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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 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.
by Greg Prince on 15 July 2019 1:17 am The Mets have prevailed. In a battle of the teams with the two worst records in the National League, they are the least worst. In their five-member division, they place fourth on merit.
Take that, Marlins.
The Marlins did. They were outplayed by the Mets for two consecutive games in a three-game series — in Miami, no less. The last time the Mets visited South Florida, it was the Marlins whose ineptitude took a holiday and the Mets who were swept three out of three. The Mets fell to five games under .500 and Mickey Callaway’s job seemed in jeopardy. It’s not quite two months later and the Mets, by dint of their first road series win (not sweep, just win) since early April, have risen to nine games under .500, meaning this will be the first week in a while when a press conference won’t be necessary to confirm Callaway is still the manager.
Funny trajectory this Mets season has taken…funny as a crutch, per the old saying. Yet as fans, we lean on what we lean on. Sunday we leaned on a 6-2 victory with all kinds of little treats embedded in the result. Let us savor each and every mouthwatering bite.
• Jacob deGrom racked up five very solid innings despite not looking particularly comfortable. Wished he could have gone longer, but having to throw to Wilson Ramos can take a lot out of an ace.
• Wilson Ramos beat out an infield hit, his seventh of the season, according to Baseball Reference. Amazing what putting bat to ball and ninety feet of effort will get a person, let alone Buffalo.
• Amed Rosario, who should have offered 180 feet of effort instead of stopping at first Saturday night on his fly ball that didn’t get caught, doubled when he got the chance Sunday afternoon. That chance didn’t arrive until the eighth, and then only after a double-switch in the seventh. Rosario was benched as a message from Mickey…or so we gleaned from the ever helpful Wayne Randazzo, who reported that was the reason there was no Amed in the finale’s lineup. This was news to print reporters, who were told the Amedless motif represented a scheduled day off for the 23-year-old shortstop two days after the four-day All-Star break. Whatever the story, Rosario tried to get out in front of it from behind, taking ownership of it when asked about it postgame (answering through interpreter Alan Suriel, who seems to have the most thankless bilingual gig in baseball) and showing the full extent of his speed via his lone plate appearance.
• Adeiny Hechavarria, starting at short while Amed sat and hopefully learned, showed again he is a good ballplayer. Not a great ballplayer; not anybody you wouldn’t trade to a depth-minded contender if the Double-A reliever promised in exchange comes attached to one of those live arms; but a guy who quietly does enough things well that they deserve to be noticed. I noticed a couple: a very pretty pivot when Hechavarria was the 6 on a 4-6-3 DP to end the bottom of the fifth, and a beautiful read of a single in front of him that allowed him to dash from first to third in the top of the sixth, setting up a run. Good ballplaying should always be appreciated.
• Robinson Cano, who until very recently wasn’t much more productive than Adeiny Hechavarria, continued to bust out, producing four hits that included his second home run in two games. The batting average that wallowed beneath .230 a little over two weeks ago has soared over .250. From the vantage point of March, that’s not very encouraging. After where he was in late June, it’s cause for another Seaver Way parade. A Robinson Cano hot streak feels a little like the kind George Foster would now and then unfurl after his atrocious introduction to Queens in 1982. I always wanted to believe Foster had regained his Cincinnati touch. I really did. But I was gonna need more than one hot streak. I rarely got it.
• George Foster teammate Keith Hernandez invoked one of his signature bromides from the booth, the one about a ground ball base hit that will look like a line drive in tomorrow’s paper. I know the old chestnut is not exclusive to Keith and I know it means a hit is a hit however it’s hit, yet Keith’s recitation of this phrase made me wonder what paper Keith subscribes to and whether, in fact, the sports editor of that paper will plaster atop that section’s lead page Monday, MIGUEL ROJAS HITS LINE DRIVE.
• Jeff McNeil! Leadoff home run! First pitch! The Mets were immediately ahead, 1-0, versus Sandy Alcantra and proceeded to never do anything but lead in this game. That was the Squirrel’s doing. The Squirrel does so much. Jeff also threw out Curtis Granderson at the plate a half-inning after Granderson robbed Pete Alonso at the left field fence. I’ve been known to look the other way and applaud softly when Grandy does something Grand against us, but taking a homer away from the Polar Bear is a skill too far.
• Pete Alonso! No home runs! Robbed of one by Curtis Granderson! So why am I shouting? Because Pete also lifted a fly ball deep enough to center to go out of other facilities and it served as a sacrifice fly to pad the Mets’ lead when its protection was in the hands of the bullpen. Sort of like needing to see more from Cano to believe he isn’t Foster (who did hit 99 home runs as a Met), I wanted to feel assured Pete didn’t come out of his Home Run Derby coronation overswinging. He looks mostly fine. He’ll get back to belting balls over walls instead of in front of them soon enough.
• The relievers of the day were, en masse, as effective as they needed to be. Justin Wilson posted a scoreless sixth. Robert Gsellman endured a hiccup but took care of the eighth and ninth. Seth Lugo inherited three runners with one out and allowed none of them to score in the seventh. As for those three runners, they were put on base by Jeurys Familia. He wasn’t effective at all. He didn’t kill us, but it’s hard to say he made us stronger. They’re gonna have to find innings that don’t count to straighten Jeurys out. Or innings that count in a league that isn’t this one. Whereas most Met relievers who implode leave me in a mood of malice, I feel genuinely sad watching Familia not get outs. He was a 96-save man across two playoff seasons that happened not so long ago. He was pretty good for another playoff club last year. I partially blame myself for being happy to welcome him back after his summer abroad. Same for Jay Bruce entering 2018. Mets who leave obviously need longer decontamination periods. I don’t have a slice of Statcast data to support that assertion, I just know it’s true.
• Juan Lagares made two putouts. There was nothing remarkable about either. Juan was in for defense late. Juan almost never starts anymore. He hardly bats. But he’s still here, senior Met in terms of uninterrupted tenure, dating to April of 2013. The Mets to debut as Mets just before him: Greg Burke, LaTroy Hawkins, Aaron Laffey and Anthony Recker. They’re all retired. The Mets to debut as Mets just after him: Shaun Marcum, Andrew Brown, Rick Ankiel, David Aardsma. They’re all retired. Lagares was recalled when the Mets sent down Kirk Nieuwenhuis. Nieuwenhuis just retired from the Long Island Ducks. Lagares was chosen mainly because the defensive-specialist center fielder ahead of him on the depth chart, Matt den Dekker, was injured. Den Dekker just retired from the Long Island Ducks. The way Lagares has hit this year makes you think his next team will be the Long Island Ducks (who are actually pretty good). Nevertheless, I was just happy to see Juan out there catching fly balls and reminding us he is still on the team. We collectively fell hard for Lagares in 2013. Still being on hand in 2019 merits a hand.
• Last happy happenstance from Sunday was me watching the whole game and not feeling like a chump for doing so. There’ve been plenty of games like where I’ve been left to wonder “what the hell did I do that for?” this season. There’ll be plenty more. But once in a while, no matter that the only series you win is from the only team your record says you’re better than, you immerse yourself in your team and you don’t wonder what that was all about. You know what it’s all about. It’s about the Mets. The Mets winning. The Mets winning an entire series. Felt good. Do that again sometime soon if you don’t mind.
by Greg Prince on 14 July 2019 1:33 am Usually Brodie Van Wagenen throws the chair of unfettered frustration. Following the successful resolution of baseball activities Saturday night in Miami, we can close our eyes (or keep them wide open if we’re over on the West Side) and imagine instead Brodie threw the chair of temporary redemption. Throwing chairs still seems like unseemly behavior for a stylish executive such as himself, but let’s let the GM have this fling. What he traded for in December arrived in July for the first time since April.
A game-winning home run from Robinson Cano. A game-saving inning from Edwin Diaz. The future nightmare of Jarred Kelenic and Justin Dunn for now merely the stuff of bad dreams. Even Jay Bruce cooperated, flying out as a pinch-hitter in the Phillies’ loss to the Nationals. Not that we’re chasing the Phillies or the Nationals in any but the most deluded mind, but the way things have gone recently, you’d expect Bruce to follow the Mets around from city to city and join their opponents series by series just to make Van Wagenen’s signature trade look progressively worse.
Until Kelenic is up in the majors making like Michael Conforto did in the third — launching a slump-interrupting two-run homer out of the two-hole — and until Dunn is doing his best Noah Syndergaard impression — seven sharp innings featuring nine strikeouts, with the final eleven Marlins he faced going down in order — that little swap of Eventually for Immediately can only look incrementally better to us. We’ve already decided it’s the 21st-century amalgam of Amos Otis and Nolan Ryan for a chronic case of impetigo. It might very well be that soon, but before box scores from the Pacific Northwest taunt us clear to the end of the next decade, we are entitled to enjoy the occasional evening when the trade works as well as it possibly can.
In the eighth inning on Saturday, with Dom Smith having singled in front of him, Cano held up his end of the shall we say bargain, sending a no-doubter over the right field wall to break a 2-2 tie. Cano’s post-swing Ratso Rizzo-inflected body language (“I’m STANDIN’ here!”) certainly expressed no doubts. The baserunner who’s made himself famous for redefining effortlessness between home and first gauged the ball he blasted off Nick Anderson quite correctly. Robbie could take his sweet time starting his trot because his homer departed the Jeter Confines in a big damn hurry.
The bottom of the ninth belonged to Diaz, just as it was supposed to: in fact as well as in name. Save No. 20 wasn’t the stuff of Formula 409. Edwin doesn’t necessarily blind us with clean innings. Too often he spreads mud so thoroughly over the late-game countertop that you wish a roll of Bounty was warming up in the pen behind him. Sure enough, he did allow a one-out single to Marlin Starlin Castro, and just as surely, there was a sizzler off the bat of Harold Ramirez that he had to thank his luckiest stars landed in the glove of extremely well-situated quicker picker-upper Todd Frazier. Yet when there was a tying run at the plate with two out, Diaz ended the angst with a quick spritz of a called strike three past Jorge Alfaro.
Diaz records the clutch save. Cano cracks a key homer. Those two events occurred in conjunction with one another on Opening Day, March 29. They occurred again on April 6. They didn’t reoccur until July 13. Three months between the two ex-Mariner jewels shining in tandem as powerful reasons for a Mets victory…you could grumble that’s an uncomfortably long gap between encouraging episodes to emerge from a very dicey transaction. Or you could simply smile at the 4-2 result that fell in the Mets’ favor and shrug, “hey, third time’s a charm.”
Yeah, let’s go with that for now.
by Greg Prince on 13 July 2019 9:13 am Anticipation traditionally accompanies our team’s first game out of the All-Star break. We haven’t had a real game to watch in five days, so naturally we’re famished for Mets. On top of the yen for baseball was a hankering for an explanation by the highest-ranking official available to give us one. Brodie Van Wagenen, we were told, was going to meet the press and face our nation from Marlins Park in Miami, something he’d assiduously avoided doing at Citi Field in recent weeks, including last weekend when he let a flying chair doing his talking.
So much to look forward to on Friday — in theory. In actuality, I’m not sure what exactly we were anticipating.
Brodie did indeed take a seat in the Mets dugout (and controlled himself long enough to not throw it). SNY promised to carry it live on its social media streams, which it did, except for the part where they carried it live. It appeared they tried, but the feed kept glitching out. Perhaps technology ascertained before the rest of us could that there was not a lot worth transmitting.
Here’s what the general manager said in a Q&A session that lasted close to a half-hour:
We suck.
We’re sorry.
We’re sellers.
The first answer had been self-evident since the Mets’ 9-4 start morphed into their 40-50 first half (first half in the figurative sense, for those who wonder how 90 is suddenly half of 162). The second answer was delivered more in corporatespeak, but at least Van Wagenen resisted the temptation to tell us everything was fine, go to mets.com/tickets. The short-term resolution — the trading of every expiring contract that’s not nailed down — will play out in rumor and innuendo before fact gets in a few swings circa July 31.
Save for a few rhetorical flourishes — yeah, they came and got us; no, he doesn’t usually throw office furniture — and the latest “here’s what’s wrong with Jed Lowrie now” update, you could have predicted the topline substance of the content. Still, somebody’s gotta now and then sit down or lean against a wall and speak up. We fans want to know. We fans are insatiable that way. We’re fans. We’re even insatiable for Mets baseball when it’s gone a few days. We’re nuts, perhaps.
We got our Mets baseball Friday evening. Boy, did we ever. It was the kind of Mets baseball we grew used to getting as the so-called first half of 2019 wound down, the kind for which we should probably fasten our seatbelts as the second half gets rolling in earnest (unless you’re more the “press eject button NOW” type; no judgments). It was the Mets and the Marlins, fourth place at fifth place, non-contender dueling non-contender so palpably you could feel yourself losing half-games in the standings every time you came back from the kitchen. Because the Mets had been playing contender after contender from the middle of June clear to the All-Star break, I hadn’t fully grasped how much we were not a contender. I mean, gosh, if we could just take this game and this series against this contender, we’d be picking up ground and gathering momentum and if we’re not that far out of it…
Forget that, as they say in the rougher scenes of movies edited for television. The Mets were playing the Marlins and neither is anywhere close to anything. For a night, the Mets weren’t close to the Marlins. They led the Miamians for a spell, but then Jason Vargas, whose late-career renaissance was such a delight to support before he informed Tim Healey he’d knock him the fuck out, bro (also to be edited for television), ran into trouble in the third. First he allowed a single to opposing pitcher Caleb Smith on the heels of a single and steal to catcher Jorge Alfaro, none of the above necessarily a crime against civility. But then Vargas became obsessed with keeping Smith — the pitcher — tethered to the bag, making throw after throw to Pete Alonso. Why on earth? Maybe he hoped the ball would eventually come back autographed from the Home Run Derby champion.
Long ago, Bobby Valentine engineered a series of pickoff plays at second base after Roger Clemens, then a Blue Jay, doubled in an Interleague game. Clemens wasn’t used to running the bases. It was a hot night at Shea. Let’s sap his leg strength, Bobby ordered. It was a typically brilliant Bobby V tactic. It worked. Whatever Vargas was thinking in applying something similar to Smith didn’t (and Mickey Callaway didn’t exactly rush to take credit for it postgame). After multiple throws, Vargas had to direct his distracted attention to Miguel Rojas, who drove in Alfaro from third with a sac fly. Curtis Granderson then stepped up and delivered a two-run homer that scored not only good ol’ Grandy but Smith, who Vargas never did pick off and never did sap the pitching mojo from. For Met measure, the next batter, Garrett Cooper, also homered.
The Mets were down, 4-2, and essentially buried. Smith went six and didn’t give up anything else. Vargas was replaced with two runners on in the sixth before giving way to Robert Gsellman. Gsellman, of the Mets bullpen Gsellmans, gave up a three-run homer as soon as he could to Brian Anderson. Thar she blew. The final would be 8-4, the Mets the ones with fewer runs and another loss.
In case it wasn’t an awesome enough day in Metsopotamia, we learned during the afternoon that Dwight Gooden was arrested last month in New Jersey for driving under the influence and was reportedly found to have cocaine in his possession. That hurt worse than any random loss a losing team records in a lost second half. We’ve been rooting for Doc for 35 years, including the part when he hasn’t been pitching. Of course our allegiance stems from those golden seasons at the outset of his career, but you couldn’t have listened to the man these past several years and not been cheered that he was doing well in the way that counted most. But addiction is addiction. From afar, a Mets fan hopes he continues to battle — and that he doesn’t get behind the wheel in such a state ever again.
I also found myself a little miffed at Keith Hernandez of all people. It was just before the Vargas-Smith festival of pickoffs, when Alfaro swiped second. A catcher stealing put him in mind of John Stearns, who set a National League record for catchers stealing bases in 1978. What started as a complimentary aside to the Dude for his uncommon speed meandered into Keith noting how horrible the Mets were in those days. Not “we were bad,” but “they were bad,” because Keith wasn’t one of us until 1983. Once Keith became one of us, we stopped being so horrible and eventually became fantastic. That’s one of many reasons we will always love Keith. I don’t necessarily mind him reminding us, directly or implicitly, that he was a lifechanger. Usually I welcome it.
But during those “dark days” that Hernandez alluded to for Wayne Randazzo’s and our edification, we tuned in before All-Star breaks and after All-Star breaks for players like John Stearns stealing bases like few other catchers could. We believed in those Stearns teams to the greatest extent of our gullibility. We rooted like hell for the Mets of the late 1970s and early 1980s to beat Keith’s Cardinals, among others. We were rarely rewarded, but when we were, it was cause for celebration. For an instant, as Keith’s tangent ran its course, it wasn’t 2019 anymore. It was somewhere between 1977 and 1983, probably 1980. I didn’t know Keith Hernandez would ever be a Met. I knew John Stearns was already. Stearns, Mazzilli, Taveras, Flynn, Swan, Henderson and so on. Those were my guys. In my 1980 inner fan, they still are (I have 51 inner fans, one for each season I’ve been a fan — 52, counting the split season of 1981). My 1980 inner fan didn’t want to hear Keith Hernandez of the fucking St. Louis Cardinals put down my team, no matter how accurate his assessment.
Then I came back to 2019. Accuracy where the Mets are concerned was still being rather impolite.
by Greg Prince on 12 July 2019 2:39 am “The New York Post has asked me to cover the World Series for them if the Mets get into it. They said they couldn’t pay me for the articles, but might, just might, be able to pay some, only some of my expenses — like, maybe hotel, but not travel. That’s very similar to the arrangements that Tom Sawyer had with his friends on painting the fence. The more they painted, the more it cost them. I guess they figured I’d enjoy it because I’d get to watch some baseball games for free.
“I said no, thanks.”
—October 2
For nearly fifty years we’ve spent a good piece of our lives gripping copies of Ball Four and in the end it turns out that it was the other way around all the time.
Actually, we didn’t need to get to the end of a knuckleballing reliever’s diary of his 1969 campaign to come to that realization. Readers securely in the grip of the charms of Ball Four and its protagonist, Jim Bouton, may constitute the least secret society in baseball. Everybody who’s read it is quick to quote from it with a chuckle. Nobody doesn’t acknowledge they get it, because they have also read it, confirming their familiarity with a knowing nod, a louder laugh and, inevitably, another quote.
That Bouton broke ground is indisputable. Through his eyes, baseball was all of a sudden a modern pursuit brought to us in living color. Real people. Real lives. Real thoughts expressed real well. Home games in the Astrodome in the final chapter notwithstanding, Bouton treads no artificial turf in these pages. When the greatest author to ever toe a rubber passed away Wednesday at the age of 80, we mourned the writer/pitcher of course but we also welcomed the opportunity to celebrate his lastingest legacy all over again.
Ball Four was and is honest, unsparing and, most of all, hilarious. Its blend of unvarnished confessional and martini-dry asides created a rarity for its time: a sporting tale whose emotional complexity exceeded that of the cartoon on the back of your average 1960s baseball card. How long and sharp was the stick up the rear end of Bowie Kuhn that the eternally overmatched Commissioner framed as a scandal the publication of a book that allowed fans to understand baseball intimately and have fun while doing so? Bouton not only brought us inside a big league clubhouse but pointed out the idiosyncrasies of every character in the room so we, too, considered them our teammates. He made the Seattle Pilots immortal — and they died after one season.
Ball Four wasn’t exactly a 162-game joyride. We learned what a tough business baseball is for its prime practitioners. The dollar sums that players had to fight over would become chump change in the decade that followed the book’s 1970 release, but the basic parameters of labor scrapping with management for every inch of respect haven’t changed, not in sports, not anywhere. Bouton — with guidance, yet not ghosting, from Leonard Shecter — portrayed a kid’s game that takes a toll on a man as he gets older, and wears on the man’s family as well. You don’t always love who you’re thrown in with for six months, but you find a way to get along, get by and, when they’re done with you, get traded to Houston.
And yes, pound that old Budweiser. You can only go so long in writing about Ball Four without quoting from Ball Four.
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