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ABOUT US
Faith and Fear in Flushing made its debut on Feb. 16, 2005, the brainchild of two longtime friends and lifelong Met fans.
Greg Prince discovered the Mets when he was 6, during the magical summer of 1969. He is a Long Island-based writer, editor and communications consultant. Contact him here.
Jason Fry is a Brooklyn writer whose first memories include his mom leaping up and down cheering for Rusty Staub. Check out his other writing here.
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by Greg Prince on 18 May 2016 6:07 am I particularly liked the part where Bryce Harper struck out. That I have to be more specific than that I also particularly like.
I’m referring to the top of the fourth, one out, nobody on, the Mets ahead of the Nationals, 2-0. Noah Syndergaard is one-two on the consensus best player in the National League and…frozen. Syndergaard painted the black a shade of ebony ice. Harper didn’t know what to do with the most perfectly placed inside pitch you’ll ever see, so he stood and he took it for strike three. It was only the second out of the fourth inning, only the fifth of an eventual ten K’s unleashed by the Met starter, but it was surely a victory within a victory.
Great pitching had stopped great hitting. The law of the jungle had prevailed.
Baseball was fun again Tuesday night, which should have made Harper happy as heck, given that he pointedly referred to the sport as “tired” in Spring Training. Coincidentally, the Mets looked tired on their recent road trip to nowhere, especially its last leg, which, of course, never happened. Then they arrived home and woke up, starting their day with a nutritious breakfast consisting of sublime pitching and solo home runs.
You know, the breakfast of defending league champions.
Syndergaard ate up the Nationals with a spoon so as to get every drop: seven innings (apparently the modern-day equivalent of nine), four singles, one double, no walks, no runs and let’s not forget those ten strikeouts, including two of Harper. The line of Thor outpaced that of Max Scherzer, who went not quite as deep and failed to keep within the confines of Citi Field two fly balls to right. One was the very first pitch he delivered to Curtis Granderson, who in turn delivered it beyond the reach of Harper, who might tower over the game, yet isn’t tall enough to catch everything socked in his general direction. Granderson spent the bottom of every inning in which he batted as a baserunner of some sort, a happenstance that in 2015 tended to serve as gateway to triumph. Come the third, Michael Conforto also sent a ball suitably out of fielding range, another splendid sign.
That gave Noah a two-run lead, an edge that held up without obvious muss or fuss the rest of the way. Addison Reed and Jeurys Familia each threw perfect innings to seal a much-needed 2-0 win, a definitive first blow in the projected 19-round battle for National League East supremacy. It’s a little early to be determining a division champ, but it’s never too soon to capture what feels from the outset like a very big game.
Scherzer struck out 20 Tigers in previous start. He struck out half as many Mets this time around. Subtract a few feet from Granderson’s and Conforto’s respective efforts, and perhaps this affair would have encroached into West Coast start time. Mad Max was almost as good as Thor, but not as good. Thor was both dominant and efficient and, as a result, the Mets were winners in two hours and thirty-two minutes. Even with pair of replay reviews mixed in — both from the Nationals, including one triggered despite their not having any challenges remaining (go figure) — it was a deliciously brisk evening.
Only one National made it as far as third base. Harper didn’t get on base at all. Friendly Ghost of October Past Daniel Murphy, the focus of some well-deserved appreciation upon his reintroduction to Flushing, blooped one single (beyond the reach of Neil Walker, appropriately enough) but was stranded alongside his .399 batting average in the on-deck circle as Harper grounded out to surprise third base starter Matt Reynolds to conclude the contest.
That the Mets could top their first-place rivals behind Syndergaard is no surprise. That they could defeat Scherzer while featuring Reynolds in his major league debut at third and good old Soup Campbell at first, well, that’s the Power of Thor, a scintillating blend of heat, location and savoir faire. His second strikeout of Harper, in the sixth, consisted of a sinker, a changeup and a backdoor slider; talk about putting the Mjölnir down. Someone who can outduel another elite ace and make you forget the stiff backs of David Wright and Lucas Duda can really inspire you. After he fanned Harper in the fourth, I was ready to don appropriate headgear and parade through Times Square.
But then I would have missed Noah’s next four innings, and why would I want do that?
Heartfelt thanks to all who came out to Turn of the Corkscrew Books & Wine on Monday night for a pulsating evening of Mets talk. When in the greater Rockville Centre area, I heartily suggest visiting the independent bookseller on North Park Avenue. They stock some fairly Amazin’ items.
by Greg Prince on 16 May 2016 9:06 am “What a miserable series.”
“What series?”
“The one the Mets just played in Denver.”
“It never happened.”
“What do you mean it never happened? We just watched all three games.”
“There weren’t any three games.”
“Of course there were. There was Friday night, when Matt Harvey’s self-doubt registered higher on the radar gun than his fastball.”
“There was no game Friday night.”
“Then there was Saturday night, when Logan Verrett got jobbed on a swinging strike that masqueraded as a foul tip and crumbled immediately thereafter.”
“There was no game Saturday night.”
“And then on Sunday afternoon, Jacob deGrom looked ordinary on the mound, Alejandro de Aza and Michael Conforto looked clueless in the field, Jim Henderson looked gassed in the seventh, the bats looked hollow, the manager looked beaten and the umps looked crooked when they called Juan Lagares out at a critical juncture even though he was a) not being tagged and b) staying in the baseline.”
“There was no game Sunday afternoon.”
“No game, huh? So you’re telling me the Mets didn’t give up a tenuous 3-2 lead and lose, 4-3, to get swept by the Rockies at Coors Field.”
“Get what where?”
“Swept at Coors Field! The Mets lost three to Colorado and four in a row overall to end a long and futile road trip that left them in third place behind the freaking Phillies, never mind the Nationals.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“How could you not know? All weekend we watched and listened and fretted and moaned and…”
“None of that happened. This series never happened. Sunday’s game never happened. Coors Field never happened. Got me?”
“But the box score…”
“There is no box score.”
“And the standings…”
“There are no standings…”
“And the 19% discount promotion…”
“Look at me. Look in my eyes. Hear what I’m saying. It never happened. It never happened. Kapish?”
“Who?”
“Exactly.”
Redact the last three games from your consciousness and enjoy a much more pleasant evening tonight at Rockville Centre’s Turn of the Corkscrew Books & Wines, where I’ll be reading, discussing and signing Amazin’ Again, the story of a Mets season that most definitely DID happen.
by Jason Fry on 15 May 2016 1:16 am Now you listen to me! I want trading reopened right now. Get those brokers back in here! Turn those machines back on! Turn those machines back on!
That’s Mortimer Duke at the end of 1983’s Trading Places, after he realizes Louis Winthorpe III and Billy Ray Valentine have ruined him and his brother Randolph in revenge for a cruel and cynical experiment in social engineering. Mortimer’s command goes unheeded, of course. The machines won’t go back on any more than the genie’s going back in the bottle.
Other than not identifying with the bad guy, it’s pretty much the way I feel whenever an umpire has made a rotten, terrible, no-good, very bad call against my baseball team, one the entire world except him knows is wrong and that he will also know is wrong the second he looks at the replay, which will lead to a big fat lot of nothing because umpires getting lectured and disciplined is pretty much the only thing baseball still keeps secret.
Unless of course he already knows the call is wrong, in which case WHY DIDN’T HE ASK FOR HELP AUUGHGGHGGHHH THIS IS THE WORST THE ABSOLUTE WORST THE VERY WORST WORST WORST WORST.
That’s what Carlos Torres did to the Mets Saturday night. No, not rubber-armed, sometimes-effective and apparently ageless reliever Carlos Torres, but less-than-effective, still pretty young home-plate ump Carlos Torres.
With the Mets down 3-1 in the third, Logan Verrett fanned Tony Wolters with one out and the bases loaded, bringing pitcher Eddie Butler to the plate … oh wait. No, Carlos Torres ruled Wolters had foul-tipped the ball, when he quite clearly hadn’t. Torres didn’t get help, Terry Collins went ballistic, and soon thereafter Terry Collins was excused further attendance. Given an undeserved reprieve, Wolters clubbed a ball over Yoenis Cespedes‘s head for two runs; an out later Charlie Blackmon chipped in a two-run single of his own, and the Mets were looking at a big ugly crooked number.
Managers usually cool off enough to wax philosophical about these things after the game, but Collins was still hot: “It cost us the game. End of story.”
Wellllll. That’s loyal of Terry, but it’s not that simple.
When Joshua was about eight, I told him I was going to teach him an essential but unwritten rule of baseball, one that he would do well to accept, since it would let him avoid a fair number of churning stomachs and hours wasted moaning about injustice. Emily, by far the better parent, knew what was coming and tried to intervene, but I would not be deterred.
When you’re going horseshit, they fuck you.
I know, language. Sorry. But that gets at the essential, visceral truth far better than a more refined way of putting it.
When one’s caliber of play is subpar, the benefit of the doubt is generally not given.
Nuh-uh. It’s the first one.
Yeah, the Mets got saddled with four enemy runs they would have avoided if Torres had made the right call and Verrett had retired Butler. Yeah, they tried to come back only to wind up short. But they’ve been losing because the starting pitchers are practically outhitting the position players and fielders are coming up short or doing dopey things with depressing regularity. It’s a blueprint for losing plenty of games, with or without mistakes by umps.
The Mets look flat and tired and dispirited. Honestly, I can’t say I blame them. I’m flat and tired and dispirited by this road trip, and I’m not even on it. Seriously, I’ve been on multi-week trips covering different time zones, and by Day 10 I generally just want to be home staring at a familiar wall. And my job is to type and talk to people, not to play professional sports in front of 30,000 people and have to explain afterwards why I failed at something that’s really hard to begin with.
The Mets will be home late Sunday. They’ll actually get a day off Monday. Good. They better rest up, because then it’s six of nine against the Nationals. The first-place Nationals, who are eager to show the second-place Mets …
… oh wait. Nope, it’s the third-place Mets. You want trading places? Well we’ve traded places with the Phillies.
THE PHILLIES.
Now you listen to me! I want the ballpark reopened right now. Get those hitters back in here! Turn that scoreboard back on! Turn that scoreboard back on!
Oh yeah, that’s right. We already established that never works.
by Greg Prince on 14 May 2016 9:32 am There are moments when you sense things can’t get any better for your team. Those are moments that are both gratifying and terrifying.
Peak Mets, to dabble in the fashionable vernacular, may have been achieved early this past week. Bartolo Colon had homered on Saturday, his accomplishment stayed the toast of the town well into Monday. In between Colon going deep and the world remaining gaga, Matt Harvey slipped in his best start of 2016 versus the Padres, permitting the Mets to depart San Diego in first place for the first time all year. They alighted in Los Angeles, increased their winning streak to three behind Steven Matz, continued to fend off the pesky Nats and generally radiated invincibility. Even a loss Tuesday night couldn’t perceptibly lower my East-leading high.
No wonder, then, that when I was out early Wednesday evening, clad in a 2013 All-Star game t-shirt, having just spotted a leftover Monday Daily News with a back page banner attesting to Harvey’s Mother’s Day triumph at Petco Park, and was asked by a stranger, “How did the Mets do last night?” I reflexively answered, “They won.”
Then I retraced their steps and quickly corrected myself. “No, they didn’t win. They lost last night. Sorry about that. It was a late game.”
At which point I hoped it wasn’t too late for all of us, for I had the feeling I’d pulled a Howard Beale and meddled with the primal forces of nature. It was an innocent mistake born only of enthusiasm. Everything had been coming up Metsie for so long — not just the modest three-game winning streak snapped the night before, but the sustained buzz surrounding our sacred cause. We had one of the best teams in baseball, clearly the best team in New York. The Colon homer framed it beautifully. Consider that type of isolated incident in a single baseball game, the kind that gets and keeps everybody, not just the partisans, talking. In any year after 1995 and before 2015, if something like that happened in New York, it wouldn’t have happened to a Met. Sure, Mets did stuff, occasionally wonderful stuff, but it rarely gained traction outside our walled garden. Met moments were treated by consensus as fleeting curiosities to be consigned to the conversational cutout bin ASAP. Now?
Now they were a sensation. Now the Mets of large-scale characters and identifiable archetypes had taken over everything. The division. The city. The zeitgeist. There had been a pennant, but the pennant was six going on seven months old. This reached beyond that. We were in the second year of this. The Mets were what we’d been waiting seemingly forever for them to morph into.
I know I’d been waiting a veritable eternity to turn on the radio, flip around and hear three different DJs in the span of ten minutes, none of them on sports stations (and not all of them on contractually Met-friendly iHeart stations), kvell over something a Met did 48 hours prior. Bartolo homered Saturday. It was still the topic of choice Monday night. Not Monday morning, mind you, but Monday night. This was a couple of hours after — while running a few errands — I kept bumping into other people wearing Mets shirts or caps or jackets and being drawn into Mets dialogue. How about Colon? How about our team?
None of this shows up in the box score, except the one you diligently pore over in the mind, where you begin to picture a stage on which the Mets hardly ever lose…which is different from forgetting that the Mets lost the night before…which is what happened on Wednesday when I got the rather simple trivia question, “How did the Mets do last night?” wrong. (Some Beat The Booth contestant I’d make.)
I shouldn’t have said they won when they didn’t, I thought, and not just for the sake of accuracy. I can’t be awarding the Mets wins that are already in the loss column. I have overstepped the bounds of enthusiasm. I have put us all in dangerous territory here.
It was such an affront to baseball protocol that Noah Syndergaard went out that night, threw eight solid innings and smacked two home runs of his own (any DHs do all that?). Of course it was epic, almost Colonian. Nevertheless, I was a little uncomfortable waiting for that game to go final. I was on a train when Thor launched his second long ball and missed the play-by-play. When a friend texted me that he was going to bed since the night wasn’t going to get any better, I took that to mean, great, Noah must have given up five runs to the Dodgers. When I got to my car, turned on the game and heard Howie mention to Josh that “Walt” wasn’t necessarily the sweetest-dispositioned guy in the room, I figured he was filling L.A. time with some ancient Walter Alston anecdote. Then I deduced that the Walt in his story was Terrell and that my friend who texted me “can’t get any better” was letting me know a second pitcher homer had, like so many Los Angelenos before so many ninth innings, exited Chavez Ravine.
Yet the Mets didn’t romp. It was a close game. Nobody else drove in anything. The Mets kept leaving runners on base, Familia gave back a run in the ninth and a game in which the starting pitcher homered twice and knocked in four had to be gripped tightly to the end. On paper, that’s fine; a win is a win. But I was still wary from my misstep earlier. I’d forgotten the Mets had lost the night before when asked. I’d forgotten the Mets were capable of losing. The two home runs from Thor were almost too good to be true, and the good fortune (or Thortune) his swings wrought seemed too wonderful to last.
Next thing I’m hearing, Matz is gonna miss a start for precautionary elbow reasons and Syndergaard — the very same Syndergaard who was lighting up the radar gun in the eighth — had recently visited a doctor himself for an MRI on his moneymaker. Wilmer Flores was DL-bound with a hamstring issue and, for good measure, there was something about David Wright’s shoulder feeling sore. Oh, and had anyone else noticed that, except for the pitchers, nobody on the Mets was hitting much…or that Eric Campbell kept drifting into the starting lineup?
Clayton Kershaw was the temporary cure for my anxieties Thursday night in that, yes, the Mets looked feeble against him, but he’s Clayton Kershaw. That’s not a disturbing trend wrapping its paws around our potentially vulnerable neck. That’s Clayton Kershaw. Enough California adventure, I decided. Let’s just pack up this road show, do our stretching and wait for Coors Field to work its magic.
Friday night, Coors Field worked not at all for the Mets. Not a Unicorn or Uniclone in sight, just a dismal 5-2 defeat to Jon Gray, which is by no means an anagram for Clayton Kershaw. Gray won the first game of his career on Friday the Thirteenth after thirteen previous attempts at his maiden W. The promotion that offers 1% off ticket prices for every run the Mets tally on the Los Angeles-Denver leg of this trip is proving to be something short of a savings bonanza. They were 1-for-7 with runners in scoring position. At a ballpark built with runners on second and third, Kevin Plawecki (two-run double) and Michael Conforto (eventually wasted triple) produced two-thirds of the visitors’ extra-base power, and lest they vie too vigorously for Schaefer Player of the Game honors, each contributed an indifferent throw on the same extended sequence in the sixth, the inning that all but sealed the Mets’ fate. The sealant was fully applied a couple of batters later when Jerry Blevins, usually death on lefthanders, found one of his pitches brutally slain for a backbreaking double by lefty-swinging Charlie Blackmon.
Harvey, who was serviceable for the first five innings, had an OUT-OF-ORDER sign hung on him in the sixth. Nothing physical, just mechanical, it was ruled afterwards. Allowing for Coors Field being Coors Field, the five earned runs (including the inherited runner ushered in by Blevins) in five-and-two-thirds wasn’t exactly an atrocity, but it certainly wasn’t a signal for Kenny Mayne to bring Matt the finest meats and cheeses in all the land for a clubhouse feast. Harvey was in the pink on Mother’s Day. He had no luck on Friday the Thirteenth.
Remember when Harvey Day was occasion enough in its own right?
The Nationals won yet another in their apparently endless string of home games against some combination of the Marlins and Braves, so the first-place Mets became the second-place Mets. Thirty-five contests in, that’s of minimal concern, though I sure did like saying “first-place Mets” and knowing it was correct. I’m not even that worried about Harvey. There are instances when he strongly resembles the pitcher I think of when I wear that 2013 All-Star Game t-shirt, even if he started that affair three years ago and has pretty much removed himself from the guest list for 2016’s gala. I’ll go out on a limb and predict the Mets’ bats will heat up again soon, perhaps as soon as tonight in Denver.
But, just in case anybody asks, they lost last night. It would be presumptuous to suggest otherwise.
I do feel safe, however, in suggesting you join me at Turn of the Corkscrew Books & Wine in Rockville Centre, Monday night at seven, for a little baseball talk, featuring Amazin’ Again, my relatively anxiety-free book on the 2015 season.
by Greg Prince on 13 May 2016 1:07 pm Clayton Kershaw shutting down the Mets on almost no hits…where have we seen that before? Almost everywhere we’ve run into him, it seems, save for one buoyant October night, which attests to fine Met timing, and even then we barely touched his fresh-made turkey on nine-grain wheat with jalapeños, mustard and a little bit of vinegar. A little bit of vinegar was, in fact, all the Met lineup could muster Thursday night while enduring nine whole-grain innings of sliders, curves and effectively spotted fastballs. Every pitch Kershaw threw Thursday night in Los Angeles had mustard on it. After losing authoritatively, 5-0, all the Mets could do was tip their caps, gather their buns and move on to Colorado.
It was surely a familiar story, as Clayton Kershaw is essentially Sandy Koufax a few generations removed. I never saw Koufax pitch. Everybody who did will be sure to tell you they did. Koufax, who hasn’t pitched in 50 years, maintains that kind of cachet. So should Kershaw. It’s not thrilling to say we watched a master at work last night since his work was at odds with our preferred outcome, but we might as well own it. As those who filled the stands or turned on the set for Sandy’s starts in 1966 could attest, these things won’t present themselves for our collective witnessing forever.
If you need proof, consider the man who’s called his fair share of Kershaw’s 119 career victories and most if not all of Koufax’s 165. Vin Scully was in the booth for Clayton at Dodger Stadium just as he was for Sandy a half-century ago, just as he was for Sandy at Ebbets Field in 1955, just as he was for Sandy’s future teammates five years earlier. Scully is at 67 years and no longer counting in his major league broadcasting career. This, you no doubt know, is the last season in which Vin will be inviting baseball fans to pull up a chair alongside him.
Longevity linkage, which is so much fun to apply to the likes of Bartolo Colon (who found himself overshadowed versus Kershaw, which is a feat on multiple levels these days), is beside the point when invoking Scully. Vin was a legend before Bartolo ever saw the light of day. He’s got everybody beat in terms of service time. Retired players whose sons are players today debuted decades after Vin broke in. A retired player whose son is going into the Hall of Fame this summer was born just as Vin was concluding his first Dodger Spring Training. Our own beloved Bob Murphy, eternally the Voice of the Mets, was preparing for his first big league campaign in Baltimore when Vin had four seasons and a televised World Series under his belt.
Because this is the final season in which Vin Scully is calling Dodger games, he is graciously consenting to sit for interviews in which he reluctantly talks about himself. Both SNY and WOR recorded their own versions. Gary Cohen did the honors on TV, Howie Rose on radio (no disrespect to the sideline and pregame hosts, but who else would you send on this assignment?). Please listen to both. SNY’s is in two parts, and here; WOR’s is here. If you’ve never heard Scully reflect on Scully, you will be enchanted.
And if you have heard Scully on Scully — and chances are you have, at least a little — perhaps you will marvel as I did and always do when I hear him chatting outside of the context of a ballgame. After 67 years in baseball and 88 years on Earth, Vin has a tendency to tell what might be referred to as the same old stories. I think we would all do that if his stories were our stories. A person has his or her greatest hits, and even the most clever of inquisitors is going to veer to some fairly obvious questions in a limited time frame.
Here’s the thing, though. When you listen to Gary talk to Vin, then Howie talk to Vin, you would think Vin is receiving these perfectly fine questions for the first time in his long, illustrious life, because he answers them with such freshness. You don’t think he’s told the story of working college football from the roof of Fenway Park? The meeting with Branch Rickey? What he learned from Red Barber? Why he lets the crowd speak after an enormous home run? How the Koufax perfect game embellishment came about? His lack of rooting interest between the Mets and Red Sox in 1986 despite what their respective partisans might have believed? The advantages of working alone instead of with a partner?
Of course he has. He was asked more or less the same stuff in each Met interview, as he would be and has been in every interview with every outlet, yet somehow every time it’s as if he’s telling the story for the very first time. He’s full of wonder and awe that he’s gotten to do what he has done. There is not a hint of weariness in his replies. You have been kind enough to express curiosity about some facet of his experience, the least he can do is present a word picture as complete as the game Clayton Kershaw threw at the Mets.
It’s a gift, both what Vin Scully has been blessed with and what he’s shared with us. Perhaps I am particularly attentive to how he proffers it because I have come lately to appreciate the challenges inherent in telling the same stories freshly again and again.
In my comparatively limited case, the story is that of the 2015 National League champion Mets, the subject of my current book, Amazin’ Again. I’ve noticed a dichotomy between the types of interviews I’ve been invited to engage in since its release. If the host is a Mets fan and the setting is Mets-oriented, then I can speak in almost a coded language. I know the host and the audience will get what I mean if I make a reference to “the Kershaw game” from last July, for example, and I don’t have to explain too deeply the contextual significance of John Mayberry (whose major league slugger dad was born in 1949, the same year Scully got his big break in Boston) and Eric Campbell (who can’t hit Kershaw any better in 2016 than he could in 2015). We understand they batted fourth and fifth against the best pitcher in baseball and that the Mets needed to upgrade their offense if they intended to catch the Nationals let alone compete against Kershaw in a potential postseason matchup.
But when I find myself the subject of questioning for a broader readership, listenership or viewership, my role shifts from Mets fan talking to Mets fans to guy charged with explaining who the 2015 Mets were and what exactly they did. The chain of details you and I take for granted — strong start, injuries, teamwide slump, promising pitching, ups and downs, Gomez trade aborted, Upton homer in the rain, Cespedes, Flores and off we go — is not a given. The story I’m asked for is less the story of how the book came together or why I wrote certain passages the way I did and more the actual story in the book, a.k.a. a lot of tick-tock from last year.
That’s splendid. I love being asked anything about the Mets. But it also demands a certain amount of repetition, which, quite frankly, is something I rail against internally. I don’t want to tell the fellow on the phone in Orlando the same exact thing I told the fellow on the phone in Phoenix any more than I want to write the same exact blog post every other day. I feel I’m not giving the station in Orlando my best if all it’s getting is what Phoenix received last week. Never mind that the overlap between audiences is negligible to nil. Never mind that no matter how you tell it, Cespedes is still gonna be traded for on July 31 and Flores is gonna homer that night.
Part of this reluctance comes from the kind of reader, listener and viewer I am. I will consume every interview with somebody whose work I really revere. That person doesn’t know I’m taking in his or her thoughts for the six-dozenth time. He or she can’t be responsible for knowing I’ve heard that charming anecdote 71 times before. I don’t mind hearing it again, necessarily, but maybe there’s some heretofore unuttered nugget you could toss in for the obsessives like myself?
After 67 years of speaking through a microphone to untold millions, it’s probably enough Vin Scully can tell the exact same stories and make them sound as if he’d just broken the seal on them. They’re not talking points in Scully’s voice. They’re just what he has to say.
As for what I have to say, I’ll be at Turn of the Corkscrew Books & Wine in Rockville Centre on Long Island this Monday night, 7 o’clock, to discuss Amazin’ Again, the 2015 Mets and related subject matter. I’ll endeavor to deliver fresh, original material in this, my first appearance before an audience in practically my own backyard, but chances are I’ll tell you a few things you already know. Baseball stories and familiarity tend to gravitate toward each other in unrelenting fashion.
It’s not like you couldn’t have guessed Clayton Kershaw was going to do to do the Mets what he’s done to them so often in the past, but if you were awake, you probably tuned in anyway.
by Jason Fry on 12 May 2016 2:42 am Honestly, even without considering the lateness of the hour, a big picture of Noah Syndergaard would be more eloquent than whatever I’ll be able to come up with.
Because sometimes Syndergaard defies description.
Wednesday night’s pitching line might not look like ace-level Syndergaard — the swing-and-a-miss stuff wasn’t quite there — but that’s deceptive. Syndergaard was hitting 100 MPH in the eighth, leaned on that killer slider for some key outs in the middle innings, and showed the curveball just to make things even more unfair. Results-wise, he was dented on two bad pitches — one a slider that arrived more than it slid (it happens, even to him), and one on a too predictable first-pitch fastball down the middle to a fastball hitter. That was it.
But — as you probably know by now — that was only half of the latest Norse saga. In the third, Syndergaard hammered a Kenta Maeda offspeed pitch over the fence in right center — a pitch intended for the outside corner that drifted back and begged to be spanked. Impressive, but greater things were in the offing.
In the fifth, Syndergaard came to the plate with nobody out and runners on first and second. Terry Collins, predictably, had him bunt. Now, first and second with nobody out is the one situation where a bunt is defensible mathematically, but c’mon. Syndergaard has always shown an ability to hit and had just crashed one 407 feet. Noah didn’t get the bunt down, was allowed to swing away on 2-2, and hammered the ball over the fence in left-center, with Joc Pederson failing to get a glove on the ball and losing his cap over the fence. That blast was even more impressive than the third-inning shot — Maeda’s first pitch was a mistake, but the second was an off-speed pitch on the back corner of the plate. As Syndergaard trotted around the bases, Maeda gritted his teeth on the mound, no doubt thinking that things like this don’t happen in Japan. If it’s any comfort to him, they don’t really happen here either, much as the last week might make us dream otherwise.
Syndergaard got two more at-bats. In the sixth, with the bases loaded and one out, he practically came out of his shoes trying to take Chris Hatcher Maeda deep for a third homer, hooking two pitches hard down the right-field line and sending another one straight back before fanning. In the eighth, Joe Blanton threw him nothing but sliders, which was disappointing but wise.
If there was an unamusing part of the night, it was the Mets’ continuing futility with runners on third and less than two out. This will take a while: Yoenis Cespedes got thrown out at home on a bad gamble with one out in the second, Eric Campbell fouled out with nobody out in the sixth, Syndergaard struck out with one out and the bases loaded in the same frame, and Lucas Duda flied to short left in the seventh with runners on second and third and one out. That’s four gimme runs not converted, which forced Jeurys Familia into a dicey situation that became dicier, with the Mets needing remarkable plays from newcomers Neil Walker and Asdrubal Cabrera to stave off disaster. Such situational failings are usually baseball randomness that disappears over time; it would be just fine with me if the vanishing would begin soonest.
Anyway, the Mets kept rolling — on the same night Max Scherzer struck out 20 in leading the second-place Nats to victory. To get woofy for a moment, fanning 20 is something Syndergaard can do, but can Scherzer go deep twice?
More seriously, it’s been fun monitoring the Nats in the early going. They’re a team with so many interesting storylines: Dusty Baker‘s supervision of a clubhouse that needed healing, old friend Daniel Murphy‘s new blazing hot streak, Jonathan Papelbon‘s explosive failures, and Bryce Harper being Bryce Harper. And I’m sure knowledgable Nats fans (yes, there really are a few) have kept the same watch on Metsian doings, marveling at Syndergaard and wondering where Walker came from and sighing about years of facing Michael Conforto.
All this has necessarily happened at a remove. But that will change next week, with six Mets-Nats tilts over nine days. We’ve got work to do before then — starting with none other than Clayton Kershaw on Thursday — but isn’t that going to be fun?
by Greg Prince on 11 May 2016 11:56 am “I’ll probably only make it for one more batter,” the sleepy fan said to himself as Hansel Robles battled Trayce Thompson with two out in the bottom of the ninth, the Mets and Dodgers tied at two. “I don’t think I’ll make it to extra innings.”
Funny how sometimes things just take care of themselves. The last things I saw before my eyelids’ insides were Robles shaking off Kevin Plawecki, Thompson showered in a bucket of bubble gum and grim men in suits on a set in New York daring me to dissect the whole mess with them well past one o’clock.
Nah, thanks guys. Click.
Lest a 3-2 walkoff loss to the unlikable Los Angeles Dodgers seem all for naught, there were a few a highlights that survived to daylight from this nocturnal transmission. Somehow, the Mets scored two runs off otherwise impenetrable lefty Alex Wood, who, since he was pitching after midnight, could be derisively nicknamed Morning Wood by the puerile likes of myself, Beavis, Butt-head and the Tweetin’ tyro, Lenny Dykstra. Given his southpaw leanings, Wood stood firm against the Mets, especially phenom Michael Conforto, who has been mired (great baseball word) in a horrific slump (horrible baseball word when applied to one of your guys) ever since an enthusiastic blogger declared him the greatest thing since sliced pizza (way better than just plain bread).
The “somehow” in that Met scoring involved enemy of goodness Chase Utley playing lousy second base, and that alone was worth staying up for. Though every sight of his prematurely gray pate inspired calls to HIT HIM!!! from puerile types like myself, I’ve come around to the school of thought that Utley should be made to wait until the Dodgers visit Citi Field in a couple of weeks. First, the dread he experiences en route will be worse than the pitch to his let’s say ribs. Second, it will be 1986 weekend, so if there’s any trouble, Ray Knight and Kevin Mitchell will be on hand to keep the peace, wink wink.
Ron Darling, a 1986 Met himself, said something Tuesday night in the “in the day” vein he favors about pitchers policing hitters, fearlessly backing them off and putting them on their rear in retaliation for the crime of taking out beloved infielders in the midst of double play attempts. Ronnie talked about his experience as if he played in the Beer & Whiskey League of the nineteenth century. Baseball Reference confirms Darling’s career spanned 1983 to 1995, a period where it was intermittently bemoaned by Ronnie’s elders that pitchers “today” don’t police hitters like they used to when men were men and Bob Gibson gave his cornflakes a close shave lest they look at him wrong.
Asdrubal Cabrera made a sensational throw falling toward third from short to nail the loathsome Utley at first. Yoenis Cespedes fired a majestic cannonball from the center field track toward second to eliminate not terribly speedy Adrian Gonzalez following the world’s longest single. Spectacular defense kept the Mets in a 2-2 game from the second into the ninth. No hitting and lousy baserunning did the same. Most notable was Juan Lagares slipping off first base in a pickoff attempt that became a pickoff. Darling said the dew gathers nights at Dodger Stadium and covers the bases and those things grow slippery as an eel as the evening ensues. That may be the keenest insight a player-turned-analyst has delivered since Tim McCarver was telling Gibby stories on Channel 9.
The other reason it stayed 2-2 was Jacob deGrom reverting to genuine Jacob form after opening the game (and much of 2016) pitching like Jake from State Farm. For a couple of innings, he was hideous. Then he was finding himself. Then, as the bumper stickers that were so ubiquitous when our family visited California in the ’70s put it, he Found It. He seemed to rediscover the Jacob deGrom we remember from 2014 and 2015, including the version that toughed out the only Game Five the Mets won last postseason. Morning Wood was hard to overcome, but deGrom After Dark kept us up in a good way as long as he could. For the first time he lasted seven innings; for the first time he topped 100 pitches. It was vintage Jake, if you can refer to somebody not quite two years removed from his MLB debut doing something vintage.
We can do anything we want, even if we can’t always stay up as late as we’d like.
by Jason Fry on 10 May 2016 2:22 am I guess it’s just something about San Diego.
Tonight’s Mets game wasn’t that much less stressful than Sunday’s — in fact, it followed the same approximate blueprint — but whereas yesterday I was finger-crossing and pleading while urging Antonio Bastardo on from a continent away, tonight I was sprawled on my couch, occasionally losing track of the count even in tight moments.
Sure, on Sunday Bastardo had a much grimmer fix to escape and a smaller margin for error. But the Dodgers were still right there a swing away from ruining Monday evening, and Bastardo’s command of the strike zone was less than it had been. It’s got to be the venue: as long as it’s not the playoffs, Dodger Stadium feels more like a novelty or a vacation than one of the cauldrons of sportswriting cliche. Maybe it’s the catatonic locals, or the somehow soothing light blue and cream color scheme, or knowing Vin Scully’s on hand ladling out delightfully warm and sweet word caramel. Or maybe it’s that though there are bumps in the night in L.A., in Petco you go to sleep under the bed with an ax, because monsters own the house.
This one looked like a laugher early, with long-ago prodigal son Scott Kazmir struggling to find his change-up and searching for support from the home-plate ump and his defenders. Curtis Granderson whacked Kazmir’s first pitch over the wall and Steven Matz was on the mound for the good guys, which usually guarantees the scoring will come early and often.
Tonight that was only half-true; Kazmir found himself and the Mets started losing track of baseball necessities, with a particularly doofy moment for Yoenis Cespedes taking a run off the board. But Matz was in command on the mound and at the plate, continuing the recent run of pitcher heroics with an RBI double. A day after becoming a Met favorite, Bastardo faltered, though he got a shove off the ledge from a rare error by Juan Lagares. No matter; this time it was Jim Henderson as rescuer and Bastardo as rescuee; Big Canadian Jim fanned Yasiel Puig and got Trayce Thompson to pop up.
As for the confrontation with Chase Utley, well, it came too late in the evening for me to work up more than a vaguely pinched glower. (Though it was entertaining watching Hansel Robles — denied hostile action either via managerial orders or a glance at the scoreboard — clearly hoping for a reason to take offense at something Utley had done.) Look, Utley’s team lost in October and he now has a Thou Shalt Not rule that will bear his name years after he’s retired; if Jacob deGrom wants to bruise him with a fastball on Tuesday that’s fine, but it’s also fine if JdG sees 0-for-4 as vengeance enough.
Utley and the other Dodgers lost, the Nats won but were forbidden by math from intruding on first place (thanks math!), and the Mets kept rolling after the sleepwalking start to their trip. Maybe it was the wee hours talking, but that struck me as more than enough for the night.
by Jason Fry on 9 May 2016 2:23 am A day after Bartolo Colon shocked and delighted the baseball world, it seemed somehow anticlimactic for the Mets to be expected to go out and do something as mundane as win a game.
It would have been fitting if Major League Baseball had declared Sunday a national holiday. It would have been fine — as I suggested in moderate jest — if the world’s nations had gone a step further and inaugurated a new calendar, with the year 0 beginning the moment when Colon’s home run nestled into the waiting hands of Mets fan Jimmy Zurn, who proved an exemplary role model by handing the now-sanctified sphere over without requesting any reward beyond having been a part of it.
Alas, we were back in the fallen world on Sunday, with the Mets and Padres wearing pink for Mother’s Day and Matt Harvey hoping to pitch more like Matt Harvey and less like whatever impostor has taken the mound the last couple of months.
Last September I grabbed a subscription to MLB.tv, which I somewhat predictably found myself unwilling to part with come springtime. So I spent the afternoon before our 4:40 pm start flipping around and seeing what various clubs had done to give their uniforms a pink overhaul. The Mets looked pretty much like the Nationals, Royals and other opposing teams, which was to say bland but not particularly terrible — and points to the team for turning the piping and names on the uniforms black, which gave them a bit more pop.
The skyline logo looked abominable, though — like discarded Jello or a nasty infection. Next time the Mets are the home team for Mother’s Day, here’s hoping they rethink that part, and opt for a black logo with pink lettering. There’s precedent for that combination: a couple of years back Todd Radom unearthed the forgotten factoid that pink and black was proposed as our original color scheme, after the silks worn by jockeys for the stable co-owned by Joan Payson and her brother John Hay Whitney. Revisiting that would make Mother’s Day at Citi Field simultaneously a thank you to moms and a nod to one of the lesser-known bits of team history.
(As for the Padres’ home unis, amnesia would be the best policy. Shockingly enough, blue camo does not go with pink. If asked, I’m confident each and every mother of a Padre would have responded with “You’re not really going to wear that to play baseball in public, are you?”)
Anyway, there was Harvey glowering above and below pink lettering as the Mets tried to salvage a split and we chewed our nails on the other side of the continent. The news, happily, was good: Harvey’s fastball had its old velocity, and while his other pitches were still works in progress, he used the fastball to set them up capably, escaped fatal trouble in the middle innings, and even came within a whisker of his own home run, this one to dead center.
Perhaps that point about escaping trouble ought to come with an asterisk: I have no idea what New York’s replay umps were looking at as Andrew Cashner slid on his belly across home plate ahead of or at least adjacent to Kevin Plawecki‘s tag. (It was a big 48 hours for starting-pitcher heroics.) But fair or not, the call went our way and kept Harvey on the right side of the W.
Keeping him there would require heroics from unlikely sources, though.
Emily, Joshua and I decamped in the eighth for a walk down to Red Hook, where a combined Mother’s Day/47th birthday celebration awaited us. It sure seemed like disaster would be along for the ride: the apparently unstoppable Jon Jay singled off Jerry Blevins, bringing on Addison Reed. Reed allowed a million-hopper to Wil Myers for an infield single, then a single of the more conventional variety to Matt Kemp, and was then excused for … Antonio Bastardo.
As a newly arrived Met, Bastardo’s still coming into focus for us — he pitches bravely but has a dispiriting tendency to lose the plate, which is a wordy way of saying he’s a middle reliever. Grabbing a bat to greet him was Derek Norris, a Padre who no longer needs an introduction beyond whatever sign you invoke to ward off evil.
Norris is hitting .173 for the year, which by my back-of-the-envelope calculations means he’s 0 for 600 against every team but us. Somewhere south of Atlantic Avenue, my wife and kid and I traded grim looks. The Dark Knight was gone and this was mid-Sixties Adam-West-as-Batman bad, with the caped crusaders dangling from a pulley and being lowered into a vat of boiling chewing gum or something equally ridiculous and likely to be fatal.
Bastardo, somehow, struck out Norris, with my phone practically levitating as Howie Rose bellowed out the news. That was still bad, but Batman had worked his hands a smidgen loose and maybe, just maybe, Robin could reach his utility belt if he kicked and wriggled enough.
Melvin Upton Jr., nee B.J., took Norris’s place … and popped up, with the ball apparently going into orbit. Seriously, it took forever: we had time for nervous glances and a snatch of conversation while Howie assured us that the ball was up there above Petco Park. Sometime later on Mother’s Day it plopped into Lucas Duda‘s glove and somehow there were two out.
Now Batman and Robin were free of the pulley but still tied back to back and henchmen had rushed into the room. BAM! SOCK! POW! This was better than before, but third outs can be elusive. Standing at the plate was Alexei Ramirez, recently a White Sock and therefore a relatively unknown quantity … which meant he was the opponent that scares you the most in such a scenario, the henchman waiting in the shadows with a vase to crack over a bat-cowled cranium. Bastardo flung fastball after fastball his way, with Howie’s voice rising as each one arrived — it was a half-inning to remind you how good the man is — until Ramirez swung at one too high to reach and the Mets had come through unscathed.
We got to the restaurant and waited contentedly through a slight delay while Jeurys Familia went to work, with the last ball an excruciating-sounding grounder sent to third by Jose Pirela while Jay gathered his demon servants in the on-deck circle. Eric Campbell intercepted the ball — not always a given — and flung it to Duda, and the Mets had not only won but also ascended into first place.
Matt Harvey getting swings and misses! Antonio Bastardo saving himself and everybody else! Eric Campbell flashing leather! First place! We grinned and slapped hands and got called for our table and went in to celebrate, pleased with the day and our team and ourselves. As we sat down, I smiled to remember something Ralph Kiner may or may not have once said over the air, a greeting that on this day made perfect sense: “To all you moms out there, happy birthday.”
by Greg Prince on 8 May 2016 11:20 am “It has happened! In their fifty-first season, Johan Santana has thrown the first no-hitter in New York Mets history!”
—Gary Cohen, SNY, June 1, 2012
“And what’s left of a never-got-one nature to ache for anyway? Put aside a World Series championship even if you’ve never seen one before, because the Mets have two of those. They have cycles, triple plays, a 6-for-6 night, 10 consecutive strikeouts, a batting title and now a no-hitter. What is left hanging out there on the vine that can be attained on the field? An MVP has to be voted on, so that’s not it. A perfect game would be something, but that’s like waiting for the clouds to rain candy. Not everybody has one of those, so it’s not as if the Mets are being left out. Ditto for a four-homer performance. We’ll love if it happens, but it’s rare enough to advise against holding breath for. The phrase “the end of history” was thrown around a bit as the Cold War faded, but history just kept on coming. We no longer have our one glaring quest to intermittently preoccupy us, but I’m sure a singular outcome we hadn’t anticipated anticipating will take the place of the First No-Hitter in New York Mets History.”
—Greg Prince, Faith and Fear in Flushing, June 3, 2012
Here’s the thing about things you’re sure you’ve never seen before and that you swear you’ll never forget: You’ve almost certainly seen something like them before — and sometimes you forget them.
But don’t let that stop you from believing what you are seeing is unprecedented and that it will stay with you into eternity, especially when you see something like this embedded toward the bottom of an otherwise random box score:
HR: Cespedes (10, 1st inning off Shields 1 on, 2 Out); Colon (1, 2nd inning off Shields 1 on, 2 Out); Wright (4, 9th inning off Villanueva 0 on, 1 Out); Conforto (5, 9th inning off Villanueva 0 on, 1 Out)
You know how to read the agate. You understand, for example, that the 10 immediately inside the parentheses that follows Yoenis Cespedes’s name indicates he hit his 10th home run of the current season. Likewise, David Wright cranked out his 4th and Michael Conforto his 6th. The Mets scored six runs overall in their 6-3 victory over the Padres in San Diego Saturday night and, as has been their wont to date this year, they drove in all their runs via the circuit clout. Nothing out of the ordinary there. Likewise, you’ve seen Cespedes, Wright and Conforto go deep multiple times as Mets. Their work on this front Saturday was highly gratifying, but hardly without precedent.
But the other HR in that statistical accounting, the one with the “1,” as in 1st home run of this year or — and you knew this, too — any year…you never saw that before.
Surely something like it in some way, but no exact match. It is to professional baseball’s credit, as it approaches its 150th anniversary as a going enterprise, that the sport can continue to generate vignettes laced with profound singularity yet simultaneously evoke, evoke and evoke some more things we’ve experienced before. It’s simply stunning how acres of the mundane will be spiced with dashes of magnificence when you’re in no way expecting it.
And it was hyperappropriate that this particular episode of That’s Incredible! unfolded in the second inning, before the ballgame was official. How could it have been an official ballgame when it was indisputably a sequence of events imagined simultaneously within the minds of a million Mets fans?
“Colon looking for his first hit of the year. HE DRIVES ONE…DEEP LEFT FIELD…BACK GOES UPTON…BACK NEAR THE WALL…IT’S OUTTA HERE!!! BARTOLO HAS DONE IT! THE IMPOSSIBLE HAS HAPPENED! The team vacates the dugout as Bartolo takes the long trot. His first career home run! And there’ll be nobody in the dugout to greet him. This is one of the great moments in the history of baseball, Bartolo Colon has gone deep.”
—Gary Cohen, SNY, May 7, 2016
Colon (1). You never saw that before. Yet you have been party to enough interludes akin to it so as to recognize why Colon (1) surpasses Anybody Else (1). You wouldn’t be so quick to concur with Cohen regarding its greatness if you hadn’t. And you wouldn’t love it so much if you couldn’t comprehend how extraordinary it was.
How extraordinary? Aside from a man of nearly 43 years and shall we say unorthodox physical dimensions swinging his bat, maintaining his helmet’s place upon his head, making solid contact and shooting a ball over a fence fair for the first time in a career that stretches back far enough so that it encompasses facing Eddie Murray and playing alongside Kevin Mitchell? Those, by the by, were the designated hitters in Bartolo Colon’s first major league game, April 4, 1997.
The designated hitter, for anyone digging this up through an archaeological search in the distant future, was an “innovation” that turned fully and completely obsolete on May 7, 2016, when Bartolo Colon batted and homered for himself.
“Julio Franco doesn’t intend to slow down any time soon. Franco became the oldest player in major league history to hit a home run when he connected for a two-run, pinch-hit shot in the eighth inning Thursday night to help the New York Mets rally for a 7-2 win over the San Diego Padres.”
—Associated Press, ESPN.com, April 21, 2006
Longevity is an irresistible hook. Julio Franco, in his season-and-a-half as a Met (a tenure that commenced nine years after he was the starting second baseman behind Colon in his Cleveland debut), seemed to give us another “he’s been around so long…” angle every time he stepped on the field. That Oldest Player to Homer mark, forged when Franco was 47, was set at the very same Petco Park at which Colon became the Oldest Player to Homer for the First Time. Yet when you’ve soaked in San Diego at all hours the last three nights, have you eyeballed the joint and thought immediately, “This is where Julio Franco did something good for the Mets”?
I didn’t think so. Some of the great moments in the history of baseball slip away. It’s nice when they resurface, however. There are no guarantees, given human bandwidth and the onrush of time, but you’ll probably never forget what Colon did Saturday night, and not because he set an age-related record. You’ll retain it because he’s Colon, because of the impression he’s made in three seasons as a Met, mostly as a pitcher, sometimes as a character, previously as the worst hitter you’d ever witnessed, now because someone who could barely stand straight at the plate has crossed it upon taking James Shields deep.
Just to be on the safe side, maybe we should petition the Padres to change the name of their facility. The Bartolo Grounds has a nice ring to it.
Shields, for what it’s worth, offered no comment on his role in the heretofore unthinkable. Colon, who doesn’t say much for public consumption, patiently and warmly answered questions through an interpreter, on what he did to Shields. Big Sexy outdid Big Game James even after defeating him.
“The manager of the New York Mets watched his tired team score four runs in the top of the 19th inning to beat the Dodgers 7-3 in a game that started at 8:03 Thursday night and ended at 1:45 a.m. Friday. That’s Pacific Daylight Time. On EDT, the game was over at 4:45 a.m. Berra used 21 players while Walter Alston employed 18 in the longest home game in Los Angeles Dodger history. There were 40 hits — 22 for the Mets — nine double plays, seven errors and 40 men left on base. The Dodgers stranded 22, one short of the National League record.”
—Wire service report, St. Petersburg Times, May 26, 1973
Yogi Berra was never at a loss for memorable words, not even when he should have been sound asleep. That was not an option in the early hours of May 25, 1973, when the Mets took their sweet time vanquishing the Dodgers in Los Angeles. The franchise that distinguished itself for playing and losing some of the longest games in baseball history finally won one that went all night. Until 2010’s 20-inning marathon, the game that began on May 24, 1973, remained unsurpassed in length among extended Met victories.
Said Berra when it was all over (which was truly when it was all over), “The bus leaves in an hour — I mean the one back to Dodger Stadium tomorrow night. Oops, make that tonight.” Whether that counts as a Yogiism or a groggyism can be left to interpretation. What stand as certainties 42 years, 11 months and 2 weeks later are:
1) On the same date the Mets commenced at Chavez Ravine what would eventually become their longest win to date, Bartolo Colon was born in Altamira, Puerto Plata, Dominican Republic.
2) In the late-night West Coast game Baby Bart’s future team played on that date, Tom Seaver singled to lead off the third inning and Tug McGraw (later a teammate of Julio Franco, for goodness sake) singled in the tenth. For that matter, Yogi used Jon Matlack as a pinch-runner just sixteen days after Jon took a line drive to his head.
The year Bartolo Colon was born was also the year the American League inaugurated the DH. The Mets didn’t need it then and they don’t need it now.
Not in the box score that night/morning from Southern California: Willie Mays. Willie, 42 years and 18 days old at the time, was on the disabled list with a shoulder injury. But he’d be back in June, an active 1973 Met within the lifetime of Bartolo Colon, perhaps the most active 2016 Met going.
“But if the cheers were lusty for Rusty, they were wild for Willie when he won the 5-4 game against his former Giant teammates with a fifth-inning solo homer that broke a 4-4 tie. It’s a good thing Shea Stadium is made of steel and concrete, or the 35,505 rain-soaked fans on hand would have ripped the place apart with their enthusiasm.”
—Jack Lang, The Sporting News, May 27, 1972
Willie was also a 1972 Met. His first appearance in orange and blue, which itself was as shocking and exhilarating as Bartolo Colon’s first major league home run, came against his old club, the one that had been New York’s National League representative until it bolted for San Francisco. That Mays would homer versus the Giants, and that, when added to Rusty Staub’s earlier grand slam, it would stand up as the winning run on May 14, 1972, made it — when you consider drama and joy for drama and joy’s sake and don’t get hung up on walkoffs or pennant races — one of the handful of most dramatic and joyous home runs any Met had ever hit.
Sort of like Bartolo’s, which left Petco Park one week shy of 44 years after Willie’s left Shea, and one day after Willie turned 85 years old, or not quite twice the age Bartolo is at present.
“Plawecki at second, two out, two-nothing New York in the second. The one-one…SWING AND A DRIVE TO DEEP LEFT FIELD, IT’S GOT A CHANCE, UPTON GOIN’ BACK, IT’S GONNA GO! HOME RUN! BARTOLO COLON!! Repeating: Home run Bartolo Colon! Seven Line Army in right field might tear this ballpark down. Colon carried his bat with him until he was about ten feet from first base, he’s taking the slowest home run trot you’ve ever seen. He is approaching home plate, he touches home plate with his first major league home run, and they are gonna give him the silent treatment in the dugout. They have vacated. The Mets have left the building. Bartolo Colon is the loneliest man in San Diego as he reaches the Mets dugout and there’s nobody there to greet him. And now here they come up the dugout steps. Wow!”
—Howie Rose, WOR, May 7, 2016
Ballparks were in danger of being deconstructed from within in Willie’s day, per Jack Lang, and can still teeter on the figurative eve of destruction, according to Rose. It was serendipity that the 7 Line Army scheduled an away game in San Diego on Saturday, allowing 1,400 Mets fans an up-close view of the no-longer unfathomable three time zones from Citi Field. As for why the players the Army roots home didn’t want to see Bartolo when he arrived in the dugout a conquering hero, that’s shtick. It’s a variation on the ironically cold shoulder. I’ve never really gotten why it’s hilarious.
But all agree it is.
“Where’s the rest of the car wash? Did they close for the season?”
—Gary Cohen, SNY, September 28, 2014
Remember the car wash? It was in operation not that long ago, a 2010s touchstone not wholly unlike the one Skyler White insisted Walter buy on Breaking Bad to launder meth money. Curtis Granderson instigated it. A Met would homer — not quite the common occurrence in 2014 that it’s become lately — and everybody on the bench would grab a towel and give the slugger something akin to a wash, wax and dry. It was cleaner than the one the Whites ran (Lenny Dykstra’s, too). It was also one of those gestures that was a hoot for no obvious reason. To paraphrase Red from the eminently quotable Shawshank Redemption, baseball time is slow time, so you do what you can to keep going. Some fellas ignore their teammates after milestone home runs, others create bizarre rituals.
In the case of Lucas Duda blasting his 30th home run on the last day of the season two years ago, circumstances combined the two. Duda entered the Met dugout only to find everybody vanished. So being Lucas, he jogged through the car wash he knew so well and then back again, even if there were no attendants and no towels…until, as happened on Bart’s behalf in San Diego, everybody emerged from hiding to embrace him.
It was adorable to see at Citi Field with Duda, it was something else to see again at Petco Park for Colon.
“Bartolo rounding the bases was the most exciting two minutes in sports today.”
—@Bill_Veeck, Twitter, May 7, 2016
Nyquist was the winner of Saturday’s Kentucky Derby, the 142nd running of the Run for the Roses, clocking in at 2 minutes and 1.31 seconds, the fastest winning time in the race in 13 years. Colon — who almost incidentally won his third game of 2016 with 6⅔ innings of three-run ball (aided ably by Jerry Blevins, Addison Reed and Jeurys Familia) — took a shade under 31 seconds to round the bases in San Diego. Since baseball mostly operates independent of clocks, how long it takes to go from home to home when nobody’s trying to throw you out isn’t usually noted. The unwritten rule is, essentially, don’t dawdle, don’t show up the opposing pitcher and act like you’ve been there before.
Which, as every child in Sunday school must know by now, Bartolo had never been.
“Here’s another look at that skyrocket, a towering drive that went out at about the 370 sign, and he knew it immediately. It’ll take him about 20 minutes to go around the basepath.”
—Vin Scully, NBC, October 27, 1986
Darryl Strawberry hit the final home run of the 1986 World Series. It could be inferred by every move he’d make, every breath he’d take that he’d released a ton of frustration upon whacking Al Nipper’s ill-conceived delivery halfway to Douglaston. He’d been frustrated with the mocking his defense inspired at Fenway in Game Five. He’d been frustrated that he’d been removed from all-or-nothing Game Six. He’d been frustrated that he hadn’t homered until the eighth inning of Game Seven. Scully let it be known, not so subtly, that he didn’t approve of how much Darryl — author of to that point 108 regular-season and two NLCS home runs — was going to enjoy the post-frustration ride. Nor crazy about Straw’s slow time was Joe Garagiola, who observed, “Oh, he really took his time.”
Darryl, you see, had been there before. He’d be there again. But could anybody, even Big Game James, begrudge Bartolo his tour? These were bases he’d barely visited, other than in his dreams. He’d been to bat 246 times across 19 seasons and had scored all of 6 runs. Was Bart absolutely sure prior to visiting it on Saturday where they kept third base?
“In a team meeting earlier this season, Valentine mentioned the 1973 Mets, who won their division despite being in last place as late as August. Asked if miracles could happen, he replied, ‘One happened tonight. Al got a triple.’”
—Ken Davidoff, Newsday, August 31, 2001
Al Leiter, who spent a longer hitch than Colon in the National League, scored 15 runs in his otherwise offensively inept career. His lifetime slash line of .085/.142/.102, compiled in 613 plate appearances, is a reasonable comp for what Bart has done, home run included: .092/.099/.114. Al did somehow cajole 35 walks from his opposite numbers (whereas Bart has zero) and, most striking of all to me, as one who saw it from the Mezzanine, he tripled once. He tripled and he scored, all in the same inning.
For all the good-natured grief heaped on Colon for his crummy batting since becoming a Met in 2014, Leiter has stayed my standard for godawful-hitting pitchers. We often hear what a beast Colon can be in BP, how diligently he’s endeavored to improve his performance, that he did launch a Strawberryesque skyrocket when almost nobody was looking in Spring Training this year, that he’s not nearly the unathletic specimen he is made out to be. He may not be mistaken for Willie Mays in his Coogan’s Bluff days, but reliable sources continually report Colon’s buff.
Nobody ever said these things about Al Leiter. Al Leiter was allergic to lumber. Al Leiter wasn’t an entertaining strikeout victim. He was just a victim. Yet Al Leiter tripled. It took Preston Wilson falling down to make it happen, but it did. It seemed every bit as impossible as Colon homering. It was unforgettable if you remember it.
Even if probably not too many do fifteen years later.
“Ramon Castro’s blast off Ugueth Urbina will surely stand the test of time as a touchstone in Mets history. It was a game-, season- and life-altering event. Unless we lose the next two.”
—Greg Prince, Faith and Fear in Flushing, August 31, 2005
It helps to flirt with outsize circumstances when you’re doing something that couldn’t possibly be forgotten, lest it fade almost entirely from memory. Among the many Mets and Met moments that zipped through my mind as Colon rounded the bases (and there was plenty of time to think of them) was Ramon Castro socking a home run over the Shea Stadium wall in the heat of a playoff chase. The Mets and Phillies were both going for the Wild Card in 2005, engaging in the first somewhat serious series at Shea since 2001. Castro, who leaned a little on the Colonian side in appearance — “our pudgy-cheeked Juggernaut of Clutch” and “Round Mound of Pound,” Jason delighted in describing him — made all the difference in that three-game set’s opener. The Mets moved to within a half-game of legitimacy. We were all weaving narratives all at once declaring how crucial the Castro Home Run was going to be when the story of the 2005 Mets was told.
Except the story of the 2005 Mets isn’t much told because the 2005 Mets lost the next two and plunged from contention in early September. Castro’s was a big home run that August 30, but it takes an aficionado to recognize it now. Sometimes a home run that makes the announcer go “Wow!” transcends its moment. More often, though, it is archived and warehoused and left for an obsessive sliver of the viewing audience to bring up years later. Surely it helps if the slugger in question is transcendent. Willie Mays hit his for a team was in first place in May, yet ultimately didn’t win anything in 1972…but he’s Willie Mays. Otherwise it helps if the home run is hit in service to an overwhelmingly successful cause.
Bartolo Colon is Bartolo Colon, who has both the power to go yard and the power to evoke. I wonder how that will hold up down the road. As for the 2016 Mets, they moved to within a half-game of first-place Washington Saturday night. It would have been a shame had the homer flown to left in a loss.
“Now it is done. Now the story ends. And there is no way to tell it. The art of fiction is dead. Reality has strangled invention. Only the utterly impossible, the inexpressibly fantastic, can ever be plausible again.”
—Red Smith, New York Herald Tribune, October 4, 1951
The impossible did happen. Red Smith called it once, and Gary Cohen confirmed its recurrence. Bartolo Colon hit a home run. It was a midseason shot heard ’round the world for our times, one marveled at ad infinitum on devices barely bigger than the ball Bobby Thomson sent soaring into legend with 20-year-old Willie Mays on deck. We saw it, we heard it, we emoted and emojied it and we relish reliving it the day after because it was just that inexpressibly fantastic.
Now let’s never forget it. It’s too good not to be remembered.
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