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ABOUT US
Faith and Fear in Flushing made its debut on Feb. 16, 2005, the brainchild of two longtime friends and lifelong Met fans.
Greg Prince discovered the Mets when he was 6, during the magical summer of 1969. He is a Long Island-based writer, editor and communications consultant. Contact him here.
Jason Fry is a Brooklyn writer whose first memories include his mom leaping up and down cheering for Rusty Staub. Check out his other writing here.
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by Greg Prince on 5 April 2016 11:01 pm  No need to stop the presses, as the Mets finally maintain a 2-0 lead versus the Royals. All that gold in which the world champion Kansas City Royals draped themselves over the past two games is now dust. Gold dust. They can cram it into tiny tubes, authenticate it, mark it up and sell it as Thor-used to their heart’s content.
They’ve still won what they’ve won, yet we still have the most astounding concentration of starting pitching in civilization. We were reminded of both irrefutable facts Tuesday.
The Royals can have their flags and their rings and the accoutrements of 2015 victory. The Mets can have Noah Syndergaard pitch every fifth day and call him, depending on the prevailing winds, their No. 3 starter.
Some staff. Some stuff. This Syndergaard is good for all time zones, including the Central, where the late afternoon start, like the starter, hit all its spots. The Mets played fourteen postseason games in 2015 and none of them ended in daylight. Opening Night…well, it was called Opening Night for a reason, though Nightmarish Continuation would have sufficed. The last time the Mets took and left the field under the sun was October 4, just before they departed on their journey to greater things, which itself was the first instant they and sunshine were seen simultaneously in about a week. They won that well-pitched game, too.
Daylight does a Met body good, particularly one that’s listed at 6’ 6” and 240. Noah led us out of the darkness that enveloped the first game of 2016 and, after permitting a foreboding triple to leadoff pest Alcides Escobar, retired almost every Royal he faced Tuesday, doing so with command, arsenal and poise.
Wear all the gold you want. You face that and you’re gonna end your afternoon with your luster tarnished.
Thanks to Neil Walker bringing to bear the kind of home run power we’ve come to expect from our second basemen, the Mets took a 2-0 lead in the fourth. Thanks to everybody else in the lineup, the score loitered at 2-0 for an uncomfortable interval. Nothing wrong with leading the world champs — have you heard they’re relentless? — by two as the innings are whittled away, except for oh that déjà vu. The Mets led the Royals, 2-0, through eight one night in November, you might recall. That lead didn’t hold up.
This one did. Thor masterfully ’gaarded his advantage over six (three hits, one walk, nine strikeouts). The bullpen that never quite quelled doubts five-plus months ago transcended adequacy and groped at excellence. Jim Henderson, whose name evokes director of sales for your granary supplies’ Midwestern branch, turned the top of the seventh into a company picnic, complete with balloon animals for the kids. Addison Reed, who won’t always calm your anxieties, was Xanax for the Mets fan’s soul. And Jeurys Familia, a platinum reliever except when encountering Justin Upton, Alex Gordon and cruel fate, was his usual phenomenal self. In the middle of reveling in Jeurys’s tour de Familia, respect must be paid to Walker, who had trouble cleanly scooping an Eric Hosmer grounder with one out in the ninth, but did manage to pick it up and fire it to first, thus retiring both the runner and a seven-game-old narrative that had seeped all over our brand new calendar.
The Royals get all the breaks and eventually make the Mets pay. But they don’t cash in on every last one of them, we discovered an instant later, as Familia earned the glittering item we learned across several frightful nights last fall can be more precious than gold: a save.
The Mets are 1-1, exactly where they were after two games in 2015 (and a whole lot of other less rewarding seasons). Two and Oh would be better, as would 162-0 eventually, but this is fine. We got the first loss out of the way, we got the first win nailed down and we get on with our baseball lives. We now wait out the bizarro-schedule portion of the week — off Wednesday, off Thursday; bundle up Friday for our own humble ceremonies; and by next Tuesday, it will be like this year has been going on forever.
With pitching like we saw from Syndergaard, that sounds like an enticing proposition.
by Jason Fry on 4 April 2016 2:03 am It wasn’t exactly on my bucket list — unless you’re redefining the term to mean “stuff that makes me want to puke when I think about enduring it” — but I can now say I’ve been through an Opening Day that I was dreading.
Dreading Opening Day? What a bizarre thing for a lifelong fan to say. Yet that’s what I was doing while waiting for Mets/Royals at Kauffman Stadium and the beginning of the 2016 campaign.
It’s not baseball’s fault — the Mets and the Royals were locked into a season kickoff last summer, when nobody knew what the fates had in store, and rejiggering team schedules sounds easy until you actually try it.
Nor was any of the variously excruciating, annoying and exasperating pregame pomp and circumstance the fault of the Royals. They did what they should have done for their loyalists, and I thought they did it well. The Royals are a great team I gladly would have cheered for in October if not for the zero-sum problem involved, I love the goofball pageantry of flag-raising and gold lettering and trophies on display, and their fans had waited 30 years for a chance to coronate their heroes in their home park. I was miserable, but I managed to be happy for them, from the dude with moose horns to the fans pointing gleefully at Salvy Perez‘s gilded shin guards.
It wasn’t ESPN’s fault either, though by the fourth inning I was ready to hurl Dan Shulman, Aaron Boone and Jessica Mendoza off a nearby suburban overpass (of which one can choose many). Relentless narrative, after all, is what ESPN does.
My blog partner may have been elated, but I felt like I’d received an invitation to a party I really didn’t want to attend, knew would be super-awkward and painful, and yet couldn’t get out of. I’d been brooding about it off and on during the Mets’ alternately dopey and sleepy spring training, knowing there was no outcome that would satisfy me. If the Mets blitzed the Royals by a dozen runs, I’d demand to know why that couldn’t have happened a few months ago; if they lost, it would feel like a cruel Game 6 — a mean-spirited addendum to a series already down the toilet.
Either way, I was sure, it was going to suck.
What I didn’t dare guess — because it seemed too cruel — was it would suck pretty much exactly the way the World Series sucked. This was ripping off the Band-Aid to discover not pink and slightly delicate skin, but a wound that was still bloody and festering.
I went a little catatonic after the World Series, retreating into creating Lost Mets baseball cards and the comforting routines of work. I never quite figured out why, but I can grasp the broad outlines of the problem. It starts with the fact that I’ve always dismissed the World Series as a fun but silly exhibition series, seeing the pennant as the real prize. The 2015 Mets 2.0 — who didn’t exist before the end of July and never quite stopped feeling like strange new arrivals to me — won that pennant rather handily, surviving a ridiculously dramatic and harrowing series with the Dodgers before beating the Cubs as badly as one team can beat another.
Which was so, so awesome — all the more so for the long wait and the sheer unlikeliness of it all.
And then those same Mets went and turned in one of the worst weeks of baseball they’d given us all year.
You saw it: alternately incompetent and tragic fielding, inept baserunning, dunderheaded quick pitches, meek hitting, bad managerial decisions, and no shortage of rotten luck. It was dreadful, and as things cratered I tried to tell myself not to fall prey to the narrative. I reminded myself that I laugh at dumb talk-radio fans who confuse a bad few days of baseball with a failure of virtue, a pallid will to win, or any of that other tired Goose Gossage bullshit.
But it’s easy to laugh in May or June. Turns out it’s tougher in October.
It’s a lot tougher in October.
I sulked about it for a while, waited for the feeling to fade, and when it stubbornly persisted … well, I didn’t quite know what to do. And I still don’t.
But I do know this much: the antidote to this particular fan’s illness was not kicking off April with the same two teams and the same two starting pitchers.
Which leads me back to the narrative: If the Mets had drawn any of the other 28 possible opponents for this Opening Day, the in-game chatter would have been all about the team’s giddy success and the parade of stud pitchers and the feel-good returns of Yoenis Cespedes and Bartolo Colon and how Wilmer Flores cried and stayed and how now the promised land was within reach.
Instead, the Mets drew the only opponent that ensured a different narrative: one that was all about the Royals’ triumphs and the Mets’ failures, crystallized by poor Lucas Duda taking aim at a spectator and Travis d’Arnaud spinning vainly to catch the uncatchable.
The best revenge would have been to kick the narrative in the teeth, and leave Shulman and Co. awkwardly trying to cram an increasingly square peg in a round hole. A fine plan, except the Mets turned in a performance eerily reminiscent of the World Series that I can’t manage to get over.
I mean, it was like baseball plagiarism: There was Matt Harvey once again looking out in first-inning amazement at Cespedes and a ball fielded with horrific negligence. There were Royal grounders sneaking through holes and just eluding Met defenders in the bottoms of innings, followed by the aggravatingly familiar sight of Eric Hosmer and Mike Moustakas smothering tough hops in the tops of innings, transforming run-scoring singles into rally-snuffing outs.
Yes, the Mets made things interesting late, but their uprising started as farce and ended as tragedy.
The eighth inning looked like one of those hollow baseball moral victories, with Duda and Michael Conforto grabbing a page from Kansas City’s playbook and dropping little bloops that found grass. The ninth inning, though, turned bleak and wintry: Curtis Granderson and Cespedes sandwiched excellent at-bats around a helpless, dreadful showing by David Wright that marooned the tying run at third. It’s only one game and it would be unfair to make more of it than that, but Wright had an awful day — besides the strikeout, his bat was slow on several pitches he should have crushed and his arm was short on two infield plays.
ESPN’s sledgehammer narrative, if anything, wasn’t delivered relentlessly enough. And what was guaranteed to be a bittersweet evening at best turned out to be one of those soul-curdling losses that leave you shaking your head and waiting for a better game, one that will disperse the little black cloud created by this one.
Unfortunately, the next chance at that will be against these same Royals, and against this same narrative. Didn’t like the party? Then you’re not going to like Tuesday’s shindig either. But once again, our attendance is mandatory.
by Greg Prince on 3 April 2016 3:49 am Spring what now? Spring Training? Never heard of it. If, in fact, it existed, it has completely ceased to matter. The Mets, I seem to vaguely recall, introduced the phrase “winless streak” to the baseball vocabulary for a couple of weeks at the end of March, but March has ended. Games that don’t matter don’t matter even more now that they’re ensconced in the past tense.
It’s Opening Night tonight. That’s what matters. That and its 161 companions to come.
I’m very excited. Also, the sky is blue, the grass is green and the clouds are puffy and cumulus. None of this is news, though to me, the part where I’m excited has me psyched, stoked and revved. The last time I was very excited in advance of a season’s lid being lifted was nine years ago. Perhaps you recognize an echo in that formulation. Last September, we were clinching our first postseason trip in nine years. Now we’re opening a season on the heels of one for the first time in that same size span. One of the fringe benefits of success is a lingering case of excitement.
I’ve avoided mentioning the exact calendar year that was the site of my previous overspill of Game One enthusiasm, but after a trip to the World Series, why be coy? It was 2007. Yes, Game 162 sapped the enthusiasm that was so in abundance six months before, but never mind that. Seriously, never mind any thoughts of a Year After syndrome. 2007 undercut 2006’s legacy and cast a shadow on 2008, which itself certainly didn’t bode well for anticipation of 2009, and so we went clear up to the outset of 2015, which I approached with no more than perfunctory elation.
Which was still elation, because it was still the beginning of baseball season, and the beginning of baseball season is always just cause for elation, but 2015 followed 2014, which had been the latest in the Nothing Special Parade that had been coursing through Metsopotamia for more than a half-decade.
Ah, but 2015’s full complement of 162 changed the direction, trajectory and arc of where we were going, and ever since things straightened out to our liking, everything about the Mets is exciting. Opening Night is exciting, even if it’s at night, even if it’s on ESPN, even if it’s in an American League facility and even if it brings us into direct contact with the Kansas City Royals, the only team in all the land that had a better 2015 than ours, directly at our expense — which is almost irrelevant amid our excitement, except when pangs of regret remind us that isn’t.
But never mind that, either.
The most exciting part of all this, after an October when baseball activities never ceased and a winter devoted to ensuring there might be another one in our not-so-distant future, is that we can Believe from the get-go without straining our inner credulity (which will get you pronounced day-to-day by Ray Ramirez). We can honestly Believe we might go as least as far again, a phenomenon a whole lot different from groping for pieces of if everything goes right, then maybe we won’t be so bad. There are no motions to go through when you have a ballclub like this. There is no limiting your aspirations when you have pitching like this. There is no stretching to imagine when you have a pretty good idea of how real the Mets can be.
Our reality is a dream that has every legitimate chance to come true, not the generic dream of thirty teams having a shot while sitting at 0-0. There is at play an actual amalgam of talent and ability and experience that you’re entitled to envision processing teamwork into dreamwork. No guarantees — despite the inspirational anniversary at hand — but we have arrived at a stronger competitive not to mention emotional starting point than we have at any Opener post-2007.
We’re not living in the post-2007 world anymore. This here, brothers and sisters, is the year after 2015, and I mean that in the best sense possible.
by Greg Prince on 1 April 2016 1:47 am Not to look past Opening Night in Kansas City, let alone the Mets’ last chance to end Spring Training without a loss or tie already yet, but what’s incredibly hard to believe is that in a week’s time, Citi Field will be filled again.
I’ve really come around on the ol’ ballpark, probably because a pennant was won by the home team, but also because management never stops trying to improve it. Consider all the upgrades we’ve read about in the past few days from respected members of the credentialed media, and then add to them the thus far less-reported second wave of innovations I was fortunate enough to personally preview in the tour they gave to select bloggers like yours truly.
I think I’m most excited about the Purina One Bad Luck for the Other Team Black Cat Giveaway in the middle of the third inning of every home game — to be repeated in the 13th and 23rd, should the occasion present itself. Going to a Mets game and bringing home a kitty we weren’t expecting is an experience sure to appeal to those of us who love our felines as much as much as we do our Metsies. If you’re not a cat person, you will be soon if you are tabbed. According to the fine print on the backs of the tickets this year, acceptance of the cat is “mandatory,” as bearer “tacitly accepts responsibility to raise and nurture animal for three years from game date, subject to criminal prosecution.
And speaking of “Metsies,” the Casey Stengel “Babblehead” Doll, brought to us by Verizon Wireless, is a stroke of promotional genius. It’s like a bobblehead (even if it still doesn’t look like him), except this Ol’ Perfesser just keeps going on about how Amazin’, Amazin’, Amazin’ his Amazin’ Mets are, then offers an authentically Stengelese analysis of every player who has ever participated in a game for the Mets, including new guys like Neil Walker and Antonio Bastardo, the latter of whom the Babblehead colorfully identifies as “that son of a bitch Nelson”. I don’t know how they got the technology to work so you don’t have to pull a string or anything. Casey just starts talking and doesn’t stop. Taking him home alongside that black cat will be doubly fun.
Team history gets its due in other ways, too. Look for an exhibit in the Mets Hall of Fame and Museum devoted to the 9186 World Champions. It’s supposed to say 1986, but it came back from the printer transposed, and with so much going on ahead of the Home Opener, they just went with it. Let’s hope it’s an omen for the 92nd century.
The food concessions have been literally beefed up, with Bobby Bonilla’s Burger Grudge opening adjacent to the newly dubbed Coca-Cola Corner. Bobby Bo will be on hand, dispensing Burgers & Snarls. That’s what he calls fries; also, he kind of snarls at customers if they lean too far onto the counter. In the fourth inning, CitiVision will feature Bobby’s Beef, in which he tells off a random seatholder. The lucky fan then receives an autographed Knuckle Sandwich from Bonilla himself. (No photographs, please; Mr. Bonilla doesn’t care for the capture of his image.)
For the Burger Grudger who builds up a thirst that won’t be satisfied by carbonated soft drinks, there will be the chance to visit the latest Danny Meyer creation behind center field, the Beers of Joy stand, with all your favorite craft creations on tap, including a Union Square Hospitality Group original, Lachrymose Lager, “in honor of the player who cried out to stay in Flushing”. I guess they can’t explicitly refer to Wilmer Flores because of alcohol/athlete restrictions, but it’s a nice touch. All offerings at Beers of Joy will retail for $20.15 per 4-ounce cup.
Finally, given my particular demographic status, I appreciate the introduction of the Flomax Race to the Bathroom that follows the bottom of the fifth. It’ll be like Milwaukee’s sausage races, but each of the “contestants” truly has to go. Matt Harvey will be the spokesman. Kudos on the well-executed product placement we’ve already seen.
Of course the biggest attraction a week from this very day will be the raising of the RATIONAL LEAGUE CHAMPIONS flag. Again, it was kind of a rush job, but when you see it, you’ll know what it means.
by Greg Prince on 28 March 2016 5:21 pm Could be!
Who knows?
There’s something due any day;
I will know right away,
Soon as it shows.
The shortest span between seasons in Mets history, from a little after midnight last November 2 to a few hours before midnight this April 3, has, predictably, turned into the longest wait for a new year baseball humanity has ever known.
Remember how happy we were that Spring Training had arrived? That was about a thousand months ago, and it’s still freaking going on. The charm, at least as gauged from the northern segments of I-95, has been worn down to the nub. Spring will look good again when its view is obscured by another winter. For now, it is The Thing That Wouldn’t Leave.
Yet it will. Give it time. Just a little more time.
It may come cannonballing down through the sky,
Gleam in its eye,
Bright as a rose!
Who knows?
I’ve tuned in to at least a portion of just about every Spring game the Mets have transmitted over their TV and radio outlets this year, yet I’d be hard-pressed, even while Spring is still literally in the air, to remember anything about any of them. They’ve very recently occurred, I possess a pretty good memory, but they evaporate into mist on contact. It’s Spring Training. We’re informed so regularly how unimportant their results are that it becomes second nature to ignore just about everything we see and hear. It’s supposed to be enough that the act of baseball is being carried out. Don’t look too closely. Certainly don’t look at who’s winning or losing. Chances are nobody is doing either.
But Sunday, because it was the last Sunday during which Mets baseball would definitively not matter for more than six months, seemed to matter, at least in theory. We reached the one-week-and-counting stage of Spring. That seemed to countermand the idea that none of this counts. It was worth watching and listening and maybe retaining.
So I did. It was the Mets and a split squad of Nationals, or roughly half of our contemporary archrivals. Just based on the whole vs. half theory, we should have prevailed easily. We had them outnumbered. In Spring, though, it doesn’t work the way you’re conditioned to normally consider these matters. Numbers don’t matter. Look at the players. A bunch are wearing numbers that hardly ever appear on baseball jerseys. It’s one more in a series of winks that you really should stop staring so hard at all of this. Come back in a week.
Nah. Let’s see what we’ve got here.
It’s only just out of reach,
Down the block, on a beach,
Under a tree.
I got a feeling there’s a miracle due,
Gonna come true,
Coming to me!
Steven Matz started. Out of the corner of the one eye with which I’ve been monitoring Spring activities, I’d noticed Steven Matz was not performing in a manner befitting one-fifth or –sixth of the Greatest Starting Rotation Ever Assembled. I could dismiss such presumably aberrational behavior if I could measure it in relation to his awesome track record. But Matz has almost no track record. He threw two real good regular-season starts, went on the DL, threw four more (one of which was relatively superb), reported some back stiffness and then was tasked with taming the Dodgers, the Cubs and the Royals in October. He survived each of them and now he’s the No. 4 starter on the GSREA. There was a time we huffed “no scholarships” at starters will fewer big league credentials, but we all believe in Matz because a) we really like him; b) we really want to; c) we’re told he’s definitively worthy of our faith despite having pitched past the sixth inning exactly once in the majors.
I’m willing to take a relatively small leap that he’ll be what he is supposed to be — the best parts of his 2015 sample size were as tasty as his sample size was small — but maybe he could pitch well once in March so he could put my mind at ease in advance of April?
My fellow Long Islander did me a solid. Five-and-two-thirds innings of what appeared to be professional pitching. He walked four but struck out five and allowed only a home run to Clint Robinson in the way of damage. Later he told those who asked that the Mets pitchers had a meeting and this somehow helped. Most meetings veer to the useless. Perhaps Dan Warthen has a future in human resources.
Could it be? Yes, it could.
Something’s coming, something good,
If I can wait!
Something’s coming, I don’t know what it is,
But it is
Gonna be great!
David Wright went the other way, all the way, belting a Yusmeiro Petit pitch barely over Tradition Field’s right field fence in the first inning. David Wright stroking opposite field home runs is the rock on which His Wrightness was built. Then they built Citi Field, which sapped one of his core equities but doesn’t much matter in Port St. Lucie, where the Mets play in a ballpark whose dimensions remain an exact match for Shea Stadium. That was a brilliant concept in 1988, a lingering curiosity since 2009 for those of us who enjoy raising our eyebrows in “ya don’t say?” astonishment. The Mets aren’t using 338 down the lines and 410 to center anymore in real life, but knowing that the old ballpark’s measurements still play a role in preparing the players for their season in the current one tickles the historical rib. It’s like bumping into the Ebbets Field flagpole outside Barclays Center or scaling the restored John T. Brush Stairway behind the site of the Polo Grounds.
Here’s a ghost for you, albeit one that ultimately learned it was time to blow: the air conditioner that cooled the visitors’ clubhouse at Shea from 1964 through 2008 was a transplant from the Polo Grounds press room. Ironically, an AC unit that was said to chill effectively enough “to store raw meat” was ultimately knocked down because of a stiff Breeze.
Wright, who’s been around since that air conditioner was frosting Bobby Cox’s autographed balls, is working toward not being an anachronism. He’s working hard so he can take Johnnie Walker’s advice on remaining ambulatory. Tell us all you want that Spring is somewhere to tread emotionally lightly. David works it. At 32 and saddled stenoically, he has to.
The work paid off on Sunday. It didn’t count at all, yet surely it counted for something.
With a click, with a shock,
Phone’ll jingle, door’ll knock,
Open the latch!
Something’s coming, don’t know when, but it’s soon;
Catch the moon,
One-handed catch!
Gary Cohen was on assignment, which could be taken to mean he’d be filing reports from Lebanon on The Nightly News with Lester Holt unless you know that announcers for your favorite team actually announce other games. Howie Rose does hockey, Josh Lewin football, Gary college basketball. Though they’re all as talented there as they’re talented here, it can’t help but feel like the tiniest bit of betrayal to their true missions, which is talking to us about the Mets every time they open their mouths. Lindsey Nelson called the Cotton Bowl without once mentioning Buddy Harrelson. Lindsey, I’d wonder, why aren’t you talking about the Mets on New Year’s Day?
With Gary broadcasting for radio audiences the improbable step Syracuse took into the NCAA Final Four, Scott Braun took his place telling us about the PSL Nobody’s Keeping Track Two. Braun — whose voice I inevitably associate with Barbasol-sponsored updates on the MLB Network at four in the morning — filled in last Spring, too. He and Jim Duquette and Alexa Datt. It’s not at all bad what they do. It’s just not what we’re used to.
Keith Hernandez, though…him we’re used to and wouldn’t have it any other way. Keith, who fretted between Sunday pitches about booking his brother a hotel room in Sag Harbor two months from now, did color while Scott did play-by-play. It was a generally affable and amiable arrangement, though you certainly hope Cabrera and Walker are in better sync by Kansas City than these provisional partners were.
Scott asked Keith a pitching question. There was a pause of several seconds.
“I’m sorry,” Keith finally and honestly replied. “I was daydreaming.”
Ah, Scott. Everybody knows Ronnie handles the pitching questions. But he was on assignment as well.
Around the corner,
Or whistling down the river,
Come on, deliver
To me!
Will it be? Yes, it will.
Maybe just by holding still,
It’ll be there!
At any given moment, I’m hyperaware of no more than three Mets prospects. One of them is Amed Rosario. I’ve heard he’s the Shortstop of the Future. The last one we had was Jose Reyes. I was hyperaware of him as he climbed the ladder. It’s been all pretty TBD at that position in the four going on five seasons since Jose left. Will Amed fill the post-Reyes gap once and for all when 2018 rolls around? It’s too soon to peer so far. Rosario’s only 20, has spent all of two games above Single-A and was sporting No. 89 on Sunday.
But No. 89 was in action. He, like Matz and Wright (and, I suppose, Braun and Hernandez), started. He banged out two hits. He made a leaping grab of a line drive. He exuded enthusiasm all over Twitter before and after.
It was a “privilege and honor” playing alongside the “big boys”; any number was a good number if got him “to play in the show”; the best part of his day was “seeing Captain David Wright healthy, winning and playing in front of the Mets home crowd.” Young Amed volunteered all of this and answered every atta-boy fed him in the occasionally fraught 4-6-3 pivot of social media.
Come to think of it, maybe it’s @amed_rosario who has the future in human resources — after he stars at shortstop for us for a decade or two.
Come on, something, come on in, don’t be shy,
Meet a guy,
Pull up a chair!
The air is humming,
And something great is coming!
Who knows?
Nobody won. Nobody lost. That happens in Spring Training. It happens a lot to the Mets, who on Sunday posted a tie for the third consecutive day. Once the bottom of the ninth was over, the score Mets 4, Nats 4, I braced myself for the most predictable March camera shot this side of some UNC Tar Heel cutting down a net: Terry Collins waving “bye” to the other team’s manager.
As of this coming Sunday night, we won’t see that shot anymore. It will be whether you win or lose, not just that you played a game. The bullpen will have to fine-tune itself. Cespedes will have to judge deep flies to the base of the wall better. Conforto will have to be comfortable, deGrom up to speed and Harvey…gads, what exactly is up with the titular ace of the GSREA? Nothing good, say the sources inside my head.
This gets real and stays real before we know it. It’s only just out of reach.
Music by Leonard Bernstein. Lyrics by Stephen Sondheim. Anticipation by New York Mets fans everywhere.
***
Profuse thanks to all who came to Foley’s this past Saturday for an Amazin’ Again event that lived up to my book’s name. You humble with me with your words and actions.
Hope those of you in or adjacent to the Borough of Mets can join me Thursday evening, 6 to 7:30, at the Queens Library’s Central branch in Jamaica for a talk I assure you will be as Amazin’ as I can make it.
And speaking of Amazin’ talk, this chat between myself (at 35 minutes in) and Chris McShane of Amazin’ Avenue was a pleasure to be part of.
by Greg Prince on 22 March 2016 12:42 pm The Mets have played home games in two counties of New York City, so I’ll do the same in the coming days, as the preseason book tour for Amazin’ Again: How the 2015 New York Mets Brought the Magic Back to Queens continues.
This Saturday, March 26, from roughly noon to three, I’ll be at Foley’s, the bar dedicated to baseball, with books for purchase and signatures for free. Buy a copy if you haven’t already; bring the copy you already bought. Mostly, come say hi, hang out and share a little Mets bonhomie with your fellow fans. Foley’s is located in Manhattan at 18 W. 33rd St., between Fifth and Sixth Avenues, across from the Empire State Building, convenient to Penn Station, not far from Grand Central. (Thanks to Friend of FAFIF Sharon Chapman for getting this particular baby going.)
Next Thursday, March 31, from 6:00 to 7:30 PM, the tour travels from the borough once graced by the Polo Grounds to the borough where Shea Stadium stood and where Citi Field will hoist a National League Championship flag. That’s right, Amazin’ Again comes to Queens, specifically the Queens Library’s Central branch in Jamaica, 89-11 Merrick Blvd. I’ll be giving a talk about the book, baseball writing, the Mets and anything else anybody in the audience is curious about. As at Foley’s, copies will be available for sale and inscriptions are on the house.
For those of you who are wonderful people who ask, “When are you going to be in [place that isn’t Manhattan or Queens]?” the answer is soon, I hope. You probably know your neighborhood better than I do, so if you know of a location that strikes you as suitable for this sort of thing, let me know, and together we’ll see what we can do.
 The author sits down alongside the host with the most Amazin’ baseball stuff around, Jay Goldberg, at the Bergino Clubhouse. A word of appreciation to Jay Goldberg and everybody who came out on March 17 to Bergino Baseball Clubhouse for the first stop on the tour. It was one of the most fun Mets nights I’ve ever had that didn’t include one of Mark Simon’s meticulously catalogued walkoff home runs. You can listen in to the conversation between Jay and me here, including some lively Q&A with a terrific audience. Jay also has a handful of autographed copies of Amazin’ Again in stock if you can’t make it to either of the upcoming events and you’re a swell enough person to want one.
I also appreciate the interest over at Mets Merized Online, where I answered a string of solid 2015-related questions from Joe DeCaro and several of MMO’s highly engaged readers.
Amazin’ Again is on sale at your finer bookstores and through major online booksellers. I thank everybody who has been good enough to add it to their baseball library already and appreciate to high heavens all the nice things you’ve told me about it to date.
Oh, as for the Sports Illustrated–covering 2016 Mets — who probably have a real ballgame coming up sooner or later — I was recently part of a panel of Mets bloggers who attempted to forecast their fate for the Cardinal site, C70 At The Bat, where we hope they know enough to take good care of Ruben Tejada for us.
by Greg Prince on 17 March 2016 4:24 pm I long ago worked with a CFO who was fond of quoting the late Everett Dirksen: “A billion here, a billion there, pretty soon you’re talking you’re talking about real money — so cut down on the paper clips.” The paper clips part may have been our CFO’s coda, but you could hear the longtime Senate minority leader’s sentiments echoed from Port St. Lucie Wednesday as Ruben Tejada was, at last, given his walking papers.
Ruben always could work out a walk.
Must be the money, right? We all more or less love Ruben since last October and when it comes to Ruben’s skill set — guy who won’t necessarily kill you, guy who now and then helps you — there was nothing wrong with what he brought to the Met table. Nobody was ever more Ruben Tejada than Ruben Tejada.
That, I suppose, made him his own archetype. I think back to the first FAFIF Spring, in 2005, when the Mets deleted their perfectly good utilityman, Joe McEwing, when Chris Woodward became available and proved himself more consistently capable of doing Joe McEwing things than Joe McEwing. Nobody ever called Chris Woodward “Super,” but he seemed better in the moment. One balanced one’s sentimentality toward the next-to-last 2000 Met still on the roster (only Mike Piazza was left post-McEwing) with the realpolitik of, in essence, it ain’t Joe friends, it’s Joe business.
 Adios, amigo. Eleven springs later, releasing Tejada is a little like that, except I don’t necessarily see a contemporary Chris Woodward in his off-the-bench prime charging onto this team. Maybe Matt Reynolds makes a splash. Maybe all those balls Eric Campbell hits so hard start to fall in. Maybe Tejada doesn’t wind up on the Cardinals, which is where we tend to presume every cast-off Met winds up and elevates his baseball IQ to our eventual teeth-gnashing detriment. What it inevitably comes down to is Ruben, who never quite cemented his role, was going to make three million bucks and now the Mets won’t have to pay him five-sixths of that.
Two-point-five-million here, two-point-five-million there…and I’m not criticizing the decision for being financially driven. Roleless Ruben could be valuable or he could be a cipher. I honestly don’t know how much a player who wasn’t going to be the go-to backup infielder of record is “worth”. Yoenis Cespedes signs a three-year deal worth $75 million and it’s sort of a bargain. Jacob deGrom is renewed at $607,000 and it’s a travesty, but don’t worry, because if he stays in one piece, he’ll get much more. Michael Cuddyer accepts approximately $3 million to be on his merry way and it’s a gift. Daniel Murphy rejects a qualifying offer of $15.8 million because it’s understood to be kind of an insult.
We should all be so insulted.
Anyway, somewhere in there, $2.5 million not dedicated to Ruben Tejada, minus the $507,500 or so it will take to minimally compensate his replacement, adds up. Hopefully it adds up to whatever the Mets might need in late July, assuming the Mets need something in late July. And the Mets, as content as we are with them, always need something.
That’s the practicality. The sentiment is it’s sad that somebody ordered a Ruben to go. I mean, c’mon, he was (and is) Ruben Tejada. You talk about rules regarding kids in the clubhouse. Ruben Tejada is perpetually 14 years old from the looks of him. How in the name of Drake LaRoche can you kick him to the curb?
With the purge of the Children of Manuel almost complete, Lucas Duda is the second-longest serving Met, behind David Wright, who isn’t going anywhere unless his back tells him otherwise. Tejada was lined up to be the penultimate senior Met, which is crazy, until you remember Ruben made the club out of camp in 2010 as insurance for Jose Reyes’s thyroid condition, and Ruben wasn’t too far removed from 14 then. He’s been up and down in the intervening seasons, but mostly up and as close to a fixture at Citi Field as anything that wasn’t the Pepsi-Cola sign. But the Pepsi-Cola sign isn’t there anymore, and neither is Ruben.
I’m glad he — like Murphy and Jon Niese — got to experience a division title and part of a postseason. Without 2015, Tejada would have been consigned to the batch of players from the lean years. It’s the players who persevere through those hard times and arrive in at least the foreground to the promised land who are destined to sparkle in our memories. Ron Swoboda was a 1966 Met. Mookie Wilson was a 1982 Met. We don’t identify them as such, though, no matter that Swoboda hit an Amazin’ walkoff home run against the Giants in ’66 or that Mookie stole more bases than any Met previously in ’82. In that spirit, Ruben Tejada was a 2012 Met. He was one of the better 2012 Mets. Tejada succeeded Reyes at short, an impossible situation, and did all right. He batted .289 as a full-time player. He stayed in at-bats forever. He went back on popups with the best of them. By 2013, however, we got an inkling we had already experienced peak Tejada at the biological age of 23 (though he still looked 14). By 2014, neither Tejada nor the Mets appeared to be on the fast track to excellence.
The point is, Ruben Tejada won’t be remembered as a 2012 Met. He’s a 2015 Met, which will eternally mean something, partly due to his own contribution to the team we’d been waiting practically forever for. Hell, he literally gave a limb to the cause. Good luck to him wherever he goes.
I had a nice conversation with the folks at Mets Merized Online regarding those 2015 Mets, which you can read here. And if you want another taste of that National League championship season, I’d love you to check out Amazin’ Again, my book on how the Mets brought the magic back to Queens.
by Greg Prince on 14 March 2016 2:16 am After paying just enough attention to Spring Training to notice the hitters aren’t necessarily behind the pitchers anymore — guys in Mets unis lost 14-9 on Saturday but won 11-0 on Sunday — I realize my anxieties are lagging behind my capacity for calm. That’s a very unusual March alignment.
Starting shortstop Asdrubal Cabrera might miss Opening Night. I’m not worried.
Indefatigable utilityman and logical replacement Ruben Tejada might be traded. I’m not worried.
Kevin Plawecki might be sent down because the Mets would rather he play regularly and that a legitimate backup sit in his place. I’m not worried.
The Mets may not have a legitimate backup in-house for Travis d’Arnaud. I’m not worried.
David Wright is conserving his energy. I’m not worried.
Dilson Herrera fouled a ball off his knee and is disappearing himself to some WBC-qualifying nonsense. I’m not worried.
A vaguely familiar collection of vowels named Taijeron has driven in more runs than anybody in camp, yet is reportedly not under serious consideration for the 25-man roster. I’m not worried.
Goose Gossage said something silly about Yoenis Cespedes. I’m not worried.
Ken Davidoff wrote something sillier about Lucas Duda. I’m not worried.
And as for pitchers, the only one who worries me is Oliver Perez.
Oliver Perez, last seen in a Met uniform around this time of year in 2011? Why worry about him in the context of 2016 Mets Spring Training? Well, a Twitter movement was afoot the other day to infiltrate a Nationals promotion that encourages fans to choose who Washington should immortalize in bobblehead this season. They didn’t say which fans could have a say, so it was thought amusingly mischievous that Mets fans saddle Nats fans with good ol’ Ollie. Unofficial exit polls indicated we were winning the Perez caucuses.
That worried me. That’s unnecessary hubris, no matter how fun-loving. That’s asking for Oliver Perez to carry a 65-inning scoreless streak into a September showdown versus the Mets, a team that has not had so much as a walk, let alone a hit off the veteran lefty all year, I can just hear Gary Cohen telling me.
Let sleeping dogs who wouldn’t accept a demotion to Buffalo lie. Let the rest of March play out without major incident. Spring Training is, as usual, dragging, but it doesn’t seem to be piling up casualties. That, too, might be asking for it, but what can I tell ya? I’m not worried.
But don’t worry. There’s still time.
I had a real nice conversation about Amazin’ Again and some other Metsian items last week with the guys at the Rising Apple Report, which you can listen to here. And did I mention you can order a fresh copy of the only book celebrating the 2015 National League champions right here?
If you’d like to come on down (or up, depending on your locale) to beautiful Bergino Baseball Clubhouse on Thursday night, March 17, for my first event in support of Amazin’ Again, please RSVP to bergino@aol.com. Thank you.
by Greg Prince on 8 March 2016 1:08 am “Someday there will be nostalgia for the seventies, as hard as that may be to realize now.”
—Brendan C. Boyd and Fred Harris, The Great American Baseball Card Flipping, Trading and Bubble Gum Book, originally published in 1973
Willie Nelson was right: it is funny how time slips away. It couldn’t be more than four or five months ago that we were rooting the Mets through their first postseason in nine years, and it couldn’t be more than three or four months ago that I was putting all of those autumnal Metsian moments and the ones that preceded them into a book intended to preserve just what a thoroughly unexpected and surprisingly fulfilling ride it had been.
 A book for you and for posterity. It really wasn’t that long ago, yet here it is, coming around again, in the pages of Amazin’ Again: How the 2015 New York Mets Brought the Magic Back to Queens, which is on the cusp of release as we speak. Get a copy and find your 2015 New York Mets — prosecutors of arguably the most satisfying Met season since 1986 — emerging from the first base dugout to take that curtain call your heart has been calling for since they went gentle into that not so good November night.
I couldn’t do anything about the ending, but the rest of the story was as uplifting as it gets, and it’s all there in a volume I wrote for two audiences:
1) You
2) Posterity
You are a Mets fan. You know what 2015 was. You’ll always retain the gist of things. The book gets between the gist and fastens the details that might otherwise tumble down the memory hole, which is a terrible place for a pennant-winning ballclub to disappear. 2015 was too good a Met year to not experience repeatedly on demand. Amazin’ Again is your permanent season ticket to a year for the ages.
Posterity isn’t necessarily a Mets fan, which is why it requires a historical document lavishly layered with the moments and personalities that made 2015 a winner worth talking about into perpetuity, sort of the way we still talk about 1969. The 1969 Mets came alive for me once, in fleeting fashion, because I had the good sense at a tender age to sit up and take notice of them in real time…and then they stayed alive for me for all time because a group of writers saw fit to commit some journalism in their name as soon as that season was over.
The foundation of my baseball library is formed by books with titles like Amazin’ and Joy In Mudville and The Year The Mets Lost Last Place and The New York Mets: The Whole Story and The Perfect Game, books I encountered in the years directly following 1969, books that filled in my blanks and gave me a box seat to everything I missed on account of my mistakenly being born a tad too late to fully comprehend the depth and beauty of 1969 while it was still in progress. It was my goal, while writing Amazin’ Again, to tell a story about last year’s Mets that will hold up in the latter 2010s and into the 2020s and beyond the way the aforementioned books hold up to this very day.
So ideally you’ll grab one copy of my book for yourself and purchase and put aside another for a fan to be named later, a kid who will someday wonder what was so great about 2015 and begin to answer that question by reading what I wrote.
Though I guess you can just share that first copy.
Amazin’ Again: How the 2015 New York Mets Brought the Magic Back to Queens will be officially released on March 15. Amazon, I’m told, is already fulfilling orders, so you can click there for more information. And in the weeks ahead, I hope you’ll join me at one of several events planned in the Greater New York Metropolitan Area.
• On Thursday night March 17, starting at 7:00 PM, I will be at Bergino Baseball Clubhouse (67 E. 11th St. in Manhattan) where I look forward to joining you and proprietor Jay Goldberg in a discussion of the Mets’ first pennant-winning season in fifteen years. Jay, who stocks some of the most glorious baseball items you’ve ever seen, will have copies of Amazin’ Again on hand and I’ll be happy to sign them if you like.
• On Saturday March 26, from Noon to 3:00 PM, ace photographer Sharon Chapman and I welcome you to Foley’s NY (18 W. 33rd St. in Manhattan) for an informal book party and general preseason warmup, appropriate to an establishment that is the most baseball bar in the city. I plan to have books available for purchase and inscription that day.
• On Thursday evening March 31, beginning at 6:00 PM, Amazin’ Again comes to its borough of origin, alighting at the Central Branch of the Queens Library in Jamaica (89-11 Merrick Blvd.). I’ll be talking about the book, about writing, about being a Mets fan. Copies will be on sale here, too.
Two great podcasts — Gary McDonald’s Mets Musings and I’d Rather Kiss A Mookiee (hosted by the dynamic duo of Shannon Shark and Jason Fry) — have been kind enough to have me on already for book talk, and I invite you to listen in.
There should be more announcements to come, and I thank you in advance for your indulgence of this wave of self-promotion.
by Greg Prince on 5 March 2016 2:39 am The return address on the manila envelope was Citi Field. The postmark was Flushing. The stationery featured a Mets logo. The second word handwritten in looping cursive on the single page enclosed was “Thanks” — so was the second-to-last word. There weren’t many words in between. There didn’t need to be.
On December 14, 2011, Shannon Forde mailed me a copy of Volume 50, Issue 5 of Mets Magazine, the last game program from that season. David Wright was on the cover. A poster of Jose Reyes was in the middle. There were articles about Angel Pagan and Bobby Parnell. And tucked deep in the back, opposite an ad for Pound Ridge Golf Club (“35 Miles From Home Plate!”) was a page devoted to our blog, part of a series that had run throughout the year, “From the Blogs” — or “De los Blogs,” as it was translated in this bilingual edition of La Revista de los Mets. The piece that appeared on page 154 represented an opportunity to introduce our work to Mets fans who might never have heard of us otherwise.
Which was nice enough to begin with. I’m sure others were involved in executing the idea and signing off on it, but I’m also sure that Shannon was the one who went out of her way to think of Mets blogs and Mets bloggers in this and an array of instances. Shannon was synonymous with blog outreach, which is perhaps an unnecessarily utilitarian way of saying she reached out to the likes of us and she looked out for likes of us.
That was no small thing, because who the hell were we? Who the hell was Faith and Fear in Flushing to a Major League Baseball franchise that was covered by an ample number of dailies, periodicals and broadcast outlets? Baseball is steeped in tradition. The press box is traditionally the province of reporters attached to established news organizations. Same for the dugout and the field during batting practice. Same for the media dining room.
Shannon got us in those places. We never asked, but she got us in anyway. She adjusted tradition to modernity and let us who were purely digital and relatively unaffiliated dip a toe into waters reflexively considered off-limits. Shannon didn’t treat us like we didn’t belong. If you came into contact with Shannon Forde, you belonged.
I find myself writing about process here because it’s worth taking a step back and understanding how it is that bloggers like us got to know Shannon Forde, but the important thing is we got to know Shannon Forde. It was just a little, but a little went such a long way in the presence of someone so obviously full of grace and warmth and enthusiasm. I wouldn’t have met Shannon Forde if not for the process she instigated and facilitated. If I hadn’t met Shannon Forde, I would not be so saddened at the word of her passing Friday night following three-and-a-half years of battling breast cancer.
But I also wouldn’t have felt so enriched from the too-brief interactions we had during the seasons when the Mets held Blogger Nights, and bloggers like Jason and me and a gaggle of others who do some version of what we do were invited to take part in some of the rituals that make baseball tick. These were experiences that enhanced our understanding of the sport we embrace as fans who write, and we tried to pass along to you guys the essence of what they were about.
Most significantly, though, these were experiences that allowed us to know Shannon Forde. By that measure alone, you couldn’t have had a better experience. From what I could tell, you couldn’t come across a better person. I don’t have a good enough imagination to envision one.
You know how some people have that rare gift of making you feel better about yourself and your surroundings and the moment you’re in? I do, because I knew Shannon Forde. Again, not that well and not that much, but enough to be lifted in every encounter we had. There was nothing — zero — perfunctory about her approach to you. There was never a sense of being handled the way someone in media relations handles media. I’ve been media in many situations in my career away from this blog. I recognize handling. I also recognize the opposite. I think it’s called being a genuine person.
You couldn’t miss it with Shannon. Every simple gesture, chance meeting and prompt response from her perch as senior director of media relations was laced with kindness. Like the business with that issue of Mets Magazine. We were offered the space in the program; Jason and I collaborated on a profile of our blog; it was published in September; we got a kick out of seeing our names inside something people bought at the ballpark; and you’d figure that was that. Except three months later, we received an e-mail from Shannon. She was sorting through some stuff left over from the 2011 season and wasn’t sure whether she had sent us copies of our article. Did we need any?
I said sure (because who turns down a copy of Mets Magazine with your name in it?) and a couple of days later it appeared in my mailbox with the note.
Greg –
Thanks again!
Let me know
if you need
more copies.
Thanks,
Shannon
Thirteen words. Twice she says thanks. It seemed so typical of her and so atypical of most. The note…the issue…the sight of something with a 11368 return address in the middle of December…the fact that she sent it out literally ASAP…the fact that I offered to pick up any spare programs from her myself when I’d be coming to Citi Field to cover the Mets’ holiday party and she told me “I’ll mail them — this way you don’t have to lug them around (they do get heavy after a bit)”…that she ended that e-mail with a smiley-face emoticon…that she responded to my thank you e-mail the same way.
The thought. The thoughtfulness. The person. The person’s simple gesture that was no doubt one of countless simple gestures directed toward everybody she knew — no matter how well or how little — in which she made all feel welcome to her world. There was exponentially more to this envelope, this magazine and this note than met the eye.
There was Shannon Forde. What a gift.
Mike Lupica wrote movingly about Shannon while she was fighting the awful disease that eventually took her from her family. Joel Sherman remembered her with great affection upon learning the terrible news that she was gone at the age of 44. I recommend reading them both.
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