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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 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.
by Greg Prince on 24 August 2017 7:29 pm Here’s some good news: the Mets didn’t lose Michael Conforto in the middle of a playoff hunt. Man, that would hurt. Hurt like Conforto’s left shoulder appeared to when he dislocated it after swinging and missing against Arizona starter Robbie Ray in the fifth inning at Citi Field on Thursday. Conforto went down on the ground in agony. The Mets were in the process of going down to the Diamondbacks for the sixth time in seven games this year, though that took an emotional back seat to losing our only 2017 All-Star, one of our building blocks for 2018 and beyond.
Because these Mets never entered the playoff hunt, the loss of Conforto hurts only on a few levels, none of them intensely competitive. Hurts because he’s Conforto, mostly. Because he’s a Met, naturally. And because he’s a human being. By the by, Ray is a human being who was hit in the head by a batted ball in July, yet he returned to tame the eminently tamable Mets just weeks later. It’s a result we can’t applaud too heartily out of brand loyalty, but we should feel good about the essentials. Ray’s success at our expense is a reminder that talented players can overcome episodes that look painful to us and feel painful to them. Different injuries, but at least one positive resolution is in the books.
Every Met, with a couple of exceptions, has been injured at some point this season, so reflexively our empathy for Conforto was shared with our sorrow for ourselves. “We can’t have nice things” is the trite phrase I read repeatedly after Michael left the game. Cripes, we can have nice things. We just need more of them and better methods for protecting them from calamity, though I’m not sure how you preemptively guard against a dislocated shoulder to your best hitter. Conforto had been to bat nearly a thousand times in the majors since 2015 and hadn’t dislocated his left shoulder once while wearing a Mets uniform. Sometimes weird stuff happens.
Ofttimes weird stuff happens to the Mets, admittedly. But we already knew that.
UPDATE: An MRI revealed a tear in the posterior capsule in Conforto’s left shoulder, an issue to add to the dislocation. So, yes, it can always be worse.
by Jason Fry on 24 August 2017 1:33 am In the summer of 1977, with Tom Seaver exiled to Cincinnati, the Mets tried to lure fans back to Shea Stadium with the cheery come-on “bring your kids to see our kids.”
It didn’t work — nothing short of M. Donald Grant’s public execution would have worked under the circumstances — but this month I keep flashing back to that ancient phrase. The soon-to-be free agents are mostly gone or going, replaced by a kiddie corps of Amed Rosario, Dominic Smith, Brandon Nimmo, Kevin Plawecki, Chris Flexen and Matt Reynolds — bolstered by young veterans such as Michael Conforto and Wilmer Flores. (It still boggles my mind that Wilmer just turned 26, since he’s about 75 in Emo Met Years.)
On plenty of nights the kids haven’t been all right. They’ve looked like … well, like kids, undone to wildness and lack of focus and uncertainty and overeagerness and other kid maladies. But now and then everything has snapped into focus, and damned if you don’t find yourself fantasizing about 2018 and beyond.
Take Wednesday night’s game, in which Nimmo was on base all four times, Conforto drove in two runs, Smith belted his third big-league homer, Rosario was 2-for-4 with a RBI, Flexen recorded the best start of his very young career and Paul Sewald rode to the rescue with sparkling relief work. The oldest guy mentioned in this paragraph is all of 27.
No, it wasn’t a perfect night: Flexen still walks too many guys, and the Mets played some avert-your-eyes defense before Juan Lagares bailed them out by making a fine running catch in short center and firing home for an inning-ending, lead-preserving double play. But it was good enough for a win, and to make you imagine more such wins in the future … perhaps even the near-future.
This youth movement is an odd one — the Mets didn’t tear down an old team so much as they accelerated already-existing plans to part ways with veterans. Barring a big splash in the free-agent market — which seems unlikely given the club’s eagerness to slash payroll and trade for cash — the 2018 plan seems to be to bring back the once-glittering, now-tarnished starting pitchers and hope that a) this time their arms don’t all fall off and b) the young bats can score enough runs to win.
We’ve got all winter to discuss that plan; for now, it occurs to me that youth movements are much the same whether they’re part of a teardown or a mere remodeling. You have to put up with mistakes and mismatches, and squint to imagine potential blossoming into production.
Losing isn’t fun even when it comes with patient words about lessons and the future. (Hell, that kind of losing may be even less fun, since it implicitly demands that you accept more of the same.) The question is how much losing you’re willing to endure in exchange for basking in the occasional sunshine.
There’s no one answer to that. Personally, I’ve been chewed up by this wretched season — by the Mets’ horrific luck, poor decisions and annoying penny-pinching. But watching Rosario and Smith high-five after a win sure helps. So does seeing Nimmo sprint to first with his goofy grin, and realizing that I’ve come to admire Sewald for his guts, and thanking the baseball gods that not even Terry Collins would sit Conforto now.
Tomorrow may not bring good news: I can imagine coming in from the beach to find it’s 5-0 Diamondbacks, with Rosario booting balls and Smith looking overmatched and Rafael Montero nibbling at corners. But for now the kids are winners, and you don’t even have to squint to see it.
I could get used to that.
by Jason Fry on 22 August 2017 10:55 pm Losing with the kids is OK, at least as I see it — tonight Amed Rosario hit a home run (awesome) and nearly got thrown out to end the game stretching a double into a triple (yikes don’t do that). And Kevin McGowan escaped ghost status, keeping the roster of Mets ghostsat nine.
On the other hand, Tommy Milone? Was anyone not closely related to Tommy Milone sad to see him leave the team the first time? Who in the world was hankering for his return? Nothing against Milone — he’s a major-league baseball player and I’m the farthest thing from it — but with the Mets retooling for next year I would rather have seen anybody I could at least pretend might be a prospect. No Rumble Pony might need to be added to the 40-man roster in the winter? No Brooklyn Cyclone hurler has impressed the front office with his diligence for learning the game? Tommy Milone was really the best answer?
Down in the minors, Jeurys Familia pitched for Brooklyn, which is good — going into the offseason, the Mets desperately need to reduce the number of question marks about important 2018 arms.
And David Wright DH’ed for St. Lucie. In the grand scheme of things, that’s — sadly — not particularly important. Wright is 34 and battling multiple injuries that have ended careers; my first impression watching video of him from the Florida State League was that he looked worrisomely gaunt. Foreseeing Wright playing an important role on an active Mets roster again demands optimism that’s crossed the line into fabulism. (Though imagine if David would like to be a bench coach, minor-league manager or even … hmm.)
Still, in this crowd I don’t need to write about Wright’s service to the Mets or his decency as a person. His being cut down in the prime of what might have been a Hall of Fame career is one of the great tragedies in franchise history, one we’ve collectively pretended isn’t happening at times, because the unfairness of it all is so piercing.
Wright finishing the season with a handful of pinch-hitting appearances or a start at third wouldn’t tell us anything about 2018. But it would be a nice grace note in a season turned flat and discordant. Not everything has to be about investing in an uncertain future; we’re allowed a quiet commemoration of what’s come before, too.
by Jason Fry on 22 August 2017 12:06 am The Mets lost, and it was annoying — after a drought in the clutch, they came back to tie the game against the Diamondbacks and their dreadful uniforms, forcing the business of determining a winner to extra innings.
Then Erik Goeddel came on as the latest reliever, and it was immediately clear that he didn’t have it. He spiked balls below the strike zone, sent them sailing wide of it, and looked like a man who’d backed himself into a corner. The sarcastic cheers for strikes were inevitable — and so, it seemed, was the outcome.
A.J. Pollock, whose season has been disappointing enough to grant him honorary Met status, passed up a 2-0 fastball right down the middle — a decision many Arizona fans probably characterized as excessively polite, given Goeddel’s desperation and lack of command. Goeddel threw the same pitch again, and Pollock did his job, clubbing the ball over the wall for a 3-1 D’backs lead.
The Mets fought back. Michael Conforto homered off perpetual annoyance Fernando Rodney, he of the askew hat and arrows fired heavenward. But that was a cosmetic victory. Yoenis Cespedes — who’d earlier driven in the tying run and actually shown interest in playing the field energetically — popped up, Wilmer Flores came out on the short side of an 11-pitch battle, and Dominic Smith flied out to left. Thanks for coming everybody and please get home safe.
“Safe” is far from assured for this year’s Mets — the latest to fall is Steven Matz, who will undergo surgery to relocate an irritated ulnar nerve, meaning his season is over. The surgery itself isn’t particularly worrisome — Jacob deGrom had it last season and showed no ill effects — but the subject is. Matz’s career has been a litany of arm woes, from the Tommy John surgery that felled him before his first professional pitch to the maladies that have now curtailed all three of his big-league seasons. Matz is left-handed and obviously talented, but it’s reached the point where the first question he has to answer is “Can this guy stay on the field?” So far the answer is “no,” making follow-up questions of little import.
Still, I found myself not terribly bothered by the loss. Part of that, I’ll admit, is being on vacation — the first few innings unfolded while I was engaged in a vigorous three-way battle for family mini-golf supremacy. But more than that, it’s that I’m content watching the young Mets earn their stripes — and take their licks.
I rooted for Curtis Granderson, Jay Bruce, Rene Rivera and other departed Mets, but they weren’t pieces of the team’s future, and watching them finish out a lost season had become a singularly pointless exercise. I’d campaigned for weeks for the Mets to move the lame-duck veterans and let the kids play. Once they finally did that, complaining about the results would be laughable.
Sure, the game’s looked too fast for Amed Rosario at times, and Dominic Smith doesn’t look like he’s enjoying his introduction to the ungodly breaking shit they throw in the Show. But it’s by enduring those moments that Rosario and Smith will learn. They need to play, just like Brandon Nimmo and Kevin Plawecki do.
Robert Gsellman might benefit from a Dale Carnegie book tucked into his stocking this Christmas, but since declaring that he doesn’t care, he’s pitched like he does. The Mets need to see if he can keep doing that — and they need to provide new challenges for Paul Sewald, Chasen Bradford and the other young relievers once starters such as Gsellman depart. Hey, that even includes seeing if Goeddel can work back-to-back days.
On Monday night the answer to that last question was “no.” But that’s all right. Testing the capabilities of Addison Reed and Lucas Duda stopped being relevant sometime this summer. It was time for the Mets to prepare a different exam, however much we may not like the class’s initial grades.
by Greg Prince on 21 August 2017 10:00 am “You have to respect a ballplayer who’s just tryin’ to finish the season,” Annie Savoy told us after she learned Crash Davis left her at dawn for an opening at Asheville in the South Atlantic League. Crash had a goal: minor league home run No. 247, the record for such things in the world of Bull Durham, if not real-life minor league baseball. When Crash next showed up in Durham, it was only after he’d taken care of business. He hit his dinger, he hung ’em up. Now, at the end of the movie, Crash just wanted to be.
Nobody on the 2017 Mets deserves to just be more than Jacob deGrom. He’s taken every ball, he’s made every start, he’s absorbed every indignity, he’s pinch-hit a few times and, for the most part, he’s kept any dissatisfaction to himself. On Sunday at Citi Field, he betrayed a touch of impatience with the less than stellar defense behind him during the inning in which he finally cracked enough to allow the Marlins to score the runs that definitively torpedoed his afternoon…but he also had the grace to apologize publicly for inadvertently showing up his rookie shortstop. Young Amed Rosario had made like Dear Evan Hansen and went tap, tap, tapping on his glove before making the throw that didn’t retire Dee Gordon in the seventh, which soon revealed itself as prelude to disaster in the form of Giancarlo Stanton taking Jacob deep for a three-run homer.
The blast would have been predictable had it come off any other Met pitcher. After Gordon beat Rosario’s throw, and before Stanton sent a pitch so far it should have had a damn stewardess on it, the starter instinctively raised his hands in disgust that he got the ground ball he needed, yet no outs to show for it. Sort of like the rest of us did, except we weren’t on TV and we aren’t Rosario’s teammate. DeGrom salvaged some diplomacy over the incident afterwards, admitting, “I probably shouldn’t have done that.”
Does anything good ever happen on a Sunday afternoon at Citi Field?
Calendar aside, it wasn’t a great day for deGrom and it wasn’t a passable day for the indisputably inexperienced, intermittently inept Mets, who ultimately lost to Adam Conley and the Marlins, 6-4. Conley notched eleven strikeouts in seven innings. The Mets fumbled continuously for nine innings. DeGrom took the defeat, pulling the ace’s record down to 13-7. There was a time not too long ago when I thought Jake had a shot at 20 wins. A lot would have had to have gone right, which should have been the clue it was an unlikely quest. These are the 2017 Mets. A lot never goes right.
The goal Susan Sarandon’s Savoy cited remains a valid one for all of us, deGrom included: just try to finish the season. We have 40 more games to go. Jake has maybe eight starts, depending on how hard he may be hitting the proverbial wall, which I hope isn’t as hard as Stanton hit him on Sunday. You could definitely envision a moment when all concerned parties agree the ball shouldn’t be given to deGrom because what’s the point anymore? Let him get an early start on winter and let him keep the one reliable arm the Mets have in functional shape ahead of 2018. Or maybe, should there be an alternative after rehabs and callups take effect, he can miss one start and be fresh to finish the season as he started it, on the mound.
Jake said he’d like to get to 200 innings. He’s at 165 right now. Decent goal. It’s an arbitrary figure, but arbitrary figures drive pitchers and fans. I have a figure even more arbitrary as my goal on his behalf: 17 wins. That’s a legitimate acelike total. We already know Jacob deGrom is a legitimate ace, but you so rarely see that many wins these days, no matter how good the pitcher.
I’m gonna put aside that pitcher’s wins are an inane category, given how a starter can put in a fine day’s work, go completely unrewarded because he’s undermined or outdueled, and then a vulture can swoop in briefly and fly away with his W. Hansel Robles, the reliever who’s often been awful, is second on the staff with seven wins. Paul Sewald, the closest thing the Mets bullpen has had to a breakout performer, is 0-5. No starter not named Jacob deGrom has more than five wins. The Mets themselves don’t have 55 wins, so it’s no wonder that the infrequent victories are distributed disproportionately.
We know wins are flawed. But they exist, and I’d like Jake to collect 17 of them. That’s four more on top of the amount he’s already secured. He’s welcome to squeeze out more if he can figure out how. I suppose I should just cut our losses and hope he doesn’t get hurt in quest of No. 14. But I like 17. Seventeen was how many Jerry Koosman had in 1969, how many Jon Matlack had in 1976, how many Doc Gooden had in 1984 and 1986, how many Ron Darling had in 1988 and how many Al Leiter had in 1998. If I may dazzle you with unassailable logic, 17 is not as many as 18, but it’s more than 16. Sixteen wins is admirable — on this team, it would be astonishing — but 17 somehow conveys another level of oomph.
R.A. Dickey was the last Met to win as many as 17. He won 20 in 2012. We’re no longer asking for 20. We’re asking for 17, a Leiter’s Twenty, if you will. Doesn’t seem like to gargantuan a sum to ask for every nineteen or so years. Jake has seven or eight starts left, pending how management chooses to nurture his right arm the rest of the way. “There’s too much nurturing in today’s game,” Keith Hernandez, the quintessential 17, suggested Sunday, just to remind us he’s had it with society in general and baseball in particular, but it’s understandable if the Mets want to cover their asset with caution and a fleece blanket. Yet if Jake is allowed to go out and be Jake, I really hope the Mets can score a few runs for him, catch a few outs for him and smoothly transfer a few grounders from their gloves for him. I hope 200 innings yields 17 wins. As long as we’re trying to finish the season, it would be nice to come away with something that makes it less trying.
In other Jake news, the Mets have received Jacob Rhame from the Dodgers as the player to be Rhame later in the Curtis Granderson deal. Stop me if you’ve heard this before, but he’s a righthanded minor league relief pitcher. My scouting report indicates that if he wants to make it with the Mets, he has a helluva first name.
by Greg Prince on 20 August 2017 3:01 am June 3, 2017, was a fine Saturday night for the New York Mets, who beat the Pittsburgh Pirates at Citi Field, 4-2, with, Lucas Duda at first, Neil Walker at second, Curtis Granderson in center, Jay Bruce around in right, René Rivera catching, and Addison Reed pitching the eighth and ninth innings to record his eighth save. Some kinda win, some kinda team.
Well, not really some kinda team, because even with that particular splendid effort put solidly in the books, that team improved only to 24-30 and sat nowhere near either first place in their division or a Wild Card spot in their league. June 3 was also the last time all five of the aforementioned position players started together in a winning Mets effort, whether saved by the closer of record or otherwise. Injuries were incurred. Lineups were juggled. Futility ensued. It was nobody’s fault, it was everybody’s fault. The Mets of Bruce and Walker, Duda and Granderson, Rivera and Reed and those with whom they attempted to blend their talents never gained traction. Now — eleven weeks since they forged their last collective success — there is no longer any sign of any of them on the team they once called their own.
There are still Mets, but those guys aren’t them. Reed, 28; Bruce, 30; Walker, 31; Duda, 31; Rivera, 34; and Granderson, 36, are fighting for playoff positions in other teams’ colors. They were supposed to be doing that in orange and blue. It didn’t happen. We have moved on because we have to. On Saturday night, August 19, 2017, the majority of the Mets who started their game at Citi Field were far younger and, as logically follows, less experienced than their early-June forebears. Kevin Plawecki, 26, was the catcher. He’s up because Rivera followed Granderson out the door on Saturday afternoon. René, who at some point held every unsure Met hand attached to an otherwise promising Met pitching arm, was claimed off waivers by the Cubs. In 2016, Rivera kept an ad hoc staff in one piece all the way to October. In 2017, there is no October to speak of on the horizon, so the Mets bade René Vaya con Dios, which is baseballese for “go and contend.”
Bidding fare thee well to the veterans you don’t expect back and allowing them to lend their abilities and wisdom to teams battling for something more than a quick end to the schedule is the humane thing to do. For example, I would have enjoyed a few dozen more opportunities to watch Curtis Granderson of the Los Angeles Dodgers play the consummate professional for the New York Mets, but as with the other vets who have been similarly dispatched, it wasn’t getting us anywhere and it wasn’t getting him anywhere. This was a Branch Rickey-Ralph Kiner year in Flushing. We were finishing out of sight with these fellas, we can finish out of sight without them. Had Grandy and Duda and so forth hung around, we’d likely be a more competent outfit than recently demonstrated in the short term, but we’d also be grousing that the kids aren’t getting their fair chance.
Those chances have arrived. Plawecki’s gonna get the games Rivera would have started, and maybe a few that would be going to Travis d’Arnaud. Brandon Nimmo, 24, is suddenly at least a part-time starting outfielder. No more Bruce, no more Granderson, hence more Nimmo than we’ve ever seen. On Saturday he joined Plawecki, 21-year-old Amed Rosario, 22-year-old Dominic Smith, 24-year-old Michael Conforto and 26-year-old Wilmer Flores in support of 26-year-old Rafael Montero’s eternal search for the fountain of effectiveness.
The young men on a mission found what they were looking for as they crafted an 8-1 victory over visiting Miami. Montero was a real pitcher for six entire innings. He pitched without fear and was rewarded with one double play ball after another. The Mets’ offense — with a helping hand from the Marlins’ defense — provided Rafael with a seven-run bottom of the sixth to ensure him one of the rare positive decisions of his career. Mets management has made mostly neutral decisions since late July. They cut their losses on the veterans who weren’t signed for next year but brought in no major league or major league-ready talent in return. Instead, it’s been about the kids who hadn’t yet gotten a shot and the kids who hadn’t yet gotten much of a shot.
Saturday night, the kids were all here and the kids were all right. Flores homered. Plawecki homered. Smith homered. Matt Reynolds, 26, who started the smashing sixth by pinch-walking for Montero, came to bat a second time in the inning, serving as the ninth de facto designated hitter in Mets history. Two nights before, Granderson became the seventh Met to homer in his final swing as a Met, the only one to leave us with a grand slam. Intriguing goings and comings are defining these transitional Met days. Smith hit his first career Citi Field home run, Plawecki his second. The five double plays the Mets turned tied a franchise high. Montero earned a home win for the second time ever, the first time since 2014, long before we’d ever given more than a passing opponent thought to the likes of Neil Walker and Jay Bruce.
We had ourselves a succinct, discrete era in the interim. We had ourselves 2015 and 2016, back-to-back postseason appearances, one deep, one cameo, each the culmination of memorable 162-game journeys. We tried to keep it going in 2017 but went irretrievably off course. We might find our way back to where we want to go in 2018, but we’ve surely veered from the path we traveled the previous two seasons. Not all the names have changed, but enough have. The 2017 that encompassed the events of June 3 was part who we were in 2015 and 2016. The events of August 19 are the preface to something else altogether, something yet to be determined.
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Already determined: win or lose, a night of baseball with the Chapmans of Central Jersey remains an unmatched delight. Stephanie and I were honored to spend Saturday in the M&M’s Sweet Seats alongside our dear friends Sharon, Kevin and Ross — the family’s youngest son, whom we’ve known since before he was knee-high to a Strawberry, recently turned 21, thus providing an excuse for Citi Field celebration — and other swell folks in the Chapman Mets orbit. The M&M’s Sweet Seats used to be the Party City Deck. Before that, it was deep left and left-center field and the reason hardly anybody hit a home run in those directions. In its current incarnation, it’s a perch that serves as a prime spot for outfield viewing (we literally had Nimmo’s back), and you will by no means leave hungry from the bountiful food and drink included with your admission. Yet I have to agree with Sharon that if you’re going to name a section for M&M’s, then just on principle, the M&M’s should flow like wine. Perhaps wine should flow like wine in that section, too, but leave that issue for when Seaver Vineyards takes over naming rights.
Surprisingly, the M&M’s don’t flow at all. There are some baked into cookies, where chocolate chips should be, but it’s not the same thing. It never is. C’mon, M&M’s. Get with your own program. You bought it, you branded it, you gotta bring out your best. Divert a case of your candy-coated product from Air Force One, slap a skyline logo over the presidential seal, and give your guests a treat that will Met in their mouths, not in their hands. I can’t believe you need me to tell you that.
by Jason Fry on 19 August 2017 2:55 am The Mets’ flaccid, meaningless loss to the Marlins was prelude to the real news of the day: the trade of Curtis Granderson and cash to the Dodgers for the curious return of a player to be named later … or cash.
The sheer Wilponitude of that transaction is irritating — to my admittedly inexpert eye this looks like a fancy way of not being willing to say “salary dump,” but we can vent about that another day. Granderson immediately leaps up 33 games in the standings and joins a clubhouse making October plans. I wish him the best in those endeavors — as, I suspect, do all his teammates and every other Mets fan.
Granderson wasn’t an MVP or a transformative player, arriving in Flushing with his best years behind him. But his on-field performance repeatedly surprised you, and the surprises were invariably to the upside. As for his off-field performance, “MVP” would indeed be the word — Granderson showed everyone what a fundamentally good person he was, whether it was raising money for charity, taking young teammates aside for conversations, or showing up with ice cream for Mets employees whose workplaces were desks instead of warning tracks and basepaths.
Granderson’s arrival on a four-year deal was something of a head-scratcher, with the prevailing wisdom that the Mets could expect two decent years and expect to swallow two lousy ones, then say farewell to a 36-year-old player. But Granderson was … well, “consistently inconsistent” might approximate it. The man would spent April and May looking like he had a giant fork in his back, then rouse himself in the warmth and prove impossible to get out. He alternated amazing funks with runs of excellence, and when each campaign was over you were surprised to find him having turned in much the same performance, and a pretty good one at that. While the batting average was never particularly robust, his early exit robs him of the certainty of hitting 20 homers in each of his four Met seasons. He helped carry the Mets to last year’s unlikely play-in game (and kept them alive with a tremendous catch in dead center) and was superb in the World Series the year before that. In the field, he played right when his arm dictated he should have been playing left, which wasn’t his fault; asked to switch to center, he acquitted himself better than anyone expected.
And hey, his final act as a Met was a grand slam against the Yankees. That’s got to count for something, right?
* * *
While pondering a departure, spare a moment for a non-arrival. The Mets called up Kevin McGowan and then sent him down without a pitch thrown in anger, making McGowan — provisionally — the 10th ghost in club history and the third to never play a big-league game for another franchise.
That “provisionally” is important here. McGowan is just 25 and might well return in September, or sooner if more veterans depart the club and payroll. Two years ago, Matt Reynolds was the Mets’ first postseason ghost, waiting until 2016 to escape baseball ectoplasm. But escape he did.
Still, funny things happen in baseball, and there are all number of ways for the likelihood of another shot to curdle into possibility, non-impossibility and then nothing. Just ask Terrel Hansen, who went back to Tidewater as a 25-year-old in 1992 and retired in 1999 after playing for three more organizations, in the Mexican League and in independent ball. Or there’s Billy Cotton, who was called up in September ’72 and — according to legend — got as far as the on-deck circle only to see the batter in front of him hit into an inning-ending double play. I’ve never been able to verify that story and hope it isn’t true, but what’s indisputable is that Cotton retired after ’74, never having returned to the big leagues.
Here’s hoping McGowan avoids such a fate. We’re Mets fans — we’ve got enough things that go bump in the night as it is.
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