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.
Got something to say? Leave a comment, or email us at faithandfear@gmail.com. (Sorry, but we have no interest in ads, sponsored content or guest posts.)
Sometimes you just have a feeling. Sometimes you just know — no matter how long the odds, how deep the deficit, how frustrating the evening has been — that when it’s all over, your team is going to come through for you.
I knew no such thing Tuesday night. I can’t even say I had a feeling, because feeling fell victim to the brutal right field corner cold. The last feeling I’d had came before I left for the game, and that feeling was I could probably get away without extreme winter-style layering, that it’s late April and it’s not gonna be that bad.
It was. It was that bad. It’s late April on the shores of Flushing Bay. It’s always that bad. So I got that wrong and I shivered in service to cheering on the Mets. Actually, I didn’t do much cheering for six-and-a-half innings. It was more like I sat in severe judgment, arms folded, staring bullets at the futile proceedings in front of me. I wasn’t being judgmental. I was just trying to stay warm.
I was failing. As were the Mets. They were losing to the Reds, 3-0, in ways that told you it wasn’t going to happen for them. One fly ball after another went nowhere except into the gloves of Cincinnati outfielders. There was a surfeit of drifting back and making the catch, except for that one instant when Spiteful Billy Hamilton flew through the air with the greatest of unease to rob Kevin Plawecki. It was the most difficult of five putouts for Hamilton, who definitively transformed center field into the room where Met hits didn’t happen.
The tone may have been set in the bottom of the first when Curtis Granderson’s leadoff HBP morphed into a two-out pickoff with cleanup hitter Michael Conforto at the plate. Or perhaps my buddy Rob and I should have known what we were in for when we were caught in a veritable rundown at the turnstiles as our print-at-home tickets, perilously light on ink, refused to scan.
It’s true: there’s no more difficult ticket in New York right now than one that will get you in to see Hamilton.
Dutifully and politely, one green-jacketed specialist after another attempted to register our respective 12-digit bar codes. I know they’re 12 digits because we spent several minutes squinting and cooperatively reading the characters aloud to a person who attempted to enter them into a handheld device (worst…Verizon…promotion…ever). Was that an ‘8’ or a ‘9’ between the ‘J’ and the ‘E’? It didn’t matter, since neither one of them computed. When nothing would produce a satisfying BEEP!, uncommon common sense eventually and blessedly prevailed.
“Ah, just go ahead.”
It was the same thing the Mets said to the Reds in the third when ad hoc first baseman Wilmer Flores couldn’t make a play on Hamilton and it led to a run off Bartolo Colon. It was emphasized in the fourth when, despite new starting catcher Plawecki gunning down a baserunner (a feat the since-DL’d d’Arnaud couldn’t accomplish the night before), the Reds added two more runs on Ivan DeJesus’s two-run homer into the candy-coated left-center field deck. De Jesus was batting .083 prior to that swing off of Colon, or .083 higher than Colon. It was that kind of night.
The Mets stayed three runs behind, a manageable margin in theory, an impossible distance in the reality we were experiencing. The Reds had the most runs, the cold had the iciest grip and the Mets were generators of exactly one hit through five innings, a harmless three through six. Brandon Finnegan, except for being robbed of an RBI on a nifty Walker-to-Cabrera double play that saved yeoman reliever Logan Verrett’s frigid bacon, could do no wrong.
The kid southpaw (nearly as junior to Bartolo as De Jesus, Jr., is to Ivan, Sr.) began to lose his grip on the game with one out in the seventh. Juan Lagares walked. Plawecki singled. You couldn’t exactly blame young Brandon. I don’t know how anybody gripped anything in those conditions.
With the two runners on, Bryan Price trudged out to the mound and called to order a conference that lasted approximately as long as the one attended by Roosevelt, Churchill and Stalin at Yalta in 1945. OK, maybe it didn’t go on for a week, but when the temperature is dropping, the wind is whipping and you’re secretly counting the outs until you can head for warmth, managers really need to stop strategizing between the white lines as if the fate of the postwar world rests on their gravest of decisions.
Price decided to leave Finnegan in for a 107th pitch, his last as it happened. Not so coincidentally, it was the first to be seen by Yoenis Cespedes since last week. Cespedes, nursing his bruised right leg and not necessarily anticipated to participate, appeared as a pinch-hitter and no worse for his bruise.
That 107th pitch of Finnegan’s, however, was maliciously battered.
Yo produced a laser of a line drive that…what’d it do? It slammed off of something. The blue left field wall for a double to score Lagares and make it 3-1? That would have been terrific. But, no, it did more than that. It rose high enough to crash into the black backdrop above it — the notorious Great Wall of Flushing — confirming it was, in fact, a three-run homer that tied the game.
The Mets had tied the game! For six-and-a-half innings it was incredibly cold and the Mets had absolutely no chance, according to holders of tickets that held not nearly enough ink. Now?
Now we weren’t really that cold. It could have been mistaken for just as warm as that June night in 2000 when Mike Piazza did something similarly striking to a first pitch. That game felt hopeless for hours on end, too. Then, with one crushing blow, it couldn’t have been any more hopeful. Mike had finished rallying the Mets from down 8-1 to lead 11-8 against their archrivals the Braves that night. This wasn’t precisely that, but what Yoenis did, emerging from the deep freeze of injured inactivity and unfolding all the arms in the vicinity until they were raised high in the chill air…it was crowd-pleasing enough to have been conceived by Lin-Manuel Miranda.
Finnegan could begin again in his next start. His immediate successor, Tony Cingrani, enjoyed far less success than Brandon had prior to his having gotten undressed by Cespedes. Cingrani gave up a triple to the ever-hustlin’ Granderson and, one out later, the decisive single to David Wright, who works what’s left of his back off for every base hit at this achy stage of his distinguished career. “Every day it sucks getting ready for the game,” one of our town’s clutchest Captains would testify later. “But I enjoy playing the game.” One assumes he enjoyed playing this game more than most.
I didn’t enjoy sitting through it whatsoever, not until I did, at which point arctic had given way to cathartic. By then, the Mets were up, 4-3, with Addison Reed and Jeurys Familia handling the lead efficiently and permanently. The last out came at the expense of Reds right fielder Tyler Holt, an unknown quantity to Rob and me, but an apparently notorious figure to our sectionmates dozens of rows below, for they had started a “HOLT YOU SUCK!” chant that was as mysterious as it was unrelenting. The whole stadium picked up on it with two out in the ninth. Holt, whatever his perceived crime, couldn’t possibly suck any more than what David has to go through in order to persevere through spinal stenosis, but we all do what we have to do in order to stay warm until we can contribute to victory.
It was a triumph I did not see coming. That scanner was better at making out our digits than I was at discerning our chances. Even preternaturally wise diehard Rob admitted, through the icicles dangling from his extremities, “I was ready to bag it” before Cespedes turned the night around. We had no sense that the Mets were going to come back and dramatically win their fifth game in a row. The sensation we received as a result (augmented in parking lot traffic when we listened to Bryce Harper make the last out versus Philadelphia via MLB At Bat) is one of those moments that does not show up in the box score.
Whenever I come across an article that endeavors to project with as much certainty as can be legitimately garnered what is going to happen in baseball — a season, a series, a game, a potential encounter between a particular pitcher and hitter — I make like a squirrelly baserunner and do my best to evade its contents, lest it tag me with too much speculative data. I like information in advance as much as the next fan, but there’s something to be said for never knowing before you can possibly know…and not pretending that you can.
So, yes, sometimes you do just have a feeling. Sometimes you do just know — no matter how long the odds, how deep the deficit, how frustrating the evening has been — that when it’s all over, your team is going to come through for you. Yet I knew no such thing Tuesday night. All I had in the way of knowledge was knowing that once in a while something you don’t see coming arrives regardless of your lack of vision. In this case, the element of surprise made what the Mets delivered quite the unforeseen delight.
Everything is a small sample size if you want it to be. Nothing proves anything until it does. After 20 games of 2015, when the Mets were 15-5 and led the last-place Nationals by eight lengths, it indicated they were gonna run away with the National League East — but it proved nothing. After 102 games of the same season, when the Mets were 52-50 and trailed the first-place Nationals by three, it indicated the Mets were in for a dogfight — but it proved nothing.
After 162 contests, the Mets had won their division by seven games over the Nationals. That proved something, at least until Game One of the NLDS, at which point you could throw away all the regular-season records because they didn’t mean a damn thing. As long as you’re still playing, every game is scheduled at the historic Proving Grounds.
In this context, eighteen games is but a drop in the baseball bucket. One-hundred forty-four games remain in 2016 and are capable of negating anything that came before them. Plus, the Department of Rational Thought requires I reiterate that it’s still early. Yet eighteen games is a sample size. It is one-ninth of the schedule, and we know how ninecentric baseball can be, particularly in the only league that plays the game correctly. Though the season just started nine minutes ago, look at it this way: if you take how many games we’ve already seen and do the same amount eight more times, we’ve got 162.
Geez, that went fast.
We’re not there yet, but we’re somewhere. We’ve eked into standings territory. It’s OK to look and take them a touch seriously. I mean, why not? It’s what we’re going to be doing for the next five months and change with any luck. So let’s see where we are after Monday night’s 5-3 victory over the Reds at Citi Field.
11-7
Second place in the N.L. East.
Three games behind Washington.
First in the Wild Card race.
One game ahead of Pittsburgh for home field.
One-and-a-half games ahead of St. Louis and Arizona for a playoff spot.
Granted, “if the season ended today” talk is ridiculous (and depressing) on the morning of April 26, but there appear to be some reasonable indicators in the standings. Today’s playoff participants would be us, the Nats, the Bucs, the Cubs and the Dodgers, with the D-Backs and Redbirds hovering directly to the rear. No projected non-contenders in there. The only perceived good National League team not above .500 is San Francisco, and they’re 10-11, a scant 2½ behind L.A.
It’s early, but it’s not so early anymore that we can’t begin crafting a few impressions of what this team of ours is like besides fairly hot (9-2 since starting 2-5).
We can pitch, which isn’t a surprise. The question is can we pitch the lights out of every ballpark every night or do we simply have better than average arms doing better than average things? The latter isn’t bad, but we hunger for all-time validation. It’s what was on the preseason menu. Monday night, Noah Syndergaard, one of the handful of best pitchers in the world in April, didn’t flirt with perfection. It was, I have to admit, a bit disappointing. We’re at that stage with Thor that when he hasn’t retired 18 of 19, something seems Thor-oughly off. Runners got on against Noah. They also stole at will. Somehow Cincy tied the game while he was the pitcher of record.
How dare this happen! Or it shows that when things go a little wrong for Thor, the sky mostly stays aloft. The kid (which he still is, last I checked) lasted six-and-two-thirds, was charged with three runs, walked nobody and struck out nine. That’s not too bad, even if your name is Noah Syndergaard.
Not a single Met has thrown a perfect game in 2016, but hardly any of their starters has pitched us out of a chance to win yet. Let’s go with that for now as a trend and take it on faith that everybody in this rotation is going to have a good night almost every night. We should survive quite nicely.
Whereas the pitching strongly resembles the strength of 2015 (give or take an ace or two still working out some bugs), the hitting is diverging from its predecessor. The biggest difference between now and then is Michael Conforto, certified No. 3 hitter and perhaps the best addition to the lineup. Conforto is not new, but, like Thor, he has evolved and developed and is a threat to do whatever it takes in a given situation. He hits. He hits with power. He hits to the opposite field. He hits the ball hard. He’s really quite the find. I worried too much would be put on him entering his first full season. I was haunted by the ghost of sure thing Gregg Jefferies and how 1989, his first full season, came crashing down on him and us. Early but solid impressions say Conforto ain’t Jefferies — and Jefferies had himself a pretty good career after a fashion.
The other upgrade to the power-packed assemblage of bats is Neil Walker. Neil is on pace to hit 72 home runs, and if the wind is blowing out, watch out Barry Bonds! “On pace” silliness notwithstanding, you have to love this guy’s April and feel confident that he’ll stay steady if not spectacular as his Month of Living John Buck-ily turns to May. He seems to know what he’s doing up there and out there.
And, yes, I said upgrade. No offense to the second baseman he succeeded. I’ll take my chances with steady.
The Mets as a whole pound the bejeesus out of the ball when they must. That’s how they won against the Reds, with Conforto, Lucas Duda and Walker each going very deep. It makes a nervous person overlook the leaving runners on base when not homering. It also allows five bases stolen against Thor and Travis d’Arnaud to go for happy naught, though you can’t be happy five bases were stolen on the catcher of the present/future. Word eventually came around that Travis is experiencing some shoulder discomfort. Like Yoenis Cespedes’s right leg needing draining and sitting (and the continued uncertainty over David Wright’s durability), that’s a cause for concern, with 144 games to go.
We can’t see all that’s ahead of us, but we’ve seen enough to feel OK. Better than OK, actually. That feels fine for now.
In the late innings of Sunday’s game, Gary and Keith warned us that this snoozy matinee against the Braves wasn’t over — and was a lot closer than it felt.
They were right about the peril and the presumption. The Braves were within bloop-and-a-blast range of a tie in those late innings and came within a measly single of a tie and a long double of a walkoff win in the ninth, and yet I was sprawled on my couch giving this one the quality of attention usually reserved for midsummer laughers.
The game certainly had its pleasures. The biggest was the return of Jacob deGrom, who’s still missing some of his velocity (in which malady he at least has company) but threw with no hint of discomfort or distress. And happiest of all, he took the mound confident that young Jaxon deGrom was at home watching him pitch (or, OK, occasionally looking in the direction of the bright blur of the set) and doing just fine.
Pitchers are creatures of routine, from their between-games preparation to the divots they carve out on the clay of the mound. So are new parents — about-to-be parents know their lives are on the verge of an enormous change, but they’re stuck waiting for it to happen, which means lots of not particularly productive worrying about it. In the vast majority of cases, within 72 hours or so those new parents have handled everything a baby needs multiple times, going from novice to reasonably proficient over the course of a long weekend. Which is when they realize they just have to repeat those last 72 hours, oh, hundreds of times. Been there!
But that didn’t happen for the deGroms. Jaxon would stop breathing while he slept — the frightening opposite of routine. Fortunately, deGrom’s sister-in-law is a respiratory therapist; she noticed what was happening immediately and knew what to do. Jaxon spent a few days in the NICU, which is where my son also began his life. We were pretty sure Joshua would be fine, and he was, but the NICU’s still an anxious place even if your time there is largely precautionary. You can’t adjust to the new life that you’d braced for, and you can see for yourself that there’s the possibility of something very different.
Jaxon’s home and Jacob’s on the mound; our best to the deGroms as Mets fans but more importantly as fellow people. It was a relief — on multiple levels — to be able to watch deGrom looking like his usual hirsute/skinny self, and to see him able to pitch well even with a somewhat rusty arsenal.
The Braves’ new normal isn’t one their fans will enjoy, though. This is a bad, bad baseball team. Our collective nonchalance was unwise, perhaps, but not uninformed: to pose a threat, the Braves were going to have to string singles together, since they were devoid of extra-base power. Rarely has a team collected 12 hits while still seeming utterly punchless.
It won’t be like this forever, of course: pitchers like young Aaron Blair, making his big-league debut after throwing seven no-hit innings for Gwinnett, may well be part of an eventual return to competitiveness and then to more than that. Blair — who looks like someone inflated Christian Yelich — was understandably unnerved in the first but righted himself after that, riding a solid change-up through five innings and change. Good for him — but he better brace for a year of taking his lumps.
The Braves are terrible, but so, by all appearances, are the Reds, Brewers, Rockies and Padres, with the Marlins and Phillies not looking a lot better. (Which isn’t to say the Marlins won’t bite us in the ass an annoying number of times — I half-suspect it’s why the franchise exists.) The Nationals are in first place because they’re really good, but it doesn’t hurt that so far they’ve played the Braves, Marlins, Phillies and Twins. They now at least have to face the Cardinals, Royals and Cubs, while we play 10 of our next 13 against the Reds, Braves and Padres.
That guarantees nothing for either team, of course — just one of the reasons baseball is so great. But we should get used to thinking about strength of schedule in a way that we haven’t always done. At least for 2016, it’s a new National League normal.
What was Chipper Jones doing in the Mets clubhouse before Saturday night’s game at Turner Field? Presumably signing over the deed on the joint to the visiting team.
Remember when Larry was loathed and Turner was terrifying? Vaguely. Like the Atlanta Braves who made the National League Eastern Division their private hunting preserve, it all seems a very long time ago.
Turner Field will stand after 2016, but the Braves won’t remain. They’re racing as fast as one can in I-85 traffic to escape what Google Maps refers to as their “nostalgia-filled modern baseball stadium” and vamoose to Sun Trust Park, where the Atlanta Braves will play as the Atlanta Braves despite not technically playing in Atlanta.
Which is fine with us, provided they continue to by no means resemble the Braves we spent a generation fearing and loathing, a tradition for which no Mets fan in his Wright mind will conjure a whit of modern nostalgia. Those Braves who made Turner Field synonymous with pain have taken a powder…which is what the Mets ground their former tormentors into Saturday night.
That makes it two wins in a row in this series and six overall, dating back to last September. It’s not enough. It can never be enough. The Mets won 8-2 on Saturday? Win 18-2 on Sunday. Sweep the four games slated in late June by larger margins. Upon return in September for the final three Mets-Braves games in Turner Field history, do to the Braves what Warden Norton threatened to do to Andy Dufresne toward the end of The Shawshank Redemption, a film that, coincidentally, was also set in a house of horrors.
Seal it off, brick by brick. Have a little baseball barbecue in the yard. They’ll see the flames for miles. We’ll “dance around it like wild Injuns,” to use the distasteful vernacular that is still evoked down Atlanta way by all that awful chopping and chanting.
The warden in Shawshank is not a suitable role model for our boys, neither in outcome nor demeanor, but the Mets were the nice guys for years at Turner Field, and until very recently, nice guys finished second over and over again. Before the Braves completely abandoned the pretense of competitive viability, they had taken five of their first six home games against the Mets in 2015, a pace completely in line with most everything that unfolded between the erstwhile rivals from September 1997 forward.
The Mets actually won their first-ever series at Turner Field, taking three out of four right after the All-Star break nineteen years ago. They capped it with a thrilling comeback victory on Sunday Night Baseball, hurtling over a first-inning 6-0 deficit to win in ten, 7-6. Bobby Jones buckled down after a nightmare beginning and persevered through seven innings. Butch Huskey clobbered a pair of home runs and drove in five. Alex Ochoa put the Mets ahead with a solo blast. John Franco wriggled out of John Franco-type trouble to nail down the save for Greg McMichael. It was a quintessential 1997 Mets triumph.
It was also the Mets’ last win at Turner Field until 2006. Or so it felt. No need to catalogue, at the moment, the 103 regular-season losses that accumulated between ’97 and ’15, nor delve deeply into the three postseason shortfalls that did a number on us in the fall of ’99. The fact that the Mets won 56 games prior to their current on-site six-game winning streak no doubt leaves you with the same thought it leaves me:
The Mets won 56 games at Turner Field?
They did. There were the aforementioned three in that misleading jaunty first voyage to the Ted; and three at the tail end of 2014, just when the Braves were completely evaporating from contention; and another three in the joyous summer of ’06, the first of a few times we thought for sure we’d never have to deal with Turner Field as Turner Field again.
The ballpark has been in business for two decades and, if pressed, I can probably identify most of the Met wins there, less from the power of memory than the fact that there haven’t been all that many Met wins to remember. Considering that the Mets visit for nine or ten games a year every year, keeping track of “all’ their victories isn’t much of a challenge. Or it wasn’t until now, when the Mets have stopped losing at Turner Field and can soon stop playing at Turner Field.
I’d like to go full-gloat, but I’ll ease up because the stadium will continue to host the Mets, and why get on its bad side? We may need wins in Atlanta before they load up the trucks and move to Cobb…County, that is. These are good times, but the evil spirits that have enveloped the edifice since that pair of September nights in 1997 when the Braves outscored the Mets 21-6 and squeezed the life out of what was left of our faint Wild Card hopes are only an overconfident stir away.
The scalping of ’97 was a veritable smoke signal of what to come. It was before 1998; and Angel Hernandez; and the three losses that closed the season and the books on our playoff chances again; and 1999; and Chipper; and Kenny; and the pennant that wasn’t; and 2000; and the division title that got away; and 2001; and Brian Jordan deleting for the second time in six days what could have been one the greatest New York baseball stories ever written; and…
Sorry. I said I wasn’t going to do that. Let’s stay in the present. Let’s stay with country squire Larry Jones dropping by to pay his respects to fellow North Floridian Jacob deGrom. Let’s revel in Steven Matz easing from jams with minimal damage. Let’s make culturally appropriate arm gestures to salute David Wright’s timely two-out, two-run double. Let’s celebrate the middle infield of Asdrubal Cabrera and Neil Walker and how they field fine and hit far. Let’s tip a cap toward Juan Lagares making the most of an unplanned appearance in the starting lineup.
Let’s keep doing at Turner Field what we never did with regularity when Turner Field was in its prime. Let’s leave it a house of happy.
***
Immense thanks to Gary Cohen for offering such a generous appraisal of our blog and my new book on the air Saturday night — and heartfelt gratitude, too, to all who asked on social media, “Hey, didja hear that?” (Sure did.)
If anything, Harvey looked worse than he did in Cleveland. The velocity was up a little, perhaps, but still not where it needs to be, and the pitches were up a lot. Harvey staggered through five innings, bailed out by Yoenis Cespedes‘s insane throw to the plate and a bit of luck. With a little less luck, Jace Peterson blasts the floater of a breaking ball that was Harvey’s last pitch of the fourth inning for a game-tying pinch-hit three-run homer; Cespedes’s throw was a mighty and marvelous thing, but I cringed to see Travis d’Arnaud‘s mitt on the wrong side of an onrushing Nick Markakis. D’Arnaud held on and didn’t get hurt, two things that haven’t always been true. Happily, Harvey was out of the inning; mercifully, he was out of the game.
I shouldn’t be too apocalyptic: pitching’s really difficult, and making progress on mechanical adjustments isn’t like throwing a switch. Harvey had some stretches where his pitches were down in the zone and had bite. Maybe he’ll have more stretches like that, gain back a few ticks on the fastball with more work, and start missing bats again. Or maybe — and honestly, this seems like the more likely outcome — something’s physically wrong, and the Mets will get Harvey to admit it so they can work on getting it put right.
The Mets won in part because Curtis Granderson was awesome and Cespy made that glorious throw. But they also won because the Braves are crummy, to use a technical term. This is an undermanned ball club enduring the barren part of a rebuild before they decamp to suburbia and get reinforcements from the minors. Bud Norris is a tomato-can hurler there to eat innings, mark time and hopefully teach the young guys something along the way — an unfortunate, sometimes admirable role recently played for our side by the likes of Tim Redding and Livan Hernandez. Norris’s outing actually was a lot like Harvey’s — his breaking stuff was lacking and his pitches were elevated — but Norris isn’t as good as even a diminished Harvey, the hitters supporting him aren’t as good as the Mets’, and he made bad pitches at bad times, scoreboardly speaking.
Still, the Mets won. And hey, Harvey’s endured an entire career worth of ulcerous 2-1 and 3-2 losses and so deserved a 5-and-fly victory. Watch baseball for even a few weeks and you’ll understand that unfairness is part of its fabric. Ask Michael Conforto, who began his night with a single and then spent the rest of it working good counts, pulverizing baseballs … and watching them sizzle into Atlanta gloves. Each time, Conforto trudged back to the dugout looking alternately amused and affronted.
Sometimes you do everything right and go 1 for 5. Or you stagger through 101 so-so pitches and walk off the winner. Baseball, man.
Welcome to Flashback Friday, where a prospective champion and a musical monarch are gonna show us what it’s all about.
New York Mets pitchers and catchers reported to St. Petersburg for the club’s 25th Spring Training on Friday, February 21, 1986. The very next day, “Kiss” became the 18th single recorded by the artist known as Prince to chart on the Billboard Hot 100.
Coincidence? I think not.
It didn’t occur to me then, but the explosion of “Kiss” onto radio and music television predicted the Met season ahead. I don’t know how I missed it, considering that in late February, throughout March, and well into April, I had two things on my mind more than any other: that song and that team.
Seriously, that’s how much I embraced both, even if the 1986 Mets weren’t yet officially “the 1986 Mets”. You knew they’d be something special as soon as they coalesced into a regulation 24-man unit and began playing games that counted. As for “Kiss,” it was championship-caliber to me from the first moment it infiltrated my ears. It stands eternally as my favorite song from the last year the Mets won the World Series and ranks as No. 14 on my personal Top 1,000 Songs of what I like to call “All Time” (1972-1999).
It didn’t take me long to get to know “Kiss”. About a second-and-a-half of strumming. Maybe a half-second grunt too identifiable to be emanating from anybody else’s throat. If you didn’t know you were listening to a Prince song by the third second of “Kiss,” then you either hadn’t been alive lately or had been off on an extraordinarily long road trip. Prince was in the midst of a run of about a half-decade or so that, in a baseball context, best recalls Pujols in the 2000s or Gehrig in the 1930s. There was nobody whose stats in the middle of the 1980s were as pervasive in the game as Prince’s sound was on the radio from roughly 1983 through 1987, maybe longer.
Others had a few more and higher-charting hits to their name during the same golden pop music age, but nobody had so many protégés, so many clients, so many acolytes, so many imitators. The radio was all Prince half the time, even when there wasn’t a Prince record in heaviest rotation.
Though you never had to wait long for one of those. The man pulled off the trick of being prolific and ubiquitous, yet having every new release come off as an absolute event.
“Prince has a new album!”
“Prince has a new single!”
“Prince a new video for the new single from his new album which is the soundtrack for his new movie!”
Prince was everywhere without particularly going out of his way to be anywhere. The world came unto (or un2) Prince and it was a joy fantastic.
As were our 1986 Mets, even when they had 162 games remaining on their schedule. The Mets of the mid-’80s had blossomed into that kind of happening. 1984 was a critical success. 1985 was a pop sensation. By 1986, they were in their “what can they possibly do next to top what they’ve done already?” phase.
Exactly like Prince at exactly the instant “Kiss” broke. He wasn’t two years’ removed from the release of Purple Rain. Not even a year had passed since Around the World in a Day. “America,” his previous single, which came from that last album, spent its final week on the Hot 100 at the end of November. Three months hadn’t gone by and Prince was all new again. There’d be a film called Under the Cherry Moon (which he’d direct and star in). Serving as its de facto soundtrack would be Parade, whose cover featured Prince, pictured from the midriff up, looking not much like he did for the prior album, an appearance different from the one before.
In 2004, speaking to the twists and turns of his career to date, Prince told the Washington Post, “Once you’ve done anything, to do it again ain’t no big deal, you feel me? […] It’s like, OK, what’s the next thing?”
Every creative person who will never lay claim to anything akin to his depth, breadth or output feels Prince there. He had been one of the two or three most enormous stars in the world in 1984 as Purple Rain enveloped the cultural consciousness. He could have issued a veritable sequel to cash in. He could have hibernated and ruminated and made his public wait. Nah, screw that. Prince was here to make music, so he made an album in 1985 that was distinct from his blockbuster from 1984, and he prepared an album for 1986 that encapsulated a whole different vibe from 1985’s.
Yet it was still quite clearly a Prince album filled with Prince songs dripping with the Prince sound. He knew how to move on to the next thing while not losing the essential qualities that defined the preceding things, just as Purple Rain stepped into another realm from 1999 — his 1982 album that blew up in 1983 and couldn’t be mistaken for its predecessors from the late ’70s and earlier ’80s — yet was very much part of the Prince family.
And oh yeah, he was all of 26 years old as 1986 dawned. Plus he generally played every instrument himself on his records.
Jesus.
Parade wasn’t what came before, but as I said, two to three seconds into its first single, there was no mistaking who was at the helm. Prince was always inviting us to a party. This one was at once intimate, cheeky and, if not “Delirious,” sneakily hilarious.
After a stuttering bit of synth-play that establishes a bass-free bass line, Prince outlines the parameters of his party nine seconds in:
You don’t have to be beautiful
To turn me on
I just need your body baby
From dusk till dawn
Prince could’ve moaned those lyrics. Had it appealed to him musically, he would have. Instead, he effected a light, frothy tone, making an extremely Princelike proposition in the poppiest way possible.
You don’t need experience
To turn me out
You just leave it all up to me
I’m gonna show you what it’s all about
If you’re not paying attention, you’d think Prince wants to take the object of his intentions to the sock hop. No, he has a heavier night in mind. But what makes his approach refreshing is his declaration to love you just the way you are.
You don’t have to be rich
To be my girl
You don’t have to be cool
To rule my world
Ain’t no particular sign I’m more compatible with
I just want your extra time and your
Kiss
He probably wants more than a peck on the cheek, but this evening, he is by no means living in a material world and thus is not clamoring for a material girl who needs to put on airs. Just be yourself, baby.
Popular music’s reigning lothario couldn’t be much more feminist.
Not that Prince doesn’t adhere to a strict personal code of conduct and request that you abide by it as well.
You got to not talk dirty, baby
If you wanna impress me
You can’t be too flirty, mama
I know how to undress me
Our host suggests some activities for our gathering.
I want to be your fantasy
Maybe you could be mine
Then his fetish for courtesy is displayed…courteously.
You could leave it all up to me
We could have a good time
We’ve only been at Prince’s party for 103 seconds, yet he has thoughtfully and cleverly laid out an irresistible agenda, set it to an irresistible beat and layered it with an irresistible message.
Who could resist a “Kiss” like that?
I couldn’t (though I don’t think it’s me, his quasi-namesake, he was trying to woo). The nation’s radio programmers and record-buyers were plenty charmed by his entreaty. From its debut at No. 52, “Kiss,” technically by Prince and the Revolution, climbed the charts steadily. It was inside the Top 40 with a bullet the week ending March 8, which was the very same day the Mets commenced their exhibition slate at Al Lang Stadium versus their co-tenants, the St. Louis Cardinals. The Mets were anxious to kiss off the Cardinals altogether following the resolution of the 1985 season, a pulsating campaign during which the Mets won 98 games yet it wasn’t quite enough for a divisional crown.
In 1986, the Mets wanted to be unstoppable. Unstoppable like Prince. Unstoppable like “Kiss,” which continued to soar on Billboard while Davey Johnson sorted out his personnel: 28 to 15 to 10 to 5 to 3 on the eve of their season opener in Pittsburgh. Prince was equally indefatigable within the space of what was now his ninth Top 10 smash.
After a marvelously flighty guitar break, Prince returns at 2:45 to reiterate his preferences for the remainder of the affair.
Women not girls rule my world
I said they rule my world
Act your age, mama
Not your shoe size
Maybe we could do the twirl
Granted, “act your age, not your shoe size” was likely lifted from a sixth-grade playground dialogue, but right in the middle of a Prince come-on, the protagonist is cracking a joke. For someone who barely smiled in his major motion picture debut, the effect is revelatory. Maybe Prince is of our world after all.
You don’t have to watch Dynasty To have an attitude
Whoa! Hold up! Prince knows from Dynasty? Not only does he invoke one of the Greed Decade’s iconic television programs — No. 7 for the 1985-86 season, according to A.C. Nielsen — but he does so to stinging effect. I didn’t watch Dynasty, but I knew what it represented. Everybody in the mid-1980s did. I had no idea Prince was at least a little like everybody while he was completely immersed in being Prince. It was as if he was letting us know he was more accessible than we would have otherwise imagined.
Another revelation. Another great line. Y’know what? Prince is pretty goddamn funny and more subtle about it than I would’ve guessed.
You just leave it all up to me
My love will be your food
We should all be so lucky to subsist on a figurative diet of Prince Rogers Nelson’s affections. Musically and lyrically, I kept going back to the buffet for another helping. He didn’t care about status. He didn’t care about astrology. He didn’t want a Joan Collins wanna-be. He just wanted my extra time. He got all 3:46 of it every time “Kiss” announced its presence with authority on whatever station was brilliant enough to play it as winter turned to spring, as Spring Training turned to baseball for keeps.
Which doesn’t even bring into account the video. The video! The video is one of the most extraordinary clips ever made. I’m sure it was filmed in some exotic Far East locale, never mind that it’s most likely a soundstage in Minnesota. Prince is prancing about with purpose. Wendy of the Revolution remains glued to a stool, bringing the licks and fending off the gaze. There’s a mystery lady who you know is going to wind up ruling Prince’s world, regardless of sign. The video for “Kiss” is the musical version of what was said about Darryl Strawberry’s every at-bat, that you would make sure you were watching every one of them because you didn’t want to miss something you’d never forget.
Except Darryl sometimes struck out or flied to right. Prince always had a hit, always gave you a good time, always got the girl…I mean woman.
On April 19, 1986, “Kiss” became the No. 1 song in the land for the first of two consecutive weeks. On April 23, the New York Mets became the sole occupants of first place in their division for the balance of 1986.
Prince’s job was done here.
Aside from bursting out of every speaker in the known universe while the season was in its gestation phase and subsequent nascence, there’s another reason I believe “Kiss” predicted what the 1986 Mets were about to turn into. During March, I visited Florida, staying with a college friend who was engaged to a girl who revealed, during one of MTV’s airings of “Kiss,” that she didn’t care for Prince.
Well, I countered as casually as I could, Prince writes; sings; plays all those instruments; dances; produces; acts; and just created this mesmerizing video we are enjoying for the umpteenth time this week. Other than that, I Princesplained, he’s not really that good.
She dropped the subject. About a year later, my college friend broke off the engagement, decided to spend the ensuing summer in New York and wound up introducing me to the woman who became my wife. I don’t know that there’s a direct connection from one Prince to another, but there ya go.
But that’s not my point. My point is Prince could do it all and do all of it better than anybody else on the scene. That’s what the Mets did in their genre in those days. No team appreciably outperformed the Mets in any facet of the game. No team performed so many facets of the game together nearly as well. And no team that good ever drew you in like the Mets of that era. Perhaps you could make a case for one of the non-Joan Collins dynasty franchises having been more accomplished, but nobody ever had the kind of…I wanna say “attitude” about it the Mets had it, just to be cute, but, really, the word I seek is aura.
Those Mets were an aura unto themselves.
The night Gary Carter died, SNY showed (and unfortunately hasn’t since repeated) the game in which he made his Met debut. That was Opening Day 1985, the season before the season, if you will. They weren’t the 1986 Mets, but most of the pieces were in place. And as I watched this collection of Mets ply their craft from the vantage point of February 2012, I was legitimately astonished. This team had Carter and Gooden and Strawberry and Hernandez and Wilson and Backman and Orosco and Johnson and Foster and was about to introduce McDowell and was a month away from bringing up Dykstra. The vintage broadcast aired in standard definition, but the Mets of that era were hi-def all the way. And we got to watch them every night as if you could be so lucky to have that as your team for a couple of years — as if the world just routinely handed you a ticket to such wonders and instructed you to do no more with it than enjoy.
It was like that listening to and watching Prince. I’m saying it now because he died yesterday at fifty-bleeping-seven years old, but it’s something I knew if didn’t always fully appreciate while his career was in progress. I probably took it for granted when his music was everywhere. There were always new Prince records and new records Prince had a hand in guiding and they were on constantly and, after a while, you didn’t consider this an unusual state of affairs. Parade gave way to Sign O’ The Times, which gave way to Lovesexy, and the hits…as well as a stream of perfectly worthy non-hits…just kept coming. Prince, emblematic of his time yet transcendently timeless, continued to make music. He stayed famous mostly for music he had made a long time before, but I don’t think we ever forgot who he was, even as our attention inevitably drifted to other sources of fascination.
You receive a sad, shocking alert about the passing of a public figure you admired and you are, understandably, shocked and saddened. The purple lining? Maybe you find yourself flashing back to that moment that made this moment matter, that moment when all you wanted to do was listen to Prince’s great new song and watch the Mets start their next great season.
I’m sorry it went down like this
But someone had to lose
It’s the nature of the business… —Glenn Frey, “Smuggler’s Blues”
My premonition called me in the middle innings Wednesday night from the Molly Pitcher rest stop on the New Jersey Turnpike. He used a pay phone. He runs a very old-school operation.
“The Mets,” he said over a not-so-clear connection. “They’re gonna get it. At the end.” Then he hung up.
Wait, did he say “at the end” or “in the end”? Either way, it didn’t sound too good.
The premonition wasn’t very specific about what was gonna happen, but he left me clues.
Home runs overturned to doubles because some jamoke sticks a glove over the wall from the wrong direction.
A runner on third with nobody out not scoring.
Colon (helluva guy) swinging at outside breaking stuff to the point where it wasn’t amusing.
A ball that just kept carrying that winds up tying the game for them.
A leadoff double from the d’Arnaud kid, who’s maybe finally heating up, going to waste for us.
A double play not made.
Back-to-back home runs that built no momentum.
Strikeout upon strikeout against a bullpen stocked with palookas nobody’s heard of.
Seventeen freaking strikeouts in all.
Their old, used-up catcher Ruiz, who word on the street had it was retired and living with a full-time nurse in Clearwater, gets three hits, or almost as many as Walker, who got four, but scored only once, which makes sense, ’cause the Mets got 14 hits but left 12 on and with runners in goddamn scoring position batted 2-for-14, one of which was the home run by Cabrera that replay review said was a double, and Cabrera winds up being the guy who gets left on third with nobody out.
Yeah, there were clues. Yet somehow the Mets led the Phillies, 4-3, in the fifth, in the sixth, in the seventh…but the premonition had been emphatic. It was gonna happen in the end. Or did he say at the end?
Sure enough, the Phillies tie it in the seventh. Blevins, who never gives up a thing to lefties, gives up a double to a lefty, Lough. Reed, who often gives up something when there’s a runner on base, gives up an RBI single to Bourjos. Bourjos was batting ninth the whole game. He’s not a pitcher. The last time the Phillies sent out a lineup with a non-pitcher batting ninth, the hitter who went last was named Bud Harrelson.
I told ya there were clues.
Even still, when Bastardo threw two shutout innings and we got through nine and it was 4-4, I thought maybe the premonition was putting me on. We hadn’t gotten in or at the end. Then I remembered: extras. Extra innings. They play those goddamn things in Philadelphia like they don’t play ’em anywhere else. They played ’em last year. They played ’em the year before that. They played ’em again Wednesday night.
Top of the tenth, another double for the d’Arnaud kid. Didn’t matter. The Mets left him on second, again, when Flores hits a tricky grounder that doesn’t fool Galvis, and Galvis throws out Wilmer. Bowa…Rollins…Steve Jeltz…Kevin Stocker…what is it about Phillie shortstops besides Bud Harrelson that makes an otherwise upstanding citizen wanna commit antisocial behavior?
Bottom of the tenth, that Henderson guy works out of a little trouble. Good to see. Maybe it’ll mean something in the eleventh.
Top of the eleventh, Granderson starts to get his kinda game in gear. He walks to lead off. Wright, who owns the joint, crushes one to deep center. I mean deep. So deep you won’t gotta review nothin’. Then the freaking ball dies at the track. Earlier there was that ball Galvis hit that just kept going. It became a two-run homer. This one didn’t and wasn’t. Nevertheless, Granderson tags and moves to second, which is so heads-up I could look past that funny business about what he puts on his feet. Bad break for David, but Curtis just did something good. But then Conforto strikes out looking and Cespedes — like Duda, so hot lately — strikes out swinging.
Bottom of the eleventh. Ah, I don’t wanna talk about the bottom of the eleventh. Robles in. Galvis all Rollinsy. A screwy intentional walk. A freaking wild pitch. A foul pop the Captain misses by six inches. Then Bourjos, the nine hitter, poking a ball Wright gets to but can’t do anything useful with. Freaking Galvis crosses the freaking plate and the Mets lose, 5-4.
Let’s just say the premonition wasn’t kidding. The Mets, they got it in the end. The wrong end. Sometimes you just have a premonition that that’s how it’s gonna go down.
I missed the first Met home run of Tuesday night while I was consumed by the culinary arts. I missed the second Met home run of Tuesday night because I was standing in line waiting to partake of the democratic process.
Don’t worry, the Mets said — we’ll make more. And I approve that message.
If you like your sample sizes small but powerful, Philadelphia’s the place you oughta be. It’s an ophthalmologist’s dream. Everybody sees a pitch he likes and everybody swats it for four bags. The Mets stroked six home runs Tuesday night on top of four from Monday. The Pennsylvania primary isn’t until next week, but it appears the Citizens Bank Park scoreboard is already feeling the burn.
The Mets are the same team that struck us as so crummy as recently as a week ago, and the Phillies are the same team that dealt them fits the weekend before last. We were in the midst of bemoaning a 2-5 start then. We’ve since won five of six, the latest victory revealing itself to be of the 11-1 variety. Some small sample sizes are more delectable than others.
Conforto, with the two-run jack (while I was cooking), and Cespedes, with the three-run bomb (while I was voting), I didn’t see except on replay. Walker and Duda and Walker again and Granderson I observed live and reveled accordingly. The sum total was highly productive and the aesthetics were astounding. You never get tired of watching your team hit home runs.
You do, however (especially if you’re a Mets fan), begin to fret that so many home runs might be too many home runs, and not just in the reflexive “same some of that for tomorrow” sense. What is it the carnival-barker philosopher king suggested about winning…oh yeah, that if you do much of it, you will become bored by it. Tedium stemming from Met slugging doesn’t worry me, though I do find it a tad disconcerting to ponder the possibility that when baseballs inevitably stop flying off of Met bats and out of parks like those in Cleveland and Philly, they won’t land anywhere where they’ll do us much good.
Tuesday night, the Mets produced all eleven of their runs via the homer. And that’s a problem…how? I’m not sure, yet as a born-again home cook, I understand that you’ve gotta vary the recipe now and then. Maybe mix in a few more singles and doubles? Not instead of homers, but in addition to?
Or just keep pounding the ball out of sight. That’s always plenty tasty.
It was particularly satisfying to drive Vincent Velasquez from the scene of so many previous crimes. That kid shut us down at Citi Field, then did the same to the Padres. No point building up a legend in our own division. And speaking of legends, let’s hear it for Logan Verrett, the veritable Seventh Beatle of our already immortal starting rotation. Logan is an afterthought all-star, ostensibly lower on the depth chart than still-rehabbing Zack Wheeler, even. Nobody asked this son of a Leach to squeeze into the class portrait, but based on his first two starts — 12 IP, 0 R, 9 H, 3 BB, 10 SO — somebody needs to Photoshop him in.
For the moment, he’s a seat-filler, one of those indistinguishable gents who slips into a star’s chair at the Oscars or Tonys so everything looks full when the director pans to the crowd. Our crowd should be giving Verrett a standing ovation for making Jacob deGrom missed on principle, not for performance. It is the fate of the spot starter to retreat into the wings until something else goes terribly wrong. We are left to appreciate Logan for what he’s done in Jake’s absence, yet kind of hope we don’t have to find him on the mound too often too soon.
As long as we’re providing plaudits for supporting roles beautifully portrayed, how about a few bouquets tossed at late-inning replacement Juan Lagares’s feet for the way he came off the Ordinary List and displayed the defense that not long ago made him a Metsopotamian cause? I’m not sure where the Juan with whom we fell in love went for the (ahem) bulk of 2015, but the original version appears to be back and on the prowl for the prevention of home runs, which can be such nasty buggers when they’re launched by the wrong team.
True, the Mets’ eighth-inning ten-run lead was reasonably secure when Maikel Franco drove the final two-on, two-out mop-up pitch from Rafael Montero (apparently the Pete Best of his generation) over the center field wall, yet how could you not ooh and aah at Lagares playing a little fence ballet and taking the homer away? It was swiped so efficiently that the candy had time to bid adieu to the baby.
Juan, we thank you, and Rafael’s ERA — down to 11.57 from 13.50 in its own small but disturbing sample size — thanks you.
And I thank Bill Donohue for having me on WGBB Sportstalk1240 a couple of nights ago to discussAmazin’ Again. You can listen in on our lively Mets conversation here. If you seek a signed copy of my book, bless you…and order one here.
That was me early in tonight’s game while I watched Noah Syndergaard mow down Phillies with his ludicrously unfair arsenal of pitches. I could have waxed admiring about his curve ball too except I was out of characters.
(David Wright compared Syndergaard to a videogame player too, but I was there first, so nyaah-nyaah to our captain. Um, even if he did hit two home runs while I sprawled on a couch and tweeted.)
This was an intriguingly odd baseball game, what with the two teams collecting 17 hits and fanning 25 times and the Mets’ scoring consisting of four solo home runs and a cue-shot double by Lucas Duda against the shift. The most intriguing aspect for me was Philadelphia’s Jerad Eickhoff playing hedgehog to Syndergaard’s fox, a strategy that for a while looked like it might work.
Here’s your scouting report: Eickhoff was throwing his curve ball when he needed a strike. Whatever Met was at the plate knew it, you knew it, I knew it, the loudmouth guy in the good seats who kept barking attempted witticisms knew it, the little animated whale that briefly and bafflingly pinged around on SNY’s feed knew it, Cindy from Lee’s Toyota in her pretend Yankees uniform knew it, and all the Flyers fans getting ready to throw stuff on the ice across the street from Citizens Bank Ballpark knew it.
It didn’t matter, because that curve was hellaciously good, good enough for Eickhoff to hang around for seven fine innings and depart with the Mets on the plus side of an awfully thin 2-1 lead.
Enter the Philadelphia bullpen, though, and oh well. First David Hernandez gave up an absolute howitzer of a line-drive home run by Duda, one heralded by some Phillie fan’s mocking invocation of “DOOOO-DA” a nanosecond before Duda reduced the ball to a cloud of vaguely horsehide-scented mist. (Don’t you wish that could always happen?) Then Neil Walker once again played perfectly fine second fiddle, connecting for a home run to left that only seemed pedestrian because of what it followed. In the ninth, Wright capped things by hitting his second home run of the game, this one off Elvis Araujo, whose name Gary Cohen of course pronounces exquisitely while I can barely type it.
Can you imagine what numbers Wright would have put up if he’d made his 2004 debut as a Phillie in this park and stayed after that? Philadelphia fans would argue over Wright or Mike Schmidt while we bemoaned having run through 712 mostly lousy third basemen. We’d also have come up with half-assed reasons that Wright was loathsome, which makes for an amusing thought exercise. Um, he wipes his nose on his jersey or something before each pitch? Yeah, that’s kind of gross. David Wright is a Phillie snot rag!
Nah, it wouldn’t work. We’d just be bummed that he wasn’t ours.
Happily, he is. The Mets are .500, Syndergaard is a monster, Duda looks alive and reports of Wright’s professional death have been somewhat exaggerated. Funny how a couple of days can change one’s outlook on things.
The Mets won a game with me recapping, so I guess I can stay!
So can Steven Matz, who rebounded rather nicely from a horror show of a beginning to his 2016 season. Matz’s Sunday outing began with disquieting similarities to Matt Harvey‘s start on Saturday: he was cruising along but telegraphing his off-speed stuff, and you had to wonder what would happen the second time through the order.
The Mets scoring six runs before the Indians had a baserunner certainly helped, and was a luxury not given Harvey. Maybe not having to wait around for a week and a half between pitching assignments did too.
As diehards we’ve heard about Matz forever: he was signed in 2009 and lost two full seasons to Tommy John surgery, not starting in pro ball until 2012. Given all that drama, it’s easy to forget Matz won’t turn 25 until just before Memorial Day, or that his entire major-league body of work before this year consisted of nine starts — three of them in the postseason. We’ve gotten used to flamethrowers reaching Triple-A, grousing briefly about being bored, then coming up and making you say ooh in short order. That happened with Matz too, amazing even Grandpa Bert, but the kid’s entitled — as we all should be — to some scuffling and growing pains. Simply put, we’ve gotten a bit spoiled since Harvey arrived to give notice that there were new sheriffs in town.
Michael Conforto‘s a newcomer too, just two seasons removed from patrolling a different New York park with the Brooklyn Cyclones. But every time the Mets treat him gingerly, you wonder why: he’s been a platoon player despite hitting lefties well in the minors, and stuck low in the order despite his obvious skills with the bat. Keith Hernandez has repeatedly called Conforto the best hitter on the team, which I’d agree with: beyond Conforto’s God-given bat speed and power, his sense of the strike zone could have been borrowed from Edgardo Alfonzo or the Shea model of David Wright. Conforto rarely turns in an at-bat where he hasn’t maximized his chance to succeed, leveraging a hitter’s count and forcing the pitcher to risk a mistake. Today’s work: ringing double to right-center on a 3-1 pitch, hard-hit ball down the line an inning later on a 1-0 pitch, 2-1 flyout to deep left. Conforto’s assignment to the third slot in the lineup has been billed as a Cleveland-only thing, but like Keith I wouldn’t be surprised if he stays there for a generation.
Oh, and points for the Cleveland crowd: the Mets’ win was helped considerably by poor Rajai Davis losing two balls in the sun, but when Marlon Byrd was similarly undone, there was Davis streaking in from center field to save the play, to cheers that had only a mild tinge of irony. Baseball specializes in these short stories, these bite-sized passion plays that you appreciate at the time even though you’ll forget them within a couple of days. Up six it was easy to be magnanimous and smile at a player claiming a bit of redemption.
Before we go: Your baseball library could do with some excellent additions. Besides Amazin’ Again, by the esteemed Mr. Prince, check out The Arm by Jeff Passan. It’s a terrific overview of elbow injuries, why they happen, how they’re fixed and what — if anything — baseball can do to reduce their frequency. The Arm is a must-read for any fan who knows that sense of dread at the sight of a young starter shaking his arm on the mound, which is to say all of us; it’s carefully researched but also grippingly told. You’ll be riveted by the story of how Tommy John met Frank Jobe and root for Daniel Hudson and Todd Coffey as they struggle physically and mentally to return and recapture what they’d been.
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.
