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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 30 April 2019 11:44 am Zack Wheeler had a bad inning, not a full-game meltdown but an uneasy, Leiteresque mix of wildness and poor BABIP luck. That bad inning was enough to put the Mets in a 4-0 hole, but then Tanner Roark couldn’t get anybody out either. The Mets crept to 4-2 and then Roark became the latest opponent to get excused further duty by his manager despite having the lead and being close to qualifying for that hoary but still valued stat, the win. With two outs in the fourth but the bases loaded, Roark walked Pete Alonso on four pitches, prompting Reds skipper David Bell to opt for Wandy Peralta … who rewarded him by walking Brandon Nimmo on four more pitches.
Tie game, and this is the kind of thing we ought to remember when we’re feeling sorry for ourselves: The Mets do not, in fact, have a monopoly on misery and all-encompassing woe-is-me baseball hangdoggery. Tie game, and it seemed all but certain that the Mets would break through and untie it, finishing an unlikely comeback and authoring a feel-good story for Wheeler a day after writing a feel-good story for Steven Matz. Why, that’s the kind of thing that can give a ballclub confidence and a sense of lift, which …
Oh that’s right, there was the remainder of the game to be played. Which, alas, proved to be more than a formality.
The Mets had their chances: there was the bases-loaded opportunity after Nimmo’s walk, of course, but they also put runners on first and second with two out in the sixth and got a one-out double in the seventh. All for naught; it was the Reds who were knocking on the door.
In the eighth, Mickey Callaway stubbornly went once again to Jeurys Familia, whose dumpster fire of a season has to be one of the Met storylines most worthy of concern. Familia walked Scott Schebler and hit Jose Iglesias in the shoulder, leaving the Mets looking at miles of bad road. Tucker Barnhart followed with a perfect bunt up the third-base line, which Todd Frazier pounced on and turned into an out; Familia then gave up a sharp grounder over the third-base bag to Jose Peraza, not an impossible play but also one that routinely ends with an errant ball bounding down the line and a left-fielder frantically exploring the corner and way too many enemy baserunners gamboling around. Frazier coolly converted it into a double play and Familia had somehow escaped his own mess.
He escaped and handed the ball to Edwin Diaz, working his third straight game in a row. And before you could say “Conor Gillaspie,” Jesse Winker had spanked a sluggish slider over the right-field fence. Winker’s home-run trot was so enthusiastic it called for a choreographer, but you know what? If fortunes had been reversed, Alonso’s bat would quite possibly have wound up in geosynchronous orbit. Winker was enjoying the moment, even if I decidedly was not, and my objections are confined to the outcome.
The Mets couldn’t answer and in rapid succession they lost, fell to .500, and tonight will send Jason Vargas out against Luis Castillo, who is not that Luis Castillo but a pitcher whose early-season successes are bad omen enough. None of that was lost on me, as I fumed and vindictively decided to let recap duty wait until morning. (A mistake: Why begin a day rubbing your own nose in the previous night’s loss?)
So why did I have the feeling that the story had gone wrong, that the Mets had been destined to win that game and something had malfunctioned? It’s an interesting question to ask as a fan of a statistically mediocre outfit whose expected strengths are so far proving flimsy.
I’d wax literary about this reservoir of good feeling and its secret wellsprings, except I don’t know where they come from.
Maybe on Monday night it was simple arrogance: the Reds are a mess and desperately need someone to tell them that their road uniforms look like late-aughts throwbacks, about which no one on the planet is nostalgic. (I mean, seriously? Two-tone caps, drop shadows and whatever’s happening with that number font? There’s so much “Oh honey, no” going on there that I wanted to watch the game peeking through my fingers.) Maybe it’s simply the presence of Alonso, the baseball equivalent of a golden retriever who just ate a sleeve of coffee pods and a bag of sugar and is so glad to see you he can’t even. Maybe it’s that when they actually manage get out of their own way, the Mets are still capable of sending out a starting pitcher who will throttle the opposition in merciless, highly watchable fashion. Or maybe it’s just that it’s still early spring, and I catch myself being surprised that baseball is something I can watch instead of just daydreaming about.
Whatever the reason, there’s a disconnect, and I remain stubbornly optimistic about a team whose results would suggest wariness as a wiser response. Is that a problem? Maybe, but I think I’m happier without having it fixed.
by Greg Prince on 29 April 2019 7:35 am Travis d’Arnaud once said something for de facto public consumption maybe only I caught. Perhaps Travis would appreciate my use of the past tense of catch in the previous sentence. He’d probably appreciate more “will catch” in the sentence that begins the next paragraph of his career, wherever it’s written.
The exchange to which I allude transpired in May of 2014, when the Mets communications staff still invited bloggers who covered the team not as a job but as a self-imposed adventure to come around and visit a few times a year. We were non-traditional media, so it seemed like a very progressive policy (which makes it odder to think it’s a policy that is now in the past tense). But we were simply media in the eyes of anybody who was directed to treat us as such.
One of those people was d’Arnaud, in what was supposed to be his first full season as starting catcher for the New York Mets. “Supposed to be” implies he wasn’t. True enough, as d’Arnaud was on the DL and thus not playing a full season. By that measure, we’re still waiting for Travis d’Arnaud’s first full season as starting catcher of the New York Mets.
Travis’s inactive status that night made him fair game for our PR minder, who saw him standing around in his shorts and t-shirt and asked him if he could take a few minutes to talk to these bloggers. Sure, Travis said, in that way I noticed ballplayers had of evincing cooperation when there was no polite way of withholding it. Besides, he was sitting out that night’s game. What else did he have to do?
We gathered around d’Arnaud somewhere behind the dugout and asked general, genial questions. We were media but we were fans. I don’t know that Travis knew the difference, or that it mattered. I always tried to snap into professional mode in these situations, using second-person rather than first-person to refer to the Mets. I also tried to think of questions a player hadn’t already been asked myriad times.
I know, I thought — he’s the starting catcher. The young starting catcher. Travis was 25, touted as one of the next big things in the Met scheme, somebody who was going to lead us (I mean them) out the endless morass that had enveloped the franchise for a half-decade. The Youth of America in Stengelese. I imagined Kim Wilde serenading them. Young Lagares; young Wheeler; young Familia; young Harvey recovering from Tommy John; the recently promoted young deGrom; young Syndergaard down on the farm; and young d’Arnaud, who was attached to Syndergaard in the trade that was supposed to help transform Met fortunes. R.A. Dickey to Toronto for an enormous fireballer and a stud catcher. The least we could get for our beloved Cy Young winner was a bright future.
We hadn’t seen Noah Syndergaard yet, at that moment honing his craft at Las Vegas, which makes him sound like a card sharp in the making, but we’d been witness to d’Arnaud’s earliest major league development dating back to the previous August. We couldn’t wait to get a look at him. He was one of those minor leaguers, all fresh and new when all about us felt old and stale. The mission of the summer of 2013 was to shove aside the latest veteran catching placeholder — John Buck —with all deliberate speed and make room for d’Arnaud. Td’A, as we’d taken to abbreviating him, came up on August 17 and gave us a glimpse. He registered his first hit on August 20, his first homer on August 25. On September 13, in the last game Ralph Kiner would ever broadcast, d’Arnaud singled home Lucas Duda in the twelfth inning to d’Liver a 1-0 win over the Marlins.
The hits were the milestones. The catching was implicit. It’s always like that, isn’t it? For three decades leading up to d’Arnaud, we idolized Carter, Hundley, Piazza and Lo Duca not for how they filled their job titles but for what amounted to what they did while moonlighting. They’d slug, we’d cheer. They’d squat, they’d get up, they’d squat again, they’d nurture a different pitcher at the beginning of every game, probably another few before the game was over, all while an umpire kept a hand on their shoulder, an umpire they couldn’t tell to kindly remove his paw because they had to curry his favor in case their mitt moved a centimeter in the wrong direction while receiving pitches that dart hard and unpredictably.
And you fume when they go into a slump.
The pitcher is “1” in your scorecard, the catcher “2,” which hints at the institutional afterthought nature of the position. Vice president of the battery. The guy who has to throw the ball back to the guy whose throwing is the only throwing we’re really interested in…unless the catcher is forced to throw somewhere besides the pitcher’s mound, in which case we are lightning-quick to judge when the catcher isn’t lightning-quick to the base where a lightning-quick runner is taking off toward quite possibly because the pitcher didn’t hold him on sufficiently.
Catchers take all sorts of hell behind the plate. They are made to wear more equipment than anybody else in the game, and even then they are left vulnerable. D’Arnaud was on the DL in May of 2014 because he suffered a concussion from absorbing a backswing. Baseball’s grudging acknowledgement of the fact that this happens fairly often was to spin off a shorter version of the disabled list just for that. “You were whacked in the head with a violently thrust piece of lumber? Take seven days and get over it.” Until that very year, it was considered admirable for opposing baserunners to crash into the catcher in quest of a run. A rule was implemented to stop doing that and we instinctively grumbled that the game was being ruined.
This was the world d’Arnaud entered willingly. The Phillies liked him enough to draft him in the first round out of high school in 2007. The Blue Jays liked him enough to insist he be a primary form of payment for Roy Halladay in 2009. The Mets were the next to like him three years later. We, the Mets fans, liked the idea of replacing Josh Thole, who left for Canada with Dickey. Not all that long before, we loved the idea of Thole halting a parade of Lo Duca successors.
On May 22, 2014, nine nights since his concussion (the third of his professional career), Travis d’Arnaud hadn’t yet done enough to either douse optimism that he would be the answer at catcher nor have us wondering if maybe the Mets’ first-round pick from 2012, Kevin Plawecki, loomed as a better long-term bet. It was too soon. D’Arnaud’s progress was stalled by injury. He’d be back in there within a week, though. He remained 25. His rookie status was intact. We were all comfortable talking in the future tense with him.
My ask to d’Arnaud was about something that inevitably loomed around catchers’ availability: day games after night games. It was one of the few concessions to the demands of catching that your regular starting catcher wasn’t expected to strap it on — you name it, catchers strap it — less than sixteen hours after having strapped it off. Day games after night games, we learned around the turn of the millennium, were why God made Todd Pratt. You bought a ticket to the matinee, you accepted that you were likely to draw the understudy. You can debate who represented the heart and soul of Bobby Valentine’s Mets, but there was no question Piazza, who passed 30 at the end of his first summer in New York, was its formidable bulk. Star or no star, Piazza’s bulk needed a blow now and then. So did Carter’s, belonging as it did to a ten-year veteran when the Mets got him, back in the day after night. “Ladies and gentlemen, the role of catcher in today’s production will be played by Ed Hearn” wasn’t your idea of dream casting, but 162 performances across 181 days required flexibility from personnel and audience alike.
D’Arnaud, on the other hand, was a rookie raring to go with every curtain. In light of the precedent that benched even the best of catchers (especially the best of catchers), what did he think about not catching day games after night games?
He didn’t seem think much of the question, to be honest, because Travis kind of stared at me and told me he wasn’t sure he understood what I was getting at. So I posed it again with a few fewer syllables. The recovering concussion patient took a beat and answered cordially but still gave me the impression that I was asking something that didn’t make much sense to him. Catching daily, he told me, was what he planned to do. “It’s part of my art,” he said.
His art. That stayed with me forever after as Travis d’Arnaud got back to catching. What’s the phrase we use for masks, chest protectors, shin guards and everything else a catcher straps on? The tools of ignorance. Pitchers, we say admiringly, have repertoires, whereas catchers, we chuckle, have ignorance. They would have to be a few degrees shy of a GED to want to do what they do. Just watch two of them shake hands in retirement.
But they embrace it. Piazza did. Carter did. D’Arnaud surely did. He saw it as something more than the logical outcome of a hypothetical trade school education. It was his art. He would create from behind the plate. He’d sculpt a pitching staff for us. He’d use the diamond as his palette. As the catcher, he was the only one who was always looking over the entire canvas that was the field.
At the end of his first more or less full season, Travis showed up down-ballot in the 2014 Rookie of the Year voting. The winner was Jacob deGrom, whom d’Arnaud caught regularly while Jake’s award case was coming into focus. The Mets were set at catcher at the outset of 2015…and then groping around for a replacement when Travis took a pitch off the pinky finger of his right hand — as a batter barely two weeks into the new season (making you wonder whether catchers aren’t the ones who ought to have a hitter designated in their stead). We were introduced to Plawecki, who did what he could, and waited for d’Arnaud. It wouldn’t be the first time.
Getting hurt seemed to come naturally to Travis, though catching will certainly make a person more “injury prone” than walking around upright not proactively courting aches and pains. He was back in his chosen position on the same night Wilmer Flores legendarily confounded expectations, both by enduring in a Mets uniform and tugging at the Mets wordmark when he won the July 31 game from the Nats. D’Arnaud embroidered himself into the story of that dramatic weekend sweep over Washington when he was captured on cell phone camera by Mets fans as he pulled out of the parking lot between the Saturday and Sunday contests. The fans were shouting enthusiastic sentiments at Travis. Travis, in the same earnest tones I remembered from our brief encounter, replied with comparable enthusiasm. “Let’s take this shit,” he told them regarding their admonitions to grab the division from the Nationals. And when they informed him they wanted to see some October baseball, Td’A clarified their ambitions for them:
“November.”
Them he understood and that he made good on. The Mets played November baseball in 2015, having won two postseason series in October, each of them featuring d’Arnaud power, all of their games anchored by their starting catcher of pennant record. Piazza, d’Arnaud’s childhood idol, had to grab a couple of blows in the 1999 and 2000 postseasons. Td’A, like Lo Duca, Carter and Jerry Grote, caught every inning.
We and Travis d’Arnaud will always have that. Everything after 2015 was a little less storied. More injuries, more trips to the DL until the DL became the IL. The longest of them was almost all of 2018 for Tommy John surgery, a procedure named for a pitcher that’s usually applied to a pitcher. Travis the catcher caught the UCL bug in his right elbow. The Mets went on not well without him. Eventually, similar to when they were forced to face life after David Wright despite David Wright still residing on their 40-man roster, the Mets couldn’t wait any longer for Travis d’Arnaud. As 2019 approached, they sought a veteran catcher. The one they’d had since 2013 wasn’t likely to be ready by Opening Day.
Come March 28, Wilson Ramos the 2015 Nat was catching deGrom. Td’A was activated April 7, having been tendered a contract over the winter to serve as backup catcher. D’Arnaud, now 30, had never performed the part of an understudy. Whatever he thought of this iteration of his art, he didn’t appear well suited for it. Playing sporadically, no facet of his game seemed healthy. By Saturday night, giving Ramos a night off before a day game, Travis was exposed as not ready for prime time. Balls got away. Runners got to second. For bad measure, he himself got thrown out trying to stretch a single into a desperate double. Fans booed en masse like whatever was wrong at the moment was solely the fault of the former top catching prospect.
He wasn’t helping, but the loss wasn’t entirely on him. It was one game of a career that was supposed to have gone better than it had. In the end, it was one game too many. Had the Mets come to the conclusion they reached by Sunday morning, deciding to designate Travis d’Arnaud for assignment, he wouldn’t have to have heard the boos. He didn’t deserve them. He caught the only game the Mets have ever played in November, a World Series game.
Without d’Arnaud, the Mets won their day game after a night game Sunday, 5-2. Ramos started and shepherded Steven Matz to seven solid innings versus the Brewers. D’Arnaud’s successor as backup, Tomás Nido, pinch-hit and doubled in a pair of insurance runs. The Mets got on the board in the first inning shortly after Pete Alonso tripled deep to left. As he attempted to field the ball, Ryan Braun felt something wet. It was a beer that had escaped the M&M’s Sweet Seats. The brief shower didn’t appear malicious. Replays showed a fan thought he’d be cute and try to catch Alonso’s near-homer in his cup.
I’d like to think he was pouring one out for Travis.
by Greg Prince on 28 April 2019 7:12 am
by Jason Fry on 27 April 2019 3:03 am What’s wrong with Jacob deGrom?
That’s the question we’d all like answered, starting with “my God, just tell me it isn’t the elbow.” And we had a lot of time to ponder that question Friday night, as the Mets finally kicked off a chilly, rainy game against the Brewers nearly three hours late and were then out of it early. A blowup inning for deGrom, followed by a blowup inning for Corey Oswalt, and there wasn’t much to do after that except shake our heads at the 100 or so diehards out there in the cold and worry about our ace.
So is it the elbow? Or some other critical part connected to a critical part? DeGrom sounded pretty adamant that it wasn’t, and after a fair bit of the usual Metsian nonsense he actually got an MRI, which came up clean. Pitchers are habitual liars about how their arms feel, but they usually don’t lie with such ardor. So, no, I don’t think that’s it.
That makes the culprit mechanics, a point upon which most everybody connected to Metdom seems to agree. I didn’t follow the whole discussion, largely because it was really freaking late at night, but basically the dominoes of his motion aren’t falling properly, particularly when pitching from the stretch, and the arm is dragging, and pitches that last year were darting with pinpoint accuracy are sailing outside, or to the wrong side of the plate, and they’re either balls to be ignored or fat strikes that get whacked.
At least that’s what Jim Duquette said, and what Mickey Callaway said, and what deGrom himself said. All offered variants of the same diagnosis, which is that it’s a mechanical flaw, the nature of that flaw is clear, and deGrom just has to turn the mechanical fixes into muscle memory to eliminate it. Which is a lot easier said than done, particularly after a stretch in which illness and rain and worry have done a number on deGrom’s usual between-games routine.
So say the people on the TV, and let’s hope so, because that does sound fixable. DeGrom’s cerebral and coachable and blessed with a lengthy track record of ideal mechanics and great success. Though of course the miracle is that pitchers can ever repeat their mechanics at all, given the complexities of pitching in isolation — to say nothing of game situations, aches and pains and everything else that can throw someone off by that minute fraction that means the clockwork jams up. Maybe the next start will be the one where deGrom’s location is there from the start, and the results are like the deGrom we saw not so long ago in Miami. Or maybe it will be the start after that.
Or OK, maybe this particular dark forest is darker than deGrom and his helpers realize, and they’re hacking their way deeper into it instead of back towards sunlight. That happens too.
Pitchers break — that’s a regrettable, bedrock fact of baseball. And even when they’re whole, pitching’s really hard. A season like Jacob deGrom’s 2018 is like a once-a-generation comet, to be viewed with awe and then remembered with a rueful, you-had-to-be-there head shake for years thereafter. Getting back to anywhere near that would be a victory for deGrom, the Mets and all of us.
Let’s hope it’s soon. And if it isn’t soon, let’s hope we can all be a little patient, and remember just how miraculous pitching on a high level is. It’s amazing it happens at all, let alone that it can become something you’re surprised not to see every fifth day.
by Jason Fry on 25 April 2019 12:54 am Sometimes, it turns out, a dull baseball game is better without a little injection of excitement.
Wednesday night’s series finale between the Mets and Phillies started off glacial and boring and then turned glacial and annoying. The Phils nicked Jason Vargas for a run in the first but nothing else; the Mets couldn’t get the hit they needed against Vince Velasquez, with Wilson Ramos having a particularly frustrating night. And then Robert Gsellman came into a 1-0 game and got pounded and that was effectively it.
I could talk about Vargas being good, which statistically he undeniably was, but something just felt flat and off for both teams until Gsellman showed up and made you reconsider the watchability of flat and off. Take Vargas’s final pitch of the night, a 2-2 fastball to Bryce Harper. The pitch before had been a changeup that started inside and dove into the dirt, designed to get Harper looking inside. The next pitch, it was clear to me, everyone in the park, everyone watching on TV, and anyone you happened to wake up from a nap of between five minutes and five decades for a quick briefing, was going to be a fastball on the outside corner. It was, it arrived at a Vargasian 86 MPH … and Harper looked at it for strike three.
Yeah, that kind of night.
Anyway, Gsellman came in and was bad and that let all the air out of a game that had turned into a fallen souffle anyway. I’d spent an hour and a half waiting for the Mets to get a big hit, then downgraded my hopes to having someone on either team look vaguely awake. But then Mickey Callaway summoned Jacob Rhame because someone had to pitch the ninth, and Rhame had to face his Tuesday-night antagonist Rhys Hoskins. Hoskins came into that confrontation as wired as if he’d just hoovered up a bag of trucker speed, hit a home run down the left-field line, and should finish his trot around the time the other Phillies get off their bus back home.
And now let’s have 1,000 words about how baseball is a pale shadow of what it used to be, followed by a rant about how the pinkos banned leaded gasoline.
No, if you want that go listen to sports-talk radio or find dumb people on Twitter. (And, honestly, what are you doing here in the first place?)
Rhame wasn’t trying to hit Hoskins Tuesday night to avenge his sort-of-fallen teammates — he nearly hit him because he’s not a very good pitcher. To be more specific about something that doesn’t particularly deserve analysis, he nearly hit him because he’s one of approximately 90 raw chuckers stashed at AAA and called up to the big leagues when teams become disenchanted with their other not very good raw chuckers. They’re spaghetti at the wall, except the spaghetti is going nearly 100 MPH so you’re stuck with contractors in your kitchen all the time.
Hoskins was understandably upset because he could have been killed by the 25th guy on a roster demonstrating why he should be the 27th or 28th guy, but the rest was silly, which may occur to him at some point. (Or may not — I don’t know if Rhys Hoskins is a person things occur to.) Honestly, Hoskins doesn’t need to prove himself to the Jacob Rhames of the baseball world with a home-run trot that makes you think of continental drift; he does that by not having to live in an airport hotel when he’s in the majors.
At least the studious-looking Rhame showed some brains by being studiously uninterested in waving further red flags at this particular bull, noting that Hoskins doesn’t get to trot if he makes a better pitch. Points to him for that — and if there’s any sense left on the planet, that’s where this silliness will end. The Mets won’t see the Phils again until June, at which point if Rhame’s logged more than a couple of weeks away from Syracuse, something’s probably gone pretty seriously wrong.
Maybe in that series Hoskins can get mad at Drew Gagnon.
Morning update: The Athletic’s reporting says I’m wrong and this is all much, much dumber than I thought. Enormous sigh.
by Greg Prince on 24 April 2019 5:24 am Zack Wheeler struck out eleven Phillies in the course of throwing seven shutout innings Tuesday night at Citi Field, which was extremely nice and fairly necessary. Wheeler’s a pitcher, and it’s his job to pitch very well. Replicating his trajectory of 2018, except sooner, he’s gone from shaky outings to beginning to find himself to totally kicking it in gear.
Don’t mistake our blasé reaction for apathy. Believe us, we care. We care for the first-place Mets’ 9-0 victory over the second-place Phillies. We care for previously presumed extraneous third baseman Todd Frazier launching a grand slam off Drew Anderson in the fifth and putting the affair fully out of the reach of the visiting Pennsylvania Proprietors (they do own second place). We care for Jacob Rhame letting one or two get away in the direction of Rhys Hoskins in the ninth after the way Phillie pitchers have been plunking Met batters, though we wish he was a little more subtle and a little less wild about it (we usually wish Rhame wasn’t on the mound at all, but a nine-run lead seemed safe enough). We certainly care that Wheeler aced the bulk of his exam by throwing like an ace.
But, really, we care that Zack — two innings after doubling in two runs — blasted his very first major league home run, off another Zach (Eflin), partly because we love when Mets homer; partly because we love even more when Mets pitchers homer; mostly because we freaking love how much Mets pitchers have homered over the course of these past ten seasons.
Did you know that we’re living in the golden age of Mets pitchers slugging? This decade that’s winding down, whether you call it the ’10s or the teens, has encompassed more home runs hit by Mets pitchers than any others? Ya do now.
1962-1969: 7
1970-1979: 9
1980-1989: 14
1990-1999: 13
2000-2009: 3
2010-2019: 15
Wheeler’s long ball to left in the fourth, over not only the candy-coated party deck barrier but the original Great Wall of Flushing, gave the decennial pitching home run crown to the staff of the 2010s. It also allowed the franchise’s pitchers as a collective to equal both Roger Maris’s longtime single-season, single-batter record of 61 home runs and the 1980 Mets’ teamwide output of 61 home runs, which also represents a longtime record for a campaign uninterrupted by strike. Each of those entities required 162 games to establish their marks. The nine Mets pitchers who have harnessed the power to produce 15 Mets homers in the 2010s needed only 14 games. Technically, the Mets have played 1,481 regular-season games since April 5, 2010, but the 1,467 games in which a Mets pitcher didn’t homer were, for the purposes of this celebration, PBP — or as we might have to explain to the sad, unimaginative poobahs who have consigned the American League to perpetual boredom, pitchers batting practice.
You know what else Mets pitchers who homer practice besides going deep? Modesty. They may take their shots at the fence while in the box, but they never take them at their victims after games. They’ve been the luckiest men on the face of the earth, to judge by their quotes. Heck, judge for yourself. To commemorate the occasion when the 2010s officially became the Decade of the Slugging Met Pitcher, we present a hastily cobbled oral history, mined from the postgame reflections of the pitchers who took their cuts and rounded their bases yet didn’t want to make too big a thing out of it.
That’s all right. That’s what we’re here to do.
“They said it was enough, that was all I needed for the game. I hit it and I started running. I didn’t believe it was out. I’m on the board. At least I hit one.”
—Johan Santana, July 6, 2010; solo HR off Matt Maloney, third inning; Mets 3 Reds 0 at Citi Field
“I happened to get lucky and caught it good. I didn’t know if it was out and I was watching; that’s why I almost missed first base.”
—Jeremy Hefner, May 29, 2012; solo HR off Joe Blanton, fourth inning; Mets 6 Phillies 3 at Citi Field
“Tomorrow is my dad’s birthday and when I asked him what he wanted all he wanted was a ‘W’. I think I gave him a little extra with that. This one has my dad’s name written all over it.”
—Noah Syndergaard, May 27, 2015; solo HR off Sean O’Sullivan, fourth inning; Mets 7 Phillies 0 at Citi Field
“I think the big thing going around now is that we can rake. I wasn’t doing my job very well. I think that might have helped the cause a little bit.”
—Matt Harvey, July 11, 2015; two-run HR off Patrick Corbin, fifth inning; Mets 4 Diamondbacks 2 at Citi Field
“I don’t even know how to explain it. I’m very thankful. I thank God for this amazing moment, and I wasn’t expecting it. Once I hit it I knew it was gone. The ball in San Diego travels well.”
—Bartolo Colon, May 7, 2016; two-run HR off James Shields, second inning; Mets 6 Padres 3 at Petco Park
“I don’t think I ever hit two home runs in Little League. To hit two home runs in a big league game, especially with a pitcher like Maeda out there, it was an ultimate experience.
—Syndergaard, May 11, 2016; solo HR off Kenta Maeda, third inning and three-run HR off Maeda, fifth inning; Mets 4 Dodgers 3 at Dodger Stadium
“It’s an awesome feeling. I kind of watched it a little on that one.”
—Syndergaard, August 16, 2016; two-run HR off Braden Shipley, fifth inning; Mets 7 Diamondbacks 5 at Chase Field
“I think I got lucky. I was running pretty hard. I didn’t know it was gone.”
—Jacob deGrom, June 18, 2017; solo HR off Joe Ross, third inning; Mets 5 Nationals 1 at Citi Field
“Jogging around the bases was pretty surreal. I always looked forward to that moment when I was a little kid, you know? That was pretty killer. I knew I was going to get a home run sometime, but had to give it to myself.”
—Seth Lugo, July 15, 2017; solo HR off Chris Rusin, third inning; Mets 9 Rockies 3 at Citi Field
“It was a good feeling, I know that. I definitely got all of it, and it definitely felt good to get my first one.”
—Steven Matz, September 13, 2018 (Game One); two-run HR off Sandy Alcantara, second inning; Mets 4 Marlins 3 at Citi Field
“I don’t really know. I have no explanation for you.”
—Matz, September 18, 2018; solo HR off Aaron Nola, third inning; Phillies 5 Mets 2 at Citizens Bank Park
“I told Nimmo, ‘I am not taking the first pitch,’ and I was fortunate enough to be on time.”
—deGrom, April 3, 2019; solo HR off Trevor Richards, third inning; Mets 6 Marlins 4 at Marlins Park
“It would have been a great win today, but I let the team down.”
—Syndergaard, April 21, 2019; solo HR off Dakota Hudson, fourth inning; Cardinals 6 Mets 4 at Busch Stadium
“Pitching’s obviously first, but we work a lot on our hitting and we take pride in it. We want to do well and go up there as a staff and not give them an easy out. Luckily, I wasn’t an easy out tonight.”
—Wheeler, April 23, 2019; solo HR off Zach Eflin, fourth inning; Mets 9 Phillies 0 at Citi Field
by Jason Fry on 23 April 2019 3:20 am Bryce Harper arranged his own early exit. Steven Matz decided to stay a while longer this time. And Mark Carlson … well, he didn’t know if pitches were coming or going.
For the Mets, Matz was the happy headline. A start after recording not even a solitary out against these same Phillies, he acquitted himself far better, pitching aggressively — and, to be fair, being supported defensively. Matz has always had a bit too much Jon Niese in him for my tastes, and in the third it looked like he was about to perform an oh-so-Niesean fade. Cesar Hernandez doubled, Aaron Altherr walked, and Jake Arrieta bunted the ball a trifle too hard to Matz. Matz stared at Todd Frazier, waiting to record the out on Hernandez at third … and took the sure out at first instead. Oh boy, I thought. Here it comes. The crumble, the scuffing and kicking around the mound, the implosion, the departure, the hangdog postgame press conference. The Full Niese, in other words.
But no, not tonight. Matz fanned Andrew McCutchen, got a ground ball to short, and walked off unscathed — and, it would turn out, on his way to a victory.
That victory was helped by RBI hits from Pete Alonso and Wilson Ramos and a homer from Jeff McNeil — heroics that, unfortunately, unfolded amid the distractions of yet another baseball ump show. Harper was ejected in the fourth for chirping from the dugout about balls and strikes, an eruption that earned him a postgame scolding from Arrieta, who went on to accuse the rest of his teammates of not being ready to play after the rain delay. Things are not well in Philly, not after getting spanked by the Rockies and finding their engineered-to-dominate outfit scuffling along a tick above .500. (Things aren’t particularly better in our own N.L. East nook and cranny, but we won tonight and they didn’t, so there … at least for a night.)
Anyway, Harper was wrong on the particulars but right on the generalities. Yes, Mark Carlson had a dreadful night behind the plate; no, Harper wasn’t one of his more visible victims. The various strike-zone recording services are all a little different, but I rolled through the game pitch by pitch on ESPN’s feed and the strikes called on Harper all looked more or less legit. But Carlson missed plenty on other hitters: a whopping 18 by my count, including pitches in the ABs to Alonso, Ramos and McNeil.
I had the bad calls at 10-8 in terms of Benefiting the Phils vs. Benefiting the Mets, with Matz also getting squeezed in the Rhys Hoskins AB that yielded a home run. But as I wrote last week, surely the point isn’t to be bad at your job but have the incompetence be evenly distributed. Every single game offers evidence that baseball’s umpires are inept at correctly judging balls and strikes. They’re putting their thumbs on the scale during key moments, and it shouldn’t matter that there’s no malice involved. The game is being distorted, and baseball ought not to stand for it any longer. I think moving the mound back is reckless and dangerous and starting extra innings with runners on second is stupid and unnecessary, but I would like balls and strikes to be called correctly, and altering the game so that they are would be a change that I, for one, would greet with open arms.
Anyway, Harper departed, equilibrium disturbed but hair still perfect — seriously, he was like an action figure that came with an extra Angry Bryce head. After that some good Met bullpenning and bad Phillie bullpenning turned a close game less close, with an excess of Mets getting hit by pitches, rain beginning to fall again, and Edwin Diaz arriving for the ninth (a la some loopy Callaway formula that I’d rather not think about) and sending the Phillies away to think about what they’d done.
That wasn’t bad for a night where I’d figured the only victor would be the rain. I just wish Mark Carlson hadn’t brought his own little black cloud.
Addendum: I missed that one of the changes to be tested in the Atlantic League is indeed an automated strike zone. Huzzah! Moving the mound back is still crazy, though.
by Greg Prince on 22 April 2019 6:11 am Fine with me if you dug into a basketful of chocolate bunnies, creme eggs and jelly beans on Sunday. Or macaroons, mandel cuts and leftover sponge cake. Whatever kind of peep you fancy yourself, I do hope you didn’t confine yourself to only sweets and treats. No matter how festive the occasion, filling up exclusively from the candy & cake plank of the food pyramid doesn’t make for a well-rounded diet.
You know what you can snack on too many of to the exclusion of what’s good for you? Solo home runs. I love a solo home run now and then. Everybody does. But that’s not a meal. It’s a sugar rush at best, and not the kind you get when Edwin “Sugar” Diaz rushes in from the bullpen to successfully protect a ninth-inning lead.
Nevertheless, the Mets attempted to create a feast from four leavened fly balls on Easter Sunday/the second day of Passover in St. Louis. Each was tasty. A couple were so brightly wrapped you were tempted to paste the foil in your scrapbook. But altogether they weren’t enough by themselves to help the Mets pass over the Cardinals on the scoreboard or rise in the NL East standings.
You want clickable highlights? You got to press “PLAY” to your heart’s content, albeit in a losing cause. Pete Alonso going 444 feet off erstwhile college rival Dakota Hudson was immediate social media gold, especially with the backstory that he beseeched Mickey Callaway to let him play the day after a pitch hit him in the hand. “I must rain down plagues on the House of Hudson!” Alonso righteously thundered as dramatic prelude to his eighth homer of the young year. Or Sweet Pete simply pestered his manager persistently and, ultimately, effectively. Either way, Alonso got even with whatever forces he had it in for in the first inning, launching a ball so far that it was not only hit off a Dakota, it probably landed in one.
But it was one run.
Noah Syndergaard, this generation’s Tom Seaver and Dwight Gooden when it comes to pitchers homering, was another video clip darling Sunday. In the fourth, a long Thor fly cleared the Busch Stadium fence, spiked for a point by Cardinal middle blocker Dexter Fowler, whose unorthodox defense in the moment — the ball bounced off his glove — would have been welcome by the Redbird faithful had the wall been a net and the sport been volleyball. In baseball, however, the center fielder’s gotta catch those to keep the opponent from scoring. We who don’t dress in red didn’t mind the assist one little bit. We adore when our pitchers homer. We are practically used to having our anti-DH stance so brilliantly illustrated. Twenty Nineteen marks the fifth consecutive season in which we have witnessed two or more home runs slugged by Met pitchers, and Syndergaard’s latest raised the Met pitcher tater total for the 2010s to fourteen, tying the 1980s Mets for most in a decade, with 141 games remaining to set a new standard.
But it was one run.
By the time Noah crossed home plate with his fifth career home run — trailing only Gooden’s seven and Seaver’s six among Met hurlers — he’d already given up five runs. True, his shortstop’s leather wasn’t necessarily kosher for baseball…and the official judgment of balls and strikes was best suited for Charmin (please don’t squeeze the Syndergaard)…but Noah knew better than to blame Amed Rosario or Bruce Dreckman. “Unacceptable,” the starter called his pitching this season to date, clear through to his five innings of six-run ball in St. Louis, which left his 2019 ERA festering at 5.90. Nobody watching from New York was prepared to argue his self-aware point let alone accept his recent output. Syndergaard is a very talented pitcher who’s delivered some spectacular games for the Mets since 2015. Right now he’s more famous than good.
The rest of the Mets’ offense was Robinson Cano hitting a solo home run in the fifth; Robinson Cano being hit by a pitch in the seventh; Robinson Cano writhing on the ground in pain; Robinson Cano having been deemed by crew chief and third base ump Paul Emmel to have swung for a strike despite being hit by said pitch before he swung; Robinson Cano leaving the game with a two-strike count; Juan Lagares entering to complete Robinson Cano’s jury-rigged strikeout; and Michael Conforto hitting a solo home run two batters later. You can’t swear Conforto’s shot would have happened had Lagares been on first as a pinch-runner instead of on the bench as a technically blameless pinch-hitter, but he wasn’t, so Michael’s homer, like Robinson’s, wound up an exercise in not-so-splendid isolation.
Four home runs unadorned by baserunners was it for the Mets in what became a 6-4 loss to end a 4-6 trip on a 2-6 sag. It was also, per Baseball Reference, the fourth time in club history — and the first time on the road — the Mets attempted, however unwittingly, to get by on four solo homers and no other kind of run…and the fourth time it didn’t work.
On August 2, 1962, the Mets’ two prime power threats from their inaugural season, Frank Thomas (34 home runs) and Marv Throneberry (16) each whacked the Phillies’ Art Mahaffey for a pair of dingers at the Polo Grounds. Marvelous, right? Alas, Mahaffey whacked back by allowing nothing else but a single (to Thomas) across nine otherwise sparkling innings. Philadelphia won, 9-4.
On June 13, 1997, the Mets welcomed an American League opponent into Shea Stadium for the first non-exhibition time since the 1986 World Series. Fittingly, their initial Interleague foe was the Boston Red Sox. Less fittingly, the Mets lost, 8-4, despite two long balls from Carl Everett and one apiece from Todd Hundley and Alex Ochoa. The Mets totaled twelve hits in all, but future playoff nightmare Jeff Suppan and five relievers limited their damage to just that quartet of solo acts.
On August 5, 2017, Citi Field was the site of four solos, no winning. The trajectory was frontloaded in this one. Rich Hill surrendered a leadoff homer to Conforto, then, following two outs, back-to-back blasts from Wilmer Flores and Curtis Granderson. We had three hits and three runs. We were poised for rare greatness versus the Dodgers. Or so we fleetingly thought. Hill settled in for his requisite five innings, no longer giving up home runs or any other runs. Eventually, the Mets fell behind, 7-3. In the ninth, René Rivera added a touch of solo window dressing to make it a 7-4 loss.
Sixteen home runs. Sixteen runs batted in. Four vacuums. Four defeats: 9-4, 8-4, 7-4, now 6-4. The futility seems inevitable, but at least the games are getting closer.
by Jason Fry on 20 April 2019 11:56 pm Those of you who say the New York Mets don’t respect their history should be ashamed of yourselves.
Why, on Saturday the Mets held a throwback event that was meticulously researched and thoroughly authentic — and they did it for a road game, no less!
The Mets’ Turn Back the Clock 2017 event began on a familiar note, with Chris Flexen on the hill. Back in 2017, Flexen had just turned 23 and was clearly not ready for prime time, as his 7.88 ERA indicated. That was a while ago, and it was fair to ask if Flexen could possibly recreate the magic of that bygone campaign. But on this sunny April Saturday in 2019, Flexen took pains to make sure he looked like the vintage model. High and straight fastballs, not particularly tight curves — he served them up and the Cardinals got into the spirit by whacking them all over the park.
With Flexen having done his part, the Mets turned to non-2017 Met Luis Avilan, the one jarring note in their otherwise careful homage to a year we all remember so fondly. But Avilan soon departed, to be replaced by … Jacob Rhame! Yes, the same begoggled hero who put up a 9.00 ERA in a late-season cameo back in ’17. He was on point, too, turning in a singularly unimpressive 1.1 innings.
Even the fondest memories cool after a time, so Rhame handed off the nostalgia baton to old friend Paul Sewald, recently celebrated in these parts as the Mets’ latest Jonah. Arriving with such accolades, Sewald could have simply doffed his cap and let us soak in reminiscences of his 4.55 ERA as a newly minted big-leaguer. But he went the extra mile — of course he did, he’s Paul Sewald — by surrendering a run as well. What did you expect? Eric Clapton doesn’t sit in on a number without giving the audience a solo.
All this impressive work by beloved 2017 Mets was part of a 10-2 loss to the Cardinals. And kudos to the Mets there as well. Because if we’re celebrating 2017 — as we so obviously should — a humdrum 4-1 loss would feel perfunctory, like a mere exercise to make the cash registers ring.
It wasn’t a perfect recreation, alas. We didn’t get Terry Collins finding a reason to sit Michael Conforto, or Nori Aoki patrolling the outfield like he’d lost a bet, or Tomas Nido ending the game by getting tagged out 20 feet shy of home plate. But no matter how high the tides of yearning, you can’t go home again. A fellow wrote a book about that once, they say. It’s good advice.
My biggest regret on an otherwise perfect day was the absence of Tommy Milone. Milone exemplified the 2017 Mets — 0-3 record, 8.56 ERA, reporting for duty despite no resemblance to a big-league pitcher — but in fairness he was busy, starting for the Tacoma Rainiers on the road against the Albuquerque Isotopes.
Milone was busy, but there in spirit: Ed Leyro, our old friend and fellow 2017 Mets devotee, notes that before Saturday, the Tommy Gun’s 8.56 ERA was the highest for any Met who’d made at least five starts. But no longer — that record now belongs to fellow ’17 star Flexen, whose career mark in 11 starts stands at 8.59.
I know, I know — I need a minute too. This must be what it felt like watching Ted Williams bat on that final day in ’41, or seeing Henry Aaron running down a legend in the spring of ’74. Chills, I tell you.
And while Milone couldn’t soak in our grateful applause on Saturday, in Albuquerque he gave up four in the first, en route to a 12-4 loss.
Now that’s a True 2017 Met.
by Greg Prince on 20 April 2019 5:11 am We know from starters, emergency starters, long relievers, middle men, lefty specialists, setup men and closers. In 2018, thanks mostly to the machinations of the Tampa Bay Rays, we were introduced to something called the opener.
Jason Vargas filled none of those defined roles Friday night in St. Louis. Yes, he started as scheduled, though any scheduled Jason Vargas start is essentially an emergency. Because he threw the first pitch of the game, you couldn’t call him a reliever. Because there was no plan to limit him to one inning or one batter, he wasn’t exactly an opener. Because Mickey Callaway knows what he has in Vargas, he wasn’t going to extend him an open-ended invitation to keep pitching until his participation was no longer optimal…yet he wasn’t on a strict pitch count, so there was no obvious off ramp to his evening.
Somehow, on the heels of a very stressful piece of Met pitching news, Jason Vargas provided relief, going four innings, giving up one run on three hits and three walks and getting the hell out of Dodge with a three-run lead at his manager’s behest. He looked as good as he possibly could soldiering through the Cardinal order precisely twice, which is to say two very deep fly balls were somehow contained within the confines of Busch Stadium and a typically VERY VARGAS debacle was ducked. As aficionados of the Vargas Index are keenly aware, SORT OF VARGAS represents a triumph of the human spirit, a veritable schissel of chicken soup for the Mets fan’s soul.
In another era — or in this one with another pitcher — you’d cringe that a healthy pitcher up 4-1 one inning shy of a decision would be pulled. With this pitcher who is almost never NOT AT ALL VARGAS, you had to be thrilled luck wasn’t hubristically pushed. Jason threw 75 pitches to record his twelve outs. The one run he yielded came in the fourth, on a leadoff home run by Jose Martinez, his fourteenth hitter overall. Hitter No. 16 of 18, Dexter Fowler, walked. You could feel the leaves crumbling from Vargas’s clover. To escape minimally scathed was to succeed. Asking this particular starter, whose previous outing lasted one-third of an inning too long (which is to say one-third of an inning), would have constituted managerial malpractice.
Mickey occasionally properly processes the limitations of his personnel. In the pregame presser, Callaway said he just wanted to “get through” the upcoming game, which is an unorthodox rallying cry until you comprehend the context. The skipper had been asked how the rest of the series might play out from a starting pitching standpoint in light of that very stressful piece of news alluded to above. True, late Friday afternoon Mickey didn’t know who was going to pitch on Saturday night, but he definitely knew who was going to be pitching on Friday night. No use soft-pedaling the reality that a Jason Vargas start is the competitive equivalent of a get us over curve.
Jason’s four & door meant getting through nine would require five bullpen innings, a daunting order to be sure, but a scant request compared to the 7⅔ needed in Vargas’s last start. His successors would be working from ahead this time, thanks to a plethora of Met baserunners off Adam Wainwright and Geovanny Gallegos during the first four innings, enough driven in to construct four runs (Robinson Cano fully awoke from his offensive nap with three hits and raised his batting average from .192 to .218). Seth Lugo thus had some wiggle room when he entered in the fifth, which was great, because he had to wiggle it quite a little bit, stranding two in his first inning of work and giving up two runs on Lane Thomas’s first-ever homer in his second.
The net result of Seth’s shakiness was the contraction of a three-run advantage to two. In between his frames, that young hellcat Pete Alonso — who’d somehow gone an entire week without exploring the real estate beyond National League fences — stepped up and belted a 432-foot home run to center off Cards reliever Ryan Helsley. Pete mashes all his taters off relievers. He loves the other team’s almost as much as Mickey is compelled to rely on his own.
Jeurys Familia, whose presence used to make me a little nervous on occasion but now catapults me into a constant state of fatalism, was superb in the seventh, putting down the Redbirds in order on seven pitches. Who could blame Callaway for continuing to roll his Familia dice? He’d been so admirably careful not to expose Vargas, why not give Jeurys a shot? One out and one double — to Yadier Molina, natch — indicated his luck had been pushed plenty. Familia gave way to Justin Wilson, who proceeded to mix dollops of misfortune (infield single, J.D. Davis throwing error) with a spate of bad pitching (four unintentional balls to Kolten Wong, of them of the wild pitch variety). The cumulative effect wound up trimming the Mets’ lead to 5-4 and placing Cardinals on first and third. Wilson vamoosed in favor of Robert Gsellman, who’s been having not such a great year to date. Maybe it was his turn to turn it around, and he did, popping up Jedd Gyorko and grounding out Matt Carpenter. The Mets escaped the eighth up one.
This is where Edwin Diaz comes in and blows away the opposition for another breeze of a save, but these are the Mets and those are the Cardinals and this is the bottom of the ninth at Busch Stadium. That’s not fatalism talking. We know St. Louis. It’s not the Gateway to Easy Wins. Sure enough, after striking out Paul Goldschmidt, Paul DeJong proved nearly one Paul one too many. He lined Diaz’s one-oh slider on a plane to left field, but before you could say “there’s trouble in River City” three times fast, ace glove man Jeff McNeil — just transferred in from the outfield — nabbed that harbinger of doom for the second out. McNeil took a rare collar Friday night, his 0-for-5 plunging his .424 BA clear down to .391, but this is one Squirrel who always finds some kind of nut.
You’d have to be some kind of nut yourself to figure the storm had passed. Diaz walked Marcell Ozuna and allowed a single to Martinez, chasing Ozuna to third. The next batter was Molina. The next batter has been Molina since 2006. We survived Wainwright Friday. What were the odds we’d get through Perpetual Hurricane Yadier without one last huff and puff and potential blow of our house down?
Somehow we did. Somehow Edwin flied the Big Yad Wolf to center and the Mets were somehow 5-4 winners. I keep saying “somehow” because the more the night wore on — despite Vargas’s competent start and the visitors’ eleven hits — the more it developed a strong “we have no business winning this game” vibe. On the other hand, because of Vargas’s competent start and the visitors’ eleven hits, it also maintained an equally strong “we have no business losing this game” vibe. Sometimes the vibe you prefer high-fives you when the game is over.
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Unavailable for any kind of maneuvers involving the use of an arm for at least the next week is Jacob deGrom, whose Metsian significance is so gargantuan it’s a wonder his name isn’t in the first paragraph of this otherwise relatively informative report. In the interest of preserving a modicum of good vibrations, I opted to bury the lede as deep as I could. I just hope we don’t have to bury the season. Jake, who was first going to start Friday, then Saturday, was announced as a St. Louis non-starter altogether by Callaway. The best right elbow in baseball was “barking,” the manager explained, which didn’t explain much, except variations on “barking,” including “bark” and “barky,” immediately replaced “redacted” as the most repeated word on social and electronic media.
It’s all about caution, the Mets barked back. Jacob had that strep throat, so he wasn’t on his usual between-starts routine. He felt a little “mild soreness” on the off day, but rebounded to “significantly better following treatment” from the team’s health and performance staff Friday. Leaving alone the straight line a decade of injury-fueled cynicism has bequeathed us, we’ll truly believe the trainers did no harm. Anyway, the Mets decided not to mess around with their crown jewel and opted to IL him, which is now a thing, and schedule him an MRI, which is always a thing. If you peer hard into the Mets’ skyline logo, you’ll see a magnetic resonance imaging tube whirring steadily on one of the Woolworth Building’s upper floors.
With deGrom out for a spell (and nothing more, we hope/pray/beseech the gods), Saturday’s game, the one Callaway didn’t want to think about Friday before getting through Vargas’s start, will be in the hands of Chris Flexen. Its first pitches, anyway. Lest you’ve forgotten from his Quadruple-A cameos, Flexen’s the pitcher Vargas stands next to in the team picture to feel less bad about himself. But we’ll get through this, too.
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There’s a big night coming up at Citi Field May 1, a week from Wednesday. It’s Island Harvest’s “Home Run to End Hunger,” a fundraiser organized by the food bank and presented by Petro Home Services. The event will revolve around the Mets’ game versus the Reds, include a Field Level ticket, offer premium experiences depending on the level of support a person can give and feature Mr. Met. What could be more of a home run?
Island Harvest provides food and services to more than 300,000 Long Islanders who could really use the help, with “94 cents of every dollar contributed directed back” into its vital mission. You can learn more about “Home Run to End Hunger” here.
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The Mets lost to the Brewers at Citi Field on Saturday night, 8-6, in an ugly game made briefly attractive before it reverted to hideous. Noah Syndergaard pitched badly, Travis d’Arnaud caught badly and Jeurys Familia thought badly. In between, Pete Alonso provided a powerful antidote to the mounting blahs, but nothing anybody did well could overcome everything everybody adorned with dollops of ineptitude.
And now the Mets are a .500 ballclub, 13-13, steadying the record of the franchise since the founding of this blog at 1,147-1,147, thus marking the 53rd time Faith and Fear has, whether from above or below, reached .500 in its lifetime. It should be a familiar sensation to us, because the team we root for calls itself a .500 enterprise at some point every year of its life, save for a handful — not counting 0-0, wise guys.
In 1985 and 2007, seasons that ended a couple of hairs shy of thick and luscious, the Mets soared above .500 to start and were never pulled back to flat ground, not even for a day. The rest of Met time, .500 has proven either a way station or, early on, an elusive aspiration (though, strangely enough, never an 81-81 destination). Our pioneers spent all of 1962 through 1965 yearning to have won as many as they lost, but otherwise all Mets sans ’85 and ’07 have pulled in at 1-1 or the like as they began to fill their 162-box bingo cards.
Perhaps the current year, fueled by Alonso Unleaded, struck you as containing the potential to be one of the aviating outliers. We launched 2-0, then 5-1, then 9-4, then hung in clear to 13-12. Alas, 2019 will consistently defy gravity no longer. For 25 games, these Mets were nothing but winners in the winning percentage sense of the concept. Eventually, though, 50-50 odds catch up with you. It happens every spring. Or summer, in the case of 1991, when .500 didn’t track the Mets down until August 15 (57-57). The 2018 Mets, it will be recalled with minimal memory strain, shot out of the gate like a house on a fire until they went down in mixed metaphorical flames. The team that ascended to 11-1 and maintained a cruising altitude of 17-9 at this very stage of last season, finally discovered itself .500 after 50 games: 25-25. Two games later, they were 26-26; two games after that, 27-27. Then…well, let’s just say .500 looked pretty darn desirable by the halfway mark.
Conversely, teams we remember for extending their years joyously experienced a moment or more of stumble and humble. Your October-bound heroes from 1986 and 1988 bottomed out at 2-3. The 2015 club not only held that same drab five-game record but were no better than break-even after 84 games. The 1999 and 2000 Mets each dropped their Openers and reluctantly revisited territory beneath .500 somewhere down the road. The indomitable 2006 edition missed out on claiming wire-to-wire distinction by pausing at 1-1 (and sitting a half-game out of first for a blink). Our most recent playoff entrants, from 2016, not only lost their first regular-season game but found themselves looking up at .500 deep in the heart of August. Their spiritual ancestors, the 1973 Mets, famously climbed to first place and .500 simultaneously, hitting 77-77 on September 21 in a National League East that was more comfortable shopping at Korvettes than it was Saks.
There was this one April ages ago when the New York Mets were doing what they were known to perennially do: lose more than win. After engineering the modest self-esteem boost of a 2-1 start, those Mets slipped to .500, then below it, then characteristically far below it as quickly as they could. Those Mets were, at various plot points on their graph, 3-7, 6-11 and 9-14. It was a huge historical deal when they proceeded to win nine of their next thirteen and scaled their way to the highest peak commonly imagined for them: .500.
Oh, those 18-18 Mets were hot stuff in the eyes of their traveling press, the members of which had never seen a literally not bad edition so late in a Met season. Witnesses to the big clubhouse celebration were few, however, because most of the Mets weren’t celebrating. A winning percentage of .500, their best player scolded the media, was nothing to celebrate.
After which, the Mets lost five in a row to fall to 18-23, ha-ha.
After after which, the Mets won eleven in a row to rise to 29-23, and whether because you already knew the salient details or you’ve been paying a scintilla of attention all your life, you know I’m talking about the 1969 Mets, currently our fiftieth-anniversary darlings, forever the avatars of anything being possible. There was a time, however, when they weren’t “the 1969 Mets” yet, except in name. They might as well have been any other Mets to date based on their sub-so-so record. But records are forever subject to change while a schedule plays out, and a whole lot of games are waiting to be won beyond April. Tom Seaver, the Met who advised reporters to go find another story, knew that. Gil Hodges, who’d been convincing his charges since St. Pete that not bad wasn’t their ceiling, knew that. Soon, the whole world turned savvy.
Not every Mets team that touches .500 uses the most level of platforms as a trampoline — and three losses in a row maybe has us fearing we’re about to excavate rather than elevate — but let’s have faith that 2019’s next bounce takes us sky high and keeps us suitably aloft. What goes up can always come down some other year.