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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Brandon Nimmo is more than just happy to be here, but make no mistake: he’s happy to be here. Look at the smile that accompanied him around the bases after he bopped the first home run of his career, the one that elevated the Mets to a 7-1 lead en route to a soggy 10-2 drubbing of the presumed invincible Cubs Friday night. That’s a happy person.
I’d include a picture, but I assume Nimmo’s grin is still visible everywhere there is sky. It lit up the atmosphere at Citi Field, it brightened the broadcast wherever you were watching or listening, it took over the league lead in OPS+ — Outstanding Player Smile.
The plus is for how contagious Nimmo’s enthusiasm is to the rest of us. That’s a commodity not to be curbed.
Like every sentient Mets fan who wished to hide his eyes in the wake of the sweep the Mets suffered in Washington on the heels of however many other indignities were inflicted upon our perpetually lost and forlorn scout troop across May and June, I wasn’t looking forward to playing the Cubs. The Cubs, according to advanced metrics, have already won the 2016 World Series thrice over. At least they did before being swept by St. Louis and losing three of four to Miami recently. Speed bump aside, they’re still prohibitive frontrunners in their division and a reasonable bet to storm from ahead into the postseason.
The Mets, meanwhile, were being the Mets, and not in the lovable or miraculous sense. No need to hash out the actual numbers heading into the Thursday opener of their four-game series versus Chicago. Suffice it to say it felt like they hadn’t scored in two months, and the truthiness of that feeling was close enough to reality that it didn’t require statistical corroboration.
Then Yoenis Cespedes sleeved a Promenade Box seat his own shade of neon (now for the Mets to do the same). It was a solo home run, the one kind of run the Mets seem capable of generating, except it reached the heretofore unreachable tier, which certainly got and inverted your pessimistic attention. My first thought, after “WOW!” was, “I’m gonna have to update my list.” I keep all kinds of lists, but the one I was thinking of was my “best performance in a Met loss” list, an occasionally revisited file reflecting superb offensive and/or defensive outings that you can’t completely enjoy. The last one was Lucas Duda’s three home runs the night the Mets bowed to the Padres and Carlos Gomez wasn’t traded.
When Cespedes bombed the de facto Upper Deck on Thursday, it was 3-1 Cubs in the sixth. At last check, two-run deficits with three innings to go lie in the realm of we-can-overcome. But not for the 2016 Mets, according to anybody watching the 2016 Mets during too much of 2016. What a shame, I was sure.
Then along came Nimmo, driving in the Mets’ second run on a single up the middle after nine pitches that included three balls, three fouls and no intention of going down until he recorded his first RBI; and scoring the Mets’ fourth run when Neil Walker’s chopper flummoxed Javier Baez enough so that the Cubs suddenly resembled the Mets against the Royals from last fall when the Mets, and not the Cubs, went to the World Series. By that analogy, the Mets were the relentless come-from-behind killers who were not to be denied, a role we hadn’t seen them filling much this year.
For one night going on two, the head that wears the crown wasn’t so heavy (despite a pretty heavy press briefing from our sadly sidelined Captain in the afternoon). The Mets are defending National League champions, which is a swell thing to be, though sometimes their preceding season’s success haunts the current proceedings. If it doesn’t get in the players’ heads, it’s certainly in ours. The Mets, for the first time since Fernando Martinez was considered a growth stock, entered a campaign with expectations they’d prevail. They’ve won some, but they’ve lost almost as many overall, and the ratio’s been decidedly out of whack since the end of April. At the very least, the Mets were supposed to compete with the Nationals when this week began. When they didn’t and they came home to face the Cubs, they were supposed to cooperatively present their hind quarters for a ritual whoopin’. I believe the Stonecutters refer to this sacred rite as the Paddling of the Swollen Ass…with Paddles.
I’m not a Bark in the Park kind of fellow, but maybe there’s something to the Mets as underdogs. The big bad Cubbies were nipped Thursday and then torn to shreds Friday. Boy, did they have it ruff! In the second, Loney homered. Cabrera homered. Then it rained. Then it dried. Then Loney doubled in two more. With the Mets up 4-1 in the fourth, it became Nimmo’s time to shine, though that seems to be a 24-hour preoccupation based on his demeanor.
When Nimmo was growing up in Wyoming, his state was represented in the U.S. Senate by a politician named Malcolm Wallop. I do believe Brandon was paying a form of homage to the late legislator when he drove a Jason Hammel pitch into the Cub bullpen in the fourth, because that, as the voters from Casper to Cody to Cheyenne used to say on Election Day, was some kind of wallop.
Whoever Nimmo was demonstrating for on the floor of Citi Field, he was doing it with vigor. I’ve seen a few sluggers trot around the bases looking less than constipated after their wallops, but not many. Noted author Lenny Dykstra springs to mind as having made facial contortions for eternity when he wrecked Dave Smith to win NLCS Game Three in 1986. Todd Pratt was an exploding volcano of emotion immediately after discerning Steve Finley’s vertical leap was no match for his NLDS-ending blast in 1999. But those were homers hit in the October cauldron. This was a rookie extending a lead between rain delays. It was his first, for sure, but what do they drill into these kids’ heads from the time they’re old enough to conceal their elation? “Act like you’ve been there before.”
Our Brandon is too innocent, too unspoiled, too damn happy to abide by the code. He just hit a home run in a major league game in front of fans who weren’t blasé about it, so why should he pretend it wasn’t the highlight of his 23-year-old life? He didn’t just smile for 360 feet after socking a ball 442 feet, he took a 1986-style curtain call with the kind of gusto on which Joseph Schlitz once built a brewing empire. Nimmo really hadn’t been there before, so he might as well take in all the sights a first-time visitor to the peak of his profession has to offer. And after three months of grumbling about our defending league champions succumbing to reflexive year-after malaise (somebody keeps telling me my next book should be titled Eighty-Seven Again), it was kind of sweet to cheer from the perspective of appreciation for something that we didn’t see coming.
There was a superb grab embedded in Nimmo’s portfolio as well, a little diving number in right to rob hapless Hammel of helping his own cause in the top of the fifth. It was the putout that assured posterity that this evening, no matter how wet, officially occurred. Belting a first home run and combining it with a highlight-reel catch — as if adding on the fries and drink for value — called to mind a similar breakout performance from 34 years before. The rookie that Queens night was Gary Rajsich, a right fielder whose minor league journey differed from No. 1 pick Nimmo’s, even if his initial destiny wound up in a similar place.
If you’re old enough and retentive enough, you might see the name Gary Rajsich and be transported back to the summer of 1981, when every day was worse than any day that the Mets lose because there was no game today. The baseball strike choked the fun out of the best time of year. All we had left to root on, from a distance, was an unfamiliar name that was hard to spell.
Not that Gary Rajsich wasn’t deserving of raves for his powerful good season at Tidewater, but chances are few would have noticed had the major leagues not been on strike and the minor leagues not been on cable. Rajsich and the Tides were a featured attraction when ESPN, USA and WTBS sought to fill the baseball gap with Triple-A contests. Gary chose the moment the cameras found him to make his star turn. By early July, the mystery outfielder had gained a degree of fame for leading not just the International League but, as one wire-service story put it, “everybody else — in the majors, the minors and even the Little Leagues, as far as can be determined” in home runs. He had 22 homers, leading “the entire Western Hemisphere,” before Independence Day.
“It’s staggering,” the 26-year-old overnight sensation who had never tasted a sip of big league coffee in six professional seasons confessed. “I’ve gone from being an unknown player to being a better known one in only a few weeks.” With notices glowing all over the continent, the former Astro farmhand loomed as a lock to be called up by the Mets once the strike was over.
Except by then, Rajsich had fractured a wrist and was done for 1981, with his 24 home runs and brief spurt of celebrity placed on the shelf for the rest of the summer. But come 1982, Gary earned a place on the Mets and didn’t really do very much. Assigned only spot duty in half of the Mets’ first 34 games, Rajsich was hitting a paltry .189 and had yet to drive in a single run.
That was about to change on a Tuesday night at Shea, as Gary Rajsich was ready to enjoy the inning for which he had waited his entire life.
It was the top of the fifth, with the Mets having just taken a 3-1 lead on Cincinnati in the fourth. Randy Jones retired the first two Reds he faced before ex-Met Alex Treviño sent a sinking liner toward the right field line that was earmarked for extra bases until, out of nowhere (or a half-dozen years in the minors) came racing one Gary Rajsich. Making a move reminiscent of Ron Swoboda against Brooks Robinson in 1969, Rajsich went all out, diving for and coming up with Treviño’s ball for the third out of the inning.
“When he first hit it,” the humble rookie said, “I didn’t think I could catch it, but the wind held it up just high enough for me.”
The fifth inning had more in store for Rajsich in its bottom half. With two on and the Mets now leading 4-1, Gary did to Bruce Berenyi what he had done to so many Triple-A pitchers the year before. He got hold of a pitch and sent it deep until it disappeared over the 371 mark in right-center to put the Mets up, 7-1…the same score Nimmo’s shot resulted in.
After the 7-4 win went final, Rajsich breathed the sigh of relief he’d been waiting to exhale through the season’s first six weeks. “I really feel much better,” Gary said. “I really feel like I belong now. Everything should be real smooth. I feel like the weight of the world has been lifted off my shoulders. I’ll never forget this one.”
Gary Rajsich would hit plenty more home runs in the seasons ahead, but alas, most of them were in the minors, where his abilities topped out. Revealing himself the quintessential Quadruple-A ballplayer, Gary had only two more major league homers in him. He’d hit 28 for Tidewater in 1983 and 29 for St. Louis’s Louisville club in 1984. By 1986, he was a member of the Chunichi Dragons of the Japan Central League, where he’d stay for three seasons.
His failure to follow up on that one great inning in 1982 wasn’t necessarily the end of his big league career, though. By 2012, after building a sterling reputation within the industry, he was serving as director of scouting for the Baltimore Orioles. One of his former colleagues praised him for “his ability to connect to all kinds of different people”.
Just not enough of them had been major league pitchers.
Yet there’ll always be The Gary Rajsich Game, and now we know there will be at least one The Brandon Nimmo Game, hopefully the first of many to come. Once Nimmo’s maiden signature affair was certified official, Cespedes signaled that he is perhaps easing into another of his superhero grooves and delivered another baseball to the citizens of a far-off seating section. Cabrera chipped in with another home run, a second paddling from the swell Asdrubal (increasing the Met home run total to five, a Citi Field record for a single game). And, almost as a footnote but really quite critically, Jacob deGrom threw his best ball of the year, earning a win after enduring the first weather-driven interruption of play, going five, striking out seven and giving up nothing of substance besides a Kris Bryant home run that traveled far, but alone.
There was eventually more rain, some stellar bullpen work — welcome to New York, Seth Lugo — and a second consecutive victory over the Cubs, for whom throwing their gloves on the field surprisingly doesn’t necessarily guarantee success. Until further notice, the road to the World Series for any and all National League contenders still runs through Flushing.
How’s that for turning a frown upside down?
Ah, a long way to go and all the Mets have done lately is win two consecutive exhilarating games. Gotta stay humble, stay hungry. Heed the words of Survivor and adopt the eye of the tiger (wearing the compression sleeve of the ex-Tiger is optional). But maybe take a cue from Wet Willie and, like Brandon Nimmo, keep on smilin’. After a pair games like these, it should be easy to do.
Yep, this was all too typical of recent Mets games: in the seventh, the second baseman had a runner dead to rights at third, and hit the third baseman’s glove, only to see the ball bound away and skitter up the third-base line to bring the enemy go-ahead run home.
It wasn’t over — they fought back and had the tying run on third and the go-ahead run on second with nobody out in the ninth and the heart of the order coming up, but then, all too predictably …
What? Hang on a minute, will you? I’m typing here.
Really? Are you sure about that?
You’re sure you’re sure? All right, let me check.
Huh.
Those unfortunate things happened as described, but they happened to the Cubs, not the Mets. The second baseman with the ball who was eyeing a runner short of third was Javier Baez, not Neil Walker. The glove that ball went bouncing off of belonged to Kris Bryant, not Wilmer Flores. The runner on third in the ninth, just 90 feet from a tie game with two chances to get there, was Travis Wood, not Alejandro De Aza or Matt Reynolds. The pitcher in trouble really was ours — it was Jeurys Familia, who walked Miguel Montero and gave up a double to Ben Zobrist. At that moment he looked, unsurprisingly, rusty; he seemed, unsurprisingly, doomed.
But hold on again, I’m a little rusty myself. Let’s go back to the beginning.
It didn’t start off well, not with Zobrist singling and Bryant golfing a home run into the left-field bleachers. (By the way, will we fans of a certain age ever stop remarking whether a ball cleared the now-secondary Great Wall of Flushing? It did.) The Mets were down 2-0 with 27 outs still to get, and Steven Matz looked miserable out there — the same Matz who’s pitching with a bone spur that’s caused him to jettison his slider and may lead to surgery. Matz, it’s said, is in no jeopardy of damaging his elbow and so must learn to pitch with pain; given Matz’s biography, I don’t blame him in the slightest for being anxious about a barking elbow.
Matz settled down and settled in, but was ambushed again by Baez leading off the sixth and trudged into the dugout two batters later. (He also was nearly decapitated by John Lackey and offered an angrily inquiring shrug to his counterpart before realizing that a) Lackey hadn’t thrown a strike in the last two minutes; and b) the pitch at his head had been a slider.) The Cubs were up 3-0, Lackey was squinting and glowering through a serviceable start, the Mets weren’t hitting a lick and it sure looked like you could fill in the rest of the blanks of this one.
With one out in the sixth, Lackey threw Yoenis Cespedes a 2-0 fastball and what happened next was pretty goddamn glorious. Last October, Cespedes hit one of the more jaw-dropping home runs I’ve ever seen, the missile launch off Alex Wood in Game 3 of the NLDS that he accompanied with an epic bat flip. That contact made a crack that was loud even in a raucous packed house, and the ball was almost instantly transported from home plate to the second deck.
That October blast, though, was nothing compared to what Cespedes did to Lackey’s offering. It was gone — that was instantly and jubilantly obvious, but it kept rising and wound up three or four rows into the third deck, officially measured at 466 feet away. That’s not just way over the Great Wall of Flushing but into a precinct never before reached in Citi Field during competition; the only blasts I can remember being more impressed by were both hit by Mo Vaughn: one was a 505-footer that dimpled the old Shea scoreboard halfway up the Budweiser wrapping; the other came less than a week later and scared the hell out of a Yankee Stadium vendor in the upper deck, coming within a few degrees of leaving the park entirely.
What Cespedes did was impressive; still, to quote Gimli in another battle, it only counted as one. The blast seemed fated to be a footnote, one that would make you smile and then immediately scowl. Remember when Cespedes hit that third-deck blast during the month when everyone got hurt and the Mets lost 12 straight to the Nats and Cubs and the goddamn Marlins?
But in the seventh the Mets started doing un-Metsian things. Travis d’Arnaud singled off Lackey with one out. The embattled De Aza worked a walk against Joel Peralta. That brought up Brandon Nimmo, and SNY’s cameras caught Walker offering the newest Met hitter a hasty scouting report.
Peralta went to work on Nimmo, trying to bait him into lunging at a splitter. It seemed like a good bet to work; Crash Davis wasn’t kidding when he warned a busload of Durham Bulls that they throw ungodly breaking stuff in the Show. But Nimmo, for all the questions about him that are yet to be answered, has shown that he’s got a good eye and a calm demeanor at the plate. He fouled off a trio of tough pitches and refused to bite at two more, then got a fastball that he was able to line past Baez to cut the Cub lead to 3-2 and send De Aza to third, with Nimmo alertly grabbing second on the throw. Peralta got ahead of Walker 0-2, but Walker managed to rap a little grounder to second, one De Aza got a terrific jump on. That set up Baez’s ill-fated heave to Bryant and, astonishingly, a 4-3 Met lead.
It looked like that lead would be erased and then reversed when Familia ran into trouble in the ninth, but the prospect of a hanging seemed to concentrate his mind. Mercifully, he showed no inclination to try quick-pitching any of the Cubs, choosing instead to bury sinkers on the inside corner at the knee. It was like a metronome: Familia threw that pitch over and over to Bryant until he struck him out, then (after an intentional walk to Anthony Rizzo) ate up Willson Contreras with the same relentless approach. He then went to work on Baez, coaxing an 0-2 pop-up from him to seal it.
And so yes, we actually did win despite the Cubs and ourselves. Maybe it was only a respite for a day, but I needed to be reminded that baseball’s karmic engines are not, in fact, only calibrated to do terrible things to the Mets. First-place ballclubs with gaudy run differentials and genius managers can throw balls away and gag with gimme runs out there too. Or, if you’ll dare to see it another way, battered clubs enduring horrific luck can still get up off the mat and persuade you not to give up quite yet.
The Mets entered their series against the Nationals with a clear shot at the top spot in their division and exited it scrambling for positioning in the Wild Card race. They scored four runs in the first three innings on Monday, two in the last inning on Wednesday and none in the intervening twenty-three. One starting pitcher was overwhelmed by the running game. Another starting pitcher was undermined by the rain. A third was no match for his opponent. Elbow spurs have been revealed as present in two valuable arms. The lineup on any given night is not only dull, it is unfamiliar, stocked primarily with relative strangers and contingency additions who simply don’t inspire a midsummer’s passion. Next up: four contests against the consensus best team in baseball.
It wasn’t long ago that a Met season teetered on the brink only to straighten up and soar to the stars, leading one to conclude you can’t give up, no matter how tempting doing so seems.
Nah, can’t think like that. Eighty-five games remain. A playoff spot is still within reach. Ebb tide is bound to be followed by high, valleys by peaks, eighteen losses in thirty games by…well, there are no guarantees, but opportunity lies ahead.
As do the Cubs. Had to play ’em sooner or later. What the hell, we’re on a four-game winning streak against them. So let’s go get ’em, Neil and Asdrubal and James and Alejandro and René!
Seriously, sometimes I wonder who these guys are. I root for them, even if a year ago I was no more than mildly aware of their existence. Turnover and attrition are part of baseball, but some years are more jarring than others in that regard. I look at the Mets who are Mets now and I have to ask, whatever became of the Mets who were Mets for so long?
***
Anybody here seen our old friend Daniel?
Can you tell us where he’s gone?
He missed a lot of grounders and threw to the wrong base
But in the batting race he’s listed number one
Anybody here seen our old friend Jose?
Can you tell us where he’s gone?
His career got rocky when he moved to Colorado
They say Jose’s playing third in Binghamton
Anybody here seen our old friend David?
Can you tell us where he’s gone?
He’s got stenosis and a herniated neck disk
He can’t help us chase down first-place Washington
Didn’t you love these guys when with us?
Didn’t they drive in a couple occasionally?
Maybe even three?
Some day soon, we’ll score that many
Anybody here seen our old friend Lucas?
He was someone we’d all like
I hear he’s weeks from beginning baseball activities
Though reportedly he’s pedaling his stationary bike
Tuesday night — which bled painfully into Wednesday morning — brought cruddy relief, an absence of hitting and some bad luck, all familiar maladies of late. Matt Harvey looked better than he has in a while, with life on his fastball and sharp breaking stuff, but was chased off the mound by rain, an opponent for which no scouting report is adequate. Through no fault of his own, Harvey departed before the middle innings that have been his 2016 downfall, leaving us all to wonder how much progress he really made; through some fault of his own he allowed the Nats to grab a 1-0 lead, which was too much given that Harvey got his usual run support.
When the rain finally passed through, Harvey had turned into Erik Goeddel and newly minted Nat Lucas Giolito (who’s very tall) had turned into Yusmeiro Petit. Goeddel then turned into Jerry Blevins, who surrendered a two-run homer to Bryce Harper in the fifth. The Mets had a chance of sorts in the sixth, loading the bases against Petit with one out, but old friend Oliver Perez came in and erased James Loney on sliders, then coaxed a lazy fly ball from Wilmer Flores. In the seventh Hansel Robles surrendered a two-run double to Wilson Ramos, and by then you just wanted it to be over.
But back to the things that can go wrong.
Sometimes one flaw jumps up with maddeningly regularity: the starters can’t get through the middle innings, the bullpen develops a yen for arson, the hitters seem to freeze up with runners in scoring position, the defense gags when it really matters.
Sometimes these flaws show up in apparently random order, like a really unfun game of Whack-a-Mole: the bullpen loses a game, keeps the team in the next one only to have the hitters fail, watches in horror as a starter implodes the day after that, then regroups and induces ground balls, which the middle infielders promptly flub.
Sometimes all of these things go wrong at once.
And now and again all of these things go wrong and on top of that key players are injured and the team is facing a parade of good teams for which everything is going right, and a leadoff single for the enemy leaves you feeling like you can’t breathe. Which is pretty much where the Mets find themselves right now.
As a fan, what do you do when that happens? Well, if you’re a dummy you call the FAN and rant about the will to win or grit or players not trying. Which, to be fair, is tempting even for us non-dummies: stretches like these are frustrating and as human beings we’re determined to find patterns in randomness and search for explanations. If you’re not a dummy, in fact, you’ve got it harder. All you can do is endure, and remind yourself that every baseball season is full of ebb and flow, teams’ fortunes wax and wane, and try not to let it make you crazy.
Good luck with that, though. Because it’s not going to get easier, not with Max Scherzer trying to pitch the Nats to a sweep on Wednesday and the big bad Cubs coming to Citi Field after that, followed by the always aggravating Marlins and then — that’s right! — the Nats again. The Mets have no reinforcements coming health-wise, unless you think an aging Jose Reyes will be a game-changer; if anything they’re in danger of losing more players to bone spurs or as-yet-undisclosed ailments. Ya gotta believe and all that, of course, but by the time the All-Star Game rolls around things could be grim around here indeed.
Reminder:Debate all you want, but if you make the debate personal you’re doing it wrong, at least on this blog. There’s been too much of that around here of late, and for your proprietors it’s become a bone spur that’s harder and harder to hide from the media. Be nice to each other, y’hear?
Let’s see, what did I do with that piece I wrote about the Mets’ Monday night 11-4 loss to Washington? It had everything in it: how they led 4-0 in the middle of the third inning; how they probably could have led by more; how Brandon Nimmo recorded the first hits of his major league career; how everything looked fine in the game itself despite the news beforehand revealing Steven Matz’s elbow spur; how Matz might miss his next start and perhaps require surgery; how the Mets had Noah Syndergaard on the mound and Joe Ross on the ropes, then suddenly Syndergaard gave back the lead and then some; how Ross was untouchable after the third; how the Met bullpen didn’t help matters; how the Mets looked unhinged in the field and, ultimately, helpless at the plate; how they Mets are now four out in the division and in possession of neither Wild Card; how Syndergaard was reported to also have a bone spur, though he denied it afterwards; and, most of all, how the Nationals stole six bases, five off of Thor, including four in the wretched, ragged bottom of the third?
That’s right — I left my article on second base. The Nationals must have stolen that, too.
Memo to Brandon Nimmo: that’s not the way you’re supposed to play baseball up here.
Nimmo didn’t collect a hit in his big-league debut, but perhaps he just was trying to fit in with the rest of his new teammates. He played right field ably and showed a veteran’s eye for the strike zone, which was plenty for Day One. And he got to watch Bartolo Colon being his usual imperturbable self, showing no ill effects from taking a line drive off the thumb. Colon proved mortal only against the rejuvenated Freddie Freeman, whose first-inning homer set a dispiriting tone.
Bartolo was stingy, but other Mets were far too generous. We’ll call Logan Verrett‘s gopher ball to the irritating Adonis Garcia an error of execution, but Antonio Bastardo pitched horribly and didn’t think much more capably, making the baffling decision to fake a throw to first for an instant balk before letting Ender Inciarte basically walk to third. Rene Rivera struck out feebly in a key spot and failed to back up first base on a play where a ball eluded James Loney and went into the Braves’ dugout. I know it was hotter than blazes and a day game after a night game, but yeesh.
So the Mets end a long weekend of baseball having essentially spun their wheels against the invariably infuriating Braves. Their recent history shows them as 4-1 against the Pirates and Royals and 2-5 against Atlanta, so go figure. In Nimmo’s first two days of big-league duty he’s watched a game while wearing gaudy blue pajamas and played another in which several of his teammates appeared to be asleep. With the Nats and Cubs on tap, here’s devoutly hoping they wake up.
For nine innings Saturday night, you might have believed you were watching the Mets perform in historically frustrating fashion, better known as just another game from the past eight weeks. On April 30, the Mets had risen to eight games above .500, Michael Conforto was soaring atop an OPS of 1.118 and the only change any of us could have reasonably requested was a more equitable system of Syndergaarden Gnome distribution.
Good times. They didn’t last unabated. Momentum started, sputtered, stalled. Backs, necks, shoulders, wrists, ankles, hips — if it could be connected to a Met bone, it would go aching or worse. Inertia, injuries and plain old inability have contributed to create a lack of fluidity in the current Met season. They’re good enough to win some, not good enough to not lose some more.
These Mets entered Saturday’s shall we say action 24-26 in their previous 50 games. We’ve tended to spiritually process that win one, lose one-point-oh-eight-three-three-three sample as the Mets can’t do anything right. Not true. They win almost as much as they lose (while the Nationals, blessedly, lately lose exclusively).
Sometimes, when the Mets win, they do things you’ve almost never seen them do before.
On Saturday, they won a 1-0 game in extra innings on the road on the strength of a home run. That’s happened exactly three times in New York Mets history (which we know, thanks to the Play Index feature of Baseball-Reference). The Mets have been playing baseball since 1962. It is 2016. Fifty-five seasons, including this one, have transpired, and in 52, what occurred last night never occurred at all.
The lucky seasons before the contemporary edition provided our third episode were 1965 and 1985. Each of the games in question was remarkable and memorable before their respective home runs provided the Mets a climactic penultimate scene.
June 14, 1965: At Crosley Field, Jim Maloney no-hit the tenth-place Mets for ten innings, striking out seventeen along the way. Frank Lary for eight innings and Larry Bearnarth for the next two in no way matched Maloney for epic brilliance, but they did keep the Reds in a zero state of mind. Johnny Lewis led off the eleventh for the Mets and homered. Maloney responded by striking out Ron Swoboda to give him eighteen K’s on the evening. Bearnarth withstood Cincinnati one more time in the bottom of the eleventh to seal the 1-0 win.
October 1, 1985: At Busch Stadium, Ron Darling and John Tudor engaged in a pennant race pitching duel that could be used to illustrate a dictionary definition. Darling scattered seven baserunners over nine innings before giving way to Jesse Orosco. Tudor went ten, yielding six hits, three walks and no runs. In the top of the eleventh, after striking out Keith Hernandez and Gary Carter, Ken Dayley gave up one of the most enduringly famous home runs any Met has ever hit: Darryl Strawberry’s shot off the clock. Anybody who watched the game will remember Darryl alarmed Dayley at precisely 10:44 PM CDT. Orosco preserved the 1-0 lead in the bottom of the inning.
That was it for approximately 54½ years, until June 25, 2016, which was already shaping up as a bold-letter date in Mets history, at least around the edges. It was the day Michael Conforto, OPS having plunged to .727, graciously (but necessarily) accepted a demotion to Las Vegas. It was the day Brandon Nimmo, the Mets’ No. 1 draft choice from 2011, replaced him, finally earning elevation to the big leagues; his first game is slated to be Sunday’s finale in Atlanta. It was the day Jose Reyes, last seen in a Mets uniform the year Nimmo turned pro, was signed to a minor league contract, a formality that will allow him to work out his kinks in Coney Island and soon rejoin the team he still calls home. Judging by the joy he displayed while taking his most recent haircut, that day can’t come soon enough for Jose. It was also, sadly, the day Jim Hickman, an Original Met whose nickname Gentleman Jim was, by all accounts, well-earned, passed away at the age of 79. (More on that below.)
An active Met day, indeed, before the night’s business commenced. When pitches started being thrown in earnest, the action at Turner Field failed to encompass hitting. If it wasn’t exactly Lary vs. Maloney or Darling vs. Tudor on this steamy Georgia night, Jacob deGrom and Julio Teheran replicated the essential results. Control on each side was impeccable. The Brave starter walked nobody in his eight innings, while deGrom, this year’s poster pitcher for snakebit (no W’s since those 15,000 Gnomes were a hot topic), walked only one. Singles came and went. DeGrom produced double play grounders in three consecutive innings, making best friends everywhere he went.
Met (or Royal Giant) baserunning was the enemy on a couple of occasions. Yoenis Cespedes and his battery of bruises didn’t or couldn’t slide into second in the third, short-circuiting a legitimate scoring opportunity. In the tenth, during a sequence that seems destined to represent Alejandro De Aza’s calling card for the rest of his Met time — which looms as limited — the Braves turned a DP of the SMH variety. Matt Reynolds was on first, pinch-running for Wilmer Flores. De Aza bunted badly, popping up toward pitcher Jim Johnson. That was routine failure, but what made it horrendous was De Aza’s decision to slam his bat into the ground and dawdle in his dismay. Johnson took note, let the bunt fall to the grass and threw to second to easily nail Reynolds. De Aza, inferring that he wasn’t out, scrambled down the line in a mad dash to compensate for his shortcoming, leading with his head (if not his brain), in a sliding attempt to beat the relay to first.
It didn’t work, as De Aza continues to absorb the hard lesson Tom Haverford did on Parks & Recreation after the ultimately fleeting retirement of office scapegoat Jerry Gergich: ecosystems abhor a vacuum. Without Jerry (also known as Larry, Terry and Garry over the life of the show) around, Tom would be the colleague to get dumped on. De Aza may not bumble as a matter of course, but with a batting average of .169 and Eric Campbell nowhere in sight, somebody’s gotta serve as Soup.
Once De Aza committed the kind of misjudgment we’d have reflexively associated with Campbell until his late-May disappearance, there were two out, soon to be three. It was still nothing-nothing in Atlanta, going to the bottom of the tenth, a status maintained when Addison Reed struck out two and flied out Jeff Francoeur. Reed had entered the game in the midst of the bottom of the ninth, eliciting two foulouts with a runner on base, a nice recovery from the Adonis Garcia incident a couple of nights earlier.
The next pitcher to enter the fray was Dario Alvarez, a Met for not very long in 2014 and 2015, but one who looked like he could be a useful lefty reliever had injuries not interfered; he was the pitcher of record when the Mets stormed from behind to annihilate the Nationals last Labor Day, fanning Bryce Harper and saving all our bacon. His Atlanta assignment was Kelly Johnson, who was surely playing for one team or the other in attendance. Johnson, as you know, is the Brave who became a Met who became a Brave who became a Met who started as a Brave before sojourning to all of the American League East as well as Arizona.
Lemme check…yeah, he’s a Met now. Not only is he a Met, but he is a Met who homered in the eleventh inning of a nothing-nothing game. It’s not stunning that Johnson would muscle up and send a ball out of a park as a pinch-hitter. It’s something he did last September against the Nationals, coming through for us in the very same series in which Alvarez shone. The way things were going last night, it was surprising anybody scored, and, at the risk of feeding the woe-is-Mets narrative, a little shocking it was one of our guys.
Lemme check again…Kelly Johnson, yeah, still a Met. A Met a second the time way Lary was in 1965 (he was the first of 41 Recidivist Mets to date), the way Reyes will be within the week (he’ll be the 42nd).
As it was after Johnny Lewis and Darryl Strawberry, the Mets led, 1-0, heading to the bottom of the eleventh. And as it was in those contests, the dramatic swing wouldn’t mean a thing if it wasn’t followed up by some clutch pitching. In the best tradition of Larry Bearnarth and Jesse Orosco, Jeurys Familia — having the night before set a Mets record I’m confident neither he nor I knew existed (most consecutive saves at the start of a season, never mind four-run leads that get away) — had to put in the books what Johnson lined up at the edge of the last chapter. It didn’t come easily, because why would it, but it got put. Jace Peterson led off with a single to center, Ender Inciarte bunted him to second (and ran to first) and Freddie Freeman was wisely intentionally walked. Nick Markakis, however, grounded to Mr. Familia, who pivoted and fired to Asdrubal Cabrera covering second. One out. Cabrera threw to electric defender James Loney (Lucas Whoda?). Two out. For the inning, three out.
The Mets won a 1-0 game in extra innings on the road, fueled by a solo home run for the third time in their existence, proving yet again that if you watch enough baseball, you’ll see something you’ve only seen infrequently.
***
If you watched the Mets in their early years, you saw plenty of third baseman and outfielder Jim Hickman. The club jettisoned most of its veterans as soon as they could. Twenty-eight Mets went north in April of 1962; sixteen were gone by April of 1963. Rookie Hickman, however, outlasted everybody, persevering in Manhattan, then Queens, until the end of 1966, no small feat on a team that lost 547 games in five years.
Hickman lasted and occasionally flourished. In 1963, he became the first Met to hit for the cycle. In 1965, he became the first Met to hit three home runs in one game. The only other Met to accomplish both feats? Jose Reyes in 2006, both feats achieved in losses for a division champion, whereas Hickman’s big days occurred in rare and therefore precious wins. Jim’s biggest hit as a Met occurred two days after his cycle. On August 9, 1963, in the bottom of the ninth at the Polo Grounds, with the scored tied and the bases loaded, he lofted a fly ball that, given the dimensions of the Mets’ original environs, flew just high and just deep enough to have “just ticked the overhang of the upper stands,” per Jerry Mitchell’s reporting in The Amazing Mets. Not only was it a walkoff grand slam, it halted Roger Craig’s personal eighteen-game losing streak.
Craig was ready to do more than greet Hickman at home plate. Had the batter not touched it, the pitcher said, “I’d have tackled him to make him do it if I had to.” In those days, Mets wins were wonderful, but the Mets not losing was enormous.
Jim’s relative longevity amid constant turnover allowed him a leg up on the Met record books. After five seasons, he stood as our all-time home run (60) and RBI (210) champ. It was Hickman’s opinion, shared with Bill Ryczek in the always marvelous The Amazin’ Mets, 1962-1969, that he might have had better years early in his career had he gained the kind of sub-MLB experience someone like Nimmo has in the minors. Hickman hadn’t exactly been rushed to the bigs as a Met — he had been a Cardinal minor leaguer since 1956 when he was scooped up in the expansion draft — but some players, like some people, are late bloomers. It was generally agreed during his New York tenure that Hickman had the talent to flourish (“a beautiful swing,” Sports Illustrated raved in 1963), but also that the humble Tennessean might not have been a temperamental match for the bright-lights situation into which he was thrust in the Big Apple.
His day came, however. In 1970, Jim Hickman made the National League All-Star team, the final 1962 Met to ever be selected for the Midsummer Classic. His manager for the occasion was his erstwhile teammate Gil Hodges, but it was selection based on merit. Jim hit 32 home runs and drove in 115 runs while batting .315 for the Cubs that year. It was good enough to net him eighth place in the N.L. MVP voting.
Those glittering statistics were compiled shortly after Leonard Shecter wrote of him, “For years, Jim Hickman was one of the Mets’ best players. They didn’t go anywhere until they got rid of him.” It sounds like a knock, but Shecter was right. Hickman and Ron Hunt were traded to Los Angeles following the 1966 season to bring Tommy Davis to New York. Davis, in turn, was packaged with Jack Fisher after 1967, sent to the White Sox for Tommie Agee and Al Weis. With Agee and Weis, the Mets went very far. Before them, there were but a few Mets who took the team anywhere at all. Jim Hickman was definitely one of them.
Well now. The Mets, baseball’s worst second-place, currently-qualified-for-postseason-play team, won a game that was alternately exasperating, entertaining, frightening, amusing, and mostly befuddling.
If you missed it, Steven Matz cruised through four innings, facing the minimum and watching as the Mets put up an eight-spot against punching bag Aaron Blair. At which point everything — no really, everything — went wrong. The Braves, that irritating pack of feral Tiny Ashes, went after the Mets’ Big Ash with forks, brooms, hot stoves, soap buckets, discarded nails and everything else they could find: the butcher’s bill was double, double (lost in the lights), double, single, fielder’s choice for an out, three-run homer, single, infield single (out reversed on review), single. That was it for Matz, who slunk off the mound and sought refuge beneath a towel in the dugout.
Enter Hansel Robles, alias the Mets’ latest Plan B. Once again Robles proved a superb rescuer, coolly retiring Jeff Francoeur and Nick Markakis to bring the nightmarish fifth inning to a close. It was 8-6 Mets somehow, though it felt like it was 80-6 Braves; eventually Robles would wind up with the right-guy-in-right-place-at-right-time official scorer’s win. It was thoroughly deserved — as it was when he followed Bartolo Colon to the hill.
But that was a few perils later. The ninth was theater-of-the-absurd stuff: Jeurys Familia allowed a leadoff single to Tyler Flowers and hit Erick Aybar, then faced Chase d’Arnaud with disaster not just lurking but leaping up and down. Which was when the Braves reminded us that we do not, in fact, have a monopoly on buzzard’s luck: d’Arnaud lined a bunt in the direction of Wilmer Flores‘s feet which Wilmer fell on top of, trapping it beneath his body. He scrambled to his feet, pursued by Familia and Travis d’Arnaud, AKA the batter’s brother, who hollered for him to stomp on third to force Flowers and throw to second to force Aybar.
Familia then struck out Jace Peterson, except the ball squirted past the Met-affiliated d’Arnaud, who scampered after it and made a desperate heave towards the infield side of first, a ball seemingly destined to be corralled along the right-field foul line by Curtis Granderson as the Brave-affiliated d’Arnaud took third and Peterson took second. Except James Loney somehow speared it, scooting his feet backwards like a wide receiver on the edge of the sidelines to stay on the base as he fell and sprawled in the dirt. The umpires huddled, but Loney knew his feet had done their duty and the Mets lined up for unofficial handshakes.
Well, whew except for whatever happened to Matz. In the top of the fifth, with a laugher seemingly in progress, SNY’s cameras caught Matz sitting in the dugout palpitating his left elbow and/or forearm; when he came back out, his velocity had dipped and his location had disappeared. On the postgame, Nelson Figueroa insisted the only real oddity was that Matz had unwisely tended to his pitching arm where Mets Twitter could see it, instead of in the tunnel or the trainer’s room. Maybe, but Matz has acknowledged his elbow has been tight, he’s junked his slider because it hurts to throw it, and something sure as heck looked wrong just after all that massaging. Terry Collins said as far as he knows there’s nothing wrong with Matz’s elbow, but recent events have said plenty about Terry’s attitude towards revealing pitchers’ ailments. I’m skeptical, to say the least.
Speaking of skeptical, we’ll see if the Mets have a new old teammate back in their employ come Saturday. By now it’s baseball’s worst-kept secret that the Mets intend to sign Jose Reyes for a pittance, with the Rockies paying the rest of Jeffrey Loria’s gargantuan megadeal.
If I close my eyes, I can see the Jose Reyes I loved to watch play baseball and hated to see decamp for Loria’s gauche Miami clip joint. I can see his churning legs and lashing bat, his bouncing Predator dreads, and his dragging one hand to grasp third base as he plowed into it, a move that always reminded me of a fighter jet’s hook grabbing the cable of an aircraft carrier.
But those scenes were quite a while ago. When I open my eyes, unfortunately, I can see other things. I can see Jose Reyes displaying minimal baseball interest or competence for the Rockies last year. His legs were slow, his mind was elsewhere and it was painful to see him so dour and diminished.
And I can remember the events of the offseason. On Halloween, police in Hawaii responded to a 911 call from a Four Seasons security guard. Reyes’s wife received medical attention for injuries to her face, neck and left leg, injuries that were reportedly the result of Reyes grabbing her by the throat and shoving her into a sliding glass door.
The case was dropped in March, but only because Reyes’s wife — like all too many domestic-violence victims — refused to cooperate with prosecutors. Major League Baseball suspended Reyes anyway, sidelining him for 51 games and costing him more than $7 million in salary. (That money, of course, was also taken away from Reyes’s wife; I’ll give MLB credit for good intentions while noting that the shared financial consequences make an already wrenching choice even rougher.)
When Reyes donned a Rockies uniform for extended spring training in May, he acknowledged that “I made a mistake. … I’m going to try to be a better guy, a better man, better husband.” As part of his suspension, he agreed to donate $100,000 to organizations focusing on preventing and treating survivors of domestic violence and to undergo counseling. He never played for the Rockies again, was released and now apparently will return to us.
So where does this leave us? I’m not going to tell you what I’m about to write is what I’ll believe until the end of time or even as long as Monday. I’m struggling with this, and one thing we’ve lost in the Twitter age is being willing to say that we need to think about something more, or that we just don’t know.
It’s true that we all make mistakes. But most of those mistakes don’t involve hands around women’s throats and slamming them into things. That’s a hell of a blunder — and one that’s been minimized for far too long in pro sports and society as a whole. A donation to charity, counseling and an apology strikes me as the first step to maybe, not the last word before the matter is dropped.
If I were in charge, Reyes wouldn’t return at all. Since I’m not and it seems that he will be back, I hope the Mets have a frank conversation with him about what has to happen if he’s to wear blue and orange again. I hope he’s forthright about what happened and what he’s learned, and I hope both team and player make a real, sustained effort — involving money and time — to ensure Reyes’s mistake helps younger players and fans understand the toll of domestic violence and how to make damn sure they never become victimizers themselves.
I have happy Met memories of second chances — of Rusty Staub as elder statesman of the mid-80s clubs, of Lee Mazzilli as the final piece of the World Series team, of Jason Isringhausen as wise veteran reliever. But those were baseball second chances, involving nothing more serious than the wearing of other uniforms and the outcome of other games. What happened in Hawaii last Halloween was the farthest thing from a game. If we’re going to make progress, it has to be treated accordingly. If it’s a subject for a day before we get back to baseball, we’ll have failed before we started, and ensured that we’ll keep failing.
SNY’s cameras really shouldn’t have lingered on Braves’ bench coach Terry Pendleton, acting as manager, after Brian Snitker was ejected for arguing the result of a replay review Thursday night. Snitker is obviously too interim to fully understand the intricacies and ramifications of replay review rules (and when we’re straight on them, we’ll be sure to impart our wisdom unto him). When Pendleton fills the screen, it doesn’t take long to travel in the mind’s eye from 2016 to 1987 and frame him in his playing days, as a Cardinal, within a September night when the course of a pennant race changed perhaps irreversibly.
That’s a 29-year swing in the standings right there, going from worrying about the second-place Mets of now to shuddering over what became of the second-place Mets of then, but baseball is a time machine that way, whether you desire to connect to its services or not; it comes with the package. I saw Pendleton and I was transported to the infamous home run he hit off Roger McDowell and the shoe I threw at a nearby wall once that game went final.
Not long after the present-day portrait of Terry Pendleton at Turner Field dissolved, Adonis Garcia was batting with one out in the bottom of the eighth, the Mets leading, 3-2, Freddie Freeman on first. Freeman landed there after lining a Jerry Blevins pitch to right as the inning’s leadoff batter. You don’t think of Blevins starting eighth innings with one-run leads, which gave me pause, considering the Addison Reed–Jeurys Familia combination has been functioning without serious glitching in sealing off the final two frames, but it wasn’t ludicrous. Blevins is, in the parlance once applied to Gene Walter (speaking of 1987), death on lefthanded hitting. Freeman, though, is death on Met pitching of all stripe.
Blevins struck out his next lefty, Nick Markakis, so half harm, half foul, I suppose. The next batter was Garcia, a righty of slight track record, which motivated Terry Collins to scurry like a puppy dog to the mound to remove Blevins and insert Reed. Reed’s rap is he’s not as reliable when entering in an inning already in progress as he is when the canvas is his to paint. Last year, after joining the Mets at the edge of September, he inherited seven runs and allowed five to score. He’s improved in this area when asked to take over for a fallen bullpen comrade. Heading into his encounter with Garcia, he’d inherited eleven and stranded all but one.
Garcia, though, I perceived as daunting. It was not seeing Adonis Garcia at the plate that bothered me, but Wilson Betemit. I looked at Garcia and Betemit crossed my mind. Betemit, a utility type who played for seven teams — more with Atlanta than anybody — in parts of eleven major league seasons (none since 2013), was beefier than Garcia but a comparable power threat. According to Baseball-Reference, Betemit hit a home run once every 27.9 at-bats, Garcia, to date, once every 26.6. His numbers were unremarkable, but, according to my selective memory, Betemit homered off Mets pitching every chance he got.
It turns out Betemit hit only six home runs versus the Mets: two as a Brave, including his very first in the majors; two as a Dodger; one as a Yankee; and one as an Oriole. It’s the one as a Yankee that stays with me, struck June 29, 2008, the final Subway Series game at Shea Stadium. It was a truly lovely Sunday afternoon for eight innings, devolving, as those things would in the ninth, into a marshaling of survival instincts when Derek Jeter produced a leadoff single against Billy Wagner. The Mets hung on to their 3-1 lead, despite Jeter scampering to second on a wild pitch and Alex Rodriguez flying to Endy Chavez at the track. Betemit happened to strike out looking to end the game, but that’s not why I thought of him while he batted against Reed.
Betemit infiltrated my mind because in the seventh inning of that 2008 affair, with no runners on and Oliver Perez in shutout mode (Ollie was actually quite solid in the situations when you absolutely could not stand the idea of losing to certain clubs), Betemit launched a missile that, without resorting to more than a modicum of exaggeration, probably reached the World’s Fair Marina. It was seriously belted. Even though the home run had limited impact on the outcome of the game — none, really, as the Mets were winning when he hit and went on to win — it lurked in the recesses of my subconscious for eight years. It came out to play last night.
I thought of Wilson Betemit hitting a home run, I literally muttered to myself that I sure hoped Adonis Garcia didn’t do to us what Wilson Betemit did to us, and, within a matter of seconds, Garcia did exactly that.
Except worse, because the Mets had been up by three when Betemit let loose with his solo blast, while Garcia was up with a man on and his team down by only one. It wasn’t the same type of home run. It wasn’t pulled so dramatically and it didn’t clear the wall with acres to spare, but it counted the same. The Mets went from leading, 3-2, to trailing, 4-3.
Too Betemitesque for comfort. Too Pendletonian, too, except in 2016, it’s June, whereas in 1987, it was September, and the Cardinals were in first place and the Braves, despite displaying excessive amounts of competence of late, are in last. Still, it stung enough that when the inning was complete and I had to dash upstairs from the living room for a moment, I looked at the steps ahead of me and flashed back to that Barney Stein photograph of Ralph Branca sprawled face-down on a similar staircase in the visitors’ clubhouse at the Polo Grounds on October 3, 1951. Branca wasn’t in a good baseball mood and, 65 years later, neither was I.
I came back downstairs, but the Mets didn’t come back in the ninth. Just one game, as we say when there are 91 of them remaining on the schedule and only four separating us from the top of the division, but what a shame. There were several things to like before Reed got that fastball up in Betemit’s zone of delight. There was Matt Harvey being effective if not dominant (if neither when it came to A.J. Pierzynski) over six innings; Harvey even picked a runner off first for the first time since his maiden start of 2013. There was Alejandro De Aza making a very nice grab in center to rob Jace Peterson in the third after having doubled in his first run since Harry M. Stevens decided sticking a sausage in a bun was a capital idea. There was Michael Conforto not disabling himself when he ran into the padded left field side wall making a catch to end the fourth. There were even two close calls that went our way, no matter the damage it did to Mr. Snitker’s decorum.
In the seventh, Conforto threw out Emilio Bonifacio at the plate from fairly deep left, which was a surprise, given Conforto’s accurate but average arm, and a shock, given that Travis d’Arnaud had to catch the ball, hold the ball and legally block the plate while not reinjuring his perpetually vulnerable body. Td’A did it all, and it was a revelation…even though I was sure Bonifacio had gotten a toe in ahead of the tag. Replay review “confirmed” the call, Snitker’s ire be damned. In the eighth, which could have gotten worse after Garcia went yard, Travis fired a bullet to second to cut down Erick Aybar stealing, which nobody challenged or suggested challenging, but the umpires asked the home office in Chelsea to weigh in on. It, too, stood.
Never mind the Mets getting two calls (if, ultimately, for naught). Conforto has had little go swimmingly since an April when the game was as easy as floating on an inflatable raft with a frozen cocktail in hand. Sophomore turbulence has turned tough, but Michael’s still on the field, still learning, still succeeding intermittently. D’Arnaud’s been absent from behind the dish for too long this season, but what a shot in the arm it’s been to see his arm having recovered its zing in the small sample size we’ve observed since his return from the DL.
Earlier Thursday, I filled out my All-Star ballot — hardly the most consequential vote in the world yesterday — and abided by my rule of not selecting any Mets who in no way deserve election, while definitely voting for any Mets for whom a remote case can be made. Also, I have a whole bunch of teams in both leagues whose players are automatically by association on my no-fly list, so it’s a pretty narrow needle I’m threading while voting. I wound up punching the electronic hole for three Mets: Cespedes (the only one on track for election), Walker and Cabrera. I considered Conforto, based on his first month, but decided I didn’t want to send him the wrong message and make him complacent (don’t worry, kid, I’ll take care of you over the next fifteen summers). I looked longingly at d’Arnaud and recalled telling somebody in spring that this season would be the one when Travis, 27, makes his All-Star debut, backing up Buster Posey.
That’s not gonna happen. No year has happened in full for d’Arnaud yet, who’s at the outer perimeter of being considered a young player (except in life) without ever having participated uninterrupted in a big league season. You get used to certain guys not being around that you forget what they mean to a team. Due respect to Rene Rivera and the since-demoted Kevin Plawecki, but it’s a sharp drop from d’Arnaud to the alternatives, provided Travis a) plays and b) takes a deep breath to facilitate his development. I very much want to believe he has an All-Star date in his future, if not the immediate one. Those two plays — tagging out Bonifacio, throwing out Aybar — gave me faith.
Which is a good thing to hold on to after Adonis Garcia ruins everything.
No Mets game Saturday afternoon, so come spend an hour and change with me at the Queens Library in Briarwood, where I’ll be discussing Amazin’ Again and sharing some related baseball/book thoughts starting at 3 o’clock. Details here. Hope to see you there.
It came at the end of Terry Collins‘s press conference, and might have been funny except for the fact that it wasn’t funny: the small manager with the large personality tried to exit stage left, then had a brief, unhappy colloquy with someone not shown by SNY’s cameras. Collins objected that there hadn’t been any questions about it, then plopped down and snapped that “the puppy dog wants you guys to know that Noah Syndergaard’s seeing the doctor. His elbow flared up on him. That’s why I took him out of the game.”
(Let’s take a moment to observe that while the Mets aren’t out of the business of needlessly belittling Jay Horwitz, they’ve at least found better internal nicknames for him.)
Exit Terry again, this time for real. And cue a sudden U-turn to the familiar confines of Panic City.
Collins’s annoyance was understandable, as was his attempted dodge. (Which isn’t to say either was appropriate.) The rollercoaster Mets had looked robust and feisty against the Pirates, then inept and inanimate against the Braves. So of course they then swept an abbreviated two-game series against the Royals, last seen at Citi Field doing things that need not be spoken of.
The Mets had secured the sweep — and a win in the season series, to extract a positive that hits all of us like a negative — with a tidy, taut 4-3 win. Syndergaard wasn’t his electric self, which is to say he was merely really good, and the two teams battled back and forth, looking for a breach in the other’s defenses.
Asdrubal Cabrera scored the first run in the fourth, racing home on a little dunker by James Loney and getting past the mitt of the redoubtable Salvador Perez through a moundward scurry and a quick reversal to slap the outer margin of home plate with his hand — a run that somehow didn’t involve the apple going skyward.
It wasn’t to last, though: in the top of the inning, Kansas City’s Cheslor Cuthbert stepped to the plate against Syndergaard. Let me take a moment to observe that “Cheslor Cuthbert” is not just a ridiculous baseball name but a ridiculous name, the kind of thing an overeager young D&D player would come up with, spending four hours crafting an intricate backstory for a cleric with four hit points. (Time for a lesson, thinks the DM; this roll for wandering monsters won’t be the last.)
It may be a silly name, but the player rolled a natural 20, and a moment later Cheslor Cuthbert was trotting around the bases to tie the game. Three batters later, Whit Merrifield checked that his boater was at a jaunty angle, buttoned his cardigan and stroked a ball just past Neil Walker for a 2-1 Royals lead. Hip-hip! declared his chums, breaking into valedictory song.
(Seriously, what is it with the Royals and names?)
Ned Yost trued to coax a sputtering Danny Duffy through the fifth inning, only to run afoul of Cabrera, who crashed a two-run homer to return the lead to the Mets’ possession. (Cabrera had a really superb game, helping the Mets win with his bat, glove and baserunning smarts.) The Royals tied it immediately in the top of the sixth, but Matt Reynolds — pressed into service as a left fielder — untied it just as immediately in the bottom, smacking his first career home run off Joakim Soria.
That lead held up, and there you had it: scoring in five consecutive half-innings, three lead changes, plenty of excitement, and a victory for the forces of light and good.
So yeah, no wonder Terry Collins didn’t want to talk about injuries. He’s been manager of the Mets long enough to know that Syndergaard’s elbow flaring up would mean a question from every reporter in the room — he’d just endured a round table of inquiries about Yoenis Cespedes‘s wrist, and been asked about Zack Wheeler‘s elbow. He’s been in baseball long enough to know that none of those questions would be answerable. He’s seen the thinking around the game change enough to sense he’d have to start answering questions about, say, the wisdom of leaving a young pitcher to go north of 100 pitches with an 11-0 lead.
Terry tried to duck the question; Horwitz knew the cover-up would lead to more howling than the crime and didn’t let him.
A few weeks back, I emerged from a college-reunion dinner to see Syndergaard had exited with 2.1 innings under his belt and no earned runs allowed. My first thought was simple and awful: he’s blown out his elbow.
It wasn’t the case, thank goodness. But when Collins scurried away from his parting stink bomb on Wednesday, I had the same thought: he’s blown out his elbow.
It’s not the case this time, either — as Syndergaard himself let us know via Instagram. (What a world!) But I wasn’t shocked to have that thought again. And I won’t be shocked the next time Syndergaard turns away from his delivery with a look of annoyance, or needs something checked out, or seems to be missing a couple of ticks on that ungodly fastball.
Because odds are that sooner or later, this won’t be a false alarm: that little ligament will go, undone by the superhuman feats it’s been witness to. And then Syndergaard will spend a year in a cameo role, followed by a return that will involve a roll of the dice. Just like happened to Matt Harvey and Jacob deGrom and Zack Wheeler and Steven Matz — which is to say, every member of the presumed September rotation except Noah Syndergaard.
I devoutly hope that won’t be true this year or any year. I hope Syndergaard will be one of the outliers, a Tom Seaver or a Nolan Ryan who won the genetic lottery. If so, I’ll even forgive him when he comes back to old-timers’ affairs and grouses that pitchers were a different breed than today’s cosseted, milk-fed semi-athletes, having followed Seaver and Ryan’s lead and mistaken his good fortune for moral fortitude.
That would be better for the Mets and better for Syndergaard, needless to say — even today, slicing open the elbow of a pitcher is no routine thing. But it would be better for us, too. Noah Syndergaard is a dream: simultaneously a videogame played by a kid who’s mastered the cheat codes and a cerebral athlete determined to master the mechanics and tactics of his craft. The problem with dreams is that you wake up and are left facing mundane reality; so far with Syndergaard we’ve been able to shake off the interruptions, hit the pillow and pick up where we left off. We’ll get up soon … but not quite yet, please. Just give us a little longer.
Piazza: Catcher, Slugger, Icon, Star by Greg Prince is available from Amazon, Barnes & Noble and other online booksellers.
Amazin' Again: How the 2015 New York Mets Brought the Magic Back to Queens by Greg Prince is available from Amazon, Barnes & Noble and other online booksellers.
Volume I of The Happiest Recap: 50+ Years of the New York Mets As Told in 500+ Amazin' Wins by Greg Prince is available in print and for Kindle on Amazon.
Faith and Fear in Flushing: An Intense Personal History by Greg Prince (foreword by Jason Fry), is available from Amazon, Barnes & Noble and other online booksellers.
