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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 17 April 2019 12:06 am I spent the last five days in Chicago, getting my Star Wars on at McCormick Place and in the hotel bar. So my Mets attention was fitful and scattershot. I saw news of the first night’s events in amazing seats behind the plate at Wrigley Field (plenty of good options available when it’s still frigid), departing in the seventh when freezing rain began tumbling out of the sky. I followed the first game in Philadelphia on MLB.TV, huddled in a corner of the Delta Sky Club while wondering if I’d ever get back to New York and if the flu I’d caught would be fatal. (So far: yes, and probably not.) I was on the plane and monitoring GameDay when I saw Michael Conforto‘s AB turn into IN PLAY, RUN(S), which I took as a good omen. As, indeed, it was.
And then I got to recap Tuesday night’s delight.
With that con flu ripping through me, I conked out in my bed around 7pm, Howie Rose and Wayne Randazzo speaking beside me. I woke up some indeterminate time later to hear Howie sounding exasperated, even by Howie standards. I peered at the phone. It was 8-0. Well, that wasn’t ideal.
From there I spent the game in a strange dose, sometimes just beneath the surface of consciousness and sometimes just above it. The Mets seemed to be getting an inordinate number of hits for a team down by double digits, and I knew if ever there was a park where impossible comebacks might happen, it was Philadelphia. My sick, slumbering brain proved more creative than actual reality, though — I kept dreaming comebacks which turned out not to exist. The gap steadily widened, the narrative turned into the relative heroism of Drew Gagnon, and Howie began complaining about HBO shows not being “Curb Your Enthusiasm,” the Barclays Center and its unsuitability for hockey, and anything else about modern life that crossed his radar. (To his credit, he was generally amusing in his grumpiness, and admitted that hey, it was 14-3. Meanwhile, Gary Cohen and Keith Hernandez were trying on hotdog hats next door. However you tuned in, the night was more about survival than broadcasting awards.)
One thing I’d missed while in Chicago was the return of Paul Sewald. I must now sigh deeply.
For years I’ve had an odd habit of taking a deep dislike to one Met on the roster, concluding that everything that befalls the team is obviously his fault. Sometimes players deserve this by seeming generally unlikeable — Michael Tucker, Jon Niese, or Jim Leyritz in his happily brief spring-training cameo. (By the way, Steven Matz was thoroughly Niesean in his performance, and it’s high time someone taught him to stop feeling sorry for himself on the mound.)
Sometimes my deep dislike is inexplicable — I detested Jose Vizcaino for years before he became a Yankee and crushed our dreams in 2000. Couldn’t tell you why, but anyone singing the praises of “the Viz” made me want to throttle people. Other times my animosity builds gradually, in response to ever-mounting hangdog tragedy and buzzard’s luck. For an example of this last kind of dislike, we need go no farther than Aaron Heilman.
And Sewald. Sewald always looks doughty and determined, but it never makes a damn bit of difference — he’s doomed when he steps on the mound, and everybody knows it. Yeah, he was OKish Tuesday night. That’s because the game wasn’t close. If it had been 3-3 he’d have been undressed by a line drive, Charlie Brown-style, and have Jeff McNeil bring back the baseball in a dog dish. You know this, I know this, and most likely Paul Sewald knows it. (Mickey Callaway probably doesn’t, because I don’t think he knows anything.) Sewald is a warm body, a replacement level nonentity, a ham-and-egger with no detectable redeeming features besides being bipedal and ambulatory. Every day he spends on our roster eats minutely at my soul.
This tradition of inexplicable blame goes back way before baseball — in the English navy, tragic shipmates were known as Jonahs, and treated with everything from open hostility to secretly murderous intent. I certainly don’t want any of those things to happen to Sewald, who seems a decent sort, but he’s a Jonah and disaster will stalk the Mets so long as he trods the decks of the S.S. Mickey, getting whacked by booms and run over by poorly secured barrels and skulled by heavy, salt-sodden lines.
While thinking of Jonahs, a postscript: in the offseason I started gathering Topps cards for potential new players, and noticed a weird set with a unique Gregor Blanco card. What was Topps Emerald Nuts? It turned out to be a sponsored set given away at Giants games, with the same look as that year’s Topps cards but some different photos and unique cards. And I realized to my horror that it had existed from 2005 through 2012 without my being aware of it.
The Emerald Nuts people would probably say they just wanted to make a nice giveaway, but I know the truth: their sets constitute a rogue’s gallery of all-time Met Jonahs, possibly with malefic powers. The thoroughly detestable Guillermo Mota got unique Emerald Nuts cards in three different years. Fantastically useless outfielder Andres Torres got two. Inexplicably incompetent Ramon Ramirez got one. So did Joaquin Arias, and Tyler Walker, and Jose Vizcaino. So I spent the winter haunting eBay for sets featuring players I’d been happy to mostly forget, grumbling all the while.
Paul Sewald has no Emerald Nuts card. The set hasn’t been given away since 2012. But given who Sewald is, one day he will have one. That’s a when, not an if.
by Greg Prince on 16 April 2019 5:56 am I hope the Mets don’t have one of those mobile plans that limits their minutes, because they’re tearing through them at a prodigious rate. Time of game over the past week reads like the schedule board at Grand Central as it gears up for rush hour. 4:08; 3:15; 3:14; 3:07; 3:34; 3:36. The Harlem, Hudson and New Haven lines have rarely chugged along as deliberately as these Mets and their most recent spate of opposition. On Monday night, a date technically dedicated to the memory of Jackie Robinson, the American hero and baseball pioneer who ran fast and stole home, the pace-of-play rails slowed to an absolute crawl…but at least the Mets didn’t go off them.
It took four hours and twenty-nine minutes for the 7:05 from Philly to finally pull into the win column, including three hours and forty-six minutes ensuring a step up in fare to extra innings would be necessary. This train took its sweet time from the first inning to the ninth, then the ninth to the eleventh.
Time is apparently one commodity the Mets don’t know how to save. The game, however, got itself rescued on several occasions. Four stand out.
1) Jeff McNeil, who started in left field (and notched three hits to raise his average to .404), saved Jeurys Familia’s bacon in the eighth. Two were on, none were out, Familia had as little as possible in his arsenal while facing Maikel Franco, who hit a bullet to third. Where in the world was Jeff McNeil? In a position to grab the hot liner near the hot corner and convert it into a 6-4-3 double play that moved Odubel Herrera to third but kept the Mets’ lead at 6-5. What a lucky break that the man they call Squirrel had changed positions between half-innings. That Mickey Callaway is some genius, huh? Now all Mick had to do was be just as brilliant about taking out Familia, who had given up a single and a walk prior to Franco’s sizzler, and bring in Edwin Diaz to end the eighth and set up a serene ninth.
2) Having drawn a 4 on 16, Callaway couldn’t leave his hand be and said “hit me” again and again. Actually, he left Familia in to walk a pair of Andrews (Knapp and McCutchen) and load the bases. Having blown past 21, Mickey finally decided to deal Jeurys out of the game. Robert Gsellman, not Diaz, was his next call. It probably wasn’t Gsellman’s call to immediately walk Jean Segura, but that’s what happened, which made it a 6-6 game, which made the second save of the night possible: Juan Lagares racing from second to score when Rhys Hoskins muffed the hard grounder hit to him by Michael Conforto in the eleventh. Now that was some Jackie Robinson-style flair. Fittingly, Lagares wore 42. Less fittingly, so did everybody else. At that point, anybody who put the Mets ahead as Juan did deserved to be awarded not just the uniform number of honor but a save. After Noah Syndergaard had given back leads of 3-0 and 5-3 (he went five) and the Familia-Callaway-Gsellman straight royally flushed away the edge Brandon Nimmo gained them on his sixth-inning homer, not only the win had to be saved. So did face.
3) Diaz — remember him? — came on in the bottom of the eleventh and, for the first time as a Met, pitched like we all heard he did as a Mariner. Just a no-doubt eleven-pitch, three-strikeout dismissal of Bryce Harper, Hoskins and J.T. Realmuto, a pretty fair slugging trio to nail down the 7-6 victory. It was Edwin’s sixth and biggest save of the season, not only vaulting the Mets back into first place but kicking the Phillies the hell out of it. That’s some cold Trading Places stuff right there, apropos considering both the movie and the ballgame were shot on location in Philadelphia.
4) Though the win was safely in the books, Callaway needed to be saved again afterward when reporters couldn’t quite buy his declaration that no way, no how (at least not until the hypothetical playoffs) would he ever bring Diaz in to secure more than three outs. Seeing as how he was prepared to go down with his ship in the eighth — the S.S. Familia-Gsellman was surely taking on water — this was quite a decision to cement in advance of the next 146 games. Enter into the picture Brodie Van Wagenen to clarify and expand on Callaway’s policy, confirming this is indeed how the organization plans to use its most potent defensive weapon at critical junctures of contests that could determine the outcome of the division. Brodie allowed that there might be a touch of flexibility down the road, but to the Mets, a closer is a closer, no matter how close a critical situation might be.
Give Van Wagenen the save for coming into take some of the heat that was glancing off Callaway, I suppose. Mind you, the heat was deserved. There were instances when Diaz could have come in real handy, yet — despite having him warm up — the manager went in other directions. Gsellman. Luis Avilán. Drew Gagnon, freshly recalled from and recently started in Syracuse, was going to be the eleventh-inning man if Lagares hadn’t brought home the seventh run. Relievers are notorious for grumbling about getting up in the pen repeatedly and then not getting into the game (“dry humping,” they colorfully call it). Young Diaz said only he’s down with anything he’s asked to do by his manager.
But his general manager? The bizarreness of the postgame scene wasn’t that Callaway and Van Wagenen resided on the same debatable page. It was that Brodie thought it necessary to speak for in-game strategy. For as long as the Mets’ TV partners have been covering their clubhouse for viewer consumption, a practice that dates back at least as long as SNY as been on the air, I couldn’t recall until Monday a moment when the GM stepped forward to talk about how players had just been used and would be used. I don’t remember reading about it in the papers or seeing anything like it on the news before there was a Snigh. Omar Minaya didn’t do it. Sandy Alderson didn’t do it. The chronically kibitzy Steve Phillips resisted the temptation, at least not right after a game. There’s an unwritten rule quality to this practice. It’s a rule that probably didn’t need to be written. Managers address what happened in the game. General managers don’t pull focus unless there’s a front office kind of reason to clear a throat and announce a transaction.
BVW has never been a GM before, so you could look at his action several ways. You could say it’s inexperience, that he simply does not know that this is simply not done; you could say it’s a tacit vote of little confidence in Callaway, the manager he didn’t hire and the manager who last year did not lead the league in clear explanations; you could say it’s a bold overstep and as much of a breach of baseball etiquette as not stealing six runs up or flipping your bat toward the second deck before trotting around the bases; or you could say that Van Wagenen isn’t going to be bound by the hidebound if it doesn’t make sense to him.
I’d like to believe it’s the last one. If Callaway wasn’t getting his message across about Diaz going one inning and one inning only (as dopey as that message might be), he didn’t want to leave his manager hanging out there like a curve that didn’t break. At his inaugural press conference, the GM said something about everybody being in this Mets mission together, right up to the owners. An organization that isn’t hung up on titles and roles might be more nimble and better positioned to respond to a dozen different issues and challenges that pop up in the course of a week.
Which sounds great, even if the GM doing what a GM doesn’t traditionally do on the manager’s turf comes across as a little bush…and even if Diaz probably ought to be brought in to get batters out when the freaking game is on the line. That would be pretty nimble, too.
by Greg Prince on 15 April 2019 6:14 am “I’m not really throwing the ball where I want to,” Jacob deGrom explained to reporters Sunday night. He probably meant in relation to where Brave batters could hit it. I’d add I’d have preferred Jake not throwing the ball on ESPN’s Sunday Night Baseball, which no matter how it’s presented is an inevitable bummer.
I’ll leave it to Jake to figure out where the ball is going in advance of his next start. In deGrom we continue to trust. Our ace said he’s going to watch some video. Too bad. Nobody who roots for the Mets should ever want to watch this one again.
Sunday wasn’t Tuesday, the previous deGrom start that lacked quality. He didn’t get jumped on but he was clearly groping for his groove. For five innings it was out of his grasp, but at least he and it were in the same lane of I-285. DeGrom leaving the Mets in a 3-1 hole at SunTrust Park is not the same as Jason Vargas operating an earth mover, dumping tons of dirt on his team’s chances and skedaddling with 26 outs to go. Jake, however, did need 114 pitches for his five innings, precluding desperately desired length. He struck out nine but walked four and gave up five hits. Not quality, but not disastrous.
Except that in the wake of Vargas & Co. the night before, you’d sure like invincible deGrom to show up on cue and do what we’ve come to define as his thing. Maybe we just wish Jake could always throw the ball in 2018.
The relievers who followed him — Justin Wilson, Paul Sewald and Jeurys Familia — didn’t seem to throw the ball where they wanted to, either, while Met hitters for the most part didn’t hit the ball to too many useful places. Down by three in the eighth with two on, there was a moment of hope. Brandon Nimmo was up, Pete Alonso was on deck, the sense that three-and-a-half hours devoted to this exercise was going to feel worthwhile was palpable. But Brandon fanned, the Braves plumped up their lead and a 7-3 loss (played in a torpid 3:36 preceded by a 27-minute delay) oozed to a conclusion.
For this I DVR’d Billions, Barry and Veep? Well, sure. The Mets are my prime time programming of choice, even when the episode in progress begs to be flipped away from. I appreciate Howie Rose and Wayne Randazzo being more entertaining in sound than whatever was appearing in pictures, yet it’s a little early in the season to be deploying “TV down, radio up”. Early, but on Sunday night, necessary.
Piling on Sunday Night Baseball and the network that broadcasts it is an instinct as old as Paul Sewald himself, which is to say it dates back to ESPN first bringing us baseball in prime time in 1990 (which was when Sewald was born; it only feels like the Mets have been shuttling him in from Triple-A for the past 28 years). Plucking a Sunday ballgame from what we are conditioned to believe is its natural environs — Sunday afternoon — and making us wait around for hours on end plays havoc with our ballological clock. Shifting it from the warm and familiar surroundings of SNY and shoehorning it within somebody else’s platform and making our team fit somebody else’s agenda further dissonates our cognition. And whatever benefit a “national game” has for out-of-market Mets fans doesn’t resonate in the streaming age like it used to as a good reason for going Snighless.
I tried to give ESPN a chance. Before fleeing to WCBS, I listened to Matt Vasgersian set the scene. The Braves, he said, entered this game with a chance to take three of four from the Mets. The Mets, to that point, had taken two of three from the Braves.
Thumb meet mute.
Hank Aaron was a special guest in the booth for a couple of innings. Of course you want to hear from Hank Aaron when in Atlanta. Hank Aaron is the very definition of a living legend. Even if it distracts from deGrom’s (and Julio Teheran’s) pitching, you shrug it off in April. He’s Bad Henry, for goodness sake. But I couldn’t. I tried. Unmuted here and there, but Vasgersian, Jessica Mendoza and Alex Rodriguez together could be distilled into a spray can and be marketed as baseball repellant. Mostly Vasgersian, really, but the combined effect is an ad for silence. It didn’t help that ESPN flashed a photo of what it claimed was Hank with Jackie Robinson from their playing days, Robinson the old Brooklyn Dodger, Aaron the young Milwaukee Brave. Except it was Jackie Robinson and Boston Braves outfielder Sam Jethroe. Jethroe and Aaron didn’t look much alike. They weren’t even on the same Braves club let alone in the same Braves city. To plop a cherry atop the inaccurate Sunday Night sundae, the same photo labeled the same way pinged around Twitter a few months ago and was widely spotted and corrected.
Later, when I saw a highlight package devoted to the fiftieth anniversary of the 1969 Mets, I unmuted again. Tommie Agee was referred to on screen as Tommy Agee. Vasgersian proceeded to read from a script that said the Mets had gone “from the pinnacle to the pit” in seven years, as opposed to what they actually did. Howie Rose…take me home…
ESPN does many things well, including posting and archiving the AP recaps we’ve linked to for just about every game the Mets have played since 2005. But experiencing ESPN televising a regular-season baseball game — especially one involving a team you care about — leaves the impression that the last thing ESPN wants to do is televise a regular-season baseball game anybody cares about. Me, I’ll always look forward to a regular-season Mets game. Just not that much on a Sunday night or at all on that channel.
by Greg Prince on 14 April 2019 5:46 am You know what they say: you’re gonna win a third of your games, you’re gonna lose a third of your games and apportioning 20% of your games to Jason Vargas to start is self-defeating.
Why is Jason Vargas the Mets’ fifth starter? Because you need a fifth of Jim Beam, official bourbon of the New York Mets, to get through one of his starts. Or you would if he could make it to the fifth inning.
Saturday night he didn’t. Vargas pitched in the first but not to its end. Six batters faced, five batters reached via hit or walk (Alfonso Marquez’s strike zone was small enough to be drowned in the proverbial bathtub), four runs earned. The Vargas Index blew through the roof. VARGASM achieved.
It wasn’t enjoyable. It never is when your ERA after two starts and one mop-up relief appearance is 14.21, which is what Jason’s leading indicator was in the first months of 2018, too, so let’s rule out element of surprise for explaining why he remains a rotational stalwart for a presumed contender. One could squint and detect progress by season’s end, when he pitched competently enough to lower his earned run average to a nifty 5.77. It doesn’t sound terribly nifty, but for a while there it might as well have been fifty.
Vargas gave way not to texting Dallas Keuchel’s agent ASAP but to Corey Oswalt. Oswalt was not to be confused with either Keuchel or Allen Iverson, a.k.a. the Answer. Somebody had to take the ball after the starter evaporated. Corey, called up last week in exchange for Tim Peterson, did something we’ll assume was shy of his best. For the Braves, we were talking about practice…batting practice. Once Oswalt was done after the fourth, the Braves had nine runs and he had an ERA of 12.27…which wasn’t even the second-highest among those Mets who pitched Saturday night. Luis Avilán gave up a run in two innings to remold his earned run average to 12.71.
As in Augusta, high numbers in this part of Georgia are not the object of the competition. Not coincidentally, starting Vargas isn’t the mark of a competitive approach to baseball. In the wreckage of the Mets’ 11-7 loss (the game wasn’t really that close), Mickey Callaway — who forgot to call me for additional special advice — didn’t particularly commit to this veteran for another go-round and Vargas couldn’t say much more than he hadn’t pitched long enough to make definitive judgments about his outing. That was probably as on target as the pitcher was all night.
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The most jolting development regarding a Mets pitcher Saturday had nothing to do with those who threw. During the SNY telecast, Ron Darling announced he’ll be leaving the booth for a while to have a “large mass” removed from his chest. Planned recovery, he says, should have him back on the mic next month. Of course we hope to hear from him as soon as possible, but mostly we hope that the man attached to one of the signature arms and voices in Mets history comes through this situation in spectacular health.
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Remember Dave Liddell? No? That’s OK. He was a Mets catcher for a fraction of one June afternoon in 1990: one inning caught following one plate appearance. The lone time up yielded a single at Veterans Stadium. Though that’s the scope of his big league career, there’s an intriguing backstory to Dave Liddell worth knowing. It comes to us via mlb.com’s Anthony Castrovince, who tracked down the handful of players whose offensive statlines — 1-for-1 in 1 PA — are as perfect as their stay at the top of their profession was brief. There’s Liddell and four other guys alive who fit the description. Meet them here.
by Greg Prince on 13 April 2019 9:23 am During Spring Training you might have noticed Brodie Van Wagenen was enlisting special advisors left and Wright: Captain Dave; Al Leiter; John Franco; Jessica Mendoza. You hadn’t seen so many advisors being deployed since the Gulf of Tonkin resolution. Since special advice is so in Met vogue, I let it be known that I was also available to dispense it.
Thus, it was no wonder that Mickey Callaway called me from Atlanta Friday afternoon. He was concerned about various components of his first-place club and maintaining the synergy they’d produced to date. He was a little worried that since his team had gotten off to a great start a year ago and then imploded they might be due to disappear soon.
I advised him everything was gonna be fine.
Mickey asked me about Brandon Nimmo, who’d started the season stuck in a swamp of strikeouts.
I told him Brandon’s still the same lovable hitter he was last year, but if it makes you feel better, bat him eighth, take some pressure off him.
Mickey asked me about Zack Wheeler, who seemed to have backslid from his downright deGrominant second half of 2018.
Listen, I reminded him, Zack’s working with Dave Eiland on arm angles and such. Zack will figure it out, probably save your bullpen for a change…not to mention Jason Vargas’s upcoming start.
Mickey asked me about Robinson Cano, who’s been a boon to his teammates but not necessarily himself.
I said, Mickey, he’s Robinson Cano. Sure, he’s getting up there, but we’re gonna reap plenty of what he has left before long.
Mickey asked me about Jeff McNeil, who sometimes seems too good to be true, considering how the guy had knocked around the minor leagues without much notice, yet has done nothing but hit since being given a chance last summer.
Trust your eyes, Mickey, I advised some more — trust your eyes. And check the data if that helps. But whatever you do, Mick, keep finding space for Jeff. Lead him off if you have to.
Mickey asked me about Pete Alonso, first whether that ball he hit the night before had ever landed, and then about his plan to give him a seat on the bench.
I assured him that yes, the ball had landed (it was the wet one), and yes, it was OK to bring Pete along like a regular rookie and not some heaven-sent savior this soon into his career. Alonso was only supposed to be just now arriving here from Syracuse by dopey conventional wisdom and, besides, you gotta get Dominic Smith in the lineup now and then. Your team, Mickey, is a team, not just the sum of its parts. They all have to work in sync if they’re gonna keep up their first-place pace.
Mickey concluded I had given him sound advice and got on to managing the Mets to a 6-2 victory over the Braves in which Nimmo starred, Wheeler went a solid six, Cano contributed, McNeil continued to rake and Smith chipped in, too.
Mickey’s a good listener.
by Greg Prince on 12 April 2019 4:17 am Steven Matz went deep. Amed Rosario went deeper. Pete Alonso went deepest of all. Edwin Diaz made certain we didn’t plumb the depths.
And that is how the New York Mets took sole possession of first place twelve games into the 2019 season, which clinches the Mets absolutely nothing. My fellow math mavens with a memory longer than a caterpillar will recall one year ago at this juncture the Mets were the twelve-game champions of baseball, having won eleven of their first dozen contests, setting them up perfectly for losing 84 of their final 150.
Nevertheless, we’ll happily lay claim to first. All wins count regardless of month, and it’s not like you can unlose a loss. Then we can focus on expanding or at least sitting on our lead from this point forward. The Mets are a half-game in front of the Phillies, a game up on the Braves (their hosts and victims Thursday night) and a game-and-a-half ahead of the Nationals. You can’t have four teams in sole possession of four places with any less elbow room. The tightness hews to the bunching of the National League East we all agreed upon as imminent over the winter. The Nationals lost Bryce Harper but seemed no worse for the void. The Phillies added Bryce Harper and seemed better in many ways besides. The Braves were our returning champions and did nothing to detract from their eligibility to repeat. And the Mets, according to unbiased source Brodie Van Wagenen, were consensus favorites to leapfrog all three.
It’s 1975 again, the part of 1975 when I gobbled up preseason magazines that forecast an NL East in which one through four were supposed to be a shuffler’s delight. The Pirates and Cardinals had fought it out down to the wire in ’74. The Phillies, after languishing most of a generation in an abyss, were the Mentos of the circuit, fresh and full of life. And the Mets, with Joe McDonald exchanging players like some kind of proto-Van Wagenen, were not to be counted out. I don’t recall the GM then making bold pronouncements, but he did bring in Del Unser, Dave Kingman and Joe Torre.
Nineteen Seventy-Five turned out not so close in the end. The Phillies challenged, but the Pirates fended them off by 6½ games. The Mets and Cardinals finished over .500, tying for a distant third. I’m sure there’ve been other years when it looked like a quartet would compete teeth and nails for the title, but 1975 is the year that sticks with me as 2019 prepares to live up to its hype.
Twelve games in, we have the edge because in the twelfth game, we had Matz, Rosario, Alonso and Diaz, precisely in that order.
Long Island’s Own Steven Matz (LIOSM) can be Niese-level frustrating, but lately the lefty’s been a balm for nettled nerves. A couple of early runs did not upset Steven’s apple cart whatsoever. He wound up going six innings, the modern equivalent of eight, giving up nothing further. LIOSM features an ERA of 1.65 after three starts, his strikeouts dwarfing his innings pitched, his walks barely an issue.
Rosario, who we couldn’t wait to get a gander at less than two years ago, then somebody collectively deemed nothing all that special to look at, reminded us why we were poised to be so mad for Amed. His second-inning blast, with two on, gave Matz the cushion that allowed him to feel as comfortable on the mound at SunTrust Park as he does on the menu at the Se-Port Deli. And lest the shortstop be overly impressed with his power and start overswinging at everything in sight, the kid (he’s a lad of 23, you know) added an RBI single in the sixth. That made it four runs batted in for No. 1 and a little extra wiggle room for whatever might infect the bullpen once Matz departed.
Four runs not enough for the Mets? Is any quantity of runs enough for any pitching staff these days? The staff that doesn’t have to face Alonso may be the corps that survives longest in this league. Pete politely introduced himself to Jonny Venters in the top of the seventh. The small talk didn’t last long, as Alonso simply had to get going. This latest ’Lonsball special — his sixth — landed 454 feet from home plate, alerting the Braves that there may be a suburb even farther from Atlanta where they can next set up shop. (SunTrust, which debuted four months before Rosario, is practically a relic by local standards.) Everybody groans about the region’s horrible traffic, but if more commuters would park at the Pete & Ride, they’d get where they’re going in no time at all. Alonso’s two-run homer’s exit velocity was measured at 118.3 miles per hour. For reference purposes, that’s a homer hit as hard as hell. Perhaps harder. When Pete Alonso leaves a ballpark, Pete Alonso leaves a ballpark. Seriously, that thing struck water, specifically splashing into a decorative fountain beyond dead center field. That adorable touch of exterior decorating is a Metropolitan landmark now.
Once Pete has gone deepest, every other matter ought to be an anticlimax. But the Braves still have Freddie Freeman and you’re never truly free until you’re free of Freddie Freeman. Met Closer Diaz’s first facedown with fright incarnate came with two out and two on. Especially two on. Did I mention Diaz is the Met closer? And that Freeman was up in the ninth as the tying run? But before you could say “Dillon Gee” three times fast, Diaz struck out ye olde divisional nemesis and protected the 6-3 win that elevated the Mets above all comers. Not too far above, though. Just as well — if they got too high, they’d have to duck whatever Alonso socked last.
by Jason Fry on 11 April 2019 1:14 am As long as the Mets win, they can more or less do as they please and we’ll perform the necessary mental gymnastics to declare it good. But that said, would it kill them to play a non-insane game one of these nights?
After a day and a night of high-scoring moral victories that we had to remind ourselves were actually defeats, the Mets looked like they’d drawn a relatively conventional game against the Twins. Noah Syndergaard was crazy-good, complementing his usual 100 MPH fastballs with a refined slider and a deadly change-up. His opponent, Jake Odorizzi, wasn’t flashing the kind of stuff that causes the bobblehead factories to turn the dials to Max Wobble, yet Odorizzi was the one with a no-hitter and a 1-0 lead. Sitting on the couch, I marveled at how Odorizzi’s 94 MPH fastball has somehow become not particularly overpowering. A couple of generations back, 92 was considered legitimate heat, 95 was a weapon available to a very few, and the triple digits were largely the stuff of legends. Today, we don’t bat an eye when starters are still hitting 98 in the seventh inning — and one-inning guys who can hit 100 really may as well grow on trees.
However odd the historical precedents, there were Syndergaard and Odorizzi making the most of their arsenals — until with one out in the fifth, Jeff McNeil singled for the Mets’ first hit.
Then things got wacky — wacky enough that the sequence ought to be preserved for posterity to marvel at years from now.
Odorizzi walked Amed Rosario, which not so long ago was really hard to do.
Then he walked J.D. Davis.
With Noah Syndergaard at the plate, he threw a wild pitch, which caromed right back to home and resulted in McNeil being caught off third.
Given a gift, Odorizzi then walked Syndergaard.
Enter Andrew Vasquez, who went 2-0 on Brandon Nimmo and hit him in the numbers.
Then he walked Pete Alonso.
Then he walked Robinson Cano on four pitches.
Enter Trevor Hildenberger, who’d been a rare oasis of competence on Tuesday. He walked Michael Conforto on four pitches.
The Mets had one hit in the game and led 4-1, which is hard to do. Hildenberger threw two straight balls to Wilson Ramos, who then startled the cobweb-enshrouded infielders by smacking a two-run single past second.
It was … not exciting, exactly, but certainly welcome. But mostly it was weird: Over a 37-pitch stretch, the three hapless Twins pitchers threw 29 balls — including 13 in a row out of the strike zone.
After that, perhaps not surprisingly, the game degenerated until it may as well have been two drunks punching each other on an iced-over pond. The Mets ran the score up to 9-1, Syndergaard seemed to lose focus and let them creep back to 9-4, both Jeurys Familia and Edwin Diaz had innings with blemishes, and the Mets tiptoed away with an unsightly but undeniable 9-6 win. Hooray for the 9, ugh for the 6, and I’d be perfectly happy watching baseball for the rest of my life without seeing another 37-pitch water-torture session like Wednesday’s.
Well, unless it’s what the Mets need to do to win. That tops everything, including one’s sense of aesthetics.
by Greg Prince on 10 April 2019 4:25 am The 25-minute sogginess delay at the outset. The third starting catcher in three starts. The unfamiliar opponent from the uninvited league. The ballpark and broadcast advertisements for a namesake casino that misidentifies his number. The odds that it had to happen eventually. The species of which every member is human.
Jacob deGrom did not throw a quality start on Tuesday night versus the Minnesota Twins at clammy Citi Field. He did not pitch six innings or more. He did not limit opposing batters to three runs or less. The outs he generated were loud and infrequent. The hits he surrendered were louder and continual. There was nothing to deGrom’s four-inning, six-run, eight-hit, three-homer performance to suggest he is the best pitcher in professional baseball, let alone the pitcher who shares statistical space with Bob Gibson.
For that, we’ll have to rely on the previous 26 starts when No. 48 was the personification of beautiful music and the comprehension that one ugly outing is a blip, not a trend. They don’t take action on sports, but even if they did, I doubt the savviest oddsmakers at Jake’s 58 — which refers to an exit on the LIE, not our ace’s ERA — would bet on this kind of night befalling deGrom again soon, never mind often.
Sadly, Tuesday’s long shot wager that somebody would sooner or later stick it to deGrom paid off. That’ll happen when inverses are wild. Balls that normally confound did not move until whacked hard and far. Presumed put away pitches were never unpacked. The magic of Miami morphed into miasma versus Minnesota. Travis d’Arnaud, catching anybody for the first time in a year, was on the receiving end instead of everybody else. DeGrom persevered triumphantly with Wilson Ramos on Opening Day. He elevated Tomás Nido to such an extent that the relative neophyte last week referred to catching his teammate as an honor. We know the rapport Jacob built with Devin Mesoraco en route to the 2018 Cy Young.
D’Arnaud isn’t any of those backstops, but it’s not like he and Jake have never formed a functioning battery before (59 times before Tuesday). With Travis at last uninjured and Ramos requiring as many Buffalo breaks as can be rustled up, it’s not unreasonable to see Td’A penciled into the 2 position on our scorecards. If any pitcher figured to ease a long-absent catcher back into a big league groove, His Smoothness Himself was an optimal option. So let’s not hang this non-quality start on the catcher (except maybe the Twins’ catcher, Mitch Garver, who blasted two of those home runs off Jake). D’Arnaud will be there for deGrom again and deGrom will be there for all of us.
When Jake left shockingly early, the Mets trailed, 6-1. When everybody filed out, the Mets had lost, 14-8, and Stephen Colbert was winding down his monologue. That and the ten baseballs Citi Field couldn’t contain should tell you deGrom wasn’t the only pitcher on either side several exits east of effective. Twin bats were smoking, sure (they ordered six of those taters), but their arms were in ashes. Minny starter Kyle Gibson couldn’t make it through five. Six relievers followed him, none exactly saving the bullpen unless you count Chase De Jong, who came on in the ninth to protect a 14-4 lead and expended 46 pitches in the service of the final three outs, the third of which wasn’t obtained until six Mets reached base and four those crossed home plate. Lest we feel high and mighty about our late-night momentum, the Twins had only (only?) 10 runs total entering the top of the ninth. Then along came Jason Vargas to get some work in, presumably because Kevin Plawecki and Jose Reyes are no longer on the roster. Vargas was VERY VARGAS, Seth Lugo and Robert Gsellman nearly as much.
The Mets have been outscored 26-17 in their past two games. It doesn’t speak well for those who teed up the 26, but the 17 part implies certain inherent charms. I mean, runs…right? Who doesn’t like those? We simply request a more equitable allotment.
Six of the eight the Mets managed from perpetually behind Tuesday night were driven in by players whose names end in an “o,” which seems apropos given that their collective impact on the Mets’ fortunes in the game added up to 0. Yet solace is to be had in Amed Rosario stroking three hits; Brandon Nimmo lifting himself off the dinger schneid; Michael Conforto going deep day after day; and, in the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Swoboda, Pete Alonso writing a new foreword to the Met record book. The first baseman whose service time clock ticks on sans regret hit two more home runs Tuesday to bring his season and lifetime total to five. No Met rookie before Pete had hit five home runs in his first ten career games. No rookie of any kind had accumulated eleven extra-base knocks in his first ten career games. Pete has. If his unprecedented power display doesn’t fully make up for the first Met losing streak of 2019, it sure as hell makes you look forward to the Mets’ next chance to break it.
by Jason Fry on 8 April 2019 12:13 pm Sunday was sunny and warm, one of those days where spring tells you that despite recent events, the world will soon be habitable on a more or less regular basis. Emily and I had worked through all manner of errands and items on our separate to-do lists, so we decided that … we could go to a baseball game! Our favorite team plays a scant 8.5 miles from our house (as the trash-hunting pigeon flies, not as the car creeps or the subway goes in and out of service), so why not?
We secured pretty decent Promenade boxes on StubHub and trooped off for our first meaningful date with the 7 train since David Wright said farewell, arriving with a few minutes to spare — a little tight tactically, but accidentally optimized to let us arrow in with the hordes of deGrom bobblehead seekers having finished their business. A big house had come together around us, the Mets were right down there instead of in a distant city or on the other side of a TV screen (and decked out in their proper pinstripes instead of dopey blue motley) and as Zack Wheeler peered in at Wilson Ramos we nodded at each other happily. Back where we belong. We should do this more often.
And the game started, and … huh. It was still a fun day. It was a really fun day, in fact. It just got a little complicated.
An early bit of ironic foreshadowing came with a fan contest held out by the Home Run Apple. Some sunglass’ed Met loyalist was handed a baseball and offered a prize to chuck it through a strike-zone-sized slot 60 feet and change away. I cringed in empathy, since these things tend not to go well, but the fan took the baseball, calmly threw it through the ersatz strike zone and turned back to Fake Alexa or whoever it is who does these things these days, all without a noticeable change of expression.
Honestly, they should have signed him on the spot.
Wheeler left without a Dunkin Donuts gift certificate or whatever it was: he sent pitches here and there and everywhere except where the rule book suggests they belong. He escaped disaster in the first despite throwing six of his first seven pitches for balls, but in the second everything caved in: walk, flyout, single, walk, single, single, double, sac fly and it was 5-0 Nationals with Max Scherzer on the mound and that’s not what anybody had in mind. The crowd had gone from fractious to annoyed to actively hostile (a bit overdone since it was still a nice day) and we decided to go feed ourselves and see what had changed at Citi Field.
One thing I hope isn’t a permanent change is concessions have become the stuff of adventure. We opted for a Pat LaFrieda steak sandwich, but were told sandwiches wouldn’t be available for 10 minutes. That’s an odd thing to hear from a steak-sandwich place, but stuff happens and it’s early.
Then the beer place was out of the beer I wanted. Huh.
So we went to the Nathan’s stand … which had no hot dogs.
If you’re keeping score at home, that’s three straight failures to perform a relatively straightforward transaction. It was dispiritingly similar to Wheeler’s struggles with home plate, except in that case there was another party trying to actively thwart him. Is that now true for concessions? Did some overeager corporate descendant of Dave Howard decide Mets games would be more exciting if food-service managers tried to secure meat and beer while providers of those things spirited them away to be hoarded in secret boltholes? If that’s what’s happened, could future games feature the less exciting variant where you arrive at a counter and they are able to give you what signage indicates they sell?
With various Plan Bs secured from temporarily functional concessionaires, we returned to our seats and hoped the Mets might have a comeback in them, or at least provide us with some Plan Bs of their own. For a while it was the latter, and it was fun watching Pete Alonso scamper around and seeing what dopey new between-innings events have been cooked up and just sitting back and having baseball be all around us and knowing that this will be the daily routine again for the foreseeable future.
And then, as the sun dipped behind the rim of the stadium behind us and the afternoon grew mildly but not impossibly chilly, Scherzer finally got tired.
Or maybe he got bored, seeing how he was the only person not baffled by a pitcher’s mound. Wheeler had departed, allowing only one more run but letting that last one in on another quartet of walks. Tim Peterson had been no better, walking five and strongly suggesting he needs to become familiar with Syracuse. Luis Avilan‘s lone inning of work had resulted in a three-run bomb from Anthony Rendon. Neither of those gentlemen had thrown more strikes than balls during their tenure and the Mets were down 12-1.
(Oh, and during all that I went to get ice cream and was told the machine wasn’t working. At that point I just laughed.)
And then it was 12-2 thanks to a double by Brandon Nimmo, who didn’t smile but looked less grim than he has so far this year. Scherzer departed, Matt Grace arrived, and a Jeff McNeil singled made it 12-3. Then Alonso walloped a purported sinker to distant lands and it was 12-6.
Look, 12-6 is lipstick-on-a-pig stuff, but you’ll take it when your team’s getting the daylights beat out of it but you’ve shrugged and decided even a ballpark that can’t feed you is better than feeding yourself at home. We decided to go on walkabout for what was left of the game, descending to field level and fetching up at the railing behind whatever they call the Modell’s Zone now. (Is it creeping age or indifference to sponsorship that’s caused me to not remember anything that’s changed ballpark-wise since about 2011? I’m still writing PEPSI PORCH on my checks.)
And there we stood for the last two innings, getting a vivid reminder that the Nationals have a bullpen problem. The Mets put runners on first and third with nobody out in the eighth only to have the rally founder when Amed Rosario and Keon Broxton struck out, but then they were right back at it in the ninth against Joe Ross — he hit McNeil, walked Alonso, almost gave up a three-run homer to old friend Travis d’Arnaud and then really did give up one to Michael Conforto — a twisting liner that arced up out of our sight and then came back down to the left of us. Somehow it was 12-9, and we still weren’t winning but that pig was covered with colors and running around squealing about it, and we had to admit that was kind of fun.
You know the rest: Sean Doolittle came in to play stern teacher, putting an end to the tomfoolery and the game (the big meanie) and so we and the other remaining diehards headed back to the subway and whatever it is we do when we aren’t watching baseball. Sitting on the 7 as the ballpark shrank behind us and was lost to sight, I thought to myself that I’d had a pretty good time on an afternoon that featured my team giving up 12 runs and repeatedly refusing to feed me. Imagine what a day at the park could be like if they worked on those things.
by Greg Prince on 6 April 2019 10:52 pm You want home runs at Citi Field, perennially notorious as a launching pad for next to nothing? Met home runs, that is? Then slate your Saturday dates for when many are thinking that it would sure be delicious to have a ballgame with lunch. An in-depth exploration of all Saturday 1:10 Met home starts during these past six seasons reveals they are the source of a recurring home team power explosion that could transform the grim Astoria night into a glorious shade of orange as well as blue.
Granted, our control group study is three games, which is to say the only three Saturday 1:10 games the Mets have scheduled since 2014. Management got it in its head that Mets fans don’t enjoy sunny Saturday afternoons as much as they savor the dark of Saturday night, hence the only time we get a Mets game like it oughta be in terms of scheduling on the seventh day of the week is late March/early April. One assumes the 126th Street decisionmakers would prefer to stick fans outside to freeze past 7:10 PM every night of the week, but maybe somebody in those offices took the last Weather Education Day to heart.
If anybody was taking on-field success into account, they might notice Saturday 1:10 PM first pitches have served to cultivate an atmosphere where baseballs fly off of Mets bats and the vast majority of the crowd leaves overjoyed with the ensuing result and the chance to devote the evening ahead to other, indoor pursuits. Saturday afternoon, April 5, 2014, gave us Curtis Granderson’s first home run as a Met and Ike Davis’s last, the latter a pinch-hit walkoff grand slam to defeat the Reds, 6-3. Saturday afternoon, March 31, 2018, saw Travis d’Arnaud and Yoenis Cespedes (remember them?) each go deep in support of Jacob deGrom, contributing to a 6-2 victory over the Cardinals.
The undeniably successful albeit small sample size increased by 50% on Saturday afternoon, April 6, 2019, with more Mets home runs. Lots more Mets home runs…and just enough of other valuable stuff to ensure a Mets win that was as sunny as the skies under which they were socked.
J.D. Davis, default third baseman — as in some opposition offense seems to be his defensive fault — put his wood where his leather sometimes ain’t and brought it to bear like crazy, hammering not one but two home runs off fancy Nationals free agent acquisition (back when teams signed fancy free agents) Patrick Corbin. Like every other ball that ignored walls, Davis’s duo, proffered in the fourth and the sixth, traveled far. J.D. doesn’t stand for Just Dingers, but we’ll definitely keep accepting as many of those as he can furnish us.
Davis shaped more of Saturday afternoon’s home run pie than any other Met but he was not alone in slicing up Nationals pitching. Robinson Cano hit his first at Citi Field as a Met; he hit two there (and two at Shea Stadium) in some other uniform the affiliation of which escapes us for now. The eighth-inning blast off Justin Miller was the 313th of Cano’s career, placing him a scant 311 ahead of Pete Alonso. Alonso is up to two overall, one at the ballpark where was born to slug. Pete won’t be fenced in by any stadium, but this one is clearly his. Has a rookie in the eighth major league game of his life ever seemed so ready to roll? Not just in deed (which in Alonso’s case was done in the eighth inning, just prior to Cano’s) but in manner. Pete jumps up and down after he hits ’em like we jump up and down when he hits ’em. The whole team seems to be following his excited lead. Or as the youngster who has yet to wear a Mets uniform in ten official games put it after the game, “Never count us out. Like the Mets saying is, ‘Ya Gotta Believe.’”
If at that point he’d asked for an ice cold Rheingold and directions to Ralph’s studio, I wouldn’t have been surprised and couldn’t have swooned any harder. He’s so Met! But, really, who here isn’t when the sun is out, the ball is airborne and the mood is buoyant? Four of the five Met home runs were belted by newcomers, yet this is no longer a Citi of strangers. You get used to your guys fast when they make you want to stand with them with open arms. Davis from Houston. Cano from Seattle (and somewhere else before that). Alonso from heaven’s sandlot. They’re J.D., Robbie and Pete. They’re from here these days and we’re not proofing at the door.
The fifth home run of five the Mets walloped Saturday, thus tying a record for the most the Mets have catapulted beyond barriers in their sometimes grudging ballyard, was a product of Michael Conforto. He’s no stranger, no matter how Terry Collins and the disabled list conspired to keep us from getting to know him better for a few years. Michael’s dinger (he’s not really a Mike, is he?) soared in the sixth, a bit after J.D.’s. It was the 39th regular-season long-distance call of Conforto’s Citi Field career, placing him third among all Mets since 2009. He was previously tied with Grandy and is parked for a spell eleven behind David Wright, which doesn’t seem possible, yet adds up. Over David’s horizon awaits Lucas Duda with 71. Given the entirely non-collusive coincidental trend toward extending your young superstars before they ever find there was once such a thing as unencumbered free agency, it’s also worth noting Conforto’s bomb was the 77th of his career, meaning he’s 175 from matching Darryl Strawberry. Let’s allow for patience, health and contractual consent where that milestone is concerned.
All five Saturday sunshots were things of beauty. They were also each so special that they couldn’t be supplemented by something as mundane as a baserunner, which is to say the four Mets combined for five solo home runs. Two drawbacks to that artistic statement: 1) at the moment when the fifth home run became a souvenir, there were no other runs of any kind to join them along the Mets’ portion of the line score; 2) the Nationals also scored five runs. Starter Steven Matz gave up none of them over five innings crammed with mostly effective pitches but there was one with Robert Gsellman on the mound in the sixth, driven in by Ryan Zimmerman, who has some nerve remaining active while his Virginia playmate Wright has stepped aside and sat down; another facilitated by some passed ball nonsense (charged to Wilson Ramos, not J.D. Davis, for it’s not always J.D.’s fault); and three Gillaspied off of Jeurys Familia. So when we got those two homers in the eighth from Alonso and Cano, it wasn’t just aesthetically pleasing. It was necessary as hell to forge a 5-5 tie.
One more run was required to keep Saturday at 1:10 perfect and we weren’t about to be picky how we got it. Fortunately, the Mets proved there is more than one way to skin a Nat. With two out and the bases empty in the bottom of the eighth, Conforto doubled off of Tony Sipp, knee-nagged Jeff McNeil arose from the bench to absorb a pitch to his shoulder for the greater good and Keon Broxton took a big gulp out of Sipp, singling Conforto across the plate and the Mets into the lead. It wasn’t a home run, but other ways to score are also nice.
Just as nice was Edwin Diaz’s zippy ninth inning: ten pitches, seven strikes, three outs to end Saturday’s early bird special, 6-5, at 4:23 PM. If you weren’t full from all the dingers, you could be off to a lovely dinner. Every Saturday should unfold in such a powerfully delightful manner.
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