The blog for Mets fans
who like to read
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.
Got something to say? Leave a comment, or email us at faithandfear@gmail.com. (Sorry, but we have no interest in ads, sponsored content or guest posts.)
Need our RSS feed? It's here.
Visit our Facebook page, or drop by the personal pages for Greg and Jason.
Or follow us on Twitter: Here's Greg, and here's Jason.
|
by Jason Fry on 26 April 2025 12:35 pm On nights I’m recapping, I put a little warning for myself on repeat in my brain: It’s not all about the narrative. We see patterns while watching baseball (or while doing anything else, storytelling monkeys that we are) and we find them irresistible — pattern detection is a tool we use to make sense of a world that often seems to defy sense. To range perilously far afield from balls and bats (promise this will be brief), pattern detection is akin to our predilection for high-fat foods: They’re things that served us well as wandering hunter-gatherers in a world full of hostility and want, but have become maladaptive now that our chief adversaries include obesity and boredom.
But sometimes you can’t resist the narrative, and Friday night’s super-weirdo Mets-Nats tilt made that impossible, as it was filled to bursting with ironies and reversals and unclassifiable WTF-i-ness. The only problem, from our point of view, was that the narrative wound up being at our expense, with a last-second plot twist that I for one did not enjoy in the least.
(Though actually that’s not true. It was nicely done, and I admire both its craft and its cheek. Which isn’t the same as enjoying it.)
The Mets and Nats collided in a sporadically rainy DC, with Daniel Murphy joining Gary Cohen and Ron Darling Keith Hernandez and more than holding his own as a budding color guy, one whose next area of development should be learning to mesh with a partner or partners. (No knock on Murph whatsoever; this is the kind of thing that’s only learned in the doing.) The Mets were wearing their sad Canal Street knock-off specials, while the Nats did them one worse in sartorial decisions, taking in the field in bland City Connects 2.0 that are obviously and appreciably less interesting than their beloved cherry blossom City Connects 1.0.
(Look, I get that uniforms in general and City Connects in particular are vehicles for selling stuff, but what is with this new trend of teams using City Connects to discard their earlier good decisions? The Dodgers were first to reboot their City Connects, but that was wise as their first take made them look like overripe blueberries. But the Nats, Giants and Rockies have all unveiled new City Connects that are significant downgrades from what they had before, with the Marlins all but certain to make the same mistake next month. It stings all the more in the case of the Rockies, who’d joined the Marlins and Angels in crafting alt uniforms that ought to replace their regular ones.)
Kodai Senga looked solid though not quite himself in facing the Nats’ lineup, which is young and promising in ways that can bedevil opponents but also fans waiting for potential to gel into something more. Meanwhile, Jake Irvin kept the Mets off-balance, as he’s done repeatedly during his career, unwittingly honing his resume to be signed for the back of the Mets’ rotation in some year to come.
Our first narrative signpost came in the bottom of the second, when Dylan Crews singled to left with two outs and nobody on. Brandon Nimmo, not generally given to brain locks, mysteriously threw to third instead of second, allowing an alert Crews to take an extra base and leaving him perfectly placed to come home on a Jose Tena single that put the Mets down 1-0.
In the top of the fourth, Nimmo and Mark Vientos singled with nobody out to set things up for Jesse Winker, who hit a hard grounder that hit the dirt just in front of Nathaniel Lowe‘s glove at first. Vientos saw it was a one-hopper and sensibly kept going; Lowe saw it was a one-hopper and sensibly threw to second. But Alfonso Marquez ruled it had been a no-hopper, and a few moments later the Mets had hit into a triple play that never should have been. (An amusing sidelight: First-base coach Antoan Richardson all but blindfolding Winker to keep him from blowing a gasket.)
It’s not entirely fair to blame what happened on Marquez, who was behind the play. What is fair — and was Carlos Mendoza‘s main point of contention during both the futile on-field argument and his postgame remarks — is to blame the other three umpires for refusing to get together and overrule their colleague based on their (presumably) better angles.
For me that was the rub, or in this case the chafe. A lot was made about the fact that trapped balls in the outfield are reviewable while trapped balls on the infield aren’t, and while I agree that doesn’t make sense, it’s a point about which I throw up my hands, since so little about replay review makes sense.
The entire system is overly complicated, with reviewable/not reviewable just one system of the disease, and it will only get worse once balls and strikes can be challenged. For God’s sake, we don’t need challenges — if I wanted to watch the fucking NFL, I’d watch the fucking NFL. Just institute a no-arguments ABS system for the plate and have the umps in New York review on-field plays (of whatever variety) as needed. A yellow light in the ballpark means someone watching in Chelsea thinks an ump might need to take a second look; from there scoreboards parse replays and umps in the park don earpieces and mics as they do today. It would take two weeks tops for us all to get used to it and then we’d proceed without all this bric-a-brac.
What I took away from the whole farce came back to the narrative: Baseball portents are a tricky business, but when an umpire bad-calls you into a triple play, it might not be your night.
And yet it looked like it might be. In the eighth, with the Mets down 3-0, the storytellers really got to work carving patterns out of the play-by-play marble. With the bases loaded and two out, Nimmo hit a bounding ball over the head of pitcher Jose Ferrer that second baseman Luis Garcia Jr. just managed to keep on the infield, with Juan Soto saved from getting trapped between third and home when Keibert Ruiz bobbled the throw.
Enter Kyle Finnegan, the only trustworthy arm in the Nats pen. He threw a four-seamer that Vientos served down the right-field line, one of those Schrodinger’s balls in indeterminate flight that might collapse into a foul or an easy pop to the right fielder or trouble. It turned out to be trouble: Crews dove for it, missing by a few inches, and when various Mets were done huffing and scampering Vientos was on third and somehow it was 4-3 Mets.
The Mets got out of potential trouble in the bottom of the inning, when Tyrone Taylor cut off Garcia Jr.’s drive to the gap and made a nifty throw to second to just nab the runner, with extra credit to Francisco Lindor for alertly yelling at Jeff McNeil to let Taylor’s throw come through instead of cutting it off.
It was still 4-3 Mets come the ninth, with Ryne Stanek asked to fill in for Edwin Diaz, he of various ailments including hip cramps, legs not the same length and — one can no longer sugarcoat it — general unreliability. Stanek’s strong points have included general reliability, but he was in immediate trouble as Crews slashed a ball to right that Soto couldn’t quite keep in his glove at the fence, one of those plays that’s less “should have had it” than “you’d like to see it made.” Tena singled in Crews to tie the game; with one out Stanek was removed to fume hairily in the dugout while A.J. Minter tried to shepherd the Mets safely into the 10th.
Which almost worked. Vientos made a nice play to record a fielder’s choice, leaving CJ Abrams as the winning run at first and the huge James Wood at the plate against Minter. Minter got two quick strikes but his next three cutters weren’t quite tempting enough to coax Wood into delivering a harmless grounder.
Minter’s next cutter did produce the desired grounder; unfortunately it wasn’t harmless. It looked a lot like the play Garcia Jr. had made, but multiple little things conspired to make it different in a way that proved fatal. If McNeil had been able to field it (another play in the middle of the should have had it/you’d like to see it made axis) the Mets would have come to bat in the 10th. If McNeil had made no contact with it, it would have come to Taylor with a little more momentum and so given him a little more time. Instead it made incidental contact with McNeil, not changing direction but slowing down as Taylor (who’d rightly been playing no doubles) raced in hoping to avert disaster.
I was expected first and third, but Abrams kept going and as he rounded third Nationals Park was becoming New Soilmaster Stadium right before my eyes, with the Nats playing the role of OMG THE FUCKING MARLINS AGAIN. Taylor’s throw was yet another on the SHHI/YLTSIM spectrum — on target and made under duress but also hurried, off the mound and a little short — and there came Abrams’ hand across the plate just before the swipe from Francisco Alvarez‘s glove.
The Mets had lost a game in which the other guys got gifted a triple play, taken the lead on an unexpected uprising, and then watched everything fall apart, with Nimmo, Crews, Vientos, McNeil and Taylor all left to consider the vicissitudes of fortune and their own shifting roles in the story.
A pretty good game, if you like narratives, or can’t resist them. And now let us never speak of it again.
by Greg Prince on 24 April 2025 1:30 pm “No way we were losing that game!” I exclaimed the instant after we won that game, “that game” being Wednesday afternoon’s ten-inning thriller at Citi Field and “we” being the New York Mets, with me implicit in the first-person plural. Of course there were many ways we could have lost that game, as most games offer inflection points where things can go right or go wrong, depending on your perspective of right and wrong. From our perspective, it would have been wrong for the Mets to lose that game, therefore everything turned out right.
That’s been going on a lot lately, and who outside of Philadelphia is to complain?
There were two calls within the 4-3 Mets win that in just about every other season of Mets baseball I’m convinced would have been adjudicated differently. Neither of them directly impacted the outcome, but each had that “when you’re going horse[bleep], horse[bleep] things happen to you” feel to it. That bit of baseball wisdom would seem to apply to the Phillies these days.
One was Rob Thomson not being granted a replay review when Juan Soto threw out Nick Castellanos at the plate on Hayden Senger’s effective block and tag in the eighth inning. Video indicated there was no way Castellanos got his hand in, so unless there was a secret angle we weren’t seeing, no harm, no foul with no second look. Still, a manager being told, nope, you can’t have a review because you were a few seconds too late making your request felt like the kind of thing a Terry Collins or a Luis Rojas or any manager skippering on our behalf would have heard. Instead, it was told to the manager from the other dugout.
Thomson also didn’t get satisfaction after Castellanos was unbalked from second to first in the tenth. This was really an inning when the wrong way was in sight. Edwin Diaz, after a strong ninth, is pitching with the Ghost of Bryce Harper on second. Edwin strikes out Kyle Schwarber, but Ghost of Bryce steals third, because Edwin learned to hold runners on from Adam Ottavino. The infield comes in, which doesn’t make a difference when Castellanos shoots a single past a diving Mark Vientos. The Phillies take a 3-2 lead, which, honestly, felt a long time coming.
Brett Baty had hit a two-run homer in the second, but Zack Wheeler put the hammer down thereafter. Meanwhile, David Peterson had one inning in his five-and-third that involved a little more breaking than bending, when two Phillie runs crossed in the fourth. It was two-two forever, and the longer Wheeler goes giving up nothing, the more impregnable he seems to become. Fortunately, he went only six. The Phillies came oh-so-close to going ahead in the eighth, but there was Castellanos’s hand scraping dirt. The Mets came kinda close to winning in the ninth, with all the pieces in place for a cuckoo celebration when, with two out, Luisangel Acuña singled (I’d been thinking, “not the worst thing in the world here if he’s the final out because then he’s the ghost runner in the tenth”; shame on me) and late-inning magician Luis Torrens singled off the bench. Up came Francisco Lindor, and of course Lindor’s gonna get it done. Except, somehow, Lindor doesn’t get it done, and we have extras, and we have Diaz getting stolen on, and Vientos not nabbing the Castellanos single, and the Phillies breaking that tie.
Which brings us back around to Rob Thomson’s lack of satisfaction, for Diaz is on the mound disengaging from the rubber one too many times and has a balk called on him, which is technically what an umpire has to do. Except Diaz isn’t remotely trying to deceive the runner. The runner is Castellanos. He’ll figure out how to deceive himself. Edwin’s problem, we would learn, is a hip cramp. These guys do all kinds of stretching and take in (if we are to judge by the supplies on the bench) all kinds of fluids, but I guess it happens. Carlos Mendoza, Jeremy Hefner, and a trainer with a towel — always with a towel, I notice — come out and Diaz exits due to injury. We don’t know that it’s apparently not a big deal at the moment; in my mind, I’m thinking, “We had that great start in 1972 that was short-circuited by injuries, and here we are again.” I’m not even worried that we’re facing a runner on second with one out and, with Huascar Brazoban, Danny Young, and Jose Butto having already been used (and done well), Max Kranick coming in cold. Of course the game is about to be lost. I just hope the season isn’t going with it.
If conclusion-jumping were an Olympic event, I’d own at least a bronze medal.
The umpires decided in their wisdom that since Diaz wasn’t doing any serious balking versus Castellanos, he didn’t really balk. The man was in physical distress and trying to get loose or let the dugout know he required attention. So never mind the balk. Castellanos, you’re back on first. Thomson was upset again. I’m not sure I’d ever seen a balk overturned, and maybe the Phillies manager hadn’t. I have seen balks called for less egregious movements. No matter, for when Kranick finally declares himself warm, he walks the next batter and Castellanos lands on second with nobody out, anyway. Plus the batter, JT Realmuto, is now a baserunner, too, so don’t pout, Phillies. Sure, maybe Kranick would have grooved one to Realmuto if he was burdened by knowing a runner was on second rather than first when he came in. It’s unknowable, except for sensing that this is the sort of thing we can picture having happened to Mickey Callaway or Jerry Manuel or, despite his Talmudic knowledge of the rulebook, Buck Showalter. The Mets and their managers inevitably get screwed. That’s gospel.
Got some newer testament for us. Kranick, coming in under dire circumstances two days after throwing 36 pitches — and after allowing a single too short to score Castellanos from second — escapes. With the bases loaded, Bryson Stott flies to shallow center. Not gonna send Castellanos here, either. Max Kepler flies to right. Not gonna score anybody. The Phillies lead, 3-2, yet linger on the precipice of doom.
The Ghost of Francisco Lindor gives us more than a ghost of chance standing on second to start the bottom of the tenth. Soto, renowned thus far for everything but his power (it’ll come, I swear it will), produces the most productive weak grounder to the right side we could have asked for, placing Ghost of Francisco on third. All we need from Pete Alonso is a deep fly ball to ensure this game keeps going. We got more than we needed on a double into the right-center gap. It’s 3-3 now. Spiritually, this is a 16-inning game minimum, but we have spirits as runners so as to avoid true marathons. We might as well win this in ten.
Thomson orders Jordan Romano to walk Brandon Nimmo, meaning we have runners on first and second for Vientos. It would have been a good spot for Vientos to pull an NLCS Game Two and take personally the notion that an opposing manager would rather face him than a veteran. Maybe he did take it personally, but he couldn’t manifest that into anything useful. Mark struck out. But Starling Marte, who still very much exists despite his reduced role, comes up and singles to a patch of center field that facilitates Alonso’s trip home from second. Pete runs like a stocking in that you hope nobody stares and notices that it’s not quite something you’d intentionally show off in public, but he covers the area he needs to. The Polar Bear belly flops across the plate, and the Mets win, 4-3.
Let the cuckoo celebration commence! The first-place Mets at 18-7 are up by five game over last year’s division champs, who weren’t getting the calls or any wins during their three-day stay in Flushing. Pity for them. Hooray for us. Seven consecutive victories, best record in baseball, our cramping closer in one piece per his and his manager’s postgame briefings, and two key players we’ve done everything to this point without — Francisco Alvarez and Jeff McNeil — due back this weekend in Washington when the Mets don their updated road jerseys with the cheerful orange and blue accents and endeavor to keep the good times rolling.
“It’s only April” is usually what you say to tamp down enthusiasm. I’d add an “and” at the front of that sentiment to best reflect the Metsian mood of the month. We’re playing beautifully with not every single cylinder yet firing to its fullest extent, we’re pitching better than our lack of name-brand ace would have foretold, we’re clutch on both sides of the ball, we’ve been winning literally every day for the past week…and it’s only April.
Five or so more months of this? Maybe six? We’ll take it if we can have it.
by Jason Fry on 23 April 2025 1:08 am Some years ago, I improved my baseball life considerably by swearing off April games.
Yes, I know April baseball can be lovely — Greg and I once spent a snoozy but idyllic March 31 at Shea in 80 degree weather, watching the Mets and Phillies do nothing in particular until Alberto Castillo, of all people, won the game in the 14th. But mostly April games have followed a predictable path: accepting someone’s kind suggestion to go (seemed like such a good idea after so long without baseball), shivering and regretting the whole thing, hunting in desperation for bad stadium hot chocolate, and vowing not fall for this again.
But there’s sound policy and there’s being too rigid. Tuesday was a lovely day with temperatures borrowed from June, with the hourly forecast promising it would still be in the high 60s as midnight approached. After a brief, mildly paranoid check of weather variables Emily and I were in: This would be our season debut.
The year’s first trip to the ballpark is always special, even if fate directs you to the Bad Hot Chocolate line. There’s seeing all the new wrinkles to the ballpark experience and there’s also relearning beloved or at least familiar routines: which spot on the platform puts you in the ideal 7 line car, when to make a break for the bathroom with an eye on minimizing the wait, a reminder that a gray beard isn’t a substitute for an ID if you want a beer at Citi Field.
One thing I’m still working on committing to memory is that the center-field seats often aren’t the best choice. Shea had so few outfield seats that years later I’m still drawn to them; somehow getting to sit there strikes me as getting away with something, when in fact those seats are mostly far from the action and force you to deal with odd angles, foreshortened views and other issues. I picked up two seats on StubHub in the section bordering the bullpens on the right-field side, next to the Cadillac Club and just above it. I was pleased to see we were in the second row, but less pleased when I saw the view from my seat: It was fine if you leaned forward and rested an elbow on that wall, but sit back, as a person tends to want to do while seated, and half the field disappeared.
It had also been six months since I’d watched baseball as part of a crowd. In the early innings the tone of our section was set by a performatively trolling chatterbox of a Phillies fan; he was a lot to deal with in close proximity but sweet-natured beneath his bluster, and he actually paid attention to the game; I much preferred him to the amiable but dunderheaded Mets fans surrounding us, for whom the game was a vague event happening over there somewhere.
One thing I hadn’t forgotten was that watching baseball live is utterly different than watching it on TV. Griffin Canning was a little figure a couple of hundred feet away, far enough that I could only characterize his pitches as fast/not fast and near the plate/not at all near the plate. Cristopher Sanchez was a different such little figure, one wearing the uniform of the guys I wanted to lose.
Occasionally batted balls came near our section, to be dealt with by Nick Castellanos or Juan Soto. The bullpen catchers were regular visitors too, tossing balls back and forth with the outfielders and cheerfully granting or ignoring fans’ entreaties for balls. By the way, Soto’s love of sunflower seeds is quite something: There was almost no break in the action too short for him to get snacks from the bullpen. He also arrives at his position at pretty much the last possible moment, which I’m sure will upset people whose grift is maximizing upset but doesn’t bother me: I don’t know what the secret sauce of good outfield defense is, but I doubt it’s playing catch with the bullpen catcher.
The game ground along at a slow pace, with Canning getting in and mostly out of trouble and Sanchez’s pitch count climbing at an unsustainable pace. (He was gone after three innings and reports are he has forearm tightness — uh-oh.) The Mets kept threatening but stubbornly refused to break through until the seventh against Orion Kerkering. With two out, Pete Alonso doubled in Francisco Lindor to make a one-run lead into a two-run lead; a walk, a wild pitch and an intentional walk set up Kerkering against Luis Torrens, who smacked an 0-2 sweeper over the infield for two more runs, celebrated with an emphatic bat spike and fist pump that even registered out in the hinterlands.
That seemed to take the starch out of the Phillies; Kyle Schwarber somehow got doubled off first on a fly ball to Tyrone Taylor, prompting the outfield sections to serenade Taylor until he acknowledged us, probably to get us to knock it off. Ryne Stanek looked a little adrift control-wise, but Jose Butto had an encouraging 1-2-3 ninth and the Mets had won.
They’d won, we made our season debut, and I got to eat Mister Softee out of a helmet. That’s a pretty good night, wouldn’t you say?
by Greg Prince on 22 April 2025 1:53 pm Monday was Jesse Orosco’s birthday, so for a moment I thought the Mets were honoring him by nearly but not quite blowing a formidable ninth-inning lead. In the mind’s eye, Jesse flirted with disaster a lot in his not quite best years. In his best years, he was infallible in the mind’s eye. The mind’s eye doesn’t look things up to confirm hunches.
The rest of me does, however, so no, Jesse Orosco never had a game almost exactly like the one that one of his most celebrated successors as Mets closer did Monday. Nor did any of the famously nerve-wracking closers who have injected the ninth innings with agita and antacids in the years between Jesse’s glove and Timmy’s trumpet filling the Flushing air in their own manner.
 How we should celebrate every save. Let’s be clear on our terms. What happened in the ninth Monday night at Citi Field, after the Mets had built a luxurious lead of 5-0 versus Aaron Nola & Co. on…
• two Francisco Lindor home runs (including another leadoff keynote in the first and a later three-run bomb that happily evoked last October’s happiest madness);
• a Jesse Winker dinger;
• Tylor Megill’s further ascent toward rotation eminence via five-and-a-third frames worth of zeroes;
• and more sterling Yeomen of the Bullpen work when Carlos Mendoza judged Megill done after 92 pitches
…was the second of the evening’s Yeomen, Max Kranick, ran out of whatever fueled his scoreless seventh and eighth. Maybe Max wasn’t prepared to go from munching middle innings in relative anonymity to capturing his first major league save. He gave up three hits and a run without retiring a Phillie in the top of the ninth. Too bad Kranick couldn’t put the thing in the books and notch something sexier than a hold in the process, but that’s why we had a sizable edge and that’s why we have a closer.
Enter “Narco” man. Enter Edwin Diaz. Edwin Diaz locks games down, no muss, no fuss, right? Oh, wait, I’m working from an older script. There’s some muss. There’s some fuss. There are some Tums if you got ’em. But mostly you can count on Sugar to make the ninth-inning medicine go down. And, sure enough, Edwin secures the first much-needed out by flying Cal Stevenson to left. We could all breathe easy now.
Until the next batter, Bryson Stott, shot a three-run homer way the hell out of the park to make the game Mets 5 Phillies 4. Oh, those inherited runners. The Phillies were dead and buried for eight innings, and now they were alive and annoying, riding a real chance to upend not just this game but maybe the momentum of the divisional race. Yeah, it’s only April, But it was April in 1986 when we upended the Cardinals for the duration of that year. It was also April in 2018 when that humongous and admittedly inexplicable start we got off to (12-2) came crashing down in one inglorious eighth inning. Jacob deGrom handed his 6-1 lead versus the defending division champion Nationals with one out over to Jerry Blevins, who handed a three-run lead to AJ Ramos, who handed a two-run lead to Jeurys Familia, who completed the score’s conversion to a one-run Mets deficit. That was all in the same eighth inning. Hansel Robles came on in the ninth to make it worse. Final: Nationals 8 Mets 6. The 2018 Mets’ implosion was officially in progress.
A ninth inning that’s getting away gives the mind’s eye a lot of leeway to wander. It wandered from Diaz to thinking of that particular game from seven years ago to wondering if maybe Orosco’s glove was coming down on Edwin’s head at a most inopportune interval. This was too great a game amid too great a start to totally get away, but the scoreboard wasn’t lying that it was now a one-run affair, with that bleeping Phillie heart of the order coming up.
Then, a funny thing happened on the way to forlornness. Edwin Diaz turned back into Edwin Diaz. The good Edwin Diaz, I mean. Trea Turner goes down swinging. Bryce Harper goes down swinging. That’s all the swinging the Phillies get to do. The Mets hang on, 5-4. Megill gets his third win. Reed Garrett is credited with his seventh hold. Max Kranick gets one of those obscurities, too. And, from the annals of statistics that say what statistics say, Edwin Diaz nailed down his sixth save. The parameters were there. He came in with the tying run on deck and the other team never tied him. Way to technically go, Diaz!
No, of course it wasn’t the ideal way to go, but when somebody picks you up when they say they’ll pick you up, are you choosy about how they got there? Still, I thought, what an arduous method to earn a save. Orosco in his Messy Jesse moments must have had one of those. Or the Hall of Famer Billy Wagner. Surely Franco or Benitez, 1A and 1B in those nightmares we still have in which somebody is insisting to us, “Think of all the saves they don’t blow.” I’m often one of those doing the insisting, because high-profile Mets closers through the ages haven’t blown most of their save opportunities; it only feels like they do. And Diaz didn’t blow this one. If you tuned in an instant after Stott and just ahead of Turner, you saw only the toast of Timmy Trumpet’s tooting.
I had to confirm that something very much like this had happened at least once before to a Met in eerily similar circumstances. And it had. Once.
 Thanks to the marvel Baseball-Reference calls its Stathead tool, I was able to enter the relevant criteria:
Inherited runners: 2 or more
Inherited runners scored: 2 or more
Home runs allowed: 1 or more
Batters faced: 4 or more
Strikeouts: 2 or more
Innings pitched: 1 or more
Decision: save
As of Monday night, Stathead listed one Met pitcher as having previously filed such a performance. It wasn’t any Met closer you’d instinctively think of because the pitcher never held the title of Met closer. But on September 22, 2012, Jon Rauch, usually a setup guy (and a generally reliable one), was entrusted to finish what had been an R.A. Dickey masterpiece. By the latter half of September 2012, R.A. Dickey masterpieces were essentially all we had to root for. R.A. delivered that Saturday as he delivered virtually every day he wrapped his knuckles around the ol’ Rawlings. For eight innings, he had the Marlins shut out, cruising home with a 4-0 lead, his nineteenth win of the season clearly in sight. As the man for whom pitch counts were of little concern, Dickey was permitted by Terry Collins to continue his mastery of Miami into the ninth. The Citi Field crowd loved it. I can attest to that, as I was part of that crowd.
Ah, but the ninth this day wasn’t R.A.’s terrain. He walked Greg Dobbs on four pitches to start the inning. Donovan Solano followed by doubling. With dang Fish occupying second and third, Terry removed our simultaneously soft-spoken and loquacious ace and replaced him with the towering Rauch. All I really remember about Rauch was his height (six-eleven) and a story that came out the next year that he attempted to haze then-rookie Matt Harvey, tossing water on the new star while he dozed on a trainer’s table and destroying the kid’s phone in the process. Harvey reportedly won instant clubhouse cred by standing up to the veteran and telling the taller man to knock it the bleep off, or words to that effect. Rauch’s pitching I don’t remember that much, except that he nearly blew Dickey’s twentieth win. But that was five days later. The nineteenth win for our folk hero was still unnailed.
Second and third, and Rauch makes it not easy. The first batter he faces is Miami catcher John Buck. Buck will become part of Harvey’s dizzying story in 2013 after a) he’s traded to the Blue Jays and b) traded by the Blue Jays to the Mets for, among others, R.A. Dickey. Buck will later be remembered mainly for nurturing Harvey Day Hysteria to its apogee; driving in runs like a madman in April but only April; and slamming a celebratory pie into Jordany Valdespin’s face in one of those episodes when postgame questions didn’t include any variation of this year’s nightly query of “how great is this right now?” The 2025 Mets get asked that continually and respond that it’s very great. The 2013 Mets were just trying to protect their faces and new phones.
But that was 2013. This was 2012. Buck was still a Marlin and, against Rauch, he was a September slugger. Despite my Saturday companion Joe calling out toward the mound, “YOU BETTER NOT GIVE UP A HOMER HERE RAUCH!” Rauch gave up a homer there. Two inherited runners scored, as did the batter. The four-run lead that Rauch came in to safeguard was now one, and the batter on deck who had qualified it as a save situation was up. That was Gil Velazquez. He struck out.
All right, slate clean, maybe we get through this with minimal angst from here. (Which is what I told myself after Stott took Diaz deep.) But, no, not really. There’s a pinch-hit single before a fielder’s choice groundout. Then there’s a stolen base. At last, there’s a strikeout, Rauch’s second. In all, he faced five Marlins before making sure the Mets would win, 4-3, and Dickey would move to 19-6.
Inherited runners: 2 or more
Inherited runners scored: 2 or more
Home runs allowed: 1 or more
Batters faced: 4 or more
Strikeouts: 2 or more
Innings pitched: 1 or more
Decision: save
 It was an ugly save, just as that scene with Harvey getting drenched must have been, but it was a save nonetheless, the final of four Rauch recorded as a Met. Thus ends the Jon Rauch-Edwin Diaz comparison. Diaz, we’re pretty certain, would never haze a rookie, phenom or otherwise. The Met vibe is beautiful these days. And a fifth consecutive win remains a win despite one pitcher reducing a ninth-inning four-run lead to one, just as a save remains a save, no matter how not beautiful it felt to endure until that definitive second K slammed the game shut. The 16-7 first-place Mets came out ahead by one — which is the minimum run differential required for a team to win — and Diaz indeed has an “S” affixed to his name in the box score. Also, as of this morning, he has joined Rauch in the results portion of my highly specific Stathead search.
In the mind’s eye, all saves oughta be worthy of Orosco-style Series-clinching exultation, no matter how much Pepcid we keep handy.
by Greg Prince on 21 April 2025 1:25 am The Mets haven’t explicitly promised to catch me if I fall backwards in their general direction, but I trust them to, figuratively speaking. In this young season that has shown signs of early maturation and sustained blooming, I keep coming back to a single five-letter word.
Trust. I trust these Mets to win ballgames. I trust these Mets to not lose ballgames they’re winning. I trust that if they do lose a ballgame, they will position themselves to win anew when they take the field again.
It’s a good feeling, this trust in the Mets. It’s not a perennial. Some years it doesn’t come around at all. Some years, like last year, it takes a long time to blossom. This year it’s been here since Day One. We’re not exactly unstoppable, but we are shaping up as hard to hinder.
On Sunday, I trusted that the Mets would hold off the Cardinals once they had a lead. I trusted the Mets to take back a lead that briefly slipped into a tie. I trusted the Mets to build on their reclaimed lead and fully secure it. The Mets are practically a security blanket in that regard of late.
 Happiness is a hot start. Meet the new emotion, different from so many of the old emotions we associate with Mets baseball. I still get nervous, but I don’t get hopeless. I still pace the living room, but anxiety drives me less than empathy. I’m spiritually with these Mets because they’re spiritually with me.
Sunday afternoon, I was up on my feet to urge them through any late uncertainty (I understand it was a good day for having risen). Can ya get that run home? Can ya get another run home? A couple more would really set us up, do ya think maybe you could…you just did.
Our parochial vernacular tells us we gotta believe. Our brand right here prioritizes faith. Both are implicit within Mets fandom, though they also imply ample reason exists to doubt our team can overcome its obstacles. Nurturing trust indicates there is already something to trust. The 2025 Mets, coming hot on the heels of the 2024 Mets, have earned provisional immunity from crippling doubt. They have constructed expectations and they’ve stepped right up to meet them. Francisco Lindor, who recently homered to walk off, homers to lead off. Juan Soto makes something out of a runner on third with less than two out. Pete Alonso stays in the park for a change yet does damage via a single. Clay Holmes protects an advantage through six, helped along by Endy Nimmo at the apex of his leap.
A little bullpen trouble? Here comes a combination of Lindor, Soto, and Nimmo again. A one-run lead a little tight for your taste? Here comes insurance through the Willie Keeleresque placement of doubles from Luisangel Acuña and Tyrone Taylor. Want further protection? Soto’s your good hands agent, ripping his own two-run two-bagger. Ryne Stanek takes it from there, filing a 7-4 victory in the books.
That made it four consecutive Met wins, all at the expense of the St. Louis Cardinals, significant in that it was the first time the Mets had swept a quartet of contests from the Redbirds in 39 years. The significant part is that 39 years ago equals 1986, and that previous four-game sweep was as stage-setting as it got, also in April, also on the heels of an invigorating preceding season. The Mets had to stick it to the Cardinals after the close call of 1985. St. Louis hasn’t resided in the NL East since 1993, but we were willing to put aside geography this weekend for old time’s sake.
 Precedent like it oughta be. Four wins in a row over any quality opponent, from wherever they hail, is a decently big deal, even in April. A swell start of 15-7, good for first place, beats the alternative. April is only the beginning, this series was just one among dozens to come. The second-place Phillies enter the Lindor’s Den next. They’re our daily peripheral concern the way the Cardinals were long ago. The satisfaction of sweeping our old archrivals will take us clear to first pitch Monday night and facing our current archrivals (give or take the last-place Braves). Then we’ll want a whole new win to sate us.
I trust the Mets can deliver. And if they don’t, there’s always the next game. That’s how every season is supposed to work. This one I trust to work very well.
by Jason Fry on 19 April 2025 11:24 pm The Mets won again, once again by not scoring a bunch of runs but getting remarkable pitching. Remarkable pitching … and having every key moment go their way. Which, granted, is often two different ways of saying the same thing.
I started off listening to Howie and Keith in my backyard and then moved to watching the FOX nincompoops in my living room (not a great choice), and throughout the game I was keenly aware of events teetering on a knife’s edge, and how just a couple of changes can send a game off the axis you’d prefer it stick to.
More on that in a moment, though here’s one reason to have watched on TV: You could admire the Cardinals’ road uniforms. I complain about uniforms a lot, vociferously in the case of the Mets’ baffling decision to replace their iconic road togs with shoddy knockoffs. So let me state for the record that the Cards’ road powder blues are sublime, down to the red piping, the proper use of ST. LOUIS instead of CARDINALS, and the chef’s kiss finishing touch of the S wrapping around the bat. Perfection!
Anyway, let’s talk moments. In the second, Kodai Senga was looking at second and third and one out and a 2-0 count against Nolan Gorman. Three ghost forks later, Gorman was gone; Senga then coaxed a harmless fly ball from Yohel Pozo to keep the game scoreless. The Mets grabbed a 2-0 lead on Luisangel Acuna and Pete Alonso doubles sandwiched around a Juan Soto single; the Cardinals threatened to cut into that lead in the fifth, but Brett Baty threw home unerringly from deep at third to cut down Thomas Saggese at the plate.
But all that was the rising action. The first real tipping point came in the sixth, when Senga walked Lars Nootbaar and gave up a single to Willson Contreras. Up came Brendan Donovan, who at that moment was a) the leading hitter in the National League; b) a solid hitter you can see ascending to the next level before your eyes; and c) a guy in danger of seeing a 14-game hitting streak go by the boards. His showdown with Senga was marvelous theater: Down 1-2 in the count, Donovan bore down, spoiling ghost forks looking for purchase at the bottom of the zone and shaking off Senga’s attempt to change his eye line. Five balls fouled off, and finally Senga tried a slider. Donovan hit it hard — but Acuna scooped it up to start a double play.
Another tipping point arrived in the eighth, when A.J. Minter walked the bases loaded and faced Alec Burleson with two out. Burleson smacked a grounder to the right of second, not hit all that hard but perilously placed — a long run for Acuna and the wrong side of the bag for Lindor.
If this had been Soilmaster Stadium against the fucking Marlins, the ball would have ticked off the end of Acuna’s glove with just enough kinetic energy to spring off the top of Lindor’s, spinning out into the left-field grass as a hideous carousel of enemy baserunners sprang into motion and various horror-stricken Mets tried to reverse field. What happened instead looked on TV like three-card monte: The ball vanished not into Acuna’s glove but behind it, untouched, and wound up in the grasp of Lindor, who had just enough time to spin on the grass, lock in on Alonso’s glove and end the inning.
In the bottom of the eighth … nope, no near thing or knife edge involved, just Alonso hitting a ball to Mars and the chance to throw your arms skyward and say happy silly things. That blast (443 feet!) gave the Mets a three-run lead, which they handed to Edwin Diaz.
Diaz did throw three straight balls to Saggese, which didn’t seem like an ideal start, but this time he locked in a little earlier than he has recently: Three pitches later Saggese had been fanned. Gorman gave Diaz a good battle (how many lineups feature two Nolans, BTW?) but went down on a slider, and Pozo rolled harmlessly to Lindor.
There will be games when those key moments fall the other way and we wind up fuming. Hell, that just happened in Minnesota. But this game wasn’t one of them; everything went right and the outcome was a Mets win and a Saturday afternoon satisfyingly spent.
by Greg Prince on 19 April 2025 11:35 am Yeah! Luis Torrens! The backup catcher thrust into near-everyday action is the hero in the bottom of the eighth, rescuing the Mets with a double all the way down the left field line, scoring Brandon Nimmo from second, salvaging an inning that nearly went by the wayside on the basepaths, breaking a tie, and positioning us three outs from victory. Who could ask for anything more?
Me, that’s who, albeit involuntarily. “Gee,” I heard myself think, “I was kind of looking forward to the top of the order coming to bat again.” It’s not that I didn’t want the Mets to take the lead and conclude a win. I just wanted more Mets, especially the Mets due up every time the lineup turns over. It was more an in-a-vacuum wish than a desire to see our one-run lead vanish.
Be careful what you wish for. Or wish at will. I wished for more Mets as well as a Mets win and I got both. That’s unusual. But so is this team.
All of Friday night served to remind us the 2025 Mets are built to play entire games with the idea of winning them. They’re not incapable of falling behind, but they seem immune to accepting a loss as their imminent fate. They do lose games. They could have lost this one. They had every opportunity.
David Peterson was adequate for five-and-a-third. Despite striking out nine times against our lefty, the Cardinals solved him thrice, for a run apiece in every even inning he pitched. “Well, he just doesn’t altogether have it tonight,” I figured. Yet pitching into the sixth without total command is significant. Every third-of-an-inning a reliever doesn’t pitch on the front end is a third-of-an-inning he can stick around for later. Also significant was the return of Max Kranick, whose one-day paper stay in the minor leagues went on a day too long. Max cleared up the last two outs of the sixth and brushed aside the seventh, by which time the Mets were in a deadlocked ballgame.
Off the board through four, every Met you felt needed to “get going” got going in the fifth. Brett Baty, maybe not a lost cause, doubled to lead off. Tyrone Taylor, the center fielder about whom it seems universally agreed requires platoon partnership, tripled Baty in. Juan Soto, before the boobirds could be heard in full throat, was greeted by a purposeful ovation and responded by singling in Taylor for what became a 2-2 tie. When it was a 3-2 deficit in the bottom of the sixth, there was Mark Vientos homering for a second consecutive night to retie matters. Weren’t we recently worried about Mark’s slow start?
After Kranick and then Ryne Stanek (gotta love pitchers whose names end the way they like to finish off batters — with a K) steered us to the bottom of the eighth, several Mets generated more positive developments. Vientos singled off Old Friend™ Phil Maton. Luisangel Acuña came in to pinch-run and took his assignment to heart, stealing second. Those fast feet couldn’t get enough of forward momentum, for on Nimmo’s succeeding grounder to third, Luisangel attempted to cross over. Nolan Arenado dove at Acuña just as Acuña dove at third base. Probably not advisable aggressiveness on the fleet Met’s part, but you try to discourage a Met in motion. He might have been safe, but he was called out on the attempt to remedy his overslide, and it was too close to get overturned on review. Thus, instead of the speediest Met standing on second with one out, we had a Met not as fast on first. Woe was us.
The woe went on its way in a veritable blink, because Brandon rated a pickoff throw from Maton that got away, allowing Nimmo to take second, which allowed Torrens to drive him in to make the game Mets 4 Cardinals 3. Edwin Diaz was deemed unavailable to pitch the ninth, but we’d hand the ball to Huascar Brazoban and everything would be fine.
Except the league’s leading hitter, Brendan Donovan, instantly tickled the right field foul pole, and the game was tied anew. Dang, these Cardinals do not go away. But dangs work in opposing directions, for these Mets don’t give up. How many Met relievers have we seen give up a leadoff game-tying homer in the ninth and then recover to strike out the next three batters swinging? We’ve certainly seen at least one. Hail Huascar, king of composure!
And, oh look, my fleeting wish was coming true. The top of the order was due up in the bottom of the ninth, starting with Francisco Lindor. If Lindor didn’t do something great, there would be Soto, who had that RBI single earlier, and if Soto didn’t come through, there’d be Pete Alonso, who’d tripled way back in the first. If the ninth didn’t give us what we needed, there was always extras.
But none of that long-term planning was necessary, as it took exactly three pitches for Lindor to take Ryan Fernandez (a Cardinal presumably named for two distinguished Met hurlers of yore) clear up onto Carbonation Ridge. Yup, a walkoff home run, just like that, making the Mets 5-4 winners in one of the most wonderful games you’d ever luck into. Really, it was a game of wonders. You wondered not how the Mets were going to lose it each instance they stumbled, but how they were going to win it whenever a chance presented itself. Guessing “Lindor will hit one out” might have seemed too obvious, but it turned out to be the correct choice. The night before, Lindor coached a teammate home from third while he himself orchestrated a rundown between first and second, so your instinct is to pick Francisco to do something wondrous whenever needed. Yet most everybody else doing something well merits partial credit as an answer for how the Mets won. Torrens, Taylor, Soto, Spy…I mean Kranick, Stanek, Brazoban, Baty, Nimmo, Peterson, Acuña (sort of). There were a lot of Mets in advance of Lindor who helped make a potential loss an actual win on Friday night.
You’ll get a lot of wins when you have a lot of help.
by Jason Fry on 18 April 2025 12:38 pm The Mets’ current formula for being 12-7 … well, it’s working while not seeming like a particularly good idea.
They pitch impeccably, which you don’t need to be a lifetime baseball fan to know isn’t sustainable, and they hit … hmm, how to describe this part? Minimally? Sporadically? Just enoughally?
Thursday night’s game followed this odd, not particularly reassuring blueprint to a T. Griffin Canning was the best he’s been in a Met uniform, showing tactical smarts as well as good stuff: In the early going he sensed the Cardinals had spent a lot of time perusing the scouting reports (ah, the iPad age) about his new approach and were waiting to ambush his offspeed stuff. So he and Luis Torrens and Jeremy Hefner pulled an in-game reversal, essentially going back to the fastball-first mix Canning had used in his days as an Angel. It worked: Looking for wrinkles left the Cardinals late on high fastballs, and before they could adjust Canning was out of the game with 100+ pitches thrown and just one run allowed over six.
Reed Garrett looked a little shaky after Canning but emerged unscathed, A. J. Minter was flawless and Edwin Diaz … well, he showed us his new, not particularly welcome 2025 trick, reporting for duty a batter ahead of his location doing the same. We can mutter about this, but it’s preferable to blowing the save, another trick we’ve seen too often in the post-WBC Diaz world.
The hitters, meanwhile, cashed in during exactly one inning: Andre Pallante (whose name really looks like it needs some accent marks) was good with the exception of the second, in which he was not particularly good and also unlucky. Mark Vientos banged a home run off the base of the foul pole in Utleyville, a location I don’t ever remember seeing a Citi Field home run recorded; strange but it counted all the same. Brett Baty (who had an honest-to-goodness fine night with the bat and in the field) drove in Starling Marte with an RBI single, and as a capper Francisco Lindor singled to right, scoring Baty. On the play Lindor wound up caught between first and second, with Tyrone Taylor shifting from foot to foot uncertainly just on the home-plate side of third; destined for an out, Lindor turned into an auxiliary coach, exhorting Taylor to scamper home while scrambling to elude various Cardinals. It worked and the Mets stole an additional run.
A lone inning of offense, great starting pitching, relief that stood up. Not sure it’s the formula we would have expected, let along drawn up, but it’s working. Just as losses don’t get recorded differently if they’re moral victories, wins don’t get discounted if they feel a little less than legitimate. In this baseball family we love our red-headed stepchild wins just as much as the ones whose progeny feels more certain.
by Greg Prince on 17 April 2025 12:19 am At about ten after one in the afternoon: “All right, a day game!”
At about ten after four in the afternoon: “Day games suck.”
OK, not all day games suck, but the one the Mets played in Minneapolis on Wednesday did. Certainly the Mets’ play sucked. That’s usually my litmus test for how good a game is, whatever time span it’s filling.
It didn’t require three hours to determine this matinee lacked the charms we associate with sunshine, green grass and sneaking glances at what qualifies most afternoons as an extracurricular activity. The Mets resisted excelling at any particular aspect of their sport. The offense was spotty at best. The defense created opportunities for the opposition. There was literally no starting pitching. Because Griffin Canning was under the weather (something anybody spending the previous two nights in Minnesota would figure to be), Carlos Mendoza was forced to go with a parade of relievers, from opener onward. Huascar Brazoban took the ball first and did OK. Justin Hagenman entered behind him as the bulk guy, one of those depressing terms of art designed to diminish the sparkle of a major league debut. Hagenman had never pitched in the bigs before. It required Canning’s illness and a touch of roster trickery — pretending Jose Siri is healthy and Max Kranick is unworthy — to get him to the highest level with the least ancillary fallout. The kid from the Pork Roll end of Jersey didn’t disappoint, giving up only one run in three-and-a-third, and that one was let in by the pitcher who succeeded him, Jose Butto.
Allowing an inherited runner to score wasn’t a sin. No, Butto’s misdeed came an inning later, though even then I wouldn’t pin what went wrong entirely on Jose. Down 2-0 with two out and Ryan Jeffers on second, Butto got a ground ball to Pete Alonso out of Willi Castro. The pitcher raced the runner to the bag. The pitcher beat the runner to the bag. Umpire Hunter Wendelstedt called the runner safe. The pitcher, acting from natural inclination (or inhabited by the spirit of David Cone from 35 years ago), began to argue with the umpire, engaging him just long enough to forget about Jeffers, who sure as hell noticed what was going on and what wasn’t going on. What wasn’t going on was Butto turning to throw home until it was too late to nab him. Three-nothing, Twins.
Wendelstedt made a horrible call, and there was no recourse. The Mets had previously used their challenge to bring about a reversal that never came, bringing to mind what an inane setup the challenge system is to remedy horrible calls. The camera saw Butto’s foot hit first base before Castro’s. Too bad Wendelstedt didn’t. (None of this detracts from one’s best wishes for the umpire who had to exit the game after absorbing a foul line drive to the head a little later.)
For whatever forces conspired against the Mets, they didn’t make it any easier on themselves. Their one early scoring threat was snuffed out when Jesse Winker just missed tagging the lowest point of home plate. Replays showed the only thing Winker did wrong as he chugged from second on Brandon Nimmo’s single to left was not be a scooch faster. Aggressive baserunning is cheerworthy when it works. I kind of wished he’d have stayed at third to begin with, but maybe you take your chances.
There weren’t enough of those for the Mets all day. There was one that shaped up pretty well in the fifth that ended with Juan Soto grounding into a double play. There were three unexpected runs in the eighth, but what would have been the go-ahead run wound up in Harrison Bader’s glove as the ex-Met dove and robbed Tyrone Taylor. For an instant, a person grumbled maybe we kept the wrong half of last year’s center field platoon. Nothing against Taylor (or his Ham), but the last two games suggested there are no friends like Old Friends™ who delight in reminding former employers they shouldn’t have been allowed to slip away. Bader, whose utility evaporated down 2024’s stretch, hit and fielded to his heart’s content. Somewhere Travis d’Arnaud enjoyed a good chuckle.
But there were those three runs, which I wasn’t anticipating because I’d already decided this was a lousy day game and, therefore, a lousy day. Now, however, the day game demanded my faith. I responded by pacing in the vicinity of the television for the first time since I can’t remember when. There’s a certain pacing one does when one invests himself in the outcome of baseball game. Make my devotion to this cause worth it. I can’t run, hit, hit with power, catch or throw. Will my walking back and forth in a veritable semi-circle help?
Not really. I got Edwin Diaz out of a slight jam (me and the Crew Chief Review loophole that allows for video replay when a team is out of challenges), but I couldn’t get a run across in the top of the tenth despite our having first and second and nobody out. Well, neither me nor Winker or Nimmo. Reed Garrett, the eighty-third pitcher of the day — I lost count — permitted the winning hit that gave the Twins their 4-3 victory and us our very first losing streak of 2025, though I’d finger fate as the culprit. It was one of those games that never felt right all day.
It’s night now and it still doesn’t.
by Jason Fry on 16 April 2025 7:35 am “FUCK!” I screeched when Francisco Lindor rolled over one to second in the seventh inning, and if I do say so myself, I was in midseason form. Dismay, frustration, pique — they were all audible and apparent. Then I whacked the couch just to underscore the point.
It was a night in which I had plenty of opportunities to work on my form, as the Mets frustrated us and were frustrated by the Twins on Jackie Robinson Day, losing by a 6-3 deficit that simultaneously felt narrower and wider than the numbers indicated. Narrower because they were in the game the entire time, with Lindor the tying run as he swung through 101 MPH from Jhoan Duran to make it official (and elicit another fuck/whack combo from me); wider because once the Twins took a 3-2 lead it felt like the kind of game that was going to stay stubbornly out of reach.
Lindor’s already been mentioned twice in the frustration department; his third-inning muff of what looked like a routine grounder extended an inning and led to the first two Twins runs. Tylor Megill looked good early but then started leaking oil, winding up on the short end of a duel between gigantic hurlers that also starred Bailey Ober. Juan Soto and Jesse Winker both got hangers in key spots but missed their pitches, offering up the classic “oh I’d like that one back” face a second later. Even Max Kranick looked mortal for the first time in his very young Mets career. At least old friend Harrison Bader had fun, leading the Twins’ attack and looking typically colorful and cheerful in doing so.
Fuck. Whack. Repeat. It was that kind of night. Here’s to a different kind of day.
|
|
