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ABOUT US
Faith and Fear in Flushing made its debut on Feb. 16, 2005, the brainchild of two longtime friends and lifelong Met fans.
Greg Prince discovered the Mets when he was 6, during the magical summer of 1969. He is a Long Island-based writer, editor and communications consultant. Contact him here.
Jason Fry is a Brooklyn writer whose first memories include his mom leaping up and down cheering for Rusty Staub. Check out his other writing here.
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by Greg Prince on 22 April 2025 1:53 pm Monday was Jesse Orosco’s birthday, so for a moment I thought the Mets were honoring him by nearly but not quite blowing a formidable ninth-inning lead. In the mind’s eye, Jesse flirted with disaster a lot in his not quite best years. In his best years, he was infallible in the mind’s eye. The mind’s eye doesn’t look things up to confirm hunches.
The rest of me does, however, so no, Jesse Orosco never had a game almost exactly like the one that one of his most celebrated successors as Mets closer did Monday. Nor did any of the famously nerve-wracking closers who have injected the ninth innings with agita and antacids in the years between Jesse’s glove and Timmy’s trumpet filling the Flushing air in their own manner.
 How we should celebrate every save. Let’s be clear on our terms. What happened in the ninth Monday night at Citi Field, after the Mets had built a luxurious lead of 5-0 versus Aaron Nola & Co. on…
• two Francisco Lindor home runs (including another leadoff keynote in the first and a later three-run bomb that happily evoked last October’s happiest madness);
• a Jesse Winker dinger;
• Tylor Megill’s further ascent toward rotation eminence via five-and-a-third frames worth of zeroes;
• and more sterling Yeomen of the Bullpen work when Carlos Mendoza judged Megill done after 92 pitches
…was the second of the evening’s Yeomen, Max Kranick, ran out of whatever fueled his scoreless seventh and eighth. Maybe Max wasn’t prepared to go from munching middle innings in relative anonymity to capturing his first major league save. He gave up three hits and a run without retiring a Phillie in the top of the ninth. Too bad Kranick couldn’t put the thing in the books and notch something sexier than a hold in the process, but that’s why we had a sizable edge and that’s why we have a closer.
Enter “Narco” man. Enter Edwin Diaz. Edwin Diaz locks games down, no muss, no fuss, right? Oh, wait, I’m working from an older script. There’s some muss. There’s some fuss. There are some Tums if you got ’em. But mostly you can count on Sugar to make the ninth-inning medicine go down. And, sure enough, Edwin secures the first much-needed out by flying Cal Stevenson to left. We could all breathe easy now.
Until the next batter, Bryson Stott, shot a three-run homer way the hell out of the park to make the game Mets 5 Phillies 4. Oh, those inherited runners. The Phillies were dead and buried for eight innings, and now they were alive and annoying, riding a real chance to upend not just this game but maybe the momentum of the divisional race. Yeah, it’s only April, But it was April in 1986 when we upended the Cardinals for the duration of that year. It was also April in 2018 when that humongous and admittedly inexplicable start we got off to (12-2) came crashing down in one inglorious eighth inning. Jacob deGrom handed his 6-1 lead versus the defending division champion Nationals with one out over to Jerry Blevins, who handed a three-run lead to AJ Ramos, who handed a two-run lead to Jeurys Familia, who completed the score’s conversion to a one-run Mets deficit. That was all in the same eighth inning. Hansel Robles came on in the ninth to make it worse. Final: Nationals 8 Mets 6. The 2018 Mets’ implosion was officially in progress.
A ninth inning that’s getting away gives the mind’s eye a lot of leeway to wander. It wandered from Diaz to thinking of that particular game from seven years ago to wondering if maybe Orosco’s glove was coming down on Edwin’s head at a most inopportune interval. This was too great a game amid too great a start to totally get away, but the scoreboard wasn’t lying that it was now a one-run affair, with that bleeping Phillie heart of the order coming up.
Then, a funny thing happened on the way to forlornness. Edwin Diaz turned back into Edwin Diaz. The good Edwin Diaz, I mean. Trea Turner goes down swinging. Bryce Harper goes down swinging. That’s all the swinging the Phillies get to do. The Mets hang on, 5-4. Megill gets his third win. Reed Garrett is credited with his seventh hold. Max Kranick gets one of those obscurities, too. And, from the annals of statistics that say what statistics say, Edwin Diaz nailed down his sixth save. The parameters were there. He came in with the tying run on deck and the other team never tied him. Way to technically go, Diaz!
No, of course it wasn’t the ideal way to go, but when somebody picks you up when they say they’ll pick you up, are you choosy about how they got there? Still, I thought, what an arduous method to earn a save. Orosco in his Messy Jesse moments must have had one of those. Or the Hall of Famer Billy Wagner. Surely Franco or Benitez, 1A and 1B in those nightmares we still have in which somebody is insisting to us, “Think of all the saves they don’t blow.” I’m often one of those doing the insisting, because high-profile Mets closers through the ages haven’t blown most of their save opportunities; it only feels like they do. And Diaz didn’t blow this one. If you tuned in an instant after Stott and just ahead of Turner, you saw only the toast of Timmy Trumpet’s tooting.
I had to confirm that something very much like this had happened at least once before to a Met in eerily similar circumstances. And it had. Once.
 Thanks to the marvel Baseball-Reference calls its Stathead tool, I was able to enter the relevant criteria:
Inherited runners: 2 or more
Inherited runners scored: 2 or more
Home runs allowed: 1 or more
Batters faced: 4 or more
Strikeouts: 2 or more
Innings pitched: 1 or more
Decision: save
As of Monday night, Stathead listed one Met pitcher as having previously filed such a performance. It wasn’t any Met closer you’d instinctively think of because the pitcher never held the title of Met closer. But on September 22, 2012, Jon Rauch, usually a setup guy (and a generally reliable one), was entrusted to finish what had been an R.A. Dickey masterpiece. By the latter half of September 2012, R.A. Dickey masterpieces were essentially all we had to root for. R.A. delivered that Saturday as he delivered virtually every day he wrapped his knuckles around the ol’ Rawlings. For eight innings, he had the Marlins shut out, cruising home with a 4-0 lead, his nineteenth win of the season clearly in sight. As the man for whom pitch counts were of little concern, Dickey was permitted by Terry Collins to continue his mastery of Miami into the ninth. The Citi Field crowd loved it. I can attest to that, as I was part of that crowd.
Ah, but the ninth this day wasn’t R.A.’s terrain. He walked Greg Dobbs on four pitches to start the inning. Donovan Solano followed by doubling. With dang Fish occupying second and third, Terry removed our simultaneously soft-spoken and loquacious ace and replaced him with the towering Rauch. All I really remember about Rauch was his height (six-eleven) and a story that came out the next year that he attempted to haze then-rookie Matt Harvey, tossing water on the new star while he dozed on a trainer’s table and destroying the kid’s phone in the process. Harvey reportedly won instant clubhouse cred by standing up to the veteran and telling the taller man to knock it the bleep off, or words to that effect. Rauch’s pitching I don’t remember that much, except that he nearly blew Dickey’s twentieth win. But that was five days later. The nineteenth win for our folk hero was still unnailed.
Second and third, and Rauch makes it not easy. The first batter he faces is Miami catcher John Buck. Buck will become part of Harvey’s dizzying story in 2013 after a) he’s traded to the Blue Jays and b) traded by the Blue Jays to the Mets for, among others, R.A. Dickey. Buck will later be remembered mainly for nurturing Harvey Day Hysteria to its apogee; driving in runs like a madman in April but only April; and slamming a celebratory pie into Jordany Valdespin’s face in one of those episodes when postgame questions didn’t include any variation of this year’s nightly query of “how great is this right now?” The 2025 Mets get asked that continually and respond that it’s very great. The 2013 Mets were just trying to protect their faces and new phones.
But that was 2013. This was 2012. Buck was still a Marlin and, against Rauch, he was a September slugger. Despite my Saturday companion Joe calling out toward the mound, “YOU BETTER NOT GIVE UP A HOMER HERE RAUCH!” Rauch gave up a homer there. Two inherited runners scored, as did the batter. The four-run lead that Rauch came in to safeguard was now one, and the batter on deck who had qualified it as a save situation was up. That was Gil Velazquez. He struck out.
All right, slate clean, maybe we get through this with minimal angst from here. (Which is what I told myself after Stott took Diaz deep.) But, no, not really. There’s a pinch-hit single before a fielder’s choice groundout. Then there’s a stolen base. At last, there’s a strikeout, Rauch’s second. In all, he faced five Marlins before making sure the Mets would win, 4-3, and Dickey would move to 19-6.
Inherited runners: 2 or more
Inherited runners scored: 2 or more
Home runs allowed: 1 or more
Batters faced: 4 or more
Strikeouts: 2 or more
Innings pitched: 1 or more
Decision: save
 It was an ugly save, just as that scene with Harvey getting drenched must have been, but it was a save nonetheless, the final of four Rauch recorded as a Met. Thus ends the Jon Rauch-Edwin Diaz comparison. Diaz, we’re pretty certain, would never haze a rookie, phenom or otherwise. The Met vibe is beautiful these days. And a fifth consecutive win remains a win despite one pitcher reducing a ninth-inning four-run lead to one, just as a save remains a save, no matter how not beautiful it felt to endure until that definitive second K slammed the game shut. The 16-7 first-place Mets came out ahead by one — which is the minimum run differential required for a team to win — and Diaz indeed has an “S” affixed to his name in the box score. Also, as of this morning, he has joined Rauch in the results portion of my highly specific Stathead search.
In the mind’s eye, all saves oughta be worthy of Orosco-style Series-clinching exultation, no matter how much Pepcid we keep handy.
by Greg Prince on 21 April 2025 1:25 am The Mets haven’t explicitly promised to catch me if I fall backwards in their general direction, but I trust them to, figuratively speaking. In this young season that has shown signs of early maturation and sustained blooming, I keep coming back to a single five-letter word.
Trust. I trust these Mets to win ballgames. I trust these Mets to not lose ballgames they’re winning. I trust that if they do lose a ballgame, they will position themselves to win anew when they take the field again.
It’s a good feeling, this trust in the Mets. It’s not a perennial. Some years it doesn’t come around at all. Some years, like last year, it takes a long time to blossom. This year it’s been here since Day One. We’re not exactly unstoppable, but we are shaping up as hard to hinder.
On Sunday, I trusted that the Mets would hold off the Cardinals once they had a lead. I trusted the Mets to take back a lead that briefly slipped into a tie. I trusted the Mets to build on their reclaimed lead and fully secure it. The Mets are practically a security blanket in that regard of late.
 Happiness is a hot start. Meet the new emotion, different from so many of the old emotions we associate with Mets baseball. I still get nervous, but I don’t get hopeless. I still pace the living room, but anxiety drives me less than empathy. I’m spiritually with these Mets because they’re spiritually with me.
Sunday afternoon, I was up on my feet to urge them through any late uncertainty (I understand it was a good day for having risen). Can ya get that run home? Can ya get another run home? A couple more would really set us up, do ya think maybe you could…you just did.
Our parochial vernacular tells us we gotta believe. Our brand right here prioritizes faith. Both are implicit within Mets fandom, though they also imply ample reason exists to doubt our team can overcome its obstacles. Nurturing trust indicates there is already something to trust. The 2025 Mets, coming hot on the heels of the 2024 Mets, have earned provisional immunity from crippling doubt. They have constructed expectations and they’ve stepped right up to meet them. Francisco Lindor, who recently homered to walk off, homers to lead off. Juan Soto makes something out of a runner on third with less than two out. Pete Alonso stays in the park for a change yet does damage via a single. Clay Holmes protects an advantage through six, helped along by Endy Nimmo at the apex of his leap.
A little bullpen trouble? Here comes a combination of Lindor, Soto, and Nimmo again. A one-run lead a little tight for your taste? Here comes insurance through the Willie Keeleresque placement of doubles from Luisangel Acuña and Tyrone Taylor. Want further protection? Soto’s your good hands agent, ripping his own two-run two-bagger. Ryne Stanek takes it from there, filing a 7-4 victory in the books.
That made it four consecutive Met wins, all at the expense of the St. Louis Cardinals, significant in that it was the first time the Mets had swept a quartet of contests from the Redbirds in 39 years. The significant part is that 39 years ago equals 1986, and that previous four-game sweep was as stage-setting as it got, also in April, also on the heels of an invigorating preceding season. The Mets had to stick it to the Cardinals after the close call of 1985. St. Louis hasn’t resided in the NL East since 1993, but we were willing to put aside geography this weekend for old time’s sake.
 Precedent like it oughta be. Four wins in a row over any quality opponent, from wherever they hail, is a decently big deal, even in April. A swell start of 15-7, good for first place, beats the alternative. April is only the beginning, this series was just one among dozens to come. The second-place Phillies enter the Lindor’s Den next. They’re our daily peripheral concern the way the Cardinals were long ago. The satisfaction of sweeping our old archrivals will take us clear to first pitch Monday night and facing our current archrivals (give or take the last-place Braves). Then we’ll want a whole new win to sate us.
I trust the Mets can deliver. And if they don’t, there’s always the next game. That’s how every season is supposed to work. This one I trust to work very well.
by Jason Fry on 19 April 2025 11:24 pm The Mets won again, once again by not scoring a bunch of runs but getting remarkable pitching. Remarkable pitching … and having every key moment go their way. Which, granted, is often two different ways of saying the same thing.
I started off listening to Howie and Keith in my backyard and then moved to watching the FOX nincompoops in my living room (not a great choice), and throughout the game I was keenly aware of events teetering on a knife’s edge, and how just a couple of changes can send a game off the axis you’d prefer it stick to.
More on that in a moment, though here’s one reason to have watched on TV: You could admire the Cardinals’ road uniforms. I complain about uniforms a lot, vociferously in the case of the Mets’ baffling decision to replace their iconic road togs with shoddy knockoffs. So let me state for the record that the Cards’ road powder blues are sublime, down to the red piping, the proper use of ST. LOUIS instead of CARDINALS, and the chef’s kiss finishing touch of the S wrapping around the bat. Perfection!
Anyway, let’s talk moments. In the second, Kodai Senga was looking at second and third and one out and a 2-0 count against Nolan Gorman. Three ghost forks later, Gorman was gone; Senga then coaxed a harmless fly ball from Yohel Pozo to keep the game scoreless. The Mets grabbed a 2-0 lead on Luisangel Acuna and Pete Alonso doubles sandwiched around a Juan Soto single; the Cardinals threatened to cut into that lead in the fifth, but Brett Baty threw home unerringly from deep at third to cut down Thomas Saggese at the plate.
But all that was the rising action. The first real tipping point came in the sixth, when Senga walked Lars Nootbaar and gave up a single to Willson Contreras. Up came Brendan Donovan, who at that moment was a) the leading hitter in the National League; b) a solid hitter you can see ascending to the next level before your eyes; and c) a guy in danger of seeing a 14-game hitting streak go by the boards. His showdown with Senga was marvelous theater: Down 1-2 in the count, Donovan bore down, spoiling ghost forks looking for purchase at the bottom of the zone and shaking off Senga’s attempt to change his eye line. Five balls fouled off, and finally Senga tried a slider. Donovan hit it hard — but Acuna scooped it up to start a double play.
Another tipping point arrived in the eighth, when A.J. Minter walked the bases loaded and faced Alec Burleson with two out. Burleson smacked a grounder to the right of second, not hit all that hard but perilously placed — a long run for Acuna and the wrong side of the bag for Lindor.
If this had been Soilmaster Stadium against the fucking Marlins, the ball would have ticked off the end of Acuna’s glove with just enough kinetic energy to spring off the top of Lindor’s, spinning out into the left-field grass as a hideous carousel of enemy baserunners sprang into motion and various horror-stricken Mets tried to reverse field. What happened instead looked on TV like three-card monte: The ball vanished not into Acuna’s glove but behind it, untouched, and wound up in the grasp of Lindor, who had just enough time to spin on the grass, lock in on Alonso’s glove and end the inning.
In the bottom of the eighth … nope, no near thing or knife edge involved, just Alonso hitting a ball to Mars and the chance to throw your arms skyward and say happy silly things. That blast (443 feet!) gave the Mets a three-run lead, which they handed to Edwin Diaz.
Diaz did throw three straight balls to Saggese, which didn’t seem like an ideal start, but this time he locked in a little earlier than he has recently: Three pitches later Saggese had been fanned. Gorman gave Diaz a good battle (how many lineups feature two Nolans, BTW?) but went down on a slider, and Pozo rolled harmlessly to Lindor.
There will be games when those key moments fall the other way and we wind up fuming. Hell, that just happened in Minnesota. But this game wasn’t one of them; everything went right and the outcome was a Mets win and a Saturday afternoon satisfyingly spent.
by Greg Prince on 19 April 2025 11:35 am Yeah! Luis Torrens! The backup catcher thrust into near-everyday action is the hero in the bottom of the eighth, rescuing the Mets with a double all the way down the left field line, scoring Brandon Nimmo from second, salvaging an inning that nearly went by the wayside on the basepaths, breaking a tie, and positioning us three outs from victory. Who could ask for anything more?
Me, that’s who, albeit involuntarily. “Gee,” I heard myself think, “I was kind of looking forward to the top of the order coming to bat again.” It’s not that I didn’t want the Mets to take the lead and conclude a win. I just wanted more Mets, especially the Mets due up every time the lineup turns over. It was more an in-a-vacuum wish than a desire to see our one-run lead vanish.
Be careful what you wish for. Or wish at will. I wished for more Mets as well as a Mets win and I got both. That’s unusual. But so is this team.
All of Friday night served to remind us the 2025 Mets are built to play entire games with the idea of winning them. They’re not incapable of falling behind, but they seem immune to accepting a loss as their imminent fate. They do lose games. They could have lost this one. They had every opportunity.
David Peterson was adequate for five-and-a-third. Despite striking out nine times against our lefty, the Cardinals solved him thrice, for a run apiece in every even inning he pitched. “Well, he just doesn’t altogether have it tonight,” I figured. Yet pitching into the sixth without total command is significant. Every third-of-an-inning a reliever doesn’t pitch on the front end is a third-of-an-inning he can stick around for later. Also significant was the return of Max Kranick, whose one-day paper stay in the minor leagues went on a day too long. Max cleared up the last two outs of the sixth and brushed aside the seventh, by which time the Mets were in a deadlocked ballgame.
Off the board through four, every Met you felt needed to “get going” got going in the fifth. Brett Baty, maybe not a lost cause, doubled to lead off. Tyrone Taylor, the center fielder about whom it seems universally agreed requires platoon partnership, tripled Baty in. Juan Soto, before the boobirds could be heard in full throat, was greeted by a purposeful ovation and responded by singling in Taylor for what became a 2-2 tie. When it was a 3-2 deficit in the bottom of the sixth, there was Mark Vientos homering for a second consecutive night to retie matters. Weren’t we recently worried about Mark’s slow start?
After Kranick and then Ryne Stanek (gotta love pitchers whose names end the way they like to finish off batters — with a K) steered us to the bottom of the eighth, several Mets generated more positive developments. Vientos singled off Old Friend™ Phil Maton. Luisangel Acuña came in to pinch-run and took his assignment to heart, stealing second. Those fast feet couldn’t get enough of forward momentum, for on Nimmo’s succeeding grounder to third, Luisangel attempted to cross over. Nolan Arenado dove at Acuña just as Acuña dove at third base. Probably not advisable aggressiveness on the fleet Met’s part, but you try to discourage a Met in motion. He might have been safe, but he was called out on the attempt to remedy his overslide, and it was too close to get overturned on review. Thus, instead of the speediest Met standing on second with one out, we had a Met not as fast on first. Woe was us.
The woe went on its way in a veritable blink, because Brandon rated a pickoff throw from Maton that got away, allowing Nimmo to take second, which allowed Torrens to drive him in to make the game Mets 4 Cardinals 3. Edwin Diaz was deemed unavailable to pitch the ninth, but we’d hand the ball to Huascar Brazoban and everything would be fine.
Except the league’s leading hitter, Brendan Donovan, instantly tickled the right field foul pole, and the game was tied anew. Dang, these Cardinals do not go away. But dangs work in opposing directions, for these Mets don’t give up. How many Met relievers have we seen give up a leadoff game-tying homer in the ninth and then recover to strike out the next three batters swinging? We’ve certainly seen at least one. Hail Huascar, king of composure!
And, oh look, my fleeting wish was coming true. The top of the order was due up in the bottom of the ninth, starting with Francisco Lindor. If Lindor didn’t do something great, there would be Soto, who had that RBI single earlier, and if Soto didn’t come through, there’d be Pete Alonso, who’d tripled way back in the first. If the ninth didn’t give us what we needed, there was always extras.
But none of that long-term planning was necessary, as it took exactly three pitches for Lindor to take Ryan Fernandez (a Cardinal presumably named for two distinguished Met hurlers of yore) clear up onto Carbonation Ridge. Yup, a walkoff home run, just like that, making the Mets 5-4 winners in one of the most wonderful games you’d ever luck into. Really, it was a game of wonders. You wondered not how the Mets were going to lose it each instance they stumbled, but how they were going to win it whenever a chance presented itself. Guessing “Lindor will hit one out” might have seemed too obvious, but it turned out to be the correct choice. The night before, Lindor coached a teammate home from third while he himself orchestrated a rundown between first and second, so your instinct is to pick Francisco to do something wondrous whenever needed. Yet most everybody else doing something well merits partial credit as an answer for how the Mets won. Torrens, Taylor, Soto, Spy…I mean Kranick, Stanek, Brazoban, Baty, Nimmo, Peterson, Acuña (sort of). There were a lot of Mets in advance of Lindor who helped make a potential loss an actual win on Friday night.
You’ll get a lot of wins when you have a lot of help.
by Jason Fry on 18 April 2025 12:38 pm The Mets’ current formula for being 12-7 … well, it’s working while not seeming like a particularly good idea.
They pitch impeccably, which you don’t need to be a lifetime baseball fan to know isn’t sustainable, and they hit … hmm, how to describe this part? Minimally? Sporadically? Just enoughally?
Thursday night’s game followed this odd, not particularly reassuring blueprint to a T. Griffin Canning was the best he’s been in a Met uniform, showing tactical smarts as well as good stuff: In the early going he sensed the Cardinals had spent a lot of time perusing the scouting reports (ah, the iPad age) about his new approach and were waiting to ambush his offspeed stuff. So he and Luis Torrens and Jeremy Hefner pulled an in-game reversal, essentially going back to the fastball-first mix Canning had used in his days as an Angel. It worked: Looking for wrinkles left the Cardinals late on high fastballs, and before they could adjust Canning was out of the game with 100+ pitches thrown and just one run allowed over six.
Reed Garrett looked a little shaky after Canning but emerged unscathed, A. J. Minter was flawless and Edwin Diaz … well, he showed us his new, not particularly welcome 2025 trick, reporting for duty a batter ahead of his location doing the same. We can mutter about this, but it’s preferable to blowing the save, another trick we’ve seen too often in the post-WBC Diaz world.
The hitters, meanwhile, cashed in during exactly one inning: Andre Pallante (whose name really looks like it needs some accent marks) was good with the exception of the second, in which he was not particularly good and also unlucky. Mark Vientos banged a home run off the base of the foul pole in Utleyville, a location I don’t ever remember seeing a Citi Field home run recorded; strange but it counted all the same. Brett Baty (who had an honest-to-goodness fine night with the bat and in the field) drove in Starling Marte with an RBI single, and as a capper Francisco Lindor singled to right, scoring Baty. On the play Lindor wound up caught between first and second, with Tyrone Taylor shifting from foot to foot uncertainly just on the home-plate side of third; destined for an out, Lindor turned into an auxiliary coach, exhorting Taylor to scamper home while scrambling to elude various Cardinals. It worked and the Mets stole an additional run.
A lone inning of offense, great starting pitching, relief that stood up. Not sure it’s the formula we would have expected, let along drawn up, but it’s working. Just as losses don’t get recorded differently if they’re moral victories, wins don’t get discounted if they feel a little less than legitimate. In this baseball family we love our red-headed stepchild wins just as much as the ones whose progeny feels more certain.
by Greg Prince on 17 April 2025 12:19 am At about ten after one in the afternoon: “All right, a day game!”
At about ten after four in the afternoon: “Day games suck.”
OK, not all day games suck, but the one the Mets played in Minneapolis on Wednesday did. Certainly the Mets’ play sucked. That’s usually my litmus test for how good a game is, whatever time span it’s filling.
It didn’t require three hours to determine this matinee lacked the charms we associate with sunshine, green grass and sneaking glances at what qualifies most afternoons as an extracurricular activity. The Mets resisted excelling at any particular aspect of their sport. The offense was spotty at best. The defense created opportunities for the opposition. There was literally no starting pitching. Because Griffin Canning was under the weather (something anybody spending the previous two nights in Minnesota would figure to be), Carlos Mendoza was forced to go with a parade of relievers, from opener onward. Huascar Brazoban took the ball first and did OK. Justin Hagenman entered behind him as the bulk guy, one of those depressing terms of art designed to diminish the sparkle of a major league debut. Hagenman had never pitched in the bigs before. It required Canning’s illness and a touch of roster trickery — pretending Jose Siri is healthy and Max Kranick is unworthy — to get him to the highest level with the least ancillary fallout. The kid from the Pork Roll end of Jersey didn’t disappoint, giving up only one run in three-and-a-third, and that one was let in by the pitcher who succeeded him, Jose Butto.
Allowing an inherited runner to score wasn’t a sin. No, Butto’s misdeed came an inning later, though even then I wouldn’t pin what went wrong entirely on Jose. Down 2-0 with two out and Ryan Jeffers on second, Butto got a ground ball to Pete Alonso out of Willi Castro. The pitcher raced the runner to the bag. The pitcher beat the runner to the bag. Umpire Hunter Wendelstedt called the runner safe. The pitcher, acting from natural inclination (or inhabited by the spirit of David Cone from 35 years ago), began to argue with the umpire, engaging him just long enough to forget about Jeffers, who sure as hell noticed what was going on and what wasn’t going on. What wasn’t going on was Butto turning to throw home until it was too late to nab him. Three-nothing, Twins.
Wendelstedt made a horrible call, and there was no recourse. The Mets had previously used their challenge to bring about a reversal that never came, bringing to mind what an inane setup the challenge system is to remedy horrible calls. The camera saw Butto’s foot hit first base before Castro’s. Too bad Wendelstedt didn’t. (None of this detracts from one’s best wishes for the umpire who had to exit the game after absorbing a foul line drive to the head a little later.)
For whatever forces conspired against the Mets, they didn’t make it any easier on themselves. Their one early scoring threat was snuffed out when Jesse Winker just missed tagging the lowest point of home plate. Replays showed the only thing Winker did wrong as he chugged from second on Brandon Nimmo’s single to left was not be a scooch faster. Aggressive baserunning is cheerworthy when it works. I kind of wished he’d have stayed at third to begin with, but maybe you take your chances.
There weren’t enough of those for the Mets all day. There was one that shaped up pretty well in the fifth that ended with Juan Soto grounding into a double play. There were three unexpected runs in the eighth, but what would have been the go-ahead run wound up in Harrison Bader’s glove as the ex-Met dove and robbed Tyrone Taylor. For an instant, a person grumbled maybe we kept the wrong half of last year’s center field platoon. Nothing against Taylor (or his Ham), but the last two games suggested there are no friends like Old Friends™ who delight in reminding former employers they shouldn’t have been allowed to slip away. Bader, whose utility evaporated down 2024’s stretch, hit and fielded to his heart’s content. Somewhere Travis d’Arnaud enjoyed a good chuckle.
But there were those three runs, which I wasn’t anticipating because I’d already decided this was a lousy day game and, therefore, a lousy day. Now, however, the day game demanded my faith. I responded by pacing in the vicinity of the television for the first time since I can’t remember when. There’s a certain pacing one does when one invests himself in the outcome of baseball game. Make my devotion to this cause worth it. I can’t run, hit, hit with power, catch or throw. Will my walking back and forth in a veritable semi-circle help?
Not really. I got Edwin Diaz out of a slight jam (me and the Crew Chief Review loophole that allows for video replay when a team is out of challenges), but I couldn’t get a run across in the top of the tenth despite our having first and second and nobody out. Well, neither me nor Winker or Nimmo. Reed Garrett, the eighty-third pitcher of the day — I lost count — permitted the winning hit that gave the Twins their 4-3 victory and us our very first losing streak of 2025, though I’d finger fate as the culprit. It was one of those games that never felt right all day.
It’s night now and it still doesn’t.
by Jason Fry on 16 April 2025 7:35 am “FUCK!” I screeched when Francisco Lindor rolled over one to second in the seventh inning, and if I do say so myself, I was in midseason form. Dismay, frustration, pique — they were all audible and apparent. Then I whacked the couch just to underscore the point.
It was a night in which I had plenty of opportunities to work on my form, as the Mets frustrated us and were frustrated by the Twins on Jackie Robinson Day, losing by a 6-3 deficit that simultaneously felt narrower and wider than the numbers indicated. Narrower because they were in the game the entire time, with Lindor the tying run as he swung through 101 MPH from Jhoan Duran to make it official (and elicit another fuck/whack combo from me); wider because once the Twins took a 3-2 lead it felt like the kind of game that was going to stay stubbornly out of reach.
Lindor’s already been mentioned twice in the frustration department; his third-inning muff of what looked like a routine grounder extended an inning and led to the first two Twins runs. Tylor Megill looked good early but then started leaking oil, winding up on the short end of a duel between gigantic hurlers that also starred Bailey Ober. Juan Soto and Jesse Winker both got hangers in key spots but missed their pitches, offering up the classic “oh I’d like that one back” face a second later. Even Max Kranick looked mortal for the first time in his very young Mets career. At least old friend Harrison Bader had fun, leading the Twins’ attack and looking typically colorful and cheerful in doing so.
Fuck. Whack. Repeat. It was that kind of night. Here’s to a different kind of day.
by Greg Prince on 15 April 2025 11:21 am If 11 o’clock newscasts were what they used to be, the Minnesota Twins could have filled half of Warner Wolf’s Plays of the Month via their unintentional antics at frigid Target Field on Monday night.
 They don’t go the videotape like they used to. • Matt Walner lashed a ball that took one bounce the right field fence and then just lay motionless on the track as if it was too cold to move.
• Joe Ryan flung a pitch about a foot wide of Luisangel Acuña’s back.
• Justin Topa grabbed Luis Torrens’s simple comebacker to the mound and sent it flying down the right field line.
• Jorge Alcala did something similarly self-sabotaging with an Acuña bunt.
• Funnest of all for montage maestro Carmine Cincotta, the producer Wolf unfailingly credited, Twins second baseman Willi Castro received the relay of Mark Vientos’s liner into the right-center gap, the one that was in the process of perhaps scoring Pete Alonso from first — pending the outcome of a potentially well-executed throw home — and fired it directly…into the ground behind second, where it bounded up and flicked Vientos in what for standards & practices purposes we’ll call Mark’s rear end. First no fielders were anywhere near second base. Then three fielders surrounded second base, the same base where Vientos continued to stand as Alonso crossed the plate and Mark himself wondered what was that thing he felt tickling his backside region.
 Mr. G was at the game! Toss in myriad SNY shots of shivering fans, including a couple dressed as hot dogs, and sideline maven Steve Gelbs warming himself by decking himself out in Vikings gear (“Mr. G was at the game!”), and you’d have content that would go viral before viral was a thing.
The money highlight, however, wasn’t a blooper, but a blast: hoodied Juan Soto rocketing a home run of more than 400 feet with a runner in scoring position. BOOM! It wasn’t off the fair pole (of course it’s the fair pole, it’s a fair ball), but it was becoming fair to ask in muted tones when Juan might hit one out, or anywhere, with a man on base. Fifteen games versus fifteen years is a minuscule sample size, but we are not by nature a patient people.
Anyway, Juan quelled our percolating anxieties for a night, and the Mets kept us bundled in upbeat developments. Clay Holmes escaped his one jam of the night and went five innings; the Yeomen of the Bullpen (Brazoban for two, Garrett and Stanek for one apiece) proved characteristically stingy; the Mets converted Twin foibles into their own tallies; the Phillies lost; and except for learning Jose Siri will be out with a fractured tibia he sustained when he fouled a ball of his leg in West Sacramento, it was all good 11 o’clock news in the aftermath of first-place New York’s 5-1 win.
Back to you, Jim Jensen.
by Jason Fry on 14 April 2025 8:46 am I turned on the Mets game a couple of minutes after my Metro-North train starting trundling south out of Waterbury, Conn., picking up the voices of Keith Raad and Pat McCarthy from distant West Sacramento. I switched trains in Bridgeport as old friend Luis Severino won an extended battle with Brett Baty even as he was losing the war against his own escalating pitch count. The Mets’ 8-0 win was deemed official shortly after I disembarked at Grand Central, sparing an admiring glance at the constellations overhead before heading downstairs to pick up a Shake Shack order, preparatory for the subway and home.
While I won’t claim this is science, and after 30 years of wifely pointers I reluctantly accept that everything shouldn’t be about me, I will note that a Waterbury-Grand Central train excursion turns out to be the perfect amount of time for a baseball game.
One of the many things I love about baseball is its elasticity. Paying close attention to every pitch will yield a deep storyline and insights to take with you into future games. But the game will still reward you if your attention wanders, needing periodic reminders about inning and score, and only snaps into focus for big moments. Baseball is an ideal companion no matter where you land on this spectrum on a given day, ready to be whatever you want and/or need it to be for the 150-odd minutes apportioned to it.
Sunday’s game occupied the part of the spectrum labeled “loyal companion; reminders needed.” In the early going I grasped that Severino was pitching a lot better than he had so far in his relatively new A’s career, using his sinker and sweeper to erase his old mates. But I also gathered that he was using up a lot of pitches to do so: In the first he needed a dozen to face Francisco Lindor and Juan Soto, retiring neither of them thanks to the first of a number of Oakland Sacramento Not Yet Las Vegas misplays, then 11 more to coax a double play from Pete Alonso. (Amazing how an 11-pitch AB from the Polar Bear no longer stands out!)
Severino calmed the waters in the second, with three called strikeouts accompanied by a first-pitch Luis Torrens single, and he was efficient in the third. But the fourth was a replay of the first: an extended set-to with Mark Vientos, the loss of Torrens to a walk, and Brett Baty digging in at the plate with two out and Brandon Nimmo on second as the potential first run of the game.
Baty hasn’t exactly gotten off to a rip-roaring start — perhaps you’ve heard — but has approached recent ABs with more conviction, and he hasn’t taken his offensive struggles out to the field with him. Starting at third on Sunday, he short-circuited an A’s rally in the second by kicking off a nifty around-the-horn double play, then turned that trick again an inning later. Kodai Senga hadn’t quite found his footing, so one imagines he was a grateful beneficiary.
In the fourth, Baty worked Severino to a 3-2 count and then played spoiler, fouling off a trio of pitches while I divided my attention between encouragement and checking if this arriving train was the one to bear me the rest of the way to New York. Severino erased Baty on a cutter above the hands and yowled in triumph as he left the mound, but I chose to accentuate the positive: Baty had held his own and the Not Yet Las Vegas bullpen was going to have work to do.
Meanwhile Senga had harnessed his ghost fork and started to carve up the A’s on his way to becoming the first Mets starter to go seven innings; Severino made it two-thirds of way through the sixth but could go no further, with his 103rd and last pitch spanked into right field by Torrens to score Alonso and give the Mets a 1-0 lead.
The roof then caved in on the bullpen: a Lindor RBI double, a bases-loaded walk on Vientos’ ledger (his second RBI of the year), a balk to bring home Tyrone Taylor, and then an ugly ninth in which the Athletic defense cratered and the Mets starting lashing balls all over Sutter Health, including a double from Vientos (three RBIs!) and a triple from Baty.
By then if I’d been watching on TV I would averted my eyes out of politeness; instead, I listened idly as Keith and Pat finished painting the word picture for me. They were pleasant and informative company, and have evolved from being individual complements for Howie Rose to finding a nice rapport as a duo. (Nothing against Howie whatsoever, but there’s also an amiable Teacher’s Not in the Classroom vibe to the pairing, which makes days without Howie more palatable.)
Ideally, announcers keep you anchored to the game while also giving your mind freedom to project and toy with what-ifs and dream a little. So it was with me as Max Kranick sent the A’s home and I traversed Grand Central: I was allowing myself to think that maybe, just maybe, Saturday marked when the worm had turned for both Vientos and Baty.
Vientos has established enough of a track record to have his struggles diagnosed as either an unfortunate product of small sample size or growing pains; Baty is teetering on the edge of being formally reclassified as suspect instead of prospect, with the next stop a reclassification as “somebody else’s project.” No one knows what will happen in either case — that narrative resumes tonight in Minnesota — but when you win by more than a touchdown, your eyes naturally turn to the bright side. Which is as it should be.
by Greg Prince on 13 April 2025 12:49 pm No doubt as the Mets’ traveling party gathered for its team Seder on Saturday evening in Sacramento, one of the elder statesmen at the table — my guess is bench coach John Gibbons — noted that the 3-1 score by which the club lost in the afternoon was the first 3-1 loss the Mets had suffered at the hands of a band of Athletics since Game Six of the 1973 World Series. Whether any contemporary lessons could be drawn, or any useful parallels gleaned, from such a mirror image is likely something Gibby or perhaps a veteran like Starling Marte or Brandon Nimmo put forth for the group as a whole to contemplate between bites of gefilte fish.
 While Passover isn’t specifically a commemoration of repeated Met failures to pass over home plate more than once thousands of miles from their ancestral home, we are reminded that an unleavened offense can be a sign of eternal struggle. Yet where the veritable children sat, youthful Mets Brett Baty and Mark Vientos surely wondered aloud how the same bad things continue to happen to new generations of faithful people. “We are Mets, we seek to bring joy to millions, yet we continue to hit directly to rival fielders or often not at all. And why must Jose Siri endure such pain from a simple foul ball?” This is where the rabbinical wisdom of a Carlos Mendoza can come to bear. Mendy teaches in his low-key manner the importance of patience and practice, going out and getting them tomorrow. There have been many tomorrows across Met history. This one finds them again wandering the West…West Sacramento, specifically.
When the big hit is hidden as if it’s the afikoman, the herbs can be bitter, indeed. David Peterson toiled without reward for six innings of competent pitching. Nimmo strove to support him with a ball that departed Sutter Health Park, yet no Met stood on base as Brandon connected. It was a solitary trot for the senior member of the roster. Nimmo has seen famine on the diamond before. The team’s 0-for-5 with runners in scoring position necessarily has to be attributed to one of nature’s mysteries.
Yet the youngest at the table, Luisangel Acuña, would be right to express curiosity. “How is it if we begin a lineup with a Lindor, a Soto, and an Alonso, that we do not score plentifully? How do we inevitably wind up stuck in proverbial mortar as we attempt to transport one another from first, second, or third to home? It is here that one supposes pitching coach Jeremy Hefner clears his throat to tell the tale of Game Six of the 1973 World Series, that only other Mets-A’s contest to end on the wrong side of a 3-1 tally.
”Our people were at the precipice of the Promised Land,” Hef imparts. ”Belief was exhorted and miracles were evoked, yet our substance was constructed of solid material.” The coach, of course, refers to Stone, a fourth starter of a rarely surpassed caliber. “Remember, in those long-ago days, a fourth starter was what a fifth or even sixth starter is today, especially in a best-of-seven series.” The decision was made that Stone should sit and Seaver should go. Even the youngest in attendance at the Sacramento Seder nodded knowingly, for Seaver is a figure of legend and respect wherever Mets roam.
“But,” Hef continues, “it is as the St. Louis prophet Joaquin Andujar was once said to have said: ‘you can sum up this game in one word: you never know.’” Though Seaver had pitched throughout 1973 to a level worthy of the legend and respect that attaches to his name to this day, his right arm might have been a little weary the day of Game Six, and might have benefited from an extra day of rest. That’s what Stone was for, to give Seaver a chance to be at his best. Alas, the Mendy of his day, a golem of sorts named Yogi, wished to utilize Seaver at once and crash through the gates of the Promised Land, a destination that had seemed so distant for so long in the preceding summer, yet now stood a mere win away.
The 3-1 A’s triumph that Saturday in October of 1973 remains a shank bone of contention for Metropolitan scholars decades later. Seaver produced a pitching line that appears quality by modern standards. He lasted seven innings, he permitted two earned runs. Yet he was bested by an opponent named Catfish, never to be confused with gefilte. The Met batters in Game Six totaled only six base hits in the ancient kingdom known as Oakland; just one came with runners in scoring position. So went the 3-1 Met defeat, and thus brought on Game Seven, a desolate denouement to what had been a rousing march toward ultimate glory.
Yet there was a “day after” after Game Six, and there would be a “year after” after 1973. It took thirteen more years for another band of Mets to enter the Promised Land. A time span that measures three times that time span has since passed, and the Mets of today wander their continent in search of the happiest of resolutions to their season still. So many Mets have come. So many Mets have gone. Yet the journey in this current season only recently commenced. The tomorrows are plentiful. Another game in Sacramento, then on to Minneapolis. The map is full of places our ancestors never gave a second thought to, but we exist to keep thinking and keep learning. Or so Gibby certainly suggested as the matzo was passed from Met to Met.
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