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 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.
by Jason Fry on 27 April 2017 12:40 am Seriously. It’s not your health, your kids, your marriage, your job. It’s something you use to entertain yourself for three hours a night, and maybe think about for a couple more hours for further entertainment. Part of the fun of baseball is agonizing over it, of course, but that agony’s supposed to be a temporary condition in service of a higher purpose — the salty tears of woe making the tears of joy sweeter, or some such cheerful bullshit.
If baseball’s making you honest-to-goodness miserable, walk away from it for a bit. Go to the movies, have a date night, read a book. Build a model ship in a bottle, if you do that. You do you. Baseball will take care of itself just fine while you’re gone. Afraid you’ll miss something spectacular? Should that happen, it’ll be on SNY at least 40 times a year. You’ll get an infinity of second chances.
Is this current run of astonishing futility — losing nine of 10, with R.A. Dickey and the Nats threatening to make it 13 of 14 — agony in the pursuit of something sweeter? Probably not — most of the time we’re just kidding ourselves. But if you weren’t pretty good at talking yourself into things, you probably would’ve quit being a Mets fan by now. We’ve spent most of our lives in the desert talking about the couple of oases we stumbled across and a handful of mirages that looked pretty neat.
One problem with stretches is like this — besides the chronic unwatchable sucking, of course — is that it’s a reminder of the difference between tragedy and farce. Tragedy makes your endurance feel like heroism; farce all but dares you to admit you’re a mark.
Willie Mays on his knees pleading in vain with umpires? Tragedy.
Jason Phillips and Jay Bell and Mike Glavine impersonating a baseball team? Farce.
Daniel Murphy following the best two series of his baseball career with one of the worst? Tragedy.
Whatever the hell it is we’ve been watching for the last two weeks? Farce. Definitely farce.
If you’re ever unsure about the nature of your current misery, there’s this: farce is almost always a collective effort. (Or conspicuous lack thereof.)
Imagine I met you at Citi Field tomorrow morning and gave you a magic wand engraved with I FIX BASEBALL STUFF, but then I told you the wand only had one charge left. You’d probably aim it at one Metsian thing, hesitate and point it at something else, then look at me unhappily.
Would you fix the bullpen? The egregious defense? The anemic hitting? The guys who’ve gone from old but serviceable to apparently ancient and useless? The inexplicably lousy BABIP? The crappy weather? The coaching staff … because reasons? The manager because you’re tired of his voice? Ray Ramirez because he’s had it coming for years?
Good luck fixing farce.
What to fix Wednesday night? Robert Gsellman threw limp slider after limp slider down the middle. Mets defenders threw balls away and stumbled over them and lunged ineffectually for them. Hitters flailed helplessly with bases empty and also with them full. (Two sac flies, hooray!) Relievers bereaved. Pitching rotations were fumbled. Managers sought grumpy refuge amid the cliches of the perplexed.
Maybe at the end of the year we’ll look back and marvel that we overcame that star-crossed stretch in April to do great things. Maybe we’ll mourn the two weeks everything was shitty, and how that made the difference. Maybe we’ll recall this year as the one that went in the toilet early.
I don’t know. We’ll figure it out one 1/162 slice at a time. But however the story winds up, it’s just baseball. Don’t let it become something that isn’t good for you.
by Greg Prince on 24 April 2017 11:14 am I took strange comfort in Daniel Murphy’s first-inning grand slam off Zack Wheeler Sunday night. Very strange, admittedly, but comfort nonetheless from looking at it this way:
What’s the worst Daniel Murphy can do to the Mets with a given swing?
He can hit a grand slam.
Well, he already did that. That’s a 4-0 hole courtesy of the guy who drills more of them at Citi Field than Deepwater Horizon ever did in the Gulf of Mexico. My counterintuitive thinking was if that’s the worst Daniel Murphy can do, and the game isn’t immediately ruled over, maybe we’ll be not necessarily OK, but less dead than you’d suspect.
Even with Max Scherzer on the mound. Even with half the Mets unavailable or physically unfit for service. Even with the bloom off April’s rose, the shine off expectations’ silver and the telecast on ESPN. If Daniel Murphy has done his worst in a month whose sense of demise defies exaggeration…in a ballpark where doing his worst is Murph’s standard operating procedure…how much worse could a Sunday night game that begins Nationals 4 Mets 0 become?
Surprisingly, no worse. Not tangibly better, mind you, as the Mets did go on to lose, 6-3, absorbing an eighth defeat in nine outings; getting swept by their ostensible archrivals; and falling 5½ lengths from first place, a position we could have sworn was their reasonably attainable goal this season.
Murphy hit a grand slam. Scherzer went eight and struck out nine. The Mets never led or fully contested the inevitable result. Nevertheless, it felt like it could have been worse.
After a stretch of 1-8 baseball, the Rheingold mug can be judged no more than 11.1% full, yet there was just enough to sip on and feel sated from within the context of relative doom. The pitch Zack Wheeler threw to Murphy was the last of 101 total to irreparably harm him. He settled down, gave the Mets seven innings and the Nats no more runs. His command was sharp, his pitch count was manageable and his return from two years gone continues encouragingly. Make no mistake: he gave up a four-run homer to the fifth batter of the game, and that will deflate your win probability pronto, but if we assume we’re not smothering the rest of 2017 in a hastily flung towel, Zack’s post-slam recovery is a very good sign.
The Mets demonstrated the difference between presumed dead and confirmed buried. Wheeler’s efforts were made competitively worthwhile when Michael Conforto fired back immediately at Scherzer, leading off the bottom of the first with a homer and then notching two base hits at the stellar southpaw’s expense besides. It was right around this time last year when another star hurler, Madison Bumgarner, confounded Conforto and halted his post-rookie joyride. Michael began rowing his boat onto the rocks of a sophomore slump which ended only when 2016 did. It’s a year later. Bumgarner’s the one whose decidedly nonmetaphorical conveyance has taken a spill, while Conforto may be making himself an immovable object from the top of the Mets order, lefty-lefty matchups be damned perhaps (though, Scherzer is, you know, a righty).
This potential next step in Conforto’s steady transformation from bench caterpillar to lineup butterfly can be construed as another very good sign to emanate from yet another pretty bad night. As can Neil Walker stroking a two-run homer to push the Mets within one of the Nats in the third (though Walker producing half as many runs as his predecessor seems sadly apropos). As can the preternaturally gimpy but relentlessly game Asdrubal Cabrera withstanding a visit from the Grim Trainer in the first. As can Jeurys Familia tossing his first immaculate inning of the year, albeit an inning after Ryan Zimmerman sullied Josh Smoker’s ledger with a messy two-run blotch. As can WOR’s audio, via SiriusXM, syncing beautifully to ESPN’s video while my remote’s mute function maintained television silence. As can Yoenis Cespedes standing upright in the on-deck circle with a bat in his hands. Yo emerged in deference to the extremely remote chance Jose Reyes could extend a modest last-chance rally, which is to say there was one on with two out and the Mets down by three in the bottom of the ninth. Jose and his classic rock batting average — .104 on your dial — proved incapable of reprising any of the hits he used to be known for, but at least we had visual evidence that Cespedes lives and breathes and might even be ready to take another swing real soon.
As will the Mets. It’s the best they can do.
by Greg Prince on 23 April 2017 1:45 pm Were the Mets even part of Saturday’s 3-1 loss to the Nationals? I went to the Mets’ ballpark, saw players in Mets uniform on the field and read the name “Mets” on the half of the scoreboard where nothing was doing, but there was little evident indication that the entity known as the New York Mets was competing with the Washington Nationals.
At the moment, that’s a frightening microcosm of the National League East, a unit whose non-Met membership acts less and less hindered let alone impressed by the Mets’ presence every day…probably because their presence is so hard to detect.
We’re in the midst of a thousand-game stretch during which the Mets play only N.L. East opponents. It began promisingly enough at 7-3, it is floundering (or Marlining) badly at 8-10. The schedule shall remain divisionally familiar through May 7, when the Mets’ record, if current trends hold, projects out to 8-and-a-million.
Doing the actual arithmetic and leavening it with slighter amounts of dismay will bring you more rational numbers, but the Mets are neither inspiring reason nor generating offense, so fill in the blanks as you like. Blanks are in abundance.
I once attended a Gio Gonzalez complete game one-hitter at Citi Field, making the two-hitter that he and three sweat-free Washington relievers teamed to toss on Saturday old hat as well as cold comfort. It’s nice to not get no-hit, though if that’s your victory for the day, you might want to recalibrate your personal win column.
Jacob deGrom produced the worst double-digit strikeout game of his career, past, present and — one hopes — future. The K display lit up often enough to satisfy discount-minded Subway patrons, but the BB board, brought to you Take An Eye Without That Thing, also glowed. Jake walked six when he wasn’t striking out ten. Blended in among those true outcomes were six singles, two doubles and three runs that loomed larger than the Unisphere, the Trylon and the Perisphere. Our pitcher was pulled before he got through the sixth, which prevented any chance of deGrom being credited with a quality start. This start had a quality about it, all right, if you keep in mind that not every quality is attractive.
The game was deservedly played through a chilly mist, which is the official weather of the 2017 New York Mets, especially the chilly part. I’ve been to Citi Field five times in what is still technically the first month of the season and it’s never been anything resembling comfortable for more than an inning. Probably the most welcome feature of the facility in April is that the men’s rooms are heated — though one of the logistical letdowns is that the replacement of quiet paper towel dispensers with loud hand dryers negates one’s ability to hear the otherwise thoughtfully piped-in radio play-by-play. Sure, there’s not much satisfying Mets baseball filling the airwaves these days, but hearing Howie and Josh upon stepping out of the damp cold constitutes one of life’s small Met-related pleasures.
There were several of those away from the main stage on Saturday, a day I wouldn’t have spent at Citi Field without the gracious invitation of my old pal Dan, with whom I celebrated Curtis Granderson’s two extra-inning homers to tie and beat the Twins last September under the Branded Beverage Pavilion. We didn’t lunge for any longballs this time around, but we did stay dry in those same seats; we did extract levity from baseball misery; we did swap Charlie Finley stories (mine was second-hand; his happened to him as a child); and we did continue to appreciate Grandy’s commitment to taking care of business, everything from the subtle gestures of acknowledgement he makes to his right field minions to the defensive hustle that never stops. On Saturday, Curtis made a dive into the veritable Ageean Sea, robbing Michael Taylor of an extra-base hit as if it mattered. This was in the sixth, when it was Nationals 3 Mets 0, the Mets mathematically eliminated already, but what a catch nonetheless.
Dan and I arrived around dawn for the four o’clock first pitch, lured by the restriction of the Matt Harvey Garden Gnome Giveaway to the first dozen handfuls of people through the gate. The Harvey Gnome was joined by a most unexpected companion…no, not a supermodel gnome, but a Todd Zeile Beanie Baby, dropped off at my seat by dear friend Sharon, who read what I wrote earlier this week and, because she’s Sharon, just happened to have a Todd Zeile Beanie Baby to pass along. Kudos also to Jim and George, guys who waved me over to chat while they were in the growing gnome line. The conversation lasted long enough for Dan to find me and then, well, since we were already in line and the line started moving toward the gate, no sense going to the back of the pack, which is where the Mets seem headed Eastwise if they don’t start hitting and healing soon.
But we did get our gnomes. You take your small Met-related pleasures where you can get them.
by Greg Prince on 22 April 2017 11:32 am Matt Harvey wasn’t supposed to pitch Friday night, but went seven. Zack Wheeler is rarely supposed to hit, but he doubled as a pinch-hitter for Harvey. Robert Gsellman neither hit nor pitch, yet he was bunted to second and took third on a groundout. Michael Conforto, despite presumed holes in his game, hit a home run the other way and made a running catch just shy of the left field sidewall. Curtis Granderson, mired in his traditional April morass, singled a run home in the fourth, clouted two runs home in the sixth and later slid just shy of the right field sidewall to catch a fly ball in the sitting position. That play was in the tenth, by the end of which Jerry Blevins, Addison Reed and Josh Smoker had combined for three shutout innings.
The Mets held their own with what comparatively little they had for as long as they could, past the regulation boundaries of a normal game, whatever a normal game is anymore. Eventually, though, the Mets — whoever the Mets are anymore — succumbed to their current state of affairs and lost to the Nationals, 4-3, in eleven.
Daniel Murphy (.323/.362/.523) didn’t have quite a game for a change, but Bryce Harper (.407/.521/.864) surely did. Bryce tagged Harvey for a two-run homer in the “surprise — you’re starting!” first and evaded a tag from “surprise — you’re here at all!” third baseman T.J. Rivera in the eleventh to set up what would become the winning run. Matt also gave up a solo shot to Nationals catcher Jose Lobaton, who crossed home plate and then texted Wilson Ramos to let him know Nat catchers can still homer at will against Mets pitching.
Except for the two long balls, Matt, sans best stuff, kept Washington in gridlock. The Mets were a match for Tanner Roark, who gave up three runs in the other direction. The Nat bullpen, unfortunately, wasn’t so easily tapped, not even the enduring left arm of social pariah Oliver Perez. It indeed took until the eleventh for everything to certifiably fall apart. Smoker’s best efforts from the tenth fogged over in the eleventh. He gave up a leadoff double to freaking Harper, stood on the mound while a signal was relayed indicating an intentional walk of Murphy and exited in favor of closer from happier times Jeurys Familia.
Familia tried shaking off his considerable rust Thursday night versus the Phillies, yet it clung stubbornly to his heretofore inactive right arm over thirty low-leverage pitches. Asked to rescue a game rather than save it during Friday’s eleventh, Jeurys wasn’t really Jeu-ready. He threw a pitch wild enough that allowed Harper to race to third from second. Kevin Plawecki (another very recent promotion) took just long enough to find the handle before winging the ball to third just late enough so that Rivera couldn’t eliminate Harper. Replay review showed Bryce was barely but definitively safe. Murph, who courteously didn’t instigate a double play when he could have earlier — how do you suppose pinch-runner Gsellman moved up to third? — didn’t take second when he clearly could have. Daniel is still being Daniel, generously attempting to aid two teams at once.
The Mets could use two teams. Their first team continues to crowd Ray Ramirez’s spooky lair and their second team inevitably finds its hands full. In this case, first and third with nobody out overwhelmed Familia. Two walks followed his wild pitch, which meant he loaded the bases and then opted for the unorthodox strategy of placing the go-ahead run on home. Then he fanned the next two batters, closing the barn door good and tight once the horse was securely outside of it.
No runs off Shawn Kelley in the bottom of the eleventh, as the Mets went down for their sixth defeat in seven games. Also, for those keeping score of those of whom you can’t necessarily expect to keep score of at present, no Lucas Duda (DL), no Wilmer Flores (DL), not much Asdrubal Cabrera or Travis d’Arnaud (able to pinch-hit as long as they don’t use their bodies), no Yoenis Cespedes (at least not last night) and no deGrom. A stiff neck bumped our thus far most effective ace Friday. If it’s still stiff Saturday, Sean Gilmartin is your starting pitcher for Matt Harvey Garden Gnome Day, when the first 15,000 and everybody else will wonder what the hell is going to go wrong next.
Things could get dicey in years that turned out swell. Read about those trials, tribulations and triumphs in Piazza: Catcher, Slugger, Icon, Star, my new book about Mets clubs that were alternately awful and awesome until they were ultimately Amazin’.
by Greg Prince on 21 April 2017 12:15 pm “Just brushed my elbow up against the baserunner, Ray. I think I’ll be OK.”
“Head down the tunnel, Lucas.”
“You’re the head trainer, you must know best.”
“My wrist and the guy’s bat made contact, Ray. No biggie.”
“Head down the tunnel, Travis.”
“Gotta do what the trainer says, I guess.”
“Something with my knee, Ray. Feels a little off, but I can play if Terry needs me.”
“Head down the tunnel, Wilmer.”
“Can’t argue with good advice.”
“Ooh, the hammy’s got a little shock or cramp or something. Chilly night, huh Ray? Lemme just get loose and I’ll be good to go.”
“Head down the tunnel, Yoenis.”
“You’ve got our best interests at heart, so, yes, I shall head down the tunnel as you strongly suggest.”
***
“Hey Seth. Hey Steven.”
“Hey Lucas.”
“Hey Travis. Wilmer. Yo.”
“Hey fellas.”
“Oh, hey David. I didn’t know you guys were all still down here.”
“Yeah, Ray sent us down the tunnel.”
“I don’t like the tunnel.”
“Travis, you always say that.”
“And I never like it.”
“I dunno. I think it’s kind of homey.”
“Steven, you would say that.”
“All right gentlemen. Who’s first?”
“First? First for what?”
“I needed an octet. I only count seven of you. Where did Mister Lagares go?”
“Juan’s taking grounders at short.”
“And Mister Syndergaard? His blisters and nails were so close to bringing him down the tunnel.”
“He’s pitching. Hanging in there, too, despite how much we kind of suck right now.”
“Seven shall do then. Seven souls has a nice ring to it.”
“Speaking of rings, I’m still hoping to get a ring. You’re gonna help me get back on the field so I can win one, right, Ray?”
“Shush, Mister Wright. Where’s my equipment?”
“You mean like your medical tape? It’s right there on the shelf, Ray.”
“Calm down, Mister Flores, you shall get yours out soon enough.”
“Get my what out?”
“Gentlemen, the sooner the questions cease, the sooner I can begin the procedures.”
“Hey, anybody got a score?”
“Your teammates are losing and shall lose, six to four. But all they are losing is a baseball game, Mister d’Arnaud. You gentlemen, on the other hand, shall be bereft of your souls by night’s end.”
“Say what, Ray?”
“Did you pull a hamstring in your ear, Mister Cespedes? Ah, there’s my scythe. Let me just sterilize it with a little rubbing alcohol…so do we have a batting order yet or what?”
“HUH?”
“Mister Duda, you’re awfully vocal suddenly. Is that your way of saying you want to be the first of my seven soulectomies? I didn’t know if you boys wanted to go by salary or tenure or I could just flip the seven-sided coin I carry in my cloak.”
“This is creepy.”
“Mister Lugo, you’re still fairly new here. You should really calm down.”
“Yeah, Seth, I find this relaxing.”
“Steven, man, you’re weird.”
“Mister Wright, you are the one they call Captain. You tell me how this proceeds.”
“I’m selfless, Ray, so I might as well be the first to go soulless.”
“That would be fine, Mister Wright, but you were just moved to the sixty-day DL, so time is not of the essence. You can just stand over in the corner and resume ‘baseball activities.’”
“Like work on my swing?”
“Sure, work on that swing. Sixty days will be up before you know it. Mister Cespedes, how about you?”
“No hablo ingles, Ray.”
“Gato got your tongue, eh? No worries. It’s not your tongue your trainer is after. Mister Matz, you seem too eager to be here, so your soul might jump out of your body and that’s no challenge for my ambitious scythe. Mister Lugo, I’d like your confusion to wear off before having you on my table. It’s less messy that way. Mister Flores?”
“Hey, wasn’t there a TV in here last time? I think Friends is on.”
“This is ‘The one without the shortstop’s soul,’ and you’re guest-starring.”
“I don’t really play shortstop that much anymore. You’d think I’d get a chance between Jose and Asdrubal slumping.”
“SILENCE! THIS IMPUDENCE IS UNNERVING! MY SCYTHE IS SHAKING! I MUST HAVE SOULS! FRESH MET SOULS FOR MY COLLECTION!”
“Hey, Ray, what’s that hanging on the wall?”
“The soul of Kelvim Escobar, my finest work. Enough questions! I’ll just start with the catcher as I usually do. Get up on the table, Mister d’Arnaud.”
“Sure, Ray…ow! I think I just strained my soul again!”
“Mister d’Arnaud, your lack of health can’t even stay healthy.”
“I’ll do it, Ray.”
“Mister Duda, is that you?”
“Uh-huh.”
“Why so willing, Mister Duda?”
“Grandy said it would make a good video.”
“THERE IS NO VIDEO IN MY TRAINING ROOM! ALL OF YOU, GET OUT OF MY CHAMBER! GO SIT ON THE DISABLED LIST OR BE ‘DAY-TO-DAY’ LIKE COMMON INJURED PLAYERS!”
“See ya later, Ray.”
“Yes, I will see you all later. Sooner or later, every Met soul shall be mine.”
by Greg Prince on 20 April 2017 2:23 pm Have you ever seen anything like Jay Bruce? Once, maybe. Like most precedents, it’s inexact. Unlike most precedents, this one had physical proximity going for it.
On Wednesday night — a night when the Mets’ starting pitcher pitched into the eighth instead of the fifth and the Mets’ manager used three relievers instead of all of them — Bruce let loose with a pair of home runs that accounted for five runs batted in and exquisite timing. The first clout, in the sixth, turned the score at Citi Field from an irritating Phillies 2 Mets 0 to a jubilant Mets 3 Phillies 2. The second, in the eighth, unlocked a 3-3 deadlock and put the Mets up, 5-3. Jay thought of everything, including breathing room for the inevitable post-Gsellman bullpen blip that made it 5-4. That was a final we could handle, just as the Bruce trade is a transaction we can bring ourselves to embrace.
Remember when we were wary of acquiring Jay Bruce last year and no better than resigned to keeping him this year? No, me neither. We all loved Jay Bruce being on the Mets starting with the moment it became counterproductive not to.
Bruce is productive. Other Met hitters are sporadic. A couple are dinged up — contusions of the wrist (d’Arnaud) and hyperextended elbows (Duda) are all the rage this spring — but only one lately seems prone to produce dingers, plural. That’s the Jay Hey Kid, as we’ve been calling him ever since I wrote the first part of this sentence.
If breathless cable news talking heads applied their talents to baseball, they’d declare that Jay Bruce launching those missiles is when he became president. But I’m not concerned with presidents here. I’m thinking precedents. Precedent for Bruce entered my headspace once Bruce’s bombs cleared Citi Field airspace. It helped that I had moments earlier been sharing actual space with another Met from another administration, though in my head, all Met time is continuous and encompassing. The Met whose example Jay was following without even knowing it was Todd Zeile, last seen swinging for a fence in these parts in 2004.
Why, you may wonder, am I bringing up Zeile a Home Run Baker’s dozen years later?
Let me count the whys:
• Zeile, like Bruce, was a run-producing veteran — five seasons of 90+ RBIs — who nevertheless didn’t receive much of a honeymoon period in the wake of his Met arrival. Todd dared replace the universally adored John Olerud when Olerud left (or was allowed to leave) for Seattle prior to 2000. Olerud was intrinsic to the dynamism of the 1999 Mets. The Mets could have brought in 1938 Hank Greenberg to succeed him and fans like me would have experienced a post-Olerud letdown.
• Zeile, like most of us, wasn’t Hank Greenberg. Or John Olerud. It might have taken a while to appreciate that Zeile being Zeile, like Bruce being Bruce, could help keep a good team going. The 2000 Mets were the first Flushing edition in fourteen years to go to the World Series. They got there with a first baseman who played 153 games, hit 22 homers and contributed greatly to the reassuring sense that his club usually knew what it was doing and — if nobody screwed up too badly — was sooner or later gonna figure out a way to win.
• Zeile, like Bruce if not most of us, had a game in which he homered twice and drove in five runs to account for all the Mets’ scoring and claim responsibility for the Mets winning. It happened for Todd in 2004 in a situation similar enough to Wednesday night’s. On June 2 of that season, at Citizens Bank Park, Todd came up with two out in the eighth, the Mets trailing Philly, 3-0. Vance Wilson was on third, Kaz Matsui on second. Zeile worked Ryan Madson to a full count. The end result wasn’t a walk, but a game-tying homer. Two innings later, the score was still tied, there were again two outs and Karim Garcia was on second. The pitcher in this encounter was Roberto Hernandez. The slugger once more was Zeile, who belted the future Met reliever’s two-one delivery out of sight and put the Mets up, 5-3, which would become the tenth-inning final. According to research I did a while back, the only previous case of a pair of Met home runs springing forth from the same bat that late and doing quite that kind of prodigious damage happened in 1967 at Shea, when Jerry Buchek walloped a three-run homer in the eighth and another three-run homer in the tenth to beat the Astros, 8-5. (Jerry blossoms were in full bloom that night.)
• But I suppose the most compelling reason I found myself thinking of Zeile while Bruce was enjoying his best Mets game to date was Todd was standing a few feet from where I was jumping for Jay. We were both in the SNY suite at Citi Field. One of us is probably invited to ballpark suites often. The other of us was not only happy just to be there but delighted to be given a couple of middle innings to watch the game with an authentic 2000 National League Champion New York Met.
Zeile does some work for SNY, so his presence wasn’t accidental let alone incidental. I was there because SNY reached out to a bunch of bloggers and such, which alone was delightful, given the spiffy accommodations (heated, with a 100% chance of Shake Shack and, oh yes, the Mets playing baseball directly in front of us). The fellow who set the whole thing up, an above-and-beyond director of communications named Kevin Sornatale, is to be commended for his outreach efforts. The suiteness, at field level behind home plate, was utterly fantastic.
Watching with and talking to Zeile for half an hour was above and beyond.
My main impression of Todd Zeile, sixteen seasons a major leaguer, was this was a baseball player who really felt the game. Still does, thirteen years after we last saw him, circling the bases against the about-to-be-extinct Expos in his and their final moments on the field. I love how his experiences have stayed with him, how, depending what he is asked, he is again…
a young catcher fiercely proud of his defense;
a converted third baseman, if not necessarily of his own volition;
a hardened professional who earned the right to be a little cynical about the business of sport;
a chronic trade-deadline target who learned to deal with being dealt;
a playoff junkie whose jones for another trip to October led him to New York on the cusp of the new century;
a determined competitor who can recite what went wrong in a long-ago playoff chase that didn’t quite work out;
a true romantic determined not to waste his last time ever batting drawing a walk (so he swung at a pitch up in his eyes and homered for the ultimate Toddy Ballgame moment);
and, with eleven MLB identities from which to choose, a Met in his heart. Zeile acknowledged his Cardinal roots, but said that everything about the Mets feels like family to him, and clearly he relishes the sense that he is at home within its hearth.
I like to say “we” when it comes to the Mets, fully cognizant of my conspicuous absence within the listings of Baseball-Reference. So I asked Todd what a player with more than 7,500 at-bats thinks of amateurs like me opting for the first-person plural to describe his team. It’s all right, he told me. When he’s on the air as an ideally neutral analyst, wearing a suit instead of a uniform, he hears himself saying “we,” too. Todd said he puts himself in “the Mets fan category” as much as any of the rest of us, no quotation-marks required.
One thing is markedly different in his wing of the family, though. When Bruce sent his second home run into orbit, every one of us Mets fans populating SNY’s suite leapt and screamed and high-fived. Every one of us but one. I turned and snuck a glance at Zeile. He just watched and knew. He didn’t have to cheer Jay Bruce. He had already been Jay Bruce.
Todd Zeile played with Mike Piazza in Los Angeles, Florida and New York. One of those periods is examined pretty closely in this book right here.
by Jason Fry on 19 April 2017 12:21 am Some games are burn-the-tape affairs. Brooding about them won’t help — you’d be better served casting them aside and taking yourself somewhere else as fast as possible.
We do have historical obligations, so I’ll make this speedy: Zack Wheeler was pretty good but inefficient and still rebuilding his arm strength, so the Mets were forced to frog-march their exhausted bullpen through another campaign — and they had little room to maneuver, with the hitters having scored two runs off a shaky-looking Zach Eflin in the first but then substituting wild haymakers for the knockout blow the team needed. The game slowed into an ugly slog and then degenerated into a wretched farce.
With two outs in the eighth, Fernando Salas had thown 21 pitches with steadily diminishing effectiveness, pausing between each one to verify that his arm had not, in fact, fallen off and begun shriveling into a sad, mummified husk on the mound. (Give it time, Fernando — give it time.) Freddy Galvis helpfully lofted the 22nd pitch into the neighborhood of the third-base line, near home plate. Jose Reyes camped under it, drifted near an anxious-looking Travis d’Arnaud, then used his glove as a cesta to heave the ball over TdA’s head and send it rolling across the first-base line. That bit of slapstick kept the Phillies alive and moved the tying run to third.
Jerry Blevins came in and gave up a long double down the left-field line to Andres Blanco, a hit that would have scored Galvis but for his own sloth on Reyes’s misplay. (Quite the showcase for the national pastime tonight!) The game was tied and went into extra innings, the one place besides Soilmaster Stadium the Mets would rather not be right now. Mercifully, they at least imploded quickly, giving us a dizzying sequence of misplays and balls not quite fielded before slinking off on the wrong side of a wretched 6-2 loss.
Analysis? Must we? Early-season gag jobs like this are Rorschach blots — everyone will have his or her own interpretation, united only by being equally depressing. The relievers are exhausted in general and a couple are being ridden onto the DL, which is one of Terry Collins‘s less-amusing tricks … yet a manager has few alternatives when starters don’t supply length and offensive ineptitude removes all margin for error.
Jeurys Familia will be back soon, which should help. Reyes’s career body of work and recent performance suggest that he only looks like he’s completely forgotten to play baseball, though the act has been pretty goddamn convincing. Should he play the role too well for too long it will be time for Amed Rosario or a combination of Wilmer Flores and [I Dunno, Insert Someone Here] to report for duty instead.
But it’s too early for that. It’s too early for much of anything.
The season doesn’t have a story arc yet … which never stops us from playing fortune teller and writing our own. We stare into our cups and turn a few soggy tea leaves into a vast and woeful plantation when we’d be better off gritting our teeth and simply waiting. Every team has stretches where injuries, deficiencies and buzzards’ luck make you wonder if they’ll ever win again. From May through August we moan and groan but beneath all the noise we know it’s nothing personal, just the baseball gods telling us it’s our turn.
April and September aren’t like that, though. In those months we think we see destiny in a crummy week and go on a search-and-destroy mission for meaning. Most of the time we find nothing and only exhaust ourselves in the hunt. Soon enough it turns out it was just baseball, being wonderful and cruel and ridiculous without caring what we think of it.
This delightful game was my lone cameo between trips to Florida and California. Awesome! See you in a few days. Until then, be good to my blog partner, who’s taking on more than his share at a time when watching baseball’s not much fun.
|
|
