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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 1 September 2016 12:57 am Shortly after the Mets wrapped up their third straight win over the Marlins Wednesday night, I had an odd vision: Alejandro De Aza hits the home run that proves to be the difference in Game 7 of the 2016 World Series. He’s mobbed by 24 Mets, all of them emergency call-ups from the minors. Shortly after accepting the award as World Series MVP, De Aza steps on a land mine.
Hey, it’s not much odder than what’s currently happening in Met Land, where the team seems to win a big game every night and announce the loss of another player who’s key to the team’s hopes. After Wednesday night’s game Terry Collins pulled another of his press-conference bombshells, adding in an oh-by-the-way tone that Neil Walker would be available the next day to explain his decision to have season-ending surgery for a herniated disc.
So if you’re keeping track at home, the lone survivor of the Mets’ Opening Day infield is Asdrubal Cabrera, currently playing on one leg. Travis d’Arnaud is still behind the plate, though he missed a good chunk of the year and that faint crack I just heard down here in Jersey was probably related to an important TdA body part. In the outfield the original cast is down to some percentage of Yoenis Cespedes; the hale but not always reliably hearty Curtis Granderson; and De Aza, whose dizzying year has seen him gone from expected full-time outfielder to guy without a position to fans’ whipping boy to anointed savior to who knows what. Your guys missing until 2017: David Wright, Lucas Duda, Walker, Juan Lagares, Matt Harvey and Zack Wheeler, Oh, and Justin Ruggiano and Jonathon Niese, guys who weren’t part of the plan until they suddenly were, only now they’re history too.
And yet the Mets are still hanging around, making it impossible to rule out an October return. They’ve now passed not only the Marlins but also the Pirates in the hunt for that second wild card, and stand just 1.5 games behind the Cardinals. On Wednesday night, they did it behind the arm of wily, portly Bartolo Colon, the bat of Wilmer Flores (off a right-hander, no less, even though Wilmer’s not supposed to hit them yet at this early stage of his evolution into a Proven Veteran™ who gets to play against everybody) and the bat of Kelly Johnson.
It was Johnson — a castoff turned callback — whose two-out, bases-loaded double brought home three runs and turned a 2-2 tie into a chance for Jeurys Familia to set a new Mets single-season saves mark, pushing Armando Benitez out of the record books without the added effort needed to push him out of our hearts, since he never resided there in the first place. Johnson worked A.J. Ramos to a 3-2 count, got a slider that didn’t slide and rifled it down the right-field line.
Wednesday was Johnson’s night; Tuesday was a group effort led by late-to-the-party Granderson; Monday belonged to Cespedes. It’s good that there’s a different hero every night, because there’s no guarantee that tonight’s valedictorian will be able to limp into tomorrow’s classroom.
And yet here we are. The Mets may be a bizarre agglomeration that’s added the likes of Johnson, James Loney, Jose Reyes, Jay Bruce and now Fernando Salas in addition to a decent-sized chunk of Las Vegas’s starting rotation, but they’re facing a September schedule that’s two-thirds tomato cans.
Those moved to overconfidence by a slate filled with Reds, Braves, Twins and Phillies should, of course, remember the Mets making the Diamondbacks and Padres look like world-beaters. But those were the Mets before the latest bolt-on aftermarket part, the most recent frantic software patch, yesterday’s roll of duct tape and snarl of baling wire and blob of spit. Pick your metaphor, but ditch your crystal ball — they’ve been useless all year with this bunch.
September’s here; all we can do is hold on and see where the ride takes us. And, OK, hope it doesn’t break down and collapse before we get somewhere good.
by Greg Prince on 31 August 2016 2:59 am Meet the Mets. Meet the Mets. Step right up and meet these Mets. These Mets who we didn’t quite know not very long ago, but who are presently playing their way into our hearts and imprinting themselves on our brains.
Meet Seth Lugo. He’s our new somewhere from No. 1 to No. 4 starter. It doesn’t really matter, since everybody’s gotta be an ace on the night they take the ball. Lugo takes the ball, throws it for a bunch of innings, records a bunch of outs and keeps our team in games. He did that Tuesday night against the Marlins, and now the Mets are ahead of the Marlins and essentially tied with the Pirates. If he’s doing this for “our” team, Seth must be one of “our” guys. True, a few months ago I’d never heard of Seth Lugo, but that’s never stopped me from first-person pluralizing.
Every pitcher who was unfamiliar or forgotten is acey enough of late. Lugo. Gsellman. Montero. Throw in the relievers Smoker, who is here, and Ynoa, who is not. Four of them recently picked up their first major league wins as Mets, so we welcome them warmly into our ranks (even if pitcher wins are often misleading and should probably be replaced by a more rational system of merit-based recognition). Oh, and Rafael Montero from Monday night, not new, but still sitting on exactly one major league win back from when he was new.
A few nights before Montero returned from Eastern League purgatory, the Mets distributed to the first 15,000 fans who turned up at Citi Field a Matt Harvey bobblehead. It looked nothing like Matt Harvey, but that’s all right, considering nobody in the rotationlike blob from which our nightly starter is extracted looks like Matt Harvey. Harvey — along with Duda, Wright, Lagares, Wheeler and Niese — has disappeared from view for 2016. To be handed a box with Matt’s name and image in late August was an anachronistic reminder of who the Mets are not at the moment.
A gander at Montero taking the mound 48 hours later felt even more detached from the space-time continuum as we’d come to understand it. Rafael was presumed hot stuff in 2014, revealed lukewarm in 2015, barely a component of our consciousness in 2016. Yet Montero took the ball, threw it for a bunch of innings, recorded a bunch of outs and kept our team in his game. He did that Monday night against the Marlins. He’s back in the minors at the moment, but he left an impression while nudging us a step forward.
Good to meet Rafael again, just as it’s been good to meet or stay in touch with the seven different pitchers who started seven consecutive games between August 23 and August 29 (give or take a Niese). You don’t usually throw a different guy out there every single game for a week unless you’re playing out the frayed end of the string, loaded down with doubleheaders or beset by injuries. You know Lugo and friends weren’t chosen by choice. Too many arms have ached. Fortunately, a few are making us feel super, thanks for asking.
Good to have met Asdrubal Cabrera way back in April and reacquainted ourselves with one of the few indispensable Mets upon his August return from the disabled list. Asdrabsence made our hearts grow fonder, even if Asdrubal’s knee didn’t grow altogether healthier. Like most Mets, he can barely put his pants on one leg at a time. Like many Mets, he’s putting them on anyway and strapping on everything else besides. Tuesday night, last week’s National League Player of the Week answered two early Marlin runs with his 17th homer of the year, good for two runs and a temporary tie. We’d be out in front soon enough and there we’d stay.
Good old Asdrubal. Remember when he was a total stranger? Me neither. Baseball seasons make hail Met fellows of us all, fans and players, especially when the players give us fans what we’d been begging for and dreaming of. Cabrera was pretty much doing that all along, but it was hard to appreciate in the vacuum that was sucking 2016 into near-certain obscurity. Neil Walker and Steven Matz are inches from the wrong end of that hose, the one that pulled in Harvey and all those other Mets who have been Hoovered from our midst. Hang in there, fellas. We need everybody we can get.
We need Jose Reyes. Good to have remet him, I’d say. Conveniently ignore the issue that lurks in the subconscious no matter how well he plays and you can’t believe how well he plays. You should, though. I think we’ve looked at Jose Reyes from a distance all wrong. When he bought whatever snake oil Jeffrey Loria was selling five winters ago, what did we tell ourselves so we could convince ourselves that Ruben Tejada was a reasonable cost-efficient replacement? That Jose wasn’t going to be worth nine figures because Jose couldn’t possibly continue to be the Jose that rated nine figures.
True then, true now. But for our purposes, the purposes that involve trying to mold a legitimate contender from spare parts, Reyes didn’t have to be 2011’s batting champ and he didn’t have to live up to somebody else’s absurd/obscene price tag (though who can tell any longer how much is too much on the open MLB market?). He just had to be better than whatever we had handy. He was and he is. Watch him hit from both sides of the plate, watch him run from home to second and occasionally third, watch him field at two positions, watch him adore being a Met, the last of which is a skill you can’t teach. If he’s not the star of yore, he’s a very good ballplayer, the way Cabrera is a very good ballplayer. They know how to field and throw and go mind-to-mind with the opposing pitcher.
You get a couple of guys like that hot, there’s no telling how far you’ll go. And if you get a guy with 20 home runs up to 22 and maybe one outstanding month from him to follow, then you’re really cooking with evil gas. Curtis Granderson is the constant on this team, which seems absurd, considering he wasn’t born a Met the way Reyes was. Yet the man has been active and mostly available every single day since he signed prior to the 2014 season. In the second half of 2016, his bat has been eerily quiet. He hasn’t been hitting within a fifty-mile radius of the clutch.
Tuesday night, in a literal pinch, he did. That was no ho-hum solo home run Curtis delivered to spur the sixth inning. It put the Mets up, 4-2, and gave you the idea Lugo’s fine work hadn’t been an exercise in futility. Grandy stuck around and hit another. There was even a man on base. It’s now 22 HRs and 38 RBIs for the outfielder so diplomatic that he can park anywhere he wants in Manhattan and never get a ticket. The totals don’t balance equitably, but it’s a nice change in the weather for someone who always tries to project professional sunniness. How nice to hear him interviewed postgame and not face one question that boiled down to, “What’s wrong, Curtis?”
Nothing’s wrong when the Mets win eight of ten. Nothing’s wrong when Yoenis Cespedes is on a roll. He didn’t do much Tuesday beside strike fear into Tom Koehler & Co., but oh, Monday, that home run to win it in ten. It was Piazzaesque. It was Strawberryan. It was so very Yo. How is it possible he hadn’t hit a walkoff something or other for the Mets until then? I suppose it felt as if he had, since August and September last year were, experientially, one ongoing Yoenis Cespedes walkoff home run.
What a group, huh? Guys who we know are hurting. Guys who are probably hurting more than we know. Guys we didn’t know but have rapidly grown intimate with in the baseball sense. Guys we want to know and embrace, like Jay Bruce, who had a big hit in the first inning, but otherwise continues to resemble Bay Bruce. Guys we have slowly learned to appreciate, like Alejandro De Aza, who must be the most dynamic .196 hitter the game has ever encountered (ah, batting average is overrated). Guys like James Loney, who has stopped hitting, but sure does scoop at first. Guys like Wilmer Flores, who doesn’t seem allergic to righthanded pitching anymore. Guys like René Rivera, who if blessed by an iota more of speed would be a genuine offensive threat. Guys like Kelly Johnson, who plays wherever asked and hits whenever needed.
They were strays we reluctantly adopted. They’ve managed to form a pack barking at the tails of a flock of Redbirds. Can we keep ’em? Please?
by Jason Fry on 29 August 2016 11:56 pm OK, that was fun.
If Seth Lugo and Robert Gsellman represented Plan F and G, or some letter fairly far along in the stack, what letter was reserved for Rafael Montero?
Montero hadn’t started a game since last April and had done nothing since then to make any member of the Mets brass think well of him. He spent last summer idled by a shoulder injury that the Mets thought was between his ears, a diagnosis they all but made public. He spent most of this year getting racked around in Las Vegas, leading to a banishment to Binghamton, where his pitching well seemed of no particular import. It was a long fall for a guy who not so long ago was regarded as an electric arm to be talked up along with the likes of Matt Harvey and Zack Wheeler — a fall that sure looked like it had reached terminal velocity in terms of Montero’s Met career.
Montero didn’t erase two wasted years Monday night — he threw too many pitches and walked too many guys for that — but he used all his pitches instead of stubbornly sticking to his fastball and looked like he wanted to be on the mound. In a kinder situation, the result might have been a win, but the Mets were facing Jose Fernandez, against whom they never accomplish anything, and they were doing so with their latest patchwork lineup: no Neil Walker, no Asdrubal Cabrera, Yoenis Cespedes playing on one leg again, Jay Bruce sitting, and almost no bench.
Under those circumstances, fighting Fernandez to a draw was no small accomplishment — Montero got help from some nifty defense from an out-of-position Kelly Johnson — and the game was thrown into the bullpens with no score.
It wasn’t a tense pitcher’s duel exactly — there were too many walks for that, and in May this game would have been viewed as a slog worthy more of sighs than applause. But of course it’s not May — it’s nearly September, and both the Mets and Marlins are tattered and battered but still alive despite all that. Maybe it was still a slog, but the calendar dictated that it was a slog that mattered.
After all the pushing and shoving, Miami drew first blood with startling speed in the eighth: Ichiro Suzuki willed his 42-year-old legs to bear him to second ahead of Alejandro De Aza‘s throw, and Xavier Scruggs pounded a ball past Cespedes to make it 1-0 for Team Loria.
But the Mets struck back in the bottom of the inning, with Jose Reyes doubling, taking third on a De Aza sac fly and then breaking for the plate on a wild pitch by A.J. Ramos. That’s a dangerous gamble given Citi Field’s brick walls, and indeed the ball came right back to J.T. Realmuto, who fired it at Ramos. The pitcher came skidding in on his knees, with the ball going over his head, but elation turned to horror when Ramos crashed into Reyes’s head and shoulder, sending both players sprawling and spinning in the dust. Fortunately Reyes seems to be all right, though God only knows since these are the 2016 Mets; for now it was a double sigh of relief as the game was tied and Jose was able to report for duty.
And then it was a question of who’d break first. Bruce hit a ball hard but it wound up in the first baseman’s glove; James Loney led off the ninth with a long drive to left that sounded good but died; Reyes led off the tenth with a drive to right-center that left the bat with similar promise but yielded nothing. With two outs in the tenth, Cespedes dug in against Nick Wittgren.
Wittgren’s strategy was simple and sensible: keep the ball the hell away from the Mets’ most electric hitter. For two pitches it worked: Cespedes looked at a ball low and away, then took a called strike on the corner. Wittgren’s third pitch, though, drifted over the middle of the plate, and Cespedes did not miss it.
The ball was instantly and obviously gone — Wittgren regarded the mound in despair, Christian Yelich looked like he’d been turned to stone in left, and Cespedes flipped his bat away happily as the Mets poured out of the dugout. Ballgame.
That’s one team run down, if still to be surpassed, in the crowded wild-card chase. Who knows what will happen as the calendar turns to September? There are still Nationals lurking out there, a rotation assembled by improv, a lineup put together based on doctors’ notes, and the possibility of more Ray Ramirez in-game sightings.
But “you never know” can suggest good things as well as bad. Maybe next year we’ll get Yoenis Cespedes Dubble Bubble Bucket Crown Day, which we’ll spend in the stands happily recalling how that home run — no one will have to specify which one — was the blow that led to everything else.
It’s a nice thought, isn’t it?
Or maybe the Mets won’t be able to run down a playoff berth, but they’ll give it a gallant enough try that the season will be remembered with some fondness in addition to the frustration, as I’d argue 1987 and 2001 are recalled once the conversation around them deepens.
Or, hey, maybe this win was the high-water mark. If so, it was a moment to cherish: a ball flying this-a-way, a bat flipping that-a-way, and another day of life.
by Greg Prince on 28 August 2016 9:46 pm Like the names of Yoenis Cespedes and Neil Walker, this won’t show up in Sunday’s box score, but the Mets’ 5-1 loss to the Phillies was my thousandth game in a row. Not playing, but witnessing. I’ve watched, heard or attended at least some, usually all, of every regular-season Mets game dating back to July 30, 2010. (I also took in each of the fourteen postseason games from last year, but that should be implicit.)
This isn’t a boast, nor is it a cry for help. My streak is just one of those things I began to notice as it added unto itself. A lifetime enmeshed with baseball has cultivated a sixth sense for streaks and quirks. This is, as these things go, sort of a quirky streak. Baseball is played every day. Every day brings the unforeseen, making a thousand of anything in a row unlikely, yet every day that there is a Mets game, I find a way to see it, generally with my eyes, occasionally only with my ears. I missed the game of July 29, 2010 (but recapped it anyway), then saw the game of July 30, and haven’t since had any slip by me. I’ve been able to catch them all, so I’ve caught them. It wouldn’t occur to me not to.
A few weeks ago, when I was on Twitter offering my observations on how lousily the Mets were plying their craft on that particular night, I was asked by a fellow fan if I’d still be watching game-in, game-out, if I wasn’t blogging about them. I told him I honestly had no idea anymore because I don’t think I know how to not watch or listen to Mets games. I’m hard-wired to tune in. At the low point of the recent road trip west, the Friday night when the Mets almost drifted out of the Playoff Picture graphic, I was miserable, I was sleepy and I was excited because, “ooh, tomorrow it’s a four o’clock start!”
Great broadcasters help immensely, not incidentally. I couldn’t have done this in the days of Fran Healy. It was hard enough settling for Wayne Hagin when necessary. Great broadcasters make just another baseball game more than just another baseball game. They make it one episode after another you don’t want to miss, no matter what they wind up broadcasting on a given night or in a given season.
Also, you don’t instinctively not miss a single game within a thousand if you possess a results-dependent personality. If you can’t see every Mets game, that’s the way it goes. There are myriad reasons a person can’t. The world won’t always cooperate. I’ve been lucky, in concert with obsessed, that I’ve reached a thousand straight and will almost certainly make it 1,001 Monday night. But if you willingly skip Mets games than you can catch because they’re not performing particularly well, I will nod and pretend to understand where you’re coming from, but I don’t. Not really.
You’re a Mets fan who doesn’t want to at least check in on how they’re doing for a batter or two? These are the Mets, our team, we’re talking about. You do know that when they stop playing, they won’t be back for months. You do know you’ll make noises about how you can’t wait for Pitchers and Catchers, yet there are pitchers pitching to catchers right now for keeps. How could you not want in on that by default?
In the thousand games of my streak, the Mets have won 487 and lost 513. It doesn’t sound great, and with 2015 serving as notable exception, it hasn’t been stupendous, but I’d rather have taken in 513 losses in 1,000 games than have missed 513 games. Or any.
Admittedly, the one-thousandth in a row, played quietly on August 28, 2016, wasn’t a great advertisement for never missing a Mets game. Robert Gsellman, 18th on the starting pitching depth chart, acquitted himself beautifully for six innings, encountered a rough patch in the seventh and was not picked up by his bullpen. Also, the Mets — minus an aching Cespedes, Walker and Asdrubal Cabrera once he exited with an aggravated knee in the first — gave Gsellman one run of support. Few cylinders were firing and it showed on the scoreboard. The only saving graces arrived from St. Louis and Miami, where the Cardinals and Marlins each lost. The Pirates, however, were uncooperative.
So in that Second Wild Card race, it’s the Redbirds running a half-game ahead of the Buccos, with the Fish hanging back by a game-and-a-half, then us by two-and-a-half. Don’t mind me saying “us” — after a thousand consecutive games keeping close tabs (to say nothing of 48 seasons overall), it’s hard not to feel proprietary. Anyway, we were, not too long ago, five-and-a-half back and left for dead by someone who observes us every chance he is provided, so progress has definitely been made. Winning series is key, and the Mets won this one, after winning the last one, after splitting the one before it. There’s not that much time left in 2016 for slow, but steady is always welcome.
The Marlins arrive Monday night for four games, with Rafael Montero, about a dozen notches down from Gsellman, coming up to face Jose Fernandez in what is best thought of in advance as the You Never Know special. Is this set make or break? Losing all of them will probably break our nascent sense of pennant fever. Winning all of them won’t make our reservations guaranteed for October 5. That’s how cookies crumble and seasons disassemble when September is in sight. You can’t clinch anything by making up ground when you’re fourth of four with five weeks to go, but you can surely eliminate yourself from realistic consideration if you fall back from the pack.
Just to be in it clear to the last weekend of August, however, is quite a treat. Saturday, during my 999th game in a row, when the Mets were nailing down their series victory versus the Phillies, the fun was everywhere you looked, especially the out-of-town scoreboard at Citi Field, where I was doing my witnessing. Out-of-town scoreboards should be erected every fifty feet wherever you walk, which I guess would represent superfluous civic planning in the age of the apped-up smartphone, but the communal aspect of the OoTS is galvanizing. We all watched OAK hold off STL and we all cheered. Same for SDP taking care of MIA. We weren’t too thrilled by MIL refusing to lend us a hand vis-à-vis PIT, but sometimes — even on a night when you win by eleven runs — you can’t have everything.
Prevailing by the delightful margin of 12-1 speaks for itself funwise. To do it primarily via the little-known Home Run Cycle created an extra kick. From the near-perfect perspective of Section 513, I saw Kelly Johnson finish off the Phillies in the seventh with his four-RBI four-bagger. I saw the eight-pitch Yo Blow for three runs in the fourth that you knew was coming if you’re schooled in how Cespedes ratchets up the pitch count alongside the probability that he will make a pitcher pay. Cespedes came through an inning after the then-presumed physically fit Asdrubal offered Noah Syndergaard a cushion with a two-run homer. (Bon Jovi would tell us the reason we’re two-and-a-half from “there” is we’ve been we’ve been livin’ on Cabrera, so we really don’t want to live without him.) I saw that, and I saw the after-dinner solo mint new dad Neil passed out in lieu of cigars in the eighth.
I had no idea until a tweet mentioned it that I’d just seen every kind of home run, save for inside-the-park, in one game. I didn’t know until I got home and pieced together a few Baseball Reference Play Index clues that of the three times Elias said the Mets had executed the Home Run Cycle previously, twice it had happened in Flushing, and once I was there. On May 20, 1999, Robin Ventura launched a grand slam that became enduringly famous because it came in the first game of a doubleheader, ultimately won over Milwaukee in tried-to-give-it-away fashion, 11-10. Robin also hit a grand slam in the second game. A salami sliced during each end of a twinbill? Nobody else had done that! Of course it became famous. Lost in the excitement, from the opener, was Benny Agbayani’s solo and three-run jobs and Mike Piazza’s two-run shot (how often did Piazza going deep wind up a footnote?). I was on hand for that doubleheader and I was on hand Saturday night. Two of three Home Run Cycles in home games for me. Crazy, right?
The third was chronologically the first, from July 20, 1985, a 16-4 socking of the Braves headlined by Darryl Strawberry grand-slamming and three-run homering, and supported by Howard Johnson belting a two-run home run and Danny Heep and Clint Hurdle each going solo. Craziness is embedded in this one, too, for the guy I was with on Saturday night in Promenade, my old pal Joe, was at that game 31 years before. Thus, between the two of us, we had now witnessed in person every Met Home Run Cycle ever rolled out at Shea/Citi.
The one on the road was four years ago at Wrigley, July 27, 2012, featuring Scott Hairston with the grand slam, Ike Davis with the three-runner and Daniel Murphy on the solo and two-run tips. It accumulated into a 17-1 triumph, a game I heard through earbuds (making it No. 298 in a row for me) because it was a weekday afternoon, and sometimes you can’t watch every pitch but you can do your best to listen in, and I wouldn’t have thought of not doing my best where the Mets were concerned. On a foundation of such commitment are thousand-game streaks built.
Then again, much as you have to reluctantly rest your most vital players if their backs or quads or knees are balking, sometimes you have to do what’s best for the team, including yourself, yourself already having established yourself as a component of the enterprise. Take Friday night, Game 998 in my streak, the first of two consecutive games in which the Mets managed a grand slam. I was watching the bases load in the bottom of the fifth inning from my living room. The escalating tension of the moment (Bartolo Colon had doubled and had been standing on third base for about 20 minutes, for gosh sake) was competing with my need, perhaps intensifying my need, to dash to the bathroom. With the Phillies in a mound conference, I decided to give my bladder the green light and run. At worst, I figured, I’ll miss one pitch, and who knows, maybe if I’m not dancing around anxiously in front of the screen, it will somehow bring Wilmer Flores luck.
Luck showed up conditionally. “Hey,” Stephanie informed me when I returned from my incredibly brief pause for station identification, “there was a grand slam!” Mission accomplished, I suppose. I missed one pitch, but it was the pitch. Perhaps my voluntary absence karmically facilitated Wilmer’s big swing. More likely, the timing of my trip was immaterial because my bathroom-going decisions don’t honestly have a whit to do with the actions of two baseball teams one county away. I was 99.9% elated, for sure, maybe 0.1% dang, I couldn’t have waited? Instant replay and the rewind feature on the DVR certainly came in handy, but the thrill wasn’t quite the same.
There were still plenty of more pitches and innings to come in that game, then the next game, both of them walloping wins. That’s the beautiful thing about Mets baseball. If you miss a little, they eventually make more. And if they didn’t win today, they might win tomorrow. I can testify to that from vast personal experience.
by Jason Fry on 28 August 2016 10:13 am Years ago, I was driving through the night with some unfortunate passenger, on a road trip that was passing through northern North Carolina or southern Virginia or some similar locale. The description of the passenger has to do with the fact that we were listening to the Mets, and in this analog, pre-At Bat era we were out of radio range.
I refused to stop listening, even though the static was rising to painful peaks and atmospheric wow and flutter were killing two out of three words. When a protest was lodged, I insisted I could follow what was going on, and when that was met by doubt I proved it. No, I couldn’t follow the nuances of each play, or even differentiate between, say, a single and a batter being safe on an error. But I knew if a batter had reached, if an out had been made, if a run had scored.
It wasn’t the words so much as it was the rhythms and pitch of the announcer’s voice — back then it was either Bob Murphy and Gary Cohen or Gary and Howie Rose. Higher and faster narration meant something potentially big was happening; lower and slower was routine. That primed me to hunt for clues, and a third of the words were enough to fill in the rest of what had happened.
I didn’t have better ears than my passenger, just a lot more experience: I’d listened to the Mets so many times that I had an extensive library of calls committed to whatever shadowy part of memory handles pattern-matching. That part of my brain was pretty good at recognizing the sound signature of a single, a double up the gap, a home run, a routine fly, a managerial dispute and most every other ballgame component.
Last night I realized I can do the same thing with a televised game. We’re back on Long Beach Island for our annual week of sun, surf and sand, and game time found me out on the porch, eating dinner with family and our friends. I had recap duty, but I decided I could probably handle that by having one of the little bedroom TVs on about 10 feet away from where I was sitting. I couldn’t hear the game, and the TV was a small square, but I could see and thought that would be enough.
I could have guessed this, but baseball has a visual library too, one you can recognize at a glance if you’ve seen your share of games. Mostly you’re looking at the pitcher’s back and the reactions of whoever’s just been involved in events. Pattern-matching, though, depends on a small slice of the game: the important sequences are the transitions between the behind-the-pitcher shot and whatever’s next. If the shot switches to the infeld and someone’s vaguely hunched, you’ve got a routine grounder. If the shot jumps to half the outfield and folks are standing still, you’ve got a lazy fly. If the first thing you see after the pitcher’s back is the entire outfield and someone running, you pay attention.
With the Mets, that last shot was happily common. I couldn’t reliably see the ball, but I got used to seeing the full panorama of Citi Field’s outfield (such as its architectural missteps allow) and a Phillie hurrying to a location he wasn’t going to reach. I saw Asdrubal Cabrera erase a brief-lived Philadelphia lead, and Kelly Johnson put the game out of reach by launching a ball to the shoals of the 7 Line’s orange sea, and Neil Walker add to the festivities.
And I saw Yoenis Cespedes threaten my fellow al fresco diners of the Acela Club. That was fun, even peering through the New Jersey night. First there was a whole lot of Jeremy Hellickson‘s back and Cespedes lashing at balls, followed by the things Cespedes does to reset himself: a little stutter-step away from the point of contact, then a knock of the bat on each heel — bap, bap — before digging back in and cocking a reloaded bat, (By now I’ve got a Cespedes visual library too.) Cespy even lost a bat and nearly beheaded Noah Syndergaard, to add a little variety. At the end of the at-bat came contact, and the SNY cameras pulling way back, tracking fast enough that the left-fielder was blurry, then climbing hastily so that the outfield wasn’t visible at all, just the upper reaches of the foul pole.
Good lord did that get smacked, I thought, and then leaned forward, trying to figure out if it had been fair or foul. Half of a video board’s message told me the good news, changing from 91 MPH FASTBALL to ME RUN. Which meant Cespedes didn’t have to run but could trot.
The routine shots brought good news too: I saw plenty of shots of Syndergaard’s back that needed no transition, because Philadelphia batters wouldn’t be concerning themselves with the bases. I saw glum Phillie get-togethers on the mound. I saw fans waving and yelling happily. I saw Met helmets getting ceremonially snatched off heads. I saw a rout, and that’s fun to witness, even if it’s at a slight remove.
by Jason Fry on 27 August 2016 12:27 am Bartolo Colon going for the cycle! Leaping grabs from Jose Reyes! Bullets fired by Yoenis Cespedes! Asdrubal Cabrera going deep from both sides of the plate — and making a nifty play to short-circuit the Phillies!
And of course Wilmer Flores sending one into the Flushing night to make a tense ballgame so much more relaxed.
That was fun. Unfortunately, the scoreboard-watching hasn’t been as much fun — the Marlins, Pirates and Cardinals have already won and the Giants are pummeling the Braves — but at least there’s scoreboard-watching to be done, with the Mets refusing to flatline despite daily injuries and a rotation that now features the understudies’ understudies.
But let’s go back to Wilmer’s big moment, and the wackiness that preceded it.
There was no shortage of wackiness. The bottom of the fifth began with Bartolo lacing a fastball over Freddy Galvis‘s head, a ball that was on a startled Aaron Altherr before he could adjust, sending Altherr to the wall and Bartolo to second. Reyes then dropped a little blooper just inside the right-field line — one of those parachutes into no man’s land that’s a guaranteed double. It was, except Bartolo had rumbled to third and halted there to vent clouds of steam.
No matter, right? Cabrera, who’d gone back-to-back with Reyes in the first for a 2-0 Met lead, hit the first pitch he saw to Maikel Franco at third. Colon made a half-hearted attempt to deke Franco, which went about as well as you imagined. One out, but here came Cespedes, who’d nearly decapitated poor Phillies starter Adam Morgan back in the first. Cespedes didn’t connect this time, but rapped a grounder to Cesar Hernandez at second.
Hernandez was playing back, conceding the run, but Colon didn’t break on contact. He didn’t break at all. Poor Reyes — who in most innings would have moved up to third when Cabrera hit into a fielder’s choice and then scored on Cespy’s grounder — was still pacing around at second, like a dog taken to the park and then unaccountably left leashed while lovingly gnawed Frisbees and spit-soaked tennis balls filled the air. The Mets were about to pull off the difficult but decidedly Metsian feat of starting an inning with consecutive doubles and not scoring.
Neil Walker stood between Morgan and escape. Morgan started Walker with two straight balls, but then got him to pop a change-up into foul territory behind first. It was a tough play, but there was air under the ball and Hernandez, right fielder Peter Bourjos and Ryan Howard were all converging on it.
Bourjos probably had the best shot at the ball — Hernandez had too far to go and Howard was looking over his shoulder — but he pulled up when he saw Howard steaming towards the angle of stands. Catching it would have been a good play, one deserving of praise, but not an impossible one. And Howard was there. But he’d gone a bit too far; the ball came over his left shoulder instead of his right, and plopped to the ground just out of reach of his outstretched arms.
Walker, given another life, fouled off four more pitches, then took two balls. The bases were loaded. And then, as is so often the case with baseball, what had unfolded so slowly reached a speedy conclusion: Morgan’s first pitch to Flores was a low fastball that Wilmer golfed over the fence.
We had lots to cheer for, but the turning point Friday night wasn’t the Flores grand slam — not really. It was a modest curling pop, one that neither Hernandez nor Bourjos nor Howard converted into the out that his pitcher desperately needed. A little thing, but then baseball so often turns on little things.
by Greg Prince on 26 August 2016 12:18 pm The Mets, who couldn’t have been deader last week, are alive if not 100% well. When you’ve won exactly one more game than you’ve lost, yet retain aspirations of winning twelve in October/November, you can’t have everything.
Though you need to come close.
Thursday night was the must-iest win of the year, superseding Tuesday night by dint of taking place two games later. That’s how it works when the season winds toward either completion or extension. If you’re in first place by a lot, you can relax. If you’re in last place by a lot, you can shrug. If you’re upper-middling, you can’t lose series. The Mets didn’t in St. Louis. Now they can’t at home.
Laurels must be terribly uncomfortable since somebody’s always warning you against resting on them. The Mets should take that wisdom under critical advisement. Winning the final two in San Francisco, then two of three in St. Louis, has earned them a breather. So breathe…and get after Philadelphia.
The Phillies are not in the playoff race, but our demi-contenders — three out in the all-important delusion column, four in the grandeur — can’t care about such niceties. Strategizing around strength of schedule can steep only the weakest of tea. Recall what a bounty of fine fortune was bestowed upon us when we were gifted a nine-game stretch of nothing but the addled and infirm, a.k.a. Arizona and San Diego. We lost six of nine. Had we taken a few more here and there from the likes of them, the Phils and the Braves, every game wouldn’t carry that extra whiff of must.
On the field, you can’t tell the contenders from the pretenders from the not bothering to act. The Diamondbacks were demonic. The Cardinals were discombobulated. Glance at no standings and you’d never guess who it is we’re trying to catch. All you would know from the last game of the road trip that threatened to never end is the Cardinals are, in their current incarnation, not catching everything hit or thrown at them, and that certainly aided our righteous cause.
Heading the parade of advantage-takers in orange and blue were Seth Lugo, until he cramped, and Alejandro De Aza, whose style can’t be. Three cheers for Alejandro, formerly known to me as Almostandro for the way he never quite came through. He is these days experiencing a De Azanaissance, making this a welcome period of rebirth for us all. Thursday, Al (as we fair-weather fans of his call him) pulled in a possible Cardinal homer at the wall in the first, singled in two runs in the fourth and went very deep with two on in the fifth. By then, the De Azafied Mets had built a 7-0 lead, which Lugo, entering the bottom of the sixth, prepared to nurture for another inning or so, until he felt something in his calf. Perhaps it was sympathy pain for Jay Bruce.
Both Lugo and Bruce are reported doing fine, which perfectly explains why the latter didn’t play at all Thursday and the former didn’t throw another pitch. (Wait, what does “fine” mean again?)
Once Lugo turned into leg-oww — and Ray Ramirez collected his quota of souls for the evening — the Mets dipped into their bullpen. I was shocked to learn there were still pitchers in there whose arms hadn’t fallen off from accelerated nightly entry, but they’re a resilient little corps. Did you know Sean Gilmartin is on the team again?
Seven-run leads with twelve outs remaining fluffs a cushion like it oughta be, plus the bats added a few runs, so calamity was avoided via a 10-6 win. The Mets return from their arduous (for them and for us) journey 5-5 on the road and still viable within the Wild Card realm. They won a series, the mandatory minimum for teams with plans.
Congratulations, fellas. Now keep doing that.
by Jason Fry on 25 August 2016 10:46 am It’s a truism of baseball that no matter what you’re going to win 54 games and lose 54 games, with what happens in the other 54 determining your season.
Which is a pretty good rule, even if the Mets broke it for the first four years of their existence and came within a whisper of busting it in a good way in ’86.
But why stop there? I suspect you could make all sorts of corollaries to that rule, perhaps starting as follows:
- You’re going to get three laughers and three laughees. The former are easy; you get your baseball merit badge by sticking around for the end of the latter.
- You’re already signed up for two to four miraculous games in which your team comes off the deck and seizes victory accompanied by shafts of sunlight and Wagnerian orchestration. You’re also signed up for a few games that will leave you muttering during future winters.
We’d have to divide and subdivide pretty far to get to games like Wednesday night’s, though: contests where your team isn’t going to get its brains beat in, exactly, but nothing will go right, a big neon L is flashing from at least the middle innings, and it takes forever and a day for the whole mess to limp to its foregone conclusion.
Jacob deGrom had nothing for the second start in a row — no velocity and no location, two fatal flaws that were masked for a while by some ridiculously good luck: Yadier Molina thought he’d drunk a Daniel Murphy invisibility potion, Randall Grichuk got thrown out at the plate even though I still haven’t seen Travis d’Arnaud touch him, and the Cardinals repeatedly hit screaming rockets right into the gloves of Mets.
We’ve seen deGrom somehow parlay such bad hands into victory — just ask the Dodgers — but on Wednesday he was out of magic tricks, and all that luck meant was he got to hang around while nothing worked, sweating and waiting to be excused further frustration. The Cardinals wound up with 19 hits; it seems like a kindness that they only scored eight runs. Meanwhile, the game’s official time was clocked at 2:55, relatively tidy for modern baseball, but I call nonsense on that one — having watched the entirety of this mess, I recall it taking closer to 20:55.
There’s really nothing else to be said about this one. DeGrom doesn’t know what’s wrong with deGrom and in all likelihood his malady is just fatigue, unhappy random number generation or some of both. Jay Bruce finally got a hit essentially by accident, then departed with a leg cramp; Kelly Johnson continued to look iffy at second base; d’Arnaud unaccountably swung at the first pitch to short-circuit a potential Mets rally.
But all that’s window dressing: this was one of those 54 we were fated to lose, and one of the subset of those 54 that arrived without competitive or aesthetic merit. Some games you endure and hope to never think of again: they don’t make anyone saw on the violin while Ken Burns pans a resonant photo, but they’re part of baseball too.
by Greg Prince on 24 August 2016 12:41 pm When Jim Henderson entered Tuesday night’s game at St. Louis — one on, one out, Yadier Molina coming up, Mets leading by two in the seventh — it occurred to me that this was potentially a pivotal moment in Henderson’s Met legacy. If Henderson surrendered a two-run homer to Molina, which wasn’t out of the question in light of Jim’s lengthy layoff and Yadier’s inherent evil, we’d probably always remember the righthander (steady April notwithstanding) as an ultimately overripe reliever who torpedoed the last chance we had to make something out of a disgustingly frustrating season. But if Henderson kept the Mets’ edge intact, we probably wouldn’t remember anything about it all. That’s how our memories operate. Do something to us, and we’ll hold that grudge for eternity. Do something for us, well, let’s get to the eighth and see what happens.
As it happened, Molina did as Molina does and singled on the first pitch, placing Redbird runners on first and second. But Henderson next elicited a slow ground ball from Jhonny Peralta for a fielder’s choice to force Molina, then struck out Jedd Gyorko. The Mets still led, 6-4.
We can forget about remembering Henderson’s clutch two-thirds of a seventh inning because the Mets went on to extend their lead and win, 7-4. Middle relievers, even those who extinguish threats before they can devour what’s left of your year, are designed to fade into the background when everything turns out all right. The legacy of Jim Henderson, 2016 New York Met, can return to TBD status.
The same to-be-determination can be applied to his entire team, which engaged in a fairly thrilling victory at Busch Stadium, one that will stand time’s test as a signpost of the best that was yet to come for these Mets…or be quickly forgotten if it isn’t followed up by more and more victories, whatever their composition.
Insight alert: The Mets have to keep winning ballgames from here on out. Pretty insightful, eh? That’s been the Mets’ assignment since April 3, but they’ve slacked off on the W’s enough to make their task monstrously difficult, though not yet impossible. It is the existence of possibility that made the game of August 23 land as monumental before, during and immediately after it was played. Whether it lives to ring a bell in the weeks, months and years to come depends on how the games of August 24, August 25 and so on unfold.
On many levels, it deserves to be remembered for as long as the length of Gary Cohen’s hair when he was a senior at Columbia. Effective seventh-inning relief from Henderson was just one strand of the entire stunning picture.
The best relief pitching, of course, is that which doesn’t have to be used. That wasn’t an option Tuesday night. Jon Niese took the mound in the bottom of the first, staked to a three-nothing lead following Wilmer Flores’s lefty-bashing home run off Jaime Garcia, and commenced to giving runs back ASAP. After four batters, he gave back the mound. Niese, we had been warned, was having an issue with his left knee (most alarmingly, it keeps being found inside the bottom half of a Mets uniform).
There’s a fine line between the pitcher who tries to pitch through discomfort for the good of his team and the pitcher who tries to pitch through discomfort to the detriment of his team. Niese’s teammate from when he first came up in 2008, Johan Santana, revealed after his final start of that year that he had been pitching with a torn meniscus, another of those body components you have little idea exists unless you’re a Mets fan. Santana, in an episode that was transferred directly to legend, threw a three-hit shutout at the Florida Marlins and carried the Mets to their 162nd game with a puncher’s chance of playing it forward. Johan had kept his injury quiet throughout that pennant race, pitching better and better as the stakes intensified. It’s not like Jerry Manuel had any better options, not in the first inning, not in the ninth.
Terry Collins was kind of strapped for a starter, too, though the theoretical dropoff from Cy-worthy Santana in a season’s penultimate contest to the spare parts of ’08 was probably exponentially greater and scarier than that between a hobbled (if not necessarily unvaliant) Niese giving it a go in a reasonably big game and pot luck.
Pot luck had an identity, actually. It was Robert Gsellman, missing a vowel but not the opportunity to make a recognizable name for himself. Very recent Las Vegan Gsellman was sort of facing what faced Niese upon his major league debut eight Septembers ago. Like Niese, Gsellman was beckoned into a playoff chase in which every result increasingly mattered. Unlike Niese, who performed as if freaked out by the bright lights of Miller Park (3 IP, 5 ER in a maiden outing rescued by Manuel’s bullpen of infamy and a tenth-inning sac fly from Endy Chavez), Gsellman showed up on the Busch mound with a big grin evident. You’re making your debut, you’re being asked to keep your barely contending team afloat and you’re taking on the very opponent that has be to taken down a notch to make anything of value happen in the standings?
Why not grin? It might not be how Sal Maglie would have done it, but I doubt anybody’s referring to Robert as the Barber. Then again, it’s doubtful anybody’s referred Robert to a barber of late. Maybe the young man, bearing a passing tress-ticular resemblance to Jimmy Fallon’s Mets Bucket Hat Guy, can consult with Jacob, Noah and 1980 Gary regarding styling tips. Before Gsellman could get in the flow of pitching to big leaguers, however, he had to deal with the Welcome Wagon gift basket Niese had arranged for him. Two walks and a Brandon Moss single accounted for one run and two runners. Molina, of course, was the first batter Gsellman had to encounter. From Heilman to Gsellman, it’s always Molina.
Yadier the Irritant doubled in a second St. Louis run. Peralta grounded out, but it brought home Moss. That luscious sundae the Mets fixed for the themselves in the top of the first, crowned by Wilmer’s three-run cherry, was now melted. At three-three after one, it was a whole new ballgame.
Just as well. Who wants one started by Niese?
The Mets cottoned nicely to their second chance within a last chance. Gsellman, in his first time batting, laid down a sac bunt to set up the revival corps of Jose Reyes (single) and Asdrubal Cabrera (double), leading to a pair of runs. Reyes and Cabrera had walked and singled, respectively, to facilitate Flores in the first. Maybe that propaganda about how we should just wait until we get our injured troops back — the ones, that is, who can come back — contained a kernel of hopeful truth. Reyes is running and rolling in a manner reminiscent of how he ran and rolled in the initial heyday of Molina (an epoch still sadly in progress) and Cabrera is once more Joe Pro at short. The two-hole fits him very nicely at bat.
The other returner to form, Yoenis Cespedes, remained vital Tuesday night. No home run from the man in the comfortingly familiar neon sleeve, but two hits and two sweet defensive plays, one picking a line drive from just above the left field grass blades in the first, the other a leap at the corner wall to take away a probable homer in the sixth. At a couple of intervals, the dreaded quad appeared to have acted up, but then it stopped acting whatsoever, as Cespedes ran fluidly and purposefully. All we can do is hope he (as opposed to Niese) can endure successfully despite whatever might bother him inning to inning. It will require rooting with crossed fingers, but we know how to do that.
Gsellman was now a pitcher with a two-run advantage and he made it hold up. No runs in the second. No runs in the third. After Joltin’ Justin Ruggiano homered deep to lead off the fourth, no runs in the bottom of that frame. Three-and-two-thirds of season-saving ball from the rawest of rookies once he succeeded the veteran who can’t help but rub the rawest of nerves. Niese has since been sent to the disabled list, where he might bump into Steven Matz. Gsellman, a starter in the minors, may have found himself a promising temp gig.
The Mets, meanwhile, have found themselves not completely out of contention, though how far in they are is up for calibration. Three-and-a-half behind the leader in their category with 37 games to go is, unlike us, not insane. But it requires some luck (the Marlins lost, but the Pirates won, so we’re still fourth in our ad hoc division), some health (Niese we can get by without, Cespedes we can’t) and a ton of good baseball. The Mets played a bunch of it Tuesday night. From the second through the ninth, six relievers gave up only one run. With runners in scoring position, hitters went five-for-ten. There was a sweetly executed tack-on tally in the top of the ninth — Reyes single, wild pitch, Cespedes infield single, James Loney single — and a stressless forty-second save from Jeurys Familia. There was a third consecutive win for the first time since America’s 240th birthday party. Seriously, the Mets hadn’t strung together three wins in a row since they took every game between June 30 and July 4…which is a pretty long time ago.
Which, in turn, explains why winning this one was so important — and why it won’t be destined to stick out in Metsopotamian memory unless many more such pleasant memories are manufactured pronto.
by Jason Fry on 22 August 2016 7:30 pm Listen up, posters.
We’ve had it with the invective in the comments. We’ve banned one person already, but it’s had no apparent effect on the conversation, which has become increasingly rancorous and tiresome. Today I had to wade into the comments multiple times to wag my finger, and that was on an off-day after a thoroughly gratifying win.
Something is broken here. We’re sick of it. So it’s getting fixed, starting now.
We love our readers. We truly do. We welcome your passion for the team whose cause we have each decided, consciously or otherwise, to make our own. So by all means, weigh in on the Mets’ fortunes in the context of what we post if so motivated. Talking the game is part of the game.
But if you attack other posters as part of that debate, one of us will edit you, put you on the commenter’s DL, or give you the Mejia treatment as we see fit. And if you offer repeated high-horse comments that make your targets obvious, we’re going to do the same.
If you’re not sure if something crossed the line, it probably has. Dial it back.
If you’ve made your point once, you’ve probably made it literally a dozen times. Let it be. It may be the greatest point on God’s green earth, but there is no need to hammer it until it screams. If minds haven’t changed despite your continued assertions, move on.
There are lots of places online in which you can excoriate other Mets fans directly or loftily belittle those you don’t agree with. This has never been one of those places. It’s not going to become one of those places.
This blog exists because Greg and I love baseball and the Mets, even when they’re driving us insane, and we wanted a place to share our thoughts and hear from other like-minded folks. We’ve been at it for more than a decade, and for most of that time I’ve been excited to see that my blog partner has a new post, or that one of our posts has generated a lot of discussion. But too often recently, I see a big number under comments and my heart sinks, because I know I’m going to have to wade through a lot of bad behavior.
It shouldn’t be that way. And because we pay the server bills, it’s not going to be that way any longer.
This is not about a given individual or line of thought. It’s about tone. We try to set a good one here. (And sometimes we ourselves fall short.) We want that to resonate within everything under our banner.
Comments are closed, for obvious reasons. Tomorrow’s a new day. Thanks for reading.
(All of the above seconded by Greg.)
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