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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“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.
If you’re ever in San Diego, definitely take in a game at Petco Park. I’ve been a couple of times, and it’s an underrated stadium. Petco has good food (the fish tacos in particular); some winning departures from the standard New Ballpark sample book, such as the white and buff colors and hanging gardens; the grassy hill beyond the outfield fences is a fun addition that doesn’t try too hard; and the park is unmistakably part of the surrounding cityscape instead of faking it the way Citi Field does.
Just don’t go when the Mets are in town.
The Mets are not actually 0-42 at Petco Park, though it certainly feels that way. Still, 14-28 is bad enough. And somehow every game here feels the same, at least to those of us back home with toothpicks separating our eyelids:
The game begins at some absurd hour even by West Coast standards. I don’t know why 10:30 feels so much worse than 10:10, but it does. If this start time isn’t outlawed by the Geneva Conventions already, a revision is in order.
The Mets trudge around like they’ve just arrived on a plane that was marooned on the tarmac until the toilets began leaking no-longer-entirely-blue liquid and the passengers began threatening to riot.
The Mets either do absolutely nothing or do a lot of somethings that amount to nothing, leaving you in an angry debate with yourself about which is worse.
No matter what the score is or how speedy the action, the game feels like it’s been going on for five hours and the Padres actually have six or seven times as many runs as the scoreboard indicates.
With the Mets behind late, you find yourself secretly hoping they go quietly instead of tying it up, because the prospect of more of this kind of baseball makes you want to curl into a ball and sob.
Dodger Stadium never feels this way even if the Mets are getting pounded. Whatever the Giants’ park is called now never feels this way even if terrible things are happening. Petco always feels like this, even if things are going well. Except two-thirds of the time they’re not.
Honestly, the above should suffice, but I’ll honor the grisly historical record by at least feinting in the direction of specifics.
Noah Syndergaard wasn’t bad by any means, though due to the Petco Effect it somehow felt like he gave up six or seven runs in 2 1/3.
The Mets seemed morally opposed to getting a hit for the second befuddling night in a row, with added sting coming from watching them once again drive a handful of balls at decent velocity directly into Padre gloves.
One attempt at a Met comeback was short-circuited when Tim Teufel sent Asdrubal Cabrera homeward on a rather perilous play. Let’s give Teufel the benefit of the doubt since a good 80% of us were equally desperate for something to happen, but Cabrera was nabbed rather easily at the plate.
And yes, he was nabbed. I know there was a brief kerfuffle over whether Derek Norris dropped the ball very late in the play or in the transfer, but I honestly didn’t care about that or whether or not Cabrera touched the plate, should have touched the plate, should touch the plate next time, or should do some vaguely defined something differently in some head-spinning future perfect subjunctive.
I’m not against replay, but it still needs some calibration: it should exist for getting boundary calls right and eliminating gross injustices, and not for subjecting routine plays to nitpicky NFL bullshit. Cabrera would have been out when the Cincinnati Red Stockings were taking on local nines before a crowd of still-youngish Civil War veterans; he would have out when crowds were encouraged to buy war bonds and plant victory gardens; he would have been out the first time the Padres dressed like psychedelic tacos; and he was out last night.
The Mets mounted another attempted rally in the ninth and actually had a chance when Fernando Rodney threw a narcoleptic change-up to Yoenis Cespedes. Cespedes missed it. It happens. Rodney then found his feel for the pitch and used a steady diet of them to dispatch Cabrera and last hope Alejandro De Aza.
And so the Mets vanished into the night and we vanished into our beds, plagued by the disquieting thought that this series is only half over. Meaning that we have 10 more hours and 36 or 37 enemy runs yet to endure.
Every paean to the beauty of baseball dies somewhere above the vast acreage of the Petco Park outfield, not unlike the fate that awaited every fly ball the Mets hit from the first until the seventh inning Thursday night. Unkind dimensions, marine layer, jet lag, Met lag, not to mention shifts up the wazoo and the starter who wasn’t ours pitching like our starter was supposed to pitch…it was San Diego after dark, and that’s never beautiful.
But it was late. That’s the key. That’s what makes the whole package brutal. To watch the first game of a West Coast trip, we adjust our internal clocks and struggle against the external ones. It was a losing battle all around, especially aesthetically. It almost always is when we commence these California journeys in San (yawn) Diego.
The Mets lost, 5-3, unless you consider it a moral victory that they were not no-hit when such an outcome appeared a distinct possibility. In that case, count the Mets a winner; your standings must be a sight to behold. The final score reflects a brief scare put into Padre hearts in the ninth — Curtis Granderson solo homer, Yoenis Cespedes two-run shot — but, really, this was over not long after 10 o’clock Eastern.
Jacob deGrom slogged through five innings, surrendering eight hits, a walk and three runs. It was a little reminiscent of how he began the last game he started in the Golden State, which was only Game Five of the NLDS. Jake didn’t look swell from jump that night, but he hung in like nobody’s business, fended off the Dodgers for six and handed the ball to Noah Syndergaard with a precarious 3-2 lead that Thor and Jeurys Familia kept intact and shipped home for a date with the Cubs.
Now that was beautiful. This wasn’t. This was deGrom groping for answers most the 86 pitches he was active. He said afterwards he thinks he detected a flaw in his delivery, and if he has and he can correct it, well, we’ll all let our hair down in Jacobian style. As with Matt Harvey the other night, this performance can be categorized, if you squint hard, as a top-notch starter lacking good stuff keeping his team in the game to no avail, given that his offense supported him not at all.
That’s a mighty tight squint right there, but it was just one game. It was almost the one game of a lifetime for Colin Rea and the Padres franchise, however, as the 25-year-old righty I like to call “who?” carried San Diego’s potential first no-hitter twenty outs deep. By the time Yo broke it up with a shift-shattering single in the seventh, the Pads were up by five and a Mets fan really had to convince himself that the deficit wasn’t insurmountable. Otherwise, as long as we were staying awake and the Mets were going nowhere, maybe witnessing somebody else’s history wouldn’t be such a bad show. Cespedes saved us from absorbing that indignity and no-hitter maven Dirk Lammers from having to revise an already published manuscript.
Rea — throwing to Lucifer in the flesh Derek Norris (8-for-8 versus us since That Day In The Rain) — was better than deGrom and better than anybody who batted against him, but, at the risk of being a sleepy, sore loser, he wasn’t as unhittable as the box score through 6⅔ IP would indicate. Grandy was robbed right down to his freshly self-laundered socks by juggling Jon Jay in center in the third and a Lucas Duda grounder was gobbled up by third baseman Brett Wallace when he was stationed to the right of second in the fifth. The Mets were at least as luckless as they were clueless en route to almost going hitless and definitely winding up winless.
You can deduct all the style points you like, but it doesn’t change anything on the scoreboard. Props to Rea for taking a shutout into the ninth, however he arrived there. But kiddo, when you get pulled after coming relatively close to what no pitcher on your team had ever done, and you’re walking back to your dugout, tip your cap to the fans standing and applauding. Don’t they teach this stuff anymore? Or does the lack of experience starters in this century have at concluding what they have begun — 104 professional starts for Rea, zero complete games — make learning such niceties superfluous?
It’s something to think about until midnight tonight, or whenever the next game on this already stupid trip gets underway.
OTHER THINGS TO OCCUPY YOUR TIME WHILE YOU WAIT AND WAIT FOR FIRST PITCH FROM SAN (YAWN) DIEGO:
• Order a lovingly personalized and signed copy of Amazin’ Again, my book on the 2015 Mets that includes a chapter on That Day In The Rain and several more on all the good things that mysteriously followed.
• Listen to a riveting Mets conversation between me and host J.B. on The Happy Recap Radio Show. Tune in for the blatant promotion, stay for the dozens of digressions (including first word on my next book).
• Plan to join me at Turn of the Corkscrew Books & Wine in Rockville Centre — my first Long Island appearance on behalf of Amazin’ Again — Monday night, May 16, at 7 PM, an evening the Mets are off and an hour that decent people are awake to fully enjoy baseball talk.
• Wish the great New York Giant, New York Met and American treasure Willie Mays a happy 85th birthday. Willie Mays is 85. Geez. You can’t Say Hey enough…y’know?
Some Mets fans find Matt Harvey too chilly and self-involved to embrace wholeheartedly. But maybe they’d feel more charitable if they considered Tuesday and Wednesday’s games together.
On Tuesday Harvey wasn’t great — the velocity was missing and the mechanics were uncertain, as they’ve been for three confounding months. But the Mets also did nothing to support him at the plate. Even on this blog it shouldn’t be all about us — Matt Wisler was really good, an early warning that the Braves will emerge from their teardown/flight to suburbia to threaten anew — but Harvey’s been through this before.
Late last June, Harvey pitched six innings and allowed just a single earned run against the Reds in a rain-suspended game. The Mets got the win the next day, but Harvey did not — and ESPN New York noted it was the 14th time in 51 career games that Harvey had allowed no more than one run in six innings or more but been denied a W. That was the worst such luck in the last century, but amazingly, Harvey’s luck actually got worse: he started 14 more games in 2015 and suffered that fate again in four of them. And that’s not even counting a five-inning start in which he held the Yankees to one hit and wound up with nothing but a pat on the back.
Run support? The Mets scored a skinny 2.3 runs a game for Harvey in 2012 and 3.65 a game for him in 2013, making him 64th in MLB in the latter season. In 2015 Harvey enjoyed the best run support of his career — 4.41 per game, good for 26th in MLB and second on the Mets behind inveterate whiner Jon Niese. But this year Harvey’s back down to 3.50 runs per game, tied for 73rd among starters.
Perhaps his oft-cited 27-22 career record is more forgivable now?
Steven Matz, on the other hand, knows about runs. He rather famously drove in four of them in his debut — the same debut that was delayed while the Mets finished up the suspended contest in which they’d given Harvey rather minimal help. That’s certainly one way to ensure decent run support, but Matz’s teammates have generally done their part. In 2015 the Mets scored 5.67 runs a game for their newly arrived hurler; this year they’ve upped that to 6.00, leaving Matz sharing the fifth-best such mark with … Jon Niese.
(Niese, by the way, has thanked his new teammates by posting a 5.94 ERA. I’m no whiz at sabermetrics, but I believe that’s statistical proof he’s a dick.)
Anyway, on Tuesday there was a whole lot of Matt Wisler, not enough of Matt Harvey and absolutely zero from the Mets. They looked chilled and frustrated, making Mets fan wonder if a matinee the next day was such a good idea. So of course Matz took the mound in a frigid drizzle and the Mets went out and clobbered Jhoulys Chacin like it was an August night, hitting a trio of two-run homers (Rene Rivera, driving in Wilmer Flores; Asdrubal Cabrera, bringing home Curtis Granderson; and Lucas Duda, piggybacking Yoenis Cespedes) and then following that with a Duda solo shot and a Flores run-scoring double. Eight runs in Matz’s column, which was eight more than Harvey got and a lot more than Matz needed. He allowed hits to Chacin and Erick Aybar, hit Freddie Freeman, and that was it. Every other Brave wound up walking back to the dugout in bafflement.
I don’t have a conclusion about any of this except that baseball is random and weird, sometimes in cruel ways. And hey, Matz probably feels like the baseball gods owe him a couple after forcing him to begin his pro career with two years of rehab. Matz might have become an answer to a trivia question, the local boy who was shot from the sky a second after launch; instead he’s traded that cruel beginning for a grandpa who’s become a meme, a share of pennant money and a bright future. And run support. That always helps too.
Tuesday was Harvey Day, though you could have been excused for identifying it as simply Tuesday. Matt Harvey, as has been the case most of his six starts this season, pitched well enough to not lose had he been facing the 2016-to-date version of himself. Unfortunately, he was up against Matt Wisler, and Wisler’s been a mother throughout his brief career against the Mets, never more so than Tuesday, when he one-hit them over eight innings.
If you could have had your choice of Matts last night, and you chose Harvey, you would have lost, just as the Mets did, 3-0. But why wouldn’t you choose Harvey? He’s been the ideal choice almost every night since Harvey Day became a thing.
Our Matt will have his Day again, but it’s a tough find on the calendar at present. Breaking stuff lacks bite. Velocity is off. Trademark poise of yore goes missing in tight spots. Good thing calendars have pages that turn.
Dan Warthen hasn’t yet produced an answer for Matt’s trending 2-4, 4.76 woes. Warthen’s an expert, and if he doesn’t seriously know, then I don’t seriously know. But that won’t stop me from offering a cartoon solution that I’m sure you’ll agree will be of no help at all.
Or it might be exactly what turns him around.
Perhaps instead of treating Harvey as the Dark Knight, we need to look at him as Popeye (who is underrated as superheroes go). When Popeye was in trouble, what did he turn to? Spinach. A couple of cans down the gullet when his back was against the wall, and next thing you knew, the ol’ salt’s biceps were shaped like battleships, his fists were suddenly anvils and nobody (not Bluto, not Brutus, not Freddie Freaking Freeman) stood a chance of besting him.
As much as we know about Matt, including his bathroom habits, it is not on record how he reacts to spinach. Yet according to extensive research — mainly rereading this Men’s Journalprofile from 2013 a few minutes ago — his most dominant period of pitching coincided with his most public enjoyment of potent potables. Matt himself revealed a familial fondness for “dirty martinis and music […] we get the booze going, and the music starts playing.” If that was his training method, it paid off, because right around that time he started the All-Star Game. Talk about your sweet music! Then he condemned the story, not long after which he was diagnosed with a bad elbow.
Perhaps if he hadn’t turned so shy about how he liked to bend it (responsibly and with moderation, of course), it would have been fine.
Harvey has spent the past couple of years convincing us how committed he is to his craft. In the postgame scrum last night, he reiterated how hard he’s been working and how hard he’s going to keep working. Nelson Figueroa observed that the pressure may be getting to Matt, because it sounded as if he’s become someone who, instead of playing ball, is working ball, and that, SNY’s analyst indicated, can be counterproductive.
So let’s make baseball fun again for Matt Harvey. Next time he finds himself down three runs in the sixth, Erick Aybar on second, Mallex Smith on first, his pitch count busting into triple digits, his skipper skedaddling from the dugout to remove him in favor of Hansel Robles, instead of giving him the hook, give him what he really needs. Send Olive Oyl (or whichever high-fashion model is currently the apple of his eye) to the mound with a bottle of Absolut in one hand and a bottle of vermouth in the other, outfit Kevin Plawecki’s chest protector with a chilled cocktail shaker and…well, if the same principle rescued Popeye, imagine what it could do for Batman.
Or Harvey could just watch some tape, confer with Warthen, adjust his mechanics and try his best his next time through the rotation. That might do the trick, too. I honestly have no idea.
There has to be a Met fan out there who got stuck with an uncooperative schedule and plopped down on the couch or in the stands after the first inning.
Sorry pal — you missed a lot.
You missed David Wright walloping a pitch over the Great Wall of Flushing, followed two batters later by Yoenis Cespedes unloading, followed by Lucas Duda hitting a tracer off the face of whatever they’re calling the Pepsi Porch now. Boom boom boom — 16 pitches, three home runs, and poor Mike Foltynewicz was stuck out there worrying that the next batter might leave him lying on his back surrounded by clothing like Charlie Brown.
Hokusai might have been inspired to paint Three Views of Met Fury, as every home run was different: Wright’s was a majestically clubbed rain-bringer, Cespedes’s an almost perfect mathematical arc ending in the stands, and Duda’s one of his signature inside-out line drives, less a parabola than a straight line between bat and whatever it dented.
That was pretty much it if your tastes ran to offense, but the pitching side offered more subtle pleasures, as it belonged to Bartolo Colon.
If the Mets were transformed into the world’s greatest rock ‘n’ roll band, Bartolo would be Charlie Watts, keeping time with a bemused smirk as his flashier bandmates strutted and preened in the spotlight. He’s imperturbable when things go badly and calm to the point of bland when things go well. You get the impression he’s not particularly thrilled by the raucous applause that greets his dislodged helmets and thunderous routes to cover first, but he’s willing to shrug it off. Let those who only see that much feel they got their money’s worth; he’ll be putting on a quietly amazing display for those who know what to look for.
Colon threw 99 pitches Monday; 92 of them were fastballs. (Tip to SNY’s Nelson Figueroa for the postgame note.) Granted, with Bartolo a fastball is less a single pitch than an ongoing improvisation for speed, movement and location. But still, 92 out of 99? That’s crazy — in an era of specialization and expanding arsenals, Colon succeeds with a basic formula that long-gone generations of pitchers would greet with a nod. (So too with recently departed ones — Monday’s victory was Colon’s 220th, pushing him past Pedro Martinez to become the second-winningest Dominican starter.)
There’s a story about Cy Young I assume is apocryphal but worth telling anyway. Some painfully young reporter came up to him after a loss and started asking questions that were clearly stretching for gravitas and meaning, causing a weary Young to give the kid the side eye and harrumph, “Son, I’ve lost more games than you’ve seen.”
If Colon hasn’t heard that one, I imagine he’d appreciate it. He’s started 472 big-league games, which means he’s seen everything baseball can do to a pitcher: losing 1-0 despite unhittable stuff, winning 11-6 with nothing, seeing games barfed away on errors or sabotaged by bad luck, falling into a win because of the other team’s misfortune or lousy weather, and so on. And yeah, he’s undoubtedly seen teammates beat the tar out of some newcomer so he winds up batting in the first and then cruises through however many innings his body allows.
You can’t surprise him any longer, so he goes out and pitches, sizing up the opposing lineup, trying out what he has, and then tinkering from there. Colon knows sometimes his assortment of fastballs will be disobedient and drift over the fat part of the plate, leading to bad things. He knows even punchless teams can cluster hits and walk away with a victory — just as he knows they’re more likely to scatter them and wind up with nothing. By now he’s seen it all, even if you haven’t. Your mouth may be hanging open in disbelief, but Bartolo’s reaction will probably be a blink-and-you-missed-it smile or a little shrug — ohright, this again. And then he’ll get on with it, like he has so many times before.
One of the first things we learn as kids is that you can’t win ’em all. We know this, and when we’re disappointed to realize it really is true, we remind ourselves that it wouldn’t actually be fun to win ’em all.
From a fan’s perspective, rooting for a team on a crazy roll isn’t really so different than rooting for one that can’t get out of its own way — we confuse very recent history with eternal destiny.
When your team’s losing daily, you get hypersensitive to players’ body language and random portents and umpire bias and everything up to and including monsters under the bed. It’s self-evident that they will never, ever win again, that such a thing is in fact impossible. If they’re up 9-3 with two out in the ninth, a meteor will hit the stadium or the Rapture will occur. Something will happen, and only a damn fool would bet against it. Until finally they win a game and it’s not a big deal and you feel kind of sheepish about the whole thing.
Winning’s like that too. Well, except it’s a lot more fun. We’re down 3-0? Ah, no biggie. The late rally will just make it more dramatic. They’re just missing pitches, or balls aren’t quite falling in, but another time through the order and the reversion to the mean will be sweet, just you wait and see. Until finally they lose a game and it’s happened and you don’t really want to discuss how an hour ago you were so smugly unperturbed.
That’s pretty much how Sunday’s soggy, chilly matinee with San Francisco went. Noah Syndergaard was pitching just fine and obviously a little bump was no big deal … until he was out of the game and Hansel Robles had sent inherited runners home and then he’d lost. Michael Conforto was going to wreak havoc like he does every at-bat until he was striking out and flying out on the first pitch and then he’d taken an oh-for. The Mets were going to come back and win until they’d made that impossible by losing.
It happens. Afterwards, I found myself thinking — as I do more and more — about how many baseball games turn on something very small.
No, not Ron Kulpa’s called third strike on Asdrubal Cabrera, though that was pretty, well, sight-deficient. I’m thinking about Bruce Bochy sending Buster Posey from first with one out in the fourth. If Posey doesn’t break, Brandon Belt’s one-hop grounder to Neil Walker is a sure-fire double-play. Instead, Posey was already steaming into second, causing Walker to momentarily eye Matt Duffy coming home with the first run and then reluctantly take the out at first. With one more out to get, Syndergaard threw Hunter Pence a fastball that hit 98 but had too much plate; Pence blasted it into the seats above the Mo Zone. More stuff happened, including the call that deserved an umpire’s mea kulpa, but essentially that was it.
Look, good call by Bochy — he’s got those rings for a reason. But as with most baseball narratives, most successes and failures are Just So Stories, ruled on after the fact. If Belt hits a liner to Juan Lagares in right, it’s a different kind of double play and someone out there is grumbling about Bochy trying to force things instead of trusting a disciplined team of hitters and the left arm of Madison Bumgarner.
Games get won even when your team appears star-crossed, just like games get lost even when you’re reveling in being bulletproof. You could look it up. Next time I’m feeling hopeless or overly buoyant, I’ll try to remind myself to do that.
You have to love a team whose prospective greatest-hitting homegrown player ever has just tied an offensive record set by somebody from its toddler stages.
What am I saying? You already do.
Toward the end of a week defined by a streak, if not streakiness, we learned that when Michael Conforto doubled in the second inning at Citi Field on Saturday, his sixth game in a row with a two-base hit, he had matched a Met feat previously accomplished only by Joe Christopher, who doubled in both games of a doubleheader on August 14, 1964, and then each of the next four days.
Joe Christopher, who was plucked in the 1961 expansion draft from the Pirates, began as a Met on May 21, 1962, and hasn’t been a Met since October 3, 1965, maintains a share of a line in the Mets record book as of the morning of May 1, 2016. Of course he does. The Mets, no matter the heights to which they rise, will always have those humble beginnings at their core. It’s reassuring to know traces of them continue to show up even in bountiful eras like the one in which we presently gratefully reside.
Joe was the 35th player to play as a Met. With René Rivera making his debut behind the plate Saturday, we’re up to 1,013 overall. We’re 978 players beyond Joe Christopher, yet Joe Christopher still comes up in milestone statistical conversation.
Granted, “most consecutive games, double,” isn’t one of those records MLB Network breaks into regularly scheduled programming to track, but nevertheless, it’s something. It’s something that a Met from more than fifty years ago did something of a positive nature that no Met who followed him had done until this moment in time.
Which we can refer to in all good conscience as Michael Conforto’s time.
Conforto has six games in a row with a double, while the Mets have eight games in a row with a win. It’s probably not coincidental, though it helps to have capable company. When Christopher strung together the first three of his half-dozen contests with a double, the Mets were in the midst of losing their sixth, seventh and eighth out of their previous nine games. Then they got as hot as the 1964 Mets would ever get and won their next three — Christopher tripled twice and homered in addition to doubling on August 18 — and two more besides. Five consecutive wins represented a Met best, tying a mark set in May 1963, and allowing the Mets to pick up a game on the league-leading Phillies.
After winning five in a row, Joe Christopher’s 1964 Mets stood 35½ out. Thirty-six in the loss column.
The Mets completed their third season of existence with their traditional ironclad grip on tenth place entirely intact. Winning those five in a row pushed them to a spirited 42 games below .500 en route to a 53-109 finish, so you can’t put too much stock into what Joementum meant to them. Christopher, though, enjoyed a season that stands out as one of the prettiest fingers among the Mets’ annual fistfuls of sore thumbs. His OPS of .826 was tops among all Met regulars in their pre-1969 history, a period generally dismissed as prehistoric. A person who wasn’t around then is often left with the impression that the only things the Mets produced in those days, besides losses, were anecdotes. But even the 1,732,597 who filled brand new Shea Stadium in 1964 were looking for something beyond 23-inning losses and perfect-game victimization. In Joe Christopher, they got a .300-hitting right fielder on whose encouraging performance they could hang their proverbial hat until better days came along.
Better days are here again. Conforto days. It hasn’t really taken 52 years to upgrade from Christopher to Conforto. There have been some fine times in between. Yet when you think about a hitter coming up through the Met system and sending a charge through a Met crowd by his mere presence, there hasn’t been that much to think about over the past half-century.
It’s a familiar refrain to anybody who’s paid attention. When it comes to developing outstanding young hitters, the Mets sure have developed some outstanding young pitchers. For the first two decades, the answer to “who’s the best homegrown hitter the Mets ever produced and held onto for more than a minute?” was Cleon Jones. Then, for the next two decades, it was decidedly Darryl Strawberry. Ultimately, David Wright pre-empted all comers. You couldn’t not mention Jose Reyes and you wouldn’t want to forget Edgardo Alfonzo and you were entitled to rattle off a few others who suited your personal preferences on the road from Ed Kranepool to Daniel Murphy…but it wasn’t going to take long to make a list, and our list wasn’t likely to interact with larger lists that took into account great homegrown hitters from all organizations.
Before long, our list might begin and end with Conforto, and that version of the list might grow tentacles that reach into the wider-ranging baseball consciousness. Imagine a discussion of homegrown Met hitters who get talked about not just as the best of Mets but the best around. Conforto could conceivably enter the Mets in that kind of conversation, a dialogue where a Met voice has been conspicuously lacking pretty much forever. Journeying home from Saturday’s 6-5 win over the Giants — one the Mets wouldn’t let be pried from their possession any more than I would dream of letting go of my hard-earned Syndergaarden gnome — I caught sight on Twitter of a stat that floored me.
Michael Conforto’s first 77 games in the big leagues have been more productive than either Mike Trout’s or Bryce Harper’s.
Conforto: .298 BA, 13 HR, 44 RBI, 25 doubles
Trout: .285 BA, 10 HR, 38 RBI, 15 doubles
Harper: .268 BA, 9 HR, 29 RBI, 16 doubles
When Joe Christopher broke into the big leagues with the Pirates in 1959, 77 games equaled exactly half-a-season. Today, it’s a little less. So we’re looking through the prism of virtually no time at all. That said, since it was 2012 and not 1959 when Trout and Harper came up, I can remember quite clearly each of them being raised to a pedestal above all young players, a perch where each has stood ever since, both by reputation and achievement.
Therefore, it’s not crazy to begin to think of Conforto, who was a first-round draft pick (thus pre-empting flash-in-the-pan anxieties), as having a shot at sticking around such rarefied air, no more than it’s ludicrous to see the Mets’ recent fortunes as indicative of how the rest of their campaign is going to play out. To ever so slightly twist a lyric from the late, lamented Prince (who wrote “Manic Monday” for the Bangles under the pseudonym Christopher, don’tcha know), sometimes it shows in April. Just because it’s early doesn’t mean it’s wrong.
It’s early for the Mets, but Messrs. April land inside May as baseball’s scaldingest team and perhaps its most fully realized competitive enterprise. When your most glaring shortfall on a given Saturday is a dependence on a journeyman backup catcher to handle one of your full deck of aces, yet you still fend off a perfectly worthy opponent, the second month of your season looms as promising as the first ended.
Jacob deGrom wasn’t super sharp, but he bore down when he had to and overcame a bit of shaky corner infield defense. Outfield legs were at least as reliable as those from the bullpen, and together they supported deGrom’s six solid enough innings. As for the offense, Neil Walker’s reign of April concluded in fitting fashion when he singled in the first two runs in the first off San Francisco loser Matt Cain; Wilmer Flores made up for his fill-in yip at third with a yippee! of a tack-on homer in the sixth; and Conforto — clearly the people’s choice, as gauged by the reactions of a majority of the Citi Field record 44,666 who were on hand for 15,000 gnomes and 2016 Mets — did everything else.
We seem to be embracing Conforto like we’re loving the comparably mythic Noah Syndergaard. Two hours before first pitch, the lines for Thor’s likeness stretched way the hell up the subway staircase and around every corner in sight. Working on a tip from a trusted source, I took my chances with the McFadden’s queue and was — after a wait that would shock Shake Shack — gnomefully rewarded. I like my gnome a lot. I like far less the grubby mindset that limits the distribution of a prized promotional item because its purveyors know it will lure you to their facility ridiculously early and get you (probably) to buy more stuff than you would otherwise once you’re finally through the gate.
I also wasn’t thrilled to be standing in characteristic minding-my-own-business mode behind a particularly nasty, admittedly inebriated lass who tried, through the haze of her apparently epic schnapps consumption, to pick a hockey fight with me (not an actual hockey fight, just some edgy Rangers-Islanders banter…which she has plenty of time to indulge in, what with her team no longer involved in the playoffs). I didn’t want to get into it with a girl barely eligible to be served by the bro-iest sports bar on 126th Street. I was old enough to be her father. I was old enough to be everybody’s father at McFadden’s. I’m old enough to be Michael Conforto’s father and wonder if I can retroactively adopt him and maybe deposit his checks into our family account.
Michael, who’s like a son to me but I’m delighted to share joint custody alongside all Mets fans, singled as part of the initial Met rally. He doubled to increase the Met margin to 4-0 in the second. And he went deep over the right field fence in the fifth to give deGrom some welcome breathing room. That left him a triple shy of the cycle, which maybe put his 4/30/2016 performance a notch below the 8/18/1964 output of Christopher (who lacked only a single, or the foresight to stop at first on one of his triples, in his quest to cycle), yet it was enough to wind down the first April of the young man’s major league career at .365/.442/.676. Conforto leads the National League in doubles with eleven and is third in OPS at 1.118. He was interviewed by Steve Gelbs on the field, over CitiVision, as SNY’s star of the game. We roared in approval at his video visage and then, suitably stoked, thundered down the stairs from Promenade chanting LET’S GO METS!!! the entire trip to Field Level.
For my money, the star of the game was any fan who paid his or her way into the ballpark, didn’t receive a gnome, yet LGM’d with gusto because his or her adoration for the home team trumps trinket allocation’s attendant cynicism every day of the week. Then again, Mets-lovers have always given, regardless of how many games the objects of their affection were taking. “I really enjoyed the fans at Shea Stadium,” Joe Christopher told author Bill Ryczek in the mid-2000s. “The people in the right field section used to cheer me all the time. They gave me presents.”
A memory like that is a pretty good gift, no matter what side of the transaction you’re on. And gnome or gnot, the Mets of today are 15-7, which actually sounds a little light until you recall the 2-5 start which, technically, also happened in April. But we were so much older then. We’re younger than that now. We’re certainly better.
If not for the pesky creakiness that plagued us in Kansas City and most of the first homestand, we’d be in the standings stratosphere rather than a half-game to the rear of the uncooperative Washington Nationals (in a division where, by the way, every team that isn’t Atlanta holds a winning record). Also, we might have broken the Met mark for most wins in April, which is sixteen, compiled twice before. When I read that the 2016 Mets trailed the eventually 97-65 2006 Mets by one April win, I was encouraged for what lies ahead. When I read the other edition to boast a sweet sixteen was the 2002 Mets, a squad fated to crumble to 75-86, I determined that they then — and certainly not us now — were the aberration.
You can project anything you want with five months to go and who knows how many years of Conforto potentially doing what no homegrown Met hitter before him has done. Go ahead, dream. Just because it hasn’t happened yet doesn’t mean it won’t.
You didn’t necessarily have to be there. You could glean just fine far from Citi Field what 12 runs in one inning looked like, felt like, even smelled like. It smelled like victory, of course.
But if you were fortunate enough to be at Citi Field on Friday night, you learned something that I doubt came through on television, radio or any outlet’s gamecast. You learned April 29 is the new New Year’s Eve.
What the hell am I talking about? Besides the fact that runs were streaming over Flushing like confetti above Times Square four months ago?
See, there was this between-innings timewaster that ran on the video board when the score was still all zeroes. The lovely Alexa of Branden & Alexa fame wrangled a seated fan to play Mets Jeopardy. She told the gentlemen that to win valuable prizes, he was going to have to answer a question, presumably in the form of a question, and that it had something to do with the letters “N” and “Y”. At this point, she promised, Neil Walker was going to come on the screen and help him out with a clue.
Onto the screen flashed no image whatsoever of Neil Walker. Instead, we saw this:
“WHAT IS NEW YEAR’S EVE?”
No clue. Just cluelessness. The contestant did not hide his confusion. The host, deprived of the clip that was supposed to get her from Point A to Point C, tried to plow ahead as if nothing was askew. Neil Walker, nine April home runs to his credit, had other fish to fry, perhaps a couple of pitchers to fillet; we can’t blame Neil Walker for anything these days. Nevertheless, the entire sponsored enterprise was in jeopardy of imploding.
Yet the show must go on. Somebody paid for it. Alexa kept calm and pretended this was the plan, asking the fellow to give his best guess despite not having been asked a specific question. Plainly befuddled, he went with, “Uh…what is New Year’s Eve?”
Yup, that was the answer. It was right there, displayed in dead-on balls accurate fashion that would have made Mona Lisa Vito proud. You couldn’t miss it, even if you couldn’t quite discern how it emerged without proper context. Maybe the Citi Field A/V squad decided cutting to the chase would guarantee a winning entrant. It reminded me of the time my seventh-grade English teacher was conducting a spelling test and, upon reading aloud a word, some wiseacre asked, “Can you spell it for us?” Reflexively, she did.
Everybody got that one right.
If you weren’t at Citi Field on Friday, you missed all this. But because I was there and my dear friend Jeff was there, and we tried and failed to comprehend how a simple game show conceit fell apart upon exposure to artificial light, a shtick was born. When Neil Walker came up in the bottom of the second and bunted for a base hit, we yelled, “NEW YEAR’S EVE!” And when Neil Walker batted again in the third, we repeated ourselves: “NEW YEAR’S EVE!”
When Walker missed a tenth April home run by a few eyelashes, settling for his first Met double and seventeenth Met RBI, we intensified the repetition of our catchphrase du nuit. “NEW YEAR’S EVE! NEW YEAR’S EVE!”
How perfect it would be, we decided, to make Neil Walker’s signature CitiVision graphic neither a cartoon ballplayer kneeling in prayer nor one going out for a stroll, but simply the “WHAT IS NEW YEAR’S EVE?” bullet that fired too soon. From now until whenever he leaves as a free agent, it would be his — and our — personal version of the Rally Monkey.
By this point it was Mets 4 Giants 0, what with Curtis Granderson and David Wright having started the bottom of the third with consecutive walks off Jake Peavy; Michael Conforto doubling in Grandy; and the presumably fit-as-a-fiddle Yoenis Cespedes returning from most of a week sidelined to single and bring home the Captain and the Prodigy. Lucas Duda walked directly thereafter — as did Bruce Bochy, albeit from the third base dugout to the mound.
Peavy pitched as if it really was New Year’s Eve, departing with the starter’s version of a blistering hangover, his ERA rising from 6.86 to 8.61. In came Mike Broadway and, with him, the hip hooray and ballyhoo of a New York Met rockin’ eve just gettin’ rollin’.
No lullaby for Broadway, only an extended nightmare that commenced with the third pitch he threw to Asdrubal Cabrera. It became a double, the inning’s third, and it plated Lucas and Neil. Five pitches later, Kevin Plawecki was walked. First and second, nobody out, a 6-0 lead, and it suddenly dawned on us there was more transpiring before us than just another Met offensive onslaught. Everybody had come up, one through eight, and everybody had gotten on. Steven Matz was about to bat. By any measure, the Mets were batting around and then some.
And they were still just getting rolling. Because Terry Collins veers toward being no fun, he ordered Matz to bunt, as if Matz can’t hit, as if Broadway couldn’t be hit. In any event, Matz couldn’t bunt and struck out. The party paused for an instant.
Then it was back to lampshades on heads. Curtis drove a ball to deep right that, like Walker’s, looked like it would be traveling over a fence. Instead, it descended in front of the No Zone (as in No Homers Allowed). Hunter Pence made a play on it.
A very bad play. The Giants’ Sign Man dropped a catchable ball. It was marked a single. Asdrubal scored, Kevin stopped at second. It was 7-0. Then David singled to load the bases and young Michael singled to push the margin to 8-0. The pace was a little too station-to-station for my tastes, to be honest. Then again, when it stayed 7-0 for more than a minute, I asked Jeff, in all seriousness, “How disappointing would it be if all we got out of this inning was seven runs?”
Man, these are some crazy times we live in.
Broadway was still pitching for San Francisco. Bochy didn’t guide his team to three world championships in five years rescuing lost causes. The reliever’s next task was to face Cespedes with the bases loaded. For anyone with a working knowledge of the Met record book, the setup was ideal. The most runs the Mets had ever scored in an inning was eleven. With one swing, that standard could be smashed, and who was more capable of swinging and smashing than Yoenis? I had seen it for myself three nights earlier when he came off the bench against Cincinnati after several days of inactivity and cranked a three-run pinch-homer to left to turn around a game, extend a winning streak and, for all we know, redefine a season.
At 8-0, there was no longer a remotely reasonable claim to be made on disappointment. And if you were gonna prevail upon the fates to give you exactly what you wanted, shouldn’t you save that sweetest taboo for a spot where you really need the biggest of bangs? To ask Yoenis Cespedes to do what I wanted him to do might have amounted to using up one of a limited quantity of karmic favors, and for what?
For a record?
For flair?
For fun?
It was raining just enough to be bothersome, but not so much that I had to be such a wet blanket about wanting what I could barely bring myself to utter out loud. Yoenis Cespedes didn’t re-sign with the Mets so we could dream medium. Besides, Bryce Harper insists baseball be made fun again. Who has been more fun since last August than Yo? What has been more fun since the middle of this month than rooting for these Mets?
Ah, screw it, I thought in silence. Hit a grand slam, Yoenis. Give us our record twelve-run inning.
“You got it, pal!” I’m pretty sure I heard him holler over the crack of his bat that sent Broadway’s first pitch in the general direction of the Great White Way. It was indeed a grand slam. It was indeed 12-0, Mets. All twelve had indeed scored in this, the longest third inning in the history of humankind.
Talk about your valuable prizes.
Yup, it was very New Year’s Evelike up in Promenade at this point, but I’d temporarily forgotten Jeff’s and my refrain from Mets Jeopardy and instead remembered all our old and new acquaintances down on the field with a single word…a single number, to be dead-on balls accurate about it.
I typed it twelve times, but I might’ve shouted it twenty-four. I honestly couldn’t believe the Mets had just scored twelve runs in an inning for the first time in their history. It wasn’t as if I’d been dreaming since July 16, 2006, of surpassing the eleven runs that scored in the top of the sixth that night at Wrigley Field, just as the Mets tallying eleven within the span of three outs was a going concern once ten became the number to beat in the bottom of sixth at Shea Stadium on June 12, 1979. But when these milestones approach, the desire to reach out and grab them grows overwhelming.
Just as the Mets have, huh? Without Cespedes in the lineup, they kept winning and were plenty imposing. With Cespedes, where between one and eight in their standard lineup is the letup for the opposing pitcher? Mike Broadway picked a very bad night to be an understudy to Jake Peavy.
Cespedes, though…what a star. In a ten-pitch span dating to the previous Friday in Atlanta, Cespedes came to the plate five times, took six swings, delivered four hits, totaled twelve bases and drove in eleven runs. And that was all while letting a debilitating bruise heal. Amid the twelve-run inning and eventual 13-1 win, Yoenis set two Met records of his own: most RBIs by one batter in one inning (six); and most consecutive games with at least one extra-base hit (nine). The Mets he surpassed in these respective realms were Butch Huskey and Ty Wigginton. I liked Butch Huskey and Ty Wigginton just fine in their day. The days Yoenis Cespedes and these Mets are giving us, though?
The only thing missing from Wednesday night’s game was Keith Hernandez requesting that someone put a tent on the circus.
This is not a blueprint for constructing a satisfying baseball game: a seemingly much reduced Matt Harvey giving up a home run to Zack Cozart on the fourth pitch thrown, followed by Ivan De Jesus smacking the seventh pitch thrown off of Harvey’s derriere, followed a bit later by Lucas Duda dropping a ball in a rundown to force his pitcher to get another out.
That doesn’t sound fun at all, and yet we came to the end of the first inning and found ourselves feeling hopeful. Yes, it was 1-0 Reds. But it was only 1-0 Reds. And despite the fireworks and fumbles, Harvey’s fastball was coming in around 95 and 96, not the 92 or 93 of his dispiriting outings in Cleveland and Atlanta. He’d struck out Joey Votto, Eugenio Suarez and Devin Mesoraco and walked away more nicked than cut.
And then the circus truly got rolling. With two out in the bottom of the first and Alejandro De Aza on second, Lucas Duda hit an arcing drive to left fielder Scott Schebler. It hit Schebler in the glove, which is normally what a fielder wants, but it didn’t stay there, falling to the grass instead for a free run. The Mets then capitalized further, with a Neil Walker single driving home Duda for a 2-1 lead. Schebler, by the way, has the presumably unconscious habit of flipping his mouthguard around nonstop, which was fine until it fell out of his mouth while he was at bat in the sixth. When the SNY cameras returned to Schebler, I hoped the mouthguard would be missing, tucked in a pocket until it could be rinsed off, while pretty much knowing that … yecch. That’s the kind of thing that gets your mother to email you disapprovingly.
Poor Schebler wasn’t alone, at least in terms of non-mouthguard-related miscues. Walker made an error of his own, Asdrubal Cabrera corraled a ball but couldn’t unload it, David Wright was awarded first base on catcher’s interference … MY WORD, to return to The Quotations of Chairman Keith. As the errors mounted all you could do was hang on, with no sense of how this one was going to unfold. Granted, no one ever knows how a game is going to unfold, but a decent amount of time you can guess — unless chaos is erupting everywhere at regular intervals, in which case you just shrug and try to imagine what wacky thing might happen next.
What happened was the undermanned Reds (no Jay Bruce, no Brandon Phillips, a discombobulated Votto) tried to fight back but couldn’t, thanks to three rather delightful Metsian storylines.
The first was Harvey, whose location wasn’t perfect (and whose bunting was very far from it), but who kept his velocity and seemed to gain a better feel for his slider and change-up as the game rolled along. Harvey’s 102nd pitch, to finish the sixth inning and his night, was a 97 MPH fastball — very good news indeed.
Storyline No. 2 to enjoy was the continuing rampage of Neil Walker, whose ninth home run of the still-young season tied Dave Kingman, Carlos Delgado and John Buck for most Met home runs in April. That company doesn’t guarantee anything — Buck, you may recall, followed his nine home runs in a blazing April 2013 with a grand total of six more over the next four months, a display so impressive that the Mets made him a throw-in in the Marlon Byrd trade with the Pirates. But for now, dare to dream: rather than compare Walker with dearly departed Daniel Murphy, let’s measure him against Bryce Harper, his co-leader atop the NL HR leaderboard. (Yeah, I know. We’re daring to dream, remember?)
Our third storyline concerned Michael Conforto, who for the first two hours of Wednesday’s game looked like the overanxious young player he’s never been. Conforto struck out looking in the first with De Aza on second, fouled out meekly in the bottom of the second with the bases loaded, and stranded two more runners with a groundout in the fourth. If you were keeping score at home, that was six seven runners left idle in three un-Conforto-like at-bats. Oh ye of little faith: In the sixth, against Blake Wood, Conforto got two more runners dropped on his ledger and responded by roping a double to left-center to give the Mets a sorely needed cushion. If we can go back to dreaming, a generation spent watching Conforto and Noah Syndergaard in blue and orange sounds pretty swell.
So the Mets won — that’s their sixth straight, their 11th in 13 contests, and the mighty Nationals are just a skinny game north of us in the standings. Jump to conclusions and you set yourself up for a fall, but this could be fun.
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.
