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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I came home from Closing Day today, still a little miffed that Jose Reyes pulled himself from the game the second he got to first. I didn’t mind the protecting of his .337 average. But he couldn’t have stayed on the bag another minute? Who pinch-runs for Jose Reyes if he’s not injured?
Teddy Ballgame, it is emphasized in some quarters, would not have sat himself when he was going for .400 in 1941. Fine. He wins the sportsmanship award from 70 years ago. Nevertheless, I looked forward to finding out if .337 would be enough to win a batting crown here in the present of 2011. Ryan Braun came into tonight batting .335 and could still steal this thing. Everybody else was worried about Wild Card races — the Cardinals having made up so much ground on the Braves, while the Rays are perhaps on the verge of taking down the Red Sox — but this was the one I was focused on.
Yet as I will when I go to day games, especially when I went the night before, I drifted off on the couch after Braun’s first at-bat, which was an out. Maybe I did more than drift off, because it feels like I was asleep for the longest time, during which I had the strangest dream.
First, Braun went 0-for-4 to finish .332. Reyes indeed won the batting title, the first any Met ever got. It should have been a bigger deal. It wasn’t. The choreography of exiting in the first inning seemed to be what got people’s attention. Next, he filed for free agency. The Mets didn’t make him an offer. Suddenly he was a Florida Marlin, the worst thing you can be. No, actually, they were called the Miami Marlins in my dream. They weren’t wearing teal anymore. They had a new stadium and a bunch of other free agents to go with Jose and that young slugger who kills the Mets, Mike Stanton. Except Mike Stanton was now Giancarlo Stanton.
I found myself at Citi Field in what I guess was the next season. Jose came up to bat for the Marlins. I stood and applauded. Not many did. Nobody had a memory. In my dream, it really bothered me. I couldn’t get used to him not being a Met. I couldn’t stand that the weird Marlin uniform he was wearing (black and orange and maybe two or three other colors) was all anybody saw. In my dream, Sandy Alderson said something about sending him a box of chocolates instead of possibly negotiating a contract. I think it was supposed to be a joke. I didn’t get it.
Ruben Tejada was the Mets’ shortstop in my dream. I found myself resenting the kid, which is too bad, because I really like him as a second baseman and still hold out hope that when the Mets do re-sign Reyes — they’re not gonna let him go, no way — Ruben will be Jose’s double play partner for years to come. David will be at third and Ike, once he’s over the mysterious injury he sustained in Colorado and the valley fever, will be at first. I don’t know what they’ll do with Daniel Murphy. He’s always getting hurt and, besides, he’s not really a second baseman. Maybe we could trade him to some American League team that could use him as a designated hitter and get bullpen help. Maybe somebody would take Manny Acosta as long as I’m dreaming.
Anyway, Reyes is a Marlin, and I keep showing up at Citi Field to applaud him even if nobody else does. This goes on for a season and then he’s a Blue Jay. I guess the Marlins had another fire sale. They kept Stanton and apparently nobody else. Reyes was in the other league and the Mets continued to suck. Tejada wasn’t that great a shortstop, it turned out. They couldn’t replace Jose. They even tried Omar Quintanilla, one of those names I think I saw in a box score once. It’s weird how stuff like that infiltrates your dreams.
Next thing I know, the Mets are really good. Reyes is a Rockie (traded for Troy Tulowitzki, who I wouldn’t mind never seeing at Citi Field again after what he did to us in April) and looks bored. I’m not sure what one thing had to do with the other, but I told you it was a strange dream. I’m at a game where we’re playing Colorado and think that it’s too bad he’s not the player he was when he was competing for the batting title for us, but time marches on and maybe I’m finally over him.
Here’s where it really gets bizarre. In the dream, Reyes is wearing a Brooklyn Cyclones uniform. Or was it a Binghamton uniform? Either way, he’s sort of back with the Mets. He’s older. He kind of looks like himself but not quite — you know, like the difference between Izzy when he came up and Izzy when he came back this year. They’re saying Jose’s going to be a Met again for real. They’re holding a press conference and he’s saying how happy he is to be home, but it doesn’t feel exactly like a homecoming. Somebody keeps interrupting to mention Reyes wouldn’t be here if he hadn’t thrown his wife into a glass door in Hawaii — Hawaii? — and he’s a bad guy and the Mets shouldn’t sign him. Then somebody else says he’s served his suspension, and the Mets could use him maybe.
He’s not the shortstop in my dream. He’s the third baseman. David Wright has a bandage on his neck and a beard. He doesn’t play anymore but he hangs around. Jose has a beard, too. Terry Collins is still the manager. Both he and David say nice things about Jose, though they, too, sort of reprimand his behavior. So does Alderson. Jose’s back but he’s not back. He’s wearing No. 7, except even that isn’t simple. He had to get it back from a catcher with an odd-looking last name that begins with a lower-case letter. The catcher switches to 18 in tribute to, get this, Peyton Manning.
Finally, after I don’t know how many years in the dream, Jose steps up to bat against the “Miami” Marlins. He gets a nice hand — a nicer hand than he got when he returned as a Marlin — but on TV it sounds a little more tentative than I would have imagined prior to this business about him being arrested in Hawaii, which even in this whole surreal scenario I can’t truly fathom. Gary and Ron (Keith isn’t there) take very measured tones. In the moment it takes me to absorb that my favorite player is a Met again and that it’s not the unalloyed restoration I had hoped for, because what he did was as bad as everybody was suggesting, he strikes out. In the rest of the game, he doesn’t get on base and the only fielding he does at third is take a throw from the catcher wearing 18 with the lower-case letter on a stolen base from one of the Marlins.
I also think I saw Ichiro Suzuki in the visitors’ dugout and Curtis Granderson in right field for the Mets. James Loney was on first base for us, the guy from the Dodgers; I don’t know what happened to Ike. And on TV they were saying something about who was on the All-Star team. Jose wasn’t. It was like all Cubs plus Daniel Murphy, except Murphy was a National and lost the starting spot at second by only 88 votes (yeah, right, Daniel Murphy an All-Star second baseman — I suppose Terry Collins is managing). The Mets had three All-Stars, or one more than we did this year when it was Reyes and Beltran before we traded him to the Giants. One of them was the minor league pitching prospect Familia, and don’t ask me why his name appeared in my subconscious. The other two were spelled funny. Yoendegaard something or somebody? I have no idea who they were or what they represented. Oh — Beltran was an All-Star again, but for the Yankees, for crissake.
The only part of the whole thing that felt real was Mike…I mean Giancarlo Stanton homering twice for the Marlins, one on a searing line drive above a bunch of seats Citi Field doesn’t actually have (there was a blue fence in front of the black wall), one on an absolute bomb where nobody except maybe Scott Hairston hits them. The Marlins won, ending a Mets winning streak in which they’d scored a ton of runs before Reyes reappeared, the implication being nothing in your dreams is ever quite or even close to how you want it.
Then I woke up. What did Braun do in his second at-bat?
It happens sometimes: life, that amorphous bundle of stuff, refuses to conform itself to the rhythms of 7:10 and 1:10 and 4:10. I thought I had my July 4th parceled out so three hours were reserved for the Mets game, but I hadn’t been paying attention to which day was which.
I’ve got a mental list of about 50,000 favorite things about baseball. Near the top you’ll find how the game stays rewarding at many different levels of engagement. You can watch in “lean-forward” mode, scrutinizing every pitch and trying to think along with the pitcher and the catcher against the hitters, in hopes of cracking the code and predicting victory or defeat. Or you can watch in lazy “lean-back” mode, letting the game be a companion as you do errands, read magazines, or just loll on the couch. (You might even nod off and miss an inning or four.) They’re very different experiences, both far better than an afternoon or evening featuring no baseball.
Then there’s the phenomenon of the game that happens without you, which is an odd mix — at least for me — of philosophy and superstition.
When I had to check out of Independence Day’s Mets-Marlins tilt, it didn’t seem like much of a tragedy.
First, I’d watched the Mets and every other team take the field in ridiculous MLB-mandated clown suits. I’m all for supporting our troops — we’ve collectively failed, as we collectively fail at so many things these days, at ensuring returning veterans get educational and job opportunities for their service and support for dealing with physical and mental injuries suffered during that service. But it’s beyond me why supporting that worthy goal means baseball teams should look like your TV’s on the fritz. The Stars-N-Stripes uniforms looked objectively terrible, like some intern went on Photoshop, slid team colors vaguely in the direction of red and blue, flung a cut-rate cap into the mix and logged off.
A suggestion for MLB: quit half-assing the aesthetics. How about putting each team in a uniform inspired by a military unit from its state? Here’s the 10th Mountain Division, based at Fort Drum in upstate New York. Design a July 4th Mets uniform inspired by that insignia and those colors. Or do something else — if my two-minute idea is already better than what MLB does, I’m sure smarter people could come up with something really compelling. What we’re getting now is an unholy mess.
(Before we charge on into Matt Harvey, did anyone catch the Nats and Brewers playing at 11 a.m.? The Brewers were caught batting out of order, which means Ryan Braun‘s single became an out charged to Jonathan Lucroy, who’d been the scheduled batter, and credited to catcher Wilson Ramos, who’d had nothing to do with anything. Lucroy then came up the second time through the order and lined out on the first pitch he saw. Which meant that, yes, Jonathan Lucroy was 0 for 2 in the box score after seeing one pitch in real life. It’s an unfair game.)
Anyway, Harvey took the hill for the Mets, looked good in the first and then stuff started happening. As has happened in a number of his 2016 starts, Harvey’s pitches were missing that little bit of finish that would make sliders dip across the margins of the strike zone and make fastballs wiggle in it. A bunch of those pitches got hit. So too did some better pitches that the Marlins happened to place fair — something we thought was dandy when it befell Jon Lester but were less amused by yesterday. And there were some things that could have gone Harvey’s way but didn’t: in the second, it looked like Mets would escape down just 1-0 after Chris Johnson was tagged out trying to advance to second. But the umps ruled — correctly — that Johnson had made it there safely. Three more hits, two more runs and a bunch more pitches followed.
Harvey made his own bad luck in the fourth. With the bases loaded and one out, Martin Prado hit a one-hop grounder that Harvey fielded on the mound. A simple throw to Travis d’Arnaud, waiting with his foot on home plate, a relay to the sure-handed James Loney at first, and the inning would be over with the Mets down a not-insurmountable 3-0. Harvey spiked the ball into the dirt wide of d’Arnaud, then gave up a two-run single to Christian Yelich. 6-0 Marlins, exit Harvey attended by a whole lot of boos.
By that point I was prepping for the dinner I’d failed to account for schedule-wise. I heard Josh Lewin burbling outside of the shower (he was on At Bat, not seated on my toilet — that would have been strange for both of us) and emerged to find nothing substantive had changed. D’Arnaud hit a homer, followed by Curtis Granderson doing the same, but those seemed cosmetic and I headed out the door for dinner with my wife and her father-in-law having written this one off.
Between the appetizer and the main course, news gleaned from a surreptitious phone peek: it was 6-4.
More news a bit later from MLB In Lap: it was 6-4 but the Mets had runners on second and third with nobody out. That’s when the Mets have been least dangerous this year, but two things: a) you should read this nifty FanGraphs piece I keep failing to find a place for; and b) it feels like the worm’s turned over the last several days, as that piece suggested it might.
And indeed, a glance lapward as dinner ended showed that somehow it was 6-6. Amazin’!
Here’s where the philosophy/superstition arrives. Despite being a generally rational human being in an age of science, I find it hard not to believe that the universe — or at least the baseball part of it — is governed by laws about karma and right practice. I’d gone AWOL on the Mets when it was 6-2 and in my absence they’d tied the game. Clearly, if I reappeared as a fan I would be punished for dereliction of duty.
We went home and turned on the set.
After d’Arnaud got aboard on an infield hit, I knew Terry Collins would do two things, neither of which I approved of: a) he would give up a precious out by bunting; and b) he would not run for d’Arnaud because it was theoretically possible that Rene Rivera would get injured in the 512th inning. And so it was: Juan Lagares bunted d’Arnaud over, Granderson flied out, Neil Walker did what his name suggests (walking, not kneiling) and up stepped Yoenis Cespedes.
And well, ker-blam, up the gap on Fernando Rodney, shorn of his goatee by the Marlins and shorn of his skyward arrow by the Mets, at least for a day. So much for superstition and decrying 19th century strategy.
Enter Jeurys Familia and bring on some nail-biting. Perhaps feeling invulnerable after escaping my karmic comeuppance, I offered a semi-prediction with Johnson at the plate, one out and Familia’s pitch count in the 20s.
“This isn’t the guy who scares me in a situation like this,” I said. “Johnson’s a .248 hitter who’s already got three hits on the day. The guy who scares me is the .300 hitter who’s oh for five.”
Two pitches later, Johnson hit a perfect double-play ball to Asdrubal Cabrera. It’s nice to be right once in a while, even if you feel like you don’t deserve it.
It doesn’t take a Richard Henry Lee galloping down to the House of Burgesses and back (stopping off in Stratford long enough to refresh the missus) to deliver a resolution that declares unequivoca-LEE that the four-game series the New York Mets just completed against the Chicago Cubs is and ought to be considered among the most glorious quartets of contests ever brought forth on this continent, or at least Flushing.
So help me Wilmer.
As great series go, this was about as good it gets. The mood beforehand was morose. The incoming opposition was assumed omnipotent. What could possibly go right?
Everything. Every little thing the Mets did at Citi Field in sweeping the four games winding down the season’s first half and leading up to this Fourth of July was magic. Two nailbiters; two blowouts; a dozen homers; thirty-two runs overall; and fourteen runs in the finale, fueled by twenty-two hits that included six in six at-bats from one third baseman whose jersey every July seems to tell us all we need to know.
At the end of last July, Wilmer Flores famously tugged at the “Mets” on his shirt as he crossed home plate in the twelfth inning so as to inform us what team he was about to spiritually lead on an uncharted adventure into autumn. At the beginning of this July, it was the number on his uniform top that accurately transmitted the weekend’s vital 411.
Wilmer wears 4.
The Mets just swept 4.
And what a 4 they were.
Seats that had never been touched were reached on Thursday. Players that had been barely seen became stars on Friday. Leads teetering on the brink of dissolution remained resolute on Saturday. And hits that just kept on coming just kept on coming and coming some more on Sunday, especially from Flores, he who homered and singled in the second, singled in the fourth, homered in the fifth, singled in the seventh and — batting against a catcher, which will happen when you’re poised for a sixth plate appearance — singled in the eighth.
Six hits in one game tied a Mets record, originally forged by the revered Edgardo Alfonzo in 1999. Like Wilmer, Fonzie hailed from Venezuela and got shifted around the infield quite a bit in his Mets career. Unlike Fonzie, Wilmer rarely receives the benefit of the doubt. Once Edgardo proved he could hit, a spot — some years at third, others at second — was found for him. The only place Wilmer ever seems guaranteed of having is in our hearts.
The diamond has proven a more tenuous setting for Flores. He was more or less the regular shortstop in 2015, but the Mets got amnesia and then Asdrubal. Lately Wilmer’s the stopgap third baseman, filling in for one sidelined franchise legend while seatwarming for another. That Jose Reyes (all not-so-ancillary issues aside) has never played third in the majors doesn’t seem to faze those who assign players their positions. Perhaps Reyes will be professionally reborn at David Wright’s corner. Perhaps Flores, on the heels of 6-for-6, will look pretty good by comparison.
He looked incomparable at the plate Sunday. So did the Mets as an entity. The 22 hits tied another team record: most in a home game, first set on September 20, 1981, which was no random affair. It was the third win of a three-game sweep of first-place St. Louis in the “second season” of that torn-asunder strike year. The Mets failed to hit with runners on for much of the day, which explains why a 22-hit attack produced only a 7-6 victory. Ah, but the twenty-second hit excavated from that Sunday at Shea is what made for the happiest of recaps, with Mookie Wilson ending the game via walkoff home run against future Hall of Famer Bruce Sutter.
Sweeping the Cardinals moved the Mets to within two-and-a-half games of first place with two weeks to go as New York improbably insinuated itself into a mini-pennant race. The particulars of what turned into a false alarm (the Mets fell out of contention almost as quickly as they’d catapulted into it) are broadly forgotten, but the emotions were timeless. Mookie, then 25, called it “the most exciting game of my life”. The fans, deprived of a semblance of September stimulation for so long, were on board with his sentiment. There was no Mr. Met Dash or sponsored postgame festivity, yet, as Bob Murphy described the euphoria over Channel 9, when he was still doing TV, “The crowd is just staying here. They don’t want to go home. It’s unbelievable!”
You gotta believe nobody was in a rush to exit baseball nirvana, which is where we and our team currently reside after sweeping four from the Cubs. I don’t know if these four wins over Joe Maddon’s projected world champions (based on zero percent of October precincts reporting) will send us roaring into the second half on a runway of momentum, or if this was yet another of those spurts that will be answered with a spritz of 2016 reality, the kind that has thus far doused every encouraging burst of energy with a dose of lethargy. I also don’t much care after bearing witness to these four games, each and every one of them a beauty on its own terms. The Wild Card is still up for grabs and the division isn’t down the tubes. That’s all the context I need on this holiday Monday.
Sunday we had Flores and his six hits. We had Syndergaard and his untroubled seven innings. We had the Mets chasing Lester in the second after posting eight runs. We had Granderson, Rivera and Johnson each chipping in a homer, making it five Met bombs bursting in air on the day, matching the Citi Field team record established two whole nights earlier. We had basically every Met, compression-sleeved and otherwise, doing something marvelous to create the 14-3 punctuation that punted Chicago from the premises. We had four wins in a row against the Cubs in one series for the first time since, oh yeah, the 2015 NLCS, but also four wins in a row against the Cubs in one regular-season series for the first time since the Mets administered reprisal for 1984’s not-ready-for-prime-time shortfall by sweeping the defending divisional kings out of Queens in June of 1985. Those Sutcliffe-Sandberg Cubs were reeling when they dropped by Flushing and, soon after losing four of four to the rival Mets, dropped off the map for the rest of ’85. The Shea PA blasted “The Night Chicago Died” for emphasis when it was over. It was glorious.
As was this series, when the Mets went on a tear…a tear of joy.
Say, a friend of mine has a neat idea to commemorate a piece of Citi Field history. Check it out here and, if so inclined, please lend your support to the effort.
When the 2016 Mets trudged home to Citi Field earlier this week, it sure looked like they’d ceded the divisional race on June 29, dragged down by injuries, bad luck, lack of clutchness and Daniel Murphy, to name but a few maladies.
Later today, somehow, they’ll trust a four-game sweep of the big bad Chicago Cubs to Noah Syndergaard.
Baseball is designed to break your heart, as Bart Giamatti warned us all those years ago. But it’s also designed to make you look stupid, whether you’re an optimist or a pessimist. This isn’t a bug but a feature: if you tell a half-year story in three-hour chapters, you’re certain to get lost in the plot’s twists and turns.
Still, good luck keeping perspective. We’re storytelling monkeys, an adaptation that helped us find patterns when leopards were picking off our ancestors who picked fruit at dusk but now mostly causes us to believe in conspiracies and fail to calculate odds. And look, it’s a lot more fun to listen to the story that’s unfolding now than it is to clap your hands over your ears and insist the real tale’s still unknowable. Try intoning that “the odds are against this meaning anything in October” right after the conclusion of a Braveheart-style comeback in early May. If you don’t get beer thrown on you, you’ll find yourself with no one to talk to on the 7 train. And with reason.
The same thing is true, in miniature, of individual games. Last night, as Bartolo Colon drifted serenely on and off the pitcher’s mound and Jake Arrieta stalked around in a huff, I found myself thinking that while watching a game we’re forever assembling, disassembling and reassembling it in our heads based on what seems fated to happen. (To be fair, this may be a side effect of recapping.)
Sometimes these stories-in-progress are pretty easy calls: if the Mets give up 10 in the first, you’ve probably got an embarrassing farce that will grind on interminably. If they score 10 in the first, substitute “merry” for “embarrassing” and “amble along amusingly” for “grind on interminably.”
But a lot of the time you don’t know — and so you keep trying scenarios on for size and running the risk of making a fool of yourself.
Here’s last night’s likely story, revised as events shifted or threatened to:
1) Romp, with Fireworks: So declared after Neil Walker followed Brandon Nimmo‘s opening walk with a high drive that clanged off the facing of the top deck of Citi Field’s Sponsored Soft-Drink Demarcated Region. This narrative picked up speed after Yoenis Cespedes followed with a double and the Mets kept ratcheting Arrieta’s pitch count higher.
2) Grim Reminder That One Does Not Waste Runs: Swam into view after Cespedes — who’d arrived at second before Arrieta recorded an out — failed to score. Making Arrieta throw 35 pitches in the first was good; failing to convert a gimme third run was not. It was only 2-0, and those were the Cubs out there.
3) ‘I Told You’ Shrug of Despair: Proposed story filed in the top of the fourth, when the Cubs began things with a Kris Bryant single and an Anthony Rizzo shot over Cespedes’s head that let the excess of Cub fans in the stands find their voice. Now it was 2-2 and anything — Gutty Mets Win, Evil Cubs Take Revenge, Death March to Inning Twenty — seemed possible.
4) We’re Unlucky Except When We’re Lucky: In the bottom of the fourth Asdrubal Cabrera singled, Alejandro De Aza forgot to screw up and Travis d’Arnaud stepped up with two out and two on. He hit a sad little pop fly, one that sounded like it might have broken his bat and drifted over the infield. Javier Baez almost made a barehanded, back-to-the-infield, over-the-shoulder catch, but that’s hard to do. The perfectly placed ball fell in, and because there were two out both runners scored. 4-2 Mets, somehow.
5) Offensive Ineptitude > Occasional Luck: Bottom of the Mets’ fifth, Nimmo single, Walker single, three straight outs. It would be dumb to have Cespedes bunt, of course, but still. What the hell, stupid Mets? If we lose this game 5-4 that inning is really gonna hurt.
6) What the Hell, Stupid Mets? (Reprise):Juan Lagares came back just to hit into a double play with runners on the corners and one out? Ridiculous!
7) Middle Relief Is Our Soft Underbelly: Enter Erik Goeddel, exit baseball struck by Ben Zobrist. 4-3 Mets, enter Jerry Blevins … who walks Jason Heyward. Enter Addison Reed, and oh man this is the same Addison Reed who sometimes looks great and sometimes throws an eye-high bait pitch down the middle at 92, and that’s Bryant at the plate and OH GOD NOW A WILD PITCH SENT HEYWARD TO SECOND AUGGHH I DON’T WANT TO LOOK.
8) Addison Reed Is a Goddamn Gunslinger, I Tell Ya: Oh, he struck Bryant out and did that thing where he sticks his hat back on his head and moseys (mosies?) off the hill into the dugout like a boss. You and me, we’re temporarily cool, Addison Reed.
9) That Was Fun, But Now I Need to Author a Screed About Bullpen Management: Rizzo’s leading off the Cub eighth in a one-run game. Shouldn’t Jeurys Familia be in here instead of facing the bottom of the order in the ninth? Terry Collins is so stupid. Wait, except relievers take comfort from clearly delineated roles and that’s not Terry’s fault and honestly the guy in the other dugout’s the innovator. Baseball is so stupid.
10) Have You Already Forgotten That Addison Reed Is a Goddamn Gunslinger?: Struck out the side. I’m the one who’s so stupid.
11) Jeurys Familia Is God, Maaaan: No sweat, Mets win. A crisp, exciting game in which the Mets wore down Arrieta and then hung on, and Bartolo’s Zen and Loney started that nifty double play blah blah blah blah.
12) Get Out the Brooms, We Can Sweep the Cubs This Is Awesome!!!!: Well yeah. Unless we don’t and it isn’t. In which case a new narrative awaits.
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.
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.
