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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 3 September 2017 12:16 pm Saturday night, I was informed relatively late in the evening, would have been Marv Throneberry’s 84th birthday. If I had known earlier, I’d have baked a cake in his honor and then dropped a piece in his memory. Instead, I watched the Mets drop the back end of a day-night doubleheader to the Astros after watching them do the same with the front end. That’s error enough for one day and night.
Casey Stengel didn’t save Marv a slice of his birthday cake, legend has it, because Casey figured Throneberry’d fumble it like he did so many grounders and throws that befuddled him at first base when the Mets were young and their manager was aging rapidly. The team was off on July 30, 1962, the 72nd anniversary of Casey’s birth, so they celebrated in St. Louis on the 29th, a Sunday that also featured a doubleheader the Mets dropped. Marv’s gift to Casey was chasing Ken Boyer from first to second (safe!) on a botched rundown while Stan Musial gallivanted home from third (safe!) in the opener. That’s a performance hard to call cakeworthy in any century.
Another version of the legend is that five weeks later, when Marv turned 29 on September 2, 1962, he wanted to know where his cake was. If this telling is true, Throneberry’s sense of entitlement seems relatively justified…if, in fact, you’re gonna keep delivering cakes to the clubhouse every time a player celebrates a birthday, which doesn’t sound like the most optimal fitness plan for a roomful of athletes. Marv and the Mets were literally marvelous on their first baseman’s birthday. He collected a pair of base hits, committed no errors and helped his club beat the Cardinals, 4-3. The Mets raised their record to 35-103 that Sunday afternoon in St. Loo. Seeing as how nobody had to worry about staying in fighting trim for the pennant race, hell yes, give that man some cake. Give him the whole damn box. And one to grow on.
However Marv came by his miffedness, it’s Stengel’s sentiment that continues to glow like a trick candle that defies blowing out: Well, Marv, we wuz gonna save you a piece/give you a cake, but we wuz afraid you wuz gonna drop it.
Wuz, not was. That I’m certain of. I’m also certain that when it comes to quotability, Casey Stengel’s Met standard will not be threatened by Terry Collins. When asked after the nightcap why he allowed Dominic Smith to swing on three-and-oh, Terry answered, “Why the hell not?”
Actually, Casey probably said that a lot, too, but there were fewer microphones picking up everything accurately in 1962. Also fewer first basemen.
It’s no accident that the subject of Marv Throneberry’s birthday arose Saturday night. Somewhere amid the misery of the Mets’ third consecutive loss, there was a ball that clanked off the glove of Astros first baseman Tyler White, and Keith Hernandez quickly invoked the name Dick Stuart, a.k.a. Dr. Strangeglove. Stuart is the tin standard for first basemen overmatched by the demands of their position, a reputation cemented long before he arrived on the 1966 Mets for 31 games, 4 homers and 6 errors. Stuart was a Met like (until further notice) Nori Aoki is a Met. He was just passing through, which is fine for those of us who keep tabs on all 1,041 men who’ve been Mets, but his Metness is not otherwise his calling card. You can be certain Keith Hernandez, the polar opposite of Dick Stuart as a first baseman, has no idea Dick Stuart was a Met.
Gary Cohen, on the other hand, knows Dick Stuart was a Met, but more importantly, knew Dick Stuart can’t be the default example of first base ineptitude on the broadcast of a franchise embodied in its infancy by Marvelous Marv Throneberry. Gary proceeded to wrestle the point of reference from Keith. He talked Marv Throneberry for several minutes on what would have been Throneberry’s 84th birthday (which didn’t come up on air), invoking “the original” Frank Thomas along the way. For a generation, we heard Marv Throneberry and Frank Thomas stories regularly, because that’s what Bob and Ralph and Lindsey filled the spaces between pitches, out-of-town updates and commercial reads with. One-hundred twenty losses notwithstanding, it was nice to hear the 1962 Mets discussed during a Mets game again.
It wasn’t so nice watching the 2017 Mets resemble the 1962 Mets, but that’s the Metsus Operandi of the moment. Having lost 26 of their past 37, the Mets have fallen to precisely 19 games under .500 for the first time since 2009. Two Thousand Nine was abysmal, yet heaven and earth above 1962 in won-lost terms. The last time the 1962 Mets were precisely 19 games under .500 was on June 1 of that first year. The Mets lost to the Giants at the Polo Grounds, 9-6. It was their twelfth consecutive defeat. Five more in a row would follow.
The 17-game losing streak, still the worst Met skein ever, began in Houston, hours after Ol’ Case gave us another of his legendary lines. The Mets had pulled to within seven games of the break-even point — they would never again in their existence get any closer to .500 as a franchise, by the way — and after a long night’s journey into day (the flight from Milwaukee to Houston was diverted to Dallas), an exhausted Stengel let it be known past dawn that, “If anyone wants me, tell ’em I’m being embalmed.”
Such was the Mets’ introduction to Houston in 1962. They lost the two games versus the Colt .45s on that trip; seven of eight played to completion at Colt Stadium, where Ralph Kiner swore the mosquitoes were as big as Volkswagens, that year (there was one tie); and, by 2012, when they were swept three at Minute Maid Park, should have been glad to have been saved the trouble of regular visits to their expansion brethren’s hometown. Their reacquaintance with Houston from a baseball sense has shown the Mets are true to their roots. They couldn’t win there 55 years ago and they’re not getting any better at it now.
We went over the first game after the first game Saturday. As for the second game, you can understand why I’ve sought refuge in 1962, when losing at least came with good material.
• Wilmer Flores fouled a ball of his nose and broke it. His nose, that is. The ball was fine. We’ve tacitly agreed that Wilmer’s best position is probably the dreaded DH. He grand-slammed as a DH in the first game. In the second game, he hurt himself batting. Not running, batting. He’s the second Met to do that in the last two weeks, Michael Conforto having disabled himself without making contact. What can one say beyond Get Well Wilmer…and Michael…and Yoenis…and we’re gonna need a bigger get-well cake.
• Matt Reynolds lost a foul pop in the roof, which is to say it hit a rafter, it came down, Matt circled it helplessly, and he missed it.
• An inning Juan Lagares led off with a triple and included the Mets loading the bases resulted in just one run. Smith, in sanctioned why the hell not? mode, lined an RBI double that brought home Lagares. Plawecki lined a ball just as hard, but it was snagged by third baseman J.D. Davis. Two other outs were less impressive and not at all helpful.
• The one-run lead the offense reluctantly handed Seth Lugo dissipated almost as fast as Seth’s night did. After five scoreless frames, Lugo gave up a hit, a walk, another hit and a hit after that in the sixth, which doesn’t seem to be his inning in general. The Astros’ sudden barrage gave them a 2-1 lead. Hansel Robles entered to disinherit two of the runners Seth left for him. Reynolds, not a third baseman (but playing there because Flores had to leave with a broken nose), didn’t throw home on a ground ball. Three runs in. Lagares, who can only smother only so many rallies on his rounds, reeled in a sacrifice fly but couldn’t do any more. Four runs in. The Astros have the best record in the American League, and that’s without any longer deploying mosquitoes or hardly ever playing the Mets.
The Mets lost, 4-1. That was with White making like Throneberry/Stuart at first for the Astros, and Springer halting a would-be rundown as a baserunner so compliantly that even Marv could have tagged him out. Francisco Liriano didn’t look good at all in relief for the Astros and was booed by a voluble segment of Houston fans. That was an encouraging sign in the life goes on department. I’ve always said it wasn’t Piazza’s home run on September 21, 2001, that indicated to me things would get better in New York. It was blowing the game to the Braves two days later. I was bothered by baseball, which I didn’t think was gonna be possible that month. May Astros fans find solace in frustration soon. It probably won’t materialize from anything the Mets do in Sunday’s finale, but the Mets can’t do everything.
Or all that much these days.
There are many ways to support the recovery efforts from Hurricane Harvey. Here is one of them.
by Greg Prince on 2 September 2017 6:42 pm First game of the first doubleheader in Minute Maid Park history. First game back in Houston after Hurricane Harvey. First start for Matt Harvey after missing two-and-a-half months. First innings pitched in the major league careers of Jacob Rhame and Jamie Callahan. First game in a Mets uniform for Nori Aoki. First time since 2009 the Mets are 18 games under .500.
So, a lot of firsts, ranging from gratifying to concerning. Honestly, I’d usually say “horrifying” where I said “concerning,” but a bad outing by a pitcher is nothing compared to what a bad week of weather can do to a city.
Glad to see people in a ballpark enjoying a ballgame, regardless or especially because of what’s gone on beyond the ballpark walls. Glad to hear from A.J. Hinch pregame, recognizing the efforts of all involved to come through a terrible ordeal (the Houston skipper’s hat tip to the Mets was classy). Sorry to see Matt Harvey look horrid on the hill (2 IP, 7 ER), but nothing went physically wrong and he sounded confident, if self-deceptively so, afterwards. Liked the arm on Rhame, especially. The hard-hitting Astros hit Callahan hard, but he also had a bit of hard luck, and by the time he was on, the Mets were winging and prayering it.
The Mets fell behind by scores of 7-0 and 10-2 on the 45th anniversary of the Saturday night they came from eight runs behind to beat Houston in Houston. When Wilmer Flores launched a grand slam to make it 10-7, I thought we were on to something. The something was Wilmer became the third Met to slam grandly in a loss this year; his predecessors, Jay Bruce and Curtis Granderson, are no longer on the scene. They’ll be on the scene in October.
The Mets, who finished in the rear of a 12-8 final, won’t. The Mets have lost their 76th game. They lost 75 all of last year. This isn’t last year or the year before it. This is the year they scrounge about in early September for fill-in help. That’s Aoki, taking over for some combination of Cespedes and Conforto (the latter bound for shoulder capsule surgery, it was announced Saturday). Nori will play in the second game. So will the Mets. So will the Astros. Maybe an eight-run comeback won’t be in order. How’s that for a rallying cry?
There are many ways to support the recovery efforts from Hurricane Harvey. Here is one of them.
by Greg Prince on 2 September 2017 11:19 am When the Mets play in Philadelphia, SNY unfailingly shows us cheesesteaks sizzling at Geno’s and Pat’s. In Miami, it’s sun worshipers and night clubbers doing the same. Cacti stand tall outside Phoenix. A Monument towers over Washington. Like its announcers, the network’s cameras take an expansive view of their environs.
I don’t know what SNY would have shown us under normal circumstances during the upcoming series in Houston. I don’t know what they’ll show us amidst the tragically abnormal circumstances that define the city after Hurricane Harvey. Unfortunately, we’ve seen plenty of Houston on other channels lately for the worst of reasons. It’s rather hard to believe they’ll be broadcasting baseball games from there this weekend. Or playing them.
Major League Baseball seems to exist to get its product played where it says it’s gonna get played. Every team is apportioned 81 home dates and does its damnedest to host 81 home dates. We sit and we wait interminably for the slightest of windows on a rainy night. When the window won’t open, clubs will squeeze square pegs into round holes to get everything in where if not when it was scheduled. Thus, when deemed necessary, the day-night doubleheader, the search for the mutual off day, and the pursuit of doing whatever must be done to assure every one of those 81 games is played in the place of business of record.
The Houston Astros are the Houston Astros. I can understand the desire to play Astros home games in Houston under even under the most difficult circumstances. I can also understand the homing instinct. When you’re kept from home, you want to go home. Everybody who was chased from their home by Hurricane Harvey couldn’t — or can’t — wait to get back home, regardless of the shape the home finds itself in. I can’t blame the Houston Astros for not wanting to be the Houston Astros temporarily of Tampa Bay for one more inning than they had to be.
The post-hurricane recovery won’t go tangibly better or faster because the Mets and the Astros and however many baseball fans can make their way to Minute Maid Park today, tonight and tomorrow. If there’s an emotionally comforting component to be mined from Houston hosting three ballgames in two days, may it wrap all who can feel it like a dry blanket. Stand for the national anthem before the first pitch. Stomp for “Deep in the Heart of Texas” in the middle of the seventh inning. Run the locomotive loaded with pumpkin-looking oranges if an Astro sends a ball over the tracks (and at least one probably will). What’s wet in the areas beyond the ballpark will still be wet. What’s damaged will still require repair. Hits and runs and strikeouts are limited in their utility. Usually they can do a person invested in a baseball game’s outcome good, depending on who’s doing the hitting, scoring and whiffing. Sometimes they’re just part of a game.
The Mets and Astros came into this world together, of course, in April of 1962. They grew up playing one another and stitched a lot of mutual lore. One thread of their shared tapestry is rarely cited was created on this date in 1972, when the Mets overcame their biggest in-game deficit ever in the Astrodome. New York trailed Houston, 8-0, yet won, 11-8. Within the context of what has occurred in and around Astros country, the results of the baseball games about to be played will likely feel very incidental — yet ya can’t help but root hard for a roaring Houston comeback right this very minute.
There are many ways to support the recovery efforts stemming from Hurricane Harvey. Here is one of them.
by Jason Fry on 1 September 2017 11:41 am Congratulations to Travis Taijeron, he of the almost-invariably mispronounced last name, on his first big-league hit.
And congratulations to Joey Votto for continuing to be Joey Votto. The Reds’ star demolished a ball thrown by Jeurys Familia for a home run, then gave high-fives, his bat and uniform top to a kid battling cancer. (And note how Votto gracefully handled the post-game questions.)
Beyond that, well, it was another game mercifully off the schedule. Jacob deGrom had an uncharacteristically poor day, Amed Rosario made a rookie mistake in the field, and Familia’s still shaking off the rust.
And Asdrubal Cabrera is still here, instead of airlifted to a contender in exchange for some vague prospect. (Though let’s not kid ourselves, he probably just would have become cash.) Time will tell whether that means the Mets didn’t get a deal they liked, or plan to slot Cabrera into 2018’s infield. Third base? Second base? A random selection of starts at both so both he and Wilmer Flores remain defensively out of sorts? Place your bets!
To reference a more recap-worthy game, I missed Wednesday night’s bravura performance by Rafael Montero because Joshua and I were at Coney Island to ride stuff and to see the Brooklyn Cyclones at home.
To my mild astonishment, this is the Cyclones’ 17th season by the ocean. (We don’t count the farcical summer of 2000, when the soon-to-be Cyclones were owned by the Mets, affiliated with the Blue Jays and played before basically nobody at St. John’s as the Queens Kings.)
It’s funny to recall, but the Cyclones were A Thing in the summer of 2001 — the park was invariably crowded if not sold out, and Cyclones players turned up on MTV and in cool Manhattan clubs where they could barely afford a drink even if old enough to order one.
I vividly remember two players from that team, one you’ve heard of and one you probably haven’t.
Angel Pagan was the heartthrob, a lithe, sloe-eyed center fielder with a name borrowed from a Goth band. I used to dream that one day he’d play for the Mets, and of course he did — albeit after a detour that saw him make his big-league debut with the Cubs. In fact, Pagan logged 11 big-league seasons, got a World Series ring and retired having made more than $51 million playing baseball.
John Toner played right field and had an endearing habit of paying attention whenever the girls in the bleachers called his name. Toner stalled out in Single-A in 2003, playing his last pro game as a 24-year-old. But that’s nothing to be ashamed of; something along those lines will befall most Cyclones. I like to imagine Toner remembers that summer fondly and always will.
Certainly I do — the Cyclones won the division and beat the Staten Island Yankees in a thrilling three-game playoff. They were set to play the Williamsport Crosscutters for the New York-Penn League crown on the night of Sept. 12, 2001 — a game that never took place, leaving both teams co-champions.
Five 2001 Cyclones made the big leagues — Pagan, Danny Garcia, Mike Jacobs, Lenny DiNardo, and Justin Huber. That was an intriguing part of that first season — knowing that relatively few players would achieve their big-league dreams, and trying to figure out which of the guys we were watching had a chance.
Over the years we’d learn that was more preordained than you’d like to think, a reflection of baseball’s caste system. Players start their pro careers viewed as legitimate prospects or roster fillers. Beginning as the former means you’ll be allowed to fail repeatedly; starting as the latter means having to prove yourself season after season and game after game to be thought of differently.
All these years later, when someone asks about a Cyclone’s chances, I feel bad saying that the best way to tell is to answer one or both of two questions:
1) How much money did he sign for?
2) Is he big and able to throw 95?
I’ve collected all the Cyclones’ card sets since 2001 — that was a secondary reason for our Wednesday visit. They’re in a binder, and I’ve taken the additional step of putting stickers on the players who made the big leagues. (Rehabbing Mets granted Cyclone cards don’t count.) Not every Cyclone is represented — the club has a web page for that — but it’s an at-a-glance reminder of the long odds.
Taijeron just got his sticker; so did Kevin McGowan. Right now, Michael Conforto and Rosario are the most-recent carded Cyclones to earn one — both are featured in the 2014 set, with Tomas Nido perhaps joining them in the coming weeks.
No one from the 2015, 2016 or 2017 sets has a sticker yet. But that will change. P.J. Conlon could be the first, or Justin Dunn, or Desmond Lindsay. Maybe they’ll make their debuts as Mets; maybe not. Either way, checking in with the Cyclones on Coney Island and in cardboard has become an essential part of summer. Here’s hoping it will always be so.
by Greg Prince on 31 August 2017 4:23 am The Mets won by shutout. Their starter went at least eight-and-a-third innings. He gave up no more than three hits and got the win. According to Baseball Reference, those specific boxes have been checked 119 times in franchise history, about twice a year since 1962. It’s a total that includes some of the most memorable starts a Met pitcher has ever thrown, alongside some really good games that didn’t seem like that big a deal in their time. Tom Seaver threw seventeen such starts. One of them was the Jimmy Qualls Game. A bunch were simply Tom Seaver games.
On Wednesday night in Cincinnati, Rafael Montero, who has expertly eluded comparisons to Tom Seaver every time he’s touched a baseball while wearing a New York Mets uniform, pitched the 119th of those games. It can be classified as a really good game and, within the context of who pitched it, a pretty big deal.
Rafael Montero doesn’t normally pitch into the ninth inning. Rafael Montero doesn’t normally limit his opposition to no more hits than there are bases. Rafael Montero doesn’t normally get a Mets fan excited, except to see what else is on. To be fair, almost nothing gets a Mets fan excited at this juncture of the current Mets season, save for the knowledge that the current Mets season will eventually give way to a different Mets season.
But Rafael Montero and what we’ll refer to as the Rafael Montero Game (at least until we have another one remotely like it) did. You wouldn’t have thought any Met starter whose last name begins with an upper-case letter could, but Montero was as good as any Met not named Jacob deGrom could possibly be. Against the Reds, he was sublime. He flirted with a one-hitter for more than eight innings. On most teams, you talk about a pitcher who flirts with a no-hitter. Met tradition, however, demands reverence for the one-hitter, even more than five years after Johan Santana transformed our once-mightiest feat into a relatively quaint achievement.
Montero couldn’t quite deliver the one-hitter. Nor could he quite complete his gem without bullpen assistance. With one out, nobody on and a shutout tantalizingly within his grasp, Rafael gave up a single to Phillip Ervin. Then Zack Cozart doubled, pushing Ervin to third. The demi-magic of almost a no-hitter had dissipated. You still wanted Rafael to get the shutout, not to mention the win. Mets, too, but mostly Montero. He’d been building toward this. The kid had pitched better lately than he had earlier this year. Few could pitch worse than Montero had earlier this year, though the Mets seemed to keep sending out pitchers who did. It was a lack of pitchers who were definitively better than Rafael that solidified Rafael’s spot in the rotation.
Joey Votto, who’d recorded the only other Red hit, a double back in the fourth, was up next in the ninth. In another era — even in this era — you’d yearn to leave Montero in. “His game to lose” and all that. In the previous 118 starts in which the Met starter did all that was mentioned above, 117 were wire-to-wire affairs. The one incomplete game win belonged to Jim McAndrew, who rose to the majors in 1968, the Year of the Pitcher, and was continually undone by a Mets team whose hitters barely contested the calendar. In his first four starts, rookie McAndrew allowed two runs twice and one run twice. The Mets scored zero runs for him each time. His first victory was a 1-0 routegoing squeaker over Steve Carlton and the eventual league champion Cardinals. The fireballing righthander from Lost Nation, Ia., got himself a run and worked with it. It was Jim’s only way to fly in ’68.
A couple of weeks later, sporting a won-lost record of 1-7 accompanied by a cognitively dissonant earned run average of 2.53, McAndrew was again battling a future Hall of Famer, in this case Ferguson Jenkins of the Cubs. Once more he had an entire run’s worth of support from his teammates — half as much as Montero received — and was making it stand up. Like Montero 49 years later, he’d allowed only one hit through eight-and-a-third. Also like Montero, he’d see the next two batters reach base: Don Kessinger on a single, Glenn Beckert on an infield error. And though you won’t hear these two names mentioned in the same breath often, Gil Hodges did in 1968 what Terry Collins would do in 2017. McAndrew’s manager, like Montero’s manager, removed a starter who had brought a one-hit shutout into the ninth inning. For what it’s worth, both editions of Mets sat seventeen games under .500. When caught up in the moment of preserving a slim lead constructed primarily from one pitcher’s brilliance, it’s not worth much. You don’t necessarily need a pennant race to inject urgency into your bloodstream when you’re trying to win a game that would be emotionally wrenching to lose. When you’re seventeen games under .500, a game like this spiritually becomes your pennant race.
Unlike Collins with Votto, Hodges couldn’t just point to first base to put the next batter, Billy Williams, on. Besides, Gil eschewed the intentional walk. He brought in lefty Bill Short (sort of the Jerry Blevins of his day, except used a lot less, which I suppose means he wasn’t that much like Blevins) to face Williams, as dangerous from the left side during his career as Votto is in his. Short popped out Williams. Then Hodges made another move, bringing in righty Cal Koonce to take on righty Ernie Banks. Those Cubs were stitched from Hall of Fame fabric, but Koonce, like McAndrew and Short, wasn’t intimidated. Cal drew a pop fly from Banks, and McAndrew — 8.1 IP, 2 H, 2 BB, 7 SO — was able to bank a 1-0 win.
Back in the present, AJ Ramos was Collins’s choice to serve as Bill Short and Cal Koonce rolled into one. McAndrew had already proven himself promising enough to keep pitching on a staff led by Seaver and Koosman and bolstered by Ryan. Montero, prior to Wednesday, had proven nothing except that he could find the mound every fifth day, admittedly a heroic undertaking on a staff led by deGrom and populated otherwise by happenstance. He’d gradually ascended to a state approaching competence during his previous August starts, but not enough to convince you he could nurse a 2-0 lead from the first until the ninth. Yet that’s exactly what Montero had done. It would be a shame for that lead to be lost now. It would also be a shame if Montero — 8.1 IP, 3 H, 4 BB, 8 SO — didn’t come away with more than a tough luck, kid pat on the back for his effort.
Ramos, pitching with a pinch of something extra on the line for the first time since joining the Mets, definitely exudes that closer persona, which is to say he makes me very nervous. Three men were on, one man was out, Adam Duvall was up, to be followed by Scooter Gennett. Everything had gone so well for eight-and-a-third innings. The Mets, the Mets fan assumed, were due for an implosion.
Montero, however, was due for an unambiguously good night, and no Red was gonna take it away from him. No closer, either. The reliever who took over for him threw eleven pitches. Eight of them were strikes. Duvall went down looking, Gennett swinging. When Ramos notched his save, Montero had his win, the bulk of a combined shutout victory in which he went about as far as they’ll let a pitcher go these days. It wouldn’t stand out in the portfolio of a Seaver, but like we said, nobody’d been comparing Montero to Seaver. Earning a comp with McAndrew is a pretty encouraging development for a pitcher whose career until Wednesday might have been accurately described as a lost nation.
Rafael will need more outings like this one to be considered seriously for inclusion on a choosier Mets staff. When McAndrew spun eight-and-a-third innings in 1968 like Montero did in 2017, his ERA dropped to 2.19. When Montero spun eight-and-a-third innings in 2017 like McAndrew did in 1968, his ERA slid only to 5.12. One flourished in the Year of the Pitcher. The other was nobody’s idea of a pitcher this year. But this year isn’t over yet, and maybe Montero is finally just getting started.
by Jason Fry on 30 August 2017 11:21 am Tuesday night’s game against the Reds wasn’t the worst loss of the season, because by now it doesn’t particularly hurt to see the Mets hurl balls places where they don’t belong, or stare at enemy home runs, or struggle pathetically in the quicksand of their own misfortune. We’re all used to that by now; there are no superlatives left.
But if getting beat by 10 runs and ending up with Kevin Plawecki on the mound again isn’t a low point, the definition of low point needs recalibration.
Chris Flexen was wretched. Chasen Bradford couldn’t get anybody out. And Wilmer Flores had a game to forget, making two ugly errors late and then ending an admittedly farcical ninth-inning rally by hitting into a double play.
Oh, and by getting their brains beaten in the Mets lost a chance to rewrite their team record books: they were trying to beat the Reds for the 15th straight game, which would have tied the club mark set against the pre-killer-B Pirates of the mid-1980s. By the time I realized that was a possibility, the line score was telling a different story.
Oh well.
So how do the Mets solve a problem like Wilmer? He’s proved he’s more than a platoon player, though as with Michael Conforto that was more a case of outlasting Terry Collins’ prejudices than anything else. He’s only 26 and if given a full season with regular playing time and good health will probably produce 25 to 30 homers and hit .275 for you.
That’s valuable, but Flores doesn’t supply major-league-caliber defense at any position open to him. He has slow feet, a scattershot arm and zero instincts.
I suppose this is the fun of baseball, at least when played without a designated hitter, which is to say properly: the Mets have to replace a lot of offense, but also need to support their starters with better defense. Wilmer doesn’t do both right now and at this point in his career it’s fair to ask if he ever will. So do the Mets tell him he’s the 2018 third baseman, work with him there and hope he can settle down and outhit his glove? Do they try the same thing at second? Or do they surrender and trade him to an American League team, knowing he may become a monster bat and get rubbed in their faces during every national telecast for the next decade?
Beyond such puzzles, if you were looking for excitement your best bet was to watch Zack Cozart and Asdrubal Cabrera play as if pleading to be airlifted out of their misery and installed at shortstop in Arizona before the stroke of midnight on September.
Dominic Smith collected two more hits. That’s something.
And hey, Plawecki got Joey Votto to ground out.
by Jason Fry on 28 August 2017 1:49 am I missed the first game of Sunday’s day-night doubleheader, but it was for a baseball-related reason: we took the Staten Island ferry to get our first look at the 2017 Brooklyn Cyclones.
It hasn’t exactly been going well down on Coney Island — the Cyclones are last in their division and have a .266 winning percentage, which is ’62 Mets territory. But it was a beautiful afternoon, one of those gentle, gorgeous late-summer days that just about breaks your heart because you know in three weeks such days will be impossible. And at least for a day, the Cyclones thoroughly outplayed the sloppy Yankees, spanking them by a satisfying 6-0 score. I wasn’t paying avid attention beyond what was required not to be killed by a foul ball (one near-miss), but I can report that Wagner Lagrange — making his Brooklyn debut after an impressive summer with Kingsport — is at least worth a weather eye, and not just for that indisputably awesome name. The kid knows the strike zone and has a live bat and good speed. You heard it here first, maybe.
The nightcap was under way when we returned, and for a while it was a taut game, marred only by those execrable Players Weekend uniforms. Then Seth Lugo faltered, but Tanner Roark out-faltered him, with Brandon Nimmo lining a two-run homer for a Mets lead and then lighting up all of D.C. with his goofy smile. If Nimmo can even hit his weight he’ll be a great MLB ambassador, as he all but radiates that baseball is fun and everyone playing it should enjoy it and everyone watching it should enjoy it too, and then all involved should hurry home for apple pie, stopping only to buy mom some flowers.
Alas, Nimmo’s invitation for us all to be more joyful was followed by discouraging work from Hansel Robles. Robles — snarked at by Keith Hernandez for giving up homers — chose a lower-altitude way of driving us insane, walking three straight guys before being sent to the clubhouse to think about what he’d done. He also screwed the mound up so completely that the more-reliable Chasen Bradford couldn’t pitch either — Bradford immediately walked a fourth guy, giving the Nats back the lead.
I know Robles has been better of late — he picked up two key strikeouts in the matinee, for instance — but he’s become too exasperating for logic to rule the day. I’d suggest the Mets establish a farm team in Antarctica, with Robles as the entirety of its roster.
The Mets did fight back: Wilmer Flores looked like he’d tied the game with a drive off of Shawn Kelley in the eighth, but the ball died in the air. Erik Goeddel then gave up a seemingly cosmetic, ultimately crushing home run to Adam Lind, and Sean Doolittle arrived to close things out for the Nats.
Doolittle kept throwing strikes, and the Mets looked helpless against him early in their at-bats. But they persevered, with Travis d’Arnaud, Gavin Cecchini and Jose Reyes all singling to bring up Juan Lagares with two outs and the tying run on third, go-ahead run on second. Lagares clobbered a high fastball that seemed certain to go over old pal Alejandro De Aza‘s head, which it did. But it was only high enough to require a little crow hop from De Aza; when he came down the Mets had lost.
The Mets had lost and I was yelling obscenities and reminding myself that remotes are too fragile and expensive to become missiles launched with sports-related pique. Which was a victory of a sort, if you think about it — the season’s lost, but I really thought a bunch of 51s wearing absurd uniforms were going to triumph, and was undone when they didn’t.
by Greg Prince on 27 August 2017 7:02 pm Technically, Sunday afternoon’s Mets win over the Nationals was the day half of a day-night doubleheader, but you’d be excused for confusion in that the day game itself proceeded like day and night from a Met perspective. Maybe that was appropriate at the end of a week that commenced with a solar eclipse.
DAY BREAKS: Asdrubal Cabrera homers with two Mets on. Wilmer Flores goes deep with one Met on. Tommy Milone has a 5-0 lead and pitches like he wants to make the Nationals regret ever giving up on him. Through four innings, Tommy and the Mets are cruising.
NIGHT FALLS: Milone’s revenge fantasy predictably disintegrates in the fifth, an inning he can’t get out of. No decision for Tommy, but a decent choice by Terry Collins when he replaces his Quadruple-A starter at the first sign of trouble with Hansel Robles. Robles, or El Peñaco as he wishes to be marketed, was indeed The Rock of the pen for Collins, getting the Mets through the fifth with the 5-1 lead he was handed.
PITCH BLACK: Out went Robles after two-thirds of an inning for no glaringly apparent reason. In came a parade of relievers whose Players Weekend nicknames did not endear them to us as they began the process of giving back the rest of the Mets’ lead. Eventually — and we do mean eventually, for this game lollygagged like there wasn’t one right behind it waiting to use the field — the Nationals tied it at five. In the midst of giving back runs, the Mets stopped scoring them. Assisting the Nationals’ pitchers was home plate umpire Andy Fletcher, who called strikes not even Marvin Miller would have wanted authorized. For example, Brandon Nimmo twice took ball four with the bases loaded in the sixth only to have Fletcher rule the pitches otherwise. As darkness descended on the Mets’ chances, it wasn’t like you couldn’t have seen this reversal of fortunes coming. The Mets are used to getting totally eclipsed at Nats Park.
A RAY OF LIGHT: Amed Rosario swung at a ball up above even Fletcher’s imagined strike zone and connected in the eighth for a home run that put the Mets back ahead, 6-5. It was a prodigious blast by a genuine prodigy. Amed’s defensive prowess shared center stage with his bat in the bottom of the inning when he bailed out Jerry Blevins (the pitcher of record who’d hit Daniel Murphy to start the inning) and AJ Ramos (who proceeded to string a tightrope across the scoreboard by loading the bases with two out). Matt Wieters, who left his running shoes in his locker along with his normal uniform, grounded a ball to Rosario’s right. No Met shortstop since the brief heyday of Ruben Tejada would have made a successful play. Rosario, however, is the next-generation model and he did. Threw a little high, but Wieters is torpid, and besides, reeling in the occasionally wayward throw is what Dominic Smith is for.
SUNBURST: Ramos, Collins’s 44th pitcher of the game (thus explaining why he suddenly wears 44), returned to his tightrope in the bottom of the ninth. He retired the inning’s first two Nats — including ex-Met Alejandro De Aza, who compared vengeful notes with Tommy Milone and proceeded to improve on them by tripling, doubling and driving in the tying run on a sac fly — but then Junior gave up a single to Adam Lind. Lind was pinch-run for by pitcher Edwin Jackson…one of those details which seems worth noting, if you don’t mind a little foreshadowing. Murph, the grandmaster of getting even, was up next. Murph hadn’t to this point in the series registered a base hit versus his former club. Yeah, like that was gonna remain the case. Of course Murph shot a ball right of second, all but destined to split the gap between Juan Lagares in center and Travis Taijeron in right. One of them is a Gold Glove outfielder. One of them decidedly is not and is never going to be. Guess whose glove touched the ball first without picking it up. Murph definitely had himself a double. Jackson maybe had himself the tying run.
But only maybe. Let’s hear Gary Cohen tell it:
“Murph has twenty home runs for the year. And he hits one up the middle, that’s a base hit. Jackson around second, he’ll go to third. It goes under the glove of Taijeron! Picked up by Lagares, Jackson trying to score! The relay by Cabrera to the plate…Jackson is…OUT and the BALLGAME IS OVER! Jackson thrown out at the plate to end the ballgame! Taijeron mishandled it in right, so they sent Jackson home, Lagares picked it up, got it to Cabrera, [who] threw a strike to d’Arnaud, out at the plate, and the Mets hang on to win, six to five! Wow!”
There’s a whole other game ahead of us tonight, so let’s leave it at “Wow!”
by Jason Fry on 27 August 2017 12:44 am Congratulations to Travis Taijeron for making his big-league debut after seven seasons in the minors — the last three spent at Las Vegas. With his 29th birthday looming, Taijeron had to be thinking he’d been pigeonholed as an organizational player, one whose impressive numbers at Triple-A wouldn’t interest his front office or anybody else’s beyond getting him another job offer as a roster filler.
That was Taijeron’s life Friday; one Yoenis Cespedes hamstring strain later … well, OK, one Cespedes hamstring strain and a Michael Conforto freak injury and two three outfielder trades later and it was Saturday and Taijeron was about to become an immortal. There must have been innumerable lonely nights, unhappy bus rides and sour spring-training cut days when Taijeron had to wonder if his best chance had slipped through his fingers, unnoticed and now unreclaimable. Whatever happens now, that peril is no more. He’s one of 1,038 New York Mets and 19,000+ major leaguers, and he always will be.
But Taijeron can be forgiven if he’s holding out for a second, smaller wish: to play a major-league game without being made to dress like a fucking rodeo clown.
There are some nice things about Players Weekend, if you squint — the Little League-inspired “evolution” logo is OK, and Darren O’Day‘s nickname is a good story. But if you stop squinting for so much as a second, yikes. There’s gobs of obscenely expensive shit you’re of course encouraged to buy, and broadcasters and team flacks and the media following orders to dry-hump this dumb idea with maximum enthusiasm (to his credit, Gary Cohen’s embarrassment has been palpable), and worst of all everybody looks like an idiot. Is your TV broken? No, it’s just Major League Baseball trotting out the latest “How do you do, fellow kids” initiative Power Point’ed into groaning existence by some dreary committee of well-coiffed, vacant-eyed marketing dipshits.
WARNING: I AM ABOUT TO ADMIRE THE YANKEES
Remember when the Yankees used to tell MLB to pound sand when confronted with stupid shit like this? What happened to that? Now the Yankees wear dumb holiday colors and moronic two-tone hats and send Todd Frazier out with THE TODDFATHER on his back like he’s been possessed by Chris Berman, and even though I hate the Yankees it depresses the shit out of me, because lots of times what MLB desperately needs is someone to say, “Nah, the way we’ve done it for the last 90 years or so is good enough.” You used to be able to count on the Yankees to be that franchise, even if it depressed you that your own franchise was run by craven losers. Now the Yankees are just as addicted to moronic hashtaggery as everybody else, and it makes me sad.
OK, IT’S SAFE TO COME BACK NOW
Anyway, the Mets took the field looking like some kind of faddish candy your dentist would warn you to avoid, and awaiting them were the Nats, dressed like bridesmaids who’d pregamed a little too hard and projectile-vomited raspberry margaritas on each other.
Neither team looked like it belonged on a major-league field; one of them at least played like it did. After taking advantage of the Mets’ shoddy defense and Robert Gsellman‘s indifferent sense of pitch selection (start caring, son), the Nats’ attention wandered and they let our ragtag band of recent 51s draw within two runs. The imminent danger got their attention (WARNING: CREAMSICLE OBJECTS IN REARVIEW MIRROR ARE CLOSER THAN THEY APPEAR) and they quickly unloaded on Jeurys Familia, newly returned and understandably rusty. Good teams do that, and the Nats are a good team.
The Mets are not. At this point another wretched loss is hardly worth noting. But for this weekend, there’s added reason to avert your eyes.
by Greg Prince on 26 August 2017 8:36 am As Metsian sequences of events go, the one that unfolded in the top of the first Friday night at Nationals Park was among the Metsiest of 2017. Asdrubal Cabrera was on first base, Yoenis Cespedes was on second, Dominic Smith was batting. Smith singled up the middle. Cespedes came around to score. Except Smith’s ball struck second base umpire Andy Fletcher, rendering it dead, meaning Cespedes had to go back to third.
And Cespedes was clearly hobbling rather than running between third and home, and thus had to leave the game.
And his replacement was Matt Reynolds, not an outfielder, because the Mets were playing with no outfielders in reserve a day after Michael Conforto’s season ended from injury.
And the next two batters, Travis d’Arnaud and Amed Rosario, struck out to leave the bases loaded.
And it happened against the Nationals, the Mets’ nominal archrivals, who entered action approximately a jillion games ahead of the Mets in the National League East.
And the Mets were wearing silly-looking uniforms while being yet again foiled and yet again injured.
The only elements that separated all this from being totally typical of how this season has gone were: a) the Mets had actually scored a run and taken a lead; b) Jacob deGrom was coming to the mound to skillfully protect the lead; and c) the Nationals’ uniforms looked just as silly.
In the opening game of Players Weekend, the depleted Mets in their Little League homage uniforms outlasted the disinterested Nats in their Little League homage uniforms, save for Cespedes, who didn’t last the first inning, straining the hamstring in the leg in which he hadn’t strained his hamstring before. There went Yoenis’s opportunity to display his MLB-approved nickname LA POTENCIA on his back for more than half an inning. For those of you who aren’t versed en Español, LA POTENCIA doesn’t translate to loose-limbed.
ROY HOBBLED would have been more reflective of what happened to Ces Friday and what too often happens to Ces once he challenges the basepaths to a race. What a pity, not so much in terms of what becomes of the Mets’ chances, which haven’t been seen since their likeness was emblazoned on the side of a milk carton ages ago, but because Cespedes had gotten all facets of his game in gear recently. Yoenis Cespedes at full tilt is a sight to behold. Now, likely, it will be a sight to remember until next spring, pending diagnosis, rehab and how soon he inevitably tightens up again.
Funny — or Metsian — how this season has reduced the franchise’s centerpiece player to a liability waiting to happen. Yo doesn’t always help his own cause, though from outside his carefully constructed shell you can’t always tell whether he’s calculating the discretion/valor quotient and being cleverly cautious with his valuable anatomy, or if his mind has gone on a little in-game road trip. Cespedes seems to march to his own drummer. Or hobble to it. When he’s going all out, he’s spectacular. When he opens up, he’s not bad, either. Earlier this week, David Lennon reported in Newsday that Ces, along with Cabrera and Jose Reyes, called a hitters-only meeting, instructing their callow teammates to, in so many words, get their cabezas out of their extremos traseros, no matter the standings. Eleven months ago, these three literally led the Mets to a Wild Card. In this case, they were attempting to lead them through the figurative wilderness.
Through his ever present interpreter, Cespedes explained to Lennon the overriding message he and his more experienced colleagues attempted to deliver: “We understand what the team’s situation is, and how it’s not necessarily our year. But these games are very important, because we’re here to play, to try to win, and the fans spend their money to see us.” It’s what you like to hear veterans say in any language.
What the Mets will have to do, until the next wave of Quadruple-A reinforcements is shuttled in from points far west, is get by with an outfield of Brandon Nimmo, Juan Lagares and pot luck. Can’t speak for the forthcoming mystery guest (Travis Taijeron, come on down!), but the other two members of the Elton John Brigade — they’re still standing — acquitted themselves nicely Friday night. Nimmo hustled to first three times, twice on walks. He’s worked out a celebratory routine for having extracted bases on balls. Tom Goodwin’s experience hiding his eye roll probably comes in handy. Lagares issued one of his periodic reminders that he exists and then some, singling, doubling and stealing twice. The Mets actually stole bases by the plural. Two for Juan, one for Brandon, who’d never tried it before. The Little League-styled jerseys may have imbued certain of these Mets with a sense of discovery. You mean we’re allowed to run from first to second and second to third WITHOUT waiting for one of the other guys to get a hit? Wow!
The comfortingly familiar came in the form of deGrom resuming his road to 17 wins by picking up his 14th. It was a performance commensurate with how we usually react when he is on. Jake — or JAKE, per his sanctioned stitched nickname — overwhelmed whichever Nationals Dusty Baker chose to use after a long overnight trip from Houston, as if that’s our problem. DeGrom went seven-and-two-thirds, scattered five hits and struck out ten. Jerry “GORDO” Blevins reprised his kudos-inspiring role as queller of all things Murph when, at the only sign of trouble, in the eighth, he replaced Jacob and neutralized his former teammate turned Dan the Man Musial.
The Mets’ 4-1 lead reached the bottom of the ninth in the hands of AJ Ramos, who promptly made it a 4-2 lead via a leadoff home run to Adam Lind. JUNIOR then attempted to no-decision JAKE. Ramos had no command and no clue. Despite the activation of Jeurys Familia (a Met coming back from an injury?), Terry Collins adhered to the old adage about sticking with your temporary closer who clearly doesn’t have it. My guess, based on having watched Ramos closely twice lately, is that he didn’t care for the Little League jerseys. Seriously, when he pitched effectively at Citi Field, his top button was unbuttoned, his undershirt appeared sheer and his necklace and tattoos were prominent. I think if this guy could pitch bare chested, he would.
Eventually, Ramos got it together and squirmed out of his self-created mess, preserving a good Met result amid another bad Met development. We win the game. We lose the Yo. We understand what the team’s situation is, and how it’s not necessarily our year. Boy, do we ever.
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