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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 June 2018 12:13 pm The essential kindness of baseball is that even a 51-111 team — which Greg noted is what the Mets have been since their 11-1 head fake — will give you more than half a hundred days and nights that end with a fist pump, a satisfied nod or at least a sigh of relief. The Mets beat the Diamondbacks Saturday night in Phoenix and it wasn’t even all that close: Michael Conforto hit a line-drive homer into the stands for three runs, Steven Matz looked superb working into the seventh and disaster was averted when creaky Asdrubal Cabrera managed to force his battered parts into motion enough to collar a bases-loaded grounder and flip it to still young and spry Amed Rosario.
Oh, and Robert Gsellman even used the bullpen cart. The rest of the pitchers were amused — the way Noah Syndergaard reacted, you’d think Gsellman alighted from a carriage in Cinderella’s full regalia — but I imagined Tug McGraw out there somewhere, slapping a spectral glove against his thigh in approval.
If you’re in a good mood, stop there and skip down to the three stars for more nice things.
Still here, you masochist? All right then: I couldn’t help but notice, however, that the Mets’ victory hinged on contributions from three players whose development and basic care have been horrifically mismanaged by the club.
Conforto is the best position player the Mets have developed in years, but the Mets wasted his 2016 season by adhering to an idiotic Just So Story from Terry Collins that he couldn’t hit lefties because he was a young player and not a Proven Veteran™. They have forced him to play center field, where he’s adequate at best and has never looked comfortable. They’ve done that mostly to placate Yoenis Cespedes, but have continued doing it even with Cespedes on the DL, leading to outfield alignments in which all three Mets are at their second-best position. This year, we were cheered when Conforto returned early from his grotesque shoulder injury, but it seems somewhere between “highly possible” and [sad shake of the head] that he was rushed, and would have greatly benefited from more recovery time followed by a lengthy rehab to avoid bad habits.
Matz has pitched very well this year despite various aches and pains, a narrative that’s come to fit him like a tailored suit — he’s the Guy Who’s Great When He’s On the Field (Which He Usually Isn’t). But once again, look a little deeper and you’ll find the Mets treating an injury — and a young player’s development — with negligence bordering on cruel indifference. Matz has seemed much sounder physically since surgery to reposition his ulnar nerve, a procedure for which he was shut down last August. At the time, Collins claimed Matz wasn’t injured — but then it came out that Matz was getting through the season with a regimen of game-day injections in that elbow, which often swelled to the size of a grapefruit, and had been either skipping or scrapping his bullpen sessions because of pain. Yes, most pitchers lie about their health and stubbornly try to push through anything short of a torn ligament — I’ve always thought that was all Dan Warthen meant with his comment about John Maine being a habitual liar — but well-run teams know this kind of macho stupidity is the norm and perform their own investigations. You’d think a well-run team might notice an ineffective young lefty’s elbow wouldn’t look out of place with a Sunkist sticker on it and take action, but this is the Mets. They didn’t last year and still don’t this year, despite all the happy talk about new personnel and wiser regimens.
Which brings us to Cabrera. Like the Mets as a whole, he got off to a ferocious start and is now trying to drag himself through the season on his hands and knees. Cabrera can barely move out there or at the plate, and looks all but helpless. He should be on the 10-day disabled list, along with Jay Bruce, with the injury a chance to let Luis Guillorme develop. But because this is the Mets, Cabrera is being thrown to the wolves night after night, in hopes that some sort of medical miracle will ensue. If you watch the Mets, you know that Flushing isn’t exactly Baseball Lourdes — the lame and sick tend to acquire crutches and boils, rather than be relieved of them. But Cabrera remains out there doing whatever he’s capable of doing — and hey, rumor has it Bruce is starting this afternoon.
For one night in the desert it worked. You play 162 games, that will happen sometimes. But it doesn’t happen nearly as often as we’d like, or the players we watch deserve, and the blame lies with the people who own this ramshackle franchise and dictate the shambling, self-destructive way it’s been run and will continue to be run.
* * *
Last night’s Mets game came with an appetizer that nearly topped the meal: our first trip of the year to MCU Park to see the Brooklyn Cyclones. After watching the last bits of the Mermaid Parade, having our spines realigned on the Cyclone and taking a more leisurely spin around the Wonder Wheel, we plunked ourselves down in our seats and watched the Cyclones dismantle the Staten Island Yankees, 7-0. Briam Campusano pitched six no-hit innings for Brooklyn (a night after Staten Island’s Matt Sauer did the same to them), Fort Greene’s Manny Rodriguez made his home-borough debut for the good guys, Kendall Coleman crashed a grand slam through the teeth of Coney Island’s punishing on-shore breeze and Jose Brizuela had two triples, a double and three runs scored. (Unfortunately absent: Cyclones manager Edgardo Alfonzo, but we’ll give him a pass: he was in the Dominican Republic for his induction into the Latino Baseball Hall of Fame.)
Coleman, by the way, is the first player to have played for both Staten Island and Brooklyn — he came over in the apparent dog-and-cat minor-league deal that sent L.J. Mazzilli to the Yankees. After last night, I’m gonna put that trade in our column.
Oh, and a few seconds after I admitted I was cold, Emily caught a t-shirt and handed it over. If you had any doubt, I’m the ballast in our family enterprise.
After the game, the Cyclones blitzed us with a no-foreplay 10 minutes or so of pretty solid fireworks, ending with an orgy of rockets while the Parachute Jump was decked out like an American flag and the park’s light towers’ neon circles became red, white and blue pinwheels. It was ridiculously on the nose and it worked. This also reminded me of a Cyclones’ Fireworks Night where the game went into extra innings. So to not run afoul of a Coney Island curfew, the decision was made to simply combine the fireworks show with the remainder of the game. Yes, bombs were bursting in air right behind the batter’s eye. That was perhaps the ultimate proof of something we’ve said a lot over the years, and that’s become a Bull Durhamesque koan in our family: Anything can happen in the New York-Penn League.
Anyway, we’ve been having a blast going to see the Cyclones for 17 years now, somehow, and last night has to rank as one of the best outings. Whatever your record is and however many body parts you have ailing, happy summer!
by Greg Prince on 16 June 2018 12:23 pm “You don’t know how to ease my pain…”
The Mets lost 7-3 to the Diamondbacks on Friday night, one night after losing to the Diamondbacks, 6-3. Three runs scored on each of two consecutive nights might very well be taken as, per the least intuitive manager on earth, a sign that the Mets are “slowly coming out of” their seemingly permanent offensive coma, but the giving up of that many runs may also be telling us that the outstanding starting pitching that’s been oblivious to a lack of support is reverting to merely decent — with the bullpen providing no help whatsoever. On this ballclub, merely decent starting pitching will get your starting pitcher no more than a half-hearted pat on the ass.
“You don’t know how to play the game…”
Seth Lugo earned a pat on the ass that had some thrust to it even if he wasn’t as on point as he’d been in his previous rotation cameos. Only Jacob deGrom can stay on point forever without someone standing behind him to prop him up on an off night. Seth had an off night. He wobbled. Then the Mets fell down. The Mets were never much up to begin with. True, they had baserunners, which was a charming change of pace from most games, but the key word within the word “baserunners” is “run” and the Mets avoided posting many of those.
Against Zack Godley (not to be confused with Zack Greinke, but definitely conflated with Kevin Godley in my musically attuned mind), the Mets got Michael Conforto to third in the first, but didn’t score. In the second, Jose Bautista led off with a walk, “raced” to third on Dom Smith’s double and charged home on Amed Rosario’s fly ball to definitely not deep, really more like shallow center. Jarrod Dyson’s throw not only beat Bautista to the plate by ten feet, Bautista slid closer to Chase Field’s old-timey moundward dirt path than he did that white, pentagonal object that was presumably his goal. The third brought something resembling results: Lugo singled (because Met pitchers have to be doing it for themselves); Conforto switched bodies with Brandon Nimmo and absorbed a hit by pitch; and defensive specialist Todd Frazier doubled to bring Lugo in from second. Todd made with the salt-and-pepper grinder motion upon landing at second, as if that’s a totem still in its prime. He might as well have cued up the Mojo Risin’ refrain from “L.A. Woman”.
With runners on second and third, the Mets were set to make Godley cry. Yeah, right. Nimmo struck out, Cabrera struck out. Bautista struck out. Inning over. The part of the game that seemed remotely promising over. Paul Goldschmidt had already homered and his teammates began to follow his example. The Mets were down by two when Smith, turning 23 with a flair, homered to start the fourth. Kevin Plawecki, the nearly invisible catcher, walked. Then he walked too far from first and was picked off. In the best of times, Kevin Plawecki reminds me of Hawkeye Pierce’s description of a doctor back home he didn’t care for: “incredibly average Vernon Parsons”. These are not the best of times. With Devin Mesoraco’s status as savior not as sturdy as it once was, it’s becoming hard to not notice what a black hole catcher has again become. Perhaps Jose Lobaton and Tomás Nido weren’t such an aberration after all.
Here’s Sandy Alderson on the subject, or at least Sandy Alderson saying what I imagine he’d say, based on listening to him these past eight seasons:
“I wouldn’t say we’re ‘satisfied’ with our catching situation, but right now the industry is experiencing something of a developmental drought at the position, so when you view it through the most relevant prism, I wouldn’t characterize an upgrade as a priority for us.”
Thanks for weighing in, imaginary GM.
Where were we? Oh yeah, losing. Losing 3-2 after four, losing 5-2 after five (Daniel Descalso doing the longball honors), losing 6-2 after Jon Jay drove in pesky Dyson, who had walked, stolen second and stolen third off the inspiring duo of Plawecki and Chris Beck, the latest Mets pitcher you’d never heard of until basically just now. Jay also stole a base, except replay review was mercifully inconclusive when he was mysteriously called out at second. And don’t think Goldschmidt put his bat away. A seventh-inning single off legendary missing bullpen piece Anthony Swarzak plated Jay, who skipped the uncertainty of stealing and opted to triple.
That made it 7-2 going to the ninth. My man Jose Reyes led off, worked an eight-pitch at-bat and doubled. For an instant I was transported out of 2018 and into 2006, specifically that four-game series in June when the Mets extracted every last ounce of venom from the Diamondbacks’ bloodstream, outscoring them 11-0 in just the first innings of that series and 37-9 overall. Reyes scored five runs in those four games. Goldschmidt has almost all by himself outscored the Mets this June.
Do I have to come back to the present? Well, like the Mets, we’re almost done. With one out, incredibly average (if that) Plawecki reached on an error, allowing Jose to motor to third. With two out, the suddenly active and relatively spry Wilmer Flores doubled. That’s two doubles in one inning, adding up to…let me check…yes, we got an additional run. We also had seven hits, a total we hadn’t summed in literally nearly two weeks.
Then we lost. But you already knew that.
“You don’t even know how to say goodbye.”
Flores got to reacclimate to first base late and Smith roamed left field for a few innings. These Spring Training games are ideal for switching guys around. True, this wasn’t a Spring Training game, but who can say any longer that they count for anything, except for counting purposes? In the “Two Cathedrals” episode of The West Wing the ghostly presence of Mrs. Landingham demanded of President Bartlet, “Give me numbers.”
Here’s the set I find most telling: 17-37. That’s the Mets’ record over the past 54 games. That’s easy math in our Base 162 system of keeping track. You multiply your 54-game record by three and you’ve got a full season’s total. Multiply 17-37 by three and you have 51-111.
That’s the record posted by the 1963 Mets, who were an immense improvement over the 1962 Mets, who were the first Mets, so they, like their immediate successors, had an excuse. They also had a manager who made the torrent of defeats tolerable. We have Mickey Callaway, whose postgame analysis honest-to-god centered on how much more the Mets would have scored had they just hit a few more grounders to second when they had runners on third with less than two out.
I am reminded of one more exchange, this from Pee-wee’s Big Adventure, which I first saw right around the time Godley & Creme’s “Cry” was in heavy MTV rotation.
MOTHER SUPERIOR: Oh Rusty, you are an inspiration to us all!
PEE-WEE: I’ll say! I’m going to start a paper route right now!
Here is my pro bono communications consultant advice to Mickey: Next time you’re surrounded by reporters asking you about the loss you’ve just managed, dig into your pocket, fish out your phone, tell them you’ve really got to take this call and walk away.
And keep walking if you like.
by Jason Fry on 15 June 2018 10:43 am At least the Mets are shaking things up.
You no longer tune in guaranteed to see a valiant starting pitcher labor in futility with zero run support, waiting for the one slip-up that will prove fatal. Oh, that possibility’s still front and center, but the Mets have expanded their repertoire. You might also get an acceptable, albeit curtailed performance from a starter, one that blossoms into meaningless farce when the bullpen does something awful to once again bury the Mets.
That’s what happened to Zack Wheeler against the Braves; it’s what happened to Jason Vargas Thursday night against the Diamondbacks.
Vargas was … well, “serviceable” really is the word, a vague smear of similarly bland possibilities. The Mets hung in there until the late innings, only to have Jerry Blevins and Paul Sewald and Jacob Rhame conspire to shove victory out of their reach. The upside of this one, if you squint very hard, was young bats doing what one hopes young bats will do — hit baseballs a longish way. Brandon Nimmo homered, Michael Conforto connected for a majestic 450-footer, and Amed Rosario hooked a curveball into the seats. More of that would help.
Nothing else did, though. Jay Bruce is unavailable, because of back woes, but not on the disabled list, because of the Mets. (Seriously, MLB could come up with a 2-day DL and this cheap-ass bunch still wouldn’t use it.) The useless Joses, Reyes and Bautista, continue to decompose while encased in major-league uniforms they no longer have any business wearing. Before Tuesday Rhame hadn’t pitched for nearly two weeks, which perhaps accounts for his rust but raises the question of why he’s here in the first place. Hansel Robles hadn’t pitched for nearly two weeks, which would raise the same question except ideally Robles would have 52 weeks off a year. (I know he did fine Thursday night. Spectacular! Trade him immediately — his value will never be higher.) Tim Peterson was sent down to make room for White Sox castoff Chris Beck, after not pitching for nearly … well, you get it by now. Will we get a look at Beck as July dawns? The suspense is killing me.
And so is this ballclub. If you step back so you can truly appreciate the arc of the Mets’ shittiness, you’ll find something familiar: a team that’s not just reliably bad but also deeply boring. They don’t hit, can’t run, look half-asleep while not doing the things they can’t or don’t do, and the only difference between this lost season and other lost seasons of recent vintage is periodic bouts of wondering if Mickey Callaway knows what he’s doing. I’ll leave it to you whether that’s more or less fun than watching Terry Collins‘ face turn scarlet as the second postgame question shoved him to the edge of the abyss and his fight-or-fight instinct kicked in.
Myself, I’m gonna go with equally fun, which is to say not fun at all. The Mets are a garbage fire — actually, if garbage fires could compare notes on their inconvenience and intensity, they’d probably refer to a particularly noxious colleague as a 2018 Mets — but they’re also a chore, like a nightly trip to the DMV to take the same form to a different clerk. And it’s still only June.
by Greg Prince on 14 June 2018 2:46 pm Stop me if you’ve heard this one before. An ace walks onto a pitcher’s mound. Throws a great game for like seven innings. Gets almost everybody out, gives up maybe one run. Somehow, by the eighth, he’s on the losing end of a one-nothing score. His team isn’t doing anything for him and his manager takes him out even though he hasn’t thrown that many pitches. By the end of the game, despite performing as basically the best pitcher in baseball for the entire season, he loses, his team loses and everything is terrible.
Yeah, you probably have heard that one or something very much like it before, many, many times in 2018, for it’s how Jacob deGrom rolls…or how 2018 keeps rolling Jacob deGrom. Approximately every five days a sheath of “can you believe this spit?” statistics are widely disseminated contrasting deGrom’s relentless excellence with the paucity of positive results they produce when processed through the offensive and fundamental dysfunction of those who surround him. DeGrom was excellent again on Wednesday afternoon in Atlanta: seven innings, one run. The Mets were not: nine innings, no runs. Somewhere in there, M-M-M-Mike Soroka had the knack for getting Mets out, and the Braves’ young starter probably deserves a share of credit for the 2-0 decision that tilted in the Braves’ favor. But since something along the lines of the Mets scoring little to nothing and their starting pitchers having little to no margin for error happens repeatedly, we can reasonably conclude good teams don’t lose like this daily.
But ours does.
We have trained ourselves to look past deGrom’s won-lost record, which fell to 4-2 despite his having pitched well enough to be, if you’ll excuse the expression, 11-1. You can’t ignore, however, what the Mets are shall we say accomplishing while feasting on Column ‘L’ and ordering sparingly from Column ‘W’.
• 0-2 in the two-game set in Atlanta, which seems mostly incidental, save for the concept that the fourth-place Mets are nominally in pursuit of the first-place Braves (the pursuit may be losing steam; the Mets are 9½ out — and 8½ behind the Nationals for the closest available Wild Card).
• 1-10 dating back to the beginning of their most recent homestand, a homestand traditionally considered an excellent opportunity for the home team to enhance its fortunes at the expense of visitors.
• 3-15 since the last time I had the apparently rare pleasure of writing up a Mets win (the game of May 24, three freaking weeks ago), though given the prevailing proportions it’s not like I can accuse my blog partner of presciently hoarding a bounty of victories for himself when we divvy up these assignments in advance.
• 4-17 following the most recent Mets “winning streak,” whatever that is.
• 11-27 once April became May and continued into June, which also coincides with their record since the day I sat down with a well-meaning public radio reporter who was doing a story on Mets fans enjoying life in the wake of the club’s still semi-fresh spectacular start. We talked on a Monday. By Friday, when the report aired, the Mets had dropped three going on six in a row and the tenor of the piece had morphed into some familiar variation on those lovable losers and the people who are into them despite the possibility of better judgment.
• 16-34 after last being Ten Games Over .500, a breadcrumb along the trail I point out because, as noted recently, it was unusual to stumble into a Mets ballclub that had risen that high only to fall Three Games Under .500 later in the same season. Well, the Mets are now five games below Three Games Under (a.k.a. Eight Games Under), and should they pause at a net of -1 loss at any time from here to the end of the season, they will have made Metsian history. No edition of the Mets that had been Ten Games Over has ever plunged to as many as Nine Games Under within the confines of the same schedule. Ya think it’s coming? I wouldn’t rush to New Jersey and bet against it.
• 17-35 on the heels of 11-1. “11-1” threatens to gain iconic status in our numerical lexicon, positioned to assume a place of perverse pride alongside 40-120 and 7 Up With 17 To Play. So there’s that.
• 28-36 overall, which resides on the outskirts of near-respectability and perhaps indicates a team that — had it made itself a few more breaks, gotten itself a few more hits and prevented itself a few more injuries — coulda/woulda/shoulda been hanging in there at the break-even point, where everything would appear not so great, but also not nearly as bad.
We here at Faith and Fear in Flushing know from that, for we have chronicled a team that has performed at exactly such a level across more than thirteen seasons. Wednesday’s loss in Atlanta, you see, tipped the Mets’ record in the thus far 2,170-game FAFIF Era to 1,085-1,085. That’s 1,085 regular-season wins since April 4, 2005, and 1,085 regular-season losses since April 4, 2005.
To paraphrase the visionary baseball analyst Madonna from her landmark 1984 study on playing with one’s heart, borderline, feels we’re going to lose our mind.
Feels like we’re going to lose more than we win in light of how little we win and how much we lose lately, but as you can tell, that’s not necessarily the case into perpetuity. A long-term .500 record hasn’t been the case in an overarching FAFIF context since July 4, 2015, when eternal Mets fan darling Matt Harvey was bested by Zack Greinke and the Dodgers, 4-3, dropping that year’s team record to 41-41 and the franchise’s record since we came along with our blog to 851-851. From there, the Mets rose, at first fitfully, then resoundingly. By April 13, 2017, the night the Mets needed sixteen innings to reel in those pesky Marlins, the FAFIF Era record had ascended to 994-960, implying a certain immunity to gravity’s whims. I mean, c’mon, we’d won a pennant, we went to another postseason, we were lousy with momentum…
And then we were just lousy. Since April 14, 2017, the Mets have compiled a mark of 91-125, pulling us right back down to where mediocrity’s red glare dazzled us three Independence Days ago. In the last not quite three years, we are 234-234. Good ol’ .500 just keeps finding us.
We are accustomed to the ebbs and flows of the franchise we have chosen to track, which has certainly prepared us for this particular notch on the cumulative growth chart. The Mets lost their first five in our inaugural season of 2005, then won their next five and we were .500 for the first time, yet hardly the last. In the course of ’05, the Mets settled in at .500 on 27 separate occasions, eventually poking their heads securely above break-even at 83-79. The next three autumns yielded plenty of first-world problems, but finishing with a winning record was a given in every year that remained in Shea Stadium’s life. Extremely early in Citi Field’s tenure, things stayed resolutely above the borderline; by cresting at 28-21 on May 31, 2009, the FAFIF Mets record peaked at 385-312, or 73 games above .500.
Beginning June 1, 2009 and running through June 13, 2018, it’s been 700-773, or (as should be quickly discernible without a calculator) 73 games below .500, making the whole of our existence once again .500. It was actually distressingly below .500 in the midst of 2014. On July 5 of that year, we were 38-49 in-season and 769-776 overall, our low-water mark on a going basis. Then began the deliberate climb to not so terrible in real time (79-83 for 2014) and precisely middling for a decade’s worth of blogging (810-810 from the crèche of 2005 to the doorstep of 2015).
What goes up must come down, huh? And the opposite sometimes. Maybe. Eventually. Who knows? Score a few runs for Jake first and then we’ll talk.
by Jason Fry on 13 June 2018 11:14 am A day game right after a bad loss is often a good thing — right back at em, rinse that bad taste out of our mouths, and what-not. The Mets will put that baseball truism to the test in a couple of hours, and most likely give us a reason to doubt it the way this season’s made us doubt all sorts of conventional wisdom. (Turns out an 11-1 start, while recommended, is less help than you think.)
We’ll record the particulars out of historical duty and then decorously move on. Zack Wheeler looked pretty good but got undone by some soft contact and then got tired. Paul Sewald, once thought of as reliable in a reasonably good way, gave up a game-killing grand slam to Ozzie Albies and cemented his new reputation as being reliable in Roblesian fashion. Albies, we were told, was slumping and going through young-player doldrums, which now seems fixed. Jay Bruce had a good game in a way that no longer matters. Johan Camargo made a beauty of a double play. Dominic Smith is here and still thin. Mickey Callaway was ejected for the first time for arguing an overruled hit-by-pitch that Brandon Nimmo leaned into, a call the umps made correctly.
And I think that covers it.
The most interesting news came from Sandy Alderson, quizzed by the beat scribes about various and sundry. Noah Syndergaard and Yoenis Cespedes aren’t coming back as quickly as we’d like, which if translated to Latin would make an appropriate Mets motto. A.J. Ramos is dead, basically. Sandy is aware of Peter Alonso‘s minor-league heroics. The Reyes decision will be made on the merits, HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA! And, reading between the lines a bit, while the Mets aren’t considering a full teardown, they’re going to be evaluating where they are.
It was that last that made me sad. I don’t think the Mets should go full rebuild, actually — they still have the young, cost-controlled core a team tries to find as a foundation for more. But it is pretty clear that this year will be like last year, ending with veterans sent off for lottery tickets, potential prospects standing on the field looking wide-eyed, and injured guys returning to tepid acknowledgment. That’s not the end of the baseball world — it happens, even to teams that aren’t the Mets, and it’s not an illogical course of action. But it’s sad to have that scenario already creeping into view in mid-June, in a season that started with such promise.
* * *
If you want to feel better, watch this. It’s video of Terry Collins losing his mind after Syndergaard’s 2016 ejection for throwing behind Chase Utley, with umpire Tom Hallion trying to defuse the situation. I love it because everyone involved acts exactly the way I’d expect: Terry swears with impressive venom and is adorably old school and unhinged, Noah would rather just get back to hurling baseballs, and Neil Walker is weirdly polite. Baseball, man.
by Greg Prince on 12 June 2018 3:45 pm Fifteenth anniversaries don’t get much play in our milestone-mad media. Ones, Fives, Tens, Twenties and up the line, sure, they’re money. But with rare exception, nobody gets too worked up over the crystal anniversary, not named for Billy Crystal, though I can see where the potential association might be a turnoff. Yet I encountered a fifteenth anniversary the other day whose context demanded my attention once I realized I’d never heard such a thing mentioned before.
On Sunday, during the WOR pregame show, Wayne Randazzo mentioned that day’s date, June 10, marked the fifteenth anniversary of the major league debut of everybody’s favorite current Met, Jose Reyes (please, hold your applause). The longevity itself, fifteen years in the big leagues, is impressive no matter who we’re talking about, but the part that got me was Wayne was referring to someone who began his career as a Met fifteen years ago and was still playing. It wasn’t so much that Jose was marking fifteen years — I was conscious of the math in his case — it was that anybody who was a Met fifteen years ago would continue on in the majors.
The key in this equation is “a Met fifteen years ago”. Our organization occasionally helps itself to the services of players who were something else fifteen years ago, literally and skillfully. Some of them were on their way to the Hall of Fame when they dropped by. Spahn. Mays. Murray. Henderson. Others. Some of them were on their way out but came attached to one of those fliers that’s so appealing when rosters are being filled out. I’d refer to Adrian Gonzalez here, except Adrian Gonzalez, despite his reputation for being older than dirt, was actually less venerable than the good earth during his recently expired Met tenure. A-Gon wasn’t yet in the majors fifteen years ago. Nor was Jose Bautista, who may not be the only well-traveled type the 2018 Mets took a flier on but is the only 2018 Met who can claim to have been alive before the Philadelphia Phillies ever won a World Series (born the day of Game Five of the 1980 Fall Classic). Bobby Abreu — a major leaguer in 1996, a Met in 2014 — was a different, more experienced story. So, of course, was his 2014 Met teammate 1997 MLB debutante Bartolo Colon. Whether you tell it through numbers, letters or hieroglyphics, there is no story remotely like Bartolo Colon.
But those guys weren’t Mets early in their major league careers. Those are the guys I’m interested in. The guys who survived not just fifteen years of highest-level competition but did so after being born or at least nurtured under a Met sign. Putting aside whatever animus you might feel the need to express regarding the last favorite player I will ever have (all of which has been duly noted, thank you), it occurred to me that by enduring as long as he has, Reyes must have qualified for a select club.
He has. Very select. Only five players have found themselves Mets fifteen or more years after first having been Mets. Only two nailed their crystal anniversary by being Mets exactly fifteen years later. And only Jose Reyes played baseball for the Mets on the day he broke in — June 10, 2003 (2-for-4, two runs scored when the Mets lost by two to the Rangers in Arlington) — and fifteen years to the day he broke in — June 10, 2018 (1-for-2, a run scored when the Mets won by two over the Yankees in Flushing). The opposing shortstop when Jose introduced himself was Alex Rodriguez, ESPN’s analyst in the broadcast booth fifteen years later. The opposing second baseman was Michael Young. Judging by Jose’s play in the field Sunday, young is resolutely the opposite of Reyes these days.
You shouldn’t need a hint from anybody’s Perks Patrol to guess the lone other Met to celebrate what we shall call a Metropolitan Quinceañera. The only Met who started his baseball life as a Met, spent an entire Major League Baseball life of more than fifteen years as a Met and will never be anything but a Met is Ed Kranepool. Like Jose, Ed (feted by fans at a thoughtful fundraiser in Astoria on Sunday) was a teenage New York Met, all of seventeen years old when he made his debut at the Polo Grounds on September 22, 1962, replacing Gil Hodges at first base in the seventh inning versus the Cubs. The Mets were trailing, 8-1. Ed got one at-bat, grounding out against righthander Paul Toth. The Mets lost, 9-2.
But the Krane was airborne and would remain aloft fifteen years later. September 22, 1977, was an off day for the Mets (weren’t they all then?), but the next night Ed made it official, starting at first on September 23 — the fifteenth anniversary of his first big league hit — and singling off Bob Forsch as part of a three-run rally in the fifth inning at Shea that Friday evening. Alas, the crooked number only pulled the Mets to within 8-5 and they’d fall to the Cardinals, 10-6. No wonder they called him Steady Eddie. Mr. Kranepool’s path remained straight and narrow for another two seasons. He’s the only Met to have commemorated a seventeenth anniversary as a Met.
Not the only Met with a sixteenth anniversary, however. Three Mets who missed their quinceañeras as Mets did show up for their sweet sixteens. Unlike Kranepool, they had to step away from Flushing for a spell. Like Reyes, they eventually returned to the fold.
• Tom Seaver, whose Opening Day homecoming was instantly the stuff of legend, marked the sixteenth anniversary of his promising Met debut on April 13, 1983, presumably resting up from his start of April 12, when he gave George Bamberger seven solid innings (two runs, five hits) in what became a 4-3 extra-inning loss at the Vet. As occurred when Tom first showed his stuff on April 13, 1967, he received no decision, though on that auspicious occasion, the Mets were 3-2 winners versus Pittsburgh. Seaver’s first outing past his sweet sixteen came on April 20, 1983, and it couldn’t have been more Seaverian: a three-hit shutout of the Pirates at Shea, featuring nine strikeouts while Tom pitched and a triple while Tom hit. Even then the DH was a dopey idea.
• David Cone didn’t break in as a Met, but the former Royal (eleven relief appearances in 1986) certainly broke out in Queens. On April 11, 1987, Coney relieved the immortal Gene Walter in the seventh inning and threw three frames of one-run ball versus the Braves at Shea. Unfortunately, the one run was all Atlanta needed that Saturday, and David was saddled with the 4-3 defeat. It was his first loss as a Met and the Mets’ first loss as defending champions. Precisely sixteen years later — and one week after his triumphant return to the mound where he became a star — the 40-year-old version of Cone was the starter and loser in the Mets’ first-ever game in Puerto Rico, bowing to the same Expos he bested in Flushing, 10-0. Coney had been out of baseball during 2002 and would retire before 2003 was over.
• Jason Isringhausen was all the rage as part of the Generation K vanguard on July 17, 1995 (two runs in seven innings of an eventual 7-2 Mets win at Wrigley). He’d morph over the next sixteen years into a veteran reliever chasing 300 saves, leading Izzy the Recidivist Met to still be doing business with his right arm on July 17, 2011. As Terry Collins’s sixth pitcher on a Sunday afternoon at Citizens Bank Park, Jason produced a shutout ninth inning. The Mets, though, were already down four runs and they’d stay down four runs, losing, 8-4. Izzy would gain his 300th career save in August and, like Seaver, keep pitching after his second Met tenure ended, moving on to the Angels in 2012.
Those are your Mets who were Mets fifteen or more years after they were first Mets. Small gathering for a quinceañera, but there are a few others who at least rate an invitation to the cocktail hour.
• Mike Jorgensen came up to the Mets on September 22, 1968, pinch-hitting for Ron Taylor in an 8-1 loss to the Cubs in Chicago. Fifteen seasons later, he was on track for a crystal anniversary as a Met, but another defensively minded first baseman got in the way. Jorgy’s second go-round as a Met was interrupted on June 15, 1983, by the acquisition of that Keith Hernandez fellow. Much of Jorgensen’s portfolio by 1983 was coming in to field on behalf of Dave Kingman late in games. Once Hernandez came to the Mets, there was no need to start Kingman at first nor any need to replace Hernandez ever. The Mets sold Mike to Atlanta. He’d play through 1985.
• John Franco came really close to making Club Quinceañera, an especially remarkable feat in that he was already an established veteran closer when he first pitched for the Mets on April 11, 1990. Johnny from Bensonhurst debuted as a major leaguer in 1984, for goodness sake. That means he spent six seasons as a Red prior to the Mets swapping Randy Myers to Cincinnati to obtain his implicitly trusted left arm. They had to like what they received in his first Met appearance: an inning-and-a-third of solid relief to post a save behind fellow St. John’s alum Frank Viola. Franco would spend fifteen seasons with the Mets, with one of them lost to Tommy John surgery. Yet he spent his fifteenth anniversary in the uniform of the Houston Astros once the Mets decided they’d wrung all there was to wring from his surgically repaired elbow following the 2004 season. Appropriately, the 44-year-old southpaw found himself at Shea on April 11, 2005, as the ’Stros were playing the Mets. In a cognitively dissonant Met Home Opener during which he was associated with somebody other than the home team, Franco came on in the bottom of the eighth to face Cliff Floyd with runners on base. An RBI single ensued. The Mets won. John lasted with Houston until July. Today it’s like his time as anything but a Met never happened.
• Speaking of things that never happened, Jesse Orosco’s second term as a Met was pre-empted in Spring Training of 2000 before it could truly commence. Management went to the trouble of bringing back baseball’s premiere lefty specialist during the preceding offseason, meaning we were on our way to witnessing a Met career turn 21 years old right before our eyes. True, Jesse’d been wandering the highways and byways of baseball for more than a decade, but the important thing was that a pitcher who broke in as a Met on April 5, 1979, was in position to solider on as a Met on April 5, 2000. Think about it: a teammate of Ed Kranepool pitching for us in the new millennium! Except on March 18, the Mets concluded they needed a utility player more than they needed an extra portsider and they sent Orosco to St. Louis for Joe McEwing. Not a bad deal considering how far the Mets went before 2000 was over, but a bummer in terms of Jesse pitching for the Redbirds instead of the Metsies that April 5. He threw one-third of an inning in a Cardinal win over the Cubs at Busch Stadium while the Mets were blanked at home by San Diego. Karma probably insisted.
Orosco remained a major league pitcher until 2003. He earned the last of his 144 regular-season saves that May 9 in the same stadium where he secured the final out of the 1986 World Series. This time, in a more muted atmosphere, Jesse struck out Roberto Alomar of the Mets to end the game. A month and a day later, Alomar would be playing second base alongside a rookie shortstop just called up to the majors, a highly hyped prospect who was not quite twenty years old.
Fifteen years later…well, you know.
Your next Mets off night — Thursday, June 28 — should be spent with your fellow Mets fans at Two Boots Midtown East in Manhattan. Details here.
by Jason Fry on 11 June 2018 1:58 am Last month I quoted the old Earl Weaver maxim that momentum’s only as good as tomorrow’s starting pitcher, not knowing what a cruel joke that would turn out to be. The Mets managed the head-scratching accomplishment of losing eight in a row while getting brilliant starting pitching: in that stretch, no Mets starter allowed more than three runs, only to see their work undone by bad defense, lousy relief and an utter absence of hitting. Not once or twice — that happens — but every single time.
I mean, honestly. How is that even possible?
Enter Seth Lugo, called out of the bullpen for a spot start when Noah Syndergaard‘s finger proved uncooperative. Facing the horrors of the Yankee lineup, Lugo made us recall Dave Mlicki, who famously drew first blood way back when the Subway Series was a raucous novelty instead of something to be endured. Mlicki’s strikeout of the last batter (some guy named Jeter) completed a nine-hit shutout in a Yankee Stadium that had been abandoned by its usual infestation of pinstriped mooks to become a playground for jubilant Mets fans, and my oh my was that ever a glorious night. (Somehow it was 21 years ago. I’m as horrified as you are.)
Mlicki never managed to convert an impressive arsenal of pitches to lasting success, winding up with a decidedly journeyman career: a 66-80 record and an ERA close to 5. Lugo has arguably already done better than that, starting when he brought his knee-buckling curve to the 2016 Mets’ rescue — the team won his last seven starts. 2017, alas, was another story: Lugo came out of the World Baseball Classic (grrrr) with a partially torn UCL that shelved him until June, and lost further time in August. This year he wound up in the bullpen, where he’s simultaneously seemed miscast and been one of the few trustworthy Mets.
What to do with Lugo is an interesting question: during his career he’s been tattooed when facing batting orders a third time, and working out of the pen has added several miles an hour to his fastball. But it’s a question for another day: on Sunday night, all we wanted to know was if he could save us from further indignity, averting a sweep by the Yankees and an 0-9 homestead.
He could and did. He was phenomenal. So was the Yankees’ Luis Severino, with the difference a Severino slider that Todd Frazier served over the left-field fence. Phenomenal, but of course starting pitching hasn’t been the problem of late. There was no way Lugo could go the distance, and the mind quailed at what horrors might await once he departed.
Mickey Callaway squeezed six innings and 84 pitches out of Lugo, the last of them a fastball on the corner of the plate that left Giancarlo Stanton rolling his eyes in disgust. Robert Gsellman pitched a spotless seventh, which was good except for the fact that with Jeurys Familia injured and Lugo departed, Gsellman was the Met least unqualified to be pressed into service as a temporary closer.
With one out in the eighth, Gsellman surrendered a single to Miguel Andujar and faced pinch-hitter Aaron Judge, whose arrival at the plate sent the Yankee fans into a baying frenzy. Judge grounded to second, where Jose Reyes was filling in for Asdrubal Cabrera and his suddenly balky hamstring. (Yeah, I know.) It was a double play — until Reyes threw the ball midway between first and home. And until replay clearly showed that Reyes had neither foot touching second base.
Yeah, yeah, the neighborhood play. It would have been an out when Jose Reyes was any good. But that was a long time ago.
Anyway, Jose turned a double play into a double error, and here was the disaster we’d feared, delivered in a fashion that was even more cruel than we could have imagined. Except, somehow, the Mets slipped the noose. Gleyber Torres popped to Adrian Gonzalez in foul territory, and veteran Met-killer Brett Gardner hit a soft liner to Brandon Nimmo in left.
They’d slipped the noose, but it might be a temporary reprieve, because who was going to close? The answer was Anthony Swarzak, last seen giving up a titanic homer to Judge. Swarzak started the ninth by getting Stanton looking, an unexpected turn of events that seemed to startle him as much as it did the rest of us, for he promptly lost the ability to throw a strike. He walked Greg Bird, then missed low and away on the first two pitches to Gary Sanchez.
The third pitch was low and inside — and caught way too much plate. Sanchez smoked it, sending it screaming toward the left-field corner. Except first it met the glove of Frazier, standing squarely between Sanchez and disaster. Frazier threw over to Gonzalez to double off Bird and the ballgame was over, with Devin Mesoraco giving Swarzak a “holy shit” look at the mound and Swarzak giving him an “I know, right?” look in response. Which is pretty much the same exchange my kid and I had on our couch, and thousands of pairs of Met fans had at Citi Field and on couches of their own.
The Mets had escaped. Escaped, and apparently realized that what they’ve got now isn’t working. After the game, we learned that Gonzalez has been released, with Jose Lobaton ticketed for a DFA on Tuesday in Atlanta. (Why Tuesday? Unless Lobaton needs the frequent-flyer miles, this seems cruel.) Their replacements will be Dominic Smith and Ty Kelly.
Lobaton was a bad idea the first time around and a worse one the second, but Gonzalez was honestly better than I’d expected: he went about his business in a professional manner, made the most of his diminished skills, and never embarrassed himself. Still, Smith has reached the point where he needs to learn at the big-league level, and it’s pretty clear his growing pains won’t be the thing keeping the Mets from a title. So that’s progress … except for the fact that Reyes remains on the roster.
What was obvious Sunday afternoon has to be blindingly obvious after Sunday night. Reyes no longer has any demonstrable ability to hit, run, or field any infield position. And yet the Mets continue to tiptoe around even intimating that his skills might not be quite what they were during the Bush administration, negotiating the departure as if he’s Cal Ripken in the middle of The Streak instead of a .149 hitter, a wan shadow of the player we all once loved and all know is gone for good.
I guess he has one skill left: he’s certainly a survivor.
Anyway, good luck to the Mets as they continue to navigate these inexplicably delicate negotiations, and good luck to Dom Smith on the new job. Tuesday will be the first day of the rest of our lives and all that, so let’s go beat the Braves.
Still, I swear: if Reyes is playing first on Tuesday, I’m out.
by Jason Fry on 9 June 2018 11:25 pm The Mets lost. Again. As they have done throughout this stake-in-the-heart homestead. As they have done with numbing regularity since mid-April.
The details don’t particularly matter, so we’ll buzz through them quickly: they ambushed Yankees starter Domingo German for an unfathomable three runs in the first, on home runs by Todd Frazier and Asdrubal Cabrera.
If you tuned in late, sorry, that was the offense. The Mets were ahead, by the shocking score of 3-0, but you knew it wouldn’t last.
Lots of us have or have had that pal who’s a blast to hang out with until his fourth beer, at which point a trap door opens up beneath both of you and the next stop is hell and you wonder exactly how many times you’ll need to make this exact same mistake before you learn. That was the Mets with a 3-0 lead — feeling good about it was like looking over at your nitroglycerine-laced buddy and thinking, “Whew, he’s had one beer and hasn’t slugged anyone or propositioned the waitress!” Faint comfort three hours later, when you’re in the parking lot trying to play peacemaker amid flying epithets and wondering how you’re going to find a cabbie who’s too new to understand that your maniac friend won’t manage 10 minutes before deciding he needs to throw up, piss out the window or try both at once.
Anyway, Steven Matz gave up a solo shot to Gleyber Torres and a two-run homer to Miguel Andujar to surrender the lead, then departed. Yeah, 3-0 was a long time ago.
And then, at 3-3, we waited to see how they would lose.
The culprit was Anthony Swarzak, whose first pitch to Aaron Judge was a flat slider that Judge hit to the moon. But this is not to bury Swarzak; it was going to be some Met screwing up at some point, and on Saturday night it happened to be him. Tomorrow night it might be Swarzak again, or Jacob Rhame, or Seth Lugo. It’ll be someone.
This team’s in freefall, undone by injuries and poor play and roster spots given to zombie players. We’ll talk about that in the coming days and weeks and months. We’ll grouse and groan and occasionally have something to cheer about.
But it’ll be noise.
There’s only one story around the Mets, and it’s a depressingly old one: They’re owned by a family that cannot afford the payroll of a major-league franchise in Tampa Bay, let alone New York; is no longer expected by the city’s legions of beat reporters to be accountable for that; and is under no apparent pressure to sell the team it quite obviously can no longer afford.
The Mets actually have a decent collection of young talent — the kind of core teams try desperately to obtain as the foundation of a contender. But rather than surround that cheap young talent with high-priced stars and mid-priced complementary players, the Wilpons have supplemented it with zero-priced veterans on their last legs and occasional dips into the free-agent bargain bin when the market breaks their way. If you’ve been deemed expendable by the Atlanta Braves, welcome to Flushing. If you cost more than that, your agent best have the phone numbers of 29 other GMs.
And this is how it’s going to be for the foreseeable future, which you’d better get used to measuring in decades. Major League Baseball does not care that the Mets are once again baseball’s North Korea. You want to know when things will change? Don’t ask a baseball analyst, because he’ll just shrug and say it’s a shame. Get Jeff Wilpon’s health records and consult an actuary.
This doesn’t mean the Mets will never win. They’ll be in the occasional pennant race, particularly now that there are two wild-card slots. Once in a great while, as happened in 2015, they might even come close to winning — the postseason is an exercise in rolling dice. But most of the time they won’t do any of those things. They’ll be done in by injuries and lack of talent and poor decisions and ill luck and most of all by their threadbare ownership. Some years that fate will be apparent in March; other years it will be a September surprise. But it will be the outcome nearly every year, and the only one a sane fan will expect.
This is two-Wilpon monte, and it’s a sucker’s game. Grouse all you want about bad bullpens and injured outfielders and not-ready-yet rookies and over-the-hill infielders. It’s all true, but it’s also street patter and rearranged cards. The real con happened before you even stepped up to the table. Keep that firmly in mind, and maybe you won’t be habitually and cruelly disappointed.
(Tip of the cap to Dan Lewis, who focused my attention on the real problem and kept me from hurling my in-laws’ remote through a wall.)
by Greg Prince on 9 June 2018 3:37 am When the Mets are mired deep in one of their patented extended funks, I tend to be asked — given that I’ve been around and remember things — some variation on the question, “Has it ever been this bad before?” The fact that the Mets have patented extended funks pretty much provides the answer. Yes, it’s been this bad before.
Most of the Sixties; the final segment of the Seventies; the dawn of the Eighties; the balance of the Nineties; chunks of the Ohs (I never cottoned to “Aughts”); and, in case you are afflicted with an incredibly short memory, all but a cherished fistful of months of the Tens or Teens or whatever historians will call the current decade. Within the lifespan of this blog, every single season from 2005 forward, with the possible exception of 2006, has encompassed an extended funk during which somebody was certain it couldn’t have been this bad before.
But it has been, often. It’s not always fatal to the season in which everything seems suddenly all funked up, but we do have a nearly perennial knack for being shoved by our beloved team into pits of despair, which I guess speaks both to our contemporary misery seeming surprisingly unremarkable to me and the rate of our recurring misery being more alarming than we might realize. But we’re Mets fans anyway. It’s not like we were blinded by the glare of countless championship baubles when we signed up for this.
Now don’t get me wrong. This portion of 2018 shouldn’t get a pass just because we’ve been some version of here before. Just as every pennant race brings its own unique joys, every season racing in the opposite direction deserves to be felt for all it’s worth. And this one may be singularly awful for just how ordinary it’s begun to feel.
On Friday night, the Mets lost their seventh game in a row, their fourteenth out of seventeen and their thirty-second out of forty-eight. Don’t gloss over that last set of numbers: the Mets are 16-32 since starting the season far better than that. I won’t even print what their record was after twelve games because it offers a patina of competence to their overall 2018 effort. That initial dynamic dozen, while certified as official and etched into the record books as legitimate and permanent, is no longer relevant to the campaign in progress. The team that lost only once in twelve initial outings is not the 2018 Mets anymore. The 2018 Mets are the team that has lost two of every three games for nearly a third of the season and hasn’t won consecutive games in nearly three weeks.
The seven losses in a row, on the other hand, don’t seem like they constitute a significant losing streak. They do, numerically, but experientially, it has come off, to my view at least, has just what the Mets do. The Mets play, the Mets score next to nothing or perhaps nothing and the Mets lose. How many is it now? Are we still counting?
Seriously. I’ve lived through scorching seven-game losing streaks that have scarred my soul from top to bottom. I have lay awake nights tortured by seven-game losing streaks. Usually the Z’s take a powder when the L’s reach three. Here, this homestand, in which the Mets dropped all four to the Cubs, both of two to the Orioles and now their first to the crosstown rivals, I had to stop and add it up when it got to seven.
My god, we’ve lost seven in a row. This should feel more urgent than it does. It just feels like another night without a win.
That the seventh consecutive defeat came at the hands of the team we are conditioned to despise and resent more than any on the planet (spare me your haughty “I don’t hate the Yankees” folderol if you’re one of those people) seems incidental. Had I been at Citi Field, it probably wouldn’t. But I watched on TV, with a migraine. I guess that’s sort of like being surrounded by Yankees fans.
Jacob deGrom was great for eight innings except for one pitch. Joke’s on Jake — you can’t throw one bad pitch in eight innings and expect everything to be simply, well, jake. Brett Gardner got hold of that one pitch and stroked it over the right field fence. A runner was on base. Silly deGrom, mistakes are for Yanks. Or Nats. Or whoever will be in the postseason this fall. Jake will have to make do with consolation Cy Young runner-up votes (unless somebody makes the Mets an offer they can’t refuse, and we’re getting to the point where phone lines are open).
It had been 1-1 when Gardner — who I think came up from the minors under Ralph Houk — homered. The Yankees had scored an unearned run a couple of innings earlier. Again, deGrom’s fault for not striking out every batter he faced. At the risk of being unsporting, that run wasn’t so bad because the Yankee who scored it, Masahiro Tanaka, had to leave the game as a result of having to use his legs to transport himself from one base to another until he came home on Jay Bruce’s throw to nowhere in particular. Tanaka had been stymieing the Mets’ offense since the first inning. He’d given up a leadoff home run to Brandon Nimmo — who is now tied with Jason Bay for eighteenth on the all-time Citi Field Met home run list with ten — but then literally nothing at all through five.
Learn to play baseball, American League pitchers. Then I’ll be sporting about your mishaps.
Tanaka left, Jonathan Holder entered. “Take your time warming up,” he was told, as all relievers are when injuries arise. The Mets took advantage of Holder’s unpreparedness and heightened case of nerves to go down in order in the sixth. Same as it ever was. The seventh, eighth and ninth were given over to Yankee relievers I’d heard of. The Mets gathered three hits in those three innings off those three pitchers, none for extra bases, none in particularly useful proximity to one another, certainly none that caused a run to register. Not that it was needed by the nominal visitors, but Giancarlo Stanton added one for his side by belting a barely fair, barely gone solo homer off Paul Sewald. The Marlins are having a throwback weekend in Miami. Stanton honored his old franchise by slugging at Citi like he always has. The erstwhile Floridian has more homers in the Mets’ park (22) than Bay and Nimmo combined (20).
The 4-1 loss that perfectly complemented my headache was preceded by news that Noah Syndergaard won’t start Sunday as planned (his finger’s swollen) and Jeurys Familia won’t relieve for at least ten days (his shoulder’s sore). After the routine wounds of defeat were listlessly licked, word came that Yoenis Cespedes rehabbed with Binghamton and talked to reporters. He’s looking forward to returning to the Mets in Atlanta on Tuesday. Actually, “looking forward” may be an exaggeration. He said, “If the team remains playing this way, I don’t think it’s going to help, but I’m eager to get back.”
Yo may not make it as a motivational speaker, but he’s got a helluva future as a scout if he wants it.
by Greg Prince on 8 June 2018 3:56 pm It was a rally or as close to a rally as the 2018 Mets could have conjured in the first week of June 2018. Wednesday afternoon against the Orioles, Todd Frazier singled to lead off the bottom of the ninth. Recently returned from a hamstring injury and representing the tying run, a pinch-runner was in order. One sprinted from the home dugout. Todd, with his back to his manager’s machinations, didn’t realize he as being replaced until his substitute put both of his hands on Frazier’s helmet. It was more direct than a tap on the shoulder. I’ve seen baserunners look disturbed to be informed they’re leaving the game. Not Todd. The man who brought salt and pepper to Queens got the flavor of the moment immediately. He and his successor high-fived and switched places. Frazier headed for the dugout. Jose Reyes took over at first base.
Jose Reyes, my favorite player. I was thrilled to see him in action and, from where I sat in right, applauded vigorously.
Jose Reyes, my favorite player. I was horrified that he’d get picked off and, in a voice not loud enough for him to hear, told him not to.
Brad Brach, the Orioles’ closer, threw to first immediately. Jose was safe. After a ball to Jay Bruce and then a foul, Brach threw again to Chris Davis, who did not tag out Reyes. Jose tried another lead, Brach tried another pickoff to no avail. Refocusing his concentration on Bruce, Brach threw two more pitches out of the strike zone. At three-and-one, Jay connected for a long fly to deep left field. If it traveled as far as it looked like it could, I’d have the best of all worlds: a Mets walkoff win with my favorite player not only scoring the tying run but not doing anything to keep the Mets from winning.
As Roger Angell wrote, he “has so far resisted the clear evidence that he should retire. He plays sporadically, whenever he is well and rested, and gives his best, but his batting reflexes are gone, and so is his arm.” Except Angell wasn’t writing about Jose Reyes in June of 2018. He was writing about Willie Mays in June of 1973, specifically a night when Mays chased down a double and, realizing he wasn’t up to making a sufficiently strong throw to the infield, flipped the ball to left fielder George Theodore, who was not expecting to be called upon in that situation. Who would? Who would think Willie Mays would need a cutoff man to hit the cutoff man? “The horrible truth of the matter,” Angell continued, “was that Mays was simply incapable of making the play.”
That was in the top of the fourth at Shea, against Willie’s old team, the Giants. In the bottom of the fourth, he grounded out to short, pulling his average below .100 for the year. “He has subsequently done a little better,” Angell reflected weeks later, “but his failings are now so cruel to watch that I am relieved when he is not in the lineup.”
This is what a Jose Reyes sighting is like for me these days.
The player whose promotion so delighted me this week fifteen years ago; whose reign as the Mets’ best-ever all-around shortstop elevated my spirits for nine seasons; whose absence from the Mets gnawed at me for the four seasons after that; and whose reacquisition in 2016 I embraced reluctantly but eventually…I’m thrilled to see him in action…and I’m horrified that he’ll get picked off. Or strike out. Or pop up. Or ground into a DP. Or be thrown out stealing. Or otherwise run us out of an inning. Or let a ball skitter under his glove. Or bobble a ball. Or drop one as it descends from the sky.
Yet I am instinctively thrilled to see him. When I saw him emerge from the dugout to run for Frazier, I definitely put my hands together, a little out of amazement that Mickey Callaway knew enough to take out a guy who’s not a burner even on sturdy hamstrings, mostly because the guy he put in is my favorite player. He was my favorite player almost immediately in 2003 and stayed my favorite player through 2011 and served as my favorite player in absentia until 2016. I never fully restored him to his most exalted place of pre-eminence after the circumstance that deposited him on our doorstep a second time, but I also never found another Met to fully supplant him. Nobody’s ever pinch-run for Reyes in my heart. He’s still my favorite player in the active sense, for as long as he remains active.
Which is no longer an open-ended proposition. I caught a flurry of tweets en route to the game Wednesday that reported an exit strategy was being concocted. “Mets officials,” according to the Post’s Mike Puma, had “discussed releasing Jose Reyes, but are conflicted given Reyes’ roots in the organization. Mets want Reyes receiving a proper sendoff.”
In the realm of Twitter, a medium into which patience was never programmed, the news was greeted by fast-fingered Mets fans with disbelief. Not disbelief that the Mets would be offing Reyes — Jose was routinely being typed out onto 126th Street when the club was 11-1 — but incredulity that the Mets were, for once, concerning themselves with making a player’s swan song as graceful as possible. This player’s swan song. This player who has been overmatched at bat, underskilled in the field and not much of an asset on the basepaths. Faster than Todd Frazier is basically the portfolio Jose brings to the table in June of 2018.
Had Bruce’s ball kept carrying, it would all be moot. Reyes would be running and, unless he allowed Jay to pass him, he’d be scoring. The Mets would be winning for a change. Nobody would have anything to complain about with Jose for a change. People have every right to complain, but encountering their complaints has bothered me all season. I’m not saying the complaints — that he shouldn’t still have a spot on the roster; that he shouldn’t have had a spot on the roster to begin with in ’18; that he shouldn’t have been invited back in ’16 considering the event that made him available — are without validity. I’m just saying they bothered me. Jose Reyes has been my favorite player for fifteen years. Once he’s done, I realized recently, that’ll be it. I will never again have a favorite player in the active sense.
I’ll like players. I like lots of them now. I like most everybody on the Mets. Several of them I wear t-shirts for. But none of the other current Mets has ever generated the kind of personal passion required for me to call him my favorite. Few Mets ever have. Tom Seaver did. Doc Gooden did. Rico Brogna and Edgardo Alfonzo did. Then Jose Reyes. Five players spanning fifty seasons, the first starting when I was six, the last lasting until I’m fifty-five. At forty, which is what I was when Jose was nineteen about to turn twenty, it was probably a stretch to select a favorite player. But the chemistry was just right and I went with it. I don’t see myself getting revved up for another in the latter half of my fifties or beyond.
Having a favorite player doesn’t mean blanket dispensation for what I might not like at a given interval. No. 41 will always be my No. 1 to me, but I cringe every time somebody tells me of a chance meeting in which the Franchise bristled at them. Doc is a case study in not putting too much faith in an idol. Brogna never did anything wrong other than wear the uniforms of teams I didn’t like, but the bad back that ostensibly motivated the Mets to trade him did indeed end his career prematurely and I acknowledge that (though swapping him for Ricardo Jordan and Toby Borland was hardly a solution). I’ve never forgiven the Mets for letting Fonzie walk as a free agent in December 2002, but I’ll grudgingly admit he was probably done being a superstar at that point.
I’ve had my issues with my last favorite player. Two months after I tingled that Jose of all All-Stars was the All-Star chosen to catch a ceremonial first pitch from Willie Mays in San Francisco, I thought he ran recklessly and stupidly in September 2007 and accelerated the worst collapse ever. I thought a couple of times at his peak that his maturity was maddeningly slow to develop. I didn’t mind him ferrying his batting crown to the bench ASAP on the last day of 2011, but I thought he didn’t have to take the right turn to the dugout so suddenly. What happened after that day — signing with an unpleasant division rival — I considered business. I’d have preferred the Mets had made him an offer. Maybe they weren’t crazy not to, seeing as how the Jose of Miami and Toronto was never quite the Jose of Flushing.
There was nothing to defend or rationalize when it was reported Jose threw his wife into a glass door in Hawaii, which led to his suspension from the Rockies and his reunion with the Mets. Talk about damaged goods. In retrospect, as long as his name keeps filtering through my consciousness, it reminds me of my first year collecting baseball cards, 1970. I really wanted to open a pack and find a Willie Mays. I never did. Five or six years later at a card show, I came across a 1970 Mays. Except it was a cut card. The top was lopped off and the bottom was the top of some mere mortal’s portrait. It wasn’t the Willie Mays I’d wanted when I was younger.
But it was there, it was affordable and I grabbed it. It was still Willie Mays.
And the free agent the Mets signed for the major league minimum in the middle of 2016 was still Jose Reyes. Jose Reyes with a domestic violence rap soldered to his reputation, but Jose Reyes. I still had him listed as my favorite player, same as I had Gooden when he tested positive for cocaine. Second chances. Compartmentalization. Deeply embedded sports fan loyalty. Wright was out for the year. We needed a third baseman. I had deleted some but not all of my REYES 7 shirts from rotation. And, business being business notwithstanding, he looked so happy to be home.
I got a kick out of Syndergaard. I grew fond of Cabrera. I admired deGrom. I loved that Cespedes decided to stay. But none of them was really my favorite Met by the summer of 2016. Reyes filled the role. Maybe not as he had from 2003 to 2011, but close enough. Though he wasn’t really a third baseman, he played the position as asked. He wasn’t the speedster he once was, but he ran as needed. The 2016 Mets sputtered and frustrated but, with REYES 7 again atop their batting order, they took off in late August, roared through September and, as they did with Willie Mays on their team in 1973, made the playoffs.
It’s not generally mentioned when people glibly refer to Willie Mays falling down in center field during the 1973 World Series and reflexively use him as their example of a player who resisted retirement to his own detriment that Willie was as good a player as the 1972 Mets had after he came home to New York in May. The team was riddled with injuries and falling apart, but Mays was rejuvenated. Nobody got on base more than Willie. Had he gone out as a 1972 Met, the New York coda to his career would have been sweet, hold the bitter.
But then we wouldn’t have had the night Willie said goodbye to America, despite hitting .211, despite Angell wishing he wasn’t still pushing himself onto the field a shadow of his formerly brilliant self. I was ten years old in 1973. I could decipher batting averages. But it never occurred to me to not want to see Willie Mays.
Jose Reyes, once the dust settled, helped the Mets win something in 2016. He batted more than any Met did in 2017. The results weren’t spectacular, but they steadily improved as the year went on. There were some stray good Jose moments in an otherwise dismal Met year. On the night of their final home game, some of us chanted the Jose chant as if a decade hadn’t passed. Had he gone out as a 2017 Met, the New York coda to his career would have been completed quietly and with minimal hard feelings. Those who didn’t want him back wouldn’t have been happy that he’d been here again at all, but those who were happy that he’d been here again could have finished their active relationship with him on a modestly upbeat note.
Instead, the Mets asked him back again, Jose said sure, and I’m channeling Roger Angell in that I’m relieved when my favorite player isn’t in the lineup. Never mind what impact he has on a given game. I just don’t want to see him fail and feed more fodder to those who never cease pointing out his myriad shortcomings. I love my Jose Reyes from when he was nineteen about to turn twenty. I love my Jose Reyes who set every speed-based record in Mets history. I love my Jose Reyes from when he caught a first pitch from Willie Mays. I love my Jose Reyes who batted .337. I love my Jose Reyes who homered to tie the Phillies late in an epic contest in 2006 and did the same in 2016. The Jose Reyes of today, the one whose age is about to be five times his uniform number, the one whose OPS is basically what you get for attaching your signature to the SAT, doesn’t perform remotely like that. But I saw how he greeted Frazier when he replaced him on Wednesday. I’ve seen how he high-fives teammates after they score when he’s in the on-deck circle. I’ve seen how once in a great while, when he has reason to smile on a baseball field, he brings it like few others have.
He doesn’t bring it much with his bat or arm or legs anymore. I held out hope in April, but in April he had only five hits. I looked for signs in May, but in May he had only five hits. He’s had none in June. Few at-bats, either, and little reason to be given them. Jose Reyes is more done than I’ve cared to admit. I will admit that he’s done, no matter that I haven’t cared to admit it whatsoever.
The last favorite player I’ll ever have didn’t get to cross the plate on Jay Bruce’s home run off Brad Brach, because Jay Bruce’s fly ball didn’t land over the fence. It was caught in left field for the first out of the ninth. Jose was back to being a baserunner at first, trying not to get picked off. For his sake. For the Mets’ sake. Though he’s never met me, for my sake.
Don’t get picked off, Jose.
He didn’t. He drew two more throws — once while Kevin Plawecki batted, once while Adrian Gonzalez was up. They made the second and third outs, not Jose. The Mets lost, 1-0. While pinch-running for his baseball life on June 6, 2018, Reyes didn’t further facilitate his own demise.
It’s coming. It’s racing around third like Jose used to. I know that. Maybe it doesn’t matter how it’s arranged. Maybe the concept of a “proper sendoff” is tonally out of sync with these harsh what has he done for us lately? 27-32 times. If I had my way, the player with the second-most hits any Met has ever recorded, Reyes, would leave the field one final time alongside the player with the most hits any Met has ever recorded, Wright. They played next to each other for a lot of years, you might recall. I do.
It was a while ago.
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