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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 15 May 2018 4:00 pm Let us suppose there is no more definitive sample of a manager’s effectiveness than his first 37 games in a new job. Let us make this dubious supposition because the current manager of the New York Mets, Mickey Callaway, has managed 37 games in what is still his new post and there’s nothing else definitive by which to judge his performance to date. There’s observation and anecdote and a sense that maybe he’s gonna be really good or maybe he’s not, but none of that shows up in the standings. The standings are all that show up in the standings.
So how is Mickey doing when measured against the other 37-game wonders in Mets history? As Mark Knopfler of Dire Straits said of Harry with the daytime job in “Sultans of Swing,” he’s doing all right. That’s based on Mickey’s record across this definitive 37-game stretch, a span 18 of his 20 fellow Mets managers managed to put on the board before managing further. The board was more compressed for interim skippers Salty Parker (15 games) and Mike Cubbage (7 games). Like Harry from the aforementioned Sultans, they don’t make the scene.
Your perusal of the standings will tell you that after 37 games, Mickey Callaway has guided the Mets to 19 wins and 18 losses. They were all his responsibility if neither wholly his doing nor fault. When the definitive sample was 12, maybe 14 games, there was no reason to not crown Callaway the sultan of managing. No Met manager had ever led the Mets to as good a start as he had at that tender juncture of a first season; no Met manager had ever introduced himself so well, regardless of when in a given schedule he had commenced his tenure.
The Mets were 11-1, then 12-2. Lately they’ve been less than that. That’s why you can’t form definitive judgments after 12 or 14 games. That’s why you need 37 games, at least when all you have is 37 games. The Callaway Mets, at 19-18, aren’t as impressive as they were. Mickey Callaway now officially has good old days to look back on wistfully. Some Mets managers, as they had just gotten going, had even better old days to remember. For a few, it could be said definitively that they never received better new days beyond them.
Based on those ever so helpful standings, the best First 37 Games manager among all Mets managers was Buddy Harrelson. Harrelson replaced the most successful manager the Mets had ever had, Davey Johnson. That’s counting beyond 37 games in Johnson’s case. In Harrelson’s case, 37 games was ideal. Certainly the Mets were, running up a record of 28-9 after Davey finished his heretofore brilliant Met career at 20-22 and out in 1990. Frank Cashen fired a guy who had never won fewer than 87 games across any of his six full seasons because his team was stumbling along after 42 games.
Using 42 games to draw so significant a conclusion? That’s crazy.
Using 37 games to draw any kind of conclusion? That’s what we’re doing here, and for 37 games, Buddy was exactly what the Mets needed. He was the freshest breath of air an in-season managerial change ever wrought. The air that was stale in the last days of Davey dissipated. Everybody was recharged. Everybody was resilient. Everybody was ready to play ball under Buddy. The Mets surged from seven out of first place to on the cusp of grabbing the lead. No manager has ever made his mark 37 games in the way Harrelson did.
The Mets’ tear wasn’t quite so torrid the rest of 1990. Harrelson did not steer the Mets to a division title. By the end of 1991, Cubbage was using his office. It’s almost as if you can only tell so much after 37 games.
Yogi Berra’s first 37 games as Mets manager were similarly impressive. He was thrust into managing the 1972 Mets under the worst circumstances imaginable, following the Spring Training death of Gil Hodges. Berra was handed a job nobody wished anybody but Gil still had, and he and his Mets responded amazingly. After 37 games, they were 27-10, five lengths ahead of the field. After 156 slightly strike-shortened games, however, the Mets were 83-73, because however good a manager Berra might have been, he wasn’t much of a doctor, and that’s what the injury-riddled 1972 Mets really could have used.
Unlike Harrelson, Berra made it through his second season as manager in style, with his 1973 club roaring from behind to capture the NL East and NL pennant. Even at their You Gotta Believe hottest, however, the Mets never played quite as well for Berra as they did when he first took over. Yogi was fired 109 games into the 1975 season, as strange as it seems to consider Yogi being treated like a regular manager and not Yogi Frigging Berra.
Remember Jerry Manuel? Remember his immediate impact on the Mets? It was ten years ago now, so maybe it’s not top of mind. Manuel was a Harrelson type of hire: on the coaching staff, chosen to replace an accomplished incumbent whose team was in the doldrums. Willie Randolph hadn’t accomplished as much as Johnson, but he was less than two seasons removed from helming the Mets to a postseason when he was nudged aside for Manuel in June of 2008. Had Randolph added an extra postseason berth to his résumé in 2007, he wouldn’t have gone anywhere. But ’07 was no ’06, and ’08 appeared to be going nowhere, thus the decision to give Willie the boot and Jerry a shot.
Jerry was an injection of adrenaline into the body Metropolitan. Where once we were sluggish, we were slugging. Where once were out of it, we were on top of it. When Randolph was asked to leave his place of residence, the Mets were a saggy 34-35. After 37 games of Manuel, the Mets were 23-14 as Jerrymen and in first place by a hair over the Phillies overall. The hair would thin out by September and the Mets would again just miss the postseason. In a familiar refrain, Manuel’s debut would overshadow all of his followups. When Jerry was let go after the 2010 season, there were no playoff appearances on his ledger, just a stubborn layer of regret.
Jeff Torborg was hired to overwhelm the regretful way Harrelson’s (and Cubbage’s) time in the managerial seat ended. The 1991 Mets went 77-84, the franchise’s first losing year since 1983. Torborg was going to usher winning back to Flushing. For 37 games, there was no more effective usher in any theater. The Mets were 21-16. Then the 1992 movie turned into a horror show and Torborg was, depending on your viewpoint, either helpless to keep the audience from vacating the cinema or one of the characters who made the whole thing scarier. Jeff lasted the full 162 games in 1992 (72-90), but only 38 more in 1993 (13-25).
Another 21-16 entry in our 37-game sweepstakes was Joe Frazier. His 1976 Mets galloped out of the starting gate, though truth be told, they had already broken down some from the pace they’d set at 18-9. Frazier’s reputation as the right leader at the right time fizzled as that particular presidential campaign year wore down. Upper management elected to dismiss him 45 games into 1977.
Are you thinking that a winning record in a Mets manager’s first 37 games is a sign of not so good things to come? Contrary evidence is at hand: Davey Johnson — the Mets manager we’ve already identified as most successful ever — got out to a 20-17 start in 1984, and everything would get only better with and around him for several seasons. Davey was the second Mets manager to have started 20-17. George Bamberger had the same record when he assumed the reins in 1982. Sadly, his case presents more evidence that a winning record in a Mets manager’s first 37 games is precisely a sign of not so good things to come. Bambi finished ’82 at 65-97 and resigned at 16-30 in ’82.
Nobody’s perfect. Barely shading middling should sometimes be viewed as progress. That’s what Willie Randolph did upon his ascent to Mets manager in 2005. At 19-18, he essentially blew away the blahs left over from the Art Howe era. At 19-18, Callaway hasn’t quite put the last days of Terry Collins behind us, but since we live in the present, and his 37-game record is the only one that is active, we prefer Callaway’s 19-18 to the 17-20 posted by Collins in 2011 or even the 17-20 compiled by Gil Hodges in 1968. Neither Terry nor Gil lit up the standings 37 games into their respective Met tenures, but good things were not beyond their grasp. For Hodges, they came the following year. For Collins, they’d have to wait a while.
For Bobby Valentine — who shares a birthday with Mickey Callaway, albeit exactly 25 years apart (the Met managerial equivalent of Adams and Jefferson both dying on the 50th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence) — there was no sign in his first 37 games of much good at all. To be fair, Bobby V’s first 37 games should probably be loaded down with asterisks since they bridged two seasons, one that was already in the toilet and the other that had yet to arrive in Flushing. Over the last 31 games of 1996, Bobby’s original Mets, bequeathed to him by Dallas Green, went 12-19. During the first six games of 1997, when the Mets were on an extended California road trip to start the season, they were 2-4. Add it up, and it doesn’t amount to much: 14-23.
Within a few weeks, though, things began to click, and Bobby was the manager of a surprise contender that finished 1997 at 88-74 and became a turn-of-the-millennium playoff staple. It’s almost as if a Mets manger’s first 37 games isn’t a reliable indicator of anything. Or, in Art Howe’s case, it tells you all you need to know, since Art’s first 37 Mets games gave us 16-21, and the rest of Art’s stay wasn’t appreciably more encouraging. Or, in the case of Joe Torre, 16-21 in the midst of 1977 was par for the course of what he’d deliver through 1981, but not a harbinger of Torre’s managerial career overall. He’s in the Hall of Fame, you know.
For the record, the rest of the records after 37 games were: Roy McMillan, 18-19 (and gone after his 26-27 interim stint wound down in 1975); Frank Howard, 15-22 en route to 52-64 en route to “thanks a bunch” for completing Bamberger’s unexpired term in 1983; Wes Westrum, 12-25 upon taking over for Casey Stengel in the summer of 1965; Casey Stengel, 12-25 upon inventing the Mets in 1962; and Dallas Green, 10-27 as he volubly if futilely attempted to clean up after Torborg while 1993 festered.
I’m having some fun with Callaway’s 37-game sample size because it’s all we’ve got for now. Weather permitting, we’ll soon have 38 and a whole new set of impressions. Mickey’s record is fine, if not mindblowing. Maybe we’ll give him a whole half-a-season before we begin definitively deciding what to make of him.
by Jason Fry on 14 May 2018 1:22 pm The plan was a good one: head down to Philadelphia for Saturday’s night game, for which friends had sweet tickets through a work event. I was excited to see Noah Syndergaard, our pals, the Mets, and to get another look at Citizens Bank Park, which back in the last years of Shea opened my eyes to how much better a modern park might make things.
Not so fast, said Mother Nature.
The radar was a sea of red to the west. We knew we didn’t need to hurry to be there for first pitch. Then came the rains — vengeful, Biblical rains. It didn’t take a baseball lifer to guess there would be no first pitch.
Ah well, so it goes.
But then it looked like Sunday’s game would vanish too.
This time, the weather-related havoc turned out not to be an entirely bad thing. The Mets and Phils were delayed long enough for Emily and I to take our seats in the front of the Megabus back to New York — we arrived (in radio terms) as the Mets had the bases loaded and one out against Aaron Nola in the top of the first. Alas, nothing came of it, and as the bus pulled out Jacob deGrom took the hill for the bottom of the first.
He was still there as our lumbering bus navigated central Philly traffic and construction.
He was still there as another round of passengers got their bags settled and arranged themselves on board.
He was still there as the bus headed across the Delaware River.
He was still there when we crossed into New Jersey.
It felt like he might still be there when the sun ran out of fuel, swelled and engulfed the Earth. That would probably interfere with the game even more thoroughly than a thunderstorm.
DeGrom was there for 45 pitches in all, a frustrating, quietly mesmerizing Verdun of a struggle. Like the Mets, the Phillies loaded the bases. Like the Mets, nothing came of it. DeGrom, incredibly, escaped without scoring a run. Except he didn’t really escape — that inning ‘s overwork ensured his departure.
The game then settled into a slow grind as our bus rolled up the turnpike, with Emily and I on an earbud each. It’s been a while since I was radio-only, and once again I found myself thankful for the presence of Josh Lewin. Lewin is still “the new guy,” but at this point that’s by default — somehow this is his seventh season calling games alongside Howie Rose. As has been the case since Lewin arrived in 2012, I appreciate his quirky sense of humor, his quick wit, and most of all how much he’s loosened up Rose. Howie is a treasure, but years of undistinguished radio partners had left him sounding cranky and bored by 2012. The new guy (sorry, it’s inescapable) has helped him shake off the rust, making his crankiness once again endearing. And there are few radio duos better at rising to a game’s occasion: that endless first inning brought out the best in them, as they kept track of pitches thrown, balls fouled off, remarked on the strange lack of action, eyeballed deGrom with his recent injury in mind, and searched for historical precedents.
It was a treat to listen to, though after that they didn’t have as much to work with. The game became a snoozy back and forth. Yoenis Cespedes (who arguably shouldn’t have been out there in the first place, given we all know how pushing him through a leg injury ends) connected for a home run in the sixth; Paul Sewald left a slider over the fat part of the plate in the bottom half of the inning for an enemy homer. 3-1 Phils.
Meanwhile, we were nearing New York — and I was worrying about my phone’s battery. We’d been at 47% when I got on the bus, with nary a USB port to be seen. I’d conserved power by resisting the temptation to check Twitter, email and other scores, so as our bus crawled through Mother’s Day traffic in Hoboken I wondered what percentage of phone and game remained.
The bus reached its New York stop with the Mets down to their final out and Asdrubal Cabrera at the plate as the tying run, facing Edubray Ramos, against whom he had done wonderful things before. Two strikes, and I dared to peek at my phone. Its battery counter read 2%.
I was hoping the Mets had enough game in them that I’d need more than that. If not, well, at least I’d see things through.
But that look proved fatal — it was Orpheus sneaking a glance over his shoulder. As Ramos got the sign, my screen went black. I didn’t know it at the time, but about a minute later, so did the Mets’ chances.
* * *
Longtime readers know that I’m semi-obsessed with Mets ghosts — guys who were on the active roster but never got into a game. Going into this season there had been nine of them, starting with Jim Bibby back in 1969 and running through Ruddy Lugo and Al Reyes in 2008. Two of the Met ghosts — Billy Cotton (1972) and Terrel Hansen (1992) — suffered the additional indignity of never getting to play in a big-league game for anybody.
Ghostdom can be a temporary thing. Corey Oswalt became one earlier this year, escaping when he was called up again and got into a game. Matt Reynolds spent the 2015 offseason as a ghost, with the additional asterisk of having been added to a postseason roster, before shedding his ectoplasm in 2016.
But I’ve never seen a ghost quite like Buddy Baumann.
Baumann — whose full name is the rather regal-sounding George Charles Baumann IV — was designated for assignment by the Padres at the end of April after pitching a third of an inning against the Rockies, during which he got, well, rocked and wound up suspended for being part of a brawl.
The Mets called him up for Friday’s game, but he had to serve the one-game suspension he owed MLB. Saturday’s game was rained out. Then Baumann was sent back down to make way for deGrom on Sunday.
Huh.
So is Baumann a ghost or not?
I’ve concluded that he is, though it’s a tentative, softly voiced ruling.
It’s a fact that as I write this, there was never a Mets game in which Baumann could have pitched. That would indicate he’s no more a ghost than, say, Justin Speier, who worked out with the Mets and even threw in the bullpen during a game, but was never on the active roster.
Yet while Baumann couldn’t have played, he was on the active roster. You have to be on the active roster to be suspended — that’s why his Met tenure began so oddly. He had to be activated so he could absorb the punishment of being inactive, or something like that.
Here’s hoping Baumann returns — besides clearing up the above, the Mets could sure use a second lefty. For now, he’s the most spectral ghost of all, the wandering soul who was here so he couldn’t be here.
by Greg Prince on 12 May 2018 11:53 am Choose one from among the applicable Met narratives:
a) the Mets can never do anything right;
b) the Mets rarely lose in Philadelphia.
The latter is more universally pleasing. Maybe not among the regulars at Citizens Bank Park, but that, unlike everything else lately, is not our problem. A typical for lately game, in which the Mets were going down to 1-0 defeat was interrupted by not one but two bolts of ninth-inning lightning Friday night, delivered consecutively by Michael Conforto and Devin Mesoraco, only one of whom you had in your Potential Met Heroics pool entering the week.
You might not have had Conforto, either, considering how Charlie Brownish he’d consistently looked swinging and missing last weekend against Colorado. Perhaps he’s finding his groove. Not only did his two-run homer off Hector Neris push the Mets from behind to ahead with one out in the ninth (two pitches after he sent one similarly far if a little foul), it elevated his road trip track record to 5-for-16. On the Mets’ most recent homestand, Conforto went 0-for-13. There was nowhere to go but up, and maybe Michael is heading there.
Mesoraco could have only wished to have been as lukewarm as Conforto was going into his Friday at-bat versus Neris. Devin, with whom we are now on a first-name basis, hadn’t gotten on base in eight at-bats as a Met and hadn’t taken part in a win at all for anybody in 2018. He’d played in eighteen games as a Red; the Reds lost all eighteen. The Mets lost the first two games in which Mesoraco had a hand. Meanwhile, Cincinnati took off on a winning streak without him (and with Matt Harvey, incidentally). Was the Mesoraco Effect gonna be a thing?
In one sense, it already was. Zack Wheeler threw his best start in ages on Wednesday with Mesoraco catching. Nobody much noticed since lineup card follies overshadowed everything in Metsopotamia, yet the only reason Mickey Callaway could fret that his D’OH! pas “probably cost us a game” was that Wheeler so effectively kept the Mets in that 2-1 ten-inning loss. The offense certainly didn’t. Asdrubal Cabrera’s first-inning double may have been wiped away by a clerical error, but all the “who bats third?” escapade likely deprived the Mets of was an additional LOB.
Mesoraco caught Wheeler for six uncharacteristically solid innings, which, unlike Cabrera’s double, did show up in the box score. Zack raved about Devin afterward, hinting perhaps that it does matter who does catch a pitcher. Maybe the chronically befuddled Steven Matz would have followed Wheeler’s effort with five fine innings sans Mesoraco (he was on his game in his previous start a week ago), but every little bit helps, and it now appears Devin is helping talented Met starters whose performance wasn’t living up to their curdled hype.
That, like the Mets’ near-invincibility in Philly, is a narrative we can deal with until it’s proven otherwise inoperative. We can also handle a touch of offense from our new catching savior, which he gave us in his ninth Met at-bat, the one in which he directly succeeded Conforto’s blast to right with one that rocketed to left. Suddenly, instead of moping over getting shut out at Citizens Bank, we were en route to a rousing 3-1 win.
Every postgame question I heard wondered of the Mets manager and his players what effect winning had on the outlook of the team. See, the Mets looked unhappy when they were behind and appeared happy when they surged ahead. Callaway, Conforto, Mesoraco, Matz and everybody else polled said yes, the scoring and winning represented a positive development. Good thing the Mets have a pack of intrepid journalists tailing them to discern their ever changing moods.
Like the Mets, I turned my frown upside down as results dictated. Not that I need a steady barrage of victories to love the Mets, but it certainly makes loving fun. I, like every sentient human, have no way of knowing whether prevailing dramatically one night will lead to more success, either immediately in Philadelphia (where the Mets are 42-17 since August 24, 2011) or in the ongoing season (in which the Mets are 19-17 since March 29, 2018). I do know it’s nice to get a break from all of us telling one another what a dumb, dopey franchise we root for and having that line of thinking repeatedly reinforced by those who don’t share in our emotional investment.
Losing happens. Sometimes more than winning, but even in and around winning. Gremlins once in a great while mysteriously move hitters’ names to unintended slots on lineup cards. Overly ambitious runners take one too many steps from first base and don’t dive back into the bag ahead of a pickoff attempt. Light towers shine menacingly in center fielders’ eyes. Pitchers who couldn’t get outs for us get outs for somebody else. Yet not everything is this week’s sign that the apocalypse is upon us. I understand concern. I understand a low hum of stress that can be construed as panic. I understand panic. A month or three from now, panic may retroactively seem an irresponsibly tepid reaction to all that was going wrong for the Mets in May and we never should have been fooled by that night in Philly when a couple of home runs turned out to be aberrations from doom rather than harbingers of delight.
But, for now, we have won a game we were all but slated to lose. Michael Conforto is Michael En Fuego. Citi Field is renaming its second-highest level The Meszanine. Nobody batted out of order. Our runner who got picked off did not cost us a game. Our center fielder who almost lost a ball in the glare recovered and caught it. Thor and Jake have the next two starts. Eleven of fifteen National League teams have attained between nineteen and twenty-four wins, and ours is among them.
Cheer up, fellow Mets fans. Friday Night Lightning might keep us electrified all the way to Monday. Clear eyes, full hearts, we didn’t lose.
by Jason Fry on 10 May 2018 11:44 am The Mets, who started out some long-gone season 11-1, are back to being the same shambling disaster we’ve come to know all too well.
Sudden, unexpected injuries to key players? Check.
Nagging, thoroughly expected injuries to other key players? Check.
Nagging injuries to key players with no corresponding DL stint, ensuring those maladies become something worse? Check.
Playing time given to older players who don’t warrant it? Check.
Roster spots wasted on guys who should be on the golf course? Check.
The result is a team in freefall, bearing all the grim stigmata of having broken through “flawed” on a one-way trip to “hopeless.” They’re still above .500, I know, but then a guy who just fell out of a 50th-floor window is still above ground level.
Flawed teams have one weakness — an anemic offense, a leaky bullpen, fragile starting, erratic defense — and if you’re a fan you imagine scenarios in which they patch up that problem (unlikely but hey, you can dream) or do everything else right (which actually happens sometimes).
Hopeless teams, on the other hand, have multiple weaknesses, which take turns coming to the fore and sabotaging a club. Watching baseball becomes like playing a slower, more depressing version of “Clue” — will the murder turn on runners left on base in the fourth inning, bad defense in the seventh, or bad relief pitching in the 10th?
That’s the 2018 Mets. They can’t hit or field, they can’t keep their starters in the rotation, and their relievers are either DFA-level bad, having lousy seasons, or on the DL. Wednesday’s game went down the toilet when A.J. Ramos gave up a walkoff home run in the 10th, but hey, he was just Col. Mustard with the wrench in the billiard room. If it wasn’t him it would have been someone else, in some fashion, sooner or later. (Still, can we please lock Ramos and Hansel Robles in a room and lose the key?)
Sigh.
The sigh is because the 2018 Mets are proving that the bad scenario above can, in fact, be worse. This next part won’t surprise anyone right now, but it’s important to record it for posterity, to be unearthed when the horrors of May 2018 have receded to some smudgy blur in memory.
Any team can be sabotaged by injuries, crap hitting, bad defense and crummy relief, but it takes a really remarkable team to make things worse by batting out of order.
The Mets did that Wednesday afternoon. Jim Riggleman noticed and walked out to the home-plate umps, removing Asdrubal Cabrera from second base, where he’d arrived after dumping a ground-rule double. That short-circuited a potential rally, if the term “rally” can be perverted by being connected to the 2018 Mets. (Bruce was out without seeing a pitch, with the putout credited to the Reds’ catcher, while Cabrera’s double never happened. It was nullified, which perhaps some kind person in MLB’s offices could do to this season.)
Oh, and the Mets lost by the not-coincidental-seeming score of 2-1.
The screwup wasn’t unique in Mets’ lore. The ’77 team got caught batting out of order by the Padres on April 29, with Roy Staiger phantom-retired by the catcher while Mike Vail‘s walk got wiped away. (It’s kind of fun spotting the dirty deed on Retrosheet’s play by play.) The Mets have caught opponents batting out of order three times, so at least we’re ahead in something. They caught the Pirates in ’67, the Expos in ’95 and these very same Reds (or rather, utterly different Reds except for Joey Votto) in ’08. (You can go down the rabbit hole here if you wish.)
I remember the last one and chortling at the sheepish look on the face of Dusty Baker, a manager I’d come to loathe for his destruction of young arms and general air of smugness. I’d forgotten the truly Metsian detail, however, which was that I’d stopped chortling after realizing that Willie Randolph had screwed up, noting the error by speaking up after David Ross flied out. Ross, given a second chance, singled.
(Batting out of order makes everyone’s head hurt. I’ve re-read the 2008 post above and the rule, and it still took me half an hour to process that it was indeed the luckless Bruce who should have been called out on Wednesday, not Wilmer Flores. )
Anyway, the ’67 and ’95 Mets were hot messes. The ’77 Mets and ’08 Mets were ticketed for collapses with sides of infamy. Doesn’t bode well, does it? Maybe this time around the villains will be all the Clue characters, with all the weapons, in each and every room.
by Greg Prince on 9 May 2018 7:49 am Technically, there’s no rule against using Jason Vargas and Hansel Robles in the same game, but that doesn’t mean a manager should be allowed to do it. Nevertheless, Mickey Callaway challenged common sense if not the letter of the law, and inevitable results ensued Tuesday night in Cincinnati. Vargas was characteristically horrible. Robles was predictably worse. Following the lead of their veteran starter and featured reliever, the Mets fell to the Reds, 7-2.
The offense, shorn of hamstrung and thus DL’d Todd Frazier, didn’t achieve much either — Luis Castillo of the not that Luis Castillos kept them off the basepaths until the fifth — but who noticed? Some nights the Mets’ hitting is so futile, their pitching is immaterial. Other nights it flips. The Mets are versatile that way.
Vargas seemed to have his best start as a Met 2.0, which is to say he gave up only four runs in four innings when it seemed he’d give up four runs in every inning. He was having trouble getting outs on the ground, in the air or with a baseball. The most impressive aspect of his performance was his ability to differentiate among the myriad at-bats in which he put runners on base when reporters asked afterward what went wrong. Robles, who was called up when Matt Harvey was designated for assignment on the premise that the Mets weren’t doing anything with that roster spot anyway, surrendered about as many runs as a person unintentionally could in a third of an inning. The laser beam home run he served up like a brimming bowl of Skyline Chili to Scooter Gennett got out of Great American Ball Park so fast that Hansel is only now raising his index finger toward its exhaust fumes.
While the fourth-place Mets were still the third-place Mets, they unloaded the aforementioned Harvey on the Reds in exchange for their injury-riddled former starting catcher, Devin Mesoraco. Everybody responded to the news with the same understandable knee-jerk Tom Seaver reference, though we should note the Mets have been trading in-season with the Reds since they sent Don Zimmer to Cincinnati on May 6, 1962, and received in exchange the second Bob Miller and the only Cliff Cook. Reds from Jesse Gonder to Jay Bruce have followed a similar eastbound trail to suddenly become Mets, though few quite as suddenly as Mesoraco, who was batting seventh in the originally posted Reds lineup Tuesday. Devin took BP with the Reds, struck out pinch-hitting for the Mets in the ninth and instantly became our best apparently healthy starting catcher. His presence couldn’t hurt. The same can’t be said of at least two of the pitchers he might catch.
As for Harvey, the most compelling similarity he shares with Seaver these days is they’ve both lived in Connecticut and soon they’ll both have lived in Ohio.
by Jason Fry on 8 May 2018 1:35 am The Mets played a baseball game in Cincinnati Monday night — and, for the first time in eight days, ended the night as winners.
That’s the unalloyed good news. The rest, well, it’s a matter of perspective.
The Mets hit the baseball with authority, something they hadn’t done in quite some time. Michael Conforto — who may be injured, rusty, slumping, unlucky, or some combination of those things — hit the second pitch from Homer Bailey into the nearly empty left-field seats. Jay Bruce homered. So did Adrian Gonzalez — twice. Amed Rosario had a pair of doubles and a sacrifice fly, which is close enough.
It seems cruel to squint at such welcome events, particularly after so lengthy an absence of themt. But Bailey hasn’t been an effective big-league pitcher since 2014, the Reds hit three home runs of their own, and after an initial flurry of scoring the Mets did a depressing number of lunkheaded things on the basepaths and in the coaching boxes. And if the Mets have become a tire fire, the Reds are an underground blaze eating away at a coal seam below an abandoned town. The scoreboard says the Mets won, 7-6; it gets closer to the heart of the matter to suggest the Reds proved better at losing.
But hey, Yoenis Cespedes played and didn’t seem to damage anything. And we got a chance to see the 1,050th Met in club history, in the person of Irish-born lefty P.J. Conlon.
I had no particular awareness of Conlon beyond hazy spring-training memories and knowing he’d ascended the prospect ranks high enough to be considered Potentially Useful, which sounds snarky but is actually high praise given the pitiless filter of minor-league ball. Viewed with more careful attention, Conlon is a lefty chucker with Rube Goldberg mechanics that hide the ball while making the team physician blanch — he looks like a shoulder and/or elbow injury waiting to happen. He doesn’t throw hard and never did, but that meant he arrived having had to outthink hitters he couldn’t overpower, learning to change speeds and live on the edges of the strike zone.
Conlon did that for a while, until the Reds got a longer look at him and started centering balls. I suspect that one-game scouting report may describe his career — a few trips through the league and the ubiquity of video may well make that deceptive delivery less mysterious. I’d love to be wrong, of course; even if I’m not, it’s always fun seeing a big-league debut. Conlon looked like there wasn’t enough air out there, and his every move was cheered by a large rooting section featuring his parents, well-wishers (one kissing a prayer card in particularly tense moments) and jubilantly displayed Irish flags.
Conlon wasn’t around enough to give those folks the reward of a win, but he did collect his first hit. Which, it turns out, hastened his departure — he jammed his thumb, couldn’t feel his pitches, and was pulled in the fourth.
And honestly, can you imagine a more perfect introduction to life as a Met than that?
by Jason Fry on 7 May 2018 12:26 am So were you doing your job this time, or is this another fake recap where you use fancy writing to dress up the fact that you only watched half an inning?
This time around I listened to half an inning while in a rental car on the way to Logan Airport. Does that answer your question?
It does. Which half-inning was it?
The one in which Noah Syndergaard somehow walked in the tying run.
The bad one, then.
One of the bad ones.
Were you aware that Jacob deGrom had gone on the DL at that point?
No, not until Howie and Josh told me. That was the same inning in which I learned Yoenis Cespedes had come out of the game with hip tightness or imminent death or whatever the hell it was. Oh, and Josh made much of the fact that Syndergaard apparently no longer gets swings and misses with his 97-MPH fastball.
And what was your reaction to all that?
Despair, and a reminder that one baseball game was not worth launching the rental car off the expressway to end as a flaming wreck somewhere in Medford.
What do you make of all this buzzards’ luck we’ve having?
That the season is long. That streaks happen and we are helpless to control our emotions while inside them. That the Mets might quite possibly be cursed. That I am an utter fool for letting what they do dictate any part of my happiness.
Did you note that we got beat by two solo shots hit by Ian Desmond?
I did note that … wait, where are you going with this?
Is it true that Ian Desmond is on your fantasy baseball team?
It is.
Did you start him today?
I did not.
Did you not start him because he was facing the Mets?
No. I don’t do that. I let my fantasy team be my fantasy team. I don’t bench guys against my real team. Nor do I do that despicable bullshit of saying, well, “I hope the Mets beat my starter, but only by a 2-1 score and the one is a solo shot by that other guy on my fantasy team.” People who do that are terrible and should be horsewhipped.
So why didn’t you start Desmond?
Because I didn’t, OK?
How’d your fantasy-baseball matchup turn out?
Last I checked I was tied for home runs and down one in both runs and RBIs.
So if you’d started Desmond…
Just shut up.
Sorry, it’s just that —
It’s just that WHAT? That the Mets are so fucking Metsy at the moment that they got Metsiness all over my fantasy team too? Is that what you want me to fucking say?
Dude, calm down. And anyway, I don’t think ‘Metsiness’ is a word.
And I don’t think that was a question.
Fair enough. Still, you did predict the appearance of P.J. Conlon. That’s a little spooky, isn’t it?
Possibly.
And you invoked Hansel Robles as Ol’ Point to the Sky. Also spooky, no?
Predicting Hansel Robles will do something negative isn’t exactly the stuff of oracular greatness.
Did he point to the sky on Desmond’s second homer?
I was too disheartened to check. Hang on, let me look.
And?
He fucking pointed to the sky.
So should we believe you’re some kind of prophet?
If I could see the future, I would have found some other team to root for the moment they finished cleaning up after the World Series parade in October 1986. But I can’t, so I didn’t. And now I’m ride or die with this miserable fucking ballclub as they lose and get hurt and lose and walk in runs and lose and fail to hit and lose and point to the fucking sky and lose and lose and lose and lose.
Well. You seem like you need a moment. Maybe we should leave things there.
Yes, I think we’d better.
by Jason Fry on 5 May 2018 11:27 pm Your recapper will begin by confessing something usually kept discreetly behind the Faith & Fear curtain: his direct experience of tonight’s game was limited to the bottom of the ninth, watched while scowling/frowning at a phone in a friend’s living room north of Boston.
 Well, fuck. That bottom of the ninth was brief. Mercifully, one might say: at least Saturday night’s hopeless Mets loss was concluded in a tidy, sub-three-hour fashion. We’re into the philosophy of masochism now: Would you rather lose 8-7 in fury and indignation, or 2-0 while supine and helpless?
(What’s that? You’d rather win? Oh sweet summer child, get out while you can.)
I wasn’t wholly ignorant of the proceedings before that snoozy last half-inning, of course. I’m a Mets fan — if the game’s going on I do what I can even if life gets in the way. I’d registered that the Mets were behind 1-0 on a Nolan Arenado homer off Steven Matz — a first-inning blow, of course, as the Mets’ latest way of tormenting us is to fall behind early and then commence toying with our emotions.
On and on the game wound, with me checking in periodically to note that, hey, at least Matz hadn’t come apart like a cheap watch, as recent starters have done. There were no Met threats to note, but a 1-0 deficit doesn’t require much in the way of heroism — it can be undone by little more than a couple of well-placed accidents.
I registered that the Mets were a hit away from tying the game in the bottom of the 8th, and surreptitiously flipped over to GameDay to watch a static cartoon of Jay Bruce do whatever Jay Bruce was going to do.
Jay Bruce did … well, you probably saw it. Look up a bit to see what I saw. The placement of the pitch left me fuming about the outcome, and not at all comforted by my app’s note that Bruce had flied out sharply to left fielder Noel Cuevas, a player I’ve never heard of and could easily mistake for, say, a limited-edition Christmas tequila.
That was it. The Mets gave up another run shortly before I returned to the world of WiFi, pulled up SNY and watched three Mets do nothing, completing the loss. The trainwreck continues.
The trainwreck continues, and yet we hang around watching as brakes squeal and trailer cars jackknife and locomotives plummet into abysses. It’s what we do, out of habit and duty and most of all out of a desperate, apparently inextinguishable hope.
I knew I was a hopeless case years ago, when I refused to seek shelter from the days of Lorinda de Roulet and Mettle the Mule and the Mets beginning the free-agent era as baseball’s North Korea. (When the Mets grudgingly decided Gary Matthews Sr. might make sense as an acquisition, they sent him a telegram requesting he contact the club. It worked out pretty much as you expected.) I endured Vince Coleman reluctantly admitting that nearly blinding a child with a quarter-stick of dynamite wasn’t a good look. I lived through Jason Phillips and Vance Wilson and the terminally bored Shea scoreboard operators mixing them up, not that there was actually any appreciable difference between the two. I saw Kevin McReynolds and Bobby Bonilla return to teams that didn’t want them. I pretended that Victor Zambrano and Mike Pelfrey had brains. I knew Tommy Milone would pitch and Nori Aoki would play the outfield and still cleared my schedule to see what would happen.
Which is a long-winded way of saying I’m disappointed but not devastated by an 11-1 team turning into a 17-145 one, or however this ultimately turns out. (Probably not that bad, but you never know.) As proof of that, almost before I’d absorbed the news that the Mets had concluded someone might fix Matt Harvey but it wasn’t going to be them, I had a question: Who was being called up to take Harvey’s place?
I wanted to know, and it annoyed me that this piece of information wasn’t to be found amid seemingly infinite hot takes about grit and talent and blah blah blah. Who was the new Met? Was it … well, hell, I had no one in particular in mind, just someone we hadn’t seen before, who’d take his place in The Holy Books and — just maybe — our hearts.
Or not. I thought about Mac Scarce, whose Met identity was already hobbled by arriving in the Tug McGraw trade and whose one-game tenure consisting of coming into a tie game and giving up a walk-off single to Richie Hebner, of all people. I thought about Lino Urdaneta, whose Met tenure was a success only because he arrived with an ERA of infinity. (It’s now and forever will be a cool 63.00.) I thought about Garrett Olson, whose Met tenure passed unnoticed while I yapped happily with a friend during a blowout game. I thought about Akeel Morris, who came and went while I was on a family trip to Mexico but still got a share of pennant prize money for his minimal contributions. I thought about Gerson Bautista, the only Met missing from The Holy Books because I don’t yet have a minor-league card for him.
They’re all Mets, just like Tom Seaver and Keith Hernandez and Mike Piazza and Yoenis Cespedes. Mets you might forget, granted, but Mets all the same.
The Mets didn’t call up a new player, alas: no Corey Taylor or P.J. Conlon or, I don’t know, Drew Smith. They called up Hansel Robles, Ol’ Point to the Sky, who’s a candidate for the Harvey treatment himself.
But my reflexive facepalm was somehow comforting. Hansel Robles, Jesus Christ, I thought, or something along those lines. But I’ve thought that before. Hey, maybe Robles figured something out during this stint in Las Vegas. I’ve thought that before too. Or if not, maybe this will be the end and we’ll see if Taylor or Conlon or Smith have something to offer. I haven’t thought any of those things yet, but I know the blueprint. When the time comes, I’ll be ready.
Maybe these Mets will start hitting again. Maybe the pitching will emerge from this rough patch — because, hey, wasn’t Matz pretty darn good tonight? Maybe they’ll look more like that 11-1 team than the 6-and-whatever-it-is-now mess they’ve become.
Or, if not, the 2019 Mets will give us hope. Or the 2020 Mets. Or some science-fiction version of the Mets who will be here before we know it. And we’ll go on. We always do.
by Greg Prince on 5 May 2018 4:34 am The Mets were teasing me again Friday night. For the second time this week, I went to see them, and for the second time this week, they got me revved up in the bottom of the ninth after spending eight-and-a-half innings essentially disengaged from the competition at hand. I was a willing passenger on their herky-jerky, ultimately ill-fated thrill ride in spite of my technically correct assessment of their impending fortunes. I fully understood their roar back from Zack Wheeler-fueled deficits of 5-0 and 8-2 would inevitably let me down, but I decided to let them and the silly hope they episodically engender have a go at me. The weather was sublime, the company (2015 National League champion spirit animal David “Skid” Rowe, in from California for the weekend) was even better and the whole point of being a Mets fan is to believe, no matter that deep down you are staunchly incredulous.
As the ninth pretended to provide a legitimate chance to crumble the Rockies — our hitters hitting, our runners running and all of us noisy — I allowed myself a glance toward the Mets dugout and pondered who wasn’t in there. Matt Harvey, I thought, is missing quite the scene in Flushing.
Matt Harvey, of course, used to be quite the scene in Flushing. Not so much lately, but go back a half-decade, and the only instances for which we generated measurably voluble noise were the days Matt pitched. Those were the days, my friend. Harvey Days. You remember Harvey Days, don’t you? They were an event unto themselves, an every-fifth-game season within a season, a square peg of winning demeanor jammed into a round hole of stubborn losing culture.
Those days are gone forever. The Mets just let them go.
Harvey the recently reluctant reliever was offered a trip to the minors by his employers. When Matt was a kid in Connecticut, bona fide major league starting pitchers Bobby Jones and Steve Trachsel, each of them an erstwhile All-Star, accepted demotions from the Mets to the Norfolk Tides when they could have contractually refused. But both (Jones in 2000, Trachsel in 2001) were struggling and both needed to find answers. They determined themselves not too big to go down to Triple-A. They returned to pitch and pitch well in New York.
Perhaps that road map to potential recovery struck the Dark Knight as too mundane a route to theoretically follow back to his perch atop Gotham. Matt said no. The Mets said bye, designating this erstwhile All-Star for assignment. Maybe Harvey will find his answers elsewhere. He won’t find them as a Met — not in Las Vegas, not in St. Lucie, not at Citi Field. He might not have found them before his contract ran out anyway. His body’s been through a lot; transplanting it to a less harsh environment wasn’t guaranteed to help his repertoire regain its snap. But he wasn’t getting anywhere here, so you’d figure he’d be willing to give another readily accessible path a try.
As the ninth-inning rally ensued, I turned toward the Mets dugout once more and remembered Harvey in his pomp. I remembered the physically imposing rookie who dropped and drove into our consciousness in the summer of 2012. I remembered the first hint that young, home-nurtured pitching was about to renew itself as a Met trademark. I remembered a neophyte’s self-assured insistence that he was never supposed to lose, let alone give up runs. I remembered four wins in four starts to kick off his first April. I remembered no losses until June. I remembered so many flirtations with no-hitters that one could be forgiven for suggesting they and Harvey get a room. I remembered Terry Collins smoothing out his rotation just enough so that Matt Harvey would be available to start at Citi on July 16, 2013. His opponents would be the best hitters in the American League. Like just about everybody else to that point that year, they couldn’t score off him either.
To dwell on more about Matt Harvey’s Mets career in the bottom of the ninth on Friday night seemed impolite to him. I preferred to leave him where we admired him, at the peak of his pomp, in the midst of his Days. It was also impolite to be distracted from the team he used to pitch for. They were busy rallying versus the Rockies as best as they could. I turned my attention away from who wasn’t in the dugout, jumped back into the present and made noise for those who were present. These were the Mets who fell behind by five before they batted, the Mets who edged to within one before they ended. These, for better and worse, were the Mets of Cabrera and Cespedes, Nimmo and Rosario, Frazier and Bruce, Conforto and Wheeler and so on.
There was no sign of Harvey among them. Really, there hadn’t been for ages.
by Jason Fry on 4 May 2018 1:11 am Remember when the Mets were good?
Our once-promising team is now thoroughly rooted in all-time last place, behind such worthies as the 2018 Baltimore Orioles, the 1962 Mets, the 1875 Brooklyn Atlantics and the 1899 Cleveland Spiders. That seemingly pretty decent 17-12 record? An illusion born of sabermetrics or some other newfangled defacement of the grand old game. No, the stats lie. The Mets are terrible, they’re getting worse, and we all know it.
They’re terrible individually and yet somehow even less than the sum of their ill-fitting parts. If you want to know how Jason Vargas‘s 2018 is going, he gave up six runs on 11 hits in 4 2/3 innings yet somehow lowered his ERA nearly six full points. Matt Harvey came in and was awful, which is no longer news nor anything that anybody particularly cares about. Jose Reyes started, presumably to keep a fuming Todd Frazier from excoriating more umpires, and did his usual nothing. Michael Conforto struck out some more.
It doesn’t end there. I have it on good authority that Mickey Callaway opened a bag of sunflower seeds and carelessly dropped it five seconds later; that Jay Horwitz let a ballpoint pen explode in his shirt pocket; that Chuck in community relations got phished and now everybody needs new passwords and a visit from the IT guy; and that various Mets fans forgot to walk dogs, came home from the bodega with the wrong milk, just realized Wednesday was mom’s birthday, dropped phones in toilets, mistook shampoo for toothpaste, and sped off with grocery bags atop cars.
If you have anything to do with orange and blue, it was that kind of day. Just like it was that kind of day yesterday. Tomorrow’s forecast? Iffy with a significant chance of horrific. Dress accordingly.
The Braves, on the other hand, are getting better a lot faster than we’d hoped they would. Freddie Freeman, a star in years both lean and kind, now has a supporting cast worthy of him. Ozzie Albies and Ronald Acuna Jr. both look like special players, with the ball making the kind of sound off their bats that Buck O’Neil once beamed and told us to listen for. Add in excellent complementary players such as Nick Markakis and Ender Inciarte, and now just wait for Dansby Swanson to relax and play up to his talent level. And I didn’t even mention Julio Teheran, who was coming off an injury so discombobulating that he only nearly no-hit the Mets.
The Braves aren’t this good; the Mets aren’t this bad. But the trend lines are disturbing, and being outscored 21-2 doesn’t lie. It’s said that when one door closes, another door opens. But that’s not so comforting when the door closing is yours and the one opening has your rival’s name on it.
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