit him personally.) I gave the cabbie a ludicrously large tip, pleased by yet another Rusty encounter, even if this one was once removed.
Staub died on March 29, 2018, and at first it seemed incomprehensible that my first favorite player could be gone — and on Opening Day, no less. But in mourning his death, I realized that through sheer dumb good fortune, my first favorite had been a perfect choice. He’d been a Met when I was a child who just wanted to hoot and cheer, one who came with a cardback full of interesting factoids to memorize and recite. He’d returned to the Mets when I was a teenager fascinated by the mental aspect of baseball and its hidden workings. And he’d stuck around as an alumnus when I was an adult curious about interesting lives and currents in the game’s history. He was gone, tragically, but he’d never be forgotten, not by me. How could he be? After all, he’d been there from the beginning.
Read more A Met for All Seasons posts.
by Greg Prince on 21 April 2020 1:08 pm Starting today and slated to appear in this space every Tuesday and Friday in the weeks and months ahead is a new Faith and Fear in Flushing series: A Met for All Seasons. In it, Jason and I will consider a given Met who played in a given season and…well, we’ll see.
Here’s the background: We conducted a draft nine years ago when a semblance of this concept first occurred to us; one of us would do this player for this year; the other of us would do that player for that year; and so on. The “so on” became nothing except for an occasional “hey, remember that thing we were gonna do?” Luckily, we’d each saved our draft lists. Thus, a little while ago, once we realized we weren’t going to be busy recapping games for the foreseeable future, we extended the draft eligibility period, held some supplemental rounds, implemented a compensation pool (allowing us to replace any selections we’d rethought since 2011, given that it worked so well for the White Sox in 1984) and certified our choices.
Now, after nearly a decade of talking and not talking about it, we each have thirty players bearing the banner for a particular year and will set out to explain, to some extent, why we chose who we chose and what they mean to us as Mets fans. Some weeks I’ll go Tuesday and Jason will go Friday; some weeks it will work the other way around. (Coincidentally, Jason and I once went in on a Tuesday/Friday ticket plan.) The seasons we’re covering are 1962 through 2021, the last couple encompassing an air of mystery or perhaps optimism. The Mets we’re talking about will be revealed in due time. We’d like to think they represent a decent cross-section of the Met experience over the nearly sixty years there’ve been Mets, but maybe we just picked players we wanted to write about. The order in which they’ll appear is non-chronological.
For example, I’m starting with 1994 and my Met for that season is Rico Brogna.
Rico Brogna is my Met for 1994 as a person, I suppose, but probably more as an idea. I think I’m going to find out as we do this that I tend to think of ballplayers as ideas as much as I do people. I have it on good authority — hell, I’ve witnessed it for myself — that ballplayers are people, too. We probably forget that from time to time, considering we only know of these people because they are ballplayers. That’s generally good enough for us, the fans.
We’re people as well, but we’re talking baseball here.
I immediately think of Rico Brogna when I think of the 1994 Mets season because of the idea he represented to me coming out of that strike-shortened year. Rico Brogna was who and what I wanted to come back. He’d brought me hope and I figured he could only deliver more. I was going to hold tight during absent August, silent September, ohfer October, the long, even colder winter, and the farce spring when MLB lured replacement players to wear their clubs’ uniforms in games that didn’t count, threatening to keep them around for games that did. By April 26, 1995, the latest the Mets have ever opened a season (until 2020, if they open one at all), I should have been fed up with baseball, which didn’t even have the dignity to be around for months on end to let me be fed up with it.
Instead, I kept hanging tight, waiting for Rico and welcomed back the whole package, lock, stock and Brogna. Twenty-five years later, deep in a void that superficially recalls the lack of baseball wrought by the 1994-1995 strike, I can’t say it was Rico Brogna the person or even Rico Brogna the player I wanted. I wanted Rico Brogna the idea.
Rico Brogna debuted as a Met on June 22, 1994. I had never heard of him despite his having been a first-round draft pick of the Detroit Tigers in 1988. He came up to majors four years later, played nine games, and returned to Triple-A Toledo for another year. I missed it when the Mets traded their own former first-rounder, Alan Zinter (1989), for Brogna four days before Opening Day 1994. The Mets were busy that week. They picked up David Segui on March 27, Jose Vizcaino on March 30. So overcome with joy that the 1994 Mets would be even more materially different from the nightmare 1993 Mets, I guess I didn’t squint all the way to bottom of the transactions box for March 31 to see this extra move.
With Vizcaino at short, Segui at first and Brogna assigned to Norfolk, the post-apocalyptic Mets got off to a modestly brilliant start in 1994. Anything that wasn’t indicative of another 59-103 record would have struck me as modestly brilliant. The Mets swept their first three in Chicago, returned to Shea for their Home Opener with a winning record and levitated themselves four games over .500 after 32 games. In New York in May 1994, with all five winter sports teams having made the playoffs — and the Knicks, Rangers and Devils all legitimately carrying championship aspirations — it felt like nobody outside the hardest core of Mets fans was paying attention. But I was, and I was delighted that the Mets were, after a three-year dip in fortunes, kind of OK again.
The high times of 18-14 didn’t last, but I was slow to get the memo. I didn’t want to read it. I was convinced the Mets were pretty good. Alas, the dark side of .500 beckoned for keeps in early June. Fifth place in the newly aligned National League East, which is to say the basement, loomed as our summer home. I didn’t maintain any allusion we could keep up with the Expos or Braves or anybody else vying for the new Wild Card, but I just liked that the 1994 Mets weren’t the 1993 Mets anymore. I wanted them to quit reminding me a year hadn’t passed since they were the 1993 Mets.
The Rangers won the Stanley Cup on June 14. The Knicks took the Rockets to the seventh game of the NBA Finals on June 22. In between, David Segui went on the 15-day disabled list, necessitating the promotion from Norfolk of Rico Brogna. I know which one of those sports stories resonates most for me now, but like I said, I didn’t know anything about Rico Brogna then. I was only getting used to him replacing Segui on June 28 when word came down that Dwight Gooden — who’d pitched Opening Day in Chicago and still reigned at least titularly as ace of the Mets’ rotation — tested positive for cocaine and was about to be suspended, just as happened in 1987. Doc, my favorite player ever since he first emerged as breathtaking Dr. K, went through rehab seven years before and was welcomed back as if not a hero, then definitely as family. In 1994, he was essentially kicked out of the house. There was little in the way of acknowledging addiction as a disease, just disbelief that this was happening a second time, how could anybody with so much to lose be addled enough to lose it? Yup, the Mets were finally getting headlines.
On the night the news of Doc’s KO broke, Rico Brogna started his third consecutive game for the Mets and, for the third consecutive game, recorded a pair of hits, including his first National League home run. The Mets lost, falling ten below .500 for the first time in 1994, but Rico raised his average to .333.
Without meaning to, Rico Brogna filled the opening for my favorite player before I had time to place a classified. Doc wasn’t around. Rico was. I learned about him. He was 24, born in Massachusetts, but grew up to become the pride of Watertown, Conn., from whence he was drafted. Played high school football well, we heard. Became buddies with the pitcher called up to take Doc’s spot in the rotation, Jason Jacome (pronounced hock-a-me). They were spotted palling around on a West Coast trip, the two new guys grabbing tenuous hold of the steering wheel for a franchise that had once more lost its way. In 1984, it was Gooden joining forces with Strawberry. In April it was Segui and Vizcaino. Now it was these two newest newcomers, 24-year-old Rico, 23-year-old Jason, a couple of lefties from out of nowhere. On July 7, in his second start, Jacome shut out the Dodgers, lifting the Mets to their sixth win in eight games since the night Doc was disappeared. Segui was back from the DL, but was planted for the time being in left field. A good glove man through his career, David was nonetheless Wally Pipped.
 When baseball returned, Rico would be back with it. It would take a little while for Rico Brogna to settle in as a new age Lou Gehrig. There was a bit of slumping in California, but the Mets came home and the bat reheated. Rico’s average rose over .300 to stay. The Shea PA played “Rico Suave” when he’d get a big hit, briefly leading me to believe Brogna was Latino. I wasn’t corrected in this conception until some guy behind me at a game told his companion, “Brogna — that’s the Italian kid.” I didn’t care what Rico Brogna was other than that he was the Mets’ first baseman.
On July 25, a Monday night (I don’t have to look up the date or day), Rico Brogna exploded fully upon the Metropolitan-American consciousness, certainly the slice that was attempting to tune into The Baseball Network. The Baseball Network is hard to explain all these years later. It was hard to explain in 1994. Eschewing the “Game of the Week” motif as hopelessly outdated, MLB decided to have what amounted to a series of nationalized regional telecasts, with in-market exclusivity for particular games, which meant on a given weeknight, maybe you saw your favorite team, maybe you didn’t, no matter that they were all scheduled to play, no matter that cable networks existed in summertime to show baseball games. Sometimes New York got the Mets, sometimes it got that other New York team. And if the first-place Yankees ridiculously took TV precedence, the Mets were confined to radio. Got all that? Also, though these games aired on ABC, they were not announced by, say, Al Michaels. You got an announcer from one team and an announcer from another team and that was your crew. Actually, that was a pretty decent feature. Suddenly Bob Murphy was sometimes doing TV. On July 25, with the Mets in St. Louis and somehow rating preferential treatment back home on Channel 7, it was Gary Thorne, at this point part of the WWOR-TV booth, and Al Hrabosky.
They wound up co-hosting, live from Busch Stadium, The Rico Brogna Show. With as much spotlight as the 1994 Mets were going to garner, the young man from Connecticut raised his and therefore our profile. Brogna sizzled in St. Loo, going 5-for-5, making him the first Met to register five hits in one game in six years. His biggest hit was a two-run double that keyed a five-run fifth, giving Bret Saberhagen all the support he needed to cruise to a complete-game 7-1 win. Rico came into the game batting .333. He came out of it batting .377.
“I guess he’s what you would call a manager’s delight,” Saberhagen marveled. “It’s probably a night that I’ll remember for quite a while,” Bret’s first baseman allowed, humbly adding, “Some of the balls found some holes.”
Yes, sir, the 1994 Mets were rising like the mighty Mississippi. At least to me they were. They escaped the cellar. Saberhagen had made the All-Star team by walking basically nobody. Second baseman Jeff Kent showed he could hit a ton if not field quite as much. Vizcaino was a genuinely reliable all-around shortstop. Jason Jacome was en route to a winning record and the Mets began flirting seriously with one of their own. And Rico Brogna? He had, in my mind in about a month, ascended total obscurity to next big thing to biggest thing there could be, albeit on a limited scale.
Two-and-a-half weeks later, it all stopped, because the owners wanted to institute a salary cap and the players wanted no such thing and no compromise was forthcoming. On August 11, all the baseball on all the channels went dark and stayed dark. The blackout remained in effect clear through what was supposed to be the postseason, an affair that wasn’t remotely likely to include the 55-58 Mets, but I wasn’t aiming my sights that high one year after 1993. The previous August, former Cy Young winner Saberhagen was known mostly for blasting bleach at reporters, and former stolen base champ Vince Coleman was living down his contretemps that involved tossing powerful firecrackers at fans in the Dodger Stadium parking lot. Bobby Bonilla had been making threats, Eddie Murray snarled his hellos and everybody was stuck in a seventh-place snit. It was enough in August of 1994 that the fresher-faced third-place Mets were closing in on .500. It would have been great had they been granted the opportunity to reach it and hover above it.
After 113 games, almost .500 would have to do. I had that to cling to — that and seven home runs, twenty runs batted in and a .351 batting average I hadn’t anticipated in the slightest out of that fine young man from Watertown in his first 39 games as a Met. I had an idea of what Rico Brogna could do. I had an idea that Rico Brogna would keep making the Mets better. It would have to tide me over until whenever there’d again be baseball.
And it did.
by Greg Prince on 19 April 2020 4:12 pm This Sunday afternoon in New York has been sunny if chilly and breezy. Tonight will be chillier, probably as breezy and a whole lot darker. If this Sunday afternoon were a Sunday afternoon as originally conceived, I’d be sitting around complaining there’s no Mets game on because it’s being held in abeyance for Sunday Night Baseball.
That would be a great complaint to make right now.
I’m still sort of tracking the 2020 Mets schedule despite it having been rendered inoperative by prevailing circumstances, thinking to myself every day or two that if the Mets were playing, this is where they’d be playing and this is what might be going on. In doing so, I’ve gone through an array of phantom-limb sensations.
Opening Day.
The gaping off-day void that follows Opening Day.
The probable first rainout.
The inevitable first loss (because you can’t win ’em all).
The disbelief they’d be playing in this weather.
Knowing in my bones that the Mets would be not so great, not so bad and that the emerging effect would register as not so satisfying.
The trip to Washington, where our resentment levels would have risen about as high as their championship flag.
The trip to Houston, where there’d have been ONE pre-series storyline and it wouldn’t be Jake Marisnick’s triumphant return.
The trip to Milwaukee, when I would have mentioned, as I do upon every trip to Milwaukee, that the Mets always lose their second-to-last game in Beertown.
The well-meaning Jackie Robinson Day mandate that every player on every team don 42 and the slight chuckle the invocations of Ron Taylor, Ron Hodges and Roger McDowell still elicit annually.
Disdain for Saturday night home games in April.
Disgust for Sunday night games anywhere anytime.
It’s almost as if we don’t need a season to be fans. But we do. For although there is much about absorbing baseball that is familiar enough to perform by instinct, there’d be something going on these first few weeks of 2020 that we couldn’t know about.
I can’t tell you what it was or is or would have been. Finding out what is why we keep coming back. If every season was a simple recycling of occasions and themes, the computer simulations I’ve mostly avoided would do. But the unknown is what you can’t program, no matter how sophisticated your software. You can imagine your head off (surely you have time to do so), but during a baseball season, the most unlikely or outrageous outcome you can imagine is no match for the thoroughly mundane that constitutes the fiber of our existence. We need that low hum of grounders to short and fouls into the crowd. It’s from the swelled ranks of the totally expected that one unanticipated aberration rises up and grabs our attention. Next thing we know, something we didn’t see coming lodges in our consciousness. Suddenly it’s a part of how we view baseball from here to eternity.
To borrow a phrase coined by my friend Sharon when I was crafting the original Happiest Recap series in 2011 (most Amazin’ first game of a season, most Amazin’ 137th game of a season and so on), I adhere to the Metropolitan Calendar more than the Gregorian one the rest of society uses. When retracing Met steps — for example their record at a certain juncture of a certain season — I like to think in terms of where they were after ‘x’ number of games rather than where they were on such-and-such a date. Comparing records after ‘x’ number of games gives me a comparable playing field. The Mets have opened seasons on March 28, April 26 and sixteen dates in between. On April 26, 2019, when the Mets had been playing for close to a month, their record dipped to 13-12. On April 26, 1995, the Mets were freezing in Denver, saddled with a mark of 0-1 following the finally resolved baseball strike of the previous summer, autumn and winter and, at last, Opening Night at brand new Coors Field. You can see why I might find limited utility in contrasting what those two editions of the Mets were up to on April 26.
Beyond exactitude issues, I’m rather fatigued by “This Date In…” reminders. I have been for about a decade. I used to love being reminded — and reminding others — that on this date in some past year something Metwise happened and, say, wasn’t that something we haven’t thought about in a while? Because such information is so readily searchable, you can’t scroll six socially responsible feet on your feed of choice without being inundated with this or that having happened this or that many years ago. It was more fun when it wasn’t as easily accessed, which is to say it was more fun when it was left to people with unusual capacity for retaining day & date details (ahem) to the reminding, whether or not anybody else was in the mood to be reminded.
Nevertheless, I’ve picked up on a couple of those helpful reminders over the past couple of days and I’m glad I did, not so much for the facts that have resurfaced, but to realize that with every game and every swing and every pitch, we get new facts. On April 17, 2010, we received a torrent of them because the Mets and Cardinals played twenty innings that weren’t technically endless but essentially were. On April 19, 2013, we calibrated our common tongue to incorporate the wonders of how we reacted to our young and promising ace outpitching somebody else’s young and promising ace. That was the night we chanted, with all relevant evidence tilting in our enthusiasm’s favor that HAR-VEY’S BET-TER! On that night precisely seven years ago, there was no disputing our assertion was anything but fact, just as on the afternoon into evening of ten years and two days ago, there was no escaping the sense that there’d be no escaping a game that would never end.
Maybe you remember what happened the game before or after the Mets beat the Cardinals in twenty innings or the game before or after Matt Harvey overwhelmed Stephen Strasburg. Probably you don’t. That’s all right. You probably remember the two games in question, though. They became an element of your fandom. Maybe not the most definitive or compelling elements, but they’re there. You might not recall the exact dates or even the seasons they occurred without a nudge, but somewhere in the back of your mind, the games or at least the takeaways from them are there. Sometimes, as on April 17, 2010, games seem to stretch beyond their reasonable parameters. Sometimes, as on April 19, 2013, pitchers get us so excited that we don’t only want to watch them with awe, we need to describe them aloud.
And those were only two games among 162 games in their respective seasons among who knows how many thousands you’ve experienced through your life? If April of 2010 hadn’t included a slate of Mets games, you wouldn’t have a specific point of reference involving a twenty-inning win at Busch Stadium in which Tony La Russa resorted to pitching position players and Jerry Manuel warmed up Francisco Rodriguez enough so that K-Rod threw the equivalent of a complete game in the bullpen. If April of 2013 had proceeded without the Mets, you wouldn’t remember that there was a span of weeks when everybody talked about Matt Harvey as the next Tom Seaver and it was rarely interpreted as hyperbole.
So much to glean from two memorable baseball games ten and seven years later. So much to glean at the time from the now forgotten baseball games surrounding them. So much to inform our perspective as we roll along. So much to reach back and touch for a few minutes when there’s nothing of a similar nature emerging to engage never mind not depress us. It’s all a part of our baseball fandom.
This April we’re not adding to it, which is a real shame, if merely incidental to the larger picture painted by these unfortunate days.
Without new baseball, I’ve reveled, to a point, in the old baseball broadcast by outlets whose archives are a seemingly shallow blessing. Listen, if you want to air The First No-Hitter in New York Mets History and I happen to notice it’s on, I will greet its closing moments with a substantial semblance of the rapture I experienced and expressed on June 1, 2012. But don’t expect me to make a night of it when you have aired The First No-Hitter in New York Mets History so many times that the total outpaces the viewer’s ability to count, maybe find another game to show.
SNY has been running an online survey in an effort to determine what Mets fans think is the greatest game of the last decade. They are providing a list of five choices — the no-hitter; Wilmer’s tears of joy; David’s return to the lineup wherein eight Met home runs were hit; the 2015 division clincher; and David’s farewell — and will televise them in ascending order this Monday night through Friday night, five through one. All five have been shown repeatedly. All five have been repeated repeatedly. Then they went into reruns and were rerun rerunnedly. After which, they went into a rotation so heavy that MTV c. 1983 was embarrassed that a cable channel could play the same few hits over and over and over.
Maybe find another game to show? Definitely find another game to show. We are hungry like the wolf to watch something besides the same dozen games in a loop.
Show the last game the Mets played before they’d ever had a no-hitter.
Show the first game the Mets played after they’d finally had a no-hitter.
Show David Wright going two-for-four with a double amid Jon Niese going six innings giving up four runs to whoever, it doesn’t matter.
Delve into that SNY library and do what you did for the first week or two of the great postponement. The network aired every 2019 win it aired last year, not just the so-called classics. Pete Alonso didn’t necessarily homer. Jacob deGrom didn’t necessarily toss eight scoreless. Nobody’s shirt was necessarily giddily detached from anybody’s sweaty torso. It was just one baseball game after another and it was quietly exhilarating amid a silent spring. We didn’t require additional suspense or intrigue. I didn’t require it be a Mets win, but I can understand if others aren’t so expansive to their approach to rewatchables.
I hoped that once SNY got done with the wins from 2019, they’d cue up the wins from 2018, then 2017 and keep going clear back to 2006, the first year there was SportsNet New York. Perhaps, if it didn’t require anybody to endanger their health or cross constricting contractual boundaries, they could arrange to pop on Mets games that predate SNY. This topic usually quickly descends into “SHOW THE JIMMY QUALLS GAME!” or some other vintage fare that one can be pretty sure doesn’t exist on tape or film fifty-one years later. I’m all for wish-listing, but I’ll be reasonable here. I’m not asking for video miracles. I’m asking for Brian Bannister and Moises Alou and Cory Sullivan and maybe a little Josh Satin. If a digital treasure chest of Fran Healy wishes to spill its secrets regarding Shane Spencer settling under a can of corn or Esix Snead coming into run with blazing speed, wonderful. Anything older, fantastic. Anything, really.
Nobody has to be walking off. Nobody has to be nailing down a Cy Young. Just fill the rest of our April with what we don’t have in front of us, and then do it again in May and June and we’ll let you know when you can stop.
by Greg Prince on 11 April 2020 6:27 pm Major League Baseball, assessing myriad proposals, has discussed a radical plan that would eliminate the traditional American and National Leagues for 2020, a high-ranking official told USA TODAY Sports, and realign all six divisions for an abbreviated season. […] The plan would have all 30 teams returning to their spring training sites in Florida and Arizona, playing regular-season games only in those two states and without fans in an effort to reduce travel and minimize risks in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic. The divisions would be realigned based on the geography of their spring training homes. […] Financially, it could be a huge boon for the TV rights holders. You could have a captive TV audience the entire day. […] The DH would likely be universally implemented as well.
—Bob Nightengale, USA Today, April 10, 2020
“We will not have sporting events with fans until we have a vaccine,” says Zach Binney, a PhD in epidemiology who wrote his dissertation on injuries in the NFL and now teaches at Emory. Barring a medical miracle, the process of developing and widely distributing a vaccine is likely to take 12 to 18 months. […] O.K., but what about empty stadiums? “The idea of a quarantined sports league that can still go on sounds really good in theory,” says Binney. “But it’s a lot harder to pull off in practice than most people appreciate.”
—Stephanie Apstein, Sports Illustrated, April 10, 2020
Yes, we all need a room of our own.
—Billy Joel
Seen the leagues go on hiatus
I saw the teams try quarantine
’Cause life went still across the USA
We all wore facial masks
And tried hard not to breathe
They schemed a scheme to restart playing
And broadcast content good to go
They shoved the DH in
Remade divisions
Like in MLB The Show
I’ve seen the leagues go on hiatus
I saw no people in the seats
At first it sort of seemed to make some sense
We’d see it from our homes, just watching on TV
They opened parks around St. Lucie
Like stuck inside an endless March
No fans allowed in there
The owners didn’t care
They had some programming to stream
I’ve seen the leagues go on hiatus
I saw the Mets play ’til late fall
DeGrom and Ramos formed a battery
Robotics called the strikes
And electronic balls
They tried creating stringent guidelines
Confining most all personnel
They said cameras could stay
Shooed families away
Pretending all of this was swell
Our ancient leagues, before hiatus
Gave us the game we came to know
They didn’t haul the sport to Florida
And turn the stadiums into a studio
Perhaps soon we won’t remember
This awful godforsaken year
I hope that once we’re fine
Then we can take in nine
Where all can gather without fear
by Greg Prince on 6 April 2020 4:10 pm As of tonight’s off night, per the current non-operative schedule, the 2020 Mets would have played eight games already. They were slated for nine, but the second of them, on Saturday, March 28, would have been rained out. I can’t prove that — I can’t prove anything where the 2020 Mets are concerned — but it rained all day in New York two Saturdays ago, and not even the large gate attached to a Pete Alonso Bobblehead Day seemed likely to pull the tarp from Citi Field’s diamond. In context, the rainout would have caused consternation and chaos in modest doses. Context ain’t what it used to be.
So let’s say the Mets would have played eight games by now. Let’s figure BobblePete would have found a makeup day to nod agreeably. Let’s assume, which you can never do in normal times, whatever those are, that the pitching would have been pushed back to a point, meaning the optimal utility of Jacob deGrom, whose Bobblehead Day dawned dry enough to play on March 29, didn’t get leapt over during the season’s second week, which, if you’re not scoring at home (though you’re likely doing everything else there), was just last week. I know, I know; who can tell anymore?
DeGrom in the Opener. Stroman that succeeding Sunday, which was three days later. Then Porcello, Matz and I gotta believe deGrom again, because you don’t want him sitting and waiting for a week. Wacha in Washington for their disgusting flag-raising and so forth. Then it’s another day off, followed by Stroman on Saturday, going on five days’ rest and, I guess, Porcello Sunday, a.k.a. yesterday. We arrive in Houston, packing righteous indignation and who to pitch? You can use deGrom on proper rest tomorrow or you can keep Matz from going altogether stale.
You’d use deGrom, right?
I don’t know who Rojas — and the calls Rojas would have gotten from Van Wagenen that Rojas would already be getting a little edgy from — would have chosen. I don’t know what would have happened in the eight games the Mets would have played by now. Without indulging in the well-meaning simulations out there that I can’t bear to look at, I have a hunch the Mets would be somewhere between 3-5 and 5-3 after eight games. It’s just a hunch. The Mets haven’t been 5-3 after eight games since 2017, 3-5 since 2016 or 4-4 since way back in 2011 (I’ve lived long enough that 2011 now qualifies as “way back”). It just feels right that these Mets would be settling in somewhere between a little better than .500 and a little worse than .500.
I could be wrong. I could be absolutely wrong. The Mets were 7-1 two years ago, 6-2 last year. They’ve never been 8-0, but there are six instances of them being 2-6 (most recently way back in 2010) and three times when all they had was one or zero wins. But I’m a little too hypothetically optimistic to think they’re as bad as they were in 1962, 1963, 1964 or, for that matter, 2010. Just call me wide-eyed. Or Zoom me any adjective you like.
Scenarios:
The Mets are 3-5. We are healthily panicked, just ill at ease enough to fit the circumstances. Three wins and five losses after eight games is not a good look. We are reminding ourselves multiple times a day that there are still 154 games remaining, and even if somebody among Washington, Atlanta, Philadelphia and Miami (hey, you never know) is off to a 7-1 launch, well, there are still 154 games remaining. After losing five of eight to start the season, we are trying to not doubt Luis. We are trying to not doubt whichever element of the staff, starting or relieving, we deem culpable for 3-5. We’ve probably called for and will receive by tomorrow night some change to the batting order and maybe somebody who’s been mostly glued to the bench entering the lineup. Just a scheduled off day for Cano, Luis will say. Just letting Amed clear his head, maybe. Say, how’s Conforto’s oblique, anyway?
The Mets are 4-4. We’re not thrilled, but we’re not overtly hostile. Four wins and four losses after eight games is what our record says it is. It’s OK. It’s not great, because we’ve already experienced the agony of defeat four times, and that’s three times too many. Jason or I wrote that first “so we won’t go 161-1” column and we all ingested easily enough the reality that there are a third you win, a third you lose, et al. But a team we fancied jumping up to immediate playoff contention muddling along doesn’t strike us as a an adequate break from the blocks. Somehow 4-4, doesn’t feel 125 percentage points better than 3-5. Not much of a sample size there from to which to judge, of course. Then again, we have zero sample size in actual 2020, so I’d take 4-4 over 0-0 ASAP as long as nobody spreads or catches anything from it.
The Mets are 5-3. That’s not bad. That’s more than not bad. But if we’re 5-3, why aren’t we 6-2? You know if McNeil had gotten that base hit with the sacks full, we’d be 6-2. You know Alonso is gonna finally belt one and more will follow once he loosens up, and it’s pretty good that we’re pretty good with the Polar Bear obviously trying a little too hard. Familia’s weight loss has made a difference. Brach may be the secret weapon. And what about that running grab Marisnick made? Luis putting him in for defense really paid off. Still, it feels like they could be better than 5-3. But we shouldn’t be complaining. It’s just eight games.
If only.
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