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ABOUT US
Faith and Fear in Flushing made its debut on Feb. 16, 2005, the brainchild of two longtime friends and lifelong Met fans.
Greg Prince discovered the Mets when he was 6, during the magical summer of 1969. He is a Long Island-based writer, editor and communications consultant. Contact him here.
Jason Fry is a Brooklyn writer whose first memories include his mom leaping up and down cheering for Rusty Staub. Check out his other writing here.
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by Greg Prince on 1 June 2019 12:01 pm Zack Wheeler, in his fifth major league season of actually pitching as opposed to healing, has never pitched for a Mets team that finished with a winning record. The only two good seasons during his injury-interrupted tenure were the seasons he missed with Tommy John surgery and rehab, 2015 and 2016. The Mets popped every drop of champagne they’ve had cause to spray and spill in this decade without his participation in the jubilation.
So can we at least get above .500 this season for Zack? For the rest of us, too, but especially for him?
Zack helped nudge us to within one game of break-even on Friday night, going seven innings, leaving as the losing pitcher, but magically becoming the winning pitcher when the Mets scored him a couple of runs and his successors didn’t allow the Diamondbacks any at all. It may not have been the smoothest attainment of a positive decision for a starter, but picking up Zack after leaving him behind during the playoff pushes seems the least the Mets can do — the very least. The only time Wheeler’s name came up amidst the all-too-brief exciting years was when the Mets tried to trade him and Wilmer Flores for Carlos Gomez.
Coincidentally those three fellows all converged at Chase Field Friday night, though only two had anything to do with the Mets’ 5-4 victory. Wilmer currently sits on the Arizona IL, modeling the strangest hoodie in that it features no shade of orange or blue, a.k.a. Wilmer colors. Zack gave Mickey Callaway desired length, like a very long snake might. He was really good for five innings, not so hot in the sixth, when Ketel Marte and Christian Walker took him deep, yet he hung in there to complete the frame and then another.
The Mets were down a run after seven, which they wouldn’t stay forever, thanks to Recidivist Carlos lining a just-fair ground-rule double toward the left field corner, driving home J.D. Davis, who himself had just pinch-hit successfully for Juan Lagares and plated Todd Frazier as the tying run. Maybe Carlos’s shot should have been a triple, given that the D’Backs ball dude instinctively fielded the ball and therefore interfered with it while it was live in foul territory. Then again, maybe it would have been called foul initially by a third base umpire had there been a third base umpire. The blue crew was working with one man down after home plate ump Jim Wolf had to depart many innings prior after getting hit by a live ball himself.
Gomez would be involved in a triple in the eighth, not catching a deep drive hit by Eduardo Escobar, but like J.D. and Carlos saved Zack, freshly activated Seth Lugo came to the rescue of Gomez and kept Escobar from scoring. In the ninth, the official task of saving would fall on the shoulders of Robert Gsellman, allowing Edwin Diaz to continue to rest up from Wednesday night’s still nearly unbelievable debacle. It should be totally unbelievable since the Mets led L.A., 8-5, heading to the ninth and Diaz is Diaz, which we were told means something, and hopefully still will. Except the Dodgers are the Dodgers, and that really means something.
Fortunately, the Diamondbacks aren’t the Dodgers and the Mets could be themselves and get away with it.
The Mets had been leading by a pleasant score of 3-1 early, thanks to Wheeler and, of course, Adeiny Hechavarria, whose two-run double brought him to within one RBI of Robinson Cano’s season total. Hechavarria seemed to think he had tied Cano by blasting a three-run homer, but he apparently forgot the center field wall at Chase Field is as high as the Grand Canyon is wide. Maybe he, like Gomez, should have at least had a triple. Maybe it was enough that he was Adeiny Hechavarria, certified season savior so far.
Without Adeiny picking up for Cano (notice who we’re referring to in friendly first-name fashion and who we feel a chilly distance from), Wheeler’s Mets wouldn’t have been a winner Friday. Without Wheeler, the Mets likely wouldn’t be nearing a winning record at all. Right about now would be a very good time to near it, grab it and keep it. The Mets have played 57 games to date. There’s a splendid little history attached to Mets teams picking their 57th game to get serious about their seasons. In three separate years, the Mets have pushed themselves to one game over .500 to stay at this very juncture of the schedule.
The 1987 Mets, who had been floundering in ways unbecoming of a defending world champion, took out their frustrations all over the Cubs, clobbering them at Wrigley, 13-2, upping their mark to 29-28. Considering the 1986 Mets had been 41-16 after 57 games, 29-28 wasn’t terribly impressive for a franchise whose radio bumpers and promotional soft drink cans implored them to “DO IT AGAIN!”. The 1987 Mets had spent the first 56 games of their year acting utterly conflicted. Did they really want to win anymore? After bottoming out at 16-20, you had to wonder.
Hindsight, however, tells us that the 57th game was decisive. Once the 1987 Mets got to 29-28, they stayed over .500 for the rest of their championship defense. Granted, it wasn’t a successful championship defense, but it could have been worse. For 56 games, it definitely was.
Three years later, the 1990 Mets were barely removed from a vexing slumber that eliminated the most successful manager they ever had from their dugout. Davey Johnson led the Mets to winning records so routinely that the alternative barely occurred to you. Yet at 20-22, Frank Cashen’s impatience overwhelmed him. Out went Johnson, in came Bud Harrelson, whose miracle pedigree was impeccable. But not even Buddy, experienced in the magic of 1969 and 1973, could work an instant abracadabra. Remaining lethargic for a spell, the 1990 Mets sagged to 21-26 on Buddy’s watch.
Then talent began to tell, Harrelson’s managing acumen began to jell and the Mets pursued their destiny in earnest. In their 57th game, they spanked the Cubs in Chicago, 9-6, and rose to 29-28. Not only would they never slip back to .500 let alone beneath it again, they were in the process of launching like few Met teams had before or have since. In a veritable blink, the 21-26 disappointments were a 48-31 juggernaut and ensured one more summer of genuine contention in Flushing.
The ’90s soon began to bear little resemblance to the ’80s at Shea, but the Mets regained legitimacy by 1997 (see, Frank, ya have to be patient in these parts). Two winning years led into 1999 with every expectation that the Mets would make it three straight and then some. Imagine every Mets-minded person’s surprise when, after 55 games, the 1999 Mets were a flailing sub-.500 enterprise. It took some doing to get there. The ’99ers were doing fine for themselves, out to a 27-20 start. Only a massive losing streak could do them in. Naturally, a massive losing streak was doing them in. With eight in a row dropped and a 27-28 mark sore-thumbing the standings, Steve Phillips abandoned all pretense of patience, offing three of Bobby Valentine’s coaches and barely hiding his drool at the thought of taking out Bobby next. Bobby dared his GM to go ahead and guillotine him if he didn’t lead the Mets to, oh, let’s say a record of 40-15 in their next 55.
Crazy Bobby was proved a prophet when the Mets went 40-15 in their next 55. The surge started with two consecutive wins, the second of them an 8-2 home throttling of Roy Halladay and the Toronto Blue Jays. The Mets weren’t yet 68-43, let alone the 97-66 they’d be en route to the postseason, but they were 29-28 and over .500 to stay.
It’s too late for the 2019 Mets to follow in the exact statistical footsteps of this trio of highly competitive predecessors. They can’t be 29-28 because they’re 28-29. But they can still get over .500 and stay over .500. The 1970 Mets poked their heads above the waterline at 30-29 and never dipped below again. The 1989 Mets embraced their eventual winning distinction at 31-30. The 1975 Mets did the same at 33-32. A bunch more Mets teams waited longer but got where they needed to go. Some succeeded earlier, which is the ideal path as it shaves angst from your consciousness and losses from your ledger. A winning record doesn’t guarantee a playoff spot but a playoff spot is pretty much impossible without a winning record. Plus the Mets sporting a winning record when all is said and done is simply preferable to the Mets being saddled with a losing record after 162 games.
You could ask Zack Wheeler which he prefers, though at this point of his big league life, he can only guess what one of those feels like.
by Jason Fry on 31 May 2019 11:35 am So if Jason Vargas pitches well — and I mean “pitches well,” without any ironic amplification, subtle disparagement or other snobby little digs — and the Mets lose anyway, what sound does a Met fan make at 1 in the morning?
If you’re me, it’s a long, drawn-out sigh.
Vargas pitched well. Hyun-Jin Ryu pitched better. Ryu was Jacob deGrom 2018 good, and the Mets had no chance. They were beaten basically from the beginning: Vargas’s second pitch became a Chris Taylor liner to left, which J.D. Davis chose to make a valiant but ill-advised dive for. It turned into a triple, Max Muncy doubled Taylor home, and that skinny run was enough for L.A. to win.
Everything else was wishful thinking, followed up with a comical ninth, in which Pete Alonso was actually not hit by a pitch, as every replay on the planet showed. Alonso even sheepishly strolled back to home to retrieve his bat, in effect testifying for the prosecution. In a very MLB 2019 development, the umpires ignored that and him to listen to their fellow umps in Chelsea, who were apparently a bit stir-crazy after midnight and doing Whip-Its, as they confirmed the original erroneous call.
It didn’t matter: Todd Frazier struck out against Kenley Jansen, flinging his bat at the ball he couldn’t hit for good measure, Carlos Gomez flied out, and the Mets had lost.
An old but useful cliche about baseball is that April and May are about figuring out what you have, June and July are about figuring out what you need, and in August and September you go for it. So what do the Mets have? To be honest, I don’t really know. They’re deeply dysfunctional, but they’re also surprisingly fun. (Now there’s a slogan!)
What hasn’t worked? At various points, a fair amount. The starting pitching has been all peaks and chasms, which is a hard-working way to be mediocre. The vaunted closer just had the worst night of his career and has had some other less-than-stellar ones. The defense is atrocious, full stop. The health has been oh-so-Metsian — in addition to everything else, I now get to hold my breath when Michael Conforto, one of my favorite players in many years, smacks into walls. The manager is a serial dunderhead, a problem that won’t be solved by infield drills, team doctors or reversions to the mean.
And yet, well, that starting pitching has had peaks. Some of the spaghetti-at-a-wall arms in the bullpen have stuck. Alonso has been a daily delight. Conforto has unlocked his great potential and been allowed to play unmolested, unless you count the shoulders of teammates. Jeff McNeil has resumed being Jeff McNeil, hitting machine. Amed Rosario has had some baffling defensive lapses but made enormous strides as a hitter. Dom Smith has matured into a truly useful piece of the roster. Davis has outhit his glove. The Mets have squeezed some heroics out of their Proven Veterans™, with Gomez and Rajai Davis playing hero and Adeiny Hechavarria more than filling in for Robinson Cano.
I don’t think that adds up to enough to win anything — too many holes, no faith in the people who’d have to pay for fixing them — but it’s made for an interesting team, one I still want to watch after they rip our hearts out. Or after they’re stymied and expire with a sigh far from home in the middle of the night.
by Jason Fry on 30 May 2019 11:39 am As Wednesday night’s game became Thursday morning’s game, the storyline seemed pretty clear — clear enough that I scribbled some notes for myself to peruse around now. Let’s see if I can decipher them:
No aces
Noah’s struggles
Alonso show
Gomez/Seager comedy -> Frazier do or die, see that play a lot with catchers
Adeiny
Walked Buehler twice
116 pitches
And in a better world, that’s the recap I’d be writing: How Noah Syndergaard continues to navigate life stripped of his once-immortal slider, the pitch that left the 2015 Royals trudging and muttering reduced to something stubbornly ordinary. Is it mechanics? The juiced ball? Just mischance? But that recap would also have been about a confrontation of aces that never came to pass, since the Mets used grit and patience to grind down Walker Buehler. Highlights included Pete Alonso‘s two homers, a sign that Alonso might have made the latest adjustment in the endless sequence of pitcher-hitter riposte-and-parry. (Maybe, if I’d been ambitious, I would have crunched a number or two looking at Pete’s pace vs. that of Todd Hundley and Carlos Beltran. Not too early to think about!)
I definitely would have parsed that goofy play where Carlos Gomez misplayed a flyball into a Bellingeresque throw that nabbed Corey Seager at third, with a tip of the cap for Todd Frazier‘s grab and stab at the bag, the kind of no-look, do-or-die play we see catchers forced to make all the time, and that leaves them looking foolish when the timing’s even a little off.
Oh, and I would have worked in an ironic acknowledgment that the latest Met I inexplicably detest, Adeiny Hechavarria, has been inexplicably delightful to watch play. That’s why it’s good I’m not the GM, baseball’s great because you’re happy when you’re wrong, oh wasn’t that fun.
Yes, that would have been a pretty neat recap to write. I’m not sure I would have gotten in fretting about the 116 pitches Syndergaard threw, or found the “walked Walker” play on words that my partner would have turned into a feast, but I would have enjoyed writing it and you, presumably, would have enjoyed reading it.
But nope, before you could say HOLY JUSTIN UPTON, the game turned into a debacle, one of those games where the other team rips out your heart and shows it to you, glistening and making gross squelching noises because it’s still beating, and after staring at it in appalled disbelief you murmur something witnesses will later reconstruct as “oh, this means I’m dead” and everything goes black.
Homer, homer, double, double, intentional walk, blown play at second for infield single, walkoff sacrifice fly. That was Edwin Diaz‘s night, with the only out he recorded winning the game for the other guys.
What the hell happened? Diaz called it the worst night of his career, which is I hope is still true as long as he’s a Met. He thought his pitches were sharp; the Met commentariat (and the Dodgers’ hitters) disagreed, with the slider in particular seeming to lack the bite that Diaz needs. (Hmm, sliders MIA from repertoires when really needed — there’s another note to scrawl.) Blaming overuse? Seems unfair given not so long ago the suspicion was that Diaz’s problem was rust from underuse. Perhaps the unwelcome but obvious fact that the Dodgers are really, really good should be part of the equation. Perhaps it’s just baseball, which wouldn’t be baseball without the spikes of unexpected beauty/horror that interrupt the placid green Ken Burnsness of it all.
Whatever it was, it turned that recap, the one that still made me smile a bit, into this recap, the one that can’t be pushed deep enough into the archives soon enough.
Worst night of Edwin Diaz’s career. Let’s go with that, and hopefully move beyond it.
by Greg Prince on 29 May 2019 10:22 am I took a little Matz nap somewhere between very late Tuesday night and very early Wednesday morning. It was peaceful. Steven Matz had made it so, via professional hitting, heady baserunning and characteristically competent pitching. The pitching’s what we tune in for even if it’s also what we nod off during. Matz starts didn’t used to seem so relaxing. Nowadays (or nights), you don’t have to stare at the ceiling and count baserunners when he takes the mound.
Thanks to Steven’s third-inning trip around the bases — reach on infield hit; advance to second on Amed Rosario’s single; tag up and take third on J.D. Davis’s fly to deep right, Cody Bellinger’s arm notwithstanding; hustle home on a Michael Conforto trickler Justin Turner couldn’t fire to Will Smith fast enough — we had a 1-0 lead. Thanks to Bellinger being Bellinger, we were behind, 2-1, before the bottom of the inning was over. Thanks to Todd Frazier doing some of his best work at Dodger Stadium (remember how he dove into the stands to make that catch he didn’t make last September?), we were tied in the top of the fourth.
You expected Bellinger to go deep. You weren’t shocked Frazier did so. You knew from the beginning of his career that Matz knew how to handle a bat and use his feet. You’ve come to tentatively assume he will make it through the middle innings at least. With so much of this game tracking within the realm of possibility, you could close your eyes.
Thanks to it being late, I withdrew from consciousness. Not for good, but somewhere between Frazier homering to lead off the fourth and I’m gonna say Carlos Gomez getting thrown out at second to end the top of the sixth. It had been 2-2 when I drifted, it was still 2-2 when I stirred. Matz was still holding the mighty Dodgers in abeyance, an accomplishment that could be counted as a win within a tie.
How about a win as a win? In the seventh, we had the right man up to make desirable things happen: Adeiny Hechavarria, the inspirational epitome of these misfit Mets. Versus reliever Yimi Garcia, Hechavarria worked out a leadoff walk. Of course he did. Adeiny puts the cat in catalyst. And as I ignored my cat Avery’s entreaties to be fed for a few more minutes, pinch-hitter Aaron Altherr also walked, his base on balls produced against a second Dodger reliever, Dylan Floro. Why, yes, I did envision at some point in 2019 describing a Met rally that included Adeiny Hechavarria and Aaron Altherr as protagonists.
Add to Adeiny and Aaron another A-lister in Amed (I’ll be with you in a sec, Avery). Rosario bunted and reached when David Freese couldn’t handle Floro’s inexact toss to first. Sacrificing with two on and nobody out in the seventh didn’t seem like the most aggressive use of your leadoff hitter, but it was after midnight and we weren’t losing in Los Angeles, so whatever. The stage was set for Davis to do something spectacular. Floro struck him out. The stage remained for Conforto to do something spectacular. He hit a grand slam off Scott Alexander.
That was very spectacular. One swing, four runs. For efficiency alone you have to admire what a grand slam achieves. No wonder it has its own name, plus synonyms. Granny. Salami. I prefer grand slam myself. So much grandeur right there in the title.
The Mets were up, 6-2. I was up for the rest of the game, using the next commercial break to feed Avery, by which time Dave Roberts had inserted his fourth reliever of the seventh, Ross Stripling. In the bottom of the seventh, Robert Gsellman courted disaster to such an extent that I hoped Roberts could make a pitching change for our side, but Gsellman hung tough, giving back only one run and, remarkably, flying out Bellinger as the potential tying run.
Rosario, in a non-bunting situation, tripled home an additional Met run in the eighth to make it 7-3, which worried me a tad because if the Mets led by more than three but not by a whole lot more, Edwin Diaz would have to come in to handle a non-save situation, and heaven forbid a closer tries to close out one of those. But that was getting ahead of oneself, because there was still the Familia frame through which clutching a couch cushion seemed advisable. Jeurys indeed put a couple on, but eased all extant tension with a double play grounder that Frazier threw to Hechavarria and Hechavarria threw to Pete Alonso. “Around the horn,” Gary Cohen said, and for the first time in fifty years of watching baseball, I wondered if that innocent phrase had another entendre lurking inside it, like, “oh man, I am so ‘around the horn,’ if you know what I mean.”
It was late.
The Mets faced their fifth reliever in three innings, Joe Kelly, but didn’t do anything to change the score in the ninth, indeed directing us toward Diaz for the non-save. Alex Verdugo doubled. I awaited further trouble, Somehow Edwin tricked himself into thinking he needed to bear down and did, recording the next three outs in order and preserving the 7-3 win that returned us to .500 for the seventh time in the first third of this decidedly up-and-down season. I drowsily chaperoned Mickey Callaway’s and Steven Matz’s inessential reflections during the postgame show — when did Matz stop looking like he’s perpetually 14? — and, fading fast, clicked off the TV. Victorious sleep resumed.
by Greg Prince on 28 May 2019 9:33 am We may not yet know how to most accurately describe the 2019 Mets as they shift between dismal and decent, but after several hours spent witnessing some gruesome proceedings from Dodger Stadium, we are comfortable confirming the Dodgers are still quite good. They’ve got this long haul thing down pat, winning one division title after another since 2013, poising themselves to carry their streak into 2020. Is anybody in the NL West capable of keeping up with them? An eight-game lead indicates they’re ensconced in a region of their own. Watching them thwart the ultimately helpless Mets at every turn Monday night fast-forwarded my Sheadenfreude toward deep October.
“Well,” I thought, “at least they have a chance to lose another World Series.”
Lingering Utleyan resentment notwithstanding, it’s too early to cast our lot with the Red Sox or Astros or whoever isn’t the Yankees. There’s much to look forward to between now and then, like this Friday when we’re playing somebody else. To borrow from the anti-war posters of a half-century ago, playing the Dodgers is not healthy for Metsies and other living things.
The Mets need everything to go right when taking on an outfit like L.A. I came to that conclusion after much went wrong against the only outfit like L.A., which is L.A.
• They need Jacob deGrom to be at his sharpest; he wasn’t, lasting only five stressful innings, departing having given up but two runs, for he is still Jacob deGrom.
• They need their bullpen to provide a serene pathway toward the late innings when their starter is gone before the sixth; ha, fat chance.
• They need to run the bases flawlessly; having two runners cut down at home and another at third, albeit on excellent throws the likes of which they don’t usually encounter, indicates sleek baserunning wasn’t a Met core competency.
• They need to hit in the clutch, whatever that means; they roughed up Clayton Kershaw for ten hits and his successors for five more, yet were outscored, 9-5, which, by the end of the night, felt like 19-5, what a way to take a beating.
The Dodgers are a lot better than the Mets. They’re a lot better than the Tigers and the Nationals, who the Mets proved just enough better than for a week. Every game starts zero-zero, of course, and anything can happen in any game, but with the benefit of nine innings’ hindsight, it didn’t seem possible this game would go any in any direction that didn’t wind up with Randy Newman reaffirming his fondness for Los Angeles.
Yet for a couple of minutes there, we led. We were ahead, 3-2, in the fifth. You could look it up. J.D. Davis had homered with Amed Rosario on second — off Kershaw! — and despite several frames of frustration, the Mets were on top. DeGrom took that 3-2 lead into the bottom of the fifth and made it stick through 105 pitches.
In the sixth, the Dodgers saw Tyler Bashlor, Daniel Zamora and Wilmer Font. SNY’s sophisticated field microphones could pick up the sound of lips being licked in the home dugout. In brief, six runs scored. Chris Taylor homered. Kiké Hernandez homered. Mike Trout might have swung by from Anaheim to drive in a few. I lost track. Sure, you could blame Met relievers for being the way they are, but I put the onus on the analytics department for not adequately emphasizing to Met hitters the importance of RAB, or Runs Above Bashlor. It was gonna take a lot bigger lead than 3-2 to keep the Mets in front.
Down 8-3 after six, I was reminded that perhaps the least tasteful flavor of Met loss is the Sisyphus, the kind where the boulder is pushed strenuously uphill for an eternity only to have it come rollin’, rollin’, rollin’ down on the ol’ coconut an instant later. In this sort of game, I’m inevitably taken back to an August night at Shea in 1982, when the Mets trailed the Cubs, 3-1, and, finally, a successful, seemingly momentous rally was staged in the sixth, highlighted by Rusty Staub’s pinch-hit three-run double to vault the Mets ahead, 5-3. There weren’t many of us in the ballpark that night, but we all exploded the explosion of satisfaction. Our boys had done it. We were winning. Everything was gonna be all right.
The 1982 Cubs, who were never going to be mistaken for the 2019 Dodgers, came up in the seventh and scored eight runs. We lost, 13-6. Not far from where I sat, two tipsy businessmen began ironically cheering the Cubs, clowning louder with every run the visitors tallied. This behavior elicited the clearly unironic ire of a thoroughly unamused biker type. He also may have been heeding the gigantic ad suggesting that This Bud was for him. To be fair, Mike Scott, Jesse Orosco, Terry Leach and Pete Falcone combining to give up eight runs (abetted by a George Foster error) would have been enough to make the most sober of souls apply for membership in the Hell’s Angels.
Unlike the 1982 Mets, the 2019 Mets convinced themselves the game wasn’t over after handing back a tenuous lead. Slugging second baseman Adeiny Hechavarria, for whom Robinson Cano can anticipate caddying once he is physically able, belted a two-run homer off Joe Kelly in the eighth to pull the Mets to within three. Things appeared on the verge of growing even closer when, in the same inning, the Mets mysteriously loaded the bases with one out, compelling Dave Roberts to call on Kenley Jansen earlier than the closer is accustomed to being disturbed.
It couldn’t have been a more perfect setup: Tomás Nido on third, Carlos Gomez on second, Rosario on first, Davis at the plate. Even a fly ball would push across one run, keep the momentum building, keep hope alive. Sure enough, Davis delivered a representative fly to medium right. Nido, who is either deGrom’s personal catcher or deGrom is his personal pitcher, could pretty much jog home from third. Even better, speedy Gomez could aggressively take third so he’d that much closer to scoring when Michael Conforto came up next.
A little problem with that recipe for chicken salad, however. Cody Bellinger was the Dodger right fielder. Bellinger, the .383 hitter who’d already blasted his 19th homer and thrown out Conforto at the plate, felt he hadn’t ruined the Met night enough. So he loaded his cannon and took aim at third base. My first thought was it was a misguided throw, that it’s gonna sail wide, that Gomez might just trot home when the ball goes in the dugout.
My second thought was to be amazed by Bellinger’s amazing accuracy, as his throw landed exactly where it was intended, in the glove of Justin Turner, who applied a tag on Gomez’s rear end a microsecond before any of Carlos’s fingers reached the bag…and comfortably ahead of Nido crossing the plate.
So it was an inning-ending 9-5 double play that foresaw the final score. Oy.
I thought Gomez was gonna be safe. I couldn’t imagine Nido hadn’t already scored. I was mind-boggled that the Mets, who had had one runner gunned down at home in their first 52 games, had two tagged out there in their 53rd — not only Conforto in the first, but Nido in the fifth — along with what just happened at third.
To ice the cake, the Dodgers added another run in the eighth, this one off Drew Gagnon (because why should he be left out?). The Mets, still not fully clued into their fate, threatened in their own adorable manner in the ninth. Pete Alonso tripled withone out, which is to say he came about an inch from a solo home run that wouldn’t have made that much difference in the overall story of the game, but it was just one more elbow to the ribs to see his ball not leave the park. Pete neither got thrown out at home nor had any reason to approach it when Jansen struck out Todd Frazier and Hechavarria to dash the last iota of a comeback dream.
And if Adeiny Hechavarria can’t save you, who can?
by Greg Prince on 27 May 2019 3:08 pm Bill Buckner, one of the finest hitters of his generation, died Monday morning at the age of 69. Buckner recorded 2,715 base hits in a career that touched four different decades. He won the National League batting title in 1980, drove in more than a hundred runs three separate times and helped two teams — the 1974 Dodgers and 1986 Red Sox — reach the World Series.
There. That needed to be done. Bill Buckner deserved a first paragraph of his obituary that didn’t include the one play every clever person at one point or another cavalierly declared was destined to soak up real estate “in the first paragraph of his obituary”.
Buckner’s passing, first reported obliquely via tweet from his former Dodger teammate and longtime friend Bobby Valentine, was confirmed as Memorial Day went along. Jeremy Schaap of ESPN tweeted that he spoke with Bill’s wife Jody, who told him her husband, after suffering from Lewy body dementia, fought it “with courage and grit as he did all things in life”.
When I think of Bill Buckner at his best, I remember him as a dangerous hitter I did not want to see come up against the Mets. If you’re old enough, think of Al Oliver or Bill Madlock. That’s where I place Bill Buckner as a Met opponent, especially during his Cub days. He was as tough an out as any who haunted our schedule on a regular basis.
Now, obviously, that’s not what I think of when I think of Bill Buckner in general. No Mets fan does, but today, you know, let’s give a great hitter his due first. Let’s keep all he accomplished in baseball in mind. No player with as many miles as Bill Buckner had accumulated by October 25, 1986, gets to a tenth inning of a sixth game of a World Series without having earned his way there. That maybe he shouldn’t have been left in to play first base on bad legs is another matter. He was Bill Buckner, an essential component of the American League champions. He was no accident or asterisk. He was Bill Buckner. I never felt good as a Met fan seeing him at bat.
Do you realize Bill Buckner batted in the first inning of the seventh game of the 1986 World Series and singled? Thanks to rain, he’d been left to dwell on his instantly legendary defensive mishap for nearly 44 hours. He didn’t need to be reminded that Mookie Wilson’s ground ball went under his glove and through his legs, allowing the Mets to complete a miraculous comeback that kept Boston from winning its first world championship in 68 years. All of humanity had made sure he was aware, including what sounded like the vast majority of 55,078 in the stands at Shea who accorded him the most sarcastic standing ovation in the history of applause when he was first introduced that Monday night.
To be fair, no Mets fan wasn’t grateful for Bill Buckner’s failure of commission, the whiff on that grounder. There just had to be a better way to show gratitude. Whether Bill could have possibly beaten Wilson to the bag had he scooped up that ball we’ll never know. He didn’t pick it up. Ray Knight scored from second. The Mets won, 6-5. Just as Gary Carter, Kevin Mitchell, Knight and Wilson all combined to make the Met victory reality, Calvin Schiraldi, Bob Stanley, Rich Gedman and John McNamara was each partly culpable for the Red Sox defeat. Buckner, too, but only partly. Win as a team, lose as a team. But in the aftermath of Game Six, Buckner bore the brunt of blame.
Watching from home, more than a little bit of me groaned when Buckner was cheered by Mets fans. Bad form. Bad karma. Bad idea. The tiniest sliver of me — a microscope couldn’t have detected it — was actually some version of happy for the guy when he singled off Ron Darling with nobody on and two out in the first. He deserved to answer back in style.
Don’t get me wrong. I didn’t want any Red Sock driving him in and I wanted to see nothing else out of the Red Sox that evening except them clearing completely from the scene so the Mets could celebrate ostentatiously. My empathy has limits. My desired scenario pretty much unfolded, though not without some angst. I’m not fully on board with the myth that after Game Six there was absolutely no way the Mets could lose Game Seven. The Red Sox took a 3-0 lead. Having experienced 108 wins in the regular season and all those innings in the Astrodome, I had faith coming out of my ears that the Mets could/would come back, but it didn’t feel like the kind of sure thing in which you don’t consider an alternative to what you prefer exists. Not after all it took to beat Houston, not after the way we’d fallen behind Boston too often for comfort.
The Red Sox yielded their lead in the sixth and fell behind, 6-3, in the seventh. At that point, I was certain we were good. You know who probably wasn’t so certain, though? Bill Buckner. He led off the top of the eighth against Roger McDowell and singled again. The national joke was 2-for-4 in the seventh game of the World Series. I wasn’t worried. Nor was I remotely perturbed when Jim Rice singled Buckner to second. Now, when Dwight Evans came up and doubled the both of them in and the Red Sox were within one and nobody was out…yeah, I was getting a little antsy.
McDowell had nothing left. Fortunately, Davey Johnson understood that and brought in Jesse Orosco, who retired the next three batters, keeping the Mets in front, 6-5, as we headed to the bottom of the eighth. Darryl Strawberry came up and homered to Mars, Jesse drove in an additional insurance run himself and, in a matter of minutes that were seventeen years in the making, Orosco struck out Marty Barrett to end the 1986 World Series with the Mets as champions and Bill Buckner on deck.
Our celebration was on. Buckner’s reputation was altered. That’s not what we were celebrating, of course, but you’ll take all the help you can get in October. Years later, it appeared the great hitter had made peace with the fielding moment for which he is most remembered. He appeared on Curb Your Enthusiasm to make fun of it. He signed autographs alongside Mookie Wilson to raise funds from it. He went on with his life, definitely destined to be known for a dramatic error, but not needing to be defined by just one mistake.
by Greg Prince on 27 May 2019 11:16 am What was it Philippé Wynne was advising all over the radio in the autumn of 1976? Hey y’all, prepare yourself for the rubber game…win. Was that the lyric? Ah, close enough for rhythm & blues. However they heard it sung, the Mets apparently took a 43-year-old clue from the Spinners’ featured vocalist and, for the first time in 2019, found a way to take the final match in a series that was heretofore tied. Like games on Sundays (particularly at Citi Field), rubber games were a subspecies of contest that urban legend insisted the Mets were incapable of conquering. Urban legend also recently had it that Jim Riggelman would be managing the Mets by now and that Adeiny Hechavarria was the root of all Met futility, so sometimes you just gotta take urban legend like you take a Met season: one game at a time.
Sunday afternoon’s 4-3 victory over the Detroit Tigers was one game to take out for a nice dinner when it was done in a civilized 2:33. Despite the unnecessary Interleague presence of an opponent I am not normally predisposed to much consider let alone root against — the Tigers hail from the same city that gave the world the Spinners — I detected a real throwback quality at play. Starting pitchers Zack Wheeler and Spencer Turnbull each pitched long and admirably, Wheeler a little longer and to slightly greater effect. Not only did Zack go seven-and-a-third, he rightly batted in the seventh. It was right because he was still going strong on the mound, and it was right because he’d gotten himself two hits earlier in the game.
The helping of his own cause notwithstanding, Zack’s run support was generated in an inning when other Mets lifted the offense on their backs pleasantly and repeatedly. First baseman Dominic Smith, not having gathered so much rust in his Rusty Staub role that he couldn’t contribute to the lineup, led off the bottom of the fourth with an authoritatively struck double to deep center. One out later, Wilson Ramos, as hot as he is not fast, singled. Todd Frazier, detecting a hole the size of the Cumberland Gap on the right side, smartly pushed a supersized bunt between first and second into the outfield. It so crossed up the shifting Tigers that not only did Smith score easily from third, but Ramos rumbled there from first to replace him. And an out after that, the aforementioned Hechavarria lined to over the right field fence his second opposite-field three-run homer of the series.
Of Mets who have started at least four consecutive games at second base this season, here are your updated home run and RBI leaders:
Robinson Cano: 3 HR, 13 RBI
Adeiny Hechavarria: 2 HR 6 RBI
Adeiny’s adios to Turnbull’s fastball put the Mets ahead, 4-3, and there the darn thing stayed the rest of the live-long day, which turned out to be not all that long. Carlos Gomez, another in the club’s self-renewing supply of non-left fielders assigned to play left field, reduced the risk of both length and danger when he dove and took away at least one base from Dawel Lugo to begin the sixth. Among the many Met reclamation projects that made the recent homestand so memorable, Gomez shows signs of being the keeper. Rajai Davis was DFA’d Sunday to create space for Michael Conforto post-concussion (sic transit Uber anecdote). Aaron Altherr’s role and potential are TBD. With Brandon Nimmo on the DL with no projected return date — what was termed a stiff neck turned out to be a bulging disc from whiplash — Gomez is going to be a keeper. He was probably a keeper a dozen years ago, but when Johan Santana is available, you can’t always keep what you want.
Wheeler protected his one-run lead clear into the eighth, when That Man Again, JaCoby Jones, led off with a single to left that not even Go-Go could successfully go after. Jones had just accumulated his sixth hit of the weekend. If we saw him often enough, he might be a latter-day sequel to Stan Musial. We saw the Cardinals 22 times a year in 1962 and 1963. Musial, 41 when expansion birthed the Mets, saw the kind of pitching staff we were putting together and resisted retiring for a couple of seasons. Ol’ Stan went on to bat a mere .405 against our first beleaguered staffs. Small sample size caveat notwithstanding, Jones had just simultaneously become someone we’d heard of and a .462 hitter versus our current corps. The Tigers weren’t known for their offensive roar before they wandered into Flushing. Suddenly we learned the name “JaCoby” and to fear his mighty bat. They didn’t bring anybody else we should worry about, did they?
Oh, look who’s coming to the plate. It’s Miguel Cabrera, pinch-hitting for Turnbull. Some pinch-hitter. He’s not like other 2019 Tigers. He needs neither an introduction nor benefit of a three-game hot streak to convince you he’s Musial-level lethal. He’s Miguel Cabrera, which has been good enough to say it all since 2003. If he had remained a Marlin, he’d probably be an aggregate of Freddie Freeman and Anthony Rendon in our contemporary nightmares, never mind invoking eventual Hall of Famers from Stan Musial to Chipper Jones who killed us for sport. But Cabrera was traded to Detroit in the same offseason Gomez was traded to Minnesota, though not for reasons as noble as getting Santana. The Marlins were ridding themselves of Cabrera so as to never have to pay an elite player for an extended period, lest they accidentally make a habit of remaining competitive. The Tigers went on to clinch four division titles and a pennant with Cabrera at the heart of their order. Along the way he won the triple crown, something nobody’d done since Mike Yastrzemski’s grandfather, and became a lock to join the likes of Stan the Man and Larry Chipper in Cooperstown.
These days, he’s 35, verging on ancient for his sport (though younger than Cano), and slow compared to Ramos, but he’s still Miguel Cabrera, still topping .300 as a rule. The lone valid selling point of Interleague baseball is getting to see and appreciate a superstar you would otherwise miss. Miggy the Marlin I wouldn’t get a kick out of coming up as Wheeler was holding tight to a one-run lead, but this was almost a treat. Honestly, I wasn’t too happy to face him here in the context of wanting the Mets to take this series, but I did love the game within the rubber game. This sort of encounter is what makes a Sunday afternoon great. Your team is up by one. Your pitcher is hanging in there. Their manager — ex-Met Ron Gardenhire, in this case — looks to his bench and sends up an immortal who surely ain’t what he used to be, yet as the starting first baseman, the otherwise DH went 2-for-2 on Friday and added another hit Saturday to increase his lifetime total to 2,730. You could wind up disdaining the outcome, but you had to embrace the confrontation.
Zack did. He struck out Cabrera on three pitches. Take care, Miggy. See you at Comerica in 2022 and upstate whenever applicable.
Striking out Miguel Cabrera would have been a fantastic way to wrap up a Mets win, but that was only the first out of the eighth. Wheeler returned to Tigers who were not particularly famous outside the 313 area code, and they were not so easily tamed. While Niko Goodrum batted, Jones stole second. While Jones stood on second, Wheeler walked Goodrum. Thus ended Zack’s day.
In came Jeurys Familia, up went blood pressure, yet down went Lugo and Nicholas Castellanos, both on strikes, thereby ferrying the Mets safely to the bottom of the eighth still up by a run. Advantage unpadded prior to the ninth, Mickey Callaway didn’t have to think about what to do next, which is always helpful. He called on Edwin Diaz to protect that one-run lead. And Diaz…
Well, Diaz walked leadoff batter Christin Stewart on four pitches. After he did so, I heard myself let out an Edwin in the same “don’t do that” parental tones I once upon a time habitually directed toward John, Armando, Braden, Billy, Frankie and, yes, Jeurys. I realized Edwin Diaz has finally done it. He had really and truly ascended into the ranks of Met closers, not just on paper, but in my gut.
Swell.
The only other Tiger I knew before Friday, Josh Harrison, came on to pinch-run for Stewart and, as he did when he was a Pirate, acted like a real pain in the ass. Harrison stole second, though not until Diaz had struck out Ronny Rodriguez. Brandon Dixon followed with a single to left that moved Harrison to third. Dixon would go on to steal second unaccosted, placing the tying and go-ahead runs in scoring position for That Man Again.
Indeed, after John Hicks had fanned for the second out, Jones was up once more. JaCoby, not Chipper; as if it mattered. Diaz, allegedly flawless in Seattle, was being all too fallible in New York. All Met closers reveal themselves as such sooner or later, usually sooner. (Good thing we got Cano in that trade.) JaCoby worked Edwin to three-and-two, refusing to simply go away. Finally, on Diaz’s tenth delivery to him and thirty-second pitch of the ninth, Jones resisted the charms of a fastball just off the plate. JaCoby’s fine-eyed judgment would have been sufficient to load the bases in a future where an impeccably calibrated electronic strike zone holds sway.
In this game Sunday, however, the call was in the hands of home plate umpire Jerry Meals, and Meals saw it as strike three and out three. If you were scoring at home, you could put it in the books as a save for Diaz with a PS of “thank you” to the human element, a factor, like Adeiny Hechavarria, still capable of providing surprise favors. The Mets were done with the Tigers for another three years and through with being a statistically losing club for at least one day. They were .500 again — 26-26 on the season, 2-1 on the weekend, 6-1 on the week.
Bet ya didn’t see that coming seven days ago. But the unexpected tends to happen when the human element starts to jam.
by Jason Fry on 26 May 2019 9:13 am On the one hand, the Mets have made the lowly Detroit Tigers into world-beaters, opponents every bit as formidable as, say, the Miami Marlins. Can’t we just play the Nationals 162 times a year? On the other, both of these games have been a lot of fun, filled with twists and turns and chills and thrills and everything else you’d want for your entertainment dollar.
On Friday, the two teams went at each other like drunks in a barroom parking lot, launching haymaker home runs until the Tigers were the last ones standing, if barely. Saturday’s game was less of an offensive barrage, but otherwise more of the same: five lead changes and enough oddities and storylines for a week of less-interesting contests.
First of all (and I’m sure I’ll miss a few things), Jason Vargas had an … interesting … start? The Mets remain criminally negligent for offering Vargas as their best answer for fifth starter in a year with supposed playoff aspirations, but Saturday’s was the kind of game where you can squint and see why the brass likes him. He’s cool under fire, aware of what he can and can’t do, and executes the strategies available to him as best he can, not sweating it too much if results aren’t what he would have wanted. It’s not the most compelling formula, but it worked Saturday: Vargas allowed only one run, and that one wasn’t his fault.
Opposing Vargas was young Ryan Carpenter, who proved able to handle every Met except Wilson Ramos, who homered in the second and had an RBI single in the fifth. (And again after Carpenter’s departure.) The second run allowed by Carpenter was helped along by two consecutive farcical balks, with the motion Carpenter’s probably used for years suddenly deemed unfit for big-league baseball. Carpenter’s motion in the stretch features a double pause with the glove, one neither designed for nor capable of deceiving runners. Ron Gardenhire was appropriately apoplectic, while Carpenter settled for being merely aghast. To his credit, he limited the damage admirably: Yes he allowed Ramos’s single, but he fanned Pete Alonso, got Carlos Gomez to fly out and struck out Todd Frazier. If Vargas could blame the run he allowed on his teammates, Carpenter could blame that one on the umpiring crew, who put their thumbs on the scale for no good reason.
The game ground along until the eighth, when Mickey Callaway risked being burned as a heretic by bringing in Edwin Diaz with two out and the tying run on third. Callaway had sworn he would never do that, because reasons; at some point someone persuaded him that this bit of reliever dogma was singularly unhelpful for winning games, and one (deep breath here) should use one’s best reliever at critical junctures where the game’s in the balance, not just at the end of games. (One could go even further and note that might mean the sixth or seventh, but let’s not get too terrifyingly radical.)
It really was extraordinary — and heartening, to be honest. We all have our hobby horses and hangups, stubbornly persistent and self-defeating beliefs we simply can’t shed. Why, if Mickey Callaway can stray out of his comfort zone, perhaps the rest of us can too. Perhaps there’s a freedom — even, I daresay, a joy — in learning that new ideas are not necessarily harmful, and maybe there’s a comfort in discovering that one’s worldview can stretch at the margins without threatening one’s sense of self.
Except Diaz, arriving into the game not just as protector of the lead but herald of Mickey Callaway’s spiritual growth, immediately gave up a sharp single to the annoying JaCoby Jones.
Mickey, his fragile curiosity about the world having been brutally rebuffed, was last seen stomping on vaccines, destroying a flashlight and toilet, and retreating into his cave while jabbing a sharpened tree limb at anyone threatening to follow. I too have given up on the idea of doing or thinking anything different ever again. You should do the same, for fear of what new things might bring.
Thanks Diaz. Really uplifting appearance for everybody.
On the game ground, until it threatened to impinge on our dinner plans with friends a neighborhood away. When our allotted time exprired, we walked that way with WCBS burbling out of my phone. With the Mets about to be out of players, I assured Emily that Tomas Nido, the last man sitting, would hit a walkoff homer in the 11th — if Daniel Zamora didn’t do the honors himself, of course.
Neither one of those things happened; we met up with our friends for pre-dinner drinks and I turned off the audio but kept Gameday on my knee, watching in horror as the newest Met, Hector Santiago, sprayed balls well out of the strike zone but somehow escaped the usual and fitting punishment for such antics. The Mets failed to cash in their own opportunity and then it was time for dinner, with whatever the two teams did communicated through an occasional glance down at my knee.
Until, leading off the bottom of the 13th, I spotted that loveliest bit of Gameday shorthand: no out, run(s).
I’d kind of lost track, so I had to check who’d been at the plate. Well, whaddya know?
by Greg Prince on 25 May 2019 8:50 am “Did you get everything we need for the party? I don’t think these painfully bland t-shirts we promised are going to excite anybody.”
“Let’s see…I got two new players: Aaron Altherr and Hector Santiago.”
“More like used players, no?”
“Nah, they’re good as new. They work fine.”
“Uh-huh.”
“I also ordered a couple more — Ervin Santana and Matt Kemp — but they’re gonna be delivered at a later date.”
“How is that supposed to help tonight?”
“We’ll use ’em next time.”
“What about tonight? The party is tonight. What did you get for tonight?”
“Relax — I got three doubles.”
“Great. People like doubles”
“Oh, and check it out, they were having a special on home runs, so I got five of those.”
“Five? You don’t think that’s too many?”
“You can never have too many home runs. People love home runs!”
“I suppose. Let me take a look. Did you get an Alonso home run?”
“Like we’re gonna host a party and I’m not getting an Alonso home run. Of course I got an Alonso home run.”
“All right, looks good. What about the rest…Rosario, fine…Ramos, OK…what are these other two?”
“This one’s an Hechavarria.”
“They make Hechavarria home runs?”
“Sure!”
“It’s bigger than the others…three runs. Did you have to pay extra?”
“I told you, home runs were on special. They’re all over the place these days.”
“Uh-huh. This other one, I don’t recognize the brand. Did it fall off the back of a truck or something?”
“No, silly. It’s an Altherr.”
“A what?”
“An Altherr. Aaron Altherr.”
“I don’t recognize it.”
“I just told you. One of the new players. It comes with a first-pitch, pinch-hit home run.”
“Is this even real? I want to throw a nice party, not one with a load of crap nobody’s going to want to go near.”
“What are you talking about? It’s real. It’s spectacular. It’s good for one run, just like most of the rest of them.”
“Fine, fine. We’ll put the Hechavarria in the middle. It’s bigger than the rest, it’s novel, it’s a conversation piece, it’ll distract people from the…what is it again?”
“Altherr. Aaron Altherr. Don’t be such a snob.”
“Fine. We’ll put the Hechavarria next to the Alonso and the others behind the Alonso. What else did you get?”
“There’s this nice catch from Gomez.”
“Not bad. What about pitching. Did you remember to get the pitching?”
“I got the Santiago.”
“The what?”
“Do you even listen? I told you I picked up a Santiago.”
“Another bargain. Is it gonna even hold up under the stress of one of these parties?”
“What’s with you? We hold these parties all the time.”
“They’re bringing a Hall of Famer. They’re bringing Miguel Cabrera, for crissake. I’d like to have some nice things out when they do.”
“Big deal. One Cabrera and you get bent all out of shape.”
“It’s not every day we have guests who bring something that nice.”
“Are they bringing anything else anybody’s ever heard of? I’ll bet they’re not. And I have news for you — they’ve been trotting that Cabrera of theirs out at parties for ages. It’s not the classic you think it is.”
“You watch your mouth. I’m not going to let someone bring a Miguel Cabrera into our house while we just scatter a bunch of journeyman junk you scooped up by the side of the road.”
“I did no such thing.”
“Or got at the dollar store.”
“They have perfectly good stuff there.”
“Whatever. Please tell me. Did you get any pitching — besides San Diego?”
“Santiago.”
“Whatever.”
“Santiago comes with a scoreless inning. Uses the whole park!”
“Uh-huh. What else? What other pitching?”
“Don’t we already have pitching?”
“Oh, not this again. What is the first rule of throwing a classy party?”
“Here we go again. ‘You can never have enough pitching.’”
“Don’t give me that attitude. It’s true. You can NEVER have enough pitching. Did you get more pitching, besides Sandy Ego?”
“We have plenty. Here, use the Syndergaard.”
“The Syndergaard…there’s a stain on the Syndergaard! And a big hole right in the middle of it! It’s chipped full of hits! I can’t use this!”
“Nonsense. People will be so focused on the home runs that they won’t notice.”
“We’re gonna need more pitching than Syndergaard. Oh geez.”
“Will you relax? We can pull out the Bashlor.”
“The Bashlor’s not gonna work. It can’t handle inherited runners.”
“Don’t panic. We still have the Gagnon.”
“The Gagnon? That’s your answer to everything. The Gagnon. You can’t keep using the Gagnon and expect it to do the job every time. Once, twice, sure, but no, it won’t do tonight. Where did we put the Lugo?”
“I had to send it out for repairs.”
“Really? How many things do we have in the shop exactly?”
“Don’t ask.”
“I’m sorry I did. We have to have more pitching than this. Look around, maybe there’s something buried in the couch cushions.”
“Oh, I know! We can serve the Familia!”
“Do you want everybody to have to be rushed to the hospital? The Familia has been in the fridge far too long.”
“It was fine the other day.”
“That was the other day. It’s past its expiration date. It was past its expiration date last summer!”
“Then why did we get so much of it?”
“That a question I’m not in the mood to try to answer right now. We can’t bring out the Diaz, we don’t have the Lugo, the Gsellman…no, I can’t even. I do NOT have a good feeling about how this party is going to turn out.”
“Just chill. Dig how we have all the home runs lined up. They’re amazing together like that, the five of them.”
“Uh-huh. Let’s hope it’s enough to distract from the lack of pitching. Honestly, couldn’t have you picked up a little more as long as you were out scrounging?”
“We’re getting the Jason Vargas back tomorrow.”
“Don’t toy with me.”
“Sorry.”
by Greg Prince on 24 May 2019 11:39 am The Mets are 4-0 in the last four; were 0-5 in their previous five; and were 3-0 in the three before that. I’d say they’re streaky, but that doesn’t seem to cover a team that expertly wavers between exhilarating and exasperating. Are the Mets good enough to take seriously? Are the Mets bad enough to fire everybody? Do the concurrent ups and downs of Met opponents have something to do with the sharp turns in Met momentum? And how is it a whole bunch of Mets who weren’t already hurt get hurt — Lugo, Nimmo, Cano who runs out a ground ball once in his life and see where it gets him and McNeil were assigned this week to an IL that was already accommodating Mets too numerous to identify individually — and the Mets keep winning?
Oh, like any of us can produce concrete answers on demand. The best I can come up with is it’s a baseball season, and baseball seasons “swerve inexplicably,” to borrow a phrase from Robert Caro’s description of the Northern State Parkway at Old Westbury and Dix HIlls…except Caro dug and dug as Caro does and discovered the explanation (Robert Moses was in thrall to robber barons who didn’t want a public highway cutting through their expansive grounds), whereas I have no convincing explanation as to why the utterly hopeless Mets who limped out of last weekend are suddenly the giddily surging Mets hopping, skipping and jumping into this weekend, propelled toward unanticipated heights by an almost random implementation of Quadruple-A outfielders.
Well, maybe I have a convincing explanation for why the Mets have taken to winning one game after another the last time they bat, but it’s in the Washington Nationals bullpen, and my mother always implored me that if I didn’t have something nice to say about people, I shouldn’t say anything at all.
So let’s stick to the nice. Finishing off the Nationals, their relievers and the rest of them at Citi Field, was very, very nice on Thursday afternoon. Finishing off a four-game sweep of a rival on a Thursday afternoon at home is always very, very nice. It’s not a frequent occurrence, but when it transpires, it can live on accessibly in the mind’s eye. This week’s extended brooming conjured memories of a week in June a mere 34 years ago when our previous season’s nemesis, the Chicago Cubs, came into Shea Stadium trying to right their listing ship and found themselves sunk by a Met club that had been taking on water itself. We had the good pitching, the timely hitting and the opponent on the ropes. When it was all over, we had taken two pair from the defending National League East Champions, serving definitive notice that the rest of 1985 was going to look a whole lot different from the way 1984 played out.
The 1985 Cubs were dead. The 1985 Cardinals were another matter, but that was for the rest of 1985 to determine. What mattered on the nights of June 17, 18 and 19 and then the afternoon of June 20 was we took four in a row from the reeling Cubs — George Foster Metsmerized them for good in the matinee finale with the penultimate grand slam of his distinguished career — and the Shea PA blasted Paper Lace’s “The Night Chicago Died,” the second-greatest song of all-time. Brother what a ’noon it was.
The previously daunting Nats are presumed deceased, too, while the Mets are in at least temporary possession of a pulse. It beats through the magical left arm of Long Island’s Own Steven Matz (LIOSM), which scattered baserunners galore and yielded but a lone run over six ten-hit innings. It throbs within the bat of Dominic Smith, a.k.a. Le Grand Dom, who is maybe too young to be a pinch-hitter deluxe but has taken to the Rusty Staub role like nobody around here since Lenny Harris. And, lordy, it races from head to toe and all stops in between where Carlos Gomez is concerned.
Carlos Gomez! CarGo! Go-Go! From 2007! The good part of 2007! Yes, 2007 was a mostly splendid season until the c-word crashed all over us in the second half of September and obliterated the bulk of pleasant associations the followup to 2006 was generating. Gomez was intrinsic to the “maybe we’re gonna be all right” vibe that pervaded Shea that summer. He was lightning on the basepaths and he lit up the dugout. Apparently a dozen-season hiatus from Flushing has changed absolutely nothing essential about our quickest and happiest warrior.
Gomez, No. 91 in your program, No. 1A in your heart this series — alongside Rajai Davis, assuming there’s room in the rideshare — started his second Met tenure slowly. It’s understandable in that staring at him standing still in the present and remembering him perpetually on the move in the past provided you two wholly different images. The Gomez of 2019, when he first reappeared in Miami, looked so much older than I pictured him from 2007, which may have been a function of twelve years having passed. Also, the Mets stood perfectly still in Miami and none of them exuded vigor.
The Carlos Gomez from the good part of 2007 emerged from the Uber of imagination in the fifth inning Thursday when he singled off Stephen Strasburg, stole second and continued on toward third when Yan Gomes’s throw went awry, though to be fair to Yan, so did one of Carlos’s shoes. Like that was gonna stop Gomez from being safe or scoring on Juan Lagares’s imminent sac fly.
This gave LIOSM the one run he needed as a buffer against a hiccup in his magic. In fact, the magic did burp in the sixth when indefatigable Juan Soto doubled and former Met patsy Brian Dozier (recently 0-for-37 against us, setting a position-player futility record it never occurred to us existed, let alone that it existed under the auspices of eternal Met villain Mike Scioscia) singled him in. Matzie the Magician got out of the sixth like he got out of every inning, by overcoming a proliferation of baserunners. For Steven to pull a win out of his hat, however, the Mets would have to retake the lead on his behalf — and they did in the bottom of the sixth, when Pete Alonso launched a fly ball to the warning track to score J.D. Davis from third; and Wilson Ramos, speaking of speed, beat out a deep infield hit that plated Todd Frazier. Jeurys Familia protected that 3-1 lead in the seventh like he used to protect similar advantages in the ninth.
Ah, but the Mets who were no longer accustomed to losing started to lose. The inexplicable swerves are as much a fact of traffic off the Grand Central as they are on the Northern State. Robert Gsellman drove the 3-1 lead into a ditch and, quite disturbingly, the Nationals went ahead, 4-3 in the top of the eighth.
But that’s why you have a Rusty Staub, a Lenny Harris, a Dominic Smith on the bench. You have them there to come off it and signal that you’re about to change lanes. Smith did just that, leading off the eighth with a double. Smith is a 6-for-17 pinch-hitter in 2019. That’s so deluxe it oughta come with both fries and onion rings. Neither among Frazier or Alonso could steer Smith home with the tying run, and whoever was managing the Nats by the eighth (Davey Martinez got himself ejected before Washington ownership could do it to him) decided Ramos wasn’t going to get the opportunity. Wander Suero was ordered to put Ramos on first and pitch to Gomez.
Gomez was fine with that. Tony LaRussa was fine with Mike Maroth pitching to Gomez on June 25, 2007. Why wouldn’t he have been? It was only the third inning of a scoreless game, and Maroth would give up only one run over seven-and-a-third. The run was to Gomez, who homered with nobody on that Monday night at Shea Stadium, the first time we were seeing the Cardinals in Queens since the previous October, October of 2006, and you know how that month concluded between the two combatants. Not Gomez and Maroth — neither was a member of the ballclubs who fought out the ’06 NLCS — but the Mets and Cardinals. I hated the Cardinals in June of 2007 like I hated the Cubs in June of 1985 and was about to start hating the Cardinals the rest of 1985.
Hate will always pave your parkway, but love always has the right of way, and on June 25, I no doubt loved that Carlos Gomez had just hit his first home park home run for the New York Mets. I say “no doubt,” because, I have to admit that being at Shea that night to inform the Cardinals that they all still sucked, I don’t really remember that home run. I do clearly and lovingly remember the home run Shawn Green walloped to right to end the game as a Mets 2-1 win in the eleventh, an affair that felt it would otherwise go on without end. Green’s swing was an exercise of power Caro might want to examine once he completes working on Lyndon Johnson.
The Mets had three hits that night; two of them were solo shots off the bats of two of the Mets’ three 2007 right fielders. Willie Randolph shuffled among Gomez, Green and Lastings Milledge as the season began to lose its footing the way an older Gomez would lose his shoe. Maybe the Mets needed an injection of the youth Carlos and Lastings encompassed. Maybe the Mets needed the benefit of Shawn’s experience. Willie couldn’t decide. Over the final twelve games of 2007, Milledge started five games in right, Green four, Gomez three. The c-word, already in progress, was more unstoppable that September than Soto (3-for-3 with a walk) was this Thursday. The final pitcher Randolph started in 2007, a future Hall of Famer whose name escapes me at the moment, would leave the Mets soon after. To replace him, the Mets would seek another lefty who also seemed destined for Cooperstown. They found what they sought: Twins ace Johan Santana. All it took to get him was four youngsters who’d spent no or little time in the major leagues. Gomez, 21 years old with 58 Mets games on his ledger, was one of the Minnesota-bound. After June 25, 2007, he never hit another home run at Shea Stadium.
On May 23, 2019, however, after an odyssey that stretched from Minneapolis through Milwaukee, Houston, Arlington, St. Petersburg and Syracuse, the prodigal son, as Gary Cohen was in the process of tabbing him, blazed around the bases, having just hit his second home park home run as a Met, his first in home blues at Citi Field. He thoughtfully brought Smith and Ramos along on his come-from-behind sprint to make it 6-4 for the rejuvenated Go-Go Mets. When Carlos Gomez homers in a Mets uniform for the first time in twelve years, you can be assured he does not trot.
Suero, not Gsellman, was now the pitcher of record on the losing side. Edwin Diaz, not the first dude off the street the Nats could find who’d look acceptable in red, would come in to nail down a save in the ninth. The Mets, not the Nats, would call it a very, very fine afternoon. Nobody who won or lost would be certain what would happen next. Nobody ever can be, not in life, not in baseball.
Robert Caro’s long-ago editor at Newsday advised him, “Turn every page. Never assume anything. Turn every goddmaned page.” Our next chapter commences against the Tigers at 7:10 tonight. All we know in advance is nothing.
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