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ABOUT US
Faith and Fear in Flushing made its debut on Feb. 16, 2005, the brainchild of two longtime friends and lifelong Met fans.
Greg Prince discovered the Mets when he was 6, during the magical summer of 1969. He is a Long Island-based writer, editor and communications consultant. Contact him here.
Jason Fry is a Brooklyn writer whose first memories include his mom leaping up and down cheering for Rusty Staub. Check out his other writing here.
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by Greg Prince on 19 September 2019 1:45 pm To paraphrase a distinguished United States senator from her exchange with an overmatched opponent in a recent presidential debate, I don’t understand why anybody goes to all the trouble of rooting for the New York Mets just to talk about what they really can’t do and shouldn’t fight for.
The Mets are three games behind the Cubs and Brewers for the final Wild Card spot in the National League with ten games to play. Implicit in that equation is a difficult journey made tougher by how necessarily short the road ahead is. Ten games! The Mets were three games out of the playoffs with plenty more than ten games left!
But we didn’t get through 152 games of a 162-game season still alive only to rue that we’re not more alive. Alive is alive. Let’s have a plan for that. Let’s plan to stay alive.
Wednesday afternoon in Denver made that the plan, as the brink of nearly definitive extinction yet again proved overly distasteful to these Mets who can’t seem to process how dead they’re supposed to be. Generalissimo Francisco Franco is incapable of fathoming how these Mets still aren’t dead. The lot of us has written them off in coal-black ink nearly as often as Pete Alonso has launched tape-measure home runs. Yet Alonso keeps launching tape-measure home runs, the Mets keep discovering ways to win, and definitive death posthumously eludes the heretofore pronounced-deceased objects of our disturbed affection approximately twice a week.
Against the Rockies in the Mets’ series finale, Noah Syndergaard perhaps put too much faith in the powers of a personal catcher. Despite the residual simpatico Noah feels for René Rivera’s core skill set from their splendid 2016 together, the Syndergaard who faced Colorado wasn’t markedly better than the Syndergaard who faced Los Angeles five days earlier or the Syndergaard who took on Philadelphia five days before that, both times with Wilson Ramos behind the plate. Those previous starts loomed as dead-letter days in the history of the 2019 Mets, each of them among the myriad losses that buried us for good (with probably a couple more death blows in between).
This Syndergaard start — 5.2 IP, 10 H, 4 ER, 2 BB, 4 SB — was similarly grabbing the shovel from the garage and commencing to dig. When Noah exited in the sixth, the Mets trailed, 4-2, a margin that shouldn’t have felt like it required a hike up nearby Lookout Mountain, yet the Mets had numerous Golden opportunities to score taken away from them by impenetrable Rockie defense. The Blake Street Bombers of popular thin-air imagination had been transformed into a bunch of lowdown LoDo thieves, stealing bases from our battery and runs from our batters. Jeff Hoffman and his amazing, colossal earned run average completely outdoing the allegedly mighty Thor over five-and-a-third wasn’t helping matters.
My mind wandered in frustration to September 1990, particularly a pair of doubleheaders in which the Mets, with the National League East lead sitting and waiting to be taken by them, sat and watched it go in the other direction.
September 5, at Pittsburgh:
Bucs 1 Mets 0;
Bucs 3 Mets 1.
September 20, at Shea:
Expos 6 Mets 4;
Expos 2 Mets 0.
The respective pitching matchups:
Frank Viola vs. Zane Smith;
Bobby Ojeda vs. Neil Heaton;
Viola vs. Brian Barnes;
Sid Fernandez vs. Chris Nabholz.
Plus we had Darryl Strawberry.
You’d have to like our chances to win between one and four of the aforementioned games. We won none of them. Losing the pair to the Pirates was painful because that’s who we were dueling for first place, but bowing to Montreal was worse, because it was later and — though the visitors to Flushing were by no means easy pickin’s — we were “s’posed” to beat the ’Spos. We had Sweet Music and El Sid. They had Br!@n B@rnes and Chr!s N@bh#lz, if you catch my profane drift. On Wednesday, the Rockies had Jeff Hoffman, who entered the matinee with a 7.03 ERA and enough F’s in his name to make my point about the Mets not breaking through against him without me resorting to typographical tricks. Down 4-2 going to the eighth and seemingly going nowhere, I could have sworn it was effing September of 1990 all over again.
Then we got to the eighth and back to September of 2019, with one run scratched out so tenuously you wondered whether it worth the trouble of trudging to the medicine cabinet to find the tube of cortisone you were pretty sure was still in there from your last bout with hives. Alonso, who briefly raised hope and unfurled tape measures in the sixth with his 49th homer of the season (distance: somewhere on the outskirts of Boulder), led off with a single. Robinson Cano grounded to the pitcher, advancing Pete to second. Todd Frazier walked. A passed ball pushed Pete and Todd up a base apiece. Michael Conforto grounded out. The Polar Bear rumbled home to make it 4-3. The Mets were still…what’s that chronic condition of theirs again?
Oh yes, alive. The Mets were alive. And they stayed alive via the reassuring right arm of Six-Out Seth Lugo, who retired the Rockies in order in the eighth, following on the fine work of presumed missing person Brad Brach in the seventh and the post-Noah escape job engineered by Jeurys Familia in the sixth. The bullpen was keeping us in this game. How about that?
How about this? Wilson Ramos led off the ninth pinch-hitting for Rivera. There was a pretty juicy opportunity to pinch-hit for Rivera in the sixth, the inning when Alonso homered solo to cut the Rockies’ lead to 3-2 and the Mets proceeded to load the bases with two out. Mickey Callaway either showed extreme confidence in his veteran backup backstop or didn’t want to inflict upon Syndergaard the slightest discomfort by changing catchers on him midstream. Whatever the reasoning, Rivera — who doesn’t play very often and was decidedly in this game solely for his defense — hit for himself (in September, with ample alternatives on the bench). René grounded out to leave the Mets behind by a run.
That’s where the Mets were again, to start the ninth. It was later, but what they say about late’s advantages over never applied to the game just as it applies to this unfinished symphony of a season. Wilson worked out a walk versus Rockies reliever Jairo Diaz. Callaway, suddenly cognizant of his reserve depth, pinch-ran Juan Lagares for the Buffalo. J.D. Davis, the so-called Sun Bear himself, emerged from the double-switch that had catapulted him into the game in the eighth and singled. Polar or Solar, you gotta keep an eye on these ursine types.
You know who plays well with bears and other creatures of nature? Brandon Nimmo, a product of neighboring Wyoming. Wyoming is so close to Colorado that Alonso’s home run Tuesday night landed there Wednesday morning. Nimmo is so comfortable in Colorado that he singled home Lagares with little fuss to tie the game at four. And let’s not forget the Bears’ furry friend the Squirrel. Jeff McNeil nibbled at nine pitches before scurrying to first on a walk of his own, thereby placing Brandon on second and J.D. on third.
Say, the bases were loaded. That led the Mets into a brick wall in the sixth, but this was the ninth, nobody was out and maybe it was the presence of the Solar Bear, but somehow things seemed to have brightened immensely since the innings when I was stuck stewing over losing two frigging games to a team that no longer exists twenty-nine years ago. Alonso was up next, facing Joe Harvey. (A pitcher named Diaz, a pitcher named Harvey…were the Rockies trying to troll us, or what?) The narrative-driven fan would have thought this was an ideal moment for the Polar Bear’s 50th home run, a notion most grand, but the reality-based fan just thought, “get a run home somehow.”
And Pete did. He walked on four pitches, bringing Davis home from third to forge a 5-4 lead. The Mets’ aliveness was as tangible as it had been since Saturday night. All Cano had to do next was not hit into a triple play, and we could continue not being dead. Robbie came through…sort of, bounding a ball up the middle that tried very hard to be something better than a double play. Alas, it was exactly that, but that was way better than a triple play, for even as Cano’s grounder bounced off one Rockie to another to effect one out, and that second Rockie threw the ball high above first, but not Rocky Mountain High enough to facilitate avoidance of a DP (nice hustle, Cano), Nimmo whooshed across the plate with the Mets’ sixth run.
Robinson may have inadvertently performed a public service by not beating out the double play, because had Mickey eyeballed a multitude of Metsies on the basepaths, he probably would have pinch-hit for Lugo. And honestly, what kind of idiot would do that with three outs to secure in the bottom of the ninth? Mickey, nobody’s fool too often in the course of a must-have game, let Seth bat for himself. It didn’t weigh too heavily on the course of events what our irreplaceable reliever might do in his first plate appearance of 2019, but it certainly crossed my mind that one fine evening in 2017, Seth Lugo hit a home run.
Seth Lugo did not hit a home run at Coors Field on Wednesday afternoon, but he did line a very useful single into center field, scoring McNeil from first to increase the Mets’ lead to 7-4 and sprinkling the daily recommended amount of magic over this entire enterprise to make it feel as if destiny was not about to depart Denver without the Mets aboard its bus.
C’mon, we need a little narrative in our life. We also needed three outs to have life. We had Seth Lugo and a three-run lead, so confidence wasn’t the problem it usually is. Six-Out Seth surrendered a single, but otherwise emerged unscathed from all his hitting and pitching. The only thing SOS couldn’t do for us was ensure that the Brewers would lose to the Padres and the Reds would best the Cubs come nighttime. If those events came to pass, then instead of being delusional about a Mets club four behind one or two competitors with ten to play, we could be slightly less delusional because — look out, mountains! — we’re climbing to three behind two teams with ten to play.
The Padres beat the Brewers. The Cubs lost to the Reds. We’re three out with ten to play. It’s good to be alive.
by Jason Fry on 18 September 2019 2:04 am While watching Tuesday night’s game against the Rockies, I thought of a good idea and immediately decided I wanted nothing to do with it for a while.
The idea came from the shame bell in Game of Thrones, which you may know as an Internet meme even if you’re not familiar with the show. I was wondering how many games the 2019 Mets lost through terrible bullpenning, horrid defense or managerial dipshittery (shame shame shame for them all), and if listing those games might a) be cathartic; and b) show how close the Mets came to a postseason berth, and where improvements might be most profitably made in pursuit of not missing one next season. Now, a disappointed fan’s hindsight is a lot sharper than 20/20 — confirmation bias and bemoaned what-ifs make for powerful lenses — but I’m pretty sure the shame bell would toll a lot more times than the number of games separating the Mets from the wild-card teams.
And yet, I quickly decided to put this gloomy project aside. Because the Mets were playing the Rockies and I wanted to enjoy the game, even if it was highly unlikely that its outcome mattered the way the outcome of games mattered only last week.
And the Mets gave me a lot to enjoy — not just for 2019, but possibly for 2020.
There was Marcus Stroman riding an improved cutter — with which he’s apparently been tinkering — and a sharp slider to seven scoreless innings of four-hit ball, which would be impressive even if it hadn’t happened at Coors Field. I would have considered Stroman an upgrade over Jason Vargas no matter what he did, because I detested Vargas as both a pitcher and a person, but Stroman has proved easy to root for, demonstrative and energetic whether finishing pitches, hustling to cover first, or just cheering his teammates on from the dugout.
There was Amed Rosario breaking up an unlikely scoreless pitchers’ duel with a tomahawked home run in the sixth. Rosario has evolved from an unsteady fielder with an oversized strike zone to an adequate shortstop with much better judgment at the plate, raising his average from .255 at the close of June to .289 now and committing just four errors during that span, compared with 12 earlier in the year. It’s tantalizing to imagine what his 2020 might look like if he can be the player we’ve now seen for two and a half months.
It’s also tantalizing to imagine 2020 with a full measure of Brandon Nimmo, who also went deep in the sixth. Nimmo has had a very strange season. It’s easy to forget that he looked hopeless before running into a fence, starting off with bushels of strikeouts, then making a valiant but ill-advised attempt to play through his neck injury. When he returned in September it was somehow as if his weird April had never happened. Almost from the jump, Nimmo was back to providing the mix of power and plate discipline he’d shown a year earlier. Being able to count on a full season from Nimmo would also make one of the Mets’ offensively potent but defensively challenged outfielders an interesting trade commodity, but that’s another thought and post to consider later.
And, of course, there’s Pete Alonso. The Polar Bear awoke from his home-run slumber to club a ball 467 feet into the Denver night, his 48th of the season. The club RBI mark is probably out of reach, but 50 homers is not, and “I’m disappointed Alonso won’t also break the single-season RBI record as a rookie” is a complaint deserving a truly microscopic violin as accompaniment. Even Alonso’s overly enthusiastic moments make me like him more — for the last play of the game, he fell on a ball that was headed for Robinson Cano, turning a play of average difficulty into a more complicated one. (Luis Avilan‘s expression at finding himself involved in the resulting play at the first-base bag was entertaining.) But asking Alonso to forbear in such situations would be like asking your golden retriever not to wag its tail when you come home — sure, you might mourn the occasional thing swept off the coffee table to its demise, but is a broken tchotchke or two really too high a price for a little joy in your life?
Those three homers in the sixth proved more than enough for the Mets, as Justin Wilson navigated the eighth and Avilan completed the ninth, with a Charlie Blackmon moon shot the only blemish in the box score. The Mets even made up ground on the Cubs. It’s almost certainly too late for that to matter, but an evening watching your team win a baseball is always an evening well spent. Too soon — all too soon — we’ll have to get our baseball joy from the heroics of other teams and the attendant, highly temporary loyalties of October. And too soon after that, there will be no baseball joy at all. What we bank now will have to sustain us, until spring comes around again and hope blooms anew.
by Jason Fry on 17 September 2019 12:23 pm The ample lady of renown may not be singing quite yet, but I heard another singer last night. Not exactly a matinee idol, this one — he had a puffy face, jet-black hair, and big black-rimmed Coke-bottle glasses. But his voice was a rich burr that rose to an unearthly falsetto.
It’s over, it’s over, it’s OHHHHHHHHH-VERRRRRRRRRRRRRR…
There’s a fascinating race afoot in the National League, one that’s now expanded to include both wild-card spots and the N.L. Central title. But the Mets are no longer part of it in any meaningful way. When you’re five back with 12 to play, you’re not on the stage, but in the audience.
And I could feel that from the get-go Monday night. Brandon Nimmo led off the game with a home run and a joyful romp around the bases — I imagined his monologue being something like, “Gosh, the ball went all the way over that the fence! And now I get to run! Neat! And see all my base friends! HELLO, FIRST BASE, GLAD TO SEE YOU! HOWDY, SECOND BASE! HI HI HI, THIRD BASE! GEE WILLIKERS THIS IS FUN! OH, HOME PLATE, YOU’RE MY BEST FRIEND TOO! YAY!” That was a good start, but trouble awaited Steven Matz in the fourth. Given a 4-1 lead, Matz lost the plate and then threw a high sinker to opposing pitcher Antonio Senzatela, who was 0-for-2019 and whose lack of hitting prowess had been marveled at on the broadcast. Anything with a wrinkle would have probably been a swing and a miss for strike three, but Matz threw a fastball and Senzatela bashed it into left-center to tie the game. The next batter was Trevor Story, who turned on an inside sinker and hit it over the fence.
Matz was self-lacerating after the game, lamenting “a stupid pitch” made to Senzatela. For me, the moment had an added helping of surreal — I was watching on the Spectrum app, which kept switching over to the Spanish-language feed for no apparent reason. That was fine with me — if it meant the Mets winning, I would have happily listened to commentary in Esperanto, click language or whale song — except Matz wasn’t any good in any available language. He lost focus, made poor decisions, and the game went down the tubes.
If that sounds like a quick dismissal of a game with postseason implications, well, that’s the point. It didn’t feel like it had any, a realization that arrived accompanied by a hollow feeling in my stomach that I couldn’t will away. This was just a typical Coors Field farce — early lead, mid-innings land mine, slog to the end — similar to a couple of dozen others that I’ve endured. The Mets’ death struggle with the Dodgers on Sunday night felt like the conclusion of something glorious and thrilling for all it turned out to be futile. This was just another game.
Just another game, but one that delivered a bit of goofball solace in the late innings.
In the bottom of the eighth, J.D. Davis took an extra-base hit away from Story with a nifty running catch, then slammed into the fence, with the point of contact the same area where he took a fastball to the ribs from ludicrous-looking Dodger reliever Dustin May on Sunday night. Davis held onto the ball but crumpled onto his back on the warning track, with Nimmo calling for the trainers.
Thankfully, it was determined that Davis had merely knocked the wind out of himself. (Though let’s verify that — given that it’s the Mets, it’s entirely possible he actually has two ribs piercing internal organs.) One of the Mets who came out to investigate was Pete Alonso, whose normal area of responsibility lies hundreds of feet away.
Davis, despite the whole needing-to-breathe thing, managed to ask Alonso what, exactly, he was doing out there.
“Gotta check on the Sun Bear,” replied Alonso.
So yes, Alonso has dubbed Davis the Sun Bear, a revelation Davis looked faintly embarrassed about during his postgame interview. It was a chuckle I needed, and more evidence that those two need their own buddy movie. One of my favorite moments of the season was when the cameras (and mics) caught Davis, post Alonso homer, yelling out a mocking question for the Cubs: “Whaddya gonna throw ‘im? WHAT NOW?” Now, Davis has revealed a lot of talents in 2019, and become one of my favorite Mets. But despite his best efforts, his HWAR — that’s Heckling WAR, for the non-analytically inclined — remains below replacement level. This isn’t his fault: Some people have voices pitched to travel, but Davis’s is somewhere between “chirpy” and “pinched,” best suited for a cartoon sidekick.
And you know what? That works. In fact, it’s perfect. Catch Bear Patrol: Polar and Sun, coming to Disney+ this fall! In a few weeks, memories like that will make me smile, when the disappointment of a season that ended with an “almost” has receded.
by Greg Prince on 16 September 2019 1:08 pm The knots were back Sunday night. Troops of Boy Scouts, fleets of fishermen and stomachs belonging to Mets fans watching their team in the playoffs — these are the entities that know knots well. Except the Mets weren’t in the playoffs on Sunday night. It was the middle of September. Too soon for playoffs, but not too soon for a playoff atmosphere among the acids, which the truly initiated understand is where the real playoff atmosphere gurgles. Never mind the folderol about bright lights and cheering crowds. Your gut tells you when it’s go time.
If the series finale versus the Dodgers at Citi Field didn’t technically represent a play-in game, it felt like something more than a standard rubber match. Even at a juncture of the schedule when every outcome is important, this one loomed as crucial with a capital CRU. Mathematical elimination wasn’t at stake. Mathematical viability was.
Plus, the game aired on ESPN, which is capital CRUEL usually, but lent to the feeling that this was a dress rehearsal for October, when national telecasts take over and the volume on the television heads south. Howie Rose and Wayne Randazzo were thrust into a starring role for the evening, talking about a dozen seconds ahead of the network announcers, which was fitting, since I’m certain Howie and Wayne are far faster on the draw when it comes to the Mets than anybody parachuting into our storyline for a few hours.
Brandon Nimmo did his best to ease the knotty nature of the night with a two-run triple in the second off Walker Buehler, no small task. Nimmo, we were reminded on Saturday, knows how to attract a pitch to his person. Good to see he hasn’t forgotten how to make contact with a ball via his bat.
Unfortunately, that was it for Met scoring. The lead was 2-0, which was halved in the fourth inning to 2-1, after which it stayed 2-1 seemingly forever, though deep in my gut, I knew forever was incapable of lasting without the lead lengthening. Game Five of the 2015 World Series was like that. I probably didn’t have to say the “2015” part, because it’s the only Game Five of a World Series (or a World Series at all) we’ve known from lately. Matt Harvey went eight before Terry Collins decided to take him out with the Mets ahead, 2-0, then decided to keep him in. I probably didn’t have to spell that part out, either. We’re good at remembering the parts we wish we hadn’t learned to begin with.
The prime inflection point of Matt Harvey’s career is neither here nor there in 2019, except it segues into Zack Wheeler and the game I think we’d all been waiting for him to pitch since July 28, 2011, when most of us heard of him for the first time. We were giving up Carlos Beltran, in the waning weeks of his Met contract, for a single-A pitcher in the Giants system. Carlos loomed as catnip for a contender. What we got back needed to be golden. Just wait, we were told. Wheeler’s a get.
So we waited. We waited two years for Wheeler’s major league debut, which was fine. We waited through two seasons of Wheeler’s further development, which was promising enough if not incredibly tantalizing. We waited through two years of injury and rehabilitation, which was unfortunate, but the way these things go sometimes. We waited through a choppy comeback year curtailed by another physical setback, which was frustrating. We waited until the latter half of yet another year to see, once and for all, the Zack Wheeler for whom the Mets traded a likely future Hall of Famer. That was uplifting in a downbeat kind of year, which meant Zack’s excellent last three months of 2018 got us and him only so far.
On September 15, 2019, the Zack Wheeler we heard about and imagined on July 28, 2011, arrived in full at Citi Field. Not that he hadn’t pitched wonderfully before, but he’d never had a stage like this before. The Wheeler who dominated in the shadow of Jacob deGrom in the second half of 2018 was doing his thing in a vacuum. It mattered that he pitch well, but it wasn’t CRUcial. The Wheeler who was a little up and down the way the 2019 Mets were for months could operate below the radar. On Sunday night, however, we had a game that had to be pitched beautifully against an intimidating opponent that had to be tamed in a circumstance where the fate of the season potentially rode on every last detail.
A pitcher suited to this moment was the bounty said to be worthy of Beltran eight years ago. A pitcher suited to this moment was who we got. We know that now. If nothing else is left for us from 2019 when the regular season is history two weeks hence, we have Zack Wheeler who stymied the Western Division champion Dodgers for seven innings, sometimes getting in trouble, every time getting out of it in front, keeping that game 2-1 forever for as long as he could.
All that talk about all the aces the Mets had brought through their system always rang a little hollow when it got to Wheeler. Zack was an ace in theory, on paper. Injuries were part of the explanation for why it never felt totally tangible. Context was, too. Either you’re so good you can’t be ignored regardless of how your team is going or you step up and carry your team where it needs to go. For seven innings, against the toughest opponent the league offers with as much on the line as there can be in the middle of September, Zack Wheeler was definitely who you trade a future Hall of Famer to get.
Those were seven extraordinary innings. One run; six hits; no walks; five Dodgers stranded on base; nine strikeouts; a lead held that had to be held; and, as with Wheeler’s old teammate Harvey on another Sunday night on another national telecast, the question of whether he had another inning in him.
To Harvey’s manager nearly four years ago, the answer was no, yes, no, yes, oh go ahead. To Wheeler’s manager, there didn’t seem to be much question. Wheeler was done after seven if you watched the dugout with the TV sound off as I did. I didn’t expect any different, honestly. The seventh was what they nowadays call a stressful inning. Corey Seager led off with a single. With one out, Gavin Lux singled Seager to second. An ace calls on something extra and ends an inning like that with the score unchanged. Wheeler struck out Kiké Hernandez and Matt Beaty, the last strike to Beaty his 97th pitch. The stuff of aces, to be sure.
“Zack’s done,” I thought. If this were some game in some year prior to Wheeler’s debut in 2013, or his birth in 1990, I wouldn’t have thought that. But in 2019, certain innings are defined as stressful and all pitches are counted. I’m not saying I wouldn’t have suggested leaving him in had Mickey Callaway for some strange reason asked me. I’m saying I had little expectation he’d be left in. That is just not done these days. Teams build bullpens on the foundation of a core belief that starting pitchers can’t be pushed beyond so many total pitches and so many stressful innings.
Well, teams try to build such bullpens. The Mets tried. I swear they did. What they wound up with instead was a coupla guys. The coupla guys, Justin Wilson and Seth Lugo, have held the bullpen together essentially by themselves for weeks, most recently the night before. On Saturday, it was deGrom for seven, Lugo for one, Wilson for one. It worked perfectly. Now Callaway would ask it — them — to work perfectly again on no nights’ rest.
It didn’t work. The Dodgers reached Wilson for a run in the eighth to tie the game and Lugo for a run in the ninth to take the lead. The go-ahead hit, a Jedd Gyorko ground ball up the middle, appeared uncannily like balls hit substantially farther by men whose names still summer in our subconscious. Pendleton. Scioscia. Molina. Hosmer. None of the balls those fellows hit ended Mets games, seasons or postseasons. The one Eric Hosmer lined to left for a double to drive in Lorenzo Cain didn’t even tie its game, which was the one Harvey was pitching in the ninth, but in each instance, I could feel my knots giving up a little, as if they wondered if maybe getting a step on traffic wouldn’t be the worst the idea in the world. In every case, my stomach and the rest of me hung in there to the bitter end. But in every case the end was bitter.
Sunday night, the end gave us Dodgers 3 Mets 2, the Mets never scoring after the second, thus slipping back to four behind the Cubs and three behind the Brewers with thirteen games to go. The Mets finished the previous weekend four out of that second Wild Card spot we didn’t spend a serious instant thinking about until late July yet have aspired to ceaselessly ever since, because these Mets raised our sights. Another week went by, encompassing a 5-2 stretch that included a muscular four-game sweep of Arizona and a thriller of a win over Los Angeles, and we’re still four out. The distance hasn’t changed, yet the calendar has turned relentless.
All the Mets can do, starting tonight in Colorado, is win a lot. All we as Mets fans can do is hope a lot that they do, and that the Cubs, the Brewers and anybody else who may present an obstacle to our happiness don’t. Should this brilliant strategy of mine not produce the desired effect, at least we had one night that felt like a playoff game. All the tension. All the anxiety. All the knots.
It’s hard to believe this is what we root for, but it is.
by Greg Prince on 15 September 2019 1:22 pm Here’s your “watch baseball all your life and see something you’ve never seen before” moment from Saturday night: the Mets won a game by recording exactly three hits while being hit by pitches twice.
Ouch. Ouch. And yay! Necessarily in that order.
The Mets’ victory over the Dodgers at Citi Field (itself a rarity, if not really unprecedented) was a product of more than simply opportunistic offense. Let us not look past pitching. Implied in New York’s three-hit total is that Los Angeles pitched as it usually does. Hyun-Jin Ryu, lately having fallen from Cy Young certainty, made his bid for serious BBWAA reconsideration by squelching the Mets for seven innings. He gave up just two of the three Met hits, and each amounted to window dressing for a home team that did nothing resembling scoring against Bob Squelch over there. Why were the Mets dressing windows? Because it’s not like they had anything else to do in the bottoms of innings while Ryu was on the mound and in command.
Ah, but pitching is also a skill synonymous with your better Mets teams, which this Mets team has decided to be. The decision is always a sensible one when they unleash Jacob deGrom on opposing batters. Jake was Jake, also going seven innings, giving up all of four hits, no walks and no runs across 101 pitches, the last few taking enough out of him to ensure there’d be a no-decision on his ledger. Jacob is a Cy Young contender, too. If he wins it, he should accept it on behalf of the chronically indecisive. Our ace has started 30 times in 2019 and has had nothing statistically to do with the result on 13 of those occasions…nothing except keeping the Mets in most every game he gets his hands on.
Seth Lugo picked up where Jacob deGrom left off, and was somehow even better. Seth struck out Russell Martin, Edwin Rios (pinch-hitting for Ryu, phew) and Joc Pederson in order. Six-Out Seth, who should enter to ABBA’s “SOS,” both for nickname acronym purposes and the way he’s saved our season, was halfway to his optimal utilization. Without SOS, the Mets would have met their Waterloo long ago.
In the bottom of the eighth, SOS would be due up sixth. Mickey Callaway had double-switched him into the game via J.D. Davis’s slot in the lineup. He could have taken out Wilson Ramos, who was due up ninth — the Mets are carrying three catchers, which should be the major league mandatory minimum all season in my mind — but the Mets apparently have to call a three-day offsite conclave to discuss their use of Wilson Ramos. Callaway stuck with Ramos’s bat behind the plate and figured he’d double-switched without incident by taking out J.D. Anytime Mickey Callaway doesn’t accidentally bring down the entire house of cards with his Sharpie, he’s already attained a moral victory.
No more Ryu was a boost to the Metsopotamian psyche; enough with the squelching! True, Dave Roberts would have plenty of relievers to trot in and out of the action to create matchup upon matchup, but it’s September, so who doesn’t? His first pen man, lefty Adam Kolarek, struck out Robinson Cano. His second pen man, righty Joe Kelly, hit Todd Frazier on the left hand. Ouch, yes, but also a baserunner. Todd would take his bruise and stand on first base without complaint. No Met had successfully departed the batter’s box since the third.
Kelly next faced Juan Lagares, who launched two home runs, including a grand slam, just two days earlier. Lefty Michael Conforto was on the bench as a potential pinch-hitter, but Juan was hot, so why not? Indeed, Lagares battled Kelly for eight pitches, taking the reliever to three-and-two, but ultimately struck out on a pitch low enough to have been taken. That made it two outs and Frazier’s owwie looming as pain for no more than pain’s sake.
That was enough Kelly for one September night. Julio Urias was Roberts’s next choice. Urias is only 23, but goes back a ways. He was the starting pitcher the last time the Dodgers had lost at Citi Field, on May 27, 2016. That was David Wright’s final no-big-deal game as a Met and the night before Noah Syndergaard threw ostentatiously if righteously behind Chase Utley, eventually contributing to the common baseball vernacular Tom Hallion’s heretofore obscure phrase “ass in the jackpot”. Yes, it had been a while since the Mets beat L.A. in NYC. To facilitate the end of this nettlesome nine-game stretch of Flushing humiliation, we would require Brandon Nimmo, who was the other half of the aforementioned double-switch and thus batting in the nine-hole, to do something useful against Urias.
In case you’d forgotten Nimmo’s core competencies during Brandon’s lengthy absence this season, they rank as follows:
1) He smiles like nobody’s business.
2) He gets hit by pitches like no Met since Ron Hunt.
Brandon somehow contained his glee when Urias plunked him on the right elbow pad. Had Nimmo grinned too much, he might have given away his secret identity as Ron Hunt’s grandson and somebody might have suggested he hadn’t exactly attempted to avoid the pitch that put him on first. Umpires will put your ass in the jackpot if you make your owwie too obvious.
But now Nimmo was on first, with Frazier…make that pinch-runner Sam Haggerty on second. This was what folks call a rally. For seven-plus innings, the Mets had no idea what one looked like.
Amed Rosario took stock of the situation and opted to join Haggerty and Nimmo amid the basepaths via a less painful yet still passive course, walking on five pitches. Urias remained in the game to face a third consecutive batter, which may be a record for a reliever in September. Lugo was due up. Lugo once homered, you know, but no, letting Seth hit wasn’t the play here, no matter that the security blanket we each cling to like Linus Van Pelt was going to be gone from the game and we could all be left insecurely sucking our thumbs if the next pinch-hitter didn’t take advantage of this unusual bases-loaded soirée the Mets had arranged from their pair of HBPs and lone BB.
Callaway sent up Rajai Davis. Still no Conforto, eh? Lefty vs. lefty was less obvious than the spot when Michael could have replaced Juan, yet he’s still Conforto. But Rajai, 38, is both a righty and a “veteran hitter,” according to Keith Hernandez, who reveres anybody who can be characterized as a veteran anything. The Mets honor a military Veteran of the Game every night at Citi Field, presenting somebody who served the nation with an American flag that had flown over the ballpark. Could this veteran honor Callaway’s confidence by connecting for a hit for the first time since August 20, or simply reaching base for the first time since August 28? Saturday’s date was September 14. It had been a while. The last outcome we needed heading to the ninth would be going from SOS to SOL.
Find someone who looks at you the way Davis looked at Urias’s one-and-two changeup…and then maybe get away from that person, because Davis smacked that pitch hard. Rajai meant no harm, however, except to the Dodgers. The veteran hitter produced a three-run pinch-double, clearing those bases of Mets and generating a 3-0 lead for Justin Wilson to protect in the ninth. In the realm of what used to be surprising now seeming perfectly normal, Justin Wilson as de facto closer when Seth Lugo is no longer available and Edwin Diaz is stands as far less surprising than Rajai Davis coming through with perhaps the biggest Met hit of the year. Really, though, nothing the Mets do is surprising anymore, up to and including Wilson saving a decision for Lugo sans sweat to keep us within three games of the Cubs, thus legitimately proximate to the Wild Card jackpot.
When I heard Rajai interviewed postgame by Ed Coleman, the eighth inning’s protagonist described the Dodgers’ hurlers as the sort of quality pitchers the Mets will see when they are in the playoffs. “When,” not if. Eddie and I were each taken by Davis not making his plans for the next month conditional. Veteran Rajai seems to believe a different kind of flag will fly over Citi Field soon enough. Hey, Callaway has confidence in Davis and Davis has confidence in his teammates, not to mention himself. His later comments that he’d appreciate a greater opportunity to play — despite Mickey using every marble he has to calculate how to fit Conforto, Nimmo, Lagares, J.D. Davis and Jeff McNeil inside his outfield inside a pennant chase — reminded me of another many-miled pinch-hitter the Mets featured when they were going well.
After Lee Mazzilli returned for 1987 following his crowd-pleasing 1986 encore, I read (or at least recall reading) that it was his preference to make himself a Met starter again. Who wouldn’t prefer to start for a team favored to repeat as champs? Mind you, Lee was 32 and clearly cast as a bench guy. Yet he looked at a starting outfield consisting of high-profile acquisition Kevin McReynolds in left, perennial All-Star Darryl Strawberry in right and the indefatigable folk-hero Mookstra platoon in center and concluded he was good enough to be a part of all that on a defending world champion. It may have been unrealistic, but it exuded confidence by the barrel, which isn’t a bad thing to exude. Mazzilli, incidentally, received only fifteen starts in 1987, yet rolled with his assigned role, batting .309 as a pinch-hitter. That was also a pretty good thing.
The best element of Saturday, besides the combined three-hitter from deGrom, Lugo and Wilson and Davis’s clutch double, was that pairing of hit-by-pitches (assuming the swelling on Frazier’s hand went down). By Baseball-Reference’s reckoning, this win was the Mets’ 54th ever in which they collected no more than three hits, their 39th with exactly three. Usually when you’re limited to three hits, you lose. Threading such a stingy needle en route to triumph is tough unless you’re walked a whole lot or homering a little or benefiting from an opponent’s sloppy fielding. Saturday night the Mets were walked once, didn’t homer at all and received no misfielding largesse. But they did take two for the team at precisely the right time, which helped set up their all-important third hit, the one that one that wasn’t window dressing.
Though it sure was pretty.
by Greg Prince on 14 September 2019 7:20 am Before Friday night’s absolutely useless 9-2 defeat at the hands of the Dodgers, the Mets’ record in their previous 13 games stood at 9-4. Over a span of 45 games, their mark totaled 30-15. For the season as a whole, the Mets entered Friday 76-70.
Each of the “4” in the 9-4 was presumed to have ended their year. Same for most of the “15” in the 30-15 as well as many of the 70 among the “70” portion of the largest aforementioned cohort. The Mets’ year has ended so many times, it’s a wonder it’s still in progress.
Yet it is, despite Clayton Kershaw’s traditional mastery, Noah Syndergaard’s battery-operated discomfort and the general malaise that enveloped Citi Field, save for J.D. Davis homering early. Hence, we’re stuck with 9-5 for our last 14, 30-16 for our last 46 and 76-71 for all of 2019. We’re also three games behind the Cubs with 15 games to play, though only two more of those will be against the preternaturally dominant Dodgers, with none of those versus Kershaw.
So thank heaven for small favors. And for the inability of Kershaw to pitch daily. And for resilience (or its unnecessary cousin resiliency), which has been cited in Mets wins about as often as the bullpen has been sighted imploding in the bulk of those Mets losses that ended the Mets’ year, but didn’t, because, again, it’s still going on.
There are lots of yesterdays. I revel in examining them, you may have noticed over time, but for the purposes of this surprisingly ongoing playoff chase, I have taken the position that there is no yesterday, at least in the sense that it’s worth regretfully rehashing all that went wrong in those myriad losses that seemed to end our year, and oh if only we could have back this pitch or that swing or dozens of highly questionable managerial decisions. We can’t, so don’t sweat it. We can sweat it in winter should we feel the need. Working up a good regretful sweat in the cold is what helps keep us warm.
Also, there is no tomorrow, not in the sense of “the Mets need to take ‘x’ out of ‘y’.” Don’t even. The Mets need to take 1 of 1. Concentrate on the 1 in front of us. Yes, we are the fans and not players, and no, our thoughts do not technically affect the action…but you and I know better than to think in ways harmful to our team.
To sum up then:
1) Think positive if not presumptuous thoughts for tonight’s game, the most important game there is, because it’s the only game the Mets are playing tonight.
2) Somebody get deGrom some runs.
3) Whatever will be will be.
by Jason Fry on 13 September 2019 12:19 pm Let me take you back a little ways, to a not-long-ago iteration of the National League wild-card chase. The Diamondbacks were destiny’s new darlings, winning night after night and all set up for a run at the postseason, with the easiest schedule of any of the remaining contenders.
As for the Mets, they were dead and buried — grievously wounded by a sweep at home courtesy of the Cubs, then given the coup de grace by the Nationals and their own bullpen, which somehow blew a six-run lead in the ninth.
Except for the part where the Diamondbacks rolled into Citi Field, lost two tight games to the Mets, and then got absolutely stomped in the last two.
The fourth game, a Thursday matinee, was another Mets laugher. This time, your multiple-homer Met was Juan Lagares, whose third-inning grand slam made it 6-0 Mets. Todd Frazier homered yet again. So did the revitalized Robinson Cano, Tomas Nido and Michael Conforto, who reached the 30-homer plateau for the first time in his career. Meanwhile, Marcus Stroman had his best start as a Met, keeping the ball down against the D-Backs and forcing them to play patty-cake with the infield. Even the soft underbelly of the bullpen — and honestly, it’s mostly soft underbelly — held up its end.
Oh, and during the game Pete Alonso shaved the dopey mustache he should never have grown in the first place.
The Diamondbacks were one of the other wild-card contenders the Mets needed to lose on Thursday, and they took care of that themselves. Unfortunately, there was no other help coming. The Cubs overcome a frantic ninth to beat the Padres, the Brewers beat the Marlins, and the Phillies outslugged the Braves. That’s another victory for Time, which always wins.
The Dodgers, the league’s best team by a considerable margin, now come to town for three games with the Mets and no pressing business on their agenda except staying healthy for the playoffs. The Cubs and Brewers have both been cruelly shorn of star players, with Javy Baez and Christian Yelich out for the season. The Phillies keep hanging around. The Diamondbacks’ hopes just took a fusillade below the waterline, but we said that about ourselves not so long ago.
You’re probably expecting analysis — strength of schedule, if Team X wins this many games how many games does Team Y need to win, and so forth. But I’m not going to do that. Because re-read the above.
You can’t outguess baseball.
Make that your mantra for the rest of September. Hell, get it tattooed on your arm.
You can’t outguess baseball.
Sometimes Juan Lagares hits a grand slam. Sometimes the hot team turns to ice and gets the broom. The next 16 games will make sense in retrospect, but not as we go. It’ll just be a frantic ride for all involved, with emotions soaring and crashing, hopes extinguished and flickering back to life.
Which honestly, is what September baseball ought to be. Hold on, soak it in … and don’t try to outguess any of it.
by Jason Fry on 12 September 2019 3:30 am Ready to kick that football, Mets fans?
I’m not talking about the unasked-for arrival of a certain inferior sport before its time. Rather, I’m talking about Lucy Van Pelt and her ongoing invitation for Charlie Brown to kick the football she’s holding.
Lucy, you probably remember, invariably yanked the football away, causing poor Charlie Brown to let out a startled AUUGGGHHH! (or something similar) and end up flat on his back, winded and morose. But time heals all wounds, and Charlie Brown wouldn’t be Charlie Brown without an indefatigable optimism in defiance of all that has come before. And so there Lucy would be, football teed up and waiting, sweetly promising that this time it would be different.
This has nothing to do with the Mets’ wild-card chase; I just like “Peanuts” and was thinking about it.
Ha ha.
Of course it has everything to do with the wild card, and whether we can dare to believe yet again in this ragtag outfit, the one with two decent relievers, a dunderheaded manager, untrustworthy owners and a long history of agony. The same ragtag outfit that, despite all that, is also stacked with capable young hitters, has terrific starting pitchers, gets up no matter how many times it’s knocked down and always, always keeps you guessing.
Wednesday night wasn’t much for drama — the Diamondbacks’ Robbie Ray seemed out of sorts in the first inning, was betrayed by his defense and also by his location, and before Ray could blink it was 5-0 Mets and he was out of the game. It never got closer, as Steven Matz shrugged off a bout of wildness in the second and wound up with six innings of shutout ball. The Mets didn’t even have to sweat how to get the usual agonizing six or nine outs after the starter’s work was done, turning mop-up duty over to Jeurys Familia, Paul Sewald and Tyler Bashlor, who acquitted themselves blamelessly. All very nice, and that’s before the satisfying, slightly spooky fact that on a day of 9/11 commemorations, the Mets wound up with nine runs on 11 hits, paced by two-homer games from both Todd Frazier and Jeff McNeil.
A laugher? During a breathless wild-card chase? Well, that was unexpected.
What’s more, after a long stretch where the out-of-town scoreboard was uncooperative, the Mets got help: The Brewers won, but the Braves beat the Phillies and the Padres defeated the Cubs. That leaves the Mets somehow only two out, ahead of Arizona, tied with Philadelphia and eyeing both Chicago and Milwaukee, who now share the second wild card.
By my own rule of thumb, two out with two and a half weeks of baseball remaining is doable. And so here we are again. One more game with the D-Backs, a three-game set with the big, bad Dodgers (who have already clinched, with effects on their bigness and badness to be determined), a road trip to Colorado and Cincinnati, then back home for a four-game stand with the Marlins and, lurking at the end, the Braves — who also will have clinched by then, but who also will still be the Braves. The season has shrunk to something you can memorize easily.
Lucy’s holding the football, and you guys I really swear she’s had a change of heart. Just look at how sweetly she’s smiling, and how perfectly she’s got that pigskin balanced. With a good kick, I bet it would go clear over Snoopy’s doghouse and into the next yard. Maybe even over the house, and wouldn’t be that something?
by Jason Fry on 11 September 2019 2:07 pm Eighteen years ago, I added a new team to my consciousness.
The Brooklyn Cyclones weren’t actually a new club. They were the old St. Catharines Stompers, and spent the summer of 2000 as the Queens Kings, affiliated with the Blue Jays but owned by the Mets and playing before basically nobody at St. John’s. That was a mild farce, but for 2001 their ballpark was ready, their organizational migration was complete, and they became a sensation.
Fans flocked to KeySpan Park, nestled under the Parachute Jump at one end of the raucous, ragged Coney Island strip. Emily and I were often among them that summer. We loved baseball in Brooklyn; we loved being able to opt for an experience that was cheaper, faster and easier than heading out to Shea; and we loved getting to see players near the beginning of their journey to the majors, even if that was a destination most would never reach.
The team’s first star was Angel Pagan, a heartthrob center fielder with a name that belonged to the shoegaze band your kid hoped you hated; Danny Garcia, Justin Huber, Lenny DiNardo and Mike Jacobs would also make the majors from the ’01 squad, which we’d later understand was a pretty good crop. Their coaches were Howard Johnson and Bobby Ojeda, and the manager was a semi-familiar face. Edgar Alfonzo wasn’t a typo — he was Edgardo Alfonzo‘s older brother, a former minor-league infielder.
The Cyclones were a draw — that first summer the stands were filled with young Manhattanites and slumming hipsters — but they were also good. They won their first home game after being down to their last strike and two runs in arrears. They stomped the rest of the New York-Penn League in the regular season, beat the Staten Island Yankees in the first round of the playoffs, and won the first game of the championship round against the Williamsport Crosscutters. After an off-day, the Cyclones would play for the title at home.
That game was scheduled for Sept. 12, 2001. It never took place. With New York and the nation reeling, the rest of the series was called off and the Cyclones and Crosscutters declared co-champions. That’s utterly unimportant, given the lives lost on 9/11 and in the geopolitical aftershocks that are still going on … and yet it isn’t nothing. A summer of walking-on-air bliss ended with the Cyclones robbed of their reward, left with an asterisk that would remind both them and us of far greater losses.
After that giddy first season, the Cyclones became part of the fabric of our summers. Joshua was born in time for the 2003 season — I still smile to remember the look of stunned delight on his face when he learned banging on KeySpan’s metal bleachers and making as much noise as possible was not just OK but actually encouraged, provided you timed it right — and several times each year we’d make the trek down to Coney Island to see the new crop of Cyclones.
KeySpan’s light stanchions were adorned with neon hoops that glowed faintly at dusk and became circles of radiance once night fell. It had pretty good food, clever musical choices, and was, dare I say it, a lot cooler than Shea — there was a sense of giddiness and a certain ironic detachment well-calibrated for bush-league baseball in the big city, and the people who ran the Cyclones were smart about switching between the two. Here’s a snapshot of a typical between-innings moment from the early days: The in-stadium dance troupe, the Beach Bums, are working up a sweat to “Apache” accompanied by a jiggling Sandy the Seagull, who’s basically the Dude from “The Big Lebowski” turned into a mascot. Meanwhile, opposing players used to empty parks far from the bright lights are gaping at the noisy full house surrounding them.
We’ve now been attending Cyclones games for a baseball generation, which has been both an education and an evolution. We’ve adjusted to the fact that the ideal fate for a Cyclone is to go away, with a new roster each year, and we’ve learned that beneath the good times, the low minors are a cruel caste system. That new June roster consists of a handful of valued prospects who will be carefully watched by the Mets and given every chance to fail, and 20-odd teammates who are there to fill out the team and will have to do extraordinary things many times over to get anyone’s attention.
The Cyclones have changed, too. KeySpan is now MCU, with the bleachers turned into seats and turf replacing grass submerged and ruined by Hurricane Sandy. The rough edges have been sanded off — Sandy the Seagull has been slimmed down and genericized, the skits are less raucous, and the Beach Bums have become the more sedate, less-booty-shaking Surf Squad. The crowds are thinner and quieter now, though still impressive for short-season A.
But it’s still baseball by the beach. The Parachute Jump now has neon trappings that make it a nightly vertical light show. There are still goofy uniforms and tongue-in-check giveaways. With the wind off the ocean, it’s still almost impossible to hit it out to right. And of course there are still players with big-league dreams, some of which will come true: Michael Conforto, Brandon Nimmo, Seth Lugo, Paul Sewald, Chris Flexen, Amed Rosario and Pete Alonso were all Cyclones.
Missing for all those years, though, was a title — one without an asterisk. And so, with the Cyclones in the finals and the wild-card chase driving me batty, I decided to play hooky from the Mets on Monday and get a $5 ticket to see the Cyclones take on the Lowell Spinners on Coney Island.
Monday’s game didn’t go well — the Cyclones (now managed by Edgar Alfonzo’s little brother Edgardo) came out flat and were beaten 3-1 to even the series at one game each. It was cool on the beach, chilly even, and the house was two-thirds empty. But I decided to double-down on Tuesday, recap duties be damned. The Cyclones were playing for the title and I wanted to be there.
And so I was. I wore the Mookie shirt I’d made back in 2005, when Mookie Wilson was Brooklyn’s manager. I changed out my Mets-colors BC hat for my old, sun-faded one in the classic navy and red and white. And armed with a new $5 ticket, I hopped on the F train and rode out to Coney Island. The house was still less than packed, but all of Monday’s eccentric, leather-lunged diehards were in their same seats, it was a warmer night, and anything was possible.
I had resolved not to be a completely irresponsible recapper, so while the Cyclones took the field behind starter Nathan Jones, I had Zack Wheeler and the Mets in one ear.
I’ve kept tabs on multiple baseball games at once, but I don’t recall trying to follow simultaneous games closely, and I wasn’t very good at it. I kept getting the audio and the visuals confused, leading to people looking at me in puzzlement as I clapped for something good the Mets were doing while something bad was happening for the Cyclones, and vice versa. In my ear, Wheeler was holding the fort and the Mets were jumping on Todd Frazier‘s back in an effort to put the Diamondbacks behind them in the wild-card scrum. Before my eyes, the Cyclones were up 2-0, lost the lead on a single by Lowell’s burly Joe Davis and a defensive gaffe by Ranfy Adon, and fell behind 3-2 when Mitch Ragan served up a home run to Marino Campana.
But all was not lost. In the bottom of the seventh, Jake Mangum singled, Antoine Duplantis tripled Mangum in to tie the game, and Yoel Romero spanked a single to left for the lead. Pitching for the title in the ninth, Andrew Edwards surrendered a leadoff single and then a one-out walk. But Edwards fanned the next hitter, and then struck out Lowell’s Alex Erro for the title.
That was Brooklyn’s first title since 2001, its first ever if asterisks aren’t your thing, and the first pro-baseball crown in the borough since 1955. After a whole lot of “wait till next year,” next year was now. I stood in the stands, taking incompetent pictures and grinning at the sight of young men hurling cheap bubbly on each other. Edgardo Alfonzo thanked God, his players and the fans and got a Gatorade bath. King Henry mugged and Sandy and Pee Wee capered and the hoops glowed against the dark ocean and the Parachute Jump coruscated and if you’re thinking that sounds like a lot of fun, yes, it was.
And then it was time to go — and to worry about the Mets. As the F train trundled back across Brooklyn, Wheeler departed with the Mets up 3-1 and it was time for Mickey Callaway‘s nightly game of “Where in the hell do I get six outs?”
Brad Brach got the first of the six, surrendered a homer to Eduardo Escobar to bring Arizona within 3-2, then got the second. Enter Justin Wilson, who gave up a walk but then ended the eighth with the Mets still in the lead.
The Mets tallied nothing in the bottom of the eighth, but now I had a dilemma. Coming back from Coney Island, the F train is elevated before Church Avenue, dips underground for a few stops, re-emerges at 4th and 9th but then descends again before Carroll Street. Soon after Carroll I’d have to switch lines or ride the F an extra stop and walk.
With Lugo unavailable, Wilson would have to secure a four-out save, and I was pretty sure his stand-or-fall moment would come while I was underground, with no service. Wilson surrendered a leadoff single to Nick Ahmed, who advanced to second on Carson Kelly‘s groundout. Kevin Cron then singled, moving Ahmed to third — and my train was pulling into Smith and 9th, the last aboveground station on my trip.
I could get out and walk, but that would be a miserable trek if Mickey brought in Edwin Diaz to blow the game, which seemed entirely possible. So I got off the train at Smith to wait, peering out at the Gowanus and the ever-rising downtown Brooklyn beyond it and Manhattan beyond that.
Wilson got Ketel Marte to ground to Alonso, who stepped on first and then — strangely — threw not to second for the tag play but to third to hold Ahmed. There were two outs and the Mets still had the lead, but Alonso had passed up a chance to end the game.
Up strolled our old friend Wilmer Flores, and my evening had became a circle. Flores was signed by Roberto Alfonzo, Edgar and Edgardo’s brother, and played for the Cyclones in 2008, when he was all of 16 years old. The first Cyclones game I saw this year was in Staten Island, where I sat eight feet from a rehabbing Justin Wilson and somehow didn’t recognize him in a Brooklyn uniform. Now, those two — a Cyclone and a Cyclone with an asterisk — would decide things.
Oh, and the next train was pulling into the station. Should I get on and risk having my phone go silent before matters were decided? Or wait for the next train, whenever that would come?
I got on, urging Wilson to hurry up. The train sat in the station — the F train I’d let go on without me was stopped ahead of it. Wilson threw Wilmer a 1-2 cutter, which he swung through. The Mets had won. And a moment later, the conductor told us to stand clear of the closing doors and my train was on its way through the night.
A title in Brooklyn, a key game won in Queens, a cooperative train on a line connecting the two. Sometimes, if you let it, the city will love you back.
by Greg Prince on 10 September 2019 12:30 pm There was a clinching at Citi Field on Monday night. Nothing involving a Wild Card, except for the Mets assuring themselves at least one more evening keeping time at the pennant race party. Nothing definitive for the previously surging Diamondbacks, either, except for confirming our suspicions that Wilmer Flores would make us remember him at his best (winking and rounding bases). Nothing was clinched in the Cy Young derby though if anybody wants to vote Jacob deGrom a second consecutive award, his seven innings of three-hit ball — Wilmer’s inevitable homer notwithstanding — represented convincing electioneering. Also, nothing was resolved in the blistering case of Syndergaard v. Ramos, wherein Wilson, we are reminded, is nobody’s personal catcher, yet he’s undeniably everybody’s community hitter.
What was clinched in the Mets’ 3-1 victory over Arizona was that the Met with the most home runs this season will have more home runs than the Met with the most saves this season will have saves.
Got that? Allow me to elaborate.
Pete Alonso, the Met with the most home runs in any season, socked a pair to raise his total to 47. Breathe that in for a moment. A Met has 47 home runs. It was a big deal when Pete got to 42. Pete just keeps getting more. He has a shot at leading all of baseball at losing baseballs, which he’s already doing. He’s within reach of 50, which nobody anywhere used to hit more than maybe once per baseball generation. He can share the rookie record of 52 with Aaron Judge or, preferably, set a new one with 53.
For now, besides supporting deGrom in furthering what’s left of the Mets’ playoff push, Alonso has achieved the championship of Mets Home Runs vs. Mets Saves, an admittedly little-known competition. Basically, it’s known only to me…and now, you.
Here’s the deal. Early this season, around the time it became apparent that Alonso could set the Mets single-season home run standard, and I began tracking Pete’s progress versus Todd Hundley in 1996 and Carlos Beltran in 2006, I was struck by a related statistical note. Alonso, this rookie who wasn’t guaranteed to begin 2019 on the major league roster, had more home runs than Edwin Diaz, winner of the 2018 Mariano Rivera AL Reliever of the Year Award (which, sadly, is a thing), had saves. Diaz saved 57 games for the Seattle Mariners. He was the kind of closer you could count on to pile saves up, which explained why his presence among us was initially considered a blessing rather than a curse. If the Mets had leads, Diaz would come in and protect them. We saw it early on, when the Mets won five of their first six games, and Edwin saved three of them.
Yet about a quarter-way into 2019, I noticed that Diaz’s save total, while reasonably healthy, had grown stagnant compared to the home run hurricane blowing out to all fields via the new slugger in town. In one sense, it was understandable. Diaz couldn’t save games the Mets weren’t winning, and the Mets weren’t winning all that many games. Meanwhile, an everyday player can hit home runs every day (more than one a day, as Alonso demonstrated Monday) regardless of whether his team winds up winning them.
On the other hand, it had been my core belief for the past thirty or so years that closers in Queens, no matter how unreliable we considered them, stack saves like farmers in the Midwest stack wheat. A decade of exposure to John Franco, who drove me and everybody else crazy, reinforced this notion because as much as we complained about him, boy he could stack saves, so how bad could he be? Never mind that the save already stood on shaky analytical ground if you gave it a few minutes’ thought. You could pick them apart, yet they were still saves. They were receipts showing that a game was won and that a relief pitcher entrusted with providing the effective relief necessary to seal it had done exactly that. They stacked up in the Elias silo. Stack enough and they’d give you an award named for Rolaids before it is eventually renamed for some Yankee.
Thus, I came to believe saves were cheap and home runs were precious, for while John Franco was saving game after game for teams that were mostly not very good through the 1990s, few Mets were hitting a ton of home runs. Once Darryl Strawberry left and Howard Johnson ebbed, there was Hundley with those 41 in ’96 and…well, that was about it. Even when the Mets picked up the power pace in the late ’90s and early ’00s, nobody surpassed Todd. That’s how you wind up with a franchise record that gets passed in August.
With me conceiving the save as a commodity and the homer as a gem, I sort of assumed we almost always harbored an established closer with more saves than we featured a slugger — whoever our top slugger of a given year was — with dingers. But that was just my impression. Was my impression correct? Or was it just something I thought without supporting evidence, like the thing about farmers stacking wheat?
I did a little digging on Baseball-Reference. It turned out I was a little off in my presumptions. Usually throughout Met history, the team’s leading home run hitter has had more home runs than the team’s leading save-earner has had saves. This was especially the case when the franchise was young, saves weren’t yet official, and nobody thought to automatically turn what few Met leads existed over to a designated reliever. In 1962, when Frank Thomas was swatting 34 homers out of the Polo Grounds and other mostly no-longer-with-us yards, Casey Stengel only had 40 wins to steer to a conclusion. Unsurprisingly, the 1962 Mets’ leader in retroactively calculated saves didn’t wind up with many. He practically didn’t have any. Craig Anderson notched 4, leaving Thomas 30 ahead in the HR vs SV category I’d just invented.
The entire Mets pitching staff recorded 10 saves that inaugural season. Roger Craig, who led the team in wins with 10, finished second in saves with 3, including the very first one notched by a Met, on May 6, versus the Phillies at Connie Mack Stadium. Craig entered in the twelfth, relieving Anderson, who earned the win after pitching four innings of relief himself, or long enough for Gil Hodges to break a 5-5 tie with a two-run single off Phils reliever Art Mahaffey. Between them, Roger Craig and Craig Anderson started 47 games, which hints at how little specialization was attached to bullpen duty in 1962. (Hell, Mahaffey started 39 games for the Phillies that year, winning 19 of them.)
Thomas only held his single-season home run record until Dave Kingman came along in 1975, but the one he has where topping Anderson is concerned stands to this day. No leading Mets slugger has outpointed the leading Mets saver so decisively since. The gap would close once Thomas was traded, the Mets got a little better, and relief pitching gained respectability — in 1968, the Year of the Pitcher (starting and relief) Ed Charles’s team-leading 15 HRs barely beat out Ron Taylor’s team-leading 14 SVs — but it wasn’t until 1972 when saves gained prominence for a spell. Tug McGraw led the Mets with 27 of them, whereas John Milner’s 17 homers were the most any Met hitter could manage; this was also the season when no individual Met mustered 100 base hits. Tug stuck it to the Hammer again the following year, thanks to his glorious late-season surge: McGraw 25, Milner 23.
These years turned out to be historical aberrations. It took incredibly wan hitting on the part of the Mets to elevate a closer to statistical advantage. For example, in 1977, when three Mets (Milner, Steve Henderson and John Stearns) shared the sorriest-ever Mets home run leadership number with 12, it wasn’t tough for Skip Lockwood to blow past them with 20 saves. In 1980, the year the Mets as a whole pop-gunned all of 61 homers, their leader was Lee Mazzilli, with 16. The door was open for new closer Neil Allen to eclipse that total with 22. The 1977 and 1980 Mets won 64 and 67 games, respectively, yet their most successful saver could post save totals that placed them in the league’s top five each year. No wonder saves began to seem easily attainable, the chip shot extra points of baseball.
The next time saves beat homers was 1984 was when Jesse Orosco’s 31 shattered Tug’s team record from ’72. A year later, the era of Gary Carter, Strawberry and Hojo fully kicked in, while Davey Johnson saw the wisdom in apportioning save opportunities between Orosco and Roger McDowell. Hence, the rest of the 1980s belonged to the sluggers. So did the early 1990s, even as Franco settled in with save after save, including a team record 33 in 1990.
Those were the first 33 in a Met tenure that would conclude with a franchise-best 276 saves, a total 24 above the Mets career home run standard of 252 set by Straw. Funny how comparable home run and save totals can be — and curious how in the Met world saves seem to have a knack for outnumbering homers once you’re lost amid Met history’s nooks and crannies.
Indeed, the tide turned in favor of the bullpen starting in 1994, very much a nook & cranny kind of year, when Franco’s 30 saves outdistanced Bobby Bonilla’s 20 home runs (and a strike precluded anybody from totaling anything else after August 11). Franco also defended the pen’s honor in truncated 1995, with 29 saves to Rico Brogna’s 22 homers in 144 games. Hundley’s career year made home runs the de rigueur statistical indicator in Flushing for a summer, but Franco was back at it again in 1997 and 1998. Maybe if Hundley were fully healthy or Mike Piazza had been obtained earlier than late May, it would have been a different story, but no, Johnny from Bensonhurst’s 36 and 38 saves those two seasons (each a new Mets mark) were more powerful than anything any slugging Mets catcher could produce.
You’d think Piazza, Met legend he was so rightly becoming, would have crushed his bullpen batterymates in this phantom competition, but that wasn’t Mike’s style. Sure, in 1999, with newcomer Armando Benitez taking over the closing role midseason and Mike challenging Todd’s standard, it was Piazza in a breeze (40 HR to 22 SV), but not so much in 2000 and 2001, for even as Mike was slugging just swell (38, 36), Benitez was at his shall we say best: 41 saves in ’00, then 43 in ’01, each of them a Mets record.
Then came the Home Run/Save Solstice. In 2002, Armando Benitez saved (or at least didn’t blow) 33 ballgames and Mike Piazza hit 33 home runs. We had statistical parity between our top closer and our top slugger. Peace in our time in this narrowly defined realm had arrived for the only time in Mets history.
After that, it was a bit of a see-saw. Armando left our part of town in July of 2003, but his good-on-paper 21 saves proved too much for any single Met slugger to equal let alone top. Beltran grabbed a one-homer edge on Billy Wagner in 2006 (41 to 40 saves); Wagner grabbed it right back in 2007 (34 saves to 33 home runs). When Wagner went down in August of 2008, Carlos Delgado poached the crown back on behalf of the sluggers (38 to 27); when everybody who could slug went down across the vast wasteland of 2009, Frankie Rodriguez created the largest lead savers ever enjoyed over sluggers to end a season (35 to 12, the latter figure belonging to unlikely team home run leader Daniel Murphy). Not that sluggers from other teams weren’t figuring out K-Rod by September, but that’s another story.
Jeurys Familia, who you may remember from such sentences as “Jeurys Familia may be the MVP of this team” and “I can’t believe Terry Collins didn’t use Jeurys Familia in the All-Star Game,” overpowered the power-hitters on his own team. Even in 2015, when Flores etched his name with the Met consciousness forever on the strength of a dramatic home run on July 31, presaging a stretch run whose skies were filled with the darn things. Even in 2016, when the Mets rode a penchant for the long ball — seemingly to the exclusion of singles, doubles and triples — to a second consecutive playoff spot, their closer topped the best they could send to the plate. Yoenis Cespedes (who you may not remember) whacked 31 homers? Jeurys Familia answered with 51 saves, by far the most in Mets history.
Just as the notion of topping 50 home runs boggled the mind of a fan who grew up when nobody produced 50 home runs, exceeding 50 saves, whatever you thought of saves…well, that was a ton of saves. And no Met had produced as many home runs as Jeurys Familia had accumulated saves, lending credence to that core belief that was the premise for my keeping track of this stuff: that at the uppermost level of a given Met roster in any season, saves were easier to attain than home runs were to hit.
Pete Alonso is not specifically targeting Familia’s 51 from 2016 in the mythical chase of large Met numbers by Met players tasked with clearly distinct responsibilities. Pete also wasn’t specifically taking on Diaz in 2019, except in my bookkeeping. Yet on Monday night, by going deep for a 47th time this year, the Polar Bear made sure Sugar couldn’t catch him, therefore clinching the Sluggers a 39th internal championship over the Savers, who have taken the title 18 times (plus that one tie). Good ol’ Edwin has been stuck on 25 saves for several weeks; he’s 22 behind Alonso with 19 to play.
Had Mickey Callaway asked the nominally defending Rivera Awardee to save deGrom’s win over the D’Backs; and had he somehow saved it; and had Diaz been suddenly imbued with the spirit of 1973 Tug McGraw and gone on to save every Mets game for the rest of 2019, including a Wild Card tiebreaker or two; and had Pete pledged to keep his shirt on for the rest of the season, then we could have been theoretically looking at a possible 47-47 deadlock between Diaz and Alonso, echoing the moment of saver-slugger détente between Benitez and Piazza. But that was never going to happen. There’s a better chance that Alonso will outdistance Diaz by a margin greater than the 30 by which Thomas put away Anderson way back in the dark ages of 1962.
In reality, when deGrom exited after seven innings, Callaway called on Seth Lugo, a.k.a. Six-Out Seth, to nail down a team victory that was more important than any particular personal achievement, actual or imagined. And Six-Out Seth, being Six-Out Seth, retired all six Snakes who attempted to bite him. It became the fifth save for Lugo, whose prescribed usage (two innings one night, no innings for the rest of the week, apparently) precludes him from catching Diaz for most saves by a Met closer this season under any dream scenario. That’s perfectly all right, though. The best sluggers generally hit the most homers, but as we’ve deduced over these past three decades, the reliever with the most saves isn’t necessarily your best bet to close a game.
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