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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 April 2018 12:07 pm
I was driving through my hometown
I was just kinda killin’ time
When I seen a face staring out of a black velvet painting
From the window of the five and dime
I couldn’t quite recall the name
But the pose looked familiar to me
So I asked the salesgirl,
“Who was that man between the Doberman and Bruce Lee?”
She said, “Just a local hero…
“Local hero,” she said with a smile
“Yeah, a local hero…
“He used to live here for a while”
—Bruce Springsteen
The inevitable, as Steve Zabriskie might have been moved to observe, became reality Saturday night, as the Mets played a baseball game without winning it, halting their streak of victories at nine and limiting them to a record of 11-2, or their best thirteen-game start ever.
Yeah, they’re OK. Still in first place, still setting the pace, still the apple of our eye, even if they failed to raise the Apple or any hint of offense against the Brewers in the kind of lifeless 5-1 loss you could sort of see coming. I have no data to support this assertion, but when the Mets are on a roll the length of a loaf of Italian bread and attract an immense crowd anticipant of figurative fireworks (never mind the Grucciesque variety), something in the oven fails to rise to the occasion.
Enough metaphors for you? I may be projecting from some past letdown, but the feeling, even from watching at home, felt familiar. The Mets can’t lose! Gotta go see the Mets not lose! These seats are way up because we’re all here to see the Mets never lose again!
And they lose with minimal fuss.
It happens. It could happen in front of a smaller gathering in the midst of habitual losing with no more than the back of a disgruntled security guard’s hand as your premium for showing up, but this situation, wherein the “in” separates irreparably from the “vincible,” is an old chestnut that doesn’t come out to play that often, thus is stands out. This was the sixth nine-game winning streak the Mets have ever unfurled that failed to reach double digits. If double digits were that easy to attain, somebody would have invented a single digit for them.
The Mets did nothing against Milwaukee starter Chase Anderson and less against Milwaukee closer Josh Hader. There was a no-hitter in progress for a long while, three hits when nine innings were through, and only yeoman long relief from Paul Sewald to count as a positive. As little as the 2018 Mets have resembled the 2017 Mets, this was a typical Sunday afternoon game from Citi Field last year, except it occurred on a Saturday night. Maybe the Mets were simply getting a jump on today yesterday, the way some folks insist on picking up the first edition of the Sunday Times.
Might as well grab the one that doesn’t have Saturday’s Mets score. News is depressing enough lately.
Because the Mets were so wholly stymied at bat, we can, if we wish, dismiss Matt Harvey’s latest ineffective outing on the mound as relatively inconsequential. Only a starter who was truly “on” could have matched zeroes with Chase Anderson. The Matt Harvey of 2012 and 2013 could have done that. The Matt Harvey of 2018 hews closer to the Matt Harvey of 2017. We can be polite and note he threw five scoreless innings versus the Phillies in his first start and left with a lead against the Nationals in his second, but here in his third start, he left little wiggle room for interpretation of contemporary Harvey. He looked like the Harvey we’ve come to know and expect. He looked like a guy whose spot in the rotation is no given once the manager has six options to fill five spots.
Early cuts both ways. If it’s too early to make October reservations based on thirteen games, it’s too early to nudge aside a pitcher of portfolio who’s still trying to come back from all that’s ailed him. But, honestly, if Matt Harvey’s name were, I don’t know, Shaun Marcum, would we be expecting a full-blown renaissance and cling to the idealized notion that the Mets are dealing nothing but aces every evening? Directly after the game, a reporter asked Mickey Callaway if he’s thought about moving Harvey, as opposed to Zack Wheeler, out of the rotation whenever Jason Vargas returns. Callaway predictably and wisely sidestepped the question. Mickey hasn’t managed long, but he knows enough not to make personnel pronouncements to the media before he’s made them to his personnel.
That reporter couldn’t have been the only one curious about Matt’s fate. I was thinking Harvey may not be one of our five starters down the line, and I wasn’t all that convinced I was conclusion-jumping. Matt isn’t as depressing to watch this April as he was last September, but — and this doesn’t show up in the box score — he’s nearly as depressing to listen to after the game. One word has made more appearances in his answers than Jerry Blevins has made appearances in his starts:
Better.
As in “I have to be better,” “I have to do better,” “I need to make better pitches.” I swear I heard Harvey use the word “better” used in some form or fashion five separate times in less than five minutes of Q&A. None of it was in the context of warning Jonathan Villar or Jett Bandy that they’d “better” watch out after taking him deep. (I guess that’s more Thorspeak.) I remember hearing a lot of “better” out of Harvey late last season when he was pitching worse and worse. It may his safe word now, like “cripes” was for Terry Collins.
Give Matt a check mark for self-awareness. The Mets could shrug off a loss after nine straight wins. A pitcher who’s given up four runs on eight hits in five innings (on the heels of a start that measured four runs, nine hits and five innings), does need to do better, whatever his name, whatever his past. Harvey’s 2018 is a work in progress, and the Mets’ cushion in the standings allows both work and progress to continue.
That past, though. It doesn’t just linger in our collective subconscious. It has seats behind the plate in Excelsior. Back when the Mets as a whole lagged behind their emerging ace, we used to be the ones to vouch for Harvey being better. Better than Strasburg one magical Friday night. Better than Kershaw as an All-Star assignment approached. Better than any Mets starter in decades, we swore. “Harvey’s better.”
Remember that? Hard to forget. Hard not to strain to hear still.
by Jason Fry on 14 April 2018 12:28 am Baseball’s pretty fun under any circumstances. Buried in the standings and auditioning kids whom everyone knows aren’t ready? A September game’s still not a bad use of an evening. Grinding along in a summer you know won’t require keeping your fall calendar clear? Ditto.
But baseball’s even more fun when it matters.
Starting 11-1 doesn’t ensure a September or even an August of baseball that matters, but it sure doesn’t hurt. And it’s a great teaser for what could be. Which was a pretty apt description for a gorgeous Friday in New York, the kind of sparkling spring day that promises gentle weather and ample sunshine to come, with a crisp, clear night as a chaser.
It would have been a perfect night for baseball even if our team hadn’t run off eight straight victories, six of them on the road. Given that added bonus, what better plan as there than to roll up to Citi Field and cheer on the pinch-me Mets?
That’s not what I did, though.
I wasn’t there. I didn’t see the big crowd of 34,000-odd at all. But that wasn’t my fault, because I was driving from Stamford, Conn., up to Massachusetts. And I could certainly hear that big crowd. They were a constant counterpoint to Howie and Josh, a Greek chorus of emotions undergirding long drives hit by Todd Frazier and Jay Bruce, enemy bats put in futile motion by a pitchers’ parade that began with Steven Matz and ended with Jeurys Familia, and the unlikely progress of Jose Lobaton, the Plan C catcher, from home to third in a single trip.
I could hear them on every play of moderate note, and I kept catching myself smiling. Smiling and thinking, That sound makes me happy. I didn’t realize how much I missed it.
That’s another thing about baseball that makes me happy, whatever the condition of the roster, standings and apparent future: the sport is a faithful companion, loyally filling whatever time you have to offer it under any circumstances that allow you to find the game.
Our drive was three and a half hours or so, which is a chunk of time perfectly sized for a baseball game. The long-distance conversation started out the old-fashioned way, with me trying to figure out how the heck to tune the radio in the rental car and trying to remember what frequency WOR was. That approach worked just fine until around Old Saybrook, when wow and flutter began competing for the right to be heard.
Bruce’s misadventure with a fly ball marked the end of the traditional route: Howie noted that Jay was barking at himself with displeasure, but I mostly heard a female pop singer. I was pretty sure that wasn’t Bruce’s mode of self-laceration, which meant WOR was no longer able to defend its atmospheric footprint and it was time to switch to At Bat. The newfangled way can be a bit dicey away from Wi-Fi, but it was flawless this time, with nary a dreaded AUTHORIZATION ERROR or BUFFERING. It brought us to the end of the game a mere 20 minutes short of our destination, a chunk of time just right for one’s own personal happy recap.
Some thrills and spills were had along the way, sure, but when you win that’s part of the fun. Frazier cracked a pair of home runs, an excellent addition to his portfolio of enthusiasm and can-do spirit. The Mets continued their early-season habit of getting knocked down but hopping up and punching back harder. Mickey Callaway navigated lefties and righties and young guys in new roles flawlessly to escape a tense eighth inning. Lobaton emerged from a day behind the plate without (presumably) needing an X-ray or an MRI.
It was a beautiful night, we got where we needed to go with minimal bother, the fans were out in cheerful profusion, we got to listen in, and the Mets won. That’s a whole lot of win columns at once.
by Greg Prince on 13 April 2018 11:39 am Remember that bruise on Kevin Plawecki’s mitt hand from Wednesday night’s game, the one that was declared just a bruise once x-rays were reported as negative? You will when you look for Plawecki behind the plate and see no trace of him. The hand, we learned from the Post’s Mike Puma Friday morning, is broken from the fastball that hit him in the otherwise rousing top of the eighth inning when the Mets were capturing their otherwise rousing eighth win in a row. This shall we say breaking news followed the Mets revealing on Wednesday that Plawecki’s platoon partner Travis d’Arnaud was out with a torn UCL in the elbow he uses for throwing and is probably done for the year.
If you’re keeping score at home, use pencil for “2”.
Exit, once it’s made official, Travin d’Arwecki, and enter, at least temporarily, Tose Nobaton. Or Jomas Lido. However you line them up, the new catching combo is the minor variation on the major league plan. The Tomas Nido half of that you glimpsed when Plawecki left Wednesday night for his x-ray and possibly witnessed sipping coffee last September. Jose Lobaton, presumably aboard an eastbound flight from Vegas, you’ll recall from killing the Mets as a National. Now he gets a chance to make it up to us.
There are also market solutions, one in Miami if the Mets can shake J.T. Realmuto loose from the Marlins’ loose grip on competitiveness. They’ll probably want prospects and stuff for him. Carlos Ruiz is still out there somewhere, I believe. I always liked him despite his being a Phillie, “always” going back some years, which I suppose is an issue. Ruiz is 39, but played solid defense when he was 38 in Seattle. Wasn’t the very recently DFA’d Miguel Montero considered hot stuff fairly lately? Jonathan Lucroy was an ideal free agent target over the winter, but he went to Oakland. That doesn’t help, I realize, but I just wanted to mention that.
The d’Arnaud-Plawecki platoon, conceived from strong 2017 finishes and born of 2018 budgetary finagling, proved an adequate eleven-game answer as long as something absurd like serious injuries to two catchers didn’t materialize in a ten-minute span. Chalk it up to the Mets amid their best start ever to reserve a roster spot for absurdity.
Catchers, huh? We all know the riff on the first Met selected in the expansion draft. Casey Stengel said the Mets went for Hobie Landrith because without a catcher, you’re gonna have a lot of passed balls.
Great line. And apparently timeless.
The Mets have persevered through stuff like this before. Deprived of the services of Jerry Grote in the middle of 1973, they reached down to Double-A Memphis and elevated Ron Hodges. Hodges would make such an impression en route to the World Series that he fastened himself to the depth chart for a dozen seasons. Hodges was still a Met when John Stearns went down for most of two years between 1982 and 1984, a span by the end of which the Mets were again, at last, serious pennant contenders, just as they were in 1973. Nido is up from Double-A, too.
Precedent can take on whatever significance you choose. The Mets were without Todd Hundley entering 1998 and muddled through nearly two months without a legitimate starting catcher. Hell, they more than muddled. They played better than .500 ball with a mélange of Spehr, Castillo, Pratt, Tatum and Wilkins crouching and putting down fingers. The Mets went 23-20 through May 21 sans Hundley; you could look it up. Oh, then, on May 22, they got Piazza and improved exponentially. We’re probably not gonna be able to get a postmodern Piazza, but we also don’t need to improve exponentially.
I’m running out of heartening examples of catchers going down and other catchers stepping up and the Mets doing fine. Maybe Nido is reincarnated Ron Hodges and 2018 adds a charming footnote to its legend already in progress. Maybe Realmuto flies the same South Florida fire sale shuttle to LaGuardia that once transported ol’ No. 31 out of teal purgatory. Perhaps Phil Evans has gotten really good at his emergency skill set since being sent down. He’s an emergency catcher and we seem to have a bit of a catching emergency.
Anything is possible, including us being 10-1. As Mets fan Dan Rather might advise, courage. Meanwhile, best wishes Travin. May you both heal soon for everybody’s sake.
UPDATE: Additional reports indicate Plawecki has a hairline fracture and may not be out more than three weeks. This may be where we see how the new Met injury protocols perform versus the old club standard of magical thinking. Also, Johnny Monell seems to have come marching home, or at least to Las Vegas. Multiple sources report our 2015 backup-backup catcher has signed anew with the organization.
by Jason Fry on 12 April 2018 6:37 am We begin, as we apparently sometimes do, in June 2014 in Miami.
Zack Wheeler‘s best career start remains the one he turned in against these same Marlins that June 19. (Though we really are talking laundry: Justin Bour is the lone holdover from that squad.) In that game Wheeler faced the minimum 24 batters over the first eight innings, carving up what was still Team Loria with fastballs, sliders and change-ups that all bordered on unhittable. It wasn’t a no-hitter — double plays had taken care of Casey McGehee‘s second-inning leadoff single, McGehee’s fifth-inning leadoff walk, and Jarrod Saltalamacchia’s single leading off the sixth — but Wheeler’s performance was as dominant as any game in which you start getting late-inning alerts and the ninth inning pops up on national TV.
The problem? The Mets were only up 1-0, and I was mired in the dank memory of Dallas Green leaving Paul Wilson in to finish up a similarly promising 2-1 win over the Cubs on a spring afternoon in 1996. With two outs in the ninth and the tying run on second, the Mets walked Mark Grace to face Sammy Sosa, who connected and turned the game into a 4-2 loss. It would be unfair to say Sosa’s home run also walked off Wilson’s career, but it requires less poetic license than I’d like.
Eighteen years later, Wheeler gave up a two-out single to Reed Johnson. Like Wilson, he was left in, and needed to retire Rafael Furcal, a Mets nemesis on too many days. But Furcal lined a fastball (arriving at 95) to center, the game was over, and the sky was the limit for 24-year-old Zack Wheeler.
Except the sky can be lower than you think. Wheeler struggled with the usual stuff young pitchers struggle with: location, consistency and mechanics. Then he blew out his UCL, needed an extra season to rehab it, and was ineffective when he finally did return. This year’s spring training wasn’t much better, and ended with Wheeler demoted. Wednesday marked the first time he took his turn in the rotation with Noah Syndergaard, Jacob deGrom, Matt Harvey and Steven Matz, a quintet once touted as a too many aces for one hand, but which had become a full-employment act for medical professionals.
If that sounds like a lot of baggage for a spot start in April, welcome to New York.
What was most encouraging about Wheeler’s performance Wednesday night, at least to me, was that his stuff didn’t scream “electric.” Rather, Wheeler succeeded by acing the three tests he failed more often than not back when he was a wunderkind: location, consistency, and mechanics. His delivery is different, as Ron Darling noted: Wheeler now brings his hand back more sharply instead of “wrapping” or “cupping” the baseball behind his hip.
Darling said that helps turns good mechanics into muscle memory, and in earlier games he’s discussed cupping as something Harvey’s also trying to unlearn. This isn’t a new thing — Darling said he had to learn not to cup the baseball as a young hurler — so I’m curious why it’s a new thing around the Mets. Was it not detected last year? Did Dan Warthen not see it as a flaw, while Dave Eiland does? Did Warthen try to address it but found his charges wouldn’t listen?
Whatever the case, Wheeler was sent out to Las Vegas to work on his mechanics, and the early returns couldn’t have been better. But in an inverse of that 2014 game, the Mets were behind 1-0, stymied by Jarlin Garcia in his first big-league start. Stymied, as in they went the first six innings without a hit. (Parallels upon parallels: that June 2014 game was Miami starter Andrew Heaney‘s very impressive big-league debut. If you’re wondering what happened to Heaney, he was packed off to Anaheim, tore his own UCL and has struggled since returning.)
Don Mattingly removed Garcia despite his having only thrown 77 pitches, which seemed like a big mistake and sent me into a bout of cranky-ass Clint Eastwood glowering and side-eyeing. Later, Mattingly said he thought the deep counts Garcia had started running up indicated he was tiring. Defensible, though given what’s going on in Miami, it’s possible that no one noticed Mattingly has been blinking HELP ME in Morse code and he’s now communicating his distress in a new way.
The Mets, as is their wont in this so-far-charmed season, went to work in the eighth. The comeback started on a troubling note, as Tayron Guerrero drilled Kevin Plawecki in the hand with a 100 MPH fastball. With Travis d’Arnaud revealed to have a partially torn UCL — which I believe was the lone body part TdA hadn’t had trouble with — that spelled trouble. Plawecki, though sporting an impressive bruise, was able to make a fist and take a base, and two batters later Michael Conforto sent him to third with a pinch-hit double off Chris O’Grady. Adrian Gonzalez then hit for Wheeler, a lefty-lefty matchup that worked, as has pretty much everything Mickey Callaway has tried in 2018.
Gonzalez singled to center and the Mets had the lead, which they’d expand to 4-1 thanks to the heroics of Asdrubal Cabrera, Wilmer Flores and Todd Frazier. Throw in solid relief from Robert Gsellman (whose evil sinkers left the Marlins with thousand-yard stares), Jerry Blevins and A.J. Ramos and the Mets had completed a perfect road trip and risen to a 10-1 record.
When you’re 10-1, flaws can be convincingly labeled as beauty marks. Conforto has showed he can hit lefties, but Juan Lagares needs to play and his defense has been impeccable. Brandon Nimmo should be playing in the big leagues, but see the above problem. The Mets short-circuited an inning by being too aggressive on the basepaths, but the vast majority of the time their See an Inch Take 90 Feet philosophy has worked wonders. The Mets have a surplus of starters with one more yet to make his 2018 debut, but after a year of Tommy Milone I will refuse to call this a problem even if subjected to torture. (Which also describes a year of Tommy Milone.) Heck, the fact that there’s a worry about the catchers suggests Tomas Nido will walk off the Brewers Friday night.
It’s good to be 10-1. It’s better than good, in fact. It’s electric. Heck, as a wise old man once said, it’s amazin’.
by Greg Prince on 11 April 2018 4:20 am In the annals of New York Mets Squad Goals, none has loomed as more aspirational than Best Ten-Game Start in Franchise History, provided the Mets have tied their best nine-game start in franchise history, and the tenth game is the next to be played.
The parameters were in place Tuesday night in Miami. The 8-1 Mets were taking on not only the Marlins, but their lack of precedent. The Marlins were the more formidable opponent. They’re anonymous, but they are physically capable of pitching and hitting and such. Plus they wear Marlins uniforms, inevitably a Fish in our ointment. The lack of Met precedent was incidental. Nobody specifically arranged for the Mets to be 8-1 after nine games in 2018 any more than anybody aimed for 8-1 in 1985 or 2006. Well, maybe the 7-1 Mets of ’85 and ’06 and ’18 when each squad was determined to never lose again.
Our ten-game season’s final task was at hand, however it materialized. The Mets did almost nothing but win out of the gate and it sure would have been nice had they maintained their habit. That’s what I told myself I’d say had they dropped to 8-2, dropping to 8-2 about as champagne a problem as a ballclub could have ten games in. Because I’m a reasonable human being, not to mention a Mets fan in his fiftieth season of rooting for a decidedly imperfect entity, I prepared for the loss that would have prevented history. It snuck up on me in 1985. It stepped right up to greet me in 2006. This time I’d get to it before it and its accomplices, the Marlins, got to me.
For a few innings, I allowed myself the impression that the road to 9-1 was going to be paved with ample offense and deGrominant pitching. We were up handily from the outset, ahead 3-0 in the fifth. I really liked that third run. Amed Rosario doubled and Michael Conforto singled him home; cross your fingers, there’s your promotional video for the next ten years. Jacob deGrom was mostly cruising. The team milestone to which nobody gives any thought except when the bulk of the team’s first nine games are deliriously satisfying seemed within easy reach.
Reality slapped our hand in the bottom of the fifth. All those little things that go wrong, the ones that Jagger and Richards had in mind as they catalogued how one can’t always get what one wants, began to fritz out. A foul grounder in the vicinity of Todd Frazier was ruled fair. It was an unreviewable play. Like Tommy getting it in Goodfellas, we had to sit still and take it. One night in 2012, when pretty much all plays were unreviewable, our Metsies were trying to do something they never had done before and a pretty fair-looking ball was ruled foul and saved our bacon. Six years later, I decided that if I had to trade a dubious third base line call that facilitated the First No-Hitter for another that cost us the Best Ten-Game Start, I could deal with that.
When the heretofore unknown Marlin who got lucky on that foul gone fair, Yadiel Rivera, scored a couple of batters later on a grounder that ticked off the same third baseman’s glove, I figured, well, there ya go. There’s a reason we’ve never been 9-1. It’s never meant to be. We’ll just have to be the best darn 8-2 club we can be. That sense was reinforced on a run-scoring sac fly that didn’t have to be a run-scoring sac fly — Conforto caught a ball he should have let Lagares take, because Lagares has an arm Conforto simply doesn’t have — and set in bold type when Justin Bour Bourishly socked a two-run homer to give Miami a 4-3 lead.
The whole thing had been too good a set-up. A comfortable lead. Our most reliable pitcher. A team record a few innings from our grasp. Ah, as I’ve rationalized so often for five decades, whaddayagonnado?
Ya gonna come back. That’s what the 2018 Mets do. Other Mets wouldn’t, but they’re not here, man. The Met who got the Mets even in the sixth was the Met who was briefly befuddled in the fifth. Frazier (or “Todd” as I heard myself calling him encouragingly) doubled to lead off the inning. Then he scooted from second to third on a fly to left, which needs to show up in the box score, because there’s nothing intuitive about such a play. A better-situated fly, from Lagares to center, whisked Frazier home with the tying run.
My projection for Frazier prior to March 29 was he’d probably homer just enough to keep us off his back while his average wallowed in the low .200s, a number that we’d be increasingly unable to ignore by May. Frazier hasn’t hit a home run yet and is batting .212, yet he is likely as valuable to the Met cause as any position player not named Asdrubal. Todd’s made virtually every one of his hits count enormously, and he’s the universally acknowledged Minister of Team Culture. The latter won’t matter so much when the Mets aren’t streaking. Right now, they’re a blur of salt, pepper and resilience that brews up quicker than instant coffee.
The Marlins took their lead fairly dramatically, yet didn’t even have time to savor a cup of Taster’s Choice. Smokin’ Todd Frazier had punched right back. Maybe 9-1 was their destiny. Or maybe not. Sure, deGrom recovered his mojo in the sixth, but three Mets struck out swinging in the seventh, and Jacob Rhame’s first appearance since saving the series in Washington flew full Bour to hell. Justin the Recognizable Marlin went deep again, another two-run shot that pushed the Fish ahead, 6-4, and delayed Hall of Rhame ceremonies indefinitely.
Typical Mets-Marlins game at the Loriatorium getting out of hand late. But wait! There is no more Loria (as if he was the magic ingredient) and “typical Mets” has been redefined. Witness the eighth inning. Wilmer Flores homered to lead off. I had barely processed my disappointment that we were now set up to lose by one when Asdrubal Cabrera, who had homered from the right side in the fourth, homered from the left side in the eighth. It was a bomb on the kind of three-oh pitch Asdrubal has spent practically his entire career laying off. The Mets could have used a baserunner there. They could have used a run more. Cabrera meant to get them one and got them one.
I love this guy when he’s not asking to be traded.
So we’re in a 6-6 game in the eighth, with a 9-1 start still on the table. Having used Rhame and the otherwise forgotten Paul Sewald in the seventh, Mickey Callaway reached into his bulging bag of bullpen (briefly supplemented by Corey Oswalt) and pulled out Hansel Robles. That’s as mixed a bag as you could lug to any major league mound. We all know what we’re in for when we see Hansel, which is to say we have no idea what we’re in for, but it will be a fretful few minutes finding out. Robles reminds me of a town not far from where I grew up on Long Island: Point…LOOK OUT!
Hansel can’t help what he does with his right index finger after he releases the ball. I’m more concerned about his fielders having a chance to react. There was a moment of self-fulfilling prophecy in the eighth when, with one out, Bryan Holaday, a Marlin whose name I’m typing like I know who he is, got hold of a Robles delivery and sent it to very deep left. I thought it was gone. Gary Cohen thought it was gone. The camera, I swear, thought it was gone. But it wasn’t. It was only a double. “That was a near-death experience,” I proclaimed as I mopped my brow. Is “near-death experience” an exaggeration for a go-ahead run not being secured by the opposition on April 10? Maybe I’m taking this team and this season far more seriously than I’d planned.
Limited in his tour of the bases, Holaday pulled into second. That was as far as he’d be going. Robles didn’t intentionally put anybody else on and handed the 6-6 tie to the Met offense to start the ninth. A tie can be a lovely gift if the recipient knows what to do with it.
The Mets did. Rosario reached base on an error (errors make nice gifts, too). Conforto got on via walk (we can always use another one of those). Then Yoenis Cespedes, whose dedication has fortunately been more infectious than his illness, was up. Cespedes has been mired in both a slump and the flu. It didn’t stop him from driving home the winning run on Sunday night and it hasn’t kept him from staying in the lineup. In another season, under another manager, Yoenis essentially refusing to sit despite being sick would be framed as insubordination in a clubhouse out of control, especially if Yo was spotted wearing his hat backwards. But the chemistry conjured between Cespedes and Callaway — salted, peppered, parsleyed, saged, rosemaryed and thymed — is good for what ails us.
Cespedes took a break from clearing his nasal passages and repeatedly swinging through strike three to double sharply down the third base line off Brad Ziegler. Yoenis has only two hits since last week. Yoenis also has two game-grabbing hits since last week. I’ve never enjoyed a Met slump more.
No fair/foul confusion here. Rosario was home so fast that he took time to applaud his teammate before touching the plate. Conforto needed to put on a little more speed, but he, too, crossed it without encountering a fuss. Cespedes, who sometimes can’t be bothered to step toward first on a dropped third strike, hustled into third base on the futile throw that didn’t nab the insurance run he had just paid the premium on. The Mets were up by two.
Jeurys Familia entered for the bottom of the ninth. With five ostensibly successful outings to get his season going, no Met closer had ever saved so many games so soon. Yet Familia, who didn’t used to be one of those needles-and-pins closers, is one of those closers a lot lately. So many needles and pins surge through our extremities when he pitches he could open a notions shop on the side. Nothing’s bitten him badly, but oh how his ninth innings have nipped at our nerves. We can’t legitimately expect closers to amass nothing but one-two-three saves, but we do. And when they don’t do what we expect, we can only resort to our Franco-Benitez mantra:
Pins and needles
Needles and pins
It’s a Mets fan pulling for a closer we never completely trust
That grins
The stress was lighter with a two-run advantage, but still, one out in, Bour and his bat are in the box, the count has bloated to three-and-two, there’s a pitch taken at the outside corner and…strike three! Jeurys got the call. Not a gift, a legitimate strike, but this is Marlins Park in the bottom of the ninth inning. We know what tends to happen.
We are, however, getting the hang of other possibilities. Like the third Marlin of the inning, Brian Anderson, grounding to Rosario, who throws it to Flores at first and, whoa, whaddayagonnado has morphed into whaddayaknow! We know not what could happen but what did happen: the New York Mets won for the seventh time in a row and, more historically, the ninth time in ten games to start their season for the first time since there have been Mets. The first time there were Mets, in 1962, it took the Mets ten games just to win one. We’ve gone from 1-9 to 9-1, worst Met start to best Met start, in a mere 56 years.
The 2018 Mets are grand champions of the ten-game season. In lieu of a trophy, they’ll play an eleventh game next. I think I like that better.
by Jason Fry on 10 April 2018 12:41 pm We’ll start with the asterisk: * means “for now.”
That’s not said with foreboding, just a veteran fan’s acceptance of baseball reality. There are no teams with .889 winning percentages, not even dynasties. There are only teams on .889 streaks. While you’re in one, enjoy the ride. It’ll end, but that’s no reason not to throw your hands up and whoop and laugh. The nagging certainty that this isn’t real life is all the more reason to do those things, in fact.
While on their .889 streak, the Mets are cheerfully thumbing their noses at all sorts of perceived baseball realities, such as the fact that nothing good ever happens to them at New Soilmaster Stadium, the lair of the municipal scam pretending to be a sports franchise known as the Miami Marlins. The Marlins are now majority-owned by Bruce Sherman, with Derek Jeter dispensing his usual blanditudes as front man, but they’re the same hustle they were under the loathsome likes of Wayne Huizenga and Jeffrey Loria, a scheme to bilk taxpayers and eliminate all but the most masochistic fans.
The Marlins dumped a 100+ homer outfield over the winter, trading away Giancarlo Stanton, Christian Yelich and Marcell Ozuna in the kind of deals even a lapdog like Bowie Kuhn wouldn’t have countenanced, with Dee Gordon and his .300 average and 60 steals excised as an additional middle finger to whatever’s left of the fanbase. What’s left is an outfit that would be a stretch to be called a Triple-A team: there’s Justin Bour, singularly luckless newcomer Starlin Castro, and a bunch of cannon fodder.
Oh, but the roof’s open these days. Which I guess isn’t all bad, as it gives passing birds a chance to crap on that Red Grooms excrescence behind the outfield wall.
The Marlins being pitiable as opponents and contemptible as a business is nothing new: the first happens in grimly predictable cycles, while the second is a lead-pipe cinch regardless of what year it is. So too, unfortunately, is expecting the Marlins to give the Mets fits. Seriously, you could put 25 mischievous junior-high kids who didn’t much care for baseball in Marlins motley and odds are the Mets would at least have to navigate a save chance.
Monday night’s game was ominous the moment Sunday night’s game ended, with the Mets stuck showing up around dawn, looking at the possibility of a letdown game after an extra-inning triumph, and Yoenis Cespedes battling the flu. And as Monday night rolled on it sure had the aspect of one of those Objects in Rearview Mirror Are Closer Than They Appear contests. Noah Syndergaard looked sweaty and unhappy, continuing his successful but quietly perplexing early season; the Met bats went to sleep after some early noise; and whoever those guys were in orange and white and yellow and blue and several other clashing colors I can’t remember kept gnawing on the Mets’ ankles, until somehow a 3-0 lead had turned into a 3-2 frowner.
Games like that are New Soilmaster specialities, of course: if I close my eyes I get blurry images of teal, Billy the Marlin’s permanent nihilistic grin, and some slap-hitter bouncing a ball just over second, or a Met making a wild pitch, or a miscast left fielder looking up in sudden panic.
An Amed Rosario single in the seventh gave the good guys a sorely needed bit of insurance, though the worries staged a strategic retreat rather than abandoning the field: with the bases loaded, Kyle Barraclough opted for the unorthodox strategy of attacking Cespedes and Jay Bruce with changeups, his third-best pitch, which somehow worked. Then, in the ninth, Jeurys Familia needed to get two outs with the tying run on second, and oh boy. Would the Mets lose in regulation, or get walked off in the 14th on some high chopper that left Asdrubal Cabrera and Adrian Gonzalez frowning at each other, Miami and the cosmos?
But hey, charmed life … for now. Familia struck out Miguel Rojas, caught Castro looking, and the asterisk remained the business for some other day.
by Greg Prince on 9 April 2018 12:26 pm ESPN asked if the Mets and Nationals could come out and play Sunday night. Sure, they were told. But could they come out and play well? That was going to be more difficult on another Arctic evening in early April. Not that ESPN cared. They need product, and the Mets and Nationals are mandated to show up when instructed. First pitch 8:08 PM? In this endless weather? It’ll make handling the ball a challenge, but who doesn’t like a challenge?
Funny, only the Nationals have their hands raised.
Washington is not surrendering, but it’s nice to dream in the wake of a twelve-inning 6-5 victory that required perseverance as much it did mittens. The win meant a sweep of the presumptive NL East champions. We dream of sweeps of consensus favorites when we’re not the universally agreed team to beat. Sweep dreams are made of a weekend like we just reveled in, when a couple of games that honestly could have gone either way went decisively to the Mets. You braced for the Nationals to rise from the red and grab them. You figured they’d bandage Daniel Murphy up good and send him to the plate with his scythe to escort the Mets to their demise. Murphy, however, remains on the disabled list. For the first time in ages, Daniel wasn’t around to either help or hurt the Mets.
With the Murph Factor neutralized, the teams were even. And when the Mets and Nats are even, the 7-1 Mets are 3½ games better, making the magic number to clinch the division Don’t Be Silly.
Be as giddy as you choose, though, because after Sunday night (after Saturday afternoon, after Thursday afternoon, in the midst of a five-game winning streak), Hardball is Back, the Magic is Real, Baseball’s Like It Oughta Be, name your hype. The Mets are living up to it. Better yet, they’re establishing a brand focus groups would have rejected on the grounds of unbelievability.
The Mets fall behind? They catch up.
The Mets make mistakes? They recover from them pronto.
The Mets are cold? They’re hotter than the Nationals, that’s for sure.
Sunday night I was pretty certain the Mets, who currently possess their best eight-game record ever (alongside 1985’s and 2006’s) would lose. Maybe it was my two-day headache persistently elbowing me in the left sinus. Maybe it was all those pesky Nationals baserunners, fourteen of whom Washington eventually left on base, but I didn’t know that was gonna be their destination. Maybe it was Matt Harvey struggling while sort of succeeding. Matt got through five as the pitcher of record on the winning side, but he gave up some shots, including one from Anthony Rendon Yoenis Cepsedes wouldn’t have caught at the track had the wind not intercepted it first. Maybe it was ESPN, a convenient if accurate target when it comes to identifying mood-damaging entities. ESPN didn’t help my headache by making me spend several innings synchronizing my MLB app with my DVR precisely enough so I could have WOR’s beloved voices on and irritating interlopers off. (Juggling of this many initials hasn’t been necessary since the heyday of R.A. Dickey.) I can’t speak to anything A-Rod said about wanting to be a Met when the century was young, because I had the Vasgersian volume muted — did ESPN hold a talentless contest to choose its new lead baseball announcer?
While I carefully calibrated pleasing audio to plausibly live video and waited for the National shoe to drop, the multimedia Mets did good things in chunks. An Adrian Gonzalez grand slam swing in the third inning was worth four runs. MVP candidate (as in Mini Valuable Player of the eight-game season) Asdrubal Cabrera tried on a solo belt in the fifth. It looked good on him. But the Nationals wouldn’t go away, which is their prerogative in a facility called Nationals Park. I thought doom awaited on what became Harvey’s final pitch, a Michael Taylor grounder to the right side Harvey didn’t hustle to first to cover. But Gonzalez — he can still field, y’know — got the ball to Todd Frazier, and Frazier got it to Travis d’Arnaud, and Trea Turner got himself thrown out without much dispute.
That was in the home fifth, leaving Harvey ahead, 5-4, as he left us. There were miles to go before anybody could sleep. The Mets’ offense nodded off. The Nationals kept coming if not arriving. They cobbled together a run off Robert Gsellman in the seventh to tie it. Seemed like there should have been more. Or could have been more. Ideally, the Nationals should get nothing and like it. Coulda, shoulda, woulda…the Mets eschewed multiple double play opportunities all night. Whose bright idea was it store the balls in the freezer ahead of first pitch?
Somehow, the Nationals couldn’t break through to the fourth base. Rendon got himself picked off by Jerry Blevins in the eighth with, oh, Bryce Harper at bat and two out. Nice pitching for Jerry. When Harper returned to lead off the ninth, game still knotted at five, he was greeted by Seth Lugo and a base on balls. Everything that hinted at going wrong was on the verge of making good on its suggestion. A pickoff attempt went awry. Harper dashed to second. Matt Adams flied deep to center. Harper sprinted to third.
Mickey Callaway, who was apparently on safari during the denouement of the sixth game of the 1999 National League Championship Series, opted to intentionally load the bases. You can arrange that with much less fuss than you could in Kenny Rogers’s day. Howie Kendrick was pointed toward first. So was Turner. All Lugo had to do was pull two outs out of the metaphorical fire. He could do so at any base, thanks to all that walking.
Seth chose home plate, striking out Taylor swinging and Pedro Severino looking. Extra innings had been achieved. Extra headache was in effect. The Mets went down swinging, swinging and looking to Sammy Solis in their discouraging half of the tenth. Lugo, one of about a dozen secret Callaway weapons, worked around the sleekest of bunt singles to Rendon in the bottom of the tenth and retired Harper to escape another fright. The Mets made nothing out of a little something in the eleventh: Cabrera led off with a single and took second on a wild pitch, as is Asdrubal’s wont. He then attempted to take third on a pitch that was not wild enough and was thrown out in the same sequence in which Gonzalez struck out. Then d’Arnaud fanned, which helps explain why neither my foreboding feeling nor sinus headache would dissipate.
Lugo’s still out there in the bottom of the eleventh. He’s a starter who’s a reliever who hears from Peter Criss. Seth, I hear you calling…Tell Peter Seth can’t come home right now. He and the boys are playing and they just can’t find the sound. Good thing Lugo tried another take on the mound. He retired Adams, Kendrick and Turner in acoustic fashion.
Seth, what can he do? Throw three scoreless innings, that’s what.
The twelfth was the inning during which the Mets remembered it’s a long flight to Miami from everywhere north of Tampa. They got packing with Juan Lagares pinch-singling off Brandon Kintzler, the otherwise overmatched Amed Rosario competently bunting, Michael Conforto predictably pointed to first and Yoenis Cespedes processing that somebody was intentionally walked so he could bat with the go-ahead runner at second. Just when there’s no getting Cespedes out, which was the case as of Thursday, he descends imperceptibly into slumps. And just when your patience with Cespedes dwindles like a Samsung Galaxy battery, Yo charges up a fresh supply of power. Powerfully as he needed to be, Yo lined a single into center. Not one of his most resounding hits, but definitely among his most effective. Lagares scampered home from second, the Mets handed a one-run lead to Jacob Rhame…
What, you thought Mickey was gonna allow Jeurys Familia’s right arm to sway in the Washington wind? Gonna need that guy for the rest of the season. Gonna need everybody. Rhame is one of twenty-five Mets, and he was entrusted with sealing the sweep of the Nationals that would not just set but cement the tone by which the 2018 season started.
Young Rhame did it. Got turncoat Matt Reynolds to ground out, struck out Wilson Ramos reincarnation Severino and, despite allowing a double to Wilmer Difo, remained unrattled in grounding out Adam Eaton. Put it in the books as pass me that ibuprofen!
The first-place Mets barely got by the Nationals, but they don’t ask for margins at the end of the night. They just ask for the W. We saw three of them in this series, and none of them could be mistaken for curly.
by Jason Fry on 8 April 2018 12:53 pm “If you believe you’re playing well because you’re getting laid, or because you’re not getting laid, or because you wear women’s underwear, then you are! And you should know that!” — Crash Davis
I hate to say it, but the Mets aren’t this good.
All too soon, they will provide evidence of that. They will lose. Maybe they will even lose two, three or four in a row. Mickey Callaway‘s tactical decisions will backfire. His apportionment of playing time will rankle. The strike zone will cause our stalwarts to seethe, remonstrate and take an early seat or two instead of shrugging a bit sheepishly while opponents rant and rave. (Marty Foster’s been in a mood this first week, and we’ve twice been the beneficiaries.)
Streaks happen, good and bad, and as fans we’d be wise to accept their flukiness without insisting on reading too much into it. Remember the 2017 Dodgers? They spent the end of the summer losing 16 out of 17, yet wound up winning 104 games and playing Game 7 of the World Series. It was a pinch-me season … if you subtract the three weeks in which you would have sworn the Dodgers forgot how to play baseball.
A couple of things, though.
For one thing, bunched up and attended by luck as they were, those wins all count. The Mets really are five games over .500, a moderately lofty goal never achieved in 2017’s lost season. What they’ll do in 2018 is largely unwritten, but that part’s recorded in ink.
For another thing, while streaks are statistical noise in a long season, I’d argue the timing of those streaks can have a real effect. The Mets are sorting through the following things, in no particular order: a new manager; relievers being asked to work in subtly different ways; starters being asked to work in subtly different ways; key players coming back from injuries; young players at career crossroads; and a different philosophy underpinning lineup construction.
Nip and tuck a few runs and rearrange offensive output a bit and the Mets could be 1-6 going into tonight’s game in Washington, without being a drastically different team than the 6-1 outfit they are. But we all know the conversation would be night and day. The use of the bullpen would be under a microscope. There’d be carping from the jock alumni about starters and toughness and finishing what you start. Everyone with a microphone or blog software would be a newly minted expert on lineup construction. That most talkative of clubhouse sources — One Met — would be making his feelings clear. And Callaway would be under tremendous pressure to retreat and retrench. Heck, we’d probably be choking down our first dose of stentorian wisdom about How Baseball Will Humble a New Manager and Teach Him to Respect the Game’s Bedrock Truths, or some such bullshit.
Instead, because of a quirk of timing, Callaway’s got a five-game cushion, a fanbase in pinch-me mode, and buy-in from the 25 guys who have to play the game. Is that quantifiable? Probably not, but that’s not the same as saying it’s unimportant. Steven Matz and Matt Harvey, Robert Gsellman and Seth Lugo, Hansel Robles and A.J. Ramos, Michael Conforto and Seth Lugo, Kevin Plawecki and Travis d’Arnaud, Jose Reyes and Amed Rosario, Zack Wheeler and Dom Smith … they’ve all started the season watching a winning team and manager. That affects how they think about this team and their roles on it. And that kind of first week may sustain them when the pixie dust runs out and the Mets have to make an emergency reorder.
While it’s still being tossed around, though, just enjoy it. Matz still has some work to do — he threw way too many first-pitch balls and had to keep fighting his way back into counts — but he was finishing his pitches and they had life they seemed to be lacking against St. Louis. (Meanwhile all the Mets’ starters seem to be exploiting launch angles successfully with tempting high fastballs.) The bullpen wasn’t flawless, with Robles giving up a homer to Bryce Harper (and yes he pointed, at least according to Twitter) and Jerry Blevins walking Harper come crunch time. But Harper gonna Harper. Robles limited the damage, Ramos was flawless, and Jeurys Familia racked up five outs.
The Mets aren’t exactly speedy, but early in the season they’re making good use of what speed they do have, and their aggression on the basepaths is being rewarded. The seventh inning was a showcase: Rosario scored from first on a double by Cabrera to tie the game at 2-2, simply outrunning a well-executed pickup and relay by Harper and Howie Kendrick. Cabrera crossed to third on a groundout by Yoenis Cespedes. Conforto was walked, and took off for second with Todd Frazier at the plate. Frazier grounded to second, but Kendrick found Conforto up in his business instead of at a safe remove between first and second. Discombobulated, he had to settle for the out at first as Cabrera scampered home with the go-ahead run Familia would make stand up.
And let’s not forget the heroics of Juan Lagares, who gunned down Brian Goodwin at home to short-circuit the Nationals’ second. Lagares’ positioning was impeccable and the throw was a missile, a perfect arc to d’Arnaud’s mitt. Credit the catcher as well: d’Arnaud received the throw on his knees and pivoted adroitly (and legally in the age of video nitpicking) to spin Goodwin away from the plate, which I believe he’s yet to touch. Between innings, Lagares had his cap off in the dugout, leaving his eyes peeking through the vent in his Mets-blue hood as if auditioning for superhero status.
He’s got the job. So far they all do.
by Greg Prince on 6 April 2018 1:01 pm These Mets are so good, they deserve to be televised on television. These Mets have so much magic to do, Pippin has to be planning another Broadway revival. These Mets have dispirited the Nationals to such an extent that D.C doesn’t wanna come out and play on a Friday.
Helluva start we’re off to. Helluva conclusion we’re all drawing in unison that this team and this season have a chance to be pretty special. Did I say “a chance”? Did I say “to be”? Precautionary disclaimers are so some other team and some other season. These are the Mets of 2018. No further proof is required.
We’ve played six games before April Sixth. We’re five-and-one following an 8-2 thrashing of our ostensible archrivals. Save for off days and unknown fates, we can’t be stopped.
Did you catch Thursday’s matinee from Washington? By whatever medium you tuned in, you had to feel the destiny seeping through the speakers. Everything went right for the Mets. Everything went wrong for the Nationals. Nine innings of sample size was extraordinarily convincing. Someone get word to Nate Silver — we can call this race.
In their dreams, the Mets have three primary sluggers. On Thursday, all three slugged like a dream come true. In the fourth, Yoenis Cespedes golfed one toward the Treasury Department (because he’s so money). Come the fifth, Michael Conforto sent one to the opposite field, which was appropriate because playing one week after Opening Day was the opposite of what it was expected he’d be doing. It was expected Conforto would still be trying to shake the ache from his left shoulder. Bah to theoretically reasonable timetables. Conforto was back in the lineup for Game Six and, in his third at-bat, he homered by a matter of inches. It took the umpires and their replay compadres a few minutes to determine Conforto’s shot was no mere double, but that’s OK. It was either George Bernard Shaw or Robert F. Kennedy who put it best:
“Some men see Conforto on second when his ball has left the ballpark and ask what’s the holdup? I see Conforto on second when his ball has left the ballpark and say his home run trot has begun twenty-five days early.”
Michael rowing his boat ashore the Mets’ active roster ahead of all medical projections was a victory unto itself. The double that was eventually ruled a homer constitutes a winning streak of the soul.
The slugging wasn’t fully thorough until Jay Bruce produced a grand slam in the seventh. Bruce clubbed a grand slam last April as well. It came in a loss. The Mets hit four grand slams in 2017; three of them scored four runs apiece in service to respective defeats of 9-7, 7-5 and 12-8. Six games into 2018, the Mets have as many grand slams as they do losses.
And five times as many wins as either.
Each of the Mets’ home runs — Yo’s solo blast, Conforto’s time-shifted two-run job and Jay’s salami (sliced from a count that commenced at oh-and-two) — was grand. Yet none of them was the quintessential highlight of the 2018 Mets season to date. That came in the bottom of the sixth, the Mets ahead by two runs, but on the verge of offering some or all of their lead to their hosts as a Home Opener gift. Talk about ill-conceived hospitality.
Sun god Jacob deGrom, pitching in his traditionally favored daypart, was in control for five innings. He had given up two runs in the first, but one was unearned. The next few frames were an afternoon nap for the Nats’ bats. In the sixth, though, after a leadoff single, the strike zone got away from Jake. A four-pitch walk to Anthony Rendon. A four-pitch walk to Bryce Harper. The bases were juiced, the home crowd was pumped, deGrom appeared about to melt.
Ah, but Jake doesn’t melt midday. He draws sustenance from ol’ Sol. How else to explain what he did to the next three batters? In as friendly a hitting situation as he’ll ever face, Ryan Zimmerman (the brand name under which David Wright is sold and marketed in the Middle Atlantic states) flied to Bruce in short right. Bruce, who made the error that facilitated the Nats’ unearned run earlier, almost had a problem with the ball, but what is it the 2018 Mets say?
“No problem.”
Next up, Howie Kendrick, who inadvertently answered another question: what the hell is Jose Reyes doing at shortstop when Amed Rosario is presumably alive and well? Now we know. If Jose hadn’t been mysteriously inked in at short Thursday, he wouldn’t have been perfectly positioned to spear Kendrick’s sizzling liner for the second out. True, Rosario might have reeled in the very same drive, but when Houdini’s escape act includes an additional unexpected element, you shut up, you accept it and you applaud the grab.
The bases were still loaded…which is how they stayed when Trea Turner took strike three to end the bottom of the sixth (and unleash my first fierce fist pump of the young season). The strike zone that had three batters prior gotten away from deGrom was found just off the plate by Doug Eddings, who helpfully tossed it back to Jake on a very borderline call, but it’s a long season and calls go every which way.
Did I say it’s a long season? Correction: we know everything we need to know after six games. Or we will decide we do when our seventh game has yet to be played and the sixth game has been so darn invigorating. So much going right for these Mets, so much going wrong for those Nats. Stephen Strasburg not only gave up two homers, but balked in another run. Harper, other than being walked in the midst of deGrom’s detour to danger, didn’t do anything harmful. Daniel Murphy graciously remained on the disabled list. Three Nationals even struck out against Hansel Robles to confirm we didn’t need a new prescription for our glasses after he mowed down three Phillies the day before.
Game Sixes are famous in Mets postseason lore. Regular sixth games of seasons sometimes deserve cachet, too. Maybe you recall the sixth game of the 2005 season. New manager Willie Randolph’s Mets were oh-and-five and facing a rejuvenated John Smoltz inside the torture chamber known as Turner Field. Smoltz indeed struck out fifteen Mets that Sunday, but big deal, because we had Pedro Martinez, and Martinez outlasted Smoltz, threw a complete game and inserted Randolph and the Mets in the win column at last. In the sixth team outing of 2009, Martinez’s successor as Mets ace, Johan Santana, threw a whale of a game at the Marlins, but he was matched for brilliance by Josh Johnson. We lost that one when future National demon Murphy dropped a ball in left field during Jerry Manuel’s apparent experiment with defensive hallucinogenics. Just one game, each of those Game Sixes, but you kind of got a hunch about those seasons when each was over. Maybe 2005 was gonna live up to its promise. Maybe 2009 was gonna be less than we hoped for.
Sometimes we need more than just a sixth game to figure out where we’re going. In 2006, it took twelve games — a 10-2 launch — for me to (almost reluctantly) discern the Mets were for real. In 2017, after they dropped the third of three consecutive exercises in aggravation to the Fish, I was developing a sense they might be toast. Then again, the Mets were 7-3 directly before that tailspin and I was relatively confident that the first-place Mets wouldn’t be leaving their lofty perch until it was time to get to the parade. That was the last time the Mets were as many as four games over .500 until right now. Then it all went to hell. We’d certainly appreciate that not happening again.
What am I saying? Of course it won’t. These are the 2018 Mets, 5-1 with magic to do. They’ve got miracle plays to play, parts to perform, hearts to warm, kings and things to take by storm as they go along their way.
Conceivably as easily done as sung amid a start like this.
by Greg Prince on 5 April 2018 10:23 am April has arrived only in name. We are living in West March, akin to the section of the Florida panhandle referred to as Lower Alabama. It’s too cold for baseball, but baseball insisted on showing up anyway. Six games were scheduled ahead of anything that feels like spring, five of them have been put frostily in the books — and snow is in the forecast for Saturday in Washington.
Bundle up and play. Better yet, bundle up and win. The Mets have done both to the extreme, shivering out to a division-helming 4-1 record and building a pretty sweet snowman on the day it was sensibly decreed too wintry to do anything else at Citi Field. They have just swept the Phillies. The Phillies didn’t appear ready for baseball. Among new managers getting the hang of their responsibilities, score one for Mickey Callaway in the realm of preparation. Perhaps Gabe Kapler could use another few weeks in the Clearwater sun.
I don’t know that the Mets have looked splendid in fashioning a splendid start, but they haven’t looked bad. They’ve looked and performed better than their competition, which is all that matters in nine-inning spurts. They are alert to possibility. Asdrubal Cabrera, who has batted in four different spots across five games, seems headier than ever. Perhaps the moving him around has kept him on his toes. Balls in the dirt regularly advance him a base. Two-out situations sit well with the entire fluid lineup. These Mets are delivering more efficiently than UPS (UPS made me schlep two towns over to pick up a package this week, so I’m projecting).
The big blows in Wednesday’s rain-delayed, Facebook-confined matinee came off the bats of Yoenis Cespedes and Amed Rosario, each facilitated by encouraging examples of Mickeyball. Brandon Nimmo led off the first with a walk and sprinted to first. I’m not sure if that’s really a Callaway club trademark, but it seems refreshing and brisk, like those Citi Field gales. Then Yo stepped up and crushed through the wind whatever Aaron Nola threw him to deepest, highest left.
Noah Syndergaard didn’t take it from there. It was cold and he’s from Texas. He’ll have more and warmer starts to last beyond four, assuming there’s no more lat-grabbing in his immediate future. Thor threw too many pitches and was partially undermined on a first-to-second-to-first rundown gone awry, resulting in a steal of home for the Phillie who wasn’t being run down. We’re at the stage of Syndergaard’s career where we expect 2-0 leads to hold up interminably. With these winds, it’s hard for anything to stay stationary.
No worries, for the Mets have an airtight bullpen, and a manager who deploys it deftly. Under another skipper, we might interpret using a quartet of relievers in a quintet of innings as overworking the pen, but Mickey Callaway is savvy and sharp, so this must be a positive development. Robert Gsellman, like Seth Lugo, is no longer a fringe starter but a deadly weapon. Hansel Robles has morphed from reclamation project to promise reclaimed. Gsellman struck out three in two innings. Robles struck out the side in his return from purgatory. The Mets struck out fifteen in Wednesday’s game and sixty-one since last Thursday. No wonder it’s so windy around here.
While the relievers were providing relief, the opportunistic Mets and the ill-prepared Phillies matched core competencies. Cabrera, on first from a walk in the sixth, did indeed move up to second on a ball the catcher couldn’t handle and ultimately couldn’t throw correctly. Asdrubal later took third from a groundout, and was then joined on the basepaths by Wilmer Flores, who also walked. With two outs, young Amed Rosario was up and played by Kapler’s analytic dictates like a Little Leaguer. Rosario responded as grown folks will, tripling to deep right to put the Mets ahead, 4-2, the score by which they eventually salted (and peppered) this one away.
If a season that’s five games old can have a microcosm, this was it. The Mets’ pitchers were striking out batters, the Mets’ batters were taking advantage of opposing pitchers, the weather was being relentlessly unpleasant. Oh, and a win, or should I say another win. We are indeed alone in first place. We are indeed the champions of the five-game season. That, the accelerated activation of Michael Conforto and a sturdy pair of galoshes will prepare you for no more than a trip to the District to play the Nationals — presumably a step up in NL East class — but Mickeyball is all about preparation.
Watching Wednesday’s game also required prep steps. Wednesday was the dreaded Facebook game, the one that was sold from the friendly confines of subscription television to the inane terrain of social media. No SNY if you’re a local subscriber. No MLB.TV if you’re an out-of-market subscriber. No ESPN, no Fox, not even the official baseball network that was contracted to produce the elusive telecast. You had to go to Facebook, which would have been a really rad idea around 2010. (I’ve lived long enough so that invoking the first year of the second decade of the twenty-first century is shorthand for the implication of ancientness). Facebook has always shaded toward grating. Now we keep learning it’s rather shady. What a surprise.
What a surprise to find the Mets and Phillies playing nowhere else in the video sense. Not a shock, considering they warned us this game would be shifted to our smaller screens, but it definitely landed on the side of the fence you’d prefer to not climb over to get your ball back. I tried to be empathetic, thinking of otherwise blacked-out Mets fans somewhere who were delighted they could see the game via this vehicle. Not everybody has SNY. Not everybody has MLB.TV. Facebook has roughly 2.2 billion members. People in far-off lands who clicked on the MLB Live icon Wednesday had to be impressed by Nimmo’s hustle.
Instructions on how to watch the Facebook game were widely disseminated Tuesday night and Wednesday morning. That’s a bad sign. Getting to see your Mets shouldn’t require homework. Not that it was difficult. It was just unnecessary. And a downgrade from what we’re used to. We’re used to Gary and some combination of Keith and Ron. Instead, we got not them. I’d welcome Cliff Floyd onto a Mets broadcast in other situations, like one that MLB didn’t unilaterally decide I needed to see. I subscribe to cable not solely for SNY, but it’s the one channel I wouldn’t want to be without for the bulk of 162 games. Why make it superfluous for a day? Why tell baseball’s most loyal viewers — the constant ones — they are superfluous?
That it was a midweek afternoon game made it less of an imposition on certain well-formed habits. Prime time is different. SNY is No. 1 in prime time in my personal demographic, exponentially bigger than any Roseanne reboot. Afternoon games I have to pick up on the fly, in the background, generally speaking. Sometimes SNY becomes de facto radio, with me turning toward the screen only when Gary’s voice rises above the din of my keyboard clacking. Then I do as Howard Beale commanded and get out of my chair, albeit to poke my head at the TV to see what Yo just crushed and where it wound up.
Sometimes radio is my radio for afternoon games. I turn on Pete McCarthy at noon, who becomes Wayne Randazzo at 12:30, leading into Howie Rose and Josh Lewin. Their word picture doesn’t lack for sharpness and clarity. I listened to the Mets on the radio before I’d ever heard of cable TV. It’s a skill I’ve retained and embraced.
Point is, that should be up to me, the fan and customer. Don’t just tell me it’s Facebook or nothing. Alas, that is how these winds blew, so I did peek in on my tablet at this old-fashioned baseball game transmitted by relatively newfangled means. It’s not like I haven’t watched a game on my iPad, and it’s not like social media is particularly revolutionary. The part where we’re informed it’s our only visual option was the twist.
I went with Facebook’s telecast (Facecast?) for about an inning. The picture didn’t freeze. The announcers weren’t Gary, Keith or Ron. The graphics veered toward overbearing. The reminders that I could follow Todd Frazier on Instagram like Adrian Gonzalez does were excessive. I could make out Cespedes’s bomb just fine. Soon, my eyes were off my tablet and on my computer, where they were supposed to be in the midday hours. Mostly I heard voices I didn’t choose babbling on at a sub-GKR stratum, and I thought, “Why do I have this on?” I quit out of Facebook and turned up WOR on my AM dial. Always happy to listen to Howie and Josh describe the machinations of hot dog wrappers as they swirl and Jeurys Familia as he closes, just as I was always happy to listen to Bob Murphy and Gary Thorne in those days when SportsChannel existed but cable in my house didn’t.
Then I got cable, and TV is TV. Still is, cord-cutting and all. Strange that somebody somewhere decided TV is no longer the thing this year, at least not for one MLB game once a week. As ever, the fans baseball seems to value the least are the fans who cherish baseball the most.
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