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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 6 August 2019 11:23 am “At 10:13 P.M., it became officially official. The Cubs had lost, 6-2. Even if the Mets lost the second game, they would still be first. Millennium, we are here. But the Mets were no longer in a mood to lose anything.”
—Leonard Koppett, on the Mets taking first place as they swept a doubleheader from the Montreal Expos at Shea Stadium, September 10, 1969
The bottom of the fifth inning of the second game of Monday night’s Mets-Marlins doubleheader began promisingly but ended in frustration, as J.D. Davis’s leadoff double went to waste. I really thought it was going to lead to something, especially as Juan Lagares worked a three-two count versus Sandy Alcantra, but Lagares wound up fouling out, and the next two batters went down in order.
The bottom of the sixth inning of the second game of Monday night’s Mets-Marlins doubleheader also began promisingly and also ended in frustration, as two hits to start the frame — a solid liner to left from Pete Alonso and Wilson Ramos’s grounder that couldn’t be properly plucked from the ground by shortstop Miguel Rojas — resulted in nothing but two stranded runners. Luis Guillorme attempted to bunt Alonso and Ramos up a base, but Luis bunted too hard and Pete was out at third. Adeiny Hechavarria proceeded to strike out and pinch-hitter Todd Frazier grounded out.
Hence, the Mets were going to the seventh behind Miami, 4-2. It was a game in which little was going right. Two quick runs in the first were eventually negated and surpassed. After the Marlins outlasted Walker Lockett, your classic nightcap callup starter providing a classic nightcap callup starter start (4.2 IP, 8 H, 2 BB), Curtis Granderson, a former favorite in these parts, dipped into the box of Forrest Gump-context chocolates that is Robert Gsellman and rattled a two-run double to left that put the Marlins up by two in the top of the fifth. Given that we’d already lost Jeff McNeil to a calf cramp, necessitating the immediate depleting of an already thin bench, things didn’t look as good as they did in the first game.
The first game didn’t look all that great at an early interval, either, as Jacob deGrom briefly forgot how much he loves pitching at home in the sunshine, but Jake straightened himself out around the third inning and the Mets hit more than they usually do on his behalf. McNeil, when his calf was purring, led off Robert Dugger’s major league debut by belting the first pitch that young fellow ever threw at this level over the right field fence; how’s that for a classic callup start? Amed Rosario added another solo home run in the third. In the fourth, deGrom, who’s attended myriad rodeos in which two runs aren’t enough, singled in two runs. Ringing the “helped his own cause” bell seemed to guarantee the opener wouldn’t close badly. And it didn’t. Jake went seven (5 H, 1 BB, 8 SO, 2 ER) and the Mets prevailed, 6-2.
The Mets were a .500 club. Somewhere in Napa Valley, a Mets fan thought, Tom Seaver poured a nice glass of Chardonnay, because he knows .500 is no cause for Champagne. Nevertheless, the rest of us mortals could toast our break-even fortune with a perfectly good sip of whatever we had handy. The Mets hadn’t won as many as they’d lost since late May. The Mets were eleven games from .500 as recently as July 12, when insightful bloggers who diligently watch this team daily and nightly assured their readers, don’t worry, the second half of this season won’t be any better than the first half.
Funny how insights can change. The Mets got to .500 by winning 16 of their next 21 games, right up to and including the first game of this makeup doubleheader on August 5. It was quick and it was stunning and it was productive. The Mets weren’t only chasing mediocrity. They were going after almost every team in the National League, thereby compelling a whole new view of them. The Mets weren’t just another team let alone just another massive letdown of a team. The Mets were now another contender. They may have arrived in this new phase of their 2019 existence on the backs of distant also-rans, but you run where they tell you. They ran over the Padres, the White Sox, the Pirates. Now they left a cleatmark on the heads of the Marlins.
They’d really need to leave another in the second game. Getting to .500 for five minutes isn’t the most satisfying way to spend a Monday evening if you know you’re going to sleep under .500 once again when the night comes. We didn’t know it in the fifth and sixth innings of Game Two, but we could surely sense it. Lockett can’t last. Gsellman can’t get Grandy. We can’t do anything with a leadoff hit one inning or two to commence the next (WTF was with Guillorme bunting?). Robinson Cano, we were told, was gonna be out a long time with a left hamstring tear, and though we were assured McNeil’s cramp was only a cramp, who wants to be without Jeff McNeil ever, never mind in a surge toward the top of a race we’d just entered?
The seventh inning began. Jeurys Familia appeared. If you gave up on Monday at the sight of Jeurys, you could have been forgiven. But you also would have been more wrong than I was on July 12 when I declared the second half a rerun in waiting. Familia, nobody’s best bet since his return from his semester abroad, inflicted no damage to his own team. He did a walk a guy, and the guy did get as far as third on a fielder’s choice and a wild pitch, but the didn’t score. Guys — Jeurys got out of the top of the seventh unscathed.
On one hand, it was still 4-2, Marlins. On the other hand, it was still 4-2, Marlins. It wasn’t a disaster, but it loomed as potentially disheartening. Splitting doubleheaders is a preoccupational hazard of watching them. We won the first game. Losing the second happens regardless. It happens a lot even if doubleheaders rarely transpire anymore. But who wants to lose after winning so much so recently? Momentum is a funny thing. You can’t resuscitate it on demand.
Or can you?
Davis led off the bottom of the seventh with a home run off Jeff Brigham to cut the Marlins’ lead to 4-3. That was certainly a more efficient way to begin an inning than what the Mets tried in the fifth and sixth, so no complaints. But solo homers…boy, I don’t know. Depending on the score, solo homers have a way of sucking the momentum out of a comeback. One run has crossed the plate, one run has been trimmed from a deficit, but there’s nobody on base and now you have to climb a mountain again from scratch. When Lagares fouled out and Rosario grounded out, we appeared stuck at base camp.
While the next batter, Michael Conforto, went about battling Brigham toward a full count, and I calculated all that was not going to work to our advantage, Stephanie called from upstairs with a message:
“Home run!”
Yes, I said, Davis hit a home run earlier, that was nice. It was also nice that when my lovely wife went into the bathroom to get herself ready for bed that she didn’t change the station from WCBS-AM, where I’d left it earlier in the evening, to WCBS-FM, as she usually does (because how can a person nod off without one more playing of “Hotel California”?). The Mets must be doing OK if Stephanie’s not automatically tuning out the Mets.
No, she reiterated as if I didn’t understand what she was trying to tell me:
“Home run!”
Wait a sec. I suddenly got what was going on. The radio has been ahead of the TV all season. Sometimes they’re in sync. Lately they haven’t been. She’s heard me shriek from the upstairs bathroom over Met home runs that she had yet to notice on the TV downstairs because they hadn’t happened yet on the TV downstairs. Now she was upstairs with the radio. She doesn’t shriek, but she does deliver:
“Home run!”
And on the TV in the living room, Conforto indeed delivered. It was the home run I’d been hearing so much about for seconds on end. I knew it was coming, but I shrieked anyway. These solo home runs, in whatever medium they materialize, may not be so bad after all.
The Mets were tied, 4-4. For the first time since McNeil was convinced not to push his cramp any further in the third, I was fully present in the idea we could sweep. Stephanie and I both watched on television as Alonso built a full count of his own. Pete hadn’t homered in what seemed like an ice age. There had been only nine consecutive games without one of his Arctic blasts, but we had gotten used to these things coming around every couple of days. The rookie, unfortunately, was gaining experience in slumping. It was pretty much the only thing he hadn’t done since appearing fully formed in our lives in late March.
I don’t know if Pete Alonso has emerged from his slump, but I do know that he interrupted it very effectively in the bottom of the seventh inning of the second game of Monday night’s Mets-Marlins doubleheader. Against Jeff Brigham, somehow still on the mound, the Polar Bear struck like the Polar Bear does, lining a fastball into the leftest portion of the left field stands. It didn’t rise particularly high, but it exited forcefully. When it did, it changed the scoreboard once more: Mets 5 Marlins 4.
High-fives were exchanged. Stephanie went to bed. She can sleep through the endings of games like these. Go figure.
The only thing left for the Mets to do for those of us remaining awake was not blow it. “Don’t Blow It” is coincidentally my new nickname for Edwin Diaz. Diaz pitched the ninth of Game One with a four-run lead. “Don’t blow it,” I said. It was a non-save situation. We used to worry abut Diaz pitching in non-save situations. Lately we just worry about him pitching in situations. He didn’t look particularly sharp, but he didn’t blow it. Way to go, Edwin! Also, because he expended 28 pitches in securing three outs, there was no way Mickey Callaway was going to ask him to do anything in the second game. Seriously, way to go, Edwin!
Seth Lugo, National League Reliever of the Month for July (there are all sorts of awards nobody ever told us existed before we started receiving them), came on for the first three of the six outs required to make this an excellent night. Mr. July continued to master August as well. Grandy worked him to three-and-two, but grounded out to Pete. Harold Ramirez struck out. Lewis Brinson grounded to Rosario, who threw successfully to Alonso. That took care of the eighth. What of the ninth?
Have you met Seth Lugo? He’s the defending National League Reliever of the Month, you know, and he doesn’t appear in the mood to hand the trophy, assuming there is a trophy, over to anybody else. Starlin Castro grounded to short. Bryan Holoday fanned. Garrett Cooper grounded to second. It took only eight pitches in the ninth for Lugo to register a six-out save. And with Six-Out Seth in command, the Mets had become, for the first time since the world was young, a winning team.
We were and are 57-56. Maybe Tom Terrific would sanction a gulp of the bubbly to celebrate this little accomplishment that shook 41 Seaver Way to its exhilaration-starved core. One Game Over isn’t much in the picture we hope enlarges to encompass more, but climbing above .500 was a step that needed to be taken and therefore a step worth savoring. More savoring came later, for once Monday’s West Coast action was completed, we could luxuriate in knowing we’d hopped over Arizona and San Francisco. We now sit in fourth Second Wild Card place, 2½ from the top of the playoff qualification heap…though who can sit amid this much excitement let alone sleep? Because we swept before we slept, we gained ground on everybody. Clever of these Mets opting to play and win two games when others were settling for no more than one.
On June 29, when the Mets commemorated their 1969 championship, Ed Kranepool expressed best wishes to the 2019 squad, urging them to do something memorable with the approximate half-season they had remaining. “They can do it like we did,” Ed insisted. At the time, the current Mets were 37-46 and mired in a six-game losing streak. They proved so inspired by the Krane’s words that they charged out after those beautiful ceremonies and lost to the Braves, 5-4. I appreciated that Eddie thought to include the Mets of the moment in his remarks, yet I took his upbeat assessment of their chances as some combination of politeness, sentimentality and nuts.
But what the hell do I know? Other than that I now root for a team with a winning record and a stake in a pennant race?
by Greg Prince on 5 August 2019 10:59 am This is just like that other year when the Mets were diddling around for almost four months, then got hot and catapulted themselves into a playoff chase already in progress. Do you remember that other year?
You don’t. Because this is a new one on us. You’d think after 58 years, we’d have seen it all, but there’s always something new to see with these Mets and this baseball of theirs. Keeps one from growing complacent.
This isn’t 1969, when the Mets were already good in early August yet still a few weeks from making up serious ground on the Cubs. This isn’t 1973 or 2001, when the Mets weren’t close to being done diddling yet. This isn’t 2015, when we stressed over the Mets not hitting a whit into late July because for all their offensive futility, they had hovered close to the catchable Nationals all season, so how about getting a Cespedes-type, Sandy? This isn’t 2016 when the Mets modeled frustrating ambivalence regarding whether they truly wanted to defend their league championship before deciding that as long as they were still hanging around, they might as well play like defending champions. This isn’t a 1980, 1991 or 2002 when the Mets strained to contend only to fall thuddingly off the table right about now. This isn’t a 1975 or 2005 when the Mets always seemed one meaningful and ultimately unattainable roll from undeniable legitimacy. This isn’t 1981 when a once-in-a-lifetime HYPERSPACE button was pushed by the powers that be, clearing the first-half, pre-strike screen and giving the Mets a fresh start and genuine split-season hope.
This is 2019, when the Mets diddled, twiddled and resolved (“come get us”) to no effect whatsoever, allowing almost everybody in the National League to pass them, yet quietly never fell so far from the pack that it was statistically impossible to imagine them drifting upward. Implausible, perhaps. Impossible, apparently not.
So as I sat and watched the Mets pour the Pirates into the confluence of the Allegheny and the Monongahela rivers to form the mighty Ohio of National League Wild Card opportunity (three games out of something!), I felt a welcome unreality wash over me. I guess it’s real. If it is real, it’s real weird, but I welcome the weirdness, too.
A week ago, after sweeping the Pirates, I wouldn’t have associated these Mets with contention. A week from now, who knows? I’ve seen that our “playoff odds” have increased dramatically of late. I believe “playoff odds” are the stupidest baseball thing I’ve ever heard of more than I believe the Mets will be fully in a playoff race a week from now. I’ve got “games behind” and “games remaining” and the ability to imagine outcomes and scenarios both pleasant and regrettable. I don’t need “playoff odds”.
Which is not to say the oddity of the Mets being here is unwelcome. More than two-thirds into a season whose essential character is yet to be determined, I’ll tell you who else was at last tentatively welcomed into our finicky graces: Robinson Cano. Perhaps not for five years, but at last for this year. For this week, certainly. The odd outburst aside, we didn’t see what made Cano that feared hitter everybody swore he had been until a few days ago when his bat heated up and resembled lumber that had been burning since the invention of fire. On Sunday, it couldn’t have scalded more, connecting as it did for a double in the first, a double in the third and a sure double in the fourth, except between first and second, Cano stopped dead with a single and a hamstring strain.
I get the feeling we all had the same reaction: “thoughts and prayers” for Robbie’s well-being, and sincere, heartfelt sympathy for his 10-for-17 hot streak…not to mention the role it was playing in our recent success. I don’t necessarily think we were being wholly transactional, either. Nobody wants to see anybody suffer an injury, but if it’s an athlete doing in-his-prime athlete things — even if his prime is behind him — it hurts that much more. Dave Kingman keeping pace with Hack Wilson before ill-advisedly diving for a Phil Niekro fly ball in 1976. Cliff Floyd checking out of a 12-for-18 surge and checking in for heel surgery in 2003. Robinson Cano, the old man playing young again, halting in his tracks for who knows how long. It must have really been bad, because Cano didn’t make the slightest move to get back to first, standing still and waiting to be tagged as if there weren’t an inning going on (walk a few feet in somebody else’s hamstring before judging, I remind myself).
Missing Cano for the final five innings Sunday didn’t affect the outcome of a 13-2 romp that was already 8-0 when our heretofore permanent cleanup hitter gingerly departed the playing field. Whether or not there was a clear-cut Cano causation to the Mets winning nine of their past ten, we don’t know if this IL trip will create a crimp worse than the one that has Dom Smith sidelined until September. It sure doesn’t help. Then again, these Mets have become these Mets on the bats and arms of many, especially the arms. The untraded Noah Syndergaard showed no mercy on the Pirates, keeping them off the board until the seventh and taking a seat after 91 pitches only because it was a little warm out there.
Noah was succeeded to the mound by Donnie Hart, whom you’ve heard of now. Hart, a lefty who tossed a scoreless eighth, is the kind of August pickup available to contenders, someone cast off by some other organization (Milwaukee waived him). There will be no clever trades for Addison Reed or Fernando Salas as September approaches. Savvy grabs at the waiver wire and insightful scouting of the Atlantic League represent the best chances for fringe improvement. You gotta have an arm that you haven’t already shuttled up from Syracuse ten times before? Then you gotta have Hart.
Also not getting injured is a good idea for the Mets who still stand upright. Fortunately, Michael Conforto and J.D. Davis, each of whom homered off Pirate starter Joe Musgrove, appear in tip-top shape; Davis’s ball left PNC Park and might have landed in Forbes Field. Jeff McNeil, rested part of Saturday, also looks ready and rarin’ to go after homering in his second consecutive game. Pete Alonso, directed to take a breather from his unprecedented rookie slump (unprecedented for him, that is; rookies have them as a matter of course), came off the bench and played stellar defense at least. Amed Rosario doesn’t miss games and lately doesn’t miss balls hit in his vicinity. Hits balls pretty well, too.
Meld this core to Syndergaard, deGrom, Wheeler and the better Long Island angels of Matz and Stroman; cross your fingers that bullpen alchemy has become a core competency of Callaway & Co.; get lucky with the scoreboard-watching in this seven-team scramble for a pair of postseason passes…and this unforeseen entry into unreality can continue to be fun. That would make it the opposite of what the Mets were for almost the entire first two-thirds of 2019, not to mention the bulk of 2018 and 2017.
We can definitely welcome that.
by Jason Fry on 4 August 2019 12:00 am Saturday night found me in Tampa, Fla. Having finished a long day selling books at a convention, I headed out to meet writer friends for dinner. But I had other companions with me: the confounding, vexing, entertaining, and above all else unpredictable 2019 New York Mets.
I was early and the restaurant had Wi-Fi, so I sat down at the bar, fired up MLB At Bat and watched a blocky simulacrum of Marcus Stroman struggle into view. This wasn’t some weird new Gameday wrinkle, but the video feed doing the best it could with an uncertain connection and limited bandwidth. Which was fine with me, even as various gray blocks and rectangles performed what looked like a Dire Straits video version of pitching: It reminded me of watching on a snowy TV, a concept that will soon have multiple generations of baseball fans exchanging baffled shrugs.
The signal sorted itself out after a few minutes and there was Stroman, compact and coiled and wearing a strange number.
I don’t much care if starting pitchers wear position-player numbers; I save my ire for relievers donning digits that properly belong to February invitees with no chance at going north in April. And I really don’t care about Stroman taking the number that most recently belonged to Jose Reyes, seeing how Bob Geren and Travis d’Arnaud had worn it anyway and Reyes’s second Mets go-round did not do that number proud, to put it more diplomatically than he or the club deserves. But that didn’t mean that it wasn’t a strange sight. Yes, there was somebody on the mound wearing a single-digit number, and no, the Mets weren’t down by 12 in the 8th.
Pretty soon I was wishing Stroman’s work was harder to see. He looked like he was nervous and overthrowing, and his luck was miserable — though if luck is the residue of design, Stroman might have a conversation with his new front office about the thinking behind the infield defense. A 1-0 Met lead against Chris Archer became a 2-1 deficit, and then (with a little help from Luis Avilan), a 3-1 deficit.
By now we’d moved to our table, and while the game was still broadcasting itself into the air from the little rectangle of my phone, I was busy being at least a reasonable facsimile of a decent dining companion. Most of what I saw when I peeked around the glasses and plates made me either impatient or frustrated: The game was grinding along with the Mets not doing much of anything while my phone warned me that its battery life was sinking ever lower.
Jeff McNeil‘s pinch-hit drive caught my eye — I’ve watched enough baseball to be familiar with the visual vocabulary of camera angles and how and why they’re chosen, so I could tell McNeil had connected even without the sound on. Then Amed Rosario doubled, and I got excited, and I unobtrusively picked up my phone to put it in my lap for more careful scrutiny, and then I watched the screen turn black.
I walked back to the hotel with a writer pal and said my farewells, but as I rode up in the elevator my thoughts were focused on Pittsburgh and what might or might not have happened there. Into the room, plug in the phone, navigate the stupid hotel Wi-Fi access screen, remember my phone had powered out and so would need a few minutes to roll the stone away from the zero-power cave. So over to the laptop and again with the stupid hotel Wi-Fi access screen and hope the browser had kept my MLB.tv password.
It had, and the Mets hadn’t tied it. In fact, the Pirates were threatening to make tying it harder, with Starling Marte stealing third with one out and Melky Cabrera (who before last week I would have sworn had retired about four years ago) at the plate. I had my bearings, but it looked like the Pirates were about to make my hurried preparations look pointless and vaguely sad.
Then Cabrera hit into a double play. And a few minutes after that Robinson Cano had doubled off the wall and Wilson Ramos came up and clubbed a ball into the seats. After a neat-as-a-pin inning by Seth Lugo, Ramos came up again and bashed a ball over the head of Pablo Reyes, who was in the game to prevent such things.
It was 7-3 Mets, and they’d need those extra runs, as Edwin Diaz was predictably terrible again, as he’s been with maddening metronome-like regularity since the beginning of May. I know Mickey Callaway thinks all change should occur at the pace of continental drift, but this is getting ridiculous. Diaz, one hopes, will be an important asset in the Mets’ future, but he’s a liability in the team’s present and there’s no sign that things are getting better. Let Lugo close and Diaz fix what’s so thoroughly broken in less of a tightrope role, because the Mets can’t survive much more of whatever’s wrong with him.
Ramos, meanwhile, had a career game in what’s also been a funny season. Like so many other 2019 Mets, he’s simultaneously endearing and confounding, a big block of a man whose stolidity comes with an undercurrent of ironic detachment. There’s a twinkle in the eye and a slight curl of the lip that suggests Ramos is A Man Who’s Seen Some Shit, as any player who survives to attain the status of veteran catcher certainly has.
Ramos’s hitting has been solid enough when he’s not required to beat out anything on the infield, a skill deficit for which he can hardly be blamed. His catching, though, has encouraged us to rethink our undying hatred for the DH. He’s looked slow on balls in the dirt and indifferent as a receiver, with both Jacob deGrom and Noah Syndergaard clearly preferring to throw to someone who is Not Wilson Ramos. Grading that combination of plusses and minuses has very much depended on what the Mets have done on a given night.
For this night, at least, Ramos outhit his deficiencies — in fact, he demolished them, putting the rest of the Mets on his broad back and carrying them to victory. The pace might have been extremely slow — continental drift comes to mind again — but the destination was safely attained, and it was enough.
by Greg Prince on 3 August 2019 11:00 am The Mets have won seven of their past eight…is a sentence that doesn’t make a Mets fan feel any better when it is understood that the eighth game in that string was the loss. It is as easily understood that seven-game winning streaks don’t automatically grow to eight and nine and so on just because you prefer they do, but geez, it was so close.
Not close when you glance at the final score from Friday night, which says Pirates 8 Mets 4. But close when you watched the Mets grab a 2-0 lead in the first inning on balls hit hard and placed well off Trevor Williams. They left a couple of guys on, but that was OK, because Steven Matz, who shut out these same Pirates at Citi Field on Steven’s last night in town, cruised through the bottom of the first. The Mets looked ready to pounce some more in the second, but didn’t. Also OK, because Matz and his track record of not allowing the Buccos anything but ohs remained in effect.
Come the third, the Mets continued to display their renaissance awesomeness, increasing their lead to 3-0. Even their outs were rockets. Two more LOB — five through three — but, c’mon. The 2019 Mets of early August are a juggernaut. The Pirates are patsies for Matzie. Pittsburgh was even doing us the favor of throwing the same pitcher at us started last Saturday when Steven stifled them. Get the bag so we can put this thing in it!
Say, here’s something you may not have noticed when SNY went to commercial, but trust me, it’s not just something I made up this morning to make a point. Whereas other ballparks bring out a singer to perform “God Bless America” during the seventh-inning stretch on Sundays, PNC Park has an interesting tradition. Come the middle of fourth inning on Friday night, Gilbert O’Sullivan appears to offer a piece of his 1972 smash, “Alone Again (Naturally)”:
But as if to knock me down
Reality came around
And without so much as a mere touch
Cut me into little pieces
Frankly, I don’t get the appeal, but like John Denver and “Thank God I’m A Country Boy” in Baltimore, the locals love it. I assume they do, because Gilbert’s message was as true as the rest of his song about suicide is maudlin. Reality did come around. Matz’s time as master of the Pirates’ domain was up. The ’Burghers hit and hit and hit some more. That was after a leadoff walk. You know what Gilbert O’Sullivan said about bases on balls — they make you throw your 3-0 lead off a nearby tower. In Steven’s case, he didn’t even need to visit the 64-story U.S. Steel Tower at 600 Grant St. The mound at PNC sufficed for his disposal of the Mets’ advantage. Before the fourth inning was over, Matz’s evening as well as his shutout streak were done.
Mets 3 Pirates 0 had cruelly become Pirates 5 Mets 3, as the hard hitting and such on our part also inconveniently ceased. A week before, “cruelly” would have been dramatically overstating the case (though in 1972 “dramatically overstating the case” earned O’Sullivan six weeks at No. 1). But that was late July, when the Mets had won one of their last one and the Wild Card derby was barely within six whiffs of sniffing distance. These Mets of early August, the seven-in-a-row wunderkinder who are shaking up the postseason race from coast to coast (at least in our minds), we take seriously. When we take our Mets seriously, we take every game seriously. We take 3-0 leads seriously and seriously expect them to be increased and defended until they are secured.
Of course we’re pretty rusty at this, having been on pennant-chase hiatus these past couple of summers, so our emotions are going to be a little raw. It’s as if we’re listening to “Alone Again (Naturally)” closely for the first time and experiencing it a little too intensely. In the seventh, feeling marginally less sour, I made that rookie mistake I’ve made in many Augusts: I got my hopes up. The Mets were bearing down again. It was still 5-3. With two out, Michael Conforto singled. Then Pete Alonso singled. Robinson Cano stepped in against Richard Rodriguez and battled. Maybe Cano has battled as a Met before. Usually when I see Cano, I mostly think, “geez, another four years of this?” This time, though, I was pulling for Cano without implications. I needed Robbie to put the bat on the ball and keep this all-important inning going.
This, I remembered, is what a pennant race feels like. It may not have been a pennant race yet; more like Pennantmania, an incredible simulation. Whatever it was, the 2019 Mets winning or losing was suddenly a matter of utmost concern…not just because the Mets winning or losing is a fleeting indicator of self-worth, but because we have momentum to maintain and ground to pick up and what’s the score in Philadelphia, Arizona, Chicago and Colorado, anyway?
Cano did put his bat on the ball. In doing so, he set free a quail that didn’t have long to live. The quail died in a good cause, ticking off the glove of shortstop Kevin Newman in shallow centerfield. It was ruled an error, which assumes a lot of dexterity where Newman’s back-to-the-plate quail-catching abilities are concerned. However it was ruled, Robbie’s dying quail sent Conforto home and Alonso to third. It was 5-4, and the playoff-chasing Mets were off and running to their eighth straight win.
Then reality came around again. Naturally. Wilson Ramos hit a sharp ground ball into the hole between short and third. But Newman, shaking off the guilt attached to letting down Pittsburgh’s official scorer, dove, grabbed it, rose to his feet and fired to first. If you’ve watched Ramos rumble toward first base, you know Newman could have stepped into the next county for a manicure before throwing Wilson out.
So went the rally. So went the Mets’ chances to be unstoppable once Tyler Bashlor entered the proceedings. I guess Mickey Callaway wasn’t intent on winning that eighth game in a row. The Mets won nine in a row under Mickey Callaway at the outset of his managerial tenure and see where it got them. Bashlor has good stuff, I’m pretty sure, but it’s rarely been deployed in the service of getting outs in non-playoff chasing circumstances. It doesn’t accomplish much in potentially headier times, either. Tyler commenced his outing by giving up a long fly ball that PNC Park held; followed it up with two singles; and climaxed his appearance by releasing a gopher into the atmosphere.
First it made contact with the bat of Starling Marte.
Then it was never seen again.
Much like the Mets’ chances in this 8-4 loss. If Phil Regan really wanted to live up to his nickname The Vulture, our wise, veteran pitching coach would have simply swooped in and carried the reliever off in his talons at the first sign of trouble…which was Bashlor departing the bullpen. Alas, with the trade deadline door slammed shut behind us, and so many live, young arms shuttling ’twixt and ’tween ’Cuse and Queens, that’s probably not a solution to our relief corps issues. One of these guys with good stuff needs to assert his talents in a useful manner. Callaway apparently believes Bashlor can be that guy. I’d like to believe it, too, for ’tis the season for believin’. Nevertheless, when SNY runs that commercial asking where the best place is to wear the Hawaiian shirt the Mets will soon be giving away, “over my head while Tyler Bashlor is pitching” is my instinctive response.
Night One as a sub-.500 wing/prayer contender didn’t go very well. Night Two is tonight. Like the Mets, we’re just getting the hang of these kinds of nights. We’re definitely gonna need more of them.
by Greg Prince on 2 August 2019 6:37 am Here are those caveats you asked me to pick up on my way here:
1) Lousy teams sometimes shake off their lousiness for a spell before reverting to lousy.
2) Lousy teams sometimes encounter lousier teams and take advantage of their lousiness.
3) Lousy teams sometimes rise toward .500 without ever touching the break-even point and thus remain definitively lousy.
So there you have your caveats after a week when the Mets — resolutely sub-.500 through the entire second third of the season — played like they were no more than the least bit lousy. Mostly they played like they were the opposite of lousy.
They were swell.
We all like to fancy ourselves as savvy sumbitches who’ve experienced myriad rodeos, so no way we’ll be duped by a Mets team that has recently stumbled into competition it can serially punch down at. Make no mistake: the Padres, Pirates and White Sox have come off as the scrawny 98-pound weaklings Charles Atlas appealed to in the back of your Archie comics. But who have the Mets modeled themselves after since early April other than Popeye in the scenes before Olive Oyl pours spinach down his gullet? Besides, our institutional memory is layered with images of better Met teams than this getting their comeuppance from below at the worst possible junctures — or have you suddenly forgotten the final weekends of Shea’s final seasons? Your schedule is your schedule. The Mets were scheduled to succeed at the expense of others? Take it up with MLB’s randomization software.
The Mets caught a long overdue break playing who they’ve played. On Thursday afternoon at the badly named ballpark on Chicago’s South Side, they also caught balls in the infield that were ticketed for the outfield. One Met caught a ball while he sproing-g-g-ged off the protective right field netting. The Mets caught and the Mets pitched. Oh boy, did the Mets pitch. Mets who are signed for the long haul and Mets who might have been traded. They’re all Mets right now and they’re all pitching like we envision Mets pitchers pitching when we stare admiringly in the mirror at our bulging seven-game winning streak.
When the Mets win, so our mythology tells us, we win by decisively outpitching the other fellows. That’s largely how we did it on Tuesday before Noah Syndergaard was withdrawn from the annual midsummer swap meet. That’s how we did it on Wednesday as Jacob deGrom reminded us he’s been the bargain of this decade and not a bad bet for the one ahead. And that’s how we did it on Thursday via Zack Wheeler, whose shoulder appeared strong and whose uncertainty was shed. No longer rumored to be headed for a contender, Wheeler threw a game for a team that strangely behaves like it is one. Zack was golden for seven shutout innings en route to a 4-0 victory that pulled the Mets to within four games of the second Wild Card spot in the National League.
Stop giggling, you cynical fucks (one of whom is periodically me). The second Wild Card spot in the National League is a thing and four games out of it plops us squarely within Dusty Springfield territory. We’re wishin’ and hopin’, thinkin’ and prayin’. There’s a jumble of teams less than four games from the second Wild Card spot in the National League, but that’s only half as many jumbles as we peered up at approximately ten minutes ago. We needed to pass a passel of lesser squads and we did that. Now, as we home in on achieving a record that encompasses as many victories as defeats, we take aim at the next cluster. We may not have yet proved ourselves worldbeaters, but you’re gonna tell me that Wild Card bunch in front of us is impenetrable?
If two among the Cubs, the Brewers, the Phillies, the Nationals, the Diamondbacks and the Giants were that good, they would have shoved our sorry 53-55 butts into standings irrelevancy. Yet they haven’t. Instead, by effectively stifling the Padres, the Pirates and the White Sox, we have inflicted ourselves on the edge of their uppercrust caste. With a third of a campaign remaining, we are contenders. Or we are contention cosplay fetishists. We dress up as a team that can pitch with anybody and sits a manageable distance from a playoff position.
That’s kinda hot. As were the Mets when they completed their visit to the White Sox facility on Thursday. Not just Wheeler being Wheeler, but Robinson Cano slugging like the cleanup hitter none of us believes he still is; Wilson Ramos going the other way as if he was born to ignore traffic cops; Amed Rosario reasserting himself as a shortstop as opposed to a nascent center field experiment; and Jeff McNeil — Flying Squirrel! — not letting nylon barriers deter him from his dogged pursuit of putouts. Jeff took away an at-bat from Eloy Jimenez while not costing any spectators in right their beverages or heads. Those nets, like these Mets, can do all sorts of things you didn’t anticipate.
When you’re going well, nothing can stop you, not even your missteps, even the steps that loom in your mind as mistakes. For example, J.D. Davis got himself unnecessarily thrown out at third to end an inning. The Mets brushed it off. In between fancy dives and throws, Rosario had a couple of balls elude his extended grasp. The Mets brushed it off. Cano looked like a dead duck trying to score on Ramos’s sixth-inning opposite-field RBI single. He slid home safely anyway. Robbie batted fourth despite ample evidence suggesting he shouldn’t be batting at all. He homered and doubled. Wheeler was precautionarily removed after seven in deference to his recent stay on the IL. Did the bullpen proceed to implode as it has done enough to prevent the Mets from finding their inner contenders until we reached August? Actually, no. Luis Avilán was solid and Jeurys Familia, he who you wouldn’t trust to throw an office birthday party, threw the final two-thirds of the ninth inning without incident.
I know we’ve grown used to lousy. I know we’ve forgotten what swell is like. We need time to acclimate ourselves to the possibilities presented by this sudden proximity to continued competence. Don’t worry, we’ll figure it out. At best, we keep rolling. At worst, we go back where we came from. It’s not like we don’t know how to get there. Until further notice, we might as well relish the roll.
by Jason Fry on 1 August 2019 1:42 am So in the end, after all the Sturming and Dranging, the Mets did nothing else. Noah Syndergaard stayed (and celebrated with a fairly hilarious bit of guerrilla Twitter video). Zack Wheeler stayed. Edwin Diaz stayed. Even Todd Frazier stayed. Prospects of whatever pedigree did not arrive. Cash considerations were not considered. Former college roommates of owners’ children remained other organizations’ roster fillers.
It was weird and confusing, which is to say very Metsian, but I found myself happy.
Happy because I think Syndergaard and Wheeler are critical pieces of any success this franchise might have with its current corps, but I’ve covered that. Happy because Marcus Stroman is an upgrade over Jason Vargas professionally and personally. Happy because the Mets have accidentally fallen into good luck before through their own deadline-day misadventures, and who’s to say that absolutely, positively couldn’t happen again?
And happy because, despite their long list of deep flaws and serial unreliability, I kind of like this team. They’re collectively a shaggy mutt who’s indifferently housebroken and keeps tearing up the furniture, but an endearing one for all that.
Anyway, the no doubt weary Mets then went out and played a singularly bonkers game against the White Sox, one that needed one of those signs spelling out height restrictions and advising you not to ride if you’ve undergone major surgery, are pregnant, or have any sense of self-preservation.
I mean honestly, this game had everything.
Early on there was a weirdo replay review that seemed like a certain win for the Mets but was disallowed by Chelsea, proving that Angel Hernandez doesn’t even need to be in the same time zone to fuck up a call, which led to the Mets not having a challenge later when they needed it.
There was Justin Wilson giving up a shot up the middle, which hit the second-base umpire, allowing White Sox to wheel around and score while Wilson looked skyward and protested the grotesque unfairness of it all, except neither he nor I nor probably most people watching had understood the rule, and the White Sox weren’t allowed to score after all because it had hit the umpire, which was a big break for the Mets because no way was Robinson Cano going to make that play, which led to the White Sox looking skyward and protesting the grotesque unfairness of it all, which they were right about but oh well too bad, because Wilson then got out of it.
There was J.D. Davis hitting what looked like a home run into the right-field corner and then looked like a double that bounced off the chalk in the right-field corner and then was called a foul ball but nobody could tell if that was correct or not because for some unfathomable reason the right-field foul line stopped about two feet short of the wall. The umpires got together and stuck with the foul-ball ruling, which I just shrugged about, because what the hell do you do when part of the stupid foul line has been hauled off by gremlins? And then Davis hit a single up the middle, just to have a hit as far from potentially missing foul lines as possible, which is one of many things in baseball that I suspect was even harder than it looked.
There was Jacob deGrom looking electric and outstanding and wonderful and getting stuck with a no-decision, except wait a minute that isn’t bonkers at all except on a cosmic level, because it happens to Jake all the goddamn time.
There was Cano actually getting a big hit, and Frazier getting a big hit about five and a half hours after some dumb blogger lamented that he was still on the team, and Michael Conforto getting a really big hit, and all those hits were important because Mickey Callaway has never been one to assume that a stove that was hot the last 392,455 times will be hot again this time and so why not bring Diaz in to close?
And Diaz was … OKish? I mean, yeah, he gave up a home run, which is kind of not even OKish for a closer, but if you narrow your eyes a bit, or all right a lot, you’d see that the slider was actually sliding and he mixed his pitches well, and if you have a cushion you can challenge hitters and so, you know, baby steps.
(Still. If nothing else Seth Lugo ought to close for a while, right y’all?)
Anyway, it was bonkers even with some parts that I’m sure I missed, but it was actually kind of fun for all that, which is not a bad way to describe the first four months of whatever this season will wind up becoming. The Mets are now three games under .500 and you shouldn’t look at the wild-card standings, even though we all know you did like two minutes after the game ended, you hopeless sucker. It’s not Ya Gotta Believe territory – you don’t want to look at what the schedule’s throwing at us in a week or so — but maybe, just maybe, it’s yaneverknow territory.
by Greg Prince on 31 July 2019 10:51 am You could look at how Noah Syndergaard pitched Tuesday night’s game against the White Sox — brilliantly — and infer that this was Noah’s way of telling the Mets how much being one of them means to him.
You could look at how the Mets played in support of Noah as he pitched brilliantly — maddeningly — and infer that this was the Mets’ way of telling Noah he is now and forever truly one of them.
Noah, as noted, was brilliant. After so many frustrating starts in 2019, some of which yielded him wins despite his feet getting stuck in quicksand, Syndergaard rarely deserved a win more, yet he didn’t get it. That, of course, is the Met way. The Mets have deprived their best pitchers of wins for as long as they’ve had best pitchers. For seven-and-a-third innings, it was hard to imagine it getting any better than what Noah was doing. Every pitch worked. Every inning was mastered from the mound. Everything indicated Syndergaard’s plenty-long last name would be adorned at its end with a W.
Yet it wasn’t, because the Mets never automatically furnish their best pitchers with the support, offensively or defensively, they merit. Not Seaver. Not Gooden. Not Pedro or Johan or the Dark Knight of Gotham when they were steering the rotation through inevitably choppy waters. Not Jacob deGrom, the first 10-game winner to fashion an almost unanimously acclaimed Cy Young season. Noah Syndergaard got the treatment Tuesday night. It wasn’t the first time. Perversely, I hope it won’t be the last.
As the Mets prepared for their third series ever in a ballpark that’s had a different name every time they’ve detoured there, their “probable pitcher” never felt like a certainty to throw the game’s first pitch. Ervin Santana was scratched from his start for Syracuse. On most days, that news would be of surpassing interest only to Ervin Santana and the pitcher who took his place. Most days aren’t the day before the trade deadline. Ervin Santana not pitching for Syracuse was Butterfly Effect stuff. Your Triple-A starter doesn’t flap his wings, Noah Syndergaard might be packing his bags. Or Zack Wheeler. Or Marcus Stroman, who has yet to unpack.
Santana’s instructions to chill did not have a chilling effect on Syndergaard. Noah remained active for the New York Mets on the South Side of Chicago. Other teams could remain interested in him. but only the Mets could use him, which they did to optimal effect. Noah flirted with perfection, then no-hitterness before settling in for routine dominance. Eleven strikeouts. One walk. He overwhelmed the White Sox, who, to be fair, seemed ripe to get overwhelmed. If it weren’t for a Todd Frazier error, Noah would have gone unscored upon. If it weren’t for the Mets failing to hit with myriad runners in scoring position, Noah would have carried a massive lead into the late innings.
Ah, but these were the Mets being the Mets toward their best pitchers, whether it was leaving Tom Seaver high and dry in the early 1970s or Noah Syndergaard with minimal margin for error at the end of the 2010s. It was a game the Mets could have been ahead in by a ton. It was also a game the Mets could have been down by a run. What Noah didn’t hold off, Seth Lugo did. Mostly, for a very long while, it was a game that a good team would have taken hold of, except this game between the Mets and White Sox didn’t contain a good team.
The Mets, despite playing some of their best ball of the season, are still not that well-formed. The starting pitching that they are continually rumored to be intent on dismantling has been about as sublime as it can possibly be of late. The hitting has veered from opportunistic to dormant. Catching the ball is always catch as catch can. Mickey Callaway is still ostensibly running the show. On Sunday, in answering a question about the personnel upheaval potentially at hand, Callaway tried to make a point about the cohesiveness of the unit. “We wanna win together,” he said. “We wanna lose together.”
Second aspiration accomplished plenty since April of 2018, Mick. Yet finally the Mets aren’t losing together as a rule. Five in a row now, six of their last seven, 11-4 since July 13. Most of the success has come at the expense of sub-.500 outfits like themselves, as if relegation was inaugurated while nobody was looking. All we know about the Mets at the moment is after a first half when they kept blowing games to good teams is they’ve figured out how to hang on against less good teams.
Versus the White Sox, they hung in despite the machinations of the man imported specifically to make holding one-run leads a formality. Edwin Diaz came on with a 2-1 advantage in the ninth and left with a 2-2 tie. Diaz’s name has been mentioned in trade rumors, too. For all of his Mariner credentials and highly considered talents, I find myself wishing he’ll be mentioned in trade realities by four o’clock today. Trade him for a bag of balls. Very nice balls in a plush velvet bag, but move him along if you can. I won’t flinch. Some people aren’t made for certain situations. I’m sensing Diaz and the Mets are not a match made in Flushing. He has rarely been shutdown-caliber this season, which is not just a matter of style points. The more a closer has to struggle, the more the butterfly flaps its wings. Edwin throws this many more pitches, even in victory, it means he can’t do this or that the next time. And the next time inevitably includes a lot of this or that he’s not getting done.
Diaz has 23 saves anyway. Leave him be and he’ll probably collect more than 30. That sounds impressive. On some level, I’m sure it is. On some other level, I get the feeling it means some combination of other Mets relievers would have gotten most of, as many as, or more than that amount of saves. If another team wants to relieve us of our alleged ace reliever for a package properly compensatory to his reputation (he was The Man in Seattle, after all), go for it. I won’t hold it fiercely against this administration if Diaz finds himself reborn in another uniform or that if only we’d been patient we would have benefited from a renaissance tantamount to Tug McGraw shaking off his horrendous blahs in 1973. Edwin’s been a Met for two-thirds of a season in a season that wasn’t going anywhere on his right arm.
it’s not like Noah. Noah in another uniform, despite the frustrations he’s engendered periodically, would forever bother me. He’s a Met. He’s a New York Met. He’s embraced it. He’s crafted an image for himself and mostly seemed to understand the absurdity of it. To me, that’s always been the difference between the Dark Knight and Thor. Matt Harvey took the whole Matt Harvey thing far too much to heart, and when his body couldn’t keep up, his head couldn’t handle it. Noah Syndergaard is in on the jokey aspects of Thor. He’s committed to the bit, but he knows it’s a bit. It only looks like a distraction when, for one reason or another, the pitching isn’t functioning as he and we would like.
Noah as an Astro or Padre or whatever would look wrong. Dykstra as a Phillie wrong. Reed as a Twin wrong. Cleon Jones of the White Sox when the White Sox played in a great ballpark wrong. Whether it proved to be a disaster of a trade or the epitome of foresight in letting go a guy a year too soon rather than a year too late, the optics of a displaced Thor would forever sear the heart. He’d always be a Met even if he wasn’t a Met, and that’s the worst vision you can have filling your screen, in October or otherwise.
Noah of the Mets didn’t get a win on Tuesday night, but the Mets eventually did. In the eleventh inning, after a tenth when Robert Gsellman did what Edwin Diaz couldn’t in the ninth, Jeff McNeil and Michael Conforto did what no Mets could do all night. McNeil lofted a fly ball that just kept carrying until it was a two-run homer, scoring Amed Rosario (4-for-5) and himself to put the Mets out in front, 4-2. Conforto followed with a blast that was barely contained by whatever the White Sox presently refer to their building as. Gsellman protected the 5-2 advantage, and the Mets ultimately enjoyed what amounted to another productive night at the tomato can factory, taking the measure of one more team apparently worse than them. Bet you had no idea there were so many of them. I was just grateful there was no chance Diaz could re-enter the game and attempt another save.
The alchemy that pieces together a team that wins together far more often than it loses together has thus far eluded the Mets, recent string of triumphs over baseball’s tomato can division notwithstanding. If you can show me how converting Syndergaard’s abilities into other players that would lift the Mets from their perpetual state of hoping everything breaks right and maybe we can be in sixth place for the second Wild Card a mere five games out, then I could convince myself to look past Noah in strange colors. If you could convince me this isn’t only about budgeting the pitching staff, that this is really about competing, contending and prevailing, then, go ahead, convince me. I’m not convinced trading a pitcher as good as Noah Syndergaard can do that.
No wonder this time of year is such a Met drag. Getting Stroman should have been exciting. Mostly it was mysterious. Getting rid of Jason Vargas and his auxiliary director of media relations portfolio was simply a salary shed, what teams out of it do in late July. Vargas projects as useful for the Phillies, who are closer to real as an immediate contender than we are. Wheeler? We’re still looking to trade a starting pitcher who can help a team win games down the stretch? Why is our stretch perennially of such little significance that we can’t ride a Zack Wheeler for two more months and think about keeping him another year or more? Maybe a dreamish rotation of deGrom, Syndergaard, Wheeler, Matz and Stroman won’t cure all our ills. It definitely won’t help various Mets smother baseballs and throw them accurately every time out, but it’s something to conceivably look forward to.
Looking forward to the Mets other than out of habit. Remember how that felt?
by Jason Fry on 29 July 2019 1:06 pm I’ll give the Mets this much: They do keep you interested.
I started Sunday in the park with Emily and Joshua, securing visors and nice tickets in section 101, another one of those sections that didn’t exist at Shea and so are irresistible to me. The best thing about our seats? This time, they were in the shade.
The Mets then went out there and won the damn thing, 8-7, barely withstanding the Pirates to complete a three-game sweep.
It’s a win, and every win is inherently good for its effect on team record and standings. But it didn’t particularly feel like one, and let’s just say this game was not one to inspire odes to the majesty of baseball. The Mets started off by jumping on Chris Archer for a six spot, but hopes that they would then slowly pull away were unfounded. Archer settled in, or the Mets settled — hard to tell from beyond the center-field fence — and the Bucs crept back to 6-3 against a serviceable but unimpressive Jason Vargas, were pushed back to 8-3, and then came storming back against Tyler Bashlor and Edwin Diaz.
Bashlor’s brief bout of recent competence seems to have been the universe’s ruse to lull us: He walked Colin Moran, gave up a two-run homer to Bryan Reynolds, and surrendered an infield single to Starling Marte (which Adeiny Hechavarria arguably should have converted to an out) before being excused further duty. Enter Diaz, who promptly surrendered a bolt into the left-field corner by Jose Osuna, a no-doubter in Diaz’s no mas season.
Diaz got the last two outs, but he also got loudly and roundly booed — by me. I have nothing against Diaz — I thought bringing him to New York was a fine idea and didn’t sweat the price paid — but one can only take so much Looperesque/Francoian/Benitezite serial incompetence before the frustration has to go somewhere. Apparently, today was the day the relief valve deployed and I wound up furiously booing a Met while people in my section wondered if I was having a stroke.
Diaz’s struggles made me think about the plight of Off the Cliff guys. A couple of years back Chris Archer looked like a star in the making; his time in Pittsburgh has been an out-and-out disaster. What in the world happened to him? Is he hurt? Caught by a perfect storm of bad luck? At least what happened to Jung Ho Kang seems fairly clear: He set fire to his career with a flurry of DUIs, missed the better part of two years, and has reportedly quit drinking but never seen his baseball skills reignite. Kang struck out four times Sunday and is hitting .170.
The Mets have their own Off the Cliff guys — unfortunately, two of them used to be Mariners. Robinson Cano hit three home runs against San Diego not so long ago; what he’s done since, alas, has served as a reminder that Babe Ruth hit three in a game for the Boston Braves, shortly before the end. I figured Cano would be at least serviceable as a Met, at least for the first couple of years left on his mega-contract, but he’s looked like a statue at second, been below replacement value at the place and done himself no favors with bouts of on-field sloth. And he’s here for four more seasons. Gulp.
And then there’s Diaz. Hopefully whatever happened to Diaz is a blip: Jacob deGrom and Noah Syndergaard have seemed to harness previously missing sliders under Phil Regan, allowing us to imagine Diaz will go back to being Edwin Diaz. But maybe he won’t. Maybe he’s hurt, and not telling anyone. Maybe he’s just lost it — a hazard for all players but relievers in particular, one we unfortunately remember keenly when their plunge coincides with becoming a Met. (Ramon Ramirez, don’t answer the blue and orange courtesy phone.)
Oh yeah, and there’s Jeurys Familia. But honestly, I’ve depressed myself and probably you enough with those last two paragraphs.
Anyway, the Mets won and have crept back into what you could fool yourself into thinking is contention, particularly entering a stretch in which they’ll play 10 against the White Sox, Pirates and Marlins. (And oh, what could have been with two of those mind-boggling losses in San Francisco going the other way.) If the Mets play well, they could conceivably poke their noses back above .500 and be on the first screen of the wild-card standings again.
Great! But even if they do pull that off, it’s a mirage. This team doesn’t have the bullpen or up-the-middle defense to survive the last six weeks of the season, which will be heavy on games against the Braves, Cubs, Phils, Nats and Dodgers. The Mets played a brutal stretch against such solid competition in June and early July and were exposed as pretenders; I’m pretty sure the same thing will happen again. (As always with Mets pessimism: I’d love to be wrong! Please let me have to print out this post and eat it!) Their focus ought to be on 2020 and 2021.
Which brings us to the other shoe that dropped on Sunday: the Mets’ acquisition of Marcus Stroman from Toronto for two prospects, the bespectacled Anthony Kay and young fireballer Simeon Woods Richardson.
Wait, the Mets are buyers? Holy Victor Zambrano!
Except industry scuttlebutt is that the Mets are not buyers — that the Stroman deal is a prelude to trading Syndergaard or Zack Wheeler.
Which lands us back in a familiar place, one that makes me angry and has stopped making a lot of people as angry as they should be.
The Mets’ writers and a good chunk of the fanbase have accepted a poisonous narrative that ought to be unacceptable: that the Mets’ financial limitations are as unchallengeable as the laws of physics. It’s become accepted wisdom that in July the Mets will sell players off for cash considerations and/or mediocre relief prospects, and in December they’ll shop in the clearance aisle of the free-agent supermarket, shuffling to the register with a dented infielder and a scratched-up fifth starter. And so all of their moves or potential moves are assessed this way: What’s the ceiling for this empty-headed Double-A power arm? Is this aging fifth starter good for 150 innings?
It’s infuriating.
The Mets are still being run on the cheap, hobbled by the Wilpons’ refusal or inability to operate the National League’s New York franchise in a manner that Major League Baseball should expect. Their payroll figures are fundamentally dishonest, swollen by millions in MLBPA money, naming rights and recouped insurance money that the Wilpons continue to count against payroll instead of reinvesting in the team. And that’s led to their current blinkered existence. There’s a lot of talk around the Mets being “creative,” but they’re creative because that’s what you have to be when you’re cheap. The point shouldn’t be that the Mets’ creativity is so often ineffective, but that it’s self-inflicted.
Yeah, the Mets extended deGrom. Terrific! Why did we all treat it like a miracle, instead of like what any competently run big-market franchise would do? Why don’t we ask where the other extensions are?
The Mets ought to be pushing all their chips in for the next two years. Besides the superlative deGrom, they have a vibrant, exciting young core in Pete Alonso, Jeff McNeil, Michael Conforto, Syndergaard and Wheeler. They control Syndergaard through 2021 and can make a qualifying offer to Wheeler keeping him through next year. The question ought to be whether they should sign those two pitchers to long-term deals. Instead, they’re talking of trading them. It’s madness — madness that too many of us have come to accept as normality.
Which brings us to Stroman.
Look, I really like Stroman — he’s been a wonderful pitcher when healthy and he’s a player who’s easy to root for, an undersized hurler who’s withstood baseball prejudices and ridden his own talent and smarts to the upper ranks of his sport. He’s a clear upgrade over, say, Jason Vargas — to say nothing of Walker Lockett.
But is Stroman here to replace Vargas? I doubt it. I think he’s here to replace Wheeler or Syndergaard. The former would be a lateral move at best and quite possibly a downgrade, given the stretches of success Wheeler has had over the last two seasons. The latter would be a disaster in the making, a move that could easily haunt the Mets for a decade or more.
When pitching at his peak, Syndergaard is quite simply the best Mets starting pitcher I’ve ever seen — and I’ve seen Tom Seaver, Dwight Gooden and deGrom. His arsenal seems stolen from videogame cheat codes, he’s cerebral and interested in outthinking hitters as well as overpowering them, and he’s got the essential meanness that a top starter needs. He’s been hampered by a rash of odd injuries, MLB’s experiments with the baseball, and his teammates’ horrendous defense. None of those things is insurmountable or ought to blind a smart fan to his otherworldly talent.
And yet the Mets want to trade him. Why? Because he’s the most valuable chip on the market and they need to do some retrenching? Again, that’s the false narrative the Wilpons have force-fed us until it’s been accepted as true. Or is it because he’s ornery and outspoken and loves the spotlight? You better believe that’s a part of it too — which is both deeply stupid and richly ironic, given that the Mets have literally marketed Syndergaard as a deity.
The Mets ought to be selling off 2019’s deadwood: goodbye, Vargas and Todd Frazier. They could certainly explore trading pieces that don’t seem to fit, starting with Dom Smith and maybe including Amed Rosario. They ought to listen on any other proposed deal (you always listen), but always asking if that makes them better for 2020 and 2021.
Lock up Syndergaard and Wheeler and get to work on the up-the-middle defense. Yeah, you’re stuck with Cano, but improvements could and should be made at catcher, shortstop and in center. Does that mean trying Rosario in center? Trading for a center fielder? Signing an actual free agent who’s not north of 33 years old? Figure out a plan around that remarkable core of young players and go for it, the way a team playing in what’s still the capital of baseball ought to.
But here’s what I think the Mets will do instead. (And let’s be clear: Boy oh boy would I love to be wrong.) They’ll sell off Vargas and Frazier for cash considerations and maybe a couple of lightning-armed dimwits who’ll put up a 4.83 ERA over chunks of three seasons. They’ll trade Syndergaard for something that might or might not help in other areas, then anonymously whisper about how he was uncooperative in the clubhouse. They’ll then beat us over the heads with how wonderful it is that Steven Matz and Stroman are both Long Island kids — as if anyone with a brain cares whether a given Met grew up in a nice house in Stony Brook, in a missionary’s cabin in Botswana, or in a scientific research station on the Ross Ice Shelf.
The Wilpons will see that local story as a PR win, and the Mets will keep flacking it all the way to another 74-win campaign. Meanwhile, Syndergaard will hoist hardware for the Twins or Padres or Astros and when he returns to beat us we’ll get sentimental and admit that it’s all kind of a shame. And no one in the media will seriously ask if any other story was possible.
by Greg Prince on 28 July 2019 10:54 am The cynical trio situated not far from where a lefthanded pitcher was about to go to work Saturday night cleverly braced for the worst. It’s the first inning, we told each other, knowingly. We all know what that means. In past starts, it’s meant Steven Matz would be rushing to make action happen on that scoreboard before seats were fully warmed to rear ends. Long Island’s Own Steven Matz (LIOSM), a pitcher, isn’t supposed to make action happen that way. But he does. We knew it.
In eighteen previous starts in 2019, Steven had pitched seventeen first innings. That includes a start in which he pitched in a first inning but got credit for 0.0 IP because innings pitched are measured an out at a time and in that particular start, at Citizens Bank Park on April 16, there were no outs resulting from Matz’s pitching. Two doubles; two homers; two errors; a walk; a hit by pitch…it was a buffet of initializing ineptitude. If that performance didn’t represent exactly what Steven Matz did every single start — an earned run average of infinity is hard to carry across two-thirds of a season — it wasn’t utterly aberrant. Steven’s first-inning ERA this year coming into Saturday night was 10.00. And that was with outs being recorded in seventeen of eighteen starts.
After the first inning of Steven Matz’s nineteenth start, at Citi Field on July 27, his first-inning ERA dipped to 9.50. Not a plunge, but an improvement. Matz faced three Pittsburgh Pirates and retired them all, two of them looking at third strikes. The cynical trio — of which I was one-third — processed that its knowledge base would require a revision. We could no longer knowingly tell one another that Steven Matz “always” gives up runs in the first inning. Tonight he didn’t.
Every inning that followed was much like the first. Steven pitched an interesting game that, frankly, didn’t necessarily hold our interest. It wasn’t cynicism that kept us from being laser-focused on his blend of off-speed deliveries and uncommon poise. Going to a baseball game will be like that, especially if you’re in the company of fellow fans with whom you’ve never gone to a game before. I wasn’t going to this game as of Saturday morning. But then a fellow named Mike, who co-hosts a podcast that is good enough to invite me on periodically, contacted me to let me know he’d be in possession of tickets for Saturday night. Not just any tickets, but tickets that were coming to him by way of somebody who’d be wearing a uniform on the field. Who might that be? Let’s just say Mike can claim some fascinating baseball bloodlines. Anyway, did I want to go with him?
Yes, I said. Yes, let’s go to the game. Much like the podcast, our little party also included Rich, Mike’s frequent co-host. We gathered in a section off of home plate on the third base side. It wasn’t an overly partisan section but it was certainly more diverse in terms of allegiances than most other Citi Field sections. We rooted for the Mets but maybe cooled it when a certain Pirate failed to get a base hit because that certain Pirate was addressed by a tot in our row as “Daddy!”
Nothing personal, kid. “Daddy” isn’t getting a base hit off Steven this evening. Few of his teammates are, either. To be fair, neither were Steven’s teammates doing much versus Trevor Williams, Matz’s Pirate counterpart. A scintillating pitchers’ duel developed, with zeroes electronically posting inning after inning. I think it was scintillating. Like I said, I was with two guys I’d never watched a game with before. I knew their voices from the podcast. But this was three guys at the game talking not into microphones but to one other. Conversation won out over concentration. If you ever meet Mike, please ask him to tell you his Carlos May story. You won’t be sorry.
I wasn’t sorry I accepted Mike’s Saturday night invitation, even if I generally don’t love that Saturday night games exist. They can sweeten the deal with Mr. Met on the Moon bobbleheads to first 25,000 all they want. I still find the whole presentation temporally unnatural. Saturday afternoons are baseball territory. Saturday nights are for other things. What the other things are are up to you. I watch Saturday night Met games on TV or listen to them on the radio because I don’t know how to not watch or listen when the Mets are playing and, besides, and I’m 90% likely to be writing about them on Saturday nights, whether I’m yearning to or not. I’m usually a little impatient by first pitch of a Saturday night game when I’m home; they had all day to do this and they’re just starting now? I’m usually sleepy when they’re over. Frankly, I’m infrequently in the mood to write about them come midnight or whenever the postgame show ends. I have to continually remind myself that Mookie Wilson snuck a ground ball down the first base line so late on a Saturday night that it was Sunday morning and it didn’t matter what day it was. I also have to remind myself that Sunday afternoon games tend to start at 1:10 and I don’t have all of Sunday morning to write about Saturday night, which fades into the rearview mirror faster than other nights.
Most Saturday night games aren’t Game Six of the World Series. This Saturday night, though, was pretty good for late July between two teams determined to go nowhere. Now and then Mike, Rich and I would pause our stream of verities and reminiscences and what the hell to do at the trade deadline to take note of all those zeroes and how Matz was still putting them up. I’m not the most observant person when it comes to how outs are gotten. I’m just happy that they’re being got (as would have Steven on April 16 in Philadelphia). But two things did grab my attention this Saturday night.
1) A lot of ground balls pounded to Todd Frazier at third base. I was taken back to the Met heyday of Al Leiter, much of which I observed from Mezzanine 9, Row M. Leiter seemed to pitch every game that Kevin Appier didn’t, and there was inevitably a procession of grounders that Robin Ventura swallowed up into that Gold Glove of his. It was beautiful how they arranged that. Matz-Frazier was a decent facsimile of Leiter-Ventura.
2) Infield defense was suddenly a Met strength. In 2019, I mean. Amed Rosario has his eyes wide open all of a sudden. Robinson Cano is pivoting like a politician. Frazier booted a grounder but was otherwise a security blanket at third. Matz was en route to striking out seven, but when contact was elicited, groans weren’t forthcoming. That was different.
This whole thing was different. Mike, Rich and I don’t go in for different all that much. That’s the subtext of A Metsian Podcast, the show I go on with them and, when he’s available, their partner/producer Sam. We as fans who came of age with the game in the ’70s don’t care for most of the change that’s overcome baseball in the succeeding decades. Saturday night games instead of Saturday afternoons. Loudly amplified music instead of peaceful mid-inning interludes in which friends can talk and hear each other. Games that plod on endlessly instead of being played stylishly and succinctly. Starting pitchers pulled rather than trusted to finish what they started no matter how well they’re pitching. We’re not averse to progress as a concept, but we can be delightfully crotchety when it comes to what we liked about baseball to begin with.
Steven Matz of all people was giving us a taste of our own chocolate pudding, however. We wanted a pitcher who wasn’t merely an opening act for the wheel of doom spun by the Mets bullpen? We got one. His name was Steven Matz. The same Matz we identified with first-inning calamity and disappointment over the course of however many other innings he lasted. Not this Saturday night. This Saturday night, Matz was efficient and unmovable. Trevor Williams was, too, one supposes, but unlike some of our section neighbors, we didn’t care. We just cared that we got a run or three, which is exactly what we got from Michael Conforto (a solo blast to carbonation ridge in the sixth) and J.D. Davis (a two-run job over Starling Marte’s leaping form at the center field wall in the seventh).
Now that we had a relatively comfy 3-0 lead, we could get what we innately ached for: a shutout out of Steven Matz and no one else. I’d say a “complete game shutout” but “shutout” implies it was complete. Those things can be shared, and that arrangement is fine from a winning vs. losing standpoint, but we wanted nine from one man here. That’s the code of delightfully crotchety baseball fans. Of course we wanted the shutout. That’s implicit. We want every game to be Mets infinity Other Team nothing. We want it so much that no game would be official because the Mets would be piling on runs in the first inning and we’d never get to a second.
We’d settle for a 3-0 win shepherded start to finish by Steven Matz. We ascertained the pitch count was amenable to Mickey Callaway keeping his hands in his pockets or wherever they’d be a safe distance from signaling to the bullpen. Was Diaz ready to bring his big toe into battle? Was Lugo capable of a third straight day of spin rates? Was Familia still alive out there? We didn’t want to know. We wanted Matz, Matz and nothing but Matz, which is unusual, because nobody much wants Matz. We hear every pitcher’s name in trade rumors, even the most ridiculous of them. Every pitcher’s name but Steven’s.
We were inches from Throwback City now. A complete game. A shutout. A contest requiring barely more than two hours to conclude. This was the stuff of our collective childhood. We could stay up late to watch games end in those days and still get to bed fairly early because those pitchers were all succinct and stylish. Certainly in our memories they were. And on July 27, 2019, Matz made sure he’d be. His 99th pitch, a changeup to Josh Bell, was grounded to Rosario, who picked it clean and flung it to Pete Alonso for the third out of the ninth. Steven Matz had done it: he threw his first complete game, a shutout. A five-hitter with no walks. One small step for Matz, one giant leap for Mets…or at least one that has us ahead of a few other non-contenders for a change in the nether regions of the Wild Card race. That LIOSM did it in under a hundred pitches was noteworthy in some circles. It wouldn’t have been noteworthy when we were kids because nobody counted pitches. Such a feat is considered so rare these days that’s it’s named for a former Atlanta Braves tormentor of the Mets, but if you think I’m gonna call what Steven Matz “a Maddux,” you haven’t sat with me for nine innings.
Steven threw a Matz. What’s a Matz? Until otherwise indicated, it is a game spotless from the first inning through the ninth and it gets you to Woodside in plenty of time to make the 9:54 to Jamaica and your connection east from there. It’s the best Saturday night baseball can give you: terrific every minute it lasts and not lasting one more minute than it has to.
by Greg Prince on 27 July 2019 12:35 pm It was reasonably fitting that Jay Payton stopped by the SNY booth in the bottom of the fourth inning Friday night. Jay and Butch Huskey are this weekend’s special guest alumni at Citi Field. If you haven’t noticed, every Friday the Mets welcome home a pair of former players to meet the press, sign autographs in the team Hall of Fame, make the podcast and YouTube rounds, surprise contest-winners by presenting them their prizes and join the live broadcasts.
It’s possibly the classiest thing this organization does on a regular basis, providing a long-absent confirmation from the Mets that they realize there are Mets and Met years that mean something to us beyond a few superstars and a couple of champions. Sometimes the returning duos’ Mets careers were contemporaneous (Turk Wendell/Rick Reed; Doug Flynn/Joel Youngblood), sometimes they seem to be paired by chance (Frank Thomas/Rico Brogna; Jack Fisher/Felix Millan). Payton and Huskey each entered our Met consciousness during roughly the same era, but in fact they only overlapped on the active roster for a month. Butch’s final days in a Mets uniform, September 1998, coincided with Jay’s first cup of coffee. Butch was soon off to play the role of journeyman, while Jay eventually became part of that rarest of post-1986 specimens, a Mets World Series team.
That cachet definitely gave Gary Cohen a Jay hook when he spoke to Payton. Did you realize, our ace announcer asked the 2000 National League champions’ starting center fielder, that you are but one of two players to have hit a postseason home run off very recently inducted Hall of Fame closer Mariano Rivera (brief Met Sandy Alomar, Jr., being the other)? Yup, Jay said, he’s pretty aware of that delicious fact. Too bad it didn’t happen in a win instead of the late rush that didn’t quite close the gap in Game Two of the World Series, he acknowledged — could have enjoyed it more had we won.
Yet there was a World Series. There was a postseason. Jay had a huge hit to help defeat the Giants in Game Two of the NLDS nineteen years ago. He and Darryl Hamilton teamed to give the Mets a tenth-inning edge that John Franco put in the books with one of the borderline strike three calls of all time on Barry Bonds. Payton’s good work in the NLDS and NLCS came in victory. We got to enjoy it because we won.
Payton was traded by the Mets at the deadline in 2002. The Mets were barely hanging onto playoff delusions two months out. They needed another pitcher. An outfielder was deemed expendable. West to the Rockies went Jay. East to Queens came John Thomson. If you don’t remember John Thomson pitching the Mets to the 2002 postseason, you’re not alone. While the Mets evaporated in the heat of August, Jay commenced on his journeyman adventure: the Rockies through 2003; the Padres in 2004; then three American League franchises between 2005 and 2008, with one visit to the playoffs in the middle (Oakland, 2006). After injury kept him out all of 2009 — injuries bedeviled him in the minor leagues, too, explaining why it took so long for him to climb from supplemental first-round pick in 1994 to callup in 1998 to a third-place Rookie of the Year campaign in 2000 — he had one last pennant race fling with Colorado in September 2010.
At that late stage, he became the Longest Ago Met Still Active and the Last Met Standing from the ’98 Wild Card chase, which is its own kind of cachet in these parts. Given his relatively wayward professional sojourn across America, Jay had never stepped foot inside Citi Field until Friday night. He seemed to like it. Despite the organization giving up on him when he was 29, he sounded happy to be home.
Someday, depending on whether the Mets of the future (Mercury or otherwise) rigorously maintain their revitalized alumni outreach program, perhaps Zack Wheeler will sound the same way. Zack will be a Met alumnus at a date yet to be determined. It could be years from now. It could be next week. If it’s the latter, he won’t have time to chat in the booth soon because he’ll be pitching for somebody else, perhaps a Met opponent. Wheeler is the most obvious Met trade chip on this deadline’s table. Maybe, as scuttlebutt suggests, Noah Syndergaard will reveal himself as the real jackpot by July 31, but until the stakes are raised to such dizzying heights, the buzz that Wheeler is likely to go remains clearly audible.
While Payton visited Gary, Keith and Ron, Zack threw a drama-free fourth against the Pirates: three up, three down, twelve pitches in all for a pitcher who used to battle pitch counts as much as opposing lineups. This was where it got reasonably fitting, as Zack’s Met trajectory has been loosely reminiscent of Jay’s.
• Also a first-round draft choice, though selected by San Francisco before we nabbed him at another of our numerous non-contending deadlines.
• Also somebody on whom we pinned long-term hopes before we ever got a good look at him, the way fans of non-contenders will.
• Also too many injuries getting in the way of delivering on what was projected.
Jay had a swell major league career: the Rookie of the Year bid in 2000; a solid walk year in 2003 that earned him a nice free agent contract; 119 regular-season home runs plus three in postseason play…the three-run shot off Rivera included. He didn’t man center field day in, day out for a contending Mets club year after year after year as we dreamed he might, but he did it for a while. That’ll earn you an alumni invitation every time.
Zack, the same age currently that Jay was when the Mets traded him, is having the same kind of respectable career. The greatness is episodic at best. Being solid has been plenty sufficient. Solid would describe Zack’s Friday outing, his first since before the All-Star break and through an IL stay necessitated by shoulder fatigue: five-and-a-third innings, limited ahead of time to 73 pitches in deference to the shoulder. He gave up one homer on a night the Mets hit four (one dinger apiece from puppy pal Jeff McNeil, Todd Frazier, Wilson Ramos and, now with twice as many as the 17 Jay Payton belted in his rookie season, Pete Alonso), allowing three runs in all. He struck out seven and walked nobody, leaving with a couple Buccos on base, neither of whom came around to score. With legitimate relief support from Luis Avilán, Robert Gsellman, Justin Wilson and closer pro tempore Seth Lugo, he earned 6-3 win that raised his lifetime record…a.k.a. his record as a Met…to 40-36. Nobody seriously puts stock in pitchers’ won-lost records, but it was nice to see Wheeler get a W for the road, should the road beckon.
When our starter departed the game, he was given a standing ovation from the fans in attendance who could read a calendar. As I watched, I could see Zack receiving the same kind of hand in a big game the Mets needed to advance toward or in the playoffs. Except I was imagining that part. Zack never had the opportunity to take the mound in a game of a critical nature. No images left behind from the outsize stage upon which Harvey, deGrom, Syndergaard and Matz were able to stride and shine. That’s the void where Wheeler is concerned. He did his best for bad Met teams. He was too hurt to contribute at all to good Met teams. His ledger implies some of the worst timing in club history: 2013-2014; 2017-2019. In between were 2015 and 2016, the only generally enjoyable seasons we have known during Zack Wheeler’s era, except for Zack and his Tommy John situation, the era demonically pressed pause. Talk about bedeviled by injuries.
Thus, if this is it, and Zack becomes an ex-Met in the coming days and a Met alumnus with no second act, whoever interviews him when he returns to Citi Field will have no obvious upbeat angle to pursue, no “that time you and the Mets went to the World Series together” or anything close to it. Instead, the conversation will have to revolve around how well Zack pitched more often than not, how hard he tried to pitch better, how pleasant he always came off as, hopefully how much he liked being part of a Mets team that didn’t win but a bunch of us stuck with, anyway.
That will be fine, if that’s how it has to go.
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