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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 Jason Fry on 22 September 2016 2:56 am I need to find a hobby that’s better for my health than watching the New York Mets.
I’m thinking maybe Russian roulette.
A long time ago, when I was still innocent and believed there was good in the world, it was a beautiful night for a ballgame. I was sitting in the stands with my wife, enjoying a crystal-clear evening as Bartolo Colon rolled through the Braves and Asdrubal Cabrera and Rene Rivera hit home runs to give the Mets a 3-0 lead. In the middle innings, we looked at the clock in disbelief and wondered if we might be out of Citi Field at the end of a two-hour Mets win.
Yeah right. Those early innings were a feint, shadowboxing meant to distract us from one of the meanest right hooks I’ve experienced at a baseball stadium.
If there’s baseball in Hell, rest assured that the eighth and ninth innings of Wednesday night’s game will be in heavy rotation for Mets fans. Pretty much everything you can torture a baseball fan with was on display: overmanaging, ill-timed misplays, lazy and/or inept execution, and finally luck that was both terrible and fatal. It was torture by frustration, culminating with having your heart ripped out and showed to you.
Whoa it’s still beating but it’s no longer in my chest, so how am I — GAAKKK!!!
(Trigger warning: bad shit dead ahead. If you’ve had enough, by all means hit the back button. No one will blame you.)
So yeah, let’s go through that eighth and ninth. Seems like fun.
Actually we’re going to back a bit. Addison Reed faced the Braves in the eighth — the same Reed who’d been summoned with two outs in the seventh and the Mets’ lead cut to a single run thanks to a homer from old pal Anthony Recker. Reed struck out Blake Lalli to prevent further harm, causing me to think a) that Terry Collins was showing some welcome flexibility in departing from his usual rigidly scripted use of Reed and Jeurys Familia; and b) that a Faith and Fear post overloaded with adverbs would be a fun goof on Lalli’s name.
I was probably still distractedly humming Schoolhouse Rock as Reed returned to duty and an error by James Loney put Ender Inciarte on first with nobody out. (You’ll be hearing more of Mr. Inciarte’s work, alas.) Reed got 2016 Mets nemesis Adonis Garcia to fly to right, but with eternal Mets nemesis Freddie Freeman up, Terry opted for Josh Smoker.
Smoker throws hard and has guts; I’m glad he’s a Met. But he’s not Reed. Freeman singled and Terry summoned Familia for a five-out save, double-switching Jose Reyes out of a one-run game in the process. Inciarte and Freeman pulled off a double steal and then Familia went to work on Matt Kemp.
Kemp hit a ball to left, where Yoenis Cespedes was perfectly positioned — behind the ball, eyes on home plate. At third base, Atlanta coach Bo Porter saw that and put up the stop sign. Inciarte ran through it. Cespedes heaved the ball wildly and the game was tied.
In the bottom of the eighth, with one out, Cespedes connected off Brandon Cunniff.
It was an odd night at Citi when it came to baseball parabolas — yes, Rivera, Cabrera and Recker had hit balls out, but most balls weren’t traveling as far as you expected off the bat. That downtick in temperature and humidity robbed them of a bit of distance, as both Cabrera and Loney found out at discouraging points during the proceedings.
But Cespedes’s drive … it sure looked gone. Heck, off the bat it looked like it would be 20 rows beyond the Great Wall of Flushing. But as we all got to our feet I wasn’t quite sure. The ball was high — at first majestically so, then worrisomely so. Kemp went back to the wall, but he wasn’t getting as close as he could to spare his pitcher’s feelings. He looked like he had a play. The ball clanked off his glove and we turned to see Cespedes arriving at second instead of third — he’d been admiring his handiwork instead of running.
The Braves walked Curtis Granderson, and he and Cespedes pulled off a double steal of their own — take that, Braves! But Chaz Roe fanned T.J. Rivera before giving way to Aaron Krol.
Which is when Terry really started overmanaging.
Frankly, I thought Tuesday’s calling on Eric Campbell and Kevin Plawecki was a terrible idea that happened to work, which isn’t the same as a good idea. This time, Terry outdid even himself, burning Kelly Johnson in favor of Campbell. Campbell, you may recall, collected his first hit since May on Tuesday; apparently Terry decided Tuesday was the first day of the rest of Soup’s baseball life. When the Braves walked Campbell, Terry countered by hitting Plawecki for Loney. Newcomer Ian Krol was wild and went to 2-0 on Plawecki, who promptly expanded the strike zone, fanning in a remarkably feeble at bat.
(Let’s stop and recall that Terry didn’t have Wilmer Flores because Wilmer got hurt in a collision at home plate in Atlanta, a collision that wouldn’t have happened if Terry hadn’t forgotten to pinch-run for him.)
Onto the ninth in a tie game, with Familia returning to duty after sitting in the dugout during the whole excruciating mess. The Braves took the lead on a couple of soft singles and a perfectly placed RBI groundout from Inciarte. Enter Jim Johnson to protect the Atlanta lead, fresh off fanning Cespedes with a remarkable, Wainwrightian curve that ended Tuesday night’s game.
We were all hoping and praying the lineup would get to Cabrera and Cespedes, while wondering what parade of pinch-hitters Terry had in mind now. Brandon Nimmo hit for Rene Rivera and singled; Jay Bruce hit for single-thumbed Juan Lagares and arrived to an odd sound, a mix of determined cheers and anticipatory boos and possibly ironic BRUUUUCEs. He struck out, and I suppose it’s a small kindness that no one will remember that given what was in store for us.
Travis d’Arnaud, another Met who marked Bark in the Park night by finding himself on a short leash with the fans, did what Plawecki couldn’t and coaxed a walk. Cabrera hit a deep but playable fly ball. Two outs, and it was time for the Cespedes-Johnson rematch.
On Tuesday, Johnson attacked Cespedes with fastballs to set up that killer curve; this time he showed Cespedes the curve first, getting strike one with it. He then went to the fastball and threw one that didn’t sink. It arrowed right down the middle of the plate and Cespedes mashed it on a line to right-center.
It sounded good. Hell, it sounded great. It sounded like a walkoff, and we started to yell. But I remembered the ball that had looked gone and wound up just eluding Kemp’s glove, and so I felt a queasy dread as I watched Inciarte run to the fence and leap, his glove flicking above the wall. He came down on the warning track and held his glove up, radiating such joy that he looked like he was on springs, and the game was over.
I stood there in silence, trying to process everything that had happened and get it to add up to something different. The Mets put the replay up immediately, and if you watch the Braves’ highlight (not that I recommend this), you can hear the moment we all got a real look at what had just happened — an OHHHHHH rolls through the crowd as Inciarte is still making merry with his teammates.
Walking out of Citi Field, I let myself imagine how much fun it would have been if Cespedes had hit the ball just three inches higher, to paraphrase Charlie Brown. But on the 7 train the mood was … well, better than I’d expected. And I found myself oddly philosophical.
That Mets’ defeat had a lot of ingredients: frantic overmanaging, bad at-bats, errors, lazy baserunning, lousy luck. But the game came down to a line drive sizzling through the air and one guy who had a small chance at interrupting its journey.
There are lots of ways to lose a baseball game. Most of them aren’t terribly interesting, and the sting goes away once you see a game that isn’t lost. But this wasn’t one of those baseball games.
Years from now the name “Ender Inciarte” will come up and you’ll remember, and your jaw will clench. This was as cruel as the game gets — which means, inevitably, that it was also about as astonishing and thrilling as it gets. I wish I could erase the ending we got and write a new one, but I don’t have that power. It was going to happen anyway, and since it did, I don’t regret being there to see it and hear it and feel it and have to take it away with me.
When the talk turns to Pratt hitting it over the fence or the 10-run inning or the Grand Slam Single or Piazza’s 9/21 homer I smile broadly and say that yes, I was there. I cherish these things as a fan — the memories, and every chance I get to relive them.
And when talk turns to other games — to Willie Harris robbing Carlos Delgado, or Murph coming up too quick on a ground ball in the World Series — I smile wistfully and say that yes, I was there. So shall it be with the Ender Inciarte game. I don’t cherish those memories, exactly — they’re unwelcome companions when the clock says 4 am and sleep is nowhere in sight — but they’re as much a part of being a fan as those other, happier ones.
by Greg Prince on 21 September 2016 2:55 am Thirty-thousand of us were dying to be hypocrites Tuesday night. We wanted to pull one of those dazzling Asdrubal Cabrera spinoramas in our souls, execute a spectacular turn of sentiment and roar for the stranger at whom we’d been directing our derision loudly or slyly every time we saw him. Some of us preached and practiced patience, but patience, like the battery in your phone, can run low. It needs a charge. So did any of the pitches Julio Teheran delivered to Jay Bruce in the bottom of the sixth. Put a charge into one, Jay. You’ll see what a renewable resource our faith in you can be. You’ll feel it. You’ll never forget it.
It was 2-1, Braves. There were two out. Bruce was battling his erstwhile Red ass off. Ball one. Foul. Ball two. Another foul. Then another. Then ball three. A couple more fouls. I don’t remember which one clanked off the right field upper deck, but I do remember thinking that if he’d hit that in Cincinnati for Cincinnati, it would have been fair.
Nothing’s been fair for Bruce since he became a Met. He was a country mouse contentedly piling up slices of pasteurized RBIs in relative private. He was leading the National League in a traditional prestige category. It wasn’t helping the Reds and it wasn’t impressing the statsnoscenti, but it looked good on the back of a baseball card.
Then he was asked to craft some semblance of what he did for Cincy in New York, transferred midseason from a team wallowing at the bottom of its division to one clinging to a strand of Wild Card hope. It was getting late for the Mets. Jay Bruce could help them make up time and make up ground.
Bruce has indeed been on the Mets as the Mets have forged forward in their race. Bruce’s presence has been mostly coincidental. It’s become impossible to hide his lack of productivity. He was already 0-for-2 on the night and he didn’t contribute on defense when a ball fell between him and Curtis Granderson in right-center. The center fielder is a right fielder. The right fielder is still new to the terrain. Nobody called it. One run that was going to score anyway had the ball been caught scored, but no outs were made, which led to an additional baserunner and a second run. The Mets trailed, 2-1, in great part because Curtis and Jay didn’t want to step on each other’s toes.
It was Granderson’s responsibility. It was Bruce’s catch. Or it would have been had he caught it.
You could forgive Curtis. Curtis has a track record here. Curtis has won games for us. Jay has earned demerits. We could erase a whole bunch of them if this epic at-bat against the terroristic Teheran went where we wanted it to go. We could embrace Bruce if he could work through all those fouls and lean into a pitch and put it on the scoreboard. It’s usually folly to request a home run as opposed to “just get good wood on it,” but this is Jay Bruce, New York Met, we were trying to get behind. We needed airtight motivation.
We got a grounder to first on the ninth pitch. Third out of the inning, umpteenth out in the Met career of a lost soul who’s nice-guyness is neither in dispute nor of surpassing relevance. Nice guys often finish first or at least with one of the two best non-first place records in the National League. We’re rooting for a passel of nice guys who return our affection by now and then coming through for us.
We’re still waiting on Jay Bruce to be a part of that. We’re just not doing it very patiently anymore.
Next time Jay Bruce was due up, he was disappeared from the on-deck circle. We saw Eric Campbell instead. Eric Campbell used to be Jay Bruce to us, except without the bulging portfolio. We usually cringed at the sight of Eric Campbell. C’mon Terry, we begged during difficult swaths of 2015 and 2016, don’t you have somebody better than Soup? At this juncture of ’16, when so much is on the line and we’ve barely noticed the continued proximity of Eric Campbell to the rest of the Mets, we have bigger fish to fillet. How can we deride the use of Eric Campbell against a lefty when the guy he’s replacing in the critical eighth inning of the crucial 151st game of the year is Jay Bruce?
It may have been the gutsiest move Terry Collins has made in six seasons of managing the Mets. Or it may have been as logical as any of hundreds we don’t give second thought to. Collins has seen Campbell succeed against lefty pitching. He hasn’t seen much of that from Bruce.
The sixth should have been Jay’s redemption inning. Nine pitches. Good swing after good swing until a completely ineffectual swing. The eighth was no longer about Jay Bruce breaking loose. We had been down, 5-1, and about as dead in the game as we were in the season a month ago. But the pulse stirred. A one-out walk to Cabrera, whose face should be on currency because he’s so money. Yoenis Cespedes was grazed by a pitch. Granderson, who again proved he is more than a fleeting defensive communications miscue, doubled, scoring Asdrubal and sending Yo to third. Folk hero T.J. Rivera’s sac fly sent Cespedes home. The Mets, out of it, are in it. It’s 5-3.
In 506 — where we had moved in an effort to escape the divebombing gnats of 505; instead we encountered additional gnats plus a kid who just discovered Thunderstix — the scenario for which Rob Emproto and I had braced when we considered the lineup was at hand. “This is gonna come down to Bruce,” we told each other. Our projection had come to pass. Yikes.
No, not yikes. Soup. Soup instead of Bruce. All I could think was, boy, do we miss Wilmer Flores. Yet I held out hope for Campbell because a) he just became a papa, and that’s usually worth one feelgood hit; b) some number exists proving he smacks the bejeesus out of the ball even if he rarely gets on base as a result; and c) if you’re going to be grateful to be spared any more Jay Bruce, you’d better get behind his replacement.
Campbell had himself a seven-pitch at-bat versus Ian Krol. It didn’t run as long as Bruce’s in the sixth against Teheran, but it ended better: a sharp single into left, scoring Granderson. Now it was 5-4 and anything was possible…even Kevin Plawecki batting for James Loney.
Boy, do we really miss Wilmer Flores. Some games Terry seems to have any number of viable options ready to deploy. Some games his basket of deployables is disconcertingly shallow.
Pinch-hitting fever had taken hold and was spreading like a tarpulin. Plawecki got good wood on the ball. Such good wood that it was hit too hard for Adonis Garcia to handle at third. After Garcia had yet again been a three-run pain in our rear, he owed us something. The ball caromed into left field. Soup poured it on and raced to third. We had two on, two out and Travis d’Arnaud due up.
Travis d’Arnaud is the Jay Bruce of catchers. His agent can use that in contract negotiations, but it’s not a compliment. I would have welcomed another substitution right then and there. Krol was still on the mound. I would have taken my chances with Matt Reynolds. We were no longer standing still for hitters who couldn’t hit (Bruce at all, Loney against lefties), so why stop? Granted, as fans we reflexively model what Lily Tomlin said about children’s stated aspirations, which is that if we all became what we wanted to be when we grew up and managers did what we incessantly demand, we’d live in a world filled with nothing but firemen, cowboys, nurses, ballerinas and pinch-hitters.
Nobody subbed for d’Arnaud. Travis got lousy wood on the ball and grounded out to short.
Eventually, despite everything that went wrong, the Mets got the game to exactly the spot we wanted it once there were two out in the bottom of the ninth: a runner on, Cespedes up as the winning run. He struck out. Nobody booed, and only one crank in the men’s room line was heard to dismiss his entire 2016 with “he’s had a shit year.” Cespedes can be forgiven. He, like Granderson, has a track record here.
Afterwards, as the Mets positioned themselves to drop into a three-way tie with San Francisco and St. Louis for the two National League Wild Card berths, Terry did his best Laurence Olivier rending fabric from his garment in the remake of The Jazz Singer as he explained how saddened he was by having to prevent his ostensible marquee right fielder from batting for himself in the most pressing game situation the Mets encountered all night. “It’s one of the worst things you can do as a manager, to pinch-hit for a star,” Collins emoted, “especially one of the elite power hitters in the game.” The manager then praised his elite star power hitter for stepping aside like a pro.
It was, to date, the highlight of Jay Bruce’s Met career.
by Jason Fry on 20 September 2016 12:42 am Sometimes your ace, while perfectly worthy of New Yorker covers, is missing that little wrinkle from his fastball and can’t locate it anyway and he gets whacked around.
Sometimes an opponent who’s spent the year being an absolute tomato can manages to bewilder.
Sometimes your hitters connect with ball after ball after ball in ways that seem promising at first but wind up profoundly frustrating.
Sometimes Matt Kemp catches EVERYTHING THAT COMES WITHIN 50 FEET OF HIM.
Sometimes Freddie Freeman shows up and does Freddie Freeman things.
Don’t let it get you down. It’s just baseball, which can be beautiful and can be cruel and can also be baffling and exasperating. We weren’t going to win every game. In all likelihood we don’t need to win every game. Win series. Win series and we’ll take our chances.
It all starts tomorrow. It’s always all starting tomorrow.
by Greg Prince on 19 September 2016 12:05 pm Remember that weekend the Mets were vying for a Wild Card and the Minnesota Twins came into Citi Field with the worst record in baseball and you thought, “oh great, another one of those traps when the Mets inevitably play down to their competition,” and, sure enough, the Mets couldn’t score more than three runs in any of the three games, and they kept leaving runners on, and the Twins lived up to their Pesky Nats heritage, and the Mets had to keep reaching deep into their bullpen, and they were using as a starter in the middle of a playoff race somebody who’d never started in the major leagues before and he was out of the finale in the fifth, and there was more devastating injury news, and…
The Mets won all three games. Remember that.
You’re not used to it, but good things happen to the Mets. More precisely, the Mets make good things happen to themselves.
They took the schedule they were issued, they added to it dried cut grass and they made hay. They swept the allegedly dreadful Minnesota Twins three straight at home. I’m sure the former Washington Senators (original edition) have earned their worst record in baseball, but they looked perfectly professional to me. The Mets scored three, three and three runs against them in the three games and won, won and won again.
Somebody wearing a home uniform must have been doing something right. Lots of somebodies, as it turned out.
Admission to the postseason isn’t gained on the strength of one hot batter or one unbeatable pitcher. It takes a roster. In the Mets’ case, it takes an expanded roster. An organization that doesn’t celebrate Old Timers Day nonetheless dipped into its storied past and invited Lucas Duda and Juan Lagares to take bows before the crowd on Sunday. Back from incapacitating injuries, Lucas (starting first baseman until pinch-hit for in the sixth) and Juan (a defensive replacement in center in the ninth) made appearances not for ceremonial purposes, but to help the team for whom they technically still play win a game, sweep a series and near a playoff. Neither contributed anything tangible to the cause, but it was good to see them. Their active involvement was indicative of how everybody is doing his part.
Sunday afternoon, Gabriel Ynoa was the first Met you haven’t much thought about to step in and step up. I hadn’t thought about Ynoa since the previous Monday, when I couldn’t stand to think about Rafael Montero one inning longer. Twenty-four hours before Ynoa threw his first Sunday pitch, neither one of them was on my mental radar. I had Jacob deGrom to look forward to: a hat with a convincing replica of his hair on Saturday, his arm and whatever it could deliver on Sunday.
Scratch one of those. I’d gladly give up the giveaway cap to get back the shutdown arm I vaguely recall intersecting with the glory days of Duda and Lagares. That deal is not on the table. As I stood on my Long Island Railroad station’s westbound platform on Saturday and skimmed Twitter, I saw a reputable news source reporting deGrom was out for the season and headed for surgery. For about a half-a-second, I tried to comprehend what the gag was here. Then I remembered, oh yeah, deGrom — hadn’t pitched for a couple of weeks, hadn’t looked good for a couple of weeks before that, who was kidding who when they said he was going to pitch on Sunday?
Thus, Ynoa, and — don’tch’Ynoa — he was Twins-ready. Gabriel struck out eight of them in four-and-two-thirds innings, giving up only one run in the process and standing in line as the winning pitcher of record (if one can be presumptuous enough to contemplate such ephemera in a fifth inning) until he allowed a two-out single to Brian Dozier. A mere single to Dozier, he of the 41 homers, may be the moral equivalent of a third out, but not technically the same thing. Next up was lefty-swinging Logan Schafer, perhaps not the one Twin to have up when you’re having no more than a two-run lead, which is exactly what Ynoa was nursing on the mound. There was no reason to think the rookie righthander wouldn’t retire Schafer, but if you were Terry Collins, and you’d just gotten to two out in the fifth with Gabriel Ynoa filling in for Jacob deGrom, why push it?
Exit from Schafer City Mr. Ynoa, enter Josh Edgin, a lefty-versus-lefty reflex. Edgin had pitched the night before. Yours truly groaned at his appearance in the twelfth inning. Collins had run through six ostensibly better options before tapping Edgin. Edgin threw a scoreless twelfth and wound up the winning pitcher after Curtis Granderson made victors of us all. It was a good lesson: don’t doubt any Met in this September when the Mets’ September is very much and very rewardingly the sum of their parts.
Edgin entered Schafer City and could not in all good conscience recommend it on TripAdvisor. “Not a good scene for singles,” he was probably moved to comment after Logan dropped one into the outfield. With the left-leaning portion of our immediate concerns completed, we bid goodbye to Mr. Edgin and greeted Erik Goeddel. On Saturday, when my buddy Dan pointed out Goeddel was warming up, I groaned louder than I had at the sight of Edgin. Goeddel is to me what the Great Gazoo was on The Flintstones. Gazoo couldn’t be seen by most of Bedrock. Goeddel’s uselessness seemed until very recently to have escaped the notice of every Mets observer but myself. Every game he enters, our esteemed announcers are telling me what an absolutely outstanding job he’s done out of the bullpen. All I remember is five runs in a third of an inning. I don’t know which third of an inning or who scored the five runs. To invoke Bill Maher for the second consecutive month, I don’t know it for a fact, I just know it’s true.
As someone who values an actual fact, I’ll go with this one: Goeddel got out of the fifth. Not immediately — he threw a wild pitch, then walked Jorge Polanco (I’m typing names I’ve never typed before and won’t type again until who knows when; ain’t Interleague awesome?), but with Kennys Vargas up in a situation that could redefine this September with one bad pitch, Erik killed Kennys. Struck him out, at any rate. Inning and threat over.
It was a big enough moment in the course of the season to entrust to a reliever who doesn’t make me hallucinate little cartoon spacemen, but I’m not sure the manager had spectacular choices at his disposal. I wish there were an Addison Reedbot you could wind up and send out in every inning of every game to shut down opposing batters, but the Mets’ more dependable arms have been depended upon to excess of late. Twelve innings on Saturday night meant everybody could claim a Sunday afternoon hangover. The fifth was the inning to get out of in the fifth, but what of the sixth, the seventh and so on? Of those not used on Saturday, you had available Sean Gilmartin, Logan Verrett, Jim Henderson and Montero. “Oh boy,” as Buddy Holly once enthused. Of those deployed Saturday, Reed (two straight days already), Familia (ditto) and Robles (2 IP, 1 HR) were, if good sense ruled, off limits.
I could groan at Goeddel, but it didn’t mean he wasn’t the guy to go to in the fifth and to hang around in the sixth when he pitched another scoreless inning. Once he did his part, there were still three more innings and a minimum of nine more Twins to surgically separate from scoring. If the Mets had increased their lead by a few, you could go to your one of your rather-nots, but the Mets, as noted above, scored three runs in each game of the series. On Sunday, their three runs were registered by the third inning. That left the staff in an all-hands-on-deck state when a fair percentage of arms needed their rest.
More runs in the bottoms of innings seemed doable let alone desirable, but some days — and weekends — you deal with what you’re dealt. On Friday, the Mets went 1-for-8 with runners in scoring position. They won. On Saturday, the RISP total was 1-for-7. They won. Sunday, they were 1-for-the-first-1, when Michael Conforto singled home Alejandro De Aza from third and T.J. Rivera from second in the first inning, 1-for-8 the rest of the game. Rivera was responsible for the Mets’ third run with a solo homer in the third. He’s also emerged as Ynoa to the Lugo power when it comes to position players, if that formula translates. With less fuss than deGrom but just as many implications, Wilmer Flores didn’t play in this series. Wilmer hasn’t been medically written off for the rest of the season, but you gotta wonder. He still can’t swing, and an expanded roster that doesn’t include Flores taking on all lefty comers is by definition a depleted roster.
So when you’re asking yourself where the Mets would be without Seth Lugo and Robert Gsellman and now Gabriel Ynoa, be sure to toss in a rhetorical query on behalf of T.J. Rivera, and do it in a pleasing Noo Yawk accent, or as we who grew up in these parts process it, no accent at all. When Rivera talks (or tawks), he sounds a lot like his Bronx forebear Ed Kranepool. When Rivera swings, he looks a lot like his jack-of-most-trades Edgardo Alfonzo.
The Mets are doing it with Rivera and Conforto (who was a big part of the Mets’ plans in that distant epoch when Duda and Lagares nonchalantly roamed the earth); Ynoa and Goeddel; a perfect Josh Smoker in the seventh; and, because the best bet for closing isn’t always a closer, Jerry Blevins in the ninth. Blevins came on to bail out gopher-susceptible Fernando Salas in the eighth. Role-assignation be damned, Blevins stuck around for the ninth to protect what had dwindled to a one-run lead. Jerry the bleach-bottle blonde made certain we’d have more fun when he struck out John Jacob Jingleheimer Ryan Murphy, grounded out Joe Mauer (Rivera to Duda replacement James Loney for the not-so-simple 4-3) and K’d Dozier, who left New York toting the same gargantuan quantity of home runs with which he arrived.
The Mets you don’t think of fashioned a 3-2 victory after the more usual suspects notched the first two anti-Twin wins.
• Granderson, the hero of the middle match (his second homer landed a few rows in front of me and my hairy hat, capping one of the most spiritually fulfilling experiences I’ve had in eight years of attending services at Citi Field) was rested.
• Jose Reyes (whose ancient HoZay!HoZay! entreaty arose organically on Saturday, though with the bases loaded in the eleventh, it came off more like davining than singing) was rested.
• Asdrubal Cabrera pinch-hit for Duda, then returned to resting.
• Yoenis Cespedes left the game in the seventh in deference to “nausea and dizziness,” symptoms familiar to any Mets fan this time of year in this type of race.
• Jay Bruce, who I swear hit the ball encouragingly hard three out of five at-bats on Saturday even if it was to absolutely no avail (“he’s due,” Dan and I kept reassuring each other not too many feet from Jay’s left shoulder), was kept from spreading whatever ails him to the box score.
The Mets on Sunday didn’t get a full game from any of the five guys who ostensibly top their lineup and they won. They held a lead of less than three runs entering the final two innings and they set up the eighth without their setup man and closed out the ninth without their closer. They had one of their aces extracted from their immediate not to mention going plans, replaced him with whichever body seemed warmest and they continued to survive and advance. Maybe it was the level of competition that facilitated this flexibility, but let’s not lay it on the 55-95 Twins. The visitors weren’t overwhelming, but nor were they noticeably inept. The Mets have built a self-replenishing contraption. They get by without Flores because of Rivera. They don’t perish without deGrom because of Ynoa. You hear Matz threw an encouraging bullpen but you don’t hold your breath and you don’t suffocate from anxiety because somehow somebody keeps stepping in and stepping up.
You don’t or didn’t think of so many Mets who’ve become so intrinsic to their rising fortunes, yet you find yourself in September thinking constantly about the Mets — the First Wild Card-holding Mets, that is, after Minnesota was swept three while the Cards and Jints did nothing but butt zero-sum heads at one another for four days. These Mets, 20-7 since they were dead and buried, grip your attention. They occasionally stir your tummy acids while making your head spin, but wouldn’t you rather feel the baseball version what Yo was feeling Sunday as opposed to total apathy?
The Mets won their eightieth game of 2016. From 2009 through 2014, the Mets never won more than 79. Eighty was never a goal, just a steppingstone to bigger and better objectives. We saw how that played out last year and we’re seeing something develop this year. These Mets keep on keeping on as we keep being reminded how nimble they can be when it comes to negotiating every step along the way.
by Jason Fry on 18 September 2016 3:06 am I’ll accept the title of Fan Who Had Nothing to Do With the Outcome But Can Be Forgiven for Thinking He Did: a couple of seconds before the turning point of Saturday night’s marathon against the Twins, I looked up at the scoreboard and told my friend that “if this keeps up we’ll somehow be the last game on the MLB schedule.”
CRACK!
Nope, time to go home — and go home happy.
It was a late-developing thriller, though: for most of the night this was one of those close games that feels more sleepy than taut. Ervin Santana was dealing, changing speeds and leaving the Mets helpless at the plate; Seth Lugo was wild but managed to escape the jams he created, his night marred only by a curveball to Eddie Rosario that didn’t break and became a souvenir.
Nobody much minded — it was an absolutely perfect night for baseball, clear and comfortable. The 15,000 who arrived early enough to get their Jacob deGrom hair hats wore them proudly, even amid news that the man who’d inspired the giveaway would be pitching in front of the first zero fans for the rest of the 2016 season, felled by ulnar-nerve compression. (Oh, the maladies you learn about as a Mets fan.)
I was there in the company of kind friends gathered for a birthday outing, at the front of a section that contained a substantial minority of Twins rooters. Enemy fans are a fact of life in the online age, and a few fanbases — the Giants spring to mind — have become reliably irritating presences at Citi Field in recent years. The Twins fans, though, were excellent guests: heard from when something good happened for their side and otherwise conspicuous only by their gear. Chalk it up to a combination of Minnesota Nice and, well, rooting for a team destined to lose 100 games.
On our side, there was anxiety but also a steely-eyed sense that there was still a lot of baseball to be played. (We didn’t grasp just how much.) The crowd stirred when the Mets did, and really came to life when Yoenis Cespedes or Jay Bruce arrived at the plate. Our faith in Cespedes was rewarded, as he hit a soft liner over the infield to tie the game in the eighth; on the other hand, I’m worried about Bruce not just as a player but as a person, as he’s worn out his welcome to the point of getting a rough ride even on routine plays. He did hit a couple of balls on the nose, with buzzard’s luck; for his sake as well as ours I hope things turn for him posthaste.
The game ground on, with Jeurys Familia besting Joe Mauer in a nifty 11-pitch duel in the ninth before giving way to Hansel Robles, which can be an iffy proposition. Robles looked fine for one inning, but then surrendered a truly mammoth blast to Byron Buxton, one that hit the facing of the third deck above the Acela club. And while the Mets were now into the Parade of Unreliable Relievers, the Twins still had their closer.
Uh-oh, except Brandon Kintzler arrived in the 11th and discovered it was one of those dreadful nights for a pitcher when he’s brought a cocked thumb and pointed finger to an actual gunfight. Curtis Granderson lashed Kintzler’s second pitch into the left-field party deck; Bruce just missed ending the game with a drive to center; T.J. Rivera and Brandon Nimmo singled; Kevin Plawecki nearly won the game with a liner that hit Kintzler and became a stupendously unlucky out; Kintzler hit Matt Reynolds; and finally after all that up stepped Jose Reyes.
The Reyes AB was the flipside of Familia vs. Mauer: a nine-pitch marathon, but one that ended with Kintzler slipping a fastball onto the inside corner. Somehow he’d survived, on we went to the 12th, and I started telling my friends that yes, there was a 14th inning stretch.
Josh Edgin came in and did nothing wrong; Michael Tonkin came in and got Asdrubal Cabrera on a loud but inconsequential flyball, then coaxed a pop-up from Cespedes, then departed in favor of Ryan O’Rourke. I confess I looked past Granderson and started fretting about the 13th, not because I doubted Granderson but because an extra-inning homer to win the game seemed like an awful lot to ask of a man who’d just hit an extra-inning homer to tie it.
It wasn’t. Granderson worked the count full (getting the benefit of a couple of calls, if we’re being honest) and then hooked an offspeed pitch down the right-field line. It wasn’t a bolt like the one he’d hit an inning before, but a looping drive headed for the shortest porch in the park. Max Kepler tracked it to the wall and then watched it plop into Utleyville for the win.
For those keeping track at home, Granderson now has 28 home runs and just 51 RBIs; a future generation of fans will scan his 2016 numbers and assume they’ve found a typo. But then the 2016 Mets are baffling as a group, too: they’re second in the NL in homers but just 13th in runs. More interesting stats here if you’re so inclined.
To keep track of happier things, the Mets are now tied with the Giants for the first wild card, and that’s not really a tie because we have the tiebreaker for home field in the play-in game.
Yes, I said happier things. DeGrom is the latest young gun to be snatched away, leaving the Mets rotation as Syndergaard and Colon and Hold the Phone and the lineup as a grab bag of Plan Bs and Cs. We all know this, just like we know that if the Mets survive to the play-in game and make it to the NLDS they’ll be given approximately zero chance of getting any further.
But so what? This is a patchwork team that keeps sewing up holes and rips, and now somehow controls its own destiny with two weeks left to go. No 163rd game is ensured, but in mid-August who even thought we’d be having this conversation? Get to that 163rd game and you’re into the Land of Random Outcomes, where strange things happen so routinely that we ought to stop thinking of them as strange.
We’re playing with house money when we thought we’d be out on the street with empty pockets. May as well double down, right?
by Jason Fry on 17 September 2016 12:00 pm My preparations for watching Friday night’s game included slippers and finding the fake fur throw that my wife was horrified when I bought — TV-watching components that made their last appearance one chilly day in May. It’s the baseball circle of life — a young season that needed spring thawing before we discovered what it would be has grown up and become a stooped old season trying to make it into the autumn.
And we’re still not sure what kind of season it is. That’s subject to ongoing negotiations between us and the baseball gods.
The Mets held up their end, shutting out the Twins behind Bartolo Colon, Addison Reed and Jeurys Familia. Colon was … well, what can you say at this point except that he was Colon? His so-simple-no-one-else-can-do-it strategy of variants on a fastball muffled Minnesota in happily familiar fashion, though the old master looked like he had a little extra pep in his step, whether it was bearing down to erase Jorge Polanco and a Twins’ threat in the third or combining with an also sprier-than-normal James Loney for a nifty out on Eduardo Escobar in the seventh. Colon was an afterthought at the beginning of the year, a seat-filler for Zack Wheeler; now Wheeler’s at the doctor with too many of the other whippersnappers, and Bartolo has a shot at winning 15 games. Amazin’, one might say.
Still, the game had a queasy Objects in Mirror May Be Closer Than They Appear feeling — it was only 2-0 at the 7th-inning stretch, with the Mets ahead courtesy of back-to-back bolts by Jose Reyes and Asdrubal Cabrera. Yoenis Cespedes chipped in an insurance run and Reed was briskly efficient at going about his 8th inning duties, but 3-0’s not the stuff of invincibility, even with Familia on the mound.
And, indeed, Familia’s location was off. Happily, he righted himself, the plays went the Mets’ way instead of against them, and the game was won. But I still had the feeling we’d escaped. And I still refused to be lulled by strength of schedule. The Twins are having a lost season, but beware such teams. Earlier this week, I was in the back of an Uber in San Francisco when Ryan Schimpf of the lowly Padres’ wrecked a Giants victory. The car was at a light next to a bar with a big front window, and I got to look from Gameday on my phone to the pantomime playing out in the window: the little figures on the TV, the fans’ hands going to their heads in agony, the heads going down in despair.
Look elsewhere and you’ll see the Royals just got beheaded by the going-nowhere A’s, all but finishing Kansas City’s dreams of repeating as champs. The Cubs are safe this year, but whisper “Victor Diaz and Craig Brazell” into one of their fans’ ears — and then run. And how many of our pennant chases ended with ambushes by seemingly quiescent Marlins? Note that those Marlins’ descendants remain on our schedule, standing between us and October glory.
Or at least a shot at October glory — like all sports fans, we’re dishonest bargainers at this time of year, negotiating shamelessly with the baseball gods.
Just let my team salvage this wreck of a season and have something to play for down the stretch. OK, done.
Just give us that second wild card and we’ll see what our pitching can do. It’s currently yours by two games and fivethirtyeight.com (now one-stop shopping for stressing out about both baseball and the real world) likes your chances.
Um, it sure would be great to be the home team for the play-in game. Oh, I see. Greedy much? You’re a game out, so far from impossible.
You know, a 163rd game is a treat, but we really want a series. Just to see what might happen. Now you’re getting ahead of yourself, no?
And a trip back to the NLCS! Wouldn’t that be fun, to see if we can do it again? The baseball gods are sure it would be.
And repeating as league champs, well, it would validate everything. Last year wouldn’t be a fluke! [drums fingers on desk patiently]
And if we could just win the pennant, well, maybe this time there wouldn’t be quick-pitching and errors at second and wild heaves home and getting talked into an inning too many and then we’d be WORLD CHAMPS! Oh boy. Are you finished?
Yes, of course. Sorry! It’s just that … well, that would be so amazing. We’d never ask for anything again. And advisedly so.
Though, of course, back-to-back titles has to be about the best feeling a fan can have… All right, that’s it — get out. What will be will be.
by Greg Prince on 15 September 2016 11:33 am What to do with a 1-0 loss? Throw stuff? Suck it up? Shrug? There are no wrong answers. It is the baseball epitome of close but no cigar.
I’m not sure of the appeal of cigars, but one run sure sounded good on Wednesday. One Met run, that is. There was one National run, and it sounded, if you’ll excuse the expression, devastating. Wilson Ramos hit a solo home run off Fernando Salas in the seventh inning in Washington and it felt like we had just gotten our ash kicked beyond the point of surgical repair. All that was required of the Mets in their subsequent two innings of batting was a single run to change the tenor of the late afternoon, but some days a molehill is a mountain.
One-nothing doesn’t imply insurmountability in the long term. In 1986, the Mets lost each of their postseason Game Ones by that score and it didn’t stop them from taking both best-of-sevens. For that matter, their last regular-season setback was of the 1-0 variety, Ron Darling not quite beating Montreal’s Bob Sebra. (It dropped the Mets’ mark to 103-54; if you couldn’t shrug that one off, baseball might not have been the game for you.) On the final day of the 1973 schedule, the Sunday when it was conceivable five teams could finish tied for first, the Mets dropped the opener of their doubleheader at Wrigley Field, 1-0. Jon Matlack pitched great, nicked for one lousy run in the eighth inning while otherwise striking out nine and going the distance. Alas, the Mets couldn’t push one lousy run across against Rick Reuschel and Bob Locker, and there went as crucial a late-September game as you could imagine.
In the nightcap, the Mets won, 9-2, and the next day, Makeup Monday, if you will, they eliminated everybody who was still standing to clinch the division title. The only impact from the previous day’s 1-0 defeat was that it survived in allegory form to be retold reassuringly during a somewhat similar September more than four decades into the future.
Thanks to Baseball Reference’s Play Index tool, we know the Mets have lost 118 regular-season games by a score of 1-0. Comparatively, they’ve won 131 games in the same fashion, the most recent of them June 25 in Atlanta. For a team better known historically for its pitching than hitting, it makes sense we’d be more successful than not in this particular subgenre of results. You’d like to think if you give a Seaver, a Gooden, a Gsellman one run that they could make it stand up.
OK, maybe not Robert Gsellman, but then again, the rookie held the Mets aloft for five-and-two-thirds innings, aided by a pair of strike-’em-out/throw-’em-out double plays (René Rivera with the gun twice) plus one conventional 4-6-3 twin-killing. The Mets gave Robert nothing. Or Tanner Roark, Blake Treinen and Mark Melancon gave the Mets nothing. You can look at it from both sides, though you rarely do when you can’t believe your team couldn’t score one freaking run in nine innings. To some degree, however, you enter cap-tipping territory when you partake of the wrong end of a 1-0 game.
Or helmet-throwing. Again, there are no wrong answers.
For a franchise that has existed in its current guise only twelve seasons, the Nationals have demonstrated an unhappy talent for winning 1-0 games from the Mets. Wednesday’s was their fifth, as many as their Expo forebears notched across 36 campaigns. The one-nothing whitewashing that stands out as most aggravating is the first, which was tossed at Shea Stadium on May 15, 2008, while Gary, Keith and Ron broadcast from the Upper Deck and I stifled my screams on Field Level. Mike Pelfrey, who hadn’t pitched too many games of his life to that point, was pitching the game of his life. Big Pelf went seven-and-two-thirds, blemished not at all until Wilson Ramos prototype Jesus Flores doubled, Willie Harris (aaauuuggghhh!!!) bunted and Felipe Lopez sank a sac fly from one-run range in the eighth. The Mets made Jason Bergmann and his extraneous ‘n’ look like Jon Matlack for seven innings, striking out nine times, and then did so little against Luis Ayala in the eighth that they apparently jotted a note to themselves to “Go get Luis Ayala for the stretch drive should we be in one this year and find ourselves incredibly desperate for relief pitching.”
Come the ninth, the Mets were coming on as if they planned to assert themselves once and for all in what had been the wheels-spinning aftermath of the 2007 devastation. Carlos Beltran singled. Ryan Church didn’t, so Beltran stole second while Carlos Delgado batted and took third on Flores’s errant throw. Now this was more like it: one Carlos on third with one out, the other at the plate prepared to cut overgrown tattoo parlor pole Jon Rauch down to size.
Delgado lined to first. One out. Beltran was caught off third. Nationals first baseman Aaron Boone (aaauuuggghhh!!!) threw to Ryan Zimmerman. Two out. Added to what Church didn’t do a batter earlier, three out.
Now that was a one-nothing loss to throw things at because the ending was so, well, aaauuuggghhh!!! (Four months later, Pelfrey and the Mets would lose 1-0 to the Nats again, in Washington. Score a couple of runs in each of those games, and there are playoffs at Shea before it is torn down, I just now realized…aaauuu…ah, whaddaya gonna do?) The game in which Mr. Roark was no Mets fan’s fantasy took a different trajectory. Its missed opportunity arose as early as possible, in the top of the first. Jose Reyes singled. Asdrubal Cabrera singled. Yoenis Cespedes popped out, but Ramos whiffed on a passed ball and Curtis Granderson recovered from a one-and-two count to walk and load the bases.
Jay Bruce was up for the next three pitches and back on the bench seconds after the third pitch. Two out. The offensive hero of Tuesday night, T.J. Rivera, fouled out to Bryce Harper on a ball Harper had to dive, slide and not slam into the right field sidewall in order to hold onto. Three out.
Everything about that inning told me we were probably screwed, starting with the setup of Reyes and Cabrera getting on base. Seriously. It was one of those “this should be great, but it won’t be” sensations I’m sometimes overcome by. A younger version of myself would have salivated over having exactly the guy up who I want up in that situation. Of course I want Cespedes up with two on and nobody out.
I AM GOING TO HAVE AN INTERLUDE NOW.
On August 14, 1985, the Mets trailed the Phillies, 2-0, going to the bottom of the ninth at Shea. They had been as hot as they’d been at any time since 1969, winning 30 of 37, including their previous nine. I was 22 and almost always believed the Mets would, never mind could, come back. It was that kind of season and I was that kind of fan.
Howard Johnson led off and drew a walk from Kevin Gross, who was going for the shutout (good lord, I miss starters pitching in the ninth). Davey Johnson enlisted Rusty Staub to pinch-hit for Rafael Santana (good lord, I also miss having a pinch-hitter deluxe batting in the ninth). Rusty walked. Rick Aguilera pinch-ran for Rusty because the only thing you’d ask Staub to do in the last year of his star-spangled career, if you could help it, was pinch-hit. Clint Hurdle was going to pinch-hit for Roger McDowell, who had replaced Darling in the eighth and given up the second Phillie run in the ninth to Gross (see — some pitchers could pitch and hit late in games). Righty Gross was pulled in favor of lefty Don Carman. Lefty Hurdle was pulled in favor of righty Ron Gardenhire. So much chess!
Gardenhire, who was a fine manager but mostly let me down as a player, bunted. Carman, whose name is the one I hear when I listen in my mind to Harry Kalas doing Phillies games, threw the ball past first baseman Mike Schmidt (not a misprint; Schmitty played some first). The error placed Gardy on second, Aggie on third and HoJo across the plate. These Mets who we knew on a nickname basis were within one. Veteran Tom Paciorek, obtained to be sort of a righthanded Rusty, pinch-hit for rookie Lenny Dykstra. More righty-lefty stuff. Paciorek was intentionally passed to load the bases. There was nobody out. The Mets, according to 22-year-old me, could not lose.
Wally Backman, who maybe deserved more respect as a manager but was definitely deservedly revered as a player, faced a tough assignment in Carman. The Mets had recently given up on Kelvin Chapman, who had been getting the starts at second against lefties, the ones in which Wally clearly didn’t excel (a situation that led to the acquisition of Tim Teufel in the ensuing offseason). Wally was a switch-hitter, but not to great effect. For 1985, he is listed as having batted .324 as a lefty, .122 as a righty. With no better option at hand, southpaw Carman got righty-swinging Wally to ground to third baseman Rick Schu, who threw home to Ozzie Virgil, who, instead of calling his aunt, forced Aguilera.
That was OK, though. Keith Hernandez was up next. Keith Hernandez, for all you kids out there, was everything in the summer of 1985. During the 30-7 stretch alluded to above, Keith had slashed .382/.449/.583 and had grilled forty of those “ribeye steaks” he so favors. Bases still loaded, only one out, the Mets trailing by Twiggyesque run. Of course I salivated over having exactly the guy up who I wanted up in that situation. Of course I wanted Hernandez up.
The Mets could not lose, yet they did. After “seven pitches and four minutes,” as the Times put it, Keith grounded to second baseman Juan Samuel. Samuel flipped to shortstop Tom Foley for one out, and Foley relayed to Schmidt for the second out. The game was over. The Mets lost by one run. It was frustrating, but not devastating, since it was the middle of August and the Mets remained in first place. “You’ve carried us for a month, Mex, can’t do it every night,” is how Hernandez remembered his teammates patting him on the back afterwards in his 1985 diary If At First…
That 2-1 loss didn’t sting nearly as badly in the moment as, say, the 1-0 loss at Shea to Washington in 2008 (or, to be honest, that 1-0 loss in Montreal after everything was clinched in 1986, which somehow still annoys me), yet it’s stayed with me for 31 years because it taught me that even though you have up exactly the guy who you can’t imagine not carrying you, sometimes the guy can only lift so much. If Keith Hernandez at the peak of his clutchness couldn’t deliver on demand, how could I expect anybody else to do so every single time?
I AM DONE WITH MY INTERLUDE NOW.
Cespedes didn’t come through against Roark. Neither did the formerly Red white elephant in the room, Bruce, who needs a pat on his back, a rub on his shoulders, a kick in his decidedly unsmoldering ash, something. I prescribe a little faith and a ton of encouragement. I’m predicting my prescription will be ignored. Somehow I don’t think giving up and heaping abuse is the answer where a struggling human being we wish to succeed is concerned. The ol’ “he can’t be this bad” song from the Bay days is playing in my head. That was an extended mix went on for three years. We need a change of tune for two weeks. Jay’s due. Let’s hope. Or let’s see De Aza. Or Conforto. Or Nimmo. Or Tom Paciorek, who wasn’t much of an answer in 1985, but did more down the stretch than Bruce has thus far in 2016.
The one guy who’s worrying me more than Jay Bruce is Wilmer Flores, because he’s not playing at all (an option that sounds pretty good where Bruce has been concerned). Wilmer’s not having been pinch-run for in Atlanta not only potentially cost the Mets a critical run, it has definitely cost them a Wilmer. We were told his neck was bothering him after his collision with A.J. Obnoxious. It turns out his wrist is a bigger deal. He wasn’t available to swing a bat in the Nationals series. That’s an absence you begin to notice, no matter how many times SNY replays T.J. Rivera’s homer. Injuries are what have us in a three-way tug-of-pacificity at present. If we were a little healthier, yesterday’s 1-0 loss would have damaged our charge at first place, not a Wild Card. But we’ve got who we’ve got and we’ve got to go from there.
To bring this thing semi-circle, I’m brought back once more to 2008, to the part where we survived the 1-0 losses to Washington and were hanging in there in the last week of the season. The top of our order was sublime: Reyes, Beltran, Wright, Delgado twice, with Beltran fifth otherwise and an innocent rookie who’d never hurt us named Daniel Murphy batting second. Then the bottom dropped out. Those were the days and nights marked by Ramon Martinez at second, Robinson Cancel catching, whoever wherever else. Sometimes it worked. Often enough it didn’t. Despite a midseason surge (40-19) that elevated crazy ’08 above the wreckage of despicable ’07, the division and the Wild Card both got away. Even with extra bodies in September, we always seemed short of players.
Currently, the top half of the Met order is imposing: Revived Reyes, Capable Cabrera, Scary Cespedes, Evergreen Granderson. It goes a long way toward explaining the 17-7 record in effect since August 20. After them, though, I feel the earth disappear under my feet. It’s a mosh pit of moving parts five through eight. The bench strength is stretched to fill the starting lineup. The second wave of projected starters need to be plugged into a wall outlet. Losing Flores for any length of time much past the four games he’s already missed isn’t a torpedo, but all these voids become contiguous, latching onto one another and forming a season-swallowing sinkhole. In the second half of 2008, Tatis, Easley, Maine, Wagner…before you knew it, yeesh.
We don’t know “yeesh” yet and we don’t have to. Because we are by necessity at least a little bit a Cardinal and Giant blog these days, it is my pleasure to repeat what you already know, that each Met competitor lost Wednesday, so it’s still SFG and NYM in the playoffs that don’t start today, with the STL Redbirds flying a touch below radar. Half-games are wild in the Wild Card race. A St. Louis win tonight at San Francisco ties all three teams with a 77-69 record and sixteen left to play. If you’re a chaos theory fan, the kind who reserved your salivation in 1973 for everybody finishing 80-82, that’s your preferred temporary outcome. If you’re a Mets fan, I’m not sure. A pox on both their houses is instinctively appealing, but I think I just want somebody to get swept and go away. Three to make two hasn’t worked in the NBA since 1981, and it won’t work on October 5.
That’s a ways off. Let’s concentrate on scoring more runs than the last-place Twins this weekend. The Twins used to be the Washington Senators. The Washington Nationals used to be the Expos. Anybody can beat anybody. Take no games for granted.
Why am I telling you this? Somebody tell the Mets.
by Greg Prince on 14 September 2016 8:41 am I’ve invested so much of my life into loving baseball that it would have been a shame to have completely given up the game, but as Jerry Blevins prepared to face Daniel Murphy in the bottom of the tenth inning Tuesday night with two out, a runner on first and the Mets up by one, I realized that if things went astoundingly awry (and it wouldn’t be that astounding, considering the identity of the antagonist), I might have to overhaul everything I’d previously held dear. If Murphy did to Blevins what Murphy does to all Mets pitchers, and the Nationals completed in the tenth what they nearly finished in the ninth, how could I continue to love baseball? I couldn’t even fathom liking it.
I went through a similar washing my hands of the whole thing at the conclusion of the last three-way Wild Card race in which the Mets vigorously competed. That was eighteen years ago. The Mets’ vigor vanished at the worst possible juncture. They dropped their final five games and failed to capture the only at-large playoff spot then available. I was so disgusted by the outcome of the 1998 season that I swore I would no longer have anything to do with either that team or their sport ever again.
My retirement from the game lasted about a day. But I meant it when I said it in ’98 and I meant it when I thought it in the tenth inning Tuesday. Here were the Mets, not more than a half-hour removed from the cusp of a highly satisfying victory over the Nationals. Noah Syndergaard had been his lately typical extraordinary self: 7 IP, 4 H, 1 BB, 1 ER, 10 SO and only 1 SB. Thor controlled the tops of innings, while his teammates did just enough in the bottom of two of them to stake him to a 3-1 lead. After 99 exquisite pitches, the ball was handed to Addison Reed and Reed registered his team-record 36th hold, whatever that is.
All that remained was one of the great more-or-less automatics that baseball has to offer, a Jeurys Familia ninth inning. He hiccups and we jump, but have you gotten antsy to the point of clinically anxious over Familia during the Mets’ charge into Wild Card territory? I mean really anxious? In his eleven appearances since spit got real and the season turned serious, he’d thrown ten-and-a-third innings, scattered four hits, allowed a lone walk and struck out fourteen. Saves are about as dopey as holds, but Jeurys had gathered eight of those to up his season total to 48, substantially more than any Met before him.
Despite decade upon decade of watching the Mets and their closers and the ninth-leads assigned to their particular skill sets, I was relaxed, confident and anticipating the best.
You’d think I’d know better by now.
Murphy led off the ninth for the Nats. That was at least a little unsettling. Every time the Mets play Washington, another way to say he kills us is formulated and expressed. On Tuesday, it was a comparison to Lou Brock, a Hall of Famer with whom I’m fairly certain Daniel Murphy had previously never in life had been compared. In 1965, according to Elias, Brock hit safely in each of the seventeen games he played against his shall we say alma matter from the year prior. Lou became a Cardinal in 1964 after the Cubs dealt him in what has long been referred to as one of the best/worst trades in baseball history. Your characterization of Brock-for-Ernie Broglio depends on which side of the Missouri-Illinois border you sit. In any event, long before Sweet Lou blazed a trail of stolen bases to Cooperstown, that seventeen-game performance represented a record for revenge.
Guess who tied Brock’s vengeful mark Monday and shattered it Tuesday. To paraphrase what was said in Brooklyn of another Cardinal legend, here comes that Dan again. Murphy versus the Mets in 2016 has been legendary since May. Or poison. Take your pick. He had doubled against Syndergaard in the sixth but didn’t score, which in itself could have counted as a win for Thor. Overall through eight, three at-bats, no lasting damage. Yet here we were in the ninth, with the modern-day incarnation of Stan Musial presenting the first obstacle to Familia and, maybe, the unmovable object in the path of our happiness. Get by Murph (as we called him when we were young and innocent) and we’d be fine.
Getting by Murph suggests trying to weave in and out of traffic in the Midtown Tunnel. It’s all you can do to stay in your lane with everything whooshing by. Familia gripped the wheel as tightly as he could. He threw seven pitches. Two were balls. Three were fouled off. I seem to recall Sandy Alderson wanting Murphy to adjust his approach so he would hunt and peck and take and attack and I don’t remember what anymore at the plate. Somewhere along the line while growing into a feared power hitter and a fixture on the terror watch list, Daniel got good at all of that, too. No plate appearance ends until Murphy is ready to end it. So far in September, he’s getting on base at a .469 clip.
No wonder, then, Murphy connected fair on the seventh pitch he saw from Familia and did something with it. He grounded it sharply up the middle to a spot that a second baseman like Murph probably wouldn’t get to, but a second baseman like T.J. Rivera could and did, diving, smothering, grabbing and throwing as quickly as he could. Rivera, a Tuesday starter so Kelly Johnson’s batteries don’t run down and Wilmer Flores’s neck might continue to heal (I’m wondering if Wilmer’s lingering discomfort from his contact with A.J. Pierzynski’s shin guards Saturday night will be Turner Field’s final legacy unto us), made a terrific play, but not terrific enough. Murphy beat it out for an infield single.
The hit raised Murphy’s average against the Mets in 2016 to .417. Musial hit .468 against the Mets in 1962, Brock .468 versus the Cubs in 1965. So it’s not like Murph is that great.
Bryce Harper is the National whose name is supposed to be in the same conversation with baseball immortals. He hasn’t been as nearly as valuable a player to Washington this year as his New York-import teammate, but you still have to go after him like he’s the reigning MVP. Familia got two quick strikes on Harper, then a ball, then a grounder that required shortstop-turned-third baseman Jose Reyes to charge — which he didn’t do fluidly; pick up — which he did hurriedly; and fire — which he did wildly. Jose’s throw sailed past James Loney, who stretched to no avail as the ball landed in the stands. Murphy was on third. Harper, hustling just as Jonathan Papelbon lovingly taught him, was on second. Nobody was out.
Familia was having his worst money inning in a month. If your closer has no more than one of those every thirty days, you’re probably doing all right. Alas, this was no time to count our blessings. Anthony Rendon, who slew a far less tough customer the night before, came up and grounded a ball past a diving Reyes to score Murphy and send Harper to third.
One-run game. And nobody out. And Wilson Ramos, who owns the portion of the Mets pitching staff Murphy hasn’t already bought up, grounding to Rivera, another difficultly placed ball on which there was no play. Harper scores. Rendon moves to second. Wilmer Difo goes to first to run for Ramos.
Tie game. And still nobody out. Familia didn’t excel, but he didn’t do badly. He gave up balls on the ground that hit their spots, one of which flummoxed his third baseman. But a jam is a jam and Jeurys was up to his jelly in this one. Ryan Zimmerman, the syndicated-for-Washington version of David Wright (it’s like when you stay in a motel for the first time as a kid and are puzzled why all the NBC shows you know air on Channel 8), was up to either bunt compliantly or swing away heroically. The bunting didn’t work, and neither did the swinging. Zimmerman lined out to Loney softly, allowing Familia and me to breathe slightly. Then came pinch-hitter Clint Robinson, who isn’t Frank Robinson, though I always assume he is based on some fleetingly big hit he got against us last year.
C. Robby didn’t go all Frank or Brooks on our asses, thankfully. He lined to Rivera in just a confusing enough manner — T.J. plucked it inches above the dirt — to instigate a double play, with pinch-runner Difo caught off first after Rendon rushed back to second. Irrelevant of how it happened, three outs had been secured after two runs had been scored.
The tie that was a horror show moments before was now a lucky-stars-thanked situation. Yay, we get to play some more, starting with taking on Mark Melancon, the top-notch closer the Pirates traded in an effort to confound their fans regarding their contention intentions. Melancon is headed to the playoffs. The Pirates almost aren’t. Whether the Mets were aimed truly in that direction would depend, at least for a half-inning, on how well they handled Papelbon’s successor.
Jay Bruce, whose name has been mostly absent from Met pennant race accounts, led off and grounded out. Rivera, whose name was all over the bottom of the ninth in the field and had imprinted itself upon the box score with two hits and two ribbies in regulation, batted second. As he came up, I found myself sorting through his brief MLB career to date and wondering, “Has he homered yet? I don’t think he has…has he?”
I can now answer definitively that he has. The rookie from Lehman High School showed Melancon the Bronx the best way possible, via the left field grandstand. That’s where T.J. (or “T.” as his friends call him) deposited the Washington closer’s two-strike delivery for his first major league home run. The Mets were ahead again, 4-3.
That’s where it stood in the bottom of the tenth, an inning entrusted for three batters to Fernando Salas, who has been a nifty pickup. The only helpful thing Salas hasn’t done for us is go back to the beginning of his career and train as a starter, because we could really use an extra one of those this month, but bloggers can’t be choosers. Salas’s first batter, Chris Heisey — as in that ditty of yore, mairzy doats and dozy doats and liddle lamz Chris Heisey — struck out. Trea Turner, who sources have finally confirmed for me isn’t Michael Taylor, popped out to Asdrubal Cabrera. All Salas had to do from there was take care of Jayson Werth.
Like Jeff Francoeur, Jayson Werth is mysteriously still a thing, and the thing named Jayson Werth singled to left. The de facto closer had done two-thirds of his job. Fernando still had one batter to get.
He wasn’t going to get him. Maybe if he was the actual closer, yes, he’d stay in. But Salas on the edge of the ensuing encounter did not receive the benefit of the doubt that a fully pedigreed saves artist would. He was removed in deference to a desired matchup.
Daniel Murphy, meet your match in Jerry Blevins.
Or was it going to be Blevins meeting his match? That wasn’t the idea behind Terry Collins’s decision to stride to the mound rather than let it ride. Blevins versus Murphy loomed as a mismatch in the pitcher’s favor: ten at-bats, one hit when Murph was a Met. But that was before Dani-El left his home planet of Krypton and became SuperNat.
As my mind raced back to 1998, it made a pit stop in 2012 to refuel my leaded-memory tank with visions of another extra-inning game at Nationals Park. This was June 5 four years ago, four short days removed from one of the most joyous nights in Mets history. Baseball being baseball, there was little time to rest, reflect and relax after Johan Santana’s no-hitter. More games keep coming. The one on the Fifth turned in great part on shoddy infield play. Jordany Valdespin, not really a shortstop, had been moved to shortstop in the eighth. This was the harsh post-Reyes era that didn’t fully cease until Cabrera came along. JV made an error on the first chance he saw in the tenth. A couple of batters later, another E-6. There’d be some back-and-forth with the Nats until the Mets ultimately lost in twelve. It was worse than what befell Familia artistically, though there was less to lose. It was June. It was 2012. The Mets, despite a brief uptick in first-half fortunes highlighted by Nohan, were going nowhere.
These Mets of ours right now, the September 2016 Mets, have been on the road to somewhere. It’s been one of the most scintillating trips I can remember. To have it turned around by a few balls that couldn’t quite be handled in the bottom of the ninth, then to get it back on a ball that flew off an August callup’s bat in the top of tenth, only to consider what Murphy might do in the bottom of the tenth given all he’d been doing since he donned his red cape…
If this went wrong, I could not continue to tolerate baseball. I mean I would, but I was dreading the unshakable fealty I would demonstrate in the hopes that it was just one loss, there are still seventeen to play, the Cardinals and Giants are still right there. You know — all those things we tell ourselves when a season goes to hell for a third or fourth or final time.
Blevins got two strikes on Murphy. It can’t possibly be this easy. Then followed three balls. Why does it have to be this hard? Finally, a curve that curved beautifully, away from Daniel, who swung through it an instant before it landed in René Rivera’s mitt for the third out of a 4-3 Mets win. When René dug the ball out, he may have noticed continued sole possession of the second Wild Card attached to it. St. Louis would win a bit later, but San Francisco would lose in the wee West Coast hours, leaving us a half-game from each of them in either direction as the sun rose Wednesday.
That’s absolutely critical, but somehow not quite as emotionally significant as this not having become that game we’d always remember losing. We may even remember winning it for a while. That’s probably dependent on what happens this afternoon and this weekend and clear through to October 2 and perhaps beyond.
For now, gee, it’s a wonderful game.
by Greg Prince on 13 September 2016 10:17 am Terry Collins could have removed Rafael Montero at several junctures of his outing against the Washington Nationals Monday night, which speaks to what seems to be Terry’s managing philosophy: a preference to do nothing versus an inclination to do something. Montero wasn’t in the game very long by conventional measures (though it felt like hours). When you’re around for only one-and-two-thirds innings, you wouldn’t think there are multiple inflection points.
Montero was the epitome of Didn’t Have It from jump at Nationals Park. It doesn’t reflect well on the former phenom, but it happens, particularly to a No. 5 starter who was in nobody’s plans until a few weeks ago, and who displayed, at best, flashes of adequacy until Monday. Monday he had problems with the strike zone, both when he was missing it and finding it.
Still, the young pitcher (not quite 26, even after all these years) persevered across a nightmarish first inning. He was fooling nobody, retiring nobody, yet escaped with merely two runs surrendered. The Mets were down only 2-1. What a break in the midst of this improbable playoff spurt. Gabriel Ynoa was fully warmed and we could start almost fresh in the second. “Cut your losses” was never a more apt phrase from which to take heed. The gods were smiling upon us.
Collins told the gods to wipe that smirk off their faces. Despite Montero showing next to nothing, and despite the perfect exit opportunity presenting itself when the pitcher’s spot came up in the top of the second with two on and two out and a Shriners convention worth of pinch-hitters milling in the dugout, Collins did what he tends to do in these situations.
Nothing. He let Montero bat. Montero struck out. Then he came out to pitch the top of the second, and the gods told us to go screw ourselves. Rafael was hit hard and often. Opposing starter Mat Latos homered to lead off. After generating two outs in the air, Daniel Murphy doubled (Daniel Murphy is the reincarnation of Turner Field). An intentional walk to Bryce Harper was issued because you can’t let Bryce Harper beat you…not when Anthony Rendon can. And he did, with a three-run bomb that ended Montero’s night and, presumably, his tenure as a Met starting pitcher, at least for what’s left of 2016.
Sixty pitches, fourteen batters, six runs, five outs. It began badly, it kept getting worse. What was Collins waiting for?
Terry didn’t offer much of an explanation afterwards beyond he hoped the kid would find a way out of whatever was plaguing him, a concept that played better in the first several Septembers of Collins’s managerial stay here than it does in this one. If a, say, Chris Schwinden went “splat” on the mound, it would be frustrating, but it would also be 2011. Nothing was doing anyway. Monday night, the Mets were attempting to push the Cardinals further behind them and the pull the Giants significantly closer to them. That was the idea. It didn’t quite work out.
The Cardinals lost. The Giants lost. The baseball gods took a modicum of pity on us after Terry rejected their assistance in what became an 8-1 blowout. He could’ve removed Montero at 2-1, or 3-1. He could’ve summoned Ynoa. Ynoa would have…well, we don’t know’a. Gabriel walked the first batter he saw when he finally got the call after Rendon’s homer, pitched a spotless third, then gave up a couple of runs in the fourth. There’s a saying that the most popular person in any NFL city is the second-string quarterback. New York’s a baseball town, and we love whoever Terry Collins doesn’t use when we want him used. That guy can never do any wrong.
Collins can do wrong, and he did Monday night. There’s no pretending his faith in Montero wasn’t misplaced. Dents appear in every manager’s armor. Terry’s suit needs to be taken to the silversmith to have Monday’s crease taken out.
This is generally what Terry does. He does nothing if at all possible. If that sounds like an insult, it is not intended as such. There is something to be said sometimes, perhaps ofttimes, for leaving things be. Maybe not when your emergencyesque starter is melting down. Maybe not when the potential tying run is being carried by someone who just took his molasses pill. Maybe not at lots of moments when keen foresight or legitimate hindsight suggests otherwise.
But probably more than we realize. Dancing with them what brung ya lends an air of stability to a chaotic endeavor. It’s an easier sell competing for the postseason than it is trying to hold on to fourth place, but the Mets have gotten this far this year with Terry doing a little more nothing than we might like. They got very far last year on the strength of trusting his players long enough for it to pay off. The itchy telephone fingers that would have exchanged Jacob deGrom for Noah Syndergaard in Game Five of the 2015 NLDS could not be blamed for going through tube after tube of Lanacane. But Terry stuck with deGrom, despite the trouble he was courting early at Dodger Stadium, and not too many innings later, the Mets were in the NLCS.
That’s an extreme anecdotal example, but it seemed typical of Terry. Now and then, panic is advisable. Probably not too often, however, not when you’re responsible for the emotional care and feeding of 25 professionals who are more talented than we can imagine yet likely more insecure than they let on. It’s a combustible mix in any clubhouse and a major league manager has to be a master chemist. Mix and match lineups. Mix and match personalities. Mix and match the philosophical with the strategic with the tactical. Mix and match a merry-go-round of outfielders who have bobbed up and down all season long. Mix and match the struggling starter who might give you sufficient length and maybe momentum if he can just get out of the second with the fresh long reliever who might rescue you just in time when the starter seemingly obviously can’t.
Every move that isn’t made but doesn’t go wrong generally goes uncommented upon; it’s just business as usual. The moves that aren’t made that blow up by dint of their not being made are the fodder that feeds our “I knew it!” instinct. So are the moves that implode. Enough goes awry in the course of 162 games to make simultaneous cases against doing nothing, doing something, doing anything. All of it can and will make a manager look bad on occasion, especially the occasion of a September when everything is magnified.
It’s difficult to not turn every misstep into a recall referendum on managerial competence, just as it’s easy to not notice when things are rolling along as we like. We blame the manager because we can imagine we’d make the right move. His job is more accessible than seeing ourselves throwing the right pitch or laying off the wrong pitch. I couldn’t get out Anthony Rendon. I couldn’t get out Mat Latos. I could tell Dan Warthen to get on the horn to Ricky Bones and send Gabriel Ynoa in from the bullpen. In theory, I could. In theory, we all could.
We’re fans. We’re entitled to our opinions. We’re better off informing them as much as we can before we release them into the atmosphere. My opinion is Terry should have taken Montero out after the first inning, whether his spot in the order came up in the second or not. My opinion is also that the starting pitcher depth chart is in tatters and sooner or later it was gonna show (it showed on a night that the Mets scored one lone run off Latos and three relievers, so maybe we’re going nuts over naught). Hopefully deGrom returns eventually, and in the interim somebody else can throw five effective innings. There are myriad options on the roster, none of them optimal. All are better than Montero at this point, but even Terry acknowledged that tacitly after Monday night’s game.
You can’t always do nothing, no matter how appealing that sounds.
by Greg Prince on 12 September 2016 12:34 pm The Mets won their 67th game ever at Turner Field on Sunday, or as reliable sources continue to insist, “They never won there; even if you present me with a list of occasionally stirring Met victories in that ballpark, I refuse to acknowledge it.” Mets fans who prefer misery as company (and there are a few) shall forever dwell mentally in Mr. Kenny Rogers’ neighborhood, where unfriendly postal carrier Angel Hernandez is regularly misdelivering the mail, and the local public works department won’t send a crew out to fix that pothole-size strike zone on Maddux Lane no matter how many petitions we sign, and can’t somebody do something about that offensive music they keep playing while encouraging everybody to partake in that equally offensive hand gesture?
Turner Field was a town built on perceptions as much as it was the home of the Braves for twenty years. The perceptions it ingrained in most of us veered to the permanently horrible side of the street, thus the common shorthand, “house of horrors”. Can’t argue with perceptions. You can throw the occasional counterintuitive fact at them, but as we’ve seen in this political season, facts that don’t match preconceived narratives tend to be chewed up without ever being fully digested.
Pleasant to speak of Turner Field in the past tense, though. The Braves still have home games scheduled and the building will be retrofitted for other purposes, but it’s dead to us, providing a rare episode of wish fulfillment. True, the request was filed before the turn of the current century, but these things have to go through channels, and I don’t mean TBS, yet another former home of the Braves.
The visitors departed departing Turner Field 10-3 winners, taking two of three in their unlikely quest to secure a playoff berth. They are in sole possession of the second National League Wild Card, while Turner Field remains in soul-possession of Satan. The Mets shoved the Braves into the officially eliminated pile, which was an incidental benefit of their romp. The real prize was pushing themselves past the Cardinals and continuing to shadow the Giants.
Despite flubbing the ballgame aspect of Shea Goodbye, the Mets have proven adept at final farewells to other people’s ballparks. They’re on a six-game winning streak where definitive au revoirs are concerned, making the most of their parting encounters at the Ted, Joe Robbie (2011), the renovated version of the original Yankee Stadium (2008), RFK (2007), circular Busch Stadium (2005) and the Big O (2004). Unlike the subsequent last roundups, Olympic Stadium probably deserves an asterisk since it wasn’t officially announced that the Expos were vamoosing to Washington when the Mets played them for the last time in Montreal, but the bilingual writing was on the wall.
When the Mets kissed off Turner predecessor Atlanta-Fulton County Stadium on the second Sunday of September 1996, they did it in style as well, defeating the defending world champions, 6-2. Mark Clark bested Greg Maddux, with each of their records revising to 13-11. The headline from that September 8 contest was Todd Hundley blasting his 40th homer of the year, setting a new Met single-season standard (Darryl Strawberry twice hit 39) and tying Roy Campanella for the catchers’ power plateau six days before establishing a new mark at Shea. The 9/8/96 memory that stays with me most two decades hence is a conversation between Bob Murphy and Gary Cohen. Murph marveled at how many different streets in Atlanta carry the name Peachtree. Cohen commenced quoting the contemporary Presidents of the United States of America song, “Peaches.”
“Millions of peaches, peaches for me,” Gary impishly told Bob. “Millions of peaches, peaches for free.”
“Yes, Georgia is certainly famous for its wonderful peaches,” or something like that was Bob’s response before the next pitch was thrown.
1996 was a long season. 2016, however, has become quite peachy. Seth Lugo’s seven innings of six-hit ball was as sweet and juicy as could have been asked. Yoenis Cespedes crushed the cream out of a bases-loaded pitch from Brave starter Williams Perez to catapult the Mets to a 5-0 lead that made Lugo’s path down Atlanta’s many similarly dubbed thoroughfares a veritable walk in the soon-to-be-vacated park. Cespedes declined to embellish his hitting with insights afterwards. A Mets spokesman told waiting reporters, “His bat will do his talking.”
When asked to clarify, Yoenis’s lumber elaborated, through an interpreter, “OH YEAH!!!!”
Cespedes’s third-inning grand slam gave him the thirty-first 30+ HR season in Mets history, the first since Lucas Duda delivered his thirtieth on the final day of 2014, the first by a righthanded batter since David Wright in 2008, the first by someone whose default position is left field since Cliff Floyd in 2005. Those seasons all took place during the Turner Field era, when nothing good ever happened to the Mets, except for when it did. Like yesterday and this month.
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