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ABOUT US
Faith and Fear in Flushing made its debut on Feb. 16, 2005, the brainchild of two longtime friends and lifelong Met fans.
Greg Prince discovered the Mets when he was 6, during the magical summer of 1969. He is a Long Island-based writer, editor and communications consultant. Contact him here.
Jason Fry is a Brooklyn writer whose first memories include his mom leaping up and down cheering for Rusty Staub. Check out his other writing here.
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by Jason Fry on 26 July 2019 1:03 pm (Note: The format for this post didn’t occur to me until 20-odd hours after the game, so accuracy of timestamps is theoretical at best. Sorry!)
10:00 am: Wake up, groggily. What? I’m a freelance writer, I can wake up when I want. I also am typically still working at 2 am, so lay off.
10:10 am: Oh, that’s right, I bought a ticket for today’s Mets game using that 84% off code. Which meant my ticket cost $6. Awesome! Hmm, it’s a matinee, but I probably don’t need to leave for a while yet. Cool, cool.
10:30 am: Wait a minute, when does this game start? 12:10? Hmm, I don’t have as much time as I think. Still, I have a little.
10:35 am: Hey, dumbass, if you want something to eat and drink and to be in your seat before the third inning, you don’t have as much time as you think. In fact, you need to leave, well, now.
10:36 am: What to wear? Too warm for a Cyclones jersey. Way too warm for that Mobile Bears jersey. Way too fat for any Mets jersey I own. A-ha, Ebbets Field Flannels Tides t-shirt!
10:37 am: Do I need sunscreen? That horrible heat wave has broken. Eh.
10:38 am: No wait I definitely need sunscreen. The melanin in my skin has vanished for weird age/decrepitude-related reasons, so I am not capable of tanning at all. I just turn tomato-red and then peel and possibly get skin cancer.
10:39 am: Sprrrrrrrtttt! As always, manage to get sunscreen in eyes. Ow! Fuck! Ow! Fuck! Ow! Fuck!
10:40 am: Grab Lost Mets custom cards for Greg, verify ticket is on phone, grab Cyclones cap in Mets colors that I bought off eBay. Let’s go!
10:42 am: Idle thought while walking to subway and trying to rub sunscreen away from still-stinging eyes: Has a Met ever gone on the DL because they got sunscreen in an eye? Somehow this seems like it would have happened to Jeff D’Amico. Which might be unfair. Sorry, Jeff D’Amico.
10:44 am: Cool, I have my own elevator at the subway station. On the other hand, the elevators in this station get stuck all the time. If that happens now I will be unable to cannibalize a fellow stranded commuter and starve to death weeks earlier. Not that I’d want to eat another human being, but you never know. Besides, he/she would probably be a Yankee fan, so whatever.
10:45 am: Didn’t get stuck in elevator. No need to spend rest of life being taunted for cannibalism.
10:48 am: 2/3 train is not coming as advertised. Sigh. Remember when the NYC subway was reliable? (No really, it used to be.)
10:53 am: Ah, here we go. Progress resumed.
11:09 am: Switch to 7 at Times Square. Pat self on back for having learned exact car to be in to maximize efficiency of transfer.
11:12 am: It’s still confusing to not just be able to hop on the first 7 train that pulls in. Stupid Hudson Yards.
11:19 am: On 7 train. No express — wrong time of day. Decide this is proof the city hates Mets fans anyway.
11:32 am: There’s no way the 7 train needs stops every six freaking blocks. There’s no way this is the first time I’ve thought this.
11:44 am: Citi Field. My train filled up with summer campers in rainbow t-shirts. I forgot about that. They are super overamped and they haven’t even had sugar yet. Yikes.
11:46 am: Scalpers hawking cut-rate hats and asking who needs tickets. Resist temptation to tell everyone I got my ticket for $6 so hahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha
11:49 am: Lines at the Jackie Robinson rotunda make you think there’s a helicopter taking off from Saigon at the other end. Ugh.
11:52 am: Lines at the right-field gate are actually worse than that. Double ugh.
11:55 am: Line at little-used Bullpen gate is pretty reasonable. Pat self on back.
11:55:30 am: Actually helpful maroon tells us if we have no bag we can just go on in. Score!
11:56 am: In park. Wow, that really wasn’t so bad.
12:00 pm: Realize national anthem is being sung. Remove cap. Half the fans in the beyond-the-scoreboard plaza are looking at the screens and standing stock still in patriotic silence. Other half are paying zero attention. I’m normally hand-on-heart for the anthem, but it’s nearly first pitch and I need to secure food. What to do?
12:00:30 pm: Settle on a hopefully respectful-looking shuffle through crowd with cap over heart. This probably just looks weird.
12:04 pm: Fuku, David Chang’s rather excellent fried-chicken-sandwich place, has no line, probably because its location in the least-accessible corner of the plaza is horrendous. Still, that will work. Get a spicy chicken sandwich, some jalapeno-imbued fries and a Tecate the size of a fire extinguisher.
12:08 pm: My food cost me $36. Economics of how teams make money: noted.
12:10 pm: In seat for first pitch. Pat self on back yet again. I’m in the very last row of 141, to the right of the home-run apple from the batter’s point of view. I chose this seat because I’d never sat in this section. I have a weakness — not just in this ballpark but in every park — for seats that didn’t exist at Shea, and am still getting used to them 10 years after Shea got turned into rebar and powder.
12:11 pm: Being in the last row means standing room is six inches behind my head. Lots of hallooing and non-baseball yapping directly behind me. Remind self my choice of seats is not those people’s fault.
12:14 pm: A meteorologist would call this day “hot as fuck.” Neither the temperature nor the humidity are that high but the sun is high, scorching and relentless.
12:15 pm: Jacob deGrom looks excellent. The usual pitiless fastball and the other pitches seem to have a ton of movement. I can’t actually see that from beyond center field but I can see the Padre batters looking hapless and dispirited.
12:15:30 pm: Hmm. DeGrom pitching during the day, Padres not so great, getaway day. Maybe Jake will throw a no-hitter?
12:16 pm: Manny Machado singles.
12:18 pm: Holy shit it’s hot out here. If I hadn’t worn sunscreen I’d already be dead.
12:19 pm: Greg is outside waiting for our pal Matt, a superlative baseball writer and good guy. We’re not sitting together but will briefly meet up so new Lost Mets can be handed over.
12:20 pm: Greg calls to establish when we’re meeting. We can’t hear each other. I tell him bottom of the fifth at the Shea Bridge, he thinks I said bottom of the sixth. Sitcom misunderstandings a definite possibility. But how to fix? “Bottom of the fifth,” I say. “Five. Like David Wright.” This is immediately clear. Problem solved.
12:21 pm: I am patting myself on the back quite a bit today.
12:22 pm: The Padres look like the Mets did the day before — lackadaisical defense and a distinct lack of pep in step. It’s 4-0 Mets. DeGrom must have the vapors. Poor Greg and Matt are missing all this.
12:24 pm: Not for the first time, it occurs to me that seeing a game in the park and watching it at home are completely different. I can’t really see the action on deGrom’s pitches, or anything about them — just the hitters’ reactions. Later, the talk will be all about what a great slider deGrom had and how he threw it nine times in a row at one stretch. I would have been keenly attuned to that watching SNY, but here I basically have no idea. This isn’t to bash being in the park, just to note it’s a different experience. You’re there for the vibe of the crowd, the sense of momentum and whether the fans get into it or not. A crowd can feel like it’s lifting a team up or slapping it down. And you’re there in case something extraordinary happens, so you can say you were.
12:29 pm: The Promenade is filled with patches of solid, highlighter-intensity colors marking the domain of each summer camp. Bright pink, bright green, solid red, electric blue. The kids in right field are wearing shirts the same color as the Citi Field vendors.
12:45 pm: My section is the domain of a group in orange shirts. (Not the 7 line.) Their interest in the game would be kindly described as fitful. Their ability to find their seats can’t be kindly described at all. But you know what? I’m at a baseball game on a summer afternoon. I can make this work.
12:53 pm: Idly try to figure out how far I am from home plate. I’d guess 485 feet. Probably safe from a home run, unless Pete Alonso or Franmil Reyes is at the plate. And even then.
1:30ish pm: Game is speeding along. DeGrom looks unhittable. Mets have done nothing since their initial four-run outburst. I’m sweating.
2:00ish pm: Meet Greg and Matt on Shea Bridge. Greg has a tote bag in deference to Citi Field’s absurd new prohibition on backpacks. Briefly discuss why backpacks are a problem. Perhaps ISIS has weaponized zippers? Greg with a tote bag looks off to me — it’s like I’ve given Chewbacca’s bowcaster to my Luke Skywalker action figure. Decide to keep this comparison to myself.
2:11 pm: Look for ice cream. Too hot for beer, so buy a Coke. That’s $12. The guy running the ice cream machine says, semi-apologetically, that it’s coming out like a milkshake. I tell him that’s the way I like it anyway. Still, why is it the norm that something is broken/not ready at every Citi Field point of contact with the customer?
2:15 pm: Total up fees, food and subway and this outing is costing me $60, even with a $6 ticket. And I’m by myself. If you’re a couple with two kids who want to eat crap and hit the souvenir store and you’re paying full freight even in the Promenade, well, it’s a lot.
2:18 pm: Not broken — the woman checking tickets for my section. She’s great — enforcing the between ABs rule, but remembering who’s in her section so she doesn’t need to check them twice, being nice to kids, chatting amiably with people who want to.
3:00ish pm: The Mets have played some solid defense in this game. Two nifty plays by Amed Rosario, a nice running catch by Juan Lagares.
3:11 pm: Guy standing behind me is one of those Very Special People who’s given to conspiratorial thinking with zero evidence and whose normal speaking voice can be heard 200 feet away. If you’re at a game and find one of these guys, look immediately in front or behind him and you’ll undoubtedly find me, my father-in-law, or both of us. It’s our special superpower. Someone please take it away from us.
3:13 pm: Conspiracy Guy is blaming Mets for piping in fake crowd noise, oblivious to the hard-to-miss fact that there are 3,500 summer campers in the top deck and they are taking MAKE SOME NOISE very seriously.
3:16 pm: Jesus, imagine having this genius show up to be your plumber, crossing guard, etc. Cue the ominous music.
3:17 pm: On the other hand, he’s at the park for a Thursday matinee. Maybe he doesn’t have a job.
3:18 pm: On the other other hand, I’m also at the park for a Thursday matinee. Could what I do be described as a job? Decide not to pat myself on the back for this run of thought.
3:30ish pm: DeGrom deParts having done excellent work, and with run support to boot. Padres look somnambulant. Still, if any bullpen could blow it, it’s ours.
3:33 pm: I really want to see a Alonso homer. Try to remember if I’ve been in the park for one before. I’m not sure and this makes me feel like a bad fan.
3:39 pm: Edwin Diaz enters, to a combination of vaguely ironic applause and semi-hostile muttering. You can blame Brodie Von Whatshisname for a lot, but that trade turning out as poorly as it has (so far) was pretty unexpected.
3:41 pm: Diaz is hit on the big toe by a line drive, with the sound clearly audible to me in the next county, and limps off the field. Uh-oh.
3:42 pm: Luis Avilan‘s music is “The Man Comes Around,” by Johnny Cash. It’s a vaguely apocalyptic song full of Biblical imagery, and strange to hear in a ballpark. Good to hear, or too odd a choice? I’ll need to think about that one.
3:43 pm: Muse that if Diaz’s toe is broken Seth Lugo would become the Mets’ closer, which could help my fantasy team. Immediately feel bad about thinking this and chastise myself.
3:46 pm: Hunter Renfroe hits a foul ball to the first row of the Promenade. Booing follows. Guy in front row must have dropped it into section below.
3:47 pm: Hunter Renfroe hits a foul ball to the first row of the Promenade. Mad cheering follows. What the heck?
3:49 pm: Avilan sets down the remaining Padres with ease. Mets win. Not a particularly memorable game — no scoring after the first inning, no memorable plays or excitement — but a fun day in the park.
3:50 pm: I normally walk out through the rotunda but decide not to today in hopes of not getting caught in a crush of summer campers.
3:51 pm: I am already out of the Bullpen gate and on the street. One more back pat for my favorite person.
3:52 pm: Hey, is this the street they renamed Seaver Way? The chop shops are either gone or inert and blocked with chain-link fencing, but nothing else is happening yet. Ah well, give it time. I’m not going anywhere.
3:55 pm: No express 7. Wrong time of day. Still evidence that Bill de Blasio hates me, the Mets, the idea that there can be good in the world, etc.
4:11 pm: Twitter provides: Turns out the guy who dropped the Renfroe foul ball was wearing a Yankees hat. Was jeered at, removed the offending headgear, and Renfroe hit the very next pitch to him, except this time he caught it. Baseball is so wonderful.
5:32 pm: Greg emails. Wants to know if typo on the revised ’69 Donn Clendenon card I sent him (METS branding and photo) was intentional. Uh-oh.
5:33 pm: Wait a minute, the back of the revised Clendenon card is 99% the same as the original ’69 Topps card. Ask about typo.
5:36 pm: Greg reports Donn is referred to as Don on the back of the card. Look at my own cards. It’s Topps’ error, made when Greg was a small boy and I was a very small boy. Whew.
5:41 pm: Hmm, should I have fixed the Donn/Don typo? It’s authentic, yet the idea of a custom card is to turn back the hands of time and get things “right.”
6:33 pm: Hmm, should I have fixed the Donn/Don typo?
9:11 pm: Hmm, should I have fixed the Donn/Don typo?
2:55 am: Hmm, should I have fixed the Donn/Don typo?
by Jason Fry on 25 July 2019 3:18 am It shouldn’t have been a day for vituperation.
I got out on the water in a kayak. It was a beautiful evening. Dinner was tasty. And there was a baseball game on. Honestly, lots of days could be put in the win column with just one of those things happening.
And the fact that the Mets were playing seemed promising. I mean, that’s always true on at least a basic level — I’m a Mets fan, after all. But Noah Syndergaard was pitching, the Padres have been no great shakes of late, and the Mets have shown fitful signs of life.
But somehow, somewhere, something went wrong amid all these good things.
SNY made much of the fact that it was the anniversary of two significant callups: Jeff McNeil (a year ago) and Michael Conforto (four). And that’s where I took a hard left into being annoyed.
I love watching McNeil play, but were congratulations really in order? I flashed back to a year ago, and remembered how McNeil arrived derided for his defense, dismissed as a prospect, and at least a month after he’d deserved to be promoted. The Mets have done him no favors since then, either, moving him off the position where he’d worked so hard to improve.
I’m glad McNeil’s here. I hope he has a lot more anniversaries in blue and orange. But he’s succeeded despite his baseball team working overtime to make him fail.
And everything I can say about McNeil I can say quadruply about Conforto, whose development has been thoroughly botched by the Mets at every step of his career. He hit lefties in the minors so the Mets decided he had to be a platoon player — then reversed course and threw him out there against Clayton Kershaw. They denied him the regular playing time a young player needed, then exiled him to the minors for bad habits and pressing. He proved better than expected as a left fielder, so they made him into a right fielder — and then a center fielder, which he has no business being. They brought him back too early from a serious shoulder injury — and probably again from a concussion.
Happy anniversary, Michael! Next week we’ll make you into a setup guy, just because.
After that, well, it was off to the races in terms of being PO’ed at my baseball team. I started fuming about the possibility of the Mets trading Syndergaard, and about the likelihood of them trading Zack Wheeler, when they should hold on to both talented young pitchers and look to add a stud in the offseason. The Mets won’t do that, of course — instead, they’ll make trades for interchangeable, empty-headed fireballing righty relievers and salary relief, then retool with retreads found in the scratch-and-dent aisle and mumble about having liked their plan while stumbling to 70-odd wins. It makes a person weary, it really does.
Oh, and then there was the game, in which Syndergaard had another one of those not bad but not great 2019 Syndergaard games and Conforto got two hits but not one when we really needed it and poor Dom Smith had a miserable time in left field (a position he shouldn’t be playing and that you might recall the Mets bafflingly refused to help him get better at) and Jeurys Familia was terrible again and in fact the entire ballclub looked like people had been out until 5 a.m., in which case I hope they had fun, because I had no fun at all watching them.
But like I said, some days you’re just in a bad mood.
by Greg Prince on 24 July 2019 7:50 am With his third home run Tuesday night, Robinson Cano assured himself of qualifying into perpetuity for a conversation that isn’t about disappointing veteran acquisitions that cost us the potential inherent in promising youth. For an evening, our new pal Robbie didn’t need to be lumped in with every wayward American League expatriate from Joe Foy to Roberto Alomar. Instead, his company resided in the rarefied air of Page 394 of the current Mets Media Guide. You could look it up, specifically under:
Historical Records.
Batting.
Home Runs.
Individual, Game.
On Page 394, it says “3 (13 times)”. That notation will need to be revised upward at least once in advance of the 2020 edition, as Robinson Cano projects to take his chronological place atop a list that in print…
• counts down from Yoenis Cespedes’s pair of power trios (“at Philadelphia, 4/11/17”; “at Colorado, 8/21/15”);
• grabs the eye’s attention when it reaches Kirk Nieuwenhuis (the first Met who received a “vs.” instead of an “at,” tacitly implying his three homers off D’Back pitching flew above Flushing rather than Phoenix, 7/12/15);
• high-fives four members of the franchise’s 50th-anniversary all-time team (Carlos Beltran at Colorado, 5/12/11; Jose Reyes at Philadelphia, 8/15/06; Edgardo Alfonzo at Houston, 8/30/99; Darryl Strawberry, 8/5/85);
• nods reverently at a couple of other sluggers for all seasons (Gary Carter at San Diego, 9/3/85; Dave Kingman at Los Angeles, 6/4/76);
• and lands where it all started (Jim Hickman at St. Louis, 9/3/65).
Filling the Historical Records skies with three home runs apiece somewhere in between are Lucas Duda, Ike Davis and Claudell Washington. Duda had more of the Mets career that Davis was supposed to have. Washington’s Mets career was basically the June afternoon in Los Angeles when he thrice went deep. Claudell was only around for a few months in 1980. A few home runs in one game outweighs the production of plenty of Mets who lingered longer.
Cano is up to nine homers as a Met. He wasn’t brought here to hit home runs, exactly. It was figured those would be part of a broader package of offense that would spark, bolster and lift the Mets in 2019 if not beyond. He was Robinson Cano, after all…“was” being the operative word until Tuesday night. Until Tuesday night, he was Cano who we mentioned with Foy, Fregosi, Baerga, Alomar, maybe Samuel. He was Cano who used to be really something, before the Mets saw fit to trade two high-ceiling minor leaguers, among others, to secure his and Edwin Diaz’s services. Diaz has saved 22 games and blown what feels like a thousand others. It’s probably not quite that many.
In that same vein, it feels as if Cano — before he drove in all five runs on those three homers to fuel Jason Vargas’s 5-2 win over National League Rookie of No Month Chris Paddack and the Padres at Citi Field — had done absolutely nothing. Or more harm than good. Certainly less than expected. Not enough hitting. Not enough range. Surely not much in the way of running from home to first. But, because fairness compels us toward accuracy, Cano had been good for literally more than nothing, having been better than bad of late, even prior to Tuesday. If you read and listened closely, you learned Robbie the teammate was helpful in ways box scores don’t directly reflect. Keon Broxton credited Cano for valuable advice when he delivered a big hit in early April. Yeah, I know, Keon Broxton didn’t exactly deliver anything else, but player-coaching is player-coaching. At least twice Michael Conforto expressed similar sentiments after wins. When Mike Francesa asked Pete Alonso why he thought his defense was so much stronger than anticipated, the rookie sensation said he was helped immeasurably in Spring Training by his wise and experienced left-side partner Robinson Cano; after he captured the Home Run Derby trophy, Pete volunteered Cano was a genuine asset in preparing him to compete.
Items that don’t show up in the box score or make themselves evident on TV cover less ground than a slowing second baseman. Dave Kaminer, an extremely insightful FAFIF reader who’s been watching the Mets since the days of Jim Hickman, recently suggested that if Alonso is the Polar Bear, then Cano — “a veteran who doesn’t hustle, doesn’t hit, and who seems uninterested in the field” — ought to be called the Polar Opposite. I’ve been itching to co-opt that brilliant line since Dave shared it with me during the All-Star break, but it hasn’t seemed to fit as much. Now, or at least until the glitter from his epic performance fades, it doesn’t fit at all. That’s the problem with deciding where a player fits into the scheme of things while the scheme is still working itself out. I have a good friend who loyally and hopefully clung to Cano for his fantasy team throughout this season’s first 99 games of mostly misery before waiving him Tuesday morning, just in time to not benefit from Robinson’s four hits, three homers and five RBIs. That friend calmly referred to himself Tuesday night as a “moron” and “idiot,” which I can confirm he’s definitely not. (I can also confirm I maintain minimal interest in anybody’s fantasy team, even that of a good friend.)
Was Cano as washed up as it appeared prior to his breakout game? Were his fourteen seasons of Hall of Fame production prior to 2019 the true leading indicator of what his 36-year-old mind and body had left? Were we hasty to judge and deny all appeals because we’re so used to Joe Foy batting .236 while Amos Otis goes on to make five All-Star teams? The world champion Mets thought Foy was the third baseman who would solidify their 1970 title defense. Otis was expendable in that particular thing-scheme. Two years later, with Foy long gone, Jim Fregosi was the new key to the hot corner, while Nolan Ryan’s hard-to-harness heat was deemed expendable.
A generation or so after, former second baseman Juan Samuel from the Phillies was too good to pass up, so we got him to play center, sending away Lenny Dykstra and Roger McDowell in the process. Somewhat tarnished Tribesman Carlos Baerga would not all that much later be seen by the front office as a bargain at the price of Jeff Kent and Jose Vizcaino. And who would pass up Robbie Alomar if the Indians were going to practically give him to us? None of these deals is exactly analogous to what Kelenic/Dunn/et al for Cano/Diaz has been even if the results seem to have trended in the same direction (though Alex Escobar never quite tore it up for Cleveland the way Amos Otis did for Kansas City). But you know how we are. We love our apt-enough precedents and we wear transactional doom like a comfy old hoodie, holes and all. Just a couple of years ago, I struck up a conversation on the LIRR with a Mets fan who was still stewing that we gave up on Hickman in 1966 and Jim made the All-Star team in 1970.
Robinson Cano may yet escape the conversation he’s been assigned to since it became apparent the rest of the National League East wasn’t prioritizing the coming and getting of us. Because he has (deep breath) another four years on his contract, we don’t know for sure that Robbie is necessarily the stuff of Foy, Fregosi and the others who populate our cabal of eternal regret. On the other hand, he’s definitely, within the Mets Media Guide Page 394 context, of a caliber equal to Carter and Strawberry, Reyes and Beltran, Cespedes twice and Nieuwenhuis inexplicably.
Y’know, Joe Foy once went 5-for-5 as a Met, driving in five runs and homering twice — the second time in the tenth inning — to beat the Giants at Candlestick Park. It doesn’t come up often when Foy’s name stirs in Met lore, but it did happen, just like that night Robinson Cano socked three home runs to crush the Padres.
by Greg Prince on 21 July 2019 11:35 pm GREGORY LEWIS PRINCE
“GREG”
NEW YORK, N.L., 1969-2019
LOYAL METS FAN FROM AGE 6 TO 56, ENCOMPASSING TWO WORLD CHAMPIONSHIPS, SEVEN OTHER POSTSEASONS AND MYRIAD LOSING CAMPAIGNS. ATTENDED HUNDREDS OF GAMES AT SHEA STADIUM AND HUNDREDS MORE AT CITI FIELD. REGULARLY TUNED INTO TV AND RADIO BROADCASTS. READ ABOUT TEAM RELIGIOUSLY. CO-AUTHORED BLOG DEVOTED TO METS FANDOM FOR 15 SEASONS. PUBLISHED SEVERAL BOOKS ON FRANCHISE HISTORY. SHARED INTENSE PASSION FOR BALLCLUB WITH LOVED ONES AND TOTAL STRANGERS ALIKE. NEARLY ALWAYS CLAD IN SOME COMBINATION OF ORANGE AND BLUE. AFTER THIRD EXTRA-INNING LOSS IN FOUR DAYS TO GIANTS, JUST COULDN’T FUCKING TAKE IT ANYMORE.
by Jason Fry on 20 July 2019 11:38 pm After two games worth of balls going plop in the night, a Mets fan could have been forgiven for concluding Saturday afternoon’s game wasn’t exactly a must-watch event. The Mets, after a brief bout of not being completely depressing, had reverted to tragicomic form out west. First they played into the deep hours of the night against San Francisco and saw a heroic victory record-scratch into a gallingly cruel defeat, and then they played another marathon and lost when Dom Smith, Amed Rosario and special guest star Wilson Ramos combined for a recreation of one of 2018’s more depressing losses, and against the same club no less.
So what would happen Saturday? It didn’t seem impossible that they would lose in the 23rd when all nine Mets collided and knocked each other unconscious on a pop-up, yielding baseball’s first infield inside-the-park home run, or perhaps something far worse than that was in store. It was a day to commemorate the moon landing — an event that in Mets history is intertwined with the Miracle of ’69 and the giddy feeling that all things are possible to those who work hard in good faith — but if we’re being honest, for most of their history the Mets have been less Armstrong, Aldrin and Collins than a montage of rockets exploding on launch pads, expiring with a sigh of propellant just above their gantries, or pinwheeling out of control while spectators scream and run.
But one of the most basic laws of baseball is that you can’t outguess it. Walker Lockett came out throwing high sinkers, but somehow survived and then settled down and in the end walked off with his first big-league win. Our dumpster-fire bullpen somehow proved inflammable again, with the exception of poor Stephen Nogosek, but by the time Nogosek arrived both teams, the umpire crew, most of the fans and even Lou Seal in her astronaut suit were already thinking about getting dinner, so we’ll let it go.
Smith was unavoidably at center stage after the previous night’s calamity, but it sure didn’t seem to bother him, which is a necessary quality in any baseball player and even more highly recommended if a Wilpon signs your checks. (Recall that back in spring training Smith asked for reps in left field, and was rebuffed.) Leading off the second, Smith blasted a ball over one of the legs of the triangle in Triples Alley — territory that’s not easy to reach in San Francisco — and then chipped in three more RBIs for good measure. He wasn’t alone in offensive heroics: Jeff McNeil banged a homer off the foul pole, a drive that was baffling to watch on TV, as the ball shot down the right-field line, vanished, and then wound up bouncing on the field, while Todd Frazier smacked a relatively run-of-the-mill homer to left. (Sorry, Todd. It still counted.)
And then there was Pete Alonso, who greeted the news that he was being given a day off the way you’d hope — by complaining volubly, fussing in the dugout and then appearing for a sixth-inning pinch-hitting assignment that ended with him obliterating a baseball, sending it 444 feet to the opposite field. Alonso, numbers burnished and point proven, then got to continue his day of rest.
Yes, all was well for the Mets for one day in San Francisco, without extra-inning calamities or slapstick defense or other trademark horrors. Which was good, because on Sunday Steven Matz will face someone named Conner Menez, and the Mets have an annoying, years-long habit of turning newborn starting pitchers into Walter Johnson, so —
Wait. No. There I go again, trying to outguess baseball. Dom Smith and Walker Lockett and our bullpen just had something to say about that, didn’t they?
by Greg Prince on 20 July 2019 4:12 am “Don’t bother, Mickey,” I wanted to tell the beleaguered manager of the New York Mets after his club dropped and I do mean dropped its second consecutive extra-inning game, this one on a patently unbelievable albeit hauntingly familiar defensive misplay, “we didn’t touch home plate, either.”
One sometimes forgets when the bullpen falters or the left fielder is psyched out by the presence of the shortstop and an opposition baserunner scampers 270 feet to decisively break a scoreless tie that, oh yeah, it was as scoreless on our end as it was on theirs. Had the Mets been determined or destined to win Friday night’s ad hoc sequel to Thursday night’s extended debacle, they might have thought to put a run on the board somewhere between frames one and ten. Maybe they thought about it, but they didn’t come close.
To be fair, neither did the Giants. The Giants couldn’t do anything against Jacob deGrom for seven innings, which put them in the company of the entire universe from 2018 and more lineups than not of late in 2019. And going for the Giants, doing such a deGrommian job of stymieing the Mets? Not Madison Bumgarner like the night before or so many nights when Bumgarner has been impregnable to all manner of Met attack, compiling a 1.50 ERA in 72 regular-season and ahem postseason innings against our lads. Not Juan Marichal, who posted a 2.13 ERA in 342.1 innings against the Mets as part of his Hall of Fame ledger.
No, Tyler Beede. Or, yes, Tyler Beede. Either way, Tyler Beede.
It’s not fair to compare Beede to Bumgarner or Marichal, though it appears the Mets can’t tell any of the three apart, for the Mets couldn’t touch Tyler Beede. The most they could make was incidental contact, totaling three hits in eight innings. It was the twelfth MLB start lifetime for the 26-year-old righty. Perhaps someday Beede will be remembered by San Franciscans with the same reverence reserved for the likes of the Dominican Dandy or MadBum (nicknames used to be so much better). Or, just maybe, the Mets, as the Mets will, elevated some run-of-the mill starter to the ranks of the immortal for one evening.
The Mets didn’t hit Tyler Beede, they didn’t hit Will Smith and they didn’t hit Sam Dyson. Ten innings, no hitting to speak of. Definitely no scoring. Thus, after deGrom gave it the Full Jacob; Luis Avilán chipped in a scoreless inning; and Jacob Rhame surprisingly didn’t implode the second his foot made contact with the pitching rubber, it was nothing-nothing. And you know what Billy Preston said about nothing from nothing.
Thus, in the bottom of the tenth, with nothing yet lost but absolutely nothing gained, it goes down like this: Rhame walks Alex Dickerson. He strikes out Brandon Belt. He strikes out Austin Slater. He elicits a presumably catchable fly ball to left from Pablo Sandoval. The eleventh inning and the promise of more nothingness beckons. The Mets seem slated to keep going and do little while the seagulls flock to whatever it’s called this year stadium and commence their midnight snacking.
In left, Dominic Smith charges in to make the catch. From short, Amed Rosario tracks back to make the catch. Where have we seen this exercise in physical comedy play out before? Why, at Citi Field, in another game against the Giants, less than a year ago. This version was a lighter on the pratfalls but generally true to the classic slapstick form. Shortstop and left fielder, both celebrated in the same paragraph for their emerging offensive talents, reached a mutual conclusion that Sandoval’s ball should not be caught. Or if somebody’s gonna catch it, it ain’t gonna be accomplished in the first-person.
“You got it!” proves as ineffective this July as it did last August. The ball eludes the glove closest to it — Smith’s — and trickles away. Dom turns to retrieve it. Dickerson, that rascal, runs, runs and runs some more. He rounds second. He rounds third. Smith picks up the ball and fires it to Todd Frazier. Frazier receives Smith’s throw and directs a perfect strike to his imaginary teammate, catcher Ramos Wilson, not to be confused with actual catcher Wilson Ramos, who was standing on a different side of the third base line from the one to which Frazier threw. A relay aimed properly at a fellow fielder probably nabs Dickerson, provided it’s caught. Then again, catching isn’t necessarily a core fielding competency of these Mets, not even for the catcher.
However you choose to apportion DRNS (defensive runs NOT saved), the Mets still lose, 1-0, in ten. They lose in what even we who adore them in spite of themselves and defend them to the death to the outside world would have to admit was extremely Metsian. And they did it late it at night, threading the needle between keeping us from falling fully asleep while they played and leaving us agitatedly awake once they were done. A simple fly ball dropping to the grass is what we see in our insomniac visions. What we don’t spot is any Met producing any run.
Which is to say, rest easy — the Mets were probably gonna find a way to not win this game even had Smith caught that presumably catchable fly ball.
by Jason Fry on 19 July 2019 1:36 pm By definition, extra-inning losses are cruel. To come so far, battling and staving off ruination, only to have it arrive anyway? That always hurts.
To that, let us add the noncontroversial contract rider that extra-inning road losses are crueler still. Ruin, when it comes, leaves you stuck in mid-gesture, on a field where nothing you do matters anymore.
And to that, another rider: extra-inning road losses on the West Coast are another level of cruel, because it’s the middle of the night and you’ll suffer for it the next day and the non-baseball fans cluttering up life will question your decision-making. (“You stayed up until 3 a.m.? Really? Well, did they win?”)
We’ll get to more cruelty in a bit, but for now let’s rewind. Thursday night/Friday morning’s Mets-Giants tilt began with a rather different narrative: Noah Syndergaard and Madison Bumgarner, once more locked in an electric pitcher’s duel. Sure, this one was for a lot lower stakes than the game where Conor Gillaspie Did That, but it still had its significance: Bumgarner may never throw a pitch as a Giant again, and Syndergaard is a subject of at least lukewarm trade talk as well. (On the other hand, the Giants have made an unlikely run back into contention, and if the Mets trade Syndergaard I will hold my breath until I die, not that Jeff Wilpon cares.)
Both pitchers were more than up for the challenge. Bumgarner was scratched for a first-inning run but essentially untouchable for eight innings after that, and even lobbied to pitch the 10th — the equivalent of a total solar eclipse in this era of pitch counts and reliever specialization. Syndergaard was just as good, his night marred only by a fourth inning in which the Giants ambushed his fastball (and would have inflicted more damage if not for a simultaneously awkward and nifty snag by J.D. Davis).
Syndergaard has had a strange season, in large part because whatever the hell has happened to the ball has forced him to reinvent his slider on the battlefield. Slider 2.0 was in full effect Tuesday night, both on its own and as a complement to Syndergaard’s deadly fastball: After Alex Dickerson led off the bottom of the second with a triple, Syndergaard went to work, fanning Brandon Crawford and Mike Yastrzemski and popping up Kevin Pillar. In case someone at Whatever They’re Calling It This Year Park wasn’t sufficiently impressed, he then turned another leadoff triple into nothing in the seventh, with the highlight his confrontation with Bumgarner as a hitter.
With both starters out of the game, the affair became Reliever Roulette, which is not a contest I’d recommend Mets fans play. (“Five bullets in six chambers? I like my chances!”) Games like that become a succession of disastrous storylines appearing one by one for their auditions, like so:
“Oh God, Seth Lugo is going to have a bad outing and then there will be no one we trust.”
(Nope.)
“It’s funny, but Luis Avilan has been on the roster most of the year and I basically can’t think of anything when his name comes up. That will change after this ends horribly.”
(No.)
“Hoo boy, Edwin Diaz. Maybe one day we’ll understand what the hell went wrong this year, and this horrible loss will be part of the discussion.”
(All was well.)
“Jeurys Familia‘s looked better of late. That’s called being set up for a shot to the jaw. We are such suckers.”
(Nah.)
“Oh goddamnit, Robert Gsellman is gonna get a walkoff loss for his birthday, isn’t he?”
(He did not.)
“A couple of weeks ago I was sitting eight feet from Justin Wilson while he warmed up on rehab for the Cyclones, and didn’t recognize him. The universe will now have its revenge.”
(The universe didn’t care.)
Meanwhile, the Mets were just as frustrated by a parade of Giants relievers. It looked like they had Will Smith beaten in the 10th, what with second and third and none out. But Smith threw approximately six million low-and-away sliders to fan Tomas Nido, Michael Conforto and — most startlingly — Jeff McNeil. That was suboptimal, to say the least.
Eventually, what with a 14th-inning stretch and all, the game passed through the storyline auditions phase and into helpless shrug territory. Perhaps a position player would be thrown to the wolves, an ejection would leave one team with eight eligible players and send everyone to the rulebooks, or the aerial gyre of seagulls would develop a collective taste for man flesh and the game would be called on account of carnivorous perils.
Or maybe nothing would happen and the game would pass into Inning 227,298, with pilgrims from across the world coming to watch stooped Mets and Giants with six-foot beards and shredded, faded rags swing their splintered bats at coverless balls and shriek for the gods to release them from their torment.
That would have been cruel — but not much more cruel than what actually happened, which was that Pete Alonso clubbed a homer to give the Mets a 2-1 lead, except Chris Mazza — lanky with a certain mien of ironic acceptance — went out for a second inning of work and didn’t record a single out. Double, double, HBP, single that somehow didn’t score the fatal run, another single that did, and then it was 2:30 a.m. and you were left blinking and amazed and defeated.
It wasn’t a bad game — in fact, it was nearly five hours of pretty compelling baseball. But it was a cruel one, however artistic the delivery of that cruelty might have been. And it was one that will leave a mark.
by Greg Prince on 17 July 2019 10:56 pm When I was in junior high, I’d carry a Bic pen in the front left pocket of my jeans and, at some point in the course of the school year, the pen would explode. Several points, actually…and a whole pack of pens. I never understood that. It was just hanging around during one class, then making a horrible mess of things the next (similar to my grades some semesters).
The Minnesota Twins must have felt like my front left jeans pocket c. 1977 on Wednesday afternoon. All the ink pent up in the Mets suddenly went KABOOM all over them. Once they realized what hit them, there wasn’t nearly enough Bold, Cheer or Cold Power in the house to scrub that stain out.
Meanwhile, the Mets, in the role of the pen, were quite pleased with themselves, flicking their proverbial Bic all over Minneapolis. They were trailing in the middle of the seventh inning, 3-2, and came away blowout winners, 14-4. They romped so hard, I hear the Twins are considering changing the name of Target Field to Romper Room.
We were treated to both a passel and a plethora of offense from the Mets, whose general level of play we found so offensive as recently as just after the All-Star break, which — you’re not going to believe this — was less than a week ago. But we were so much older then; we’re younger than that now.
We’re certainly hotter, having won four in a row, all on the road, for the first time anywhere in nearly two months. Not too many 14-run outbursts in our carry-on bags until the Minnesota finale, though. The Mets took a good, tense bullpen duel on Tuesday night and didn’t overly overwhelm the Marlins when they commenced their recent winning ways. Those were the Marlins, the lone National League team the Mets were able to look down their noses upon. These, on the second leg of the trip to unexpected success, were the Twins of AL Central first-place elevation. You’re not gonna come out of nowhere and lay a dozen runs on the first-place Twins over the final three innings in their home ballpark.
Sure, you are. It’s what the Mets did. After hanging in admirably through six-and-a-half (Jason Vargas being a totally quality starting pitcher: 6 IP, 3 ER), the Metsies got all Twinsie on their opposition. The biggest hit, the one that put them ahead when it was still a ballgame, was Dominic Smith’s three-run pinch homer off Trevor May, scoring Amed Rosario and Adeiny Hechavarria in front of him. Rosario (not to be confused with the Twins’ version) had gotten the Mets going in the second with his tenth home run of the year. Ten home runs for a shortstop never touted for slugging, even in homer-happy 2019, is pretty impressive and a reminder that there’s likely a plethora/passel of talent embedded somewhere within that occasionally frustrating shortstop.
Amed ended the day with four hits. Dom wound up his third-of-a-day with four RBIs. In August of 2017, we applauded the promotion of each budding prospect to the big leagues. Intermittently since, we’ve set one or both aside in favor of the light given off by newer and shinier objects of our affection. Smith is 24. Rosario is 23. It’s fun to think that afternoons like this one might be a template for their continued development.
Of course if fun is your thing, dwell for a spell in the eighth inning. The Mets were still ahead, 5-3, thanks in great part to a young man from the Dominican Republic named Jeurys Familia. Heard of him? He came on and threw a scoreless inning to preserve a lead. It’s almost like he’d done that before. We should really check this guy out. Anyway, it’s 5-3 going to the eighth and the Mets are trying to do more than cling to their edge. They’re trying to enhance it. Robinson Cano walks to lead off. Rosario (again, ours) singles with two out. Hechavarria lofts a long fly ball to left. Deep, but not deep enough. It comes down on the glove of Rosario (theirs this time).
Did I say “on” his glove? Yes, because the ball did not land securely in the pocket of Eddie Rosario’s glove for a third out. It chose instead to clank off of it. With the ball roaming free with wild abandon, in came Robbie, followed closely by Amed, who has renewed his habit of running hard since somebody noticed he briefly paused it.
And would ya look at all that ink? What a shame for the Twins and whoever does their laundry.
Pen exploded, the Mets created a signature inning. A double for Jeff McNeil to drive in Adeiny. A single for Dom to drive in Jeff. And Pete Alonso, America’s home run heartthrob, reminded us how close 474 feet from home plate can be in the hands of the above-average Bear.
FOUR-HUNDRED SEVENTY-FOUR FEET…WHOA! Y’know? Yeah, Polar Pete powered a pitch from Matt Magill so high above the Twin Cities that it took out a heretofore sturdy television station transmitter and knocked WJM off the air. In his typical oblivious fashion, local anchorman Ted Baxter continued to read the news as if nothing had happened.
The score by this point, as if one needed to be kept, was Mets 11 Twins 3. After Chris Mazza threw a serviceable inning of relief in very sharp striped socks, Minnesota answered by sending forth Ehire Adrianza to mop up. Don’t feel bad if your pre-Interleague series bullpen research yielded no usable intelligence on Adrianza. Ehire is a shortstop usually and served as Rocco Baldelli’s white flag on Wednesday. The first-place Twins were crying “UNCLE” in the face of the fourth-place Mets. Good luck holding off the Indians with that attitude. Three more runs on five more hits ensued. I’d say a position player’s presence on the mound made a mockery of the game, but the game already included the use of designated hitters, so why not go all the way?
The Mets are going all the way to San Francisco on a four-game winning streak. Pack a fresh set of pens, plant them in the Giants’ pockets and keep an eye out for what might happen somewhere between Spanish and Algebra.
by Jason Fry on 17 July 2019 2:13 am A cliche of whodunits is the dog that didn’t bark — the detective’s first indication that something odd is afoot, not because something happened but because it failed to happen.
A detective would have taken a definite interest in Tuesday night’s tilt with the Twins, the start of a two-game, 20-hour whirlwind tour through Minnesota. Because pretty much nothing went as expected:
— The normally sure-handed Twins played aggressively clanky defense behind Michael Pineda, leaving their hulking hurler two runs in arrears before Minnesota got to take its first hacks against Steven Matz. That was fortunate, as the Mets only tallied one more run the rest of the way.
— Michael Conforto, who as a center fielder is more loyal grunt than special forces, ended the third inning with a leaping grab above the fence, taking a home run (or at least a game-tying double) away from long-ago paper Met Nelson Cruz.
— Conforto, whose swing has gotten rather long and whose health is once again a question mark, also chipped in four hits, with the quietest one proving the loudest in the box score. In the top of the fifth, with the game tied, the Mets had Amed Rosario on third with one out and Jeff McNeil at the plate. McNeil struck out, which I suppose does have to happen, though his look of peeved disbelief mirrored mine. No worries: Conforto then poked a little single through the left side, just past Miguel Sano and Jorge Polanco, to score Rosario.
— The Mets bullpen committed no arson, set fire to no dumpster, and failed to self-combust despite being given every chance to do so. There should be an asterisk here, as Robert Gsellman was somehow unscathed despite giving up two walks, hitting a batter and yielding a sizzling liner down the first-base line. (All you kids out there, don’t try that at home.) And Edwin Diaz … well, we’ll get to that. But Luis Avilan got the first two outs of the sixth, Jeurys Familia got a key out to end the sixth, and Justin Wilson and Seth Lugo turned in clean innings.
— Yes, Familia came into a big spot and reduced that spot to nothing, coaxing a grounder from Jonathan Schoop. No, I can’t believe it either.
For all that, the game came down to a depressingly familiar situation: Diaz in for the save and nothing going right. He started by fanning Sano with heat on the corner, or perhaps slightly off of it, looking for all the world like the free-and-easy-throwing, 99-MPH-gas-powered Diaz we saw at the beginning of the season, the one we thought we were getting from Seattle and could rely on for seasons to come.
Diaz then worked an 0-2 count against Schoop, who left with tightness in his side, or some similar malady. But after that, things somehow fell apart. Again.
Young Luis Arraez inherited this unfavorable count, but battled Diaz and walked, a gritty at-bat that seemed to rally the Twins and their fans. Diaz yielded a single to Mitch Garver, got Polanco to fly out, and gave up an infield hit to Marwin Gonzalez.
Bases loaded, two out, and here came Cruz, Diaz’s former teammate, whose 377 home runs are seemingly etched in his face. After beginning with a cameo with the Brewers, Cruz has forged the entirety of his impressive career in the American League, meaning his exploits have left little impression on me. He went to work, and as Diaz’s pitch count mounted all of the potential outcomes seemed terrible, from a grand slam to a hit batsman. (No seriously, the latter nearly happened.)
But then the game ended with a whimper. Diaz jammed Cruz with a fastball on his hands — probably not a strike, but close enough that Cruz had to swing. The ball went up instead of out and Cruz followed it briefly with his eyes, standing stock still and dispirited at home plate. Behind third, Todd Frazier hurried into foul territory, avoiding the Twins’ third-base coach and the runner hustling from second, to cradle the ball near his waist. With his prize secured, he snuck a glance into the Mets’ dugout — a well-can-you-believe-that aside.
If he couldn’t, neither could I. The ghosts of John Franco, Braden Looper, Armando Benitez and other merchants of panic wavered and dissipated from my living room: Diaz had escaped and the Mets had won. After a season marred by enough racket to fill a dozen or so kennels, for one night the dog, somehow, didn’t bark.
by Greg Prince on 15 July 2019 8:33 pm All Mets fans who were around for 1969 enjoyed 1969 in their own way. My friend Garry Spector, who was eleven, enjoyed it so much it drove him to tears. Garry recently penned a sweet reminiscence on the always exquisite Perfect Pitch blog (the unique baseball/musical diamond tended by Metropolitan Opera oboist and Metropolitan Baseball Club of New York diehard Susan Laney Spector) remembering how he absorbed the outcome of Tom Seaver’s shoulda-been-joyous one-hit victory — a.k.a. the Jimmy Qualls Game — that July 9 just over fifty years ago. You’d think he’d have jumped for joy. Yet how much joy can there be if the one hit comes in the ninth inning and prevents perfection?
“My mother,” Garry writes, “assured me that I would see a Mets perfect game someday (I’m still waiting). And this eleven-year-old cried himself to sleep.”
***
Michael Yalango enjoyed the club eleven-year-olds like Garry Spector (and six-year-olds like me) from a spot too far from home. Perhaps that’s why it meant the world to him. Michael, a young man from Staten Island who wasn’t really that big a baseball fan, got hooked from more than 8,000 miles away. He was in the army, stationed in Vietnam and thrilled to cling to anything that brought him, in his mind, in the jungle, back to New York and normality. Listening to the World Series over Armed Forces Radio, Yalango told Mike Vaccaro in Sunday’s Post, “brought me a few moments of joy in a very sad place.”
Be sure to read Mike’s story about what the ’69 Mets meant to one soldier from Staten Island. It’s hard to believe baseball could ever mean more.
***
All Mets fans, whether around in 1969 or picking up on its magic in the past tense, should be able to enjoy 1969 anew or for the first time from the canon of literature devoted to the Miracle of Miracles. Some of the books that best capture 1969’s essence were published nearly fifty years ago on the heels of those Mets doing what made those Mets eternally readable. Milestones being the magnet for reader interest that they are, several new titles have come along within the past few months to coincide with the golden anniversary commemorated so compellingly at Citi Field a couple of weeks ago. A fitting recent addition to the 1969 Mets section of your baseball library is 2019’s They Said It Couldn’t Be Done: The ’69 Mets, New York City, and the Most Astounding Season in Baseball History by Wayne Coffey.
You might think that after a half-century — which has already encompassed a recurring series of milestone anniversaries that spawned their own commemorative examinations — we already have on file everything that needs to be written about what Howie Rose accurately describes as the Greatest New York Sports Story Ever Told. But any story that is the greatest deserves to keep being told. It’s how stories keep thriving. Coffey has indeed ensured the story of the 1969 Mets remains alive and well in the here and now.
Veterans of the Met stacks will recognize certain tales culled from earlier sources, but Coffey (previously with the Daily News and collaborator with R.A. Dickey on 2012’s Wherever I Wind Up) fills his story with original reporting and diligent research, having reached out to living players, faithful fans — Howie Rose and Gary Cohen among them — and archives that were just waiting to spill their secrets. Particularly affecting are Cleon Jones, Jerry Koosman and Ron Taylor each exploring a hardscrabble upbringing, injecting a layer of personal depth not necessarily evident in previous 1969 volumes. Jones’s life in Africatown has gotten a lot of attention of late. You won’t receive a richer tour than that conducted by Coffey.
If you haven’t watched every pitch of the 1969 World Series in fifty years, or ever, don’t worry. The author has rewatched and shares virtually every one of them. It’s like running home from the bus stop (as kids of the era were wont to do that October) and finding there’s still plenty of game left. You know how the five contests turn out, but you’ll hang on every dab of shoe polish nonetheless. And you will be reminded throughout Coffey’s narrative that the one figure who towers over the Greatest New York Sports Story Ever Told is Gil Hodges. He’s the Empire State Building in a blue windbreaker. The players who survive to this day can’t credit him enough for leading them to the achievement that has defined their lives ever since. Gil seems to become more important to the Mets’ success every decade, and he was already universally understood to be its critical element.
The Mets’ journey crosses paths with those of the year’s other landmarks. Coffey takes us to those destinations, too: the moon in July; Woodstock in August; streets brimming with discontent over the war young Yalango and too many others were stuck fighting on the same day Tom Seaver was pitching Game Four. The legend of 1969 would be incomplete without these historical details and detours. From a Mets perspective, They Said It Couldn’t Be Done sort of misses, through no fault of its own, certain voices we usually hear from in these retrospectives. I missed gleaning new insights from Tom Seaver, but we know Seaver is unavailable these days. Same for Bud Harrelson. Hell, I still can’t believe Tug McGraw has been silent since 2004.
Time has its own agenda, one that dictates why the contours of a fiftieth-anniversary book is going to be different from a twentieth-anniversary book (specifically Stanley Cohen’s quintessential where-they-are-now A Magic Summer). I’m grateful Coffey dug for additional background on the late Donn Clendenon and Tommie Agee and painted such a vivid portrait of the African-American experience in and out of baseball in the years leading up to 1969. I was happy to read the current thoughts of Gil Hodges, Jr., where his father’s influence on him and the team were concerned. And the pages are surely blessed by the presence of Ed Charles, with whom the author was able to speak before he passed away in 2018.
I also very much like Coffey’s de facto confession, saved for the end of the book: sure he pursued this story like he has any of his many journalistic endeavors, but in 1969, he was a 15-year-old Mets fan, as elated as any Mets fan of any age would have been. The love and care he put into They Said It Couldn’t Be Done shows he has stayed true to his younger self’s heart.
***
The Mets had heart, as anybody who’s watched their star turn on The Ed Sullivan Show knows. Singing wasn’t a talent they suddenly discovered once they upset the Orioles. At least one Met was vocalizing up a storm at approximately this very moment fifty years ago. In The Year the Mets Lost Last Place, the remarkable book that delivers a blow-by-blow account of Met life amid the nine midsummer games that certified the franchise a contender, we are reminded that on July 16, 1969, after the second-place Mets had taken two of three from the first-place Cubs at Wrigley Field, the team flight to Montreal was livened up by Charles belting out a ditty that everybody on the sidewalks of New York could suddenly relate to:
East Side, West Side
The fans are feeling gay.
After seven long, long years,
The Mets are on their way.
South Side, North Side
The word is going round.
When October rolls around,
The Mets will win the crown.
Ed had a way with a rhyme, whether matching it to a borrowed melody or simply expressing his emotions. It’s what made the Poet Laureate of the 1969 Mets so special. Some reporter in The Year… thought he was paying the Glider a compliment when he told him in the clubhouse at Wrigley, “You’re the Ernie Banks of the Mets.” Mets PR director Harold Weissman issued an immediate correction: “No, Banks is the Ed Charles of the Cubs.”
There was only one Ed Charles, of course. Anybody who was fortunate to spend even a little time in his company understood he was an original. A friend of this blog, Michael Garry, was fortunate enough understand it well. Michael wrote a very fine book a few years ago called Game of My Life: New York Mets, consisting of interviews with Mets through the years on the one game that resonated with them more than any other. Charles was the interview-subject equivalent for the author. Michael was so moved by the relationship he built with Ed that he paid tribute to him in the most appropriate fashion possible: he wrote him a poem.
“Ed’s own poetry inspired me,” Michael recently told us. He read it to Charles “a few weeks before his death last year, and then at his funeral in Kansas City.” Since no celebration of 1969 would approach perfection without a full-throated invocation of the Glider, Michael wondered if we could publish the poem here.
What a splendid idea.
***
Inspired by Jackie,
Who came to his town,
Ed never gave up,
He never backed down.
He spoke of his struggles
In fine poetry.
Few players could speak as
Cogently as he.
Then Ed got to the majors
With the KC A’s
And proved to the world
He could make all the plays.
He manned the hot corner,
Sprayed hits, stole bases.
With more help from Finley,
They could have gone places.
But lucky for Ed,
The Mets traded for him,
And in ’69
They started to win.
They called him the Glider
For scooping up blasts.
He made it look easy,
No matter the task.
And in the World Series
The Mets wouldn’t settle.
They battled the Birds,
Proving their mettle.
Ed came up in Game Two
In the ninth inning,
Got a hit and then scored;
The run was game-winning
Back in New York,
The Mets did not stop.
They took the next three
And wound up on top.
After the clincher
Ed ran to the mound,
Jumping with joy,
His smile unbound.
Grace on the field,
Grace on the page,
Ever the Glider,
The poet, the sage.
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