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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 8 May 2017 9:33 am By now Mets fans know who Adam Wilk is. Prior to Sunday afternoon’s game at Citi Field, and not very long prior, the erstwhile Las Vegas 51 was a literal mystery. At the top of the Rotunda staircase, where nine Topps cards are arranged daily to represent the home team’s lineup, there were eight familiar images and one blank vertical rectangle. Not even a Mets logo was up in place of a player whose arrival wasn’t publicly forecast three hours before first pitch. There was no Adam Wilk on the radar, none. There was no card, no picture, no wisp of Wilk among the gamegoing populace unless they stumbled into the news. Some of us checked Twitter on the way to the ballpark and discovered who would be pitching (and who would not). Others passed through the turnstiles with literally no idea.
When, at 12:10 PM, Alex Anthony announced the identities of the competing starting pitchers slated to toe the rubber sixty minutes hence, there was this reaction from somewhere behind me in Section 515 regarding the identity of the Met entry:
“Adam What?”
No, Adam Wilk. Lefthander. Journeyman lefty acquired in the offseason, I could have informed the mystified; I remembered that from a passing transaction note during the winter when the Mets were busy signing next to nobody, which I guess could also describe Adam Wilk. Wears number…actually, I didn’t know that much. As if to obscure the truth from their customers, the Mets didn’t post a batting order on the scoreboard until they absolutely had to. Maybe there was a computer glitch that wouldn’t allow an unfamiliar sequence like W-I-L-K to register. Maybe Adam’s jersey wasn’t yet back from Stitches of Whitestone and nobody in Flushing yet knew his number was going to be 35. Those were digits that graced the uniforms of pitchers whose effectiveness while dressed as Mets few saw coming when they were first listed as probable pitchers. Rick Reed. Dillon Gee. Logan Verrett. Each alighted with more warning than Wilk. Each acquitted himself successfully on the occasion of his first start. They were improbable pitchers, but their task wasn’t impossible. They weren’t pinged all about the continental United States before being handed a baseball and instructed to face real, live batters. They didn’t materialize out of the not terribly clear blue never mind murky orange as Wilk did on Sunday.
There’s a reason for the phrase “probable pitchers”. Definite is best reserved for that which is past or present. Nothing is any more than probable in advance of occurrence. When I left the house en route to Citi Field Sunday morning, the Mets’ probable pitcher matched the identity — name and numerical — on the back of the t-shirt I decided to don, the t-shirt I bought with little hesitation in September of 2012. It couldn’t be seen underneath my hoodie and jacket in the stubborn chill and eventual drizzle of Promenade, but I was wearing HARVEY 33.
Nobody else was. Not even HARVEY 33 himself. As Wilk prepared for his first major league start in five years, Matt Harvey was yesterday’s news. In truth, he turned into what was very much today’s news, but not for pitching. That was the one thing we definitely knew he wouldn’t be doing on Sunday. We didn’t know much more about what Matt was up to beyond he was suspended by the Mets for violating what the Mets called team rules. That was relayed by Sandy Alderson and disseminated through the media. That fact, like the lineup, wasn’t posted on the scoreboard. All we saw of Harvey at Citi Field was his fleeting presence in the pregame historical montage that is aired on the video screen between sponsorship announcements. Matt Harvey starting the 2013 All-Star Game. Matt Harvey shouting after completing an inning. Matt Harvey blending into the past.
At 1:10 WILK 35 took the mound. It couldn’t have been 1:20 before Giancarlo Stanton took him into the Left Field Landing or whatever it’s called now. Two runners were on. Three Marlins scored. Four batters in, the competitive portion of Adam Wilk’s day was done. Same for the Mets. Wilk would throw eighty pitches. Another would be whacked by Stanton to distant precincts. Yet another met a similar fate from the bat of Adeiny Hechavarria. By the time Wilk threw his eightieth pitch, his earned run average was 12.27, the score was Marlins 6 Mets 0 and the only mysteries remaining were:
1) Might the drizzle turn into full-blown rain and transform the three Marlin blasts into uncountable urban legend the way precipitation drowned Jay Bruce’s home run in Atlanta last Thursday night?
2) Would the Mets register as many as one hit against Marlin starter Jose Urena, who, by the way, hadn’t given up any yet?
3) What the fudge was going on with Harvey?
The answers were, in order: no, but it did keep drizzling throughout what became a 7-0 defeat, making a miserable afternoon that much more intolerable; yes, a René Rivera single, which stood alone under the Mets hit column at day’s end; and who the fudge knows?
Adam Wilk did the best he could under the circumstances, which were on a par with the weather and score. Wilk shouldn’t have wound up (or been working from the stretch) on Citi Field’s mound Sunday. That was Harvey’s assignment. Harvey, in our own historical montage, wants the ball, takes the ball, throws the ball past batters and we roar with approval. Hard to cue up that image lately. Matt was battered in his previous start against the Braves. Said he was encouraged by how good the ball felt coming out of his hand. I used to be encouraged by how good my pencil felt as I filled in the wrong answers on junior high math tests, but it didn’t mean the results added up. Matt’s was such a wan response compared to how he visibly burned to vanquish every hitter in sight when he debuted in 2012, when he insisted he should never give up anything when the ball came out of his hand, when he inspired t-shirt sales and the renaming of days in his honor.
The boilerplate Matt spouted about the ball coming out of his hand well after he gave up six runs in five-and-a-third innings reminded me of the diagnosis delivered to the titular characters by Dr. Robert Doback (Richard Jenkins) in one of my favorite movies, Step Brothers, at a juncture of the story when Doback’s son and stepson are no longer colorfully destroying his world. He should be happy at their feints toward maturity but he realizes something is missing:
“It just kills me to see you so crushed and normal.”
Of course John C. Reilly and Will Ferrell as Dale Doback and Brennan Huff weren’t coming off thoracic outlet surgery, so perhaps holding Matt Harvey to the standard set by dopey fictional characters was no more fair than continuing to cast him as the Dark Knight of Gotham. Calculating what standard to measure Harvey against has been difficult from the moment he showed he was different from other pitchers. Harvey has seemed determined to demonstrate how different he is. When he was striking out batters, it was admirable. When he’s not showing up and putting on his uniform as he didn’t Saturday — the team rule he violated in deference to a post-golf migraine, it was titillatingly reported before Sunday was over — his nonconformity isn’t easily written off as a lovable quirk. Or to quote from another movie I enjoy citing regarding the distinction between bush and big league behavior…
“Your shower shoes have fungus on them. You’ll never make it to the bigs with fungus on your shower shoes. Think classy, you’ll be classy. Win 20 in the show, you can let the fungus grow back and the press’ll think you’re colorful. Until you win 20 in the show, however, it only means you are a slob.”
I don’t care what’s on Matt Harvey’s shoes, who designed them, how much he paid for them or in which supermodel’s company he was wearing them as he canoodled. I used to think he’d win 20 or, more importantly, that the Mets would prevail whenever he pitched regardless of who got the decision. Matt Harvey has pitched to an ERA of 5.14 this season a year and a rib after pitching to an ERA of 4.86. I barely passed geometry, but even I know that’s good only when compared to a recently deplaned Adam Wilk.
Larger than life and an All-Star at 24; squirming at staying on the same page as management at 25 and 26; crushed and normal and a little too AWOL at 28. I still have HARVEY 33. It’s probable I’ll wear it again when next I’m supposed to see him pitch, whenever that will be. What the hell, the shirt still fits.
by Jason Fry on 7 May 2017 1:35 am An old maxim of pretty much everything is never to interrupt your opponent while (s)he’s making a mistake. With that credo in mind, the Mets essentially sat back on a drizzly Saturday night and let the Marlins do whatever that was they were doing instead of playing baseball.
The Mets have their issues, goodness knows, beginning with finding 100 intact limbs to put on a given night’s roster. (More about that in a bit.) But the Marlins are in one of those dismal stretches where a team goes out for a walk and manages to find each and every single land mine buried in the field.
The Marlins sent the wonderfully named Odrisamer Despaigne to the mound in lieu of Wei-Yin Chen, who’s suffering from that most modern of afflictions, the made-for-the-10-day-DL tired arm. The third pitch Despaigne threw was botched by Justin Bour, putting Michael Conforto on first; the fourth was whacked up the gap by Asdrubal Cabrera, making it 1-0 Mets. The Mets piled on with another double, a run-scoring single, a sac fly and a pair of walks (the first to pitcher Robert Gsellman) to put up a five-spot in the first.
It didn’t get much better for Miami after that. The Marlins muffed ground balls, fumbled double plays, allowed passed balls and played the outfield like they were wearing cement shoes. There were hit batsmen, more bases-loaded walks and about a thousand shots of Don Mattingly.
With all that going on, the Mets essentially sat back and told Governor Loria’s charges to please proceed. Though I’ll add that on the Mets’ side, Curtis Granderson played a pretty nifty center field. Not bad considering a week ago it was tempting to suggest a trainer hold a mirror up to Curtis’s mouth before the game to make sure it fogged.
(Well, some other trainer than Ray Ramirez. Let’s not get giddy.)
If there are baseball gods, there’s nothing that makes them rub their immortal hands together more avidly than some earthly rooter discerning motive from statistical ebb and flow. Things aren’t going well for the Marlins right now and they are for the Mets; it would be unwise to say anything beyond that.
But I’ll risk a little heavenly wrath with a pair of brief notes.
First of all, it behooves us to remember these last couple of games the next time we’re at New Soilmaster Stadium and some annoying Marlin or other is spearing a ball in the hole or running one down in that impossible alley or snagging a grounder that appeared ticketed for grass, as I remember happening approximately 114,000 times over the course of a quarter-century as perpetrated by about 100 teal-related names I’m not going to list for fear of an epidemic of fists through monitors. The worm feels like it’s never ever going to turn; then you look over and see the little pink sucker’s doing loop-the-loops.
Second, whether it’s through pluck or luck, clubhouse leadership or managerial guidance, hearty resolve or kind-hearted randomness, the Mets are having a good stretch despite having been stripped of Yoenis Cespedes, Noah Syndergaard, Lucas Duda, Travis d’Arnaud, Steven Matz and Seth Lugo. (It’s sad that I no longer see the point of adding David Wright to that list.) We all know that, but it ought to be recorded for posterity.
Joining the DL All-Stars is Asdrubal Cabrera, who brings that certain intangible something that makes him worth more than the sum of his various aged and oft-creaky parts. Cabrera went down on a frightening play in the third, diving for a Marcell Ozuna grounder that left him rolling over his glove and then lying on his back, feet kicking feebly in agony.
Because we’re the Mets, the injury was accompanied by two elements that a halfway-decent editor would have rejected as ham-handed:
a) Cabrera went down with Sandy Alderson in the booth speaking philosophically of injuries and luck; and
b) as he lay in the grass, face contorted with pain, a cold drizzle became an aggressive rain.
Off the top of my head I can think of four serious baseball injuries any longtime fan recognizes at once. We all know that a starting pitcher shaking his pitching elbow means we need to advance his calendar 16 months or so. A runner hopping as if shot in the back of leg means at least three weeks’ absence and maybe six to eight. A batter getting hit in the bottom of the hand, just above the wrist, suggests a broken hamate bone, a vestigial bit of skeleton whose sole function is to disable ballplayers. And then there’s a diving fielder whose glove folds under him, jamming the thumb backwards or into the hand.
Depending how many years of orange and blue scars you have, you immediately thought of Darryl Strawberry, or Dave Kingman.
Or Ron Darling — as Gary Cohen tried to assess what had happened to Cabrera, Darling offered a quiet and grim diagnosis that I remembered was based on sad experience — a similar injury ended his 1987 season. As for Alderson, after a long silence he said with the vocal equivalent of a 1,000-yard stare that “we’ll see when I get downstairs.”
It turns out that Cabrera’s thumb isn’t broken, but it seems somewhere between likely and certain that Sunday’s MRI will show ligament damage. (They have MRIs on Sunday, don’t they?) [Update: They do, no ligament damage. Whew!] Which leaves the Mets with a number of serviceable though far from ideal options. They could ask Wilmer Flores to do more than platoon; they could shuffle T.J. Rivera, Jay Bruce and an outfielder; they could hope Matt Reynolds can fill the gap; or they could try to accelerate the future by recalling Amed Rosario.
Which will they choose? Will that choice work? Hell if I know. But right now the Mets are winning with a bunch of Plan Cs and Ds — and maybe this run can buy them time to get back to Plan As or Bs.
by Greg Prince on 6 May 2017 3:17 am Dee Gordon was hit by a pitch to lead off the top of the fifth inning Friday night. Then he stole second. One out later, he dashed to third on a ground ball in front of him. Dee Gordon did three very Dee Gordon things to the Mets as Dee Gordon will.
So Gordon was on third, two were out and Giancarlo Stanton was up against Fernando Salas, who had just replaced Josh Smoker. Stanton didn’t even have to do his trademark Stanton thing. The Marlins were up by four runs. A home run would bury the Mets — on the off chance that they weren’t already buried — but a hit of any kind would serve Miami’s cause handsomely. A double, let’s say. In the fourth, Stanton doubled off starter Rafael Montero to nudge open floodgates that were about to be blown off at their hinges. The Marlins were on their way to a six-run inning and a 7-1 lead. Montero was on his way to the component of the clubhouse most familiar to him, the showers. Showers would have been welcome to pour down over Citi Field at that point. All that rain all day, all these Marlin runs all night. Yet the skies were bone dry and the Mets’ luck appeared just as arid.
True, Curtis Granderson had taken a notch out of the Met deficit in the bottom of the fourth with a two-run homer, but too many miles of bad road awaited. Stanton was a flash flood warning unto himself. Whatever Salas gave up in the way of a hit was going to close the Mets’ narrowing road to victory.
Salas would give something up, right? He was the eighth-inning man when the season started, yet has crept down the depth chart with alarming alacrity in recent weeks. He was on in the fifth, basically the second mopup man in another bucket brigade. Stanton stood in. Chops were perceptibly licked.
What happened next? Not what you’d expect if you were expecting the Met worst. Salas threw one pitch and Stanton popped it to third, where Wilmer Flores reeled it in, no muss, no fuss, nowhere for Gordon to go except back to the Marlin dugout to grab his glove. Fernando Salas kept Dee Gordon from doing that vital fourth Dee Gordon thing. He didn’t let him score.
The Mets still trailed by four, but the burial plot didn’t grow deeper. It was a small victory that found a companion an inning later. Hansel Robles was pitching. He let Marcell Ozuna get as far as third base. Two Fish made it on with two out. Ichiro Suzuki, who has more hits on more continents than anybody who’s ever lived, was pinch-hitting. Another Marlins sticking it to the Mets scenario was unfolding…except Robles folded it into his back pocket. He popped Ichiro to second. Ozuna didn’t score.
Marlins had ceased. Would wonders?
Come the bottom of the seventh, wonders definitively carried the day. The Cespeless Mets were full of offense, soldering together six consecutive hits versus Brad Ziegler. Flores singled; Jose Reyes doubled; René Rivera singled in Flores; Asdrubal Cabrera pinch-singled in Reyes; Michael Conforto singled to load the bases; T.J. Rivera — who had gone deep in the first for the Mets’ early, lonely run — whacked a double to left to bring home plodding Rene and stiff-legged Asdrubal. T.J. landed at second, Michael at third. If you were scoring at home like the Mets were scoring at Citi, you knew a grim Cinco de Mayo had transformed into Fiesta de Las Carreras. The Mets put cuatro runs on the board to knot the noche at siete apiece.
Translation: Mets 7 Marlins 7. Kyle Barraclough replace Brad Ziegler. You could have asked Don Mattingly what took him so long, but with the pace of play already glacial (“Sweet Time” Montero crammed ninety pitches into three-and-two-thirds innings), that would have been rude. On the other hand, the next two Mets batters were a little too polite to Barraclough. Jay Bruce struck out swinging. Neil Walker did the same. Grandy, however, offered the reliever whose name should be continued on a second jersey nothing in the way of help. He took three unintentional balls before Mattingly flashed four fingers to load the bases.
Flores was up again. His hit keynoted the seventh. His walk would accent it. Wilmer took four pitches, every one of them allergic to the strike zone. The Mets, previously down by six runs, suddenly led by one. Cue Addison Reed and Jeurys Familia, each well-rested after Thursday night’s washout and each theoretically primed to protect a hard-earned edge. The Marlins can disrupt the best of theories, but this one proved sound. Reed overcame a two-out single in the eighth and Familia threw seven pitches in the ninth to corral an ideal save.
The 13-15 Mets improbably prevailed 8-7 in this festival of runs, pushing themselves into sole possession of a motley second place in the National League East and raising their cumulative record since April 1, 2011, to 494-506. That Friday night some six years and a month ago was Terry Collins’s first game as Met manager. This Friday night was Terry’s one-thousandth. He didn’t pull into port a winner on his maiden voyage, which also happened to involve the Marlins, but his milestone outing wound up suitably shiny.
I wouldn’t necessarily call No. 1,000 a microcosm of the Collins administration, but it certainly had its familiar elements. A starter of last resort. An early implosion. A leaned-on bullpen. An opponent imposing for its peskiness. A lineup improvised from whatever parts were healthy. An aversion to being covered in dirt. A slight flinch indicating a pulse and a heartbeat. A comeback that wasn’t predestined yet never felt inconceivable. A win that could have been a loss but wasn’t.
Terry puts in Salas and Salas stems the tide. Terry replaces Salas with Robles and Robles stands firm. Terry rests Cabrera for the most part but brings him off the bench and Cabrera extends the rally. Flores starts at third for a change, scores the innocent fourth run and drives in the essential eighth run. T.J. moves up to the two-hole and knocks in three. Jose and Curtis are given chances to succeed and eventually stop failing. Addison and Jeurys grope until they get a grip on their roles again. Terry was not directly responsible for every good thing that happened in his thousandth Mets game (he’s two weeks from having managed the most in franchise history), but let’s not pretend he’s a fully innocent bystander to the success of recent innings not to mention seasons. Conversely, he’s lost more than he’s won over the years and not every move pans out — but let’s not pretend every setback is his dumb doing.
The part I like is the not giving up. Some games you don’t detect it. Some games the Mets are dead and stay dead. Post-Montero, I assumed this was one of them. I was shocked Gordon didn’t score in the fifth. I was shocked it was still only 7-3. Yet I didn’t see any payoff percolating. I figured we’d lose anyway. I figured wrong, which is the best wrong figuring a fan can do.
There’s a difference between staying dead and playing dead. Terry’s Mets rarely play dead and they don’t easily roll over. They almost always look as alive as they are capable of doing — and Collins kvetches enough to get their attention when they don’t. Long ago, on a June afternoon during his first campaign, I watched the Mets fall behind, 7-0, then confidently and determinedly march back into contention. Not for a title, but for a day. It wasn’t overly dramatic, but it was impressive. The Mets won that game, too, 9-8. It was likely the first game of the Terry Collins era on which I didn’t reflexively give up despite long odds. Winning didn’t feel probable, but it definitely felt possible.
Joe Namath guaranteed a victory. Mark Messier guaranteed a victory. The only guarantee to emanate from a Terry Collins-guided Mets team has been implicit, but it’s implied consistently. They promise the possibility of victory, of truly trying to deliver a win for as long as such a result is accessible to them. Friday night they lived up to their generally unspoken pledge. It’s all you can ask out of your team when its losing by six in the fourth and four in the fifth. That it was ahead by one after nine is testament to what diligently pursued possibility can yield.
Hell, I would have been happy just to have kept Dee Gordon from scoring.
by Greg Prince on 4 May 2017 10:45 am Neil Walker apparently forgot how many outs there were. Jose Reyes ensured there were more outs than there should have been. Jacob deGrom walked five batters, gave up five runs and barely made it through five innings. Glenn Sherlock betrayed a fetishistic fondness for red lights when green would have been the stylish choice. Curtis Granderson’s numbers remained too small to observe sans microscope. Travis d’Arnaud had to sit. Addison Reed had to fume.
What a mess these Mets were on Wednesday night. How they beat the Braves by eleven runs we’ll never know.
Or maybe we already know. They hit like crazy. They hit safely twenty times, including twelve times with runners in scoring position. They did it without a single ball leaving the hospitable confines of SunTrust Park. They whupped up on beloved ex-Met Bartolo Colon, they whupped up on less-beloved ex-Met Eric O’Flaherty, they whupped up on a couple of other Braves hurlers besides. They cloned the 16-5 Unicorn Score that roamed Minnesota four years before and effectively echoed the joyous Minneapolis sound their predecessors’ bats made that frigid Friday night.
They made so much noise in the general vicinity of Atlanta that they definitively drowned out their shortfalls of judgment and lack of attention to detail. Sherlock (sufficiently spooked by Ender Inciarte’s arm) could hold up only so many runners; Walker (having run full speed on a popup with one out) could mindlessly break from second only so often; Reyes (traipsing back toward second at less than a snail’s pace, thus enabling a heady tagout from Dansby Swanson) could be caught sleepwalking only once. Various Mets looked bad at various points, but every Met with a bat hit just about always.
Incredibly plentiful and impeccably timely hitting will smooth your rough edges to a high-gloss finish. The Mets scored sixteen runs at SunTrust, marking the twentieth game in their 56-year history in which they’ve tallied at least that many. They are 20-0 on those occasions of offensive onslaught. If you can’t mask your imperfections with sixteen runs, you might want to try a different sport.
For one night, baseball fit the Met skill set just fine. Sherlock waved enough runners home without incident. Walker obscured his first-inning baserunning blunder by scoring twice. Reyes drove in five, decent penance for indecent fundamentals. DeGrom’s struggle with command was frustrating to watch but his uncharacteristically flat performance couldn’t pull the Braves any closer than four runs behind once he was done pitching. If you didn’t love Jacob on the mound, you had to embrace him at the plate. He contributed a pair of hits and RBIs to help his and every other interested party’s cause. D’Arnaud’s wrist may be a going concern, but René Rivera batted six times in his place and gathered three hits. Granderson — .137/.186/.242 notwithstanding — may have begun to dig out of his sinkhole. Curtis doubled twice, scored thrice and, when he stood in against Colon, provided a nice reminder that Sandy Alderson executed a pretty good free agent signing period in December 2013.
Everybody in the lineup did something positive. No starter posted an ohfer. It was a team effort all the way. DeGrom rarely requires rescue, but four relievers aided and abetted him without turning a blowout into a slugfest. Terry Collins inserted Reed in the seventh, an inning earlier than is customary (and a half-inning before the Mets slathered on an additional seven runs). Reed hadn’t been pitching all that well, so maybe there was a managerial message embedded in using him early. Or maybe Terry wanted Reed in the game against the middle of the Braves’ order in the seventh rather than its bottom in the eighth. That was the manager’s postgame explanation for Reed’s recasting. Dugout cameras inferred reliever discontent, but the setup man of record, who recently questioned the statistical glory attached to ninth-inning success, got his 4-5-6 men in order. Later Addison attributed his visible irritation solely to his dissatisfaction with how he threw, not when he threw.
Phew, that’s a relief. So is a fourth win in six games by however many runs. One is sufficient. Eleven is delightful.
by Jason Fry on 3 May 2017 12:32 am Win or lose, the 2017 Mets are exhausting.
They didn’t win tonight — Matt Harvey‘s poor location, lousy relief, Freddie Freeman‘s ubiquitous bat and annoyingly good baseball played by Ender Inciarte, Brandon Phillips and Nick Markakis took care of that — but they made it interesting, with Jay Bruce‘s grand slam making it 9-7. Dare I say they … battled? Whatever you want to call it, it wasn’t enough and left me grumbling and grousing about tack-on runs that I’d shrugged off a few innings earlier.
I’m tired, you’re tired, reinjured Travis d’Arnaud is tired, poor Kurt Suzuki is definitely tired. Which means your recapper is going to seek shelter in those friends of the weary, the bullet points:
- Harvey’s velocity was good — he hit 98 — but his fastball location was horrible and the location on his breaking pitches wasn’t a lot better. I’m inclined to give him a pass because there was a thin line between success and failure — that pitch to Inciarte was a damn good one — and because he’s coming off a complicated, uncertain injury. He’s trying to figure it out and by all accounts working hard to do so.
- Michael Conforto is a pleasure to watch regardless of the score or the standings. Please don’t let Terry mess him up for a second year in a row. Or Ray Ramirez take him down the tunnel.
- I still don’t think the Dilson Herrera trade made a lick of sense strategically, but Bruce is welcome to keep making me look foolish for being willing to leave him by the side of the Port St. Lucie highway. That’s one of the pleasures of baseball — you can be wrong and thrilled about it.
- I don’t have a line as good as this one from friend of the blog David Roth: “Jay Bruce truly became a Met in the moment when he hit a grand slam with two outs in the ninth inning of a game the Mets were losing by six.” Yeah, pretty much.
- I’d record how far Freeman’s home run went, but I can’t get in touch with any of the stewardesses who were assigned to it. Let’s just say it would take an hour or so in Cobb County traffic to retrace its path. If the Braves’ new park is a freaking pinball machine now, what will it be like on a hot night in August?
- Whoever arranged for that mooing noise on foul balls (or whatever triggers it) should be sent to Gitmo immediately. This is a bipartisan issue around which we can all unite.
- Every baseball generation brings a new crop of Braves I see in my nightmares. Inciarte and Markakis are just the latest destroyer of dreams.
- Most observations about umpires can be written off as confirmation bias — hell, most observations can be explained that way — but I’d really like to see some kind of scientifically rigorous review of how many calls were blown at first base before and after replay. Larry Vanover didn’t exactly have a night to remember.
My instinctive dislike for the Braves and most everything around them is tempered, however, when I catch sight of R.A. Dickey or Bartolo Colon in the enemy dugout. Bartolo requires no reminder, but I still find myself shaking my head and smiling at the idea of Dickey ever existing in our baseball universe.
Besides the fact that he was the only Metsian thing worth discussing for a long time, he just seemed made-up, like a collective fever dream of the Mets blogosphere that — come to think of it — was also at its peak then. He dissected the physics of knuckleballs, loved Star Wars and other dorky stuff that I love, read honest-to-God books, and was thoughtful about his sport and himself. He was like a W.P. Kinsella character who heaved himself out of the page, looked around and decided to stay.
One night Greg and I were part of a group of bloggers invited to chat with Dickey in the dugout before a game and I couldn’t bring myself to say anything. It wasn’t that I was star-struck, just that Dickey didn’t need any input from me to generate something interesting. I was more than content to watch and listen — and found myself simply and thoroughly happy that somehow, against all odds, he was ours.
The trade to Toronto rankled, not so much for the deal itself (which seemed pretty good at the time and has of course turned out to be a reverse-Fregosi heist) but because Dickey left with the usual anonymously wielded Mets knife in the back, another franchise malady that’s spanned multiple managers and front offices and so … hmm.
I watched him from afar for a bit, mildly mournful that his magic seemed to have evaporated in the foreign realms of turf, Canada and the American League. But that connection faded, as it does, and my first reaction at learning Dickey and Colon would be united against us was annoyance — the amusement and affection took a little longer to arrice.
“I hope they both win 25 and the Braves go 50-112,” I opined at the time. Neither of those things is going to happen, and I neglected to account for how many of those wins would come at our expense. But when a Mets loss is an R.A. Dickey win, it hurts a little less.
by Greg Prince on 2 May 2017 10:39 am A few weeks ago I came across an article previewing brand spanking new SunTrust Park. It said that Braves fans were certain to enjoy some fantastic feature or another, which caused me to chuckle internally, because nobody really has an inkling of what a ballpark is going to turn into until experience replaces expectation. After the Mets gave beat writers a tour of as yet unopened Citi Field in 2009, one of them — somebody who would not be sitting in a ticketed seat nor wandering around over the course of nine or more innings — suggested there was a great spot where Mets fans would gather to drink beer and watch planes take off from LaGuardia. Perhaps that has happened in the ensuing nine seasons, but I’ve never once heard of anybody making it a part of their gamegoing routine. (Apologies to baseball-loving aviation enthusiasts if I’m inadvertently devaluing your passion.)
Ballparks are like ballgames and the seasons that encompass them in that respect. You can chart all your probabilities, but you just don’t know what’s coming until it arrives, and even then you don’t know where it’s leading. The Mets’ 2017 was effectively down the tubes as of last Thursday when Noah Syndergaard was scratched from his scheduled start, Yoenis Cespedes required assistance leaving the basepaths and a sixth consecutive defeat was inflicted on our heretofore presumed airworthy enterprise. Then the Mets traveled to Washington and captured a couple of exciting contests that surely could have gone the other way but didn’t. Plus the reports on Yoenis’s hamstring didn’t indicate his demise was imminent and Noah was pronounced fit to start on Sunday with a sweep in sight. Maybe the season wasn’t over.
Or surely it was, because Syndergaard didn’t make it out of the second without grabbing a crucial portion of his imposing anatomy. Another sudden exit, another wave of doom. Next thing you know, Anthony Rendon is raining down on every reliever in sight and Kevin Plawecki is one of those relievers. It was one of those days when losing 23-5 to your ostensible archrivals wasn’t nearly the worst thing that could happen to your team.
Monday the Mets played anyway. Without Cespedes. Without Syndergaard, whose MRI results became the week’s most anticipated release this side of the Guardians of the Galaxy sequel. Without Plawecki available in the bullpen after throwing two innings the day before. With each of us having spent 24 hours as unaccredited experts in sports psychology, sports medicine, sports management and the future. With Julio Teheran prepping his own grisly guided tour of things to do in Cobb County when you’re dead.
What chances would have you assigned to a prospective Mets victory going into a setting like that?
Me, I’d have gone 50-50, my default odds before every game. Because you might win or you might lose, but you never, ever know. You didn’t know that Josh Edgin would ride a ninth-inning steed to Jeurys Familia’s rescue on Friday. You didn’t know that Zack Wheeler would get out of so many jams on Saturday that he’d merit an endorsement deal from Smucker’s. You didn’t know Plawecki would pitch on Sunday (the ninth time a Mets position player has done so) or that Sean Gilmartin would double (the thirty-first time a Met reliever has done that). You didn’t know how relevant recollections of the infamous 26-7 loss at Veterans Stadium from 1985 were going to become or that Rendon would be evoking apt comparisons to Sunny Jim Bottomley and Hard-Hittin’ Mark Whiten.
You probably could have guessed something like what happened to Syndergaard would happen to Syndergaard, but you wouldn’t have necessarily taken lat tear over biceps tendinitis in the magnetic resonance imaging pool. Sandy Alderson swears what the MRI found on Monday wasn’t what had been bugging Noah a few days earlier (for which the pitcher forewent an MRI and the club pitched him anyway). However one chose to decipher the results, Thor was disabled for an undetermined period and the Mets could be judged good as dead.
Except for beating the Braves Monday night. And having 137 more one-game seasons ahead of them. At some point Syndergaard may be back as good as new or better than ever or not quite what he was or how many days until Pitchers & Catchers 2018? We don’t know how soon we’ll be giving up on the current campaign, but May Day wasn’t the date to send up an irrevocable distress signal, not when the Mets extracted five homerless runs from the previously miserly Teheran in the fourth en route to a 7-5 Met gala. The Mets had won games by that exact score sixty-one times between 1962 and 2016 and have now done so twice in a span of four days.
See? You never know. You only think you do.
You knew the surfeit of veteran outfielders would bar deserving Michael Conforto from his opportunity, but he was playing yet again Monday, as he does every day. He’s topping the order on a daily basis and he’s quite good at it. Michael knocked in three runs from his perch, including a home run the very first time any Met ever batted at SunTrust Park. Sadly, Ender Inciarte would return the favor to begin the bottom of the first, but since we won, we can enjoy knowing we saw something else that didn’t lend itself to prediction or precedent. Elias says the dual leadoff dingers marked the first Mets game in which each leadoff man went deep immediately…and the first such Braves game in 67 years.
You knew as recently as a little more than a week ago that erstwhile top-of-the-order hitter Jose Reyes was absolutely done as a professional baseball player, but he homered, drove in two and extended his hitting streak to seven. Jose’s batting all of .178, but the Interstate’s a pretty good ride considering how much of April Reyes spent stuck on state roads.
You knew Curtis Granderson as an old man trapped in the depths of uselessness, but not only did Grandy draw an essential walk in the definitive fourth, he made a diving catch with two on and two out in the sixth to protect a one-run lead. Curtis is an excellent baseball player even when he’s not playing anything close to excellent.
You knew a bullpen that surrendered fourteen runs before Plawecki’s desperation contribution on Sunday loomed as a leaky proposition on Monday, but after adequate Robert Gsellman’s ledger was filled (5+ IP, 5 ER, the last two scoring on outs recorded by relievers), the rested core of the relief corps — Edgin, Hansel Robles, Jerry Blevins, Addison Reed and Familia — tightened the Mets’ ship. Blevins was especially crisp, sandwiching swinging strikeouts of lefty nemeses Inciarte and Freddie Freeman around a flyout of righty Brandon Phillips. Familia was awarded the save for preserving a two-run lead in the ninth, but Blevins rightly earned the clubhouse crown for keeping the score 6-5 in the seventh.
It was just one game, but so are all of them. Whether it goes down as an anomaly or a part of an emerging trend (the Mets have won three of four and crawled out of last place) is unknown at the moment. Whether amenity-laden SunTrust Park will always play as it did last night, with balls jumping and the outfield expansive, is also part of the remains-to-be-scenery. Its predecessor facility seemed like a friendly spot to drop our bags upon the Mets’ first visit in 1997. The Mets took three of four at Turner Field and you couldn’t have known what horrors awaited them at 755 Hank Aaron Drive SE.
Weathervane rooting — “yay we’re winning!”; “boo we’re losing!” — proves only that you watched the very last thing that occurred and responded accordingly, but maybe it’s not the worst way to process baseball. Maybe the lack of Syndergaard, which will truly come into focus Friday night when his place if not role in the rotation is assumed by the umpteenth coming of Rafael Montero, does doom us in the near and long term. Maybe the Mets’ training staff shouldn’t be trusted with anything stronger than a box of Band-Aids and a tube of Neosporin (and even then, call your congressional representatives and demand they preserve your and your team’s access to health insurance). Maybe we can obsess on the musculoskeletal systems of strapping young men and make accurate diagnoses regarding their ability to heal without ever having examined them or a medical text.
Whatever the prevailing conditions, the Mets won last night and maybe they’ll win again tonight. Yay.
by Jason Fry on 30 April 2017 10:59 pm Hey! We took two out of three from the Nats!
…
What?
Oh yeah, that. OK.
Before we plunge in, a few things:
1. Pitchers break. No one knows exactly why they break, or how to stop them from breaking. It’s a problem that costs their industry millions and millions of dollars a year. If you want to get acquainted with baseball people’s best guesses about why and read a terrific story besides, go out and get Jeff Passan’s superb The Arm. But even it only discovers suspicions and areas for further inquiry, not smoking guns.
2. There’s a survivor’s bias among pitchers, and that bias makes their expertise highly suspect. Tom Seaver and Nolan Ryan, to name just two, didn’t emerge from their long careers with intact ligaments (only more or less intact in Ryan’s case) because they had perfect mechanics, exemplary work habits, or were warriors whose epics preceded The Age of Wuss. No, the principal reason they survived is they won the genetic lottery at conception. The difference between Tom Seaver and Tim Leary, or Tim Leary and Les Rohr, is much smaller than we let ourselves believe, because we don’t like to think we’re watching 130-odd rounds of Russian roulette a night. If I want to know about elbow injuries I’ll ask a doctor, not a retired pitcher.
3. Young men are macho about pain and the possible reasons for it, and young men with the superhuman drive to succeed as professional athletes are really macho about pain and the possible reasons for it. This is stupid for anyone and particularly stupid for anyone who’s part of a team, but it was an issue when our forebears were making cave paintings, so good luck changing that one.
I don’t know what’s wrong with Noah Syndergaard. I’m going to fly in the face of 21st century digital discourse and wait for more information and an analysis of that information by someone who knows more about the subject than I do. When Noah grimaced in pain I turned away from the TV in despair, thinking that the awful moment I’d long expected to arrive finally had. That was followed by a bit of desperate bargaining with the universe: He’s grabbing under his arm. That wasn’t the shake of the elbow we’ve seen before that means Aw Fuck. That’s something else. It’s something else, right?
Maybe it is. “It’s my lat,” Syndergaard seemed to be saying out there, which would be comforting except the lat bone’s connected to the shoulder bone and the shoulder bone’s connected to the biceps bone and the biceps bone’s connected to the UCL bone and the UCL bone is connected to the sit-in-the-dark-in-despair-till-mid-2018 bone.
But I’m starting to do what I said I wouldn’t do. Let’s wait and see what an actual doctor says.
Here’s what I do know, however: everyone is assuming the worst for reasons beyond the biceps problem and Noah being a flamethrower with a UCL.
They’re also assuming the worst because these are the Mets we’re talking about.
And that’s prejudicial conduct this club thoroughly deserves.
This has been true for years — injuries are misdiagnosed, downplayed, handled haphazardly and allowed to blossom into full-blown disasters. It’s been true across multiple managerial reigns and front-office tenures, and accompanied by talk — though never for attribution — that the problem isn’t the much-reviled training staff or the brass but the owners.
I think that’s important when we try to understand why players go rogue, seeking second opinions, ducking doctors or balking at counsel. They’ve been told by their teammates that the men who sign the checks aren’t trustworthy. Sometimes that manifests itself as not believing good news; sometimes it shows up as refusing to risk bad news. Ultimately it’s the same mistrust.
And those players don’t need to be told, because they’ve seen it for themselves. We don’t have to go back to Ryan Church to see that — we just have to look at last week.
When Syndergaard couldn’t go because of a biceps issue, Matt Harvey was sent to the mound instead. No big deal, we were told — Harvey’s ready and willing. Except it turned out Harvey had lifted weights heavily the day before, and been told about his new assignment three hours before taking the mound.
Matt Harvey is coming off a surgery that’s riskier than reknitting a UCL. The Mets know this, and yet did something bizarrely reckless with his health. I can’t tell you how much I hate typing this next sentence, but here it is: If I were Scott Boras I would be furious with them, and rightly so.
Or take Yoenis Cespedes. Last Wednesday, after sitting out for five days, Cespedes was taking batting practice when he grabbed at his leg in obvious pain. That’s not a rumor — it was on video. He played that night and again Thursday — at least until he pulled a hamstring in the fourth inning and was lost for who knows how long.
How many members of the organization saw or were told about what happened in batting practice? And yet Cespedes was put in the lineup. How many members of the organization are aware of the uncertainty of recovery from thoracic outlet surgery? And yet Harvey was sent out to pitch with minimal communication and indifference to his health.
Again, this happened not in some less-enlightened age that good people all regret. It happened last week.
I don’t know what’s wrong with Noah. My profound hope is that it’s a relatively small thing, and an unlucky coincidence. Those things do happen. But whatever’s wrong, I don’t trust the Mets to deal with it effectively or responsibly, and I don’t think Noah Syndergaard or his teammates do either. That’s a problem that’s bigger than an injury to any individual player — even if he’s the brightest of stars.
by Jason Fry on 29 April 2017 11:35 pm Despite what you might think, and what’s popularly held to be our birthright, the Mets do not actually spend every day under a little black cloud.
It’s always useful to think of a conflict from the other guy’s perspective — besides making you a better person, you might learn something. So consider Saturday’s game from the point of view of a knowledgeable, veteran Nationals fan — a species that may actually exist. The Nats worked counts. They steadily drove Zack Wheeler‘s pitch count higher. They had leadoff runners galore. They played good defense. They fought back from deficits. And they got Bryce Harper to the plate four times, with a total of four runners in scoring position.
They did everything right except win.
Why didn’t they win? Because Harper struck out three times and hit one ball hard — a sharp one-hopper to Wheeler’s backhand. Because Angel Hernandez was at the center of a weird call that ended an inning instead of sending Jayson Werth to third. And because the Mets kept hitting home runs — including that Michael Conforto kid who can’t hit lefties and the somehow still-animate corpse of Jose Reyes. Yes, the Mets did all that! The same Mets who keep forcing pitchers into last-minute starts and don’t even blink when their best hitter injures himself in batting practice. Those idiots! The Nats did everything right and lost to those idiots! Stuff like that happens enough, you wind up thinking someone’s out to get you. (Though a .666 winning percentage and 3.5-game lead in the division do cushion the blow.)
That’s enough empathy. Through blue and orange lenses, Saturday’s game was strange, interesting and ultimately satisfying, showing you enough from Wheeler to remain hopeful about the future, enough from Reyes and Jeurys Familia to make you reconsider recent despair, and more than enough from Conforto to make you hope the people who make Metsian decisions saw the same thing you did.
But still, baseball postmortems tend to be heavier on storytelling than analysis. Which is something we ought to guard against. And there was plenty of suspect storytelling around Saturday’s game.
Let’s start with Wheeler, sent to the dugout an out shy of qualifying for a win. That kind of thing sticks in a pitcher’s craw, particularly when he leaves amid chatter about the inability of his infield to play defense.
That chatter, to be clear, was on the money — in fact, Gary Cohen and Ron Darling were in the middle of a discussion of the Mets’ lack of range when Asdrubal Cabrera and Reyes obligingly failed to corral a grounder in the 5.5 hole, followed in short order by Cabrera being a touch too slow to retire Ryan Zimmerman. Mathematical proofs have been sent up with less.
But the best defense is throwing strikes, and Wheeler didn’t do that often enough. He threw 54 strikes and 42 balls, allowed the leadoff guy to reach in four of five innings, and gave 10 of 22 batters faced the chance to swing at 2-0, 2-1, 3-0 or 3-1 pitches. Yes, Wheeler’s defense did him no favors — but he undermined himself repeatedly and was lucky to get as far as he did.
Next up: Familia. He got his first save of the year, which was certainly a nice development. (I still can’t believe the game didn’t come down to Harper as the tying run.) But there’s some dubious storytelling going on there too.
I skipped Friday night’s game for my own sanity, but caught the final couple of batters on Gameday … which was a baffling experience. Seeing INJURY DELAY paired with Josh Edgin replacing Familia, I assumed Familia had been hurt — and was still fretting about that when Harper’s AB became IN PLAY, OUT(S) and a miraculous F sprouted next to the score.
When I found out what had really happened — that Terry Collins had gambled and subbed Edgin for his struggling closer — I was curious. And after the end of today’s game, I went back and watched that inning and wound up even more curious.
On Friday Matt Wieters‘ hit, the first of the inning, came within a whisker of winding up in the glove of a diving Conforto. Adam Lind — whose chin pubes ought to qualify him for a prison term alongside Scott Spiezio — slapped one just past Neil Walker. Then Adam Eaton barely beat out a grounder perfectly placed in the hole. Familia fanned Trea Turner and was promptly removed by Terry, setting the stage for Edgin’s heroics.
Look, it worked — that’s far and away the most important thing. But compare Friday night with Saturday afternoon. On Saturday, Familia reported for duty and watched Conforto make a nice play in left and T.J. Rivera snag a tough hop at first. He then struck out Michael Taylor for the victory.
Reallocate the plays we’ve discussed by a couple of inches and you can easily turn Friday into Saturday and vice versa. Yet just watch the narrative become that Terry’s gutsy call lit a fire under Familia, who responded.
It’s a good story. But saying so won’t make it true.
Let’s tell one more.
Conforto’s two-homer Saturday left the SNY crew predicting that he won’t sit down again — and led to postgame coverage celebrating Conforto’s newfound success and hard work against lefties, which culminated in his homer off hard-slinging southpaw Enny Romero.
All very nice, except this one isn’t true at all. In fact, it’s the most irritating Just So Story in recent Mets history.
The conventional wisdom around Conforto’s 2016 is that his hot start was ruined by wicked lefties and the kind of slumps that young players are prone to, and he learned a hard but necessary lesson by being forced to go down to the minors, work on his craft and earn his place.
But do the facts support that? I’m indebted to Joe Sheehan for the following, which is just one of the many reasons you ought to subscribe to the man’s newsletter.
Going into 2016, Conforto had 180 minor-league plate appearances against lefties and hit .274. In the big leagues, he collected 34 plate appearances against lefties in 2015 and early 2016 and hit .188.
One hundred and eighty plate appearances is a decent sample size. Thirty-four plate appearances is not. Yet those 34 trips to the plate convinced Collins that Conforto should be platooned. After starting 26 of the Mets’ first 27 games and hitting the cover off the ball, he was benched for 13 of the next 45. The results were exactly what you’d expect for a young player denied regular playing time: Conforto started pressing and went into a tailspin. (Also highly relevant: he had a .167 BABIP over that period, which is a level of unlikelihood that makes you speculate about Gypsy curses.)
But wait: Terry did send Conforto up to face a lefty as a pinch-hitter on May 29. That lefty was Clayton Kershaw.
The tale of Michael Conforto and How He Lost Confidence is complete and utter nonsense. Collins thought Conforto couldn’t hit lefties because he was young and left-handed. He then created a self-fulfilling prophecy, mismanaging Conforto to the point where he couldn’t hit anybody. It was troglodytic negligence, plain and simple.
So yeah, it was fantastic watching Conforto take a tough lefty into the seats for his second home run of the day. But I bet he would have done that a few times already if he’d just been left alone last spring.
Unfortunately, that’s not the story and never will be; instead, Conforto has to stand at his locker and give non-answers to dumb questions. Watch him politely deflect questions about hitting southpaws with the usual cliches, but note where his compliance ends. He maintains he could always hit them, adding that Kevin Long’s always thought so too.
Conforto’s a smart player. He can size up a pitcher, work a count … and understand there’s no upside to calling out the boss for wasting a year of your career. Maybe the conventional wisdom is true this time, and that shot off Romero will be the start of Conforto playing 140 games a year. But I’m going to keep my fingers crossed, because Terry likes his fairy tales — particularly the ones in which the heroes are Proven Veterans™.
Storytelling is what we do around here — it’s what we all do. But lots of times there’s more than one story to choose from, and a weakness for the familiar can cause us to miss the tale that best reflects what actually happened. And I love baseball too much not to push myself to keep looking for that story, on bad days and good ones alike.
by Greg Prince on 29 April 2017 9:43 am Justice Potter Stewart, who slipped his colleague Harry Blackmun the 1973 equivalent of a Breaking News text alert while the United States Supreme Court and National League Championship Series were simultaneously in session — “V.P. Agnew just resigned!! Mets 2 Reds 0” — is probably best remembered for his concurring opinion in Jacobellis v. Ohio, a First Amendment case dealing with what was or wasn’t obscene material. The associate justice couldn’t offer a comprehensive definition, except to hold that the Constitution protects obscenity as free speech, unless it’s “hard-core pornography”.
Stewart’s guideline for what fell under that lurid heading was, depending on how you take your Bill of Rights, either good old common sense or so full of holes that it could constitute Swiss cheese. “I know it when I see it,” Stewart reasoned. Had the shrug emoji been invented, one gets the feeling he would have buttoned his thought with that single keystroke and then swiped back to MLB.com.
Potter Stewart sat on the high court for 23 years but was a hard-core Reds fan forever. Whatever he thought of Spiro Agnew, you can be sure he wasn’t thrilled by the other development that got his attention on October 10, 1973, the one that wound up Mets 7 Reds 2 with New York winning the pennant at the expense of his beloved Cincinnati. When he had a chance to catch up on the details, he must have been all SMH regarding the veritable turning point of decisive Game Five, wherein Reds third baseman Dan Driessen stepped on third for a force play that didn’t exist. Wayne Garrett doubled to lead off the fifth of what was by then a 2-2 contest. Felix Millan attempted to sacrifice him over. His bunt was fielded by Jack Billingham, who wheeled and fired to Driessen, then a rookie. Dan made a rookie mistake in not tagging Garrett. Wayne was safe. Felix was safe. Nobody was out. Soon enough, the Mets went in front, then way in front, then on their way to the World Series. It’s a reasonable standard to assume Stewart muttered a few constitutionally protected obscenities to himself over that turn of events.
It’s just as likely that Stewart, like any baseball fan, took outsize pleasure in what we shall, with the court’s indulgence, refer to as baseball porn. What is baseball porn? It’s hard to define, but you know it when you see it and you feel it deeply.
Baseball porn is the batter who, instead of slamming down his bat and turning to the dugout, runs at full speed on a pop fly and lands on second when the fielder who catches that ball ninety-nine times out of a hundred misses it completely. It’s the lefty batter who, after being foiled so often by an overshift on the right side, bunts in the deserted direction of third base and is rewarded with a single. It’s the center fielder who grabs a ball off the wall with his back to the infield and displays the presence of mind to toss said ball to the nearby left or right fielder because his teammate is in much better position than he is to make a throw to keep the runner from taking third. It’s the runner who tags up from first on a deep fly to right; the runner on second who crosses to third on any kind of out; the hitter who answers a pitch up and in with a line drive through the box; the starter whose ongoing gem crashes the hundred-pitch limit and continues his outstanding work uninterrupted; the closer who comes on to get the key out before the ninth inning; and, when necessary, the manager who removes his closer during the ninth inning because roles and egos are not nearly as important as getting the final outs of a particularly crucial game.
By that last-listed standard, Terry Collins did some obscenely good managing on Friday night. His call to the bullpen, in which Josh Edgin was summoned to replace Jeurys Familia with the bases loaded, one out, the Mets leading the Nationals by two and Bryce Harper strolling to the plate, was certifiably steamy stuff. The skipper was not sticking to the book. Familia let three consecutive Nationals reach base before registering one out. If Jeurys didn’t carry the title of closer, there would have been no reason to leave him in to face one of the world’s most dangerous hitters. Terry opted to apply a common-sense standard to a situation that encompasses no definitive indisputable resolution.
Managerial strategy can serve as very fleeting baseball porn because the execution has to be as pleasing as the idea. If Edgin — rarely confused for a sure thing, but, like Harper, a lefty — doesn’t untangle Familia’s mess and preserve all the good the Mets had produced earlier (deGrom’s 12 Ks in 7 IP, d’Arnaud’s two Washington Monumental blasts and the five runs they delivered, Reyes’s slashing and speeding reincarnation of himself as Jose-Jose-Jose from 2006), then Collins’s move would have led to no more than a steaming pile of stuff. And you would have known it when you saw it.
The game was now on Collins’s head and Edgin’s arm. So was the opportunity to halt a horrible losing streak, reverse a Cespe-less malaise and, despite April not yet yielding to May, rescue the season. The last-place Mets were already 0-3 against the first-place Nats. You want to win your division, you better win some big games. None come bigger earlier than a game that’s 7-5 in the ninth, sacks full of opponents, your main reliever (and his setup man, for that matter) having let you down and your fate residing within the ability of one of your fringe southpaws. It was no wonder Gary Cohen set the scene by channeling Bob Murphy. “Fasten your seatbelts,” Gary suggested before breaking for commercial.
We braced for Bryce. Edgin threw ball one. Harper of the .400-plus batting average and .500-plus on-base percentage then fouled one off. The next pitch to the former and possibly future MVP was miraculously bounced back toward the mound. Josh grabbed it, flung it accurately to d’Arnaud for the force and then stood by while Travis relayed it to new first baseman T.J. Rivera to create a 1-2-3 game- and skid-ending double play. If a team not at bat can be said to have forged a walkoff win, this was it. The Mets didn’t break a tie and they didn’t storm from behind. They stayed from ahead. Sometimes that’s what you have to do.
And when you’ve done it the way these Mets did, you know how good it feels.
by Greg Prince on 28 April 2017 3:12 am What sufficed for succor in 2012 evidently lacks efficacy in 2017, which is an R.A. Dickeyish way of saying that even when the Mets were routinely bad, Mets fans could take solace that R.A. Dickey was almost always good. Yet five years have passed. Tastes have transitioned. Roget’s Thesaurus is no longer the de rigueur reference book in Flushing. The Mets fan who wants to be in step with the times requires a comprehensive medical dictionary — and could probably use a thick self-help manual.
Some things, however, seem the same as they ever were. The Mets, such a lousy ballclub when Dickey was such a wonderful story, are such a lousy ballclub all over again. They’ve been growing worse and worse on a daily basis. Buddy Holly would be confounded by how much everyday it’s not getting better.
On Thursday, Dickey rematerialized and the Mets evaporated, 7-5. The result encompassed a sixth consecutive loss; a tenth defeat in eleven games; and a thousandth debilitating injury in approximately a week. This season’s sample size is no longer so small that you can’t take it to the lab and have it test positive for suck. The Mets are in last place, five under .500 and 7½ out of first. And that’s the relatively benign news.
• Noah Syndergaard was scratched from his prospective showdown versus the pitcher for whose past his future was traded. Thor’s nemesis on Thursday wasn’t the literary lion Dickey but a comic book villain named Biceps Tendinitis. The painful bastard kept Noah from raising his right arm above his shoulder on Wednesday. No, that doesn’t sound serious at all. Depending on who or what you wish to believe, Noah could be back in action as early as Sunday or disappear down the tunnel with Ray Ramirez until Odin knows when. You’re familiar with how Met injuries go. Or don’t go.
• Matt Harvey, an earlier model of mythic fireballing acedom, served as emergency starter his second start in a row. He used to be the Dark Knight. Now he’s Sean Gilmartin Deluxe. Matt wasn’t tipped off that Noah wasn’t feeling tip-top, so he went ahead with his regularly scheduled exhaustive workout. As a result, the thoracic outlet syndrome recoveree didn’t quite have enough gas in the tank to vigorously compete with a 42-year-old knuckleballer. Ad hoc Harvey Day was over in the fifth.
• Yoenis Cespedes doubled in the fourth inning, and if that’s all we said about it, you’d think, hey, great. No, not great. Cespedes and his high-strung hamstring came up limping well short of second, which sent Cespedes where all Met hopes must eventually go, directly down Trainer Ray’s Tunnel. We’ll see Yoenis in our dreams, but not in our lineup.
R.A. Dickey, now an Atlanta Brave, is no longer capable of lifting our spirits, but he had a better Thursday than all who have succeeded him at the top of the Met marquee. He wasn’t Cy Young superb, but all he needed to be was quotidian because he was facing the lousy Mets. He got through five innings, two of them with a spasming left quadriceps, which is exactly the sort of thing R.A. Dickey would a) have and b) ignore. Really, how calm does a pitcher’s quad need to be when the opponents are the Mets?
The quad acted up when R.A. was running to first in the fourth. He ran to first in the second as well, on a play that foretold what kind of day it was going to be. With one out and the bases loaded after Harvey gave up two walks and a single, Dickey squibbed a ball to Jose Reyes at third. Reyes, not a third baseman, could have…no, should have thrown home to force Kurt Suzuki. Instead, he threw to Jay Bruce at first. Bruce, not a first baseman, made the putout on Dickey while Suzuki was scoring. Later, Suzuki blasted a three-run homer off Harvey. That also encapsulated what kind of day it was. As did ramblin’, gamblin’ third base coach Glenn Sherlock waving Bruce — as much a sprinter as he is a first baseman — to his watery doom at the plate. Jay was running from second. Ender Inciarte was firing from center. Sherlock liked those odds. The laws of physics didn’t.
The Mets eventually scored five runs, none of them remotely threatening to Dickey’s determination to garner a decision. R.A. was followed to the mound by Eric O’Flaherty, whom we dared mock in the wake of Opening Day, when we fancied the Mets a rock-solid contender. O’Flaherty was a disaster against the Mets on April 3, just as he was a disaster for the Mets in the otherwise sunny year of 2015. On April 27, O’Flaherty retired all four Mets he faced.
Reyes did slightly redeem his earlier miscue by throwing home from third twice on two other obvious throw-home-from-third situations and by hitting a solo home run at some inconsequential juncture of the contest. Neil Walker had three hits. Curtis Granderson had one, which is the Curtis Granderson April equivalent of three. Josh Smoker set down all eight post-Harvey hitters he encountered. Mostly Syndergaard couldn’t go and Cespedes couldn’t stay, but I figured I’d mention the handful of nominal positives in case you’re planning on not giving up the ghost with 141 games to play.
That’s assuming the ghost hasn’t already gone on the 10-day DL.
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