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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In this post-primary, pre-convention interregnum when we speak of presumptive nominees, I must confess I was nervous when the Mets were declared presumptive winners, perhaps sweepers, of the Atlanta Braves in advance of this past weekend’s series at Citi Field. The Braves have been remarkably bad in 2016. The Mets had been pretty good to occasionally very good. Yeah, how could we lose a set of three games to these bozos?
How presumptuous.
I can’t tell if Atlanta is building something formidable based on their having swept this trio of contests from the Mets. Maybe they’re better than we were led to believe. The Mets, based mostly on their recent sample of baseball, don’t appear to be particularly able at all.
It’s not so much the loss of three games to a last-place club as it was the pulselessness that was displayed one through eight from Friday to Sunday, particularly Sunday. The Mets’ trademark starting pitching was good enough to compete if not overwhelm in all three games, but the Mets’ starting hitting, save for a handful of swings, never really began.
Sunday dreadful Sunday was the worst, which is saying something after how Saturday night went down. You can accept with grace one loss to a rebuilding entity like the Braves. You can rationalize away a second loss defined by a third base coach’s ill-advised green light. But the third, for which your batters produced one hit and no other means of reaching base?
That’s not gonna get it done, if you’ll excuse my using technical terms. It’s not much of answer, but on Sunday, the Mets didn’t look like much of ballclub. The real victims were all the kids who were looking forward to the Mr. Met Dash. Without their heroes setting an example, these boys and girls were left completely clueless as to what one does when one encounters basepaths.
I heard “shakeup” mentioned in the postgame press conference. If possible, I’d treat the current roster like a snow globe and, after swapping out Kevin Plawecki for Travis d’Arnaud, send down any four guys and bring back any four guys who aren’t named Eric Campbell. There is a handful of Mets who are performing to expectations and several others who don’t seem to be doing so badly yet also seem to be doing nothing.
Fix that, would ya?
During Saturday night’s game on Fox, one of the announcers I didn’t want to hear referred to the Mets as unathletic. How could that be? I wondered. They’re athletes. I take it that “unathletic” was intended as a synonym for slow. They are slow…but they’re also a little creaky, they don’t proceed with fluidity, and they’re not exactly nimble on their feet.
Fandom often boils down to older, unathletic men expressing dissatisfaction with younger, athletic men for not being less like them. I can be slow, creaky and look pathetic on my own very well, thank you. The Mets went 1-for-28 versus Julio Teheran. I can honestly say I couldn’t have done a whole lot worse.
For all the mostly justified kvetching, the Mets carry the exact record they held after 68 games last year and remain in position for a Wild Card spot this year, but now it’s the second one and they’d be traveling to frigging Marlins Park to face elimination. You’d like to believe the statis will cease and instead of “remaining in position,” they inject themselves with some dynamism. I swear these aren’t terrible players, as long as one of them isn’t Campbell.
I’d also like to believe I’m a better fan than the Mets were players on Sunday. I’d like to think that if I’d been at the game, I would have tepidly applauded Teheran when he came to bat in the eighth. Appreciation for the other team’s starter’s excellent outing is a dying art, just like standing for the seventh-inning stretch (a timeless ritual that mystified my section last week). Though it’s difficult to comprehend that anybody can pitch worse than his record indicates against these Mets, Teheran had been throwing his heart out all year and had two wins to show for it. A giveaway cap can be tipped lightly in his direction.
The Reds made a classy gesture last September. (Image courtesy of Studious Metsimus.)
Granted, one-hitters are useless to have thrown at you, whereas no-hitters are historic. On Channel 11, given that Sunday was Father’s Day, we were shown the last pitch from June 21, 1964, Jim Bunning’s perfect game at Shea Stadium. Between Bob Murphy’s enthusiastic call of and the Mets fans’ supportive reaction to that 6-0 whitewashing, you understood a great performance had transpired and you might as well appreciate it. I thought the Mets should have acknowledged the no-hit successes of Chris Heston and Max Scherzer last season on the Citi Field scoreboard (they didn’t) and I thought posting “CONGRATULATIONS ROYALS” wouldn’t have been out of line at the end of the World Series, as painful as it was to come out on the short end of that little get-together.
The return of the Royals to Flushing this week will elicit several regrets, and the paucity of institutional sportsmanship demonstrated by Met management will be pretty far down the list, but if a championship is captured in your midst by a worthy opponent who isn’t from across town, it really wouldn’t hurt to give the ol’ “good game, good game” before turning out the lights. Watching the Cavaliers accept their NBA hardware Sunday night on the Warriors’ home court, I really had to hand it to Golden State fans who sat and absorbed the scene implicitly commemorating their team’s demise without wadding up their yellow t-shirts and firing them in the general direction of LeBron James. Admittedly, it’s a tough line to toe without tripping on your emotions.
Listen in as Mike Silva and I dissect a below-average weekend and recall the chaos of seasons past on the Talkin’ Mets podcast. I join Mike at around the 20:00 mark.
Mets are down one to the allegedly lousy Braves in the bottom of the ninth with nobody out. Wilmer Flores is on first. James Loney has lashed a Jim Johnson pitch into the left-center gap. Flores is running. We probably have a few minutes until the situation resolves itself. I don’t want to say Wilmer is slow, but Mo Vaughn, Jason Phillips and a box turtle all just turned their heads to wish him well as they strolled by him.
While the Snickers people set up to film their next “Not Going Anywhere For Awhile?” commercial, I guess I have time to share some thoughts regarding today, Father’s Day. Our Father’s Day celebration, if that word can be used, was yesterday, which felt appropriate. I identify Saturday, its late afternoon and early evening, with my father more than any other part of the week. I think of how he and I would “go around the corner” to “take a haircut” at George’s Madison Avenue Barber Shop, which was conveniently located on Park Street, nowhere near Madison Avenue. Park Street in Long Beach was alternately known as Park Avenue, so I wondered why George didn’t just call it George’s Park Avenue Barber Shop. Either one would have communicated the classiness to which George seemed to be aspiring.
George didn’t cut my hair. Leo did. George had his chance. He freaked me out when I was two years old and taking what was apparently my first official haircut. George used that electric razor device on my burgeoning sideburns. George pinched me on the cheeks. I jumped out of the chair and ran in circles screaming and crying in objection to each act of aggression. That was it for me and George. Leo was given explicit instructions on my next visit.
“No machine,” I demanded. “No pinch on cheek.”
Leo played ball. I don’t know if his haircuts were Madison Avenue-worthy, but I put up with them. I think a lollipop might have been involved in quelling my anxieties. Over in the adjacent chair, Dad would take his haircut from George. He was a lot lower-maintenance in those days.
I don’t know why Dad would say “take a haircut”. The rest of the world would get a haircut. I said “get a haircut”. I didn’t get or take many haircuts. I was considered the family radical at an early age. Taking or getting a haircut seemed to be giving in to the system — plus the lollipop never made up for all those damn scratchy hairs down my neck and back. Also, I really wanted to let it grow long enough to effect a David Cassidy look. It never took.
But when there’d be haircuts, my dad and I would take them together. I’d chat as much as I had to with Leo, who wore glasses and spoke in a German accent. Dad would chat as much as he had to with George. Truth be told, neither one of us was much for chatting with barbers. If I had to wait my turn, I’d sit and thumb through magazines that had been sitting out since Leo didn’t need glasses. Sometimes the Saturday Newsday would be there, back when Saturday’s Newsday was essentially the Sunday Newsday, since Newsday didn’t yet publish on Sunday. I have a very clear memory of sitting in George’s and reading Newsday’s coverage of the Knicks’ instantly historic comeback victory over the Cincinnati Royals from the night before. The Knicks, trying to set a record for longest NBA winning streak, were down five by with sixteen seconds to go, yet prevailed. We thrilled to it on Channel 9 on Friday night, November 28, 1969, and here I was reliving it at the barber shop on Saturday afternoon.
I also remember that every time I had to use the bathroom at George’s, I’d see a calendar on the wall turned to the page marked JUNE 1968. The years would change, George’s calendar wouldn’t. I don’t remember there being any kind of racy picture that would make a barber reluctant to move on from it. As with the whole Madison/Park thing, I don’t think I ever asked.
How long the haircut visits would last I don’t know. They felt long. They probably weren’t. My current barber has me in and out in ten minutes if there are no other customers and he’s not too distracted by his phone. His magazines are old, too, but there’s usually a fairly recent Newsday lying around if I have to wait.
Haircut done, back and neck scratchy, there might be other errands awaiting my dad and me on Park Street. We might pick up his shirts from the dry cleaner. My father’s father was a dry cleaner, so I imagine he took that stuff pretty seriously. We might need some small grocery item from East End Dairy, which was later known as East End Deli, but I always called it East End Dairy. If my parents were going out on Saturday night, and they usually were, there might be a trip to pick up dinner for my sister and me at the Lido Deli, which did not serve dairy, because it was kosher.
None of this was exactly a ritual or a routine. Sometimes Suzan (then spelled as Susan) would be with us to get the two burgers and two French fries — which came in tiny brown paper bags like they sell you a can of Heineken in at Penn Station. At least once, Dad and I met my sister and my mother at the Associated, colloquially known in our house as Murray’s, for Murray the gonif, who earned the nickname out of accuracy for his business practices. We usually walked, since it was indeed around the corner. Or maybe we drove to Island Park or Oceanside to conduct our other affairs. Maybe we took the haircuts and just went home. We never talked about anything of substance. I learned no great life lessons, other than the kosher Lido Deli did not serve cheeseburgers.
A week consists of 168 hours. The one or two that constituted whatever it was I recall doing with my father on Saturday grow in stature like my hair tends to grow between haircuts, even to this day. At my mother’s urging, because she didn’t think Leo was a very good barber, my head would eventually be taken to others who were handier with a pair of scissors. Once they opened a McDonald’s in Long Beach, we didn’t need the Lido Deli. My father eventually opted for a different dry cleaner. Our Saturday trips to Park Street ceased.
I missed them without realizing it. They may have been the first element of my young life that I developed nostalgia for. On the Saturday prior to Father’s Day when I was sixteen, I went into the East End Dairy/Deli and had the bright idea to bring home a six-pack of Perrier. Perrier was a very chic beverage at the moment, Madison Avenue George’s kind of quaff, no doubt. My father had mentioned having it at some business lunch and deciding it lived up to the hype. That’s all I needed to hear to end my Father’s Day shopping. I gave my dad the Perrier and maybe a plastic lime filled with lime juice. He seemed to get a kick out of it and opened a bottle.
Five bottles sat in the back of the fridge undisturbed for the next decade, but I stand by my decision. A late Saturday afternoon in 1979 brought me back to an idealized late Saturday afternoon in 1969 or whenever. I could’ve found the Perrier at the Associated (albeit at Murray the gonif prices), but going into the East End Dairy for something vaguely exotic for my father is what hit the spot. My sense of who we had been as father and son bubbled up like naturally sourced sparkling water from my subconscious. Those Saturdays on Park Street, me and him, had already evaporated. I just wanted a taste.
Father’s Day never seemed like something my father particularly embraced. I don’t think he cared for the attention. I also have come to believe over the last year — as I have watched him withstand brain surgery, physical rehabilitation, cancer treatment, two or three bouts of pneumonia and a general diminishing of his being to the point where his ability to move and communicate are close to non-existent — that he has viewed the best part of his life as the part long before my sister and I came along. I don’t take that personally. He just obviously preferred being a kid.
Within a couple of days of his beginning to recover from the operation that removed his tumor last May, he began talking regularly about growing up in Jackson Heights, about his grandmother, about FDR. Some of the stories I’d heard before. Some were new to me. Over the months that followed, they’d elbow out the present. Lately he’s taken to speaking, when he does speak (softly), almost exclusively in Yiddish. Yiddish is all he spoke until he was four, according to family lore. He learned Yiddish from his grandmother. She was a great lady, he told me on multiple occasions last year and this; “It’s a shame you never knew her,” he lamented repeatedly.
Dad has been confounding longevity expectations for quite some time now. Since May of 2015, I’ve been ready for him to go at any minute. The minutes passed. He didn’t. He went downhill, but he didn’t cease. He is, despite being confined to a bed in a palliative-care facility, the Energizer bunny. He’s still going. Every trip I’ve made to see him since winter I more than half-expect to be my last. In March, I was pretty sure it was. I’d gone up to bring him my book, which he had been looking forward to seeing. He was, within the confines of his condition, pretty lucid, letting me know that he knew what was happening to him and that if I wanted to say goodbye, this would be a good time to do it.
He had gone sporadically melodramatic during various phases of his illnesses. “Say goodbye to me,” he’d wail. I think he was a victim of too many movies in which it appears people are about to die and then they die. It doesn’t work that way in real life, I have learned. But on this afternoon in March, he explained that he always regretted that he’d never had the chance to say goodbye to his mother, my grandmother (who I also never knew). He and my mother were out to dinner and came home to receive a message. His mother, who kept the books for the family dry cleaning store, suffered a stroke while working. She died immediately.
Now I finally got the subtext of “say goodbye to me” every time he didn’t want to get his blood pressure measured. All right, I figured, I better give him what he wants. He wants a goodbye scene. I gave it to him. It was simple but emotionally satisfying. I said what I needed to say, he heard what he wanted to hear and we watched the Mets lose a Spring Training game to the Red Sox.
Which, incidentally, bequeathed me one final baseball memory between us, thanks to rampant commercialism.
DAD: “Why does it say Nixon?”
ME: “Nixon?”
DAD: “It says Nixon there behind the batter.”
ME: “That’s Nikon. It’s an ad for the camera company.”
DAD: “Oh.”
There was peace and finality in that visit. There was a goodbye.
And then he kept living. Still going. There are no more conversations. There is virtually no English. His eyes don’t open much. Feeding him a fully puréed supper takes about as long as it’s taken Wilmer to round second on Loney’s extra base hit. But he still eats, and as long a person still eats, a person makes like the branded battery rabbit.
That meant one year after what we all assumed was our last Father’s Day with him, there was another Father’s Day with him. Stephanie and I opted to go see him yesterday because it was Saturday and Saturday is where I like seeing my father in my mind. We had a Father’s Day card sitting unused on a pile of papers — from one of those Junes when we each bought one, hence a leftover. It had Mickey Mouse on the front. I probably selected that one out of all the others at the CVS because I remembered being fascinated to learn that Mickey Mouse and my dad were born within a year of each other.
The printed message had something to do with his being the “No. 1” dad, as if the AP and UPI took a poll. I signed it with a little more emphasis than usual, and slipped it into the envelope, stopping to mark it “Dad,” and then realizing this is probably the last time I write that on a greeting card envelope.
But I probably thought that last year, too.
He wasn’t going to be able to read the card, let alone open an envelope, but it was Father’s Day and I still had a father. This is what we do. Assuming Perrier is not on his list of approved foods and beverages (I know where five bottles can be had cheap), we stopped at the Dollar Tree to pick up three balloons to brighten his room. We had brought a balloon for his birthday in January. It inevitably deflated, but nobody had the heart to toss it, so it had just remained tacked to his bulletin board, all saggy, these last five months. Time to bring festive back to balloons, we figured.
I went to the cashier to pay three dollars for three balloons (generic star-shaped balloons, because they’d run out of Father’s Day models), accidentally letting one slip out of my hand to the Dollar Tree ceiling. No personnel came forth with a ladder. So it became two balloons for two dollars. It’s the thought that counts.
We showed up in time for dinner. That’s the best hour to visit him. Or hours. It takes a while, just as it’s taken a while for Wilmer to reach third, for him to be fed. He’s as alert as he’ll ever be in the course of a day. When we arrived, his latest early-evening companion, a buoyant woman named Theresa, sang his praises.
“Charles is such a nice guy!” she testified. “He doesn’t call you names, he doesn’t hit you.” I’m pretty sure she meant he’s cooperative, because when you visit these places enough, just walking down the hallways you notice the residents not at their best, and with good reason. Yes, I said, my dad is a sweetheart. I wanted to say “you should have known him when,” but knowing him now, despite his lack of everything, told Theresa all she needed to know.
We presented the card, read it aloud and tacked it to the bulletin board that was crowded with cards from past occasions. We presented the two balloons, which Stephanie secured to the board as well. I opened my iPad and turned on Metromedia Radio for him. It is a recreation of the old WNEW-AM to which he listened regularly when I was growing up. In my youth, I both couldn’t stand it and came to adore it. The Internet version is positively Proustian, playing not just the standards and the big band numbers that defined the terrestrial WNEW, but the jingles and station IDs of yore. Stephanie, who works with the elderly, said music has a way of infiltrating the brain when nothing else does, even at this stage of life, so I keep tuning in faux AM Eleven Three Oh when we’re there and I keep hoping it makes an impression or at least sparks a little joy.
Me, I got mine when, after Theresa loudly announced that, “Charles, your son is here!” Suitably prodded, he opened one eye fully, the other eye a little, stared out and said, “Hi Greg.”
That was more than we got out of him on our last visit. That was all the English we heard from him yesterday. The melody lingered on, Stephanie now and then asking him if he recognized this artist or that. We’re almost certain he nodded when asked about Tony Bennett, his favorite singer of all time. Dad, I said, this is the station and the music you were always playing in the car and in the kitchen. I couldn’t wait to go up to my room and listen to my station and my music, but thanks to you, I really came to appreciate this, so thank you for that.
I saw evidence that suggested this got through as well, but the only sentiments he expressed vocally were for more water, or vaser. One Filipina health aide after another is getting to know Yiddish.
For a while, I did the lifting of cup and spoon and napkin to his lips. It’s never too late to bond, I suppose. Eventually, Theresa the professional took over, continually reminding him his son and daughter-in-law were there, continually informing us what a nice guy he is, how he never hits or calls names. On the fifth or sixth mention, I was tempted to add these skills to his LinkedIn profile. Given his small sips and what we’ll generously refer to as bites, I thought dinner would meander into breakfast, but Theresa had her ways and before we knew it, his plate was clean. He wasn’t what you’d characterize as highly engaged, but the lady swore that he was, in fact, quite excited to see us. His eyes were more open than she’d ever seen them and he wasn’t falling asleep mid-chew. This is the new normal for excitement.
We stayed a while after dinner. I had flipped the TV to Fox in hopes that a pregame show would be on, but the U.S. Open was in progress. I know nothing about golf, but I know this tournament always ends on Father’s Day. Every third Sunday evening in June, we’d all be waiting for a table at some restaurant near where he and Florence — his significant other of almost a quarter-century — lived and, over the bar, was the 18th hole. Golf and Father’s Day went together in my mind like Saturday and taking a haircut with my dad. My dad never cared for golf, but having it on in his room at least lent the concept that we were once again sort of going out for Father’s Day dinner a thin veneer of reality. We had brought sandwiches from a 7-Eleven, so it really did kind of work.
The golf didn’t put him to sleep. Making it to 87 with too many things to keep track of wrong with him took care of that. The WNEW tribute channel played in the background. I waited until the U.S. Open closed for the night and Steven Matz threw strike one to Chase d’Arnaud to depart. I kissed him goodbye on the same head that was shaved to facilitate the operation last year, the same one that was subject to radiation and chemotherapy…where at least in the back and down the sides, hair has been coming in plentiful and dark. If he were up for it, I’d say he and I should take a haircut next Saturday. I don’t really need one, but I’d go with him for the company.
Oh, there’s Wilmer Flores, coming very slowly around third. Teufel’s sending him? Really? Ender Inciarte, who’s been killing us all night, grabs the ball, relays to Aybar, Aybar throws home …yeah, Wilmer’s out by ten feet. Mets lose to the allegedly lousy Braves again.
Once upon a time, the spring of 1969, to be precise, the New York Mets were in the market for a hitter. Sure, other GMs told their Met counterpart Johnny Murphy, we’ll give you somebody. Names like Joe Torre, Richie Allen, even Frank Robinson were floated. All it would cost the Mets was young starting pitching. The Mets were loaded with young starting pitching. They had Tom Seaver, Jerry Koosman, Nolan Ryan, Gary Gentry, Jim McAndrew, plus a golden left arm in the minors, Jon Matlack. Trades were discussed. Trades were rejected. The pitching was protected.
One young Met pitcher would be dispatched in 1969, righty Steve Renko. Steve had been in the Met system since 1965, chosen in the 24th round of the very first June amateur draft, and was struggling at Triple-A Tidewater. Murphy apparently didn’t mind giving him up, since what Renko — along with Kevin Collins, Jay Carden and Dave Colon — brought back from Montreal was the kind of bat the general manager had been seeking all along: a real power hitter. The man who came to New York on June 15, 1969, was Donn Clendenon. Four months and one day later, Clendenon was accepting a 1970 Dodge Charger, his reward for being voted World Series MVP.
That trade worked out. It would always work out. When Renko and the Expos defeated McAndrew and the Mets at Jarry Park on June 26, 1970, it worked out. When Renko started a game at Shea that July in which Montreal eventually topped the Mets, it worked out. When, in the September heat of the 1970 pennant race, Renko threw a complete game in Canada to beat Seaver and the Mets, it never stopped working out.
Trading Steve Renko to the Expos for Donn Clendenon was a major step toward the Mets winning a World Series…toward winning the 1969 World Series, an achievement that forever defines this franchise for the good. Renko pitched through 1983 and won 134 big league games, nine of them at the expense of the team that drafted and traded him. Yet there was never a second of regret at having dealt 24-year-old Steve Renko away. It gave the Mets Clendenon. It gave the Mets a championship.
Friday night, John Gant, 23, won his first major league decision, a very effective 5-1 victory for the Atlanta Braves over the New York Mets. Gant is a Brave because the Mets sent him and Robert Whalen south last summer to obtain Juan Uribe and Kelly Johnson. At the time, the Mets had plenty of young starting pitching in the majors and too many minor leaguers filling their bench. They had to have Uribe and Johnson to push forward in a highly competitive pennant race. Gant was a 21st-round Met pick in 2011, taken three rounds sooner than Renko. He was at Double-A Binghamton in 2015, posting numbers no more eye-popping than those registered by Renko as a 1969 Tide. Never having seen Gant (or Whalen), I had no opinion of their prospects when Sandy Alderson opted to ship them off to the foundering Braves.
Within weeks, it was clearly the right trade for its time. Uribe and Johnson were exactly what the Mets needed in the moment. The moment would extend into November. The Mets won a division title and league championship. How we think of the Mets, as a team that is supposed to win ballgames, was utterly altered by what they accomplished in 2015. We are in a different space because of what all the players who steered the Mets into August and September did, few any more vital to the cause than the two erstwhile Atlanta utilitymen who chipped in big hit after big hit. That pennant is forever.
Just keep that in mind should Gant drop another six-and-two-thirds innings of two-hit ball on the Mets in the near or distant future. And when they play Detroit later this season, please refer to all of the above should we face 23-year-old Michael Fulmer, he of the current 7-2 record, 2.43 ERA and just-snapped 33⅓-inning scoreless streak. Fulmer, as you are no doubt aware, was the Met pitching prospect dealt to the Tigers to acquire Yoenis Cespedes. Yoenis Cespedes was the biggest reason the Mets roared into their first postseason in nine years. Fulmer might do wonderful things for Detroit and terrible things to our psyche in the years ahead. If Gant’s allegory is Renko, Fulmer’s might be Matlack, the first-round pick who was in demand, except Alderson, unlike Murphy, let him go for the bat the Mets desperately needed. Matlack was destined for a sensational career, most of it with our team. Fulmer has begun his run in spectacular fashion away from us.
We got Cespedes for him. We got to the World Series for the first time in fifteen years. It was worth it. It always will be.
By sheer coincidence, I’ll be at the Briarwood branch of the Queens Library, Saturday, June 25 at 3 PM to discuss Amazin’ seasons past and present. Hope you’ll join me.
I realized Bartolo Colon was the batter. I heard something about a ball hit into the gap. I put 40 and 2 together and zipped (in my own Bartolian fashion) from the radio in the kitchen to the television in the living room to bear witness to the breathtaking site — taking the breath of all involved, including Colon — of our immensely credentialed starting pitcher pulling into second with a double.
Wow, I said, that’s really something, though it wasn’t as something as it once might have seemed. We have seen Colon double. We have seen Colon homer. Granted, seeing Colon run each of the bases — taking third on a single that fell in front of Andrew McCutchen, tagging up and scoring on Yoenis Cespedes’s deep fly to right (I thought a couple of strong relays could have nailed him at the plate, but perhaps Gregory Polanco forgot who would be sprinting home) — was both a treat for the eyes and a dagger to the heart of the DH rationale. Yet the idea that Bart can contribute offensively is no longer absurd. Thus, it wasn’t the shock it might have been when he first became our cause.
We are not without the capacity to emit surprise. It was surprising that the second-inning hit-by-pitch that eventually sent Wilmer Flores out of Thursday night’s game versus the Pirates resulted, according to x-rays, in nothing more than a contusion. It was surprising to have Neil Walker and Michael Conforto back in the lineup. It was surprising to see the slumping Conforto (his dark forest now in its second solid month of bloom and gloom) homer directly after Walker. It was gratifying to watch Michael rob Jung Ho Kang of a run-scoring extra-base hit in the first, just as Curtis Granderson’s franchise-record 17th leadoff home run kept our cockles warm in the bottom of the inning. If you step back and realize Grandy has done more powerwise in approximately a season-and-a-half worth of leading off than any Met had done before him, his feat is kind of surprising. He’s a more accomplished home run hitter than those directly behind him in this particular procession — Reyes (16), Agee (8), Dykstra (8) — but I could swear Curtis only just got here.
That Colon would pitch well into the eighth, albeit after running strenuously in the third; and the Mets would homer thrice; and they’d withstand a bit of late-inning turbulence to hold on to defeat Pittsburgh, 6-4, was overall all very rewarding, but not that surprising. You shouldn’t get jaded, but when you follow your team closely, you do learn to detect patterns.
If you’ve been keeping tabs on the Mets long enough, you knew the news that came down Thursday regarding David Wright was on its way. Our Captain, after trying rest and rehab, went in for surgery on the herniated disk in his neck, confirming that his absence of a few weeks will extend into multiple months, possibly knocking out the remainder of 2016 and placing in question his Met future beyond.
Somewhere in the distant Met past, say before Colon and Granderson joined the club in 2014, the idea of losing David Wright for at least a hundred games would have been jarring and flooring. How do we get by without our Captain? It remains a valid question (especially after Flores had to exit), but not one that crash-lands from out of the blue. Unfortunately, we are skilled in David-deprivation. He missed much of 2015 with an ailment that has remained chronic and, pre-stenosis, had to absent himself for chunks of other seasons due to various maladies.
David Wright out for maybe the season, maybe longer, is not as surprising as a Bartolo Colon double that itself wasn’t totally surprising. That’s not an ideal state of affairs. But we get used to these things.
There is a temptation to fast-forward to whether David’s career is in jeopardy of being completely over. It’s a reasonable source of speculation, but can you imagine David Wright deciding, in so many words, ah screw it? Neither can I. He’ll give it his all because — and this isn’t a pang of romanticizing as much as it is a statement of fact — he’s a ballplayer. Playing ball is what he does. It doesn’t matter that his contract is lucrative and guaranteed. It doesn’t matter that he’s no doubt capable of spending his hopefully pain-free days pursuing other endeavors. He plays baseball. He has not voluntarily ceased doing so. Prior to the neck becoming too much of an obstacle to push through, he worked, by all accounts, as hard as he could so he could play. In his most recent (let’s not call it his last) game, he homered. He was hitting with power again. He was throwing better. Even physically compromised, 2016 David Wright presented a convincing facsimile of vintage David Wright.
I don’t picture David Wright, unless his post-surgery recovery literally kills him, not attempting to return to what he was doing before the pain overwhelmed him, what he has done since before any of us ever heard of him. Whether he’ll be able to succeed is a whole other issue, but for now, he’s on the disabled list, not the deceased list.
David is a helluva ballplayer. I speak in the present tense until further notice.
You know you’re having a good night when you can get picky over what kind of mammoth win you’d like your team to post. For those of us who remained to the bottom of the ninth inning at Citi Field Wednesday night of an obviously settled affair — and why would you leave when your team has hung up 11 runs and 19 hits? — we picked one ending as preferred above all others: Noah Syndergaard throwing the final pitch.
Imagine that. Imagine Thor going the distance. You had to imagine it in advance of Wednesday night and, alas, you still have to imagine it. That sort of achievement, so prevalent in the heyday of Shea, has grown remarkably uncommon in the yard the Mets now call their own. A Met pitcher sticking around to bookend his own evening is a rarity anywhere, but it really gets your attention when you realize how little it’s happened at Citi. The 42 in the Rotunda dwarfs the number of complete games Mets pitchers have thrown in the ballpark’s eight-season history.
How many CGs for the homestanding NYMs since 2009? The answer lies not within the monument to Jackie Robinson, but is implied at the joint that grills burgers in the name of Keith Hernandez. The number is 17, or approximately 2.9% of the 595 regular-season home games the Mets have played since shuttering Shea. I’ve been to 218 of those games and witnessed nine completed by our starters, or roughly 4.1%. A person really has to hit his spot to see one these Flushing Routegoers in flight.
Niese, a Pirate watching from the third base dugout as his old teammate thoroughly throttled his new teammates, holds the distinction of being the last Met to throw a home complete game. His came twenty days after Harvey’s, the same week Matt went on the shelf that eventually led to Tommy John surgery.
It’s probably not a coincidence that in a Met era defined by young, imposing starting pitchers, the current administration shies away from letting them complete their own business. It took four months of an absolutely dominant 2013, when Harvey was presumed healthy, before Terry Collins allowed his undisputed ace to go all the way (though there was an earlier nine-inning effort in game that went into extras). It wasn’t until the final game of 2015, the postseason edition, that we saw another Met — Harvey — given such a chance again…and that took quite a bit of histrionic lobbying on the part of the pitcher. Matt hasn’t come close to nine full innings since.
Jacob deGrom has never pitched a complete game. Steven Matz has never pitched a complete game. The only two of the past two years were from Zack Wheeler and Bartolo Colon, each in Miami. Wheeler is only now preparing to make minor league rehab starts. It seems safe to wager he will not be throwing any major league complete games for the Mets in 2016.
Colon better fits the profile of starters the Mets might let finish with limited qualms: he’s someone whose future they’re not immensely invested in. If Bart can get to a ninth inning, sure, knock yourself out. Dickey was a knuckleballer, so his length in any given game where he was rolling along was subject to effectively the same school of thought. Batista’s complete game versus Cincinnati on September 28, 2011, made total sense. It was the last game of the year, he was 40 and every Red’s back foot was planted squarely on the bus to the offseason. Before Collins, it wasn’t as if Jerry Manuel was handing out passes to the ninth, either. Hernandez and Figueroa (another Closing Day performance) were permitted to go extremely deep because what was there to lose in the club’s eyes? Same could be said for the August 2011 night journeyman Chris Capuano mysteriously mystified the Braves.
When a Niese or a Mike Pelfrey (in one of the eight Met CGs at Citi Field that I was not on hand to observe and applaud) got on a roll, they were just pretty good pitchers having very good nights, more power to them. Santana, his bouts of fragility notwithstanding, was from another time to begin with, when aces were aces and it was ludicrous to remove them from fierce competition. It’s fitting that Shea Stadium stayed vital to its very last game because of how far Johan went into its next-to-last game.
But the current Fab Four is treated with kid gloves and René Rivera’s mitt. Harvey appeared Olympian in 2013 and it was inferred he was indestructible, as long as he was handled with care. The Mets didn’t care to extend his innings any more than they had to. When he had a shutout going after eight against the Rockies on August 7 of his breakout year, and his pitch count wasn’t dizzyingly high, he couldn’t be denied. Not even a two-out line drive off his knee in the ninth would budge him. After subsequently having to miss the last month of ’13 and all of ’14 to have his right elbow repaired, you can imagine a helicopter being summoned to swoop in and remove him if he didn’t budge from the mound in a similar situation these days.
Harvey remains the last righthander among Mets to throw a complete game at Citi Field, and that was nearly three years ago. Syndergaard, a towering figure even within the community of larger-than-life Met pitchers of 2016, had gone eight innings three times in his brief career prior to Wednesday, including one start at home last year. To look at Thor, whether standing or pitching, is to understand why he came to the majors with a Norse god nickname already attached. What could possibly hurt Thor? He has the powerful repertoire, the offbeat temperament, the fire of a thousand kilns, the physical stature…if this were 1916 or 1976 or maybe 1996, you would assume a substantial percentage of his 36 starts prior to Wednesday would have been complete games, not to mention shutouts.
In 2016, even with all his successes, both categories yielded zeroes on Thor’s ledger through June 8. But on this Wednesday, June 15, he was the one assigning nice, round nothings to just about every Pirate batter he faced. There was a leadoff single and then there was total silence, punctuated only by our cheers for his strikeouts (eleven, enough to keep Subway on its toes) and, not to go unnoticed, tons of Met hits.
You know how the Mets almost got no-hit on Tuesday night and we all assumed — because we retain absolutely no memory that what happens in our worst games isn’t necessarily destined to occur in all our games — that the Mets would never hit again? Consider our assumptions rent asunder. Every Met (except Syndergaard, somehow) hit and hit forcefully. Left fielder Kelly Johnson homered. Third baseman Wilmer Flores homered and drove in four. Rivera was as lethal at the plate as he was nurturing behind it, contributing three hits. Matt Reynolds showed signs of being ready to challenge Ichiro Suzuki for the title of most prolific hitter the world has ever seen.
It was exhilarating to watch the Met offense cut loose on a night the wrist of Michael Conforto, the back of Neil Walker and the thumb of Juan Lagares made each of them invisible. An early version of Collins’s lineup, before Lagares had to be scratched, listed Asdrubal Cabrera as his cleanup hitter. Cabrera has batted cleanup in his career — he socked 25 homers for Cleveland five years ago — but a Met shortstop in the four-hole was cognitively dissonant to the eye. Howard Johnson filled that dual role now and then in 1991, but he was Howard Johnson, 30/30 man extraordinaire and never quite the full-time shortstop. Flores batted cleanup as shortstop twice in 2015, during the injury-ravaged mangy mutt days of May and June, but Wilmer wasn’t retrofitted into a major league shortstop to get his glove in the game.
The only Met shortstop to bat cleanup in the starting lineup between HoJo and Wilmer? It wasn’t anyone you’d picture of as you scroll the shortstop spreadsheet of your mind. It wasn’t Jose Vizcaino or Rey Ordoñez or Mike Bordick or the incredibly available (if not overwhelmingly desirable) Jose Reyes. According to the Baseball-Reference Play Index, it was John Valentin, twice deployed by Bobby Valentine that way in 2002. The Baseball-Reference Play Index needs to come with smelling salts for those instances when information such as the Mets batting shortstop John Valentin cleanup twice knocks you out.
“Bobby is not looking for me to hit home runs or anything like that,” Valentin said the first time the unorthodox tactic was tried, making one wonder whether John opted for a white flag over a Louisville Slugger when he stepped in to face Darryl Kile.
Back in the makeshift present, Cabrera wound up batting second, recording two hits and scoring two runs. That’s what more or less everybody in the Met lineup did. With it adding up to eleven runs, you only noticed a little that the Mets made twelve outs with runners in scoring position and left ten men on base.
For that matter, you only noticed the eleven runs a little, because all your focus was on Noah Syndergaard. Over eight innings, he registered as many strikeouts as the Mets plated runners: eleven K’s to go with no walks and no runs. There were three Pirate singles scattered, one in the first, two in the sixth. By the sixth, when Syndergaard shrugged off the mild threat by fanning Andrew McCutchen looking for Strikeout No. 8, the Mets led, 7-0. There was no danger. There was only Thor, tossing what could be best described as a Thor-hitter.
Come the bottom of the eighth, Syndergaard batted, an excellent sign of what he’d be doing in the ninth. Sure enough, in the ninth, we got what we stayed for. We got Thor on the mound for another inning.
All he needed was three outs to add to his previous 24. If he could proceed in mussless, fussless fashion, we’d be telling each other on the way out that we had just seen Noah Syndergaard’s first complete game and Noah Syndergaard’s first shutout. We already talk of Thor so much we need new material.
We wanted it like he wanted it. We would have accepted simple groundouts or pop flies, though if it were put to a text poll, we would have entered “K” for another round of emphatic door-slamming, Pirate-pounding strikeouts. We wanted him to go out in blazes of glory and flourishes of phenomenal. We wanted Rivera cradling that last 97-MPH fastball, leaping to his feet and embracing his pitcher. We couldn’t wait to tweet that perfect-partnership image and hashtag it #Thorvera.
That would have been something, but it will have to be something for another game. Noah ventured into his very first ninth inning, but there was a leadoff double to John Jaso, a ground ball that advanced him to third, then a double to David Freese. There went the shutout and, with it, the eighteenth Met complete game in Citi Field history, not to mention the tenth I could have Logged. With opportunity eroded, Terry approached the mound and Thor departed it to a standing ovation. Jeurys Familia came on to protect a ten-run lead in what we shall refer to as a non-save situation. To service his own narrative properly, Jeurys gave up a difficult ground ball that Flores made a nice play on but threw away. It allowed Freese to score (how could Terry use him in a non-save situation?) and reduce the Mets’ lead to 11-2. That’s not terribly significant to report, except for the delight inherent in noting the Mets had a ninth-inning lead reduced to nine runs.
There it stayed. Familia got the next two outs. Syndergaard got the win, going a career-longest eight-and-one-third innings. One of these days we’ll see him go nine. Several of these days, you’d have to think.
THAT’S IT! The Mets have made me so mad that I’m leaving the country!
OK, while I actually am leaving the country for six days in Iceland, the trip doesn’t actually have anything to do with the sad JV version of our team’s and their somnambulant performances of late.
Still, it won’t exactly break my heart to play a Get Out of Unfun Baseball Free card for nearly a week if it means I miss games like the weekend’s grisly crapfests against the Brewers. I won’t mourn that I didn’t see our starters’ faces fall if they dared make a mistake pitch or looked up at the scoreboard and saw they’re two runs behind. I won’t be sad to miss watching Mets run the bases like they’ve prepared with an hour of the dizzy bat race, or fielding like their gloves have been replaced by lawn darts, or trying to do whatever it is I dimly recall players wearing blue and orange are supposed to do when they swing a bat.
The starting lineup has been much reduced by injuries — the latest news is the revelation that Michael Conforto is struggling with cartilage damage in his wrist, which means he’ll have to go on the DL for a few weeks grimly plow along as if nothing’s wrong. Add in David Wright‘s herniated disk, Neil Walker‘s back, Travis d’Arnaud‘s shoulder, Lucas Duda‘s back and Juan Lagares‘s thumb and you’ve got 2/3 of a lineup replaced with Mayberry-Muno irregulars, whose effectiveness you may remember from last June’s unwatchable baseball.
Granted, last summer turned out pretty OK — there’s a book about that. The Mets came disturbingly close to getting no-hit by Jameson Taillon Tuesday night, but in 2015 they got no-hit twice — oddly, I was in the house both nights — and were still allowed to go to the World Series. Now as then, as long as they can ride their solid starting pitching they ought to be able to hang around all season, and there are three playoff slots available to teams that can do that.
But the highlight films sensibly reduce the Summer of Loathe to a montage before getting to the good stuff; nobody wants to lovingly recall fidgeting as Clayton Kershaw dissected a Triple-A lineup. Since that’s what we’re back to, I’m OK with skipping a week of it.
The Mets have played 38.3% of their allotted baseball games for 2016, which in and of itself is no magic number, but if you do the math and calculate that 38.3% of a pie has been consumed, you understand 61.7% of it remains. If you express 61.7% as a decimal figure, the kind you’d see in the standings, then you can picture .617.
And if you’ve spent your life aware of what the standings looked like at the close of the regular season in 1969 (and why wouldn’t you?), you know .617 adds up to 100 out of 162 games. That’s how many the Mets won in 1969, that’s how many are left in 2016.
So we find ourselves at a statistical milestone in this regular season, at least for those who find round numbers significant. We have the roundest of numbers awaiting us. The big one-oh-oh. One-hundred.
Sounds like a lot. But so did 162, and 38.3% of those have vanished into 34-28 air. As long as we’re counting fingers, toes, wins and losses, the Mets’ record with 100 games to go projects to 88-74 when there will be none to go. Sharp-eyed Mets fans who know their figures will recognize 88-74 as a record the Mets have achieved thrice in their existence. They finished 88-74 in an exhilarating 1997, repeated the feat in a less emotionally rewarding 1998 and compiled it all over again in a crushing 2007. In none of those seasons did they play a postseason game.
Ah, but each of those seasons was B2WC, Before the Second Wild Card, an institution that, if the season ended today (though why would it?), would serve as our bacon-saver. The Mets hold that second Wild Card, leading the Utley Dodgers by two games at present, trailing the Perennial Cardinals by a half-game for the National League’s first consolation prize. It’s all very temporary up there. If our plans had been panning out, we would be more readily comparing our mark to that of the Murpharious Nationals. At the moment, however, that’s verging on pointless. The Nationals are 4½ in front of the Mets, or as far out ahead as they were at any point last year, but they look way better and we look…
Who can tell?
The National League East of 2015, when there were 62 games played and 100 on tap, was a tale of two teams trying to get on track. The Mets were 33-29, one game worse than now, but one game better than the Nationals then. Come to think of it, when we reached 100 games done and 62 to go, the tale was still in effect. The net difference 38 games later was two games: the Mets were one behind the Nationals. That was at the beginning of the week when first everything that could go wrong did go wrong for the Mets and then everything that could go right in fact went right. (You know, trade called off; lead blown in the rain; different trade consummated; guy not traded hitting dramatic home run; main rival swept…helluva book out about it, I hear.)
We can call 62 games played a milestone. We can call 100 games played a milestone. We make those notations because 162 games, although they dwindle as nearly as quickly as the number of readily available Met players on any given Sunday, is as long a time as it is a short time. You look for signposts, for clues, for ways to stay engaged in what often penetrates our brain as an endless slog. 62 games down with a hundred to go is meaningful if we want it to be.
Baseball is beautiful, the season is what we crave when we don’t have it, but then we get to the predictably unpredictable portions where we’re flailing a bit. Like the road trip at whose end healthy bodies recede from view and all you can see is a lineup you didn’t envision a few weeks never mind a few months ago.
The highly unlikely starters of Game 62 from the perspective of Opening Night.
Batting cleanup, the second baseman Kelly Johnson.
Batting fifth, the first baseman James Loney.
We didn’t re-sign Kelly Johnson in the offseason, did we? What happened to Neil Walker? Loney…isn’t he with the, uh…not the Dodgers anymore. The Rays? Where’s Duda?
Reynolds made the team? No, he didn’t. Don’t tell me something went wrong with Cabrera. Hold up — Reynolds is batting second. And Johnson’s the cleanup hitter?!?!? Also, is Loney really that good that he’s our five-hole guy?
The less surprising but still not-quite-kosher starters of Game 62:
Terry must be giving Wright the day off. Flores must be doing OK. De Aza? Did Conforto need a day off the same day as Lagares? Plawecki getting some playing time is good, but maybe they should have found an experienced backup catcher for d’Arnaud.
Bonus unlikelihood of Game 62:
Dick Scott is managing? Who the hell is Dick Scott? Oh right, the bench coach. Wait, where did Geren go again?
Curtis Granderson led off and played right. Yoenis Cespedes was in center and holding down the three hole. Steven Matz pitched and batted ninth despite his ability to bat eighth, maybe seventh amid this bunch. Those were assumables worth assuming. You would have assumed Terry Collins would be in the dugout day in and day out. If you were told Terry Collins’s team was in possession of a playoff spot entering its 62nd game, you’d assume he’d still be the manager. He still is the manager, but on Sunday, he wasn’t feeling all that well and the Mets decided discretion is at least 61.7% of valor and they sent him to a hospital in Milwaukee (where he was deemed no worse than day-to-day, sort of like most of us).
OK, we understand why Scott was in for Collins. The rest we understand because we didn’t just arrive here in our spaceships from April 3. We know the Mets are without their catcher, first baseman and third baseman of record due to lengthy injury (though the catcher might not be injured forever, despite it appearing as if that’s exactly what he has been). We know the second baseman is aching in the back and that his Sunday replacement was reacquired because of the injury epidemic. It’s hard to remember so many days later that Johnson was fetched from Atlanta to fill in for Wright, but there are so many holes to fill on this Mets club right now that the next thing you’ll tell me is Kelly Johnson batted cleanup on Sunday.
Oh yeah, I already told you that.
The rest is just the usual Metsiness or, to be fair, anybodyness that can afflict any team during the long march from April to October. Juan Lagares was still healing in the thumb (and he eventually pinch-hit). Michael Conforto has a wrist issue (and is still slumping, including when he pinch-hit). Asdrubal Cabrera was simply taking a cue from Peter Gibbons in Office Space and opting not to take the call from Bill Lumbergh that said, Hello Asdrubal, what’s happening? I’m gonna need you to go ahead and come in on Sunday. We, uh, lost some people this week and we sorta need to play catchup.
Cabrera’s been working nights, weekends, practically every shift without a break since the season started. You couldn’t blame him if he’d voluntarily underwent hypnosis so as to instinctively tune out Lumbergh…I mean Collins…I mean Scott. Whoever was leaving those droning message on his machine, it didn’t matter. Eventually Cabrera entered Sunday’s game. Eventually the Mets, whoever constituted them, entered Sunday’s game. Their names showed up in the box score for the first six innings and their actions were mentioned on the radio, but there was no tangible evidence that they were participating in their ballgame at Milwaukee. The Brewers put the ball in play versus Matz, and they didn’t have to do much beyond that to generate runs. The Mets committed more errors (three) than they fielded regular starters (two). Zach Davies, who became a worthy Cy Young candidate yesterday if no other day, held the Mets hitless from one out in the first to three out in the sixth.
In the seventh, Davies returned to the mortal, allowed two hits and was replaced long enough to allow the Mets to scratch out a run courtesy of Almostandro De Aza, whose hallmark in 2016 has been his ability to almost gets hits, almost score runs and almost make catches. In the eighth, there was a stronger flurry of Met activity. Lagares, having convinced Miller Park security he really did play for one of the teams inside, doubled to lead off. Granderson, at last in that annual groove that lifts his batting average to .218, singled. The inning before, the Mets started with a double and a single but still needed two groundouts for one run. Lagares’s thumb, thank goodness, isn’t in his feet. He ran and he scored and the Mets closed it to 5-2. Following two-hole hitter Reynolds’s second strikeout, Cespedes doubled home Granderson. Now, at last, there was hitting and there was running and, either best or worst of all, there was hope.
Oh, sweet hope. You are the mother’s milk of the baseball season. Well, not literally. If the Mets could sell a beverage like that at Citi Field, they’d charge you eleven bucks for an eight-ounce container. But after six dreadful innings and one marginally rewarding inning, the Mets were still in this thing. Hope! Baseball! Yeah, baby! This is how we do it! We get our hopes up. We get by with a little hope from our Mets, we hope to get high — in the standings — with a little hope from our Mets.
Up next was the cleanup hitter, which suggests bad news for the Brewers. The cleanup hitter is, by definition, the most feared slugger in your lineup, or as the Mets called him for the afternoon, Kelly Johnson. All right, the Brewers probably had little fear, but Johnson is a professional hitter, or at least a professional player. We were anywhere between modestly sated to moderately thrilled to have restored him to the Met roster less than a week ago.
Forty-one players have left the Mets, played for another major league team, and returned to us. Johnson is the 41st. It’s not always a case of regret that brings Recidivist Mets back, but you can wish you still had the guy you didn’t mind giving up the first time. In December 1934, the New York Giants traded for center fielder George Davis nine months after trading him away. With Davis, the Giants won the 1933 World Series. Without him, manager Bill Terry cracked not so wise about the Brooklyn Dodgers, who relished playing proto-Marlin spoilers against them on the final weekend of ’34, costing the Giants any chance of repeating. Memphis Bill concluded his team was better with Davis than without him. “I made a mistake last spring,” he admitted, as recounted in Frank Graham’s essential Giants chronicle. “I had to see George play with another ballclub before I realized how good he was.”
The Mets had to see how bad they were as they tried to get by with Reynolds, Ty Kelly and Eric Campbell. They processed they were pretty grim, thus set out to salvage Johnson once more, leaving Akeel Morris as a non-refundable deposit. It didn’t matter that Johnson wasn’t batting more than Granderson for the last-place Braves. All that mattered was that when you viewed .215 Johnson in the context of unproven Reynolds and Kelly and a-little-too-proven Campbell, he wasn’t them. And, in limited action to date, he’s batted .444 for the Mets. He’s also awoken inside a defensive nightmare and ran the bases ludicrously on Friday night (though that sort of thing was going around).
Kelly Johnson still seems like a good addition or re-addition. But that didn’t mean he converted Cespedes from runner to run. Instead, he grounded to second, which was productive in the sense that it moved Yoenis to third, but now there were two out. Cabrera was summoned to bat for Loney, what with lefty Will Smith pitching. Reliable Asdrubal emerged from his hammock without complaint, battled Smith for nine pitches, and walked. First and third was our situation, which could totally raise your hope quotient. Johnson and Cabrera each did something not bad, yet the Mets were still waiting for something very good to happen. Where had we seen something like this before only to have the Mets not score?
From watching Mets baseball since we were wee lads and lasses. But that’s not the only thing we were used to. We were used to hope. And stitched into the tapestry of hope is faith in the new.
***
If everything is going great, we don’t need hope. When it’s not — and it wasn’t on Sunday until the eighth — we need to rely on something we don’t consider the reason we require hope, somebody who didn’t get us into this mess to begin with. We need somebody to come in and turn the beat around Vickie Sue Robinson-style. As 2016 has unfurled, that’s meant, at various very recent junctures, the likes of Matt Reynolds and Ty Kelly and James Loney and good old Kelly Johnson and did you notice Erik Goeddel was back from Vegas and rolling a perfect three outs in the seventh? The new or new-ish guy will fix a little piece of what’s dooming us and, before you know it, the rest of the roster will catch on and boy, we will be on our way!
A new Met, some new hope (courtesy Mets Fantasy Cards).
In May of 1963, the motivation for that sort of Mets-ical thinking was the acquisition from the Tigers of Chico Fernandez. Studied through a long lens, he is neither the most accomplished of Met Fernandezes (Sid, Tony) nor famous of Met Chicos (Walker, Escuela). But he was new and therefore he embodied hope. He had to. I wasn’t watching or listening when he came to the Mets, having no TV or transistor in my crib at four months old, but I know how Mets fandom functions. Surely it didn’t get this way just when I came along.
I know the Mets fan whose team was in ninth place on May 8, 1963, the day the Mets swapped Larry Foss for Chico Fernandez, got excited that we now had a guy who a year earlier had belted 20 homers for Detroit, who two years earlier swiped home in a huge game against the Yankees. This was exactly what we needed, Chico Fernandez at shortstop. We couldn’t wait to see him. By the time we did, his good vibes infected the entire operation. The Mets were on a five-game winning streak, wafting to two games under .500 and into — get this — sixth place, only five games behind the front-running Giants, the same nemeses who had beaten us 17-4 a couple of days before our fortunes transformed.
Would wonders ever cease? Hell, wonders were only starting.
Chico joined the fun on May 11, pinch-hitting for Al Moran with two out in the bottom of the ninth at the Polo Grounds, the Mets trailing the Reds, 4-2. If Fernandez could get on, then Casey could send up a pinch-hitter for Ken MacKenzie, and then…well, that’s hope. We weren’t down to our last out. We had the potential tying run in the on-deck circle.
Fernandez struck out looking. So much for a sixth consecutive win. The Mets dropped to seventh place that Saturday, eighth in the first game of a doubleheader that Sunday. But Chico displayed versatility, leading off, starting at third base (the Mets’ eleventh third baseman in their very brief history) and moving to shortstop in one of Casey Stengel’s multiplayer repositionings.
Double-negatives be damned, we hadn’t seen nothing yet, because in that Sunday’s second game, all hell broke loose in the most heavenly and Metsian way possible. Larry Burright became Met 3B No. 12 in the fifth inning, Moran No. 13 in the ninth. The Mets were giving new meaning to “three men on third” on May 12, 1963…four, actually; Rod Kanehl had started the nightcap, but left not long after getting hit by a pitch with the bases loaded in the third. Never mind that bit of trivia for the moment, though. So much more was percolating. As Sunday grew later and later, the Mets led Cincinnati 5-0; were tied with them at six; forged ahead of them by five; fell behind them by one; and, ultimately, came up victors, 13-12. Fernandez drove in the all-important seventh and scored the just as vital ninth run.
The Mets were ready to get vertical. They traveled to Houston for a Monday night game on May 13 and Stengel assigned third base to rookie Ron Hunt, giving the Mets their fifth third baseman in little more than a day, their fourth new one in a nineteen-inning span and fourteenth overall in fewer than 200 games. It didn’t help. The Colt .45s won, 4-2. Another loss to the Colts, a win (Chico singling and scoring) and a flight to San Francisco ensued. The Giants were still in first. The Mets were clinging tightly to ninth.
The game of Thursday, May 16, 1963, began fairly typically for the Mets of that era. Willie Mays homered with his pitcher, Billy O’Dell, on base in the third. Giants up, 2-0. Joey Amalfitano hit a ball that second baseman Hunt couldn’t handle with runners on second and third. Giants up, 4-0. Cliff Cook pulled the Mets to within three when he led off the fifth with a homer. But Willie McCovey increased the home team lead to five when he launched a two-run shot off Met starter Jay Hook. It was 6-1, San Fran, and what were you gonna do?
You were gonna hope. Because Hunt led off the Met sixth with a home run. And, after two outs, Jim Hickman singled. He took second on a wild pitch while Cook batted, then scored when Cook singled. Up stepped Chico Fernandez, still the newest of Mets.
Fernandez buried a Digger O’Dell delivery over the Candlestick Park fence. The Mets, not so up and at ’em moments before, were now in this thing. The Mets went from down 6-1 to down 6-5. We had Chico Fernandez homering and the Mets roaring back and, in the bottom of the sixth, Tracy Stallard relieving Hook and keeping the Giants off the board. The Mets didn’t score in the top of the seventh, but Larry Bearnarth shut down San Francisco. The eighth beckoned.
With one out against young reliever Gaylord Perry, Hickman blasted a fly ball that, had it been left alone by the Candlestick wind, was judged likely to pull the Mets into a tie. Alas, the Candlestick wind was a fickle beast. Whereas, according to Leonard Koppett in the Times, it was minding its own business earlier, this time it kicked up enough to hold Hickman’s ball in the park. Still, it was high and deep and fell in after it ticked off Mays’s glove.
Hickman reached second. How about third? Mays made a hellacious throw there, but missed his target. Had Jim kept running, he could have had himself a triple. Except Jim didn’t keep running. By Koppett’s account, he had not run “at full speed in the first place. He settled for a comfortable double, just as nine players out of ten do in such circumstances.”
Willie Mays was probably the tenth player, but he couldn’t help us for another nine years. Nevertheless, there was hope that the Mets’ next two batters could bring Hickman home. Each of them had homered earlier. We didn’t need a homer. We needed any kind of hit in the right place. Instead, Cook lofted a flyout to right (a potential sacrifice had Hickman made it to third) and Fernandez struck out. The Mets went on to lose, 6-5. A day later, they’d dip down into tenth and last place, settling there for the bulk of the season. By the second week of July, the Mets demoted Cook to Buffalo and optioned Fernandez to Seattle, which was a Boston farm club, but you could do things like that with other teams’ minor league affiliates in those days.
Chico returned in September and holds two “last” distinctions in the distinguished history of the Polo Grounds. In the top of the ninth on September 18, 1963, he gobbled up a two-out grounder from Phillie pitcher Chris Short and fired it to first baseman Tim Harkness. It was the final defensive chance ever handled by a home team in Manhattan. In the bottom of the inning, with the Mets trailing, 5-1, Harkness flied out, but Kanehl, pinch-hitting for Norm Sherry, singled. Chico stepped up and singled as well. Now we had first and second. Ted Schreiber was announced as the pinch-hitter for Bearnarth. Should he get on, Dick Smith would come up as the tying run. The Mets could send out the ancient horseshoe with a win. Or at least keep it going with a tie. There was, in an expiring ballpark’s last scheduled inning, hope.
Schreiber grounded to Cookie Rojas, who tossed it to Bobby Wine, who threw it to Roy Sievers. Fernandez was out, the Mets had lost, the Polo Grounds was done. Two of them — Chico and the Mets — hit the road to finish 1963, grip on tenth place securely cemented. Chico Fernandez, owner of Upper Manhattan’s last base hit, would never play major league baseball after that season ended. He never hit another home run for the Mets after May 16. To this day, in addition to being the eleventh of 160 Met third basemen, he is the fifth member of the One Met Homer Only club, population currently 78. 2016 inductees include Met 3B No. 160 Ty Kelly, who is presently at liberty in Las Vegas; James Loney, who you’d like to believe carries only a temporary membership card; Bartolo Colon, which is a whole other miracle; and Almostandro De Aza. De Aza almost hit a second, in Pittsburgh, but it didn’t quite clear the highest wall they have.
Chico Fernandez died on Saturday at the age of 84. He came up as a Brooklyn Dodger in 1956 and kept playing baseball after being traded in 1964 from the Mets to the White Sox for Charley Smith (Met 3B No. 17 if you’re scoring at home; Hickman and Pumpsie Green also gave it a whirl in ’63). Chico would play in the minors, in Japan, in Mexico and, as late as 1968, back in American Triple-A. He didn’t give up. For eighteen professional seasons, he maintained the kind of hope he gave us for a week in May of 1963, an interval that I suppose amounts to a footnote relative to what he achieved in Detroit. The Cuban-born infielder made his mark as the Tigers’ first Latin player to start on a regular basis. His old Detroit teammates still speak fondly of the man whose given name was Humberto. His wife acknowledged on Ultimate Mets Database that he wasn’t particularly enthused to join our second-division ranks, but was careful to add, “He did love Met fans.”
We return a little of that love 53 years later by remembering that Chico Fernandez inspired a little hope in us during a ballgame which was enshrouded in hopelessness before he hit one out of Candlestick.
***
We paid quiet tribute on Sunday by investing similar hope in Wilmer Flores, a native of Venezuela and a permanent citizen of our hearts since last summer when he showed us he, too, loves Met fans. If Flores could get a hit at Miller Park…if he could bring home Cespedes from third in the eighth, then it would be 5-4. If he could manage the right kind of hit, maybe a long one or one that got by a Brewer glove the way balls had been eluding Met leather, it could be 5-5. And if Wilmer reprised the role that earned him Best Drama in a Pennant Race in 2015…reprise it versus his ghost team, the Brewers with the type of hit he inflicted on the Nationals…well, then we wouldn’t have been wasting our hope on this Sunday, would have we?
Wilmer did his part. He connected for a sinking line drive to left. When it fell in, it would indeed be 5-4. If it did something quirky — and wasn’t it already quirky that this game wasn’t effectively over? — it could be 5-5. There was hope in the air.
Unfortunately, there was left fielder Ryan Braun diving to the ground, making a pretty good catch. Braun caught a third out along with our whimsical wishes, leaving the score where it would wind up for permanent filing, Brewers 5 Mets 3.
Yet we cannot say we wasted our hope. We never do. It’s our greatest renewable resource. The only way we cease to make more of it is to stop hoping at all. We have 100 games to keep trying.
And I hope to see you in Greenpoint at WORD Bookstore (126 Franklin St.), Tuesday at 7 PM, where I’ll be joining Mets By The Numbers author Jon Springer and NBC Sports writer D.J. Short and discussing my book Amazin’ Again. There was a lot of hope in that volume, come to think of it.
If it wasn’t exactly déjà vu all over again, I was nonetheless struck, well before its outcome became obvious, by a near-certainty Saturday that the game I was watching was not going to be won by the Mets. This was before thousands of miles worth of home runs were blasted by Brewer batters off of Logan Verrett and Antonio Bastardo and preceded by Met batters’ insistence on stranding their brethren on base.
“Do the Mets,” I asked myself, “ever win the second-to-last game of a series they play in Milwaukee?” The answer, which I just got around to looking up, is, “No.”
Really, they don’t. I suppose the operative term should be they haven’t, not since 2008, anyway. From 2009 forward, inclusive of 2016, the Mets have come to Miller Park for eight series and, in the game before the last game of each series, they have gone back to the hotel with a loss.
I checked Ultimate Mets Database, which for the purposes of this hunch-driven narrow research served as Penultimate Mets Database. Penultimate Mets games in Milwaukee consistently go down as perennial defeats.
It’s happened in second games of three-game series.
It’s happened in third games of four-game series.
It’s happened on Saturdays.
It’s happened on weeknights.
It’s happened in walkoffs.
It’s happened in slugfests.
It’s happened to aces like Johan Santana.
It’s happened to journeymen like Shaun Marcum.
It’s happened eight times in a row now.
Just because it keeps happening doesn’t mean it had to keep happening. Unlike the Brewer bats, there is limited power in precedent. Most likely it’s just one of those things, but after seven consecutive episodes of such unhappy days, it’s tough to shake the sense that an eighth will be right back after these commercial messages.
Did it have to happen this time around? Depends where you stand on the spectrum between utter randomness and preordained destiny. Verrett pitched a spotless bottom of the first and Asdrubal Cabrera hit what seemed like a long two-run homer in the top of the second. The Mets were up, 2-0, and the Brewers, who absorbed the worst from Friday night’s dual debacle, were perhaps mired in a haze that would also smother the heretofore undetected not-quite-getaway day jinx. It certainly couldn’t hurt the Mets’ cause that they were facing Wily Peralta. Peralta entered Saturday with an ERA (6.79) measuring greater than the amount a person pays for an overpriced Nathan’s hot dog at Citi Field ($6.75).
That next sound you heard was that of pitches Verrett threw going for joyrides. Or perhaps they were screaming in agony. Either way, it wasn’t good from a Met perspective. Chris Carter hit one to the occupying 7 Line Army in left. Ryan Braun launched one last seen headed toward NATO headquarters in Brussels. To paraphrase Crash Davis, anything travels that far oughta have a damn warhead on it, don’t you think? Missiles were flying everywhere. Kirk Nieuwenhuis got in on the act in his way, which consisted of a double, a stolen base and a run scored. Even Peralta, who surely knows what a home run looks like from his vast experience giving them up, sent one deep into Braun territory.
Pitchers hitting home runs: not as much fun when the gopher is on the other foot.
Curtis Granderson kept the Mets viable with a homer of his own in the fifth, cosmetically cutting the Brewer lead to 5-3, but his signature blow Saturday was the leadoff triple that didn’t quite go out in the third. Terry Collins challenged the yellow-line vagaries of Miller Park’s right field fence but was rebuffed. You’d take an immediate tally, for sure, yet the consolation was Grandy on third with nobody out. He was gonna come home eventually, right?
The Mets will board a flight to New York after today’s game, so yes, Curtis Granderson will come home to wherever he lives during the baseball season. But in the immediate context of Saturday’s third inning, home was a concept not easily grasped. Grandy retreated to third when Michael Conforto lined out nearby and then was statistically stranded there after Yoenis Cespedes walked and Neil Walker grounded into a double play. Man on third, nobody out, nobody scores…what fun. Also, Walker’s apparently chronic bad back — the Met version of a fraternity pin — acted up and he had to leave. It’s either no big deal or an enormously big deal.
That, like most things in the Met universe, will be determined by a visit to a doctor, a surprisingly lengthy inactive stay on the active roster and then who knows? By the time we find out, it will likely be little remembered that the Mets lost their second-to-last game in Milwaukee, 7-4 (with Scooter Gennett and Braun mashing Bastardo). Perhaps the Mets will have captured their Sunday Miller finale and enjoy a cheery flight into LaGuardia. Perhaps whatever has plagued them physically, mentally and spiritually on this road trip — a clunky three-city tour during which they’ve nonetheless gone 5-4 — will dissipate when they return to Citi Field, where, at least until his next start, the price of a frank will list higher than the number of earned runs Wily Peralta allows every nine innings. In defeating the Mets, the otherwise beleaguered Brewer starter lowered his ERA to 6.68 while jacking his slugging percentage to .250, or just a little lower than the figure key Met pinch-hitter Alejandro De Aza (.279) is packing these days.
Maybe they can pack one last win in Milwaukee, too. You know, they’re 8-1 in their last nine Miller Park getaway games.
Come to WORD Bookstore in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, Tuesday night at 7 PM for an evening of Mets book talk. I’ll be joining Jon Springer of Mets By The Numbers and D.J. Short of NBC Sports. Full details here. Hope to see you there.
The eleventh inning was rolling around
The opposing offenses were making no sound
Boyer the Brewer was manning the mound
Blaine looked to the plate
As the hour grew late
Asdrubal Cabrera was the hitter he found
Cabrera commenced
To single to right
To all, perhaps
An Asdrubal good night?
Flores was the Met
Seen teeing off next
A double to left
Thus entered the text
Cabrera wasn’t swift enough
To bring the run home
These Mets, they don’t scurry;
They’re more prone to roam
Kelly Johnson, class of 2015
Reappeared as a Met, shipped north for ’16
Every year he alights in our midst an ex-Brave
Would his second debut be a game he could save?
Four balls went to Kelly
To load every base
On deck was a batter
They’d much rather face
Milwaukee preferred Plawecki
As most any sharp ballclub would
Plawecki fouled out in an instant
The kid’s not yet very good
Now stepped in Matt Reynolds —
On the depth chart he ranks twenty-five
Yet it was left to disposable Matthew
To attempt to keep Met hope alive
Amazin’ Again, my book that tells how the 2015 Mets brought the magic back to Queens, makes its Brooklyn debut this Tuesday night at 7 o’clock when I join my longtime friend and esteemed blolleague Jon Springer at WORD Bookstore in Greenpoint (126 Franklin St., convenient to the G train) for a Metsian discussion many digits in the making.
Amazin’ comes to Brooklyn.
Jon is the founder of MBTN.net, a.k.a. Mets By The Numbers, which also happens to be the book Jon will be talking about Tuesday. The all-new revised edition of one of the truly essential not to mention incredibly enjoyable Met histories — which Jon first co-authored with our fellow Met-loving writer, Matthew Silverman, in 2008 — will bring to light what every Met has worn in every game since 1962 and tell the stories behind the intersection of players and numbers. Jon pretty much invented the concept of using the Internet as a repository for timeless Mets information. Come to think of it, the book works well in that capacity, too.
Moderating our discussion on all matters Met, numerical and otherwise, will be D.J. Short, one of NBC Sports’ outstanding baseball scribes. We’ll delve into our writing, our team, the whole nine yards, or should I say innings. And when it’s over, we’ll probably seek out an establishment that will allow us to watch the conclusion of that night’s Mets-Pirates tilt (hopefully tilting in our favor by then).
Whether you reside in Brooklyn as Jon and D.J. do, you were born there as I was, or you just happen to want in on an Amazin’ Mets night from wherever you hail, by all means come on down to WORD.
(If you can’t make it Tuesday night, but still want a personalized, autographed copy of Amazin’ Again, you can order one here or make your way to the Queens Library in Briarwood on June 25, details here.)
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.
