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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 16 September 2015 4:49 am I can’t take me anywhere. I can, but I can’t depend on me to respond as social norms suggest I should.
I took myself to Citi Field Tuesday night at the invitation of a friend. The ostensible lure was the manifestation of that old Wilponian chestnut, Meaningful Games In September, MGIS for short (mishegas for our readers who have just celebrated the Jewish new year).
MGIS, a phrase infamously uttered by the Met Chairman of the Board in Spring Training 2004, instantly fired up his troops. It fired them up into a state of confusion. These were the reactions captured by Lee Jenkins of the Times when he asked Wilpon’s players of yore what exactly hey thought the owner meant by Meaningful Games In September.
“What does that mean?”
—Mike Cameron
“I don’t understand.”
—Jose Reyes
“Well, I guess you’ve got to start somewhere.”
—Cliff Floyd
The general manager back then, Jim Duquette, spoke his best boardroomspeak to interpret his employer’s thinking. “I don’t think there’s any more of a definition,” the GM said as helpfully as he could. “You can take it whatever way you want.”
OK then…
What did Fred Wilpon mean by meaningful? This three-part elaboration emanated straight from the horse’s mouth:
1) “You’ll know it’s meaningful when it’s there.”
2) “You’ll be able to feel it and taste it.”
3) “We’ll be in a position to attain something.”
The first part implies Fred had no idea whatsoever. The second part confirms the first part. The third part, however, got as close to the crux of the matter as Wilponically possible.
It’s September. The Mets are, in 2015 if not 2004 (when they misplaced their Kazmir and fell on their Zambrano), in a position to attain something. Coming into Tuesday they were riding the pennant race express to runaway proportions. You might say they’d just about overshot their MGIS goal. There was none of the feisty scratching and clawing Wilpon probably envisioned when he tried to change the conversation after last-place 2003. The Mets in the here and now were aiming to extend a winning streak to nine and reduce a magic number from ten. The meaning was pretty clearly implied.
It was there. You could feel it. You could taste it. But for one night it couldn’t be attained.
It’s not like the Mets didn’t try to beat the Miami Marlins on Tuesday and it’s not like we didn’t try to urge them on. The Mets still hustled and we still buzzed. This was not your slightly younger self’s September night at Citi Field. There wasn’t an enormous crowd, but it couldn’t rightly be labeled sparse. There were sustained ripples of enthusiasm even as the score continually tilted in the wrong direction. There was always the sense that this team was never really out of it, ergo we shouldn’t give up. Everybody did what they could, it’s just that none of it worked.
What did it mean?
Probably nothing.
I mean, sure, I could be more agitated that Tom Koehler plunked Yoenis Cespedes on his powerful hip. I could be more frustrated that every home run the Mets nearly hit either died at the track or drifted foul. I could be more concerned that Jacob deGrom hasn’t looked terribly deGrominant of late. I could have scowled more as I entered “L 9-3” in my Log when I got home. I could even wallow in Washington picking up an entire game in the standings to now trail by 8½ with — hide your eyes if you’re squeamish — 17 to play.
But after those eight straight wins and everything else, the following areas are where I opted to derive my meaning at the first Meaningful Game In September game my friend and I ever attended at Citi Field.
• A serious discussion of whether the Mets should erect a statue of Marv Throneberry. We agreed they should. It would display an organizational sense of humor true to the franchise’s roots. The two caveats we decided upon were 1) of course you’d have to have a Seaver statue to balance the ridiculous with the sublime; and 2) the ideal Throneberry statue portrays Marvelous Marv looking longingly at the piece of cake his manager swore they wuz going to give him but wuz afraid he’d drop it.
• A hypothetical offer my friend made me: I could have another Mets world championship affixed to their past. That is to say any year I wanted could be added to 1969 and 1986. It could be a year they came close, it could be a year they finished last. It would be worked into their backstory and our memory bank. It wouldn’t alter the course of team history otherwise and I wouldn’t have to do anything wacky like go back and live my life from that year forward, but it would come at a cost. In exchange for that third retroactively granted world championship, the Mets could never have had Tom Seaver. They’d still win what they won in 1969 and 1973, but without The Franchise or anybody truly like him. Seaver never would’ve existed as a Met. Forty-one would be just another number. Would I take that deal, he asked. I thought for less than 41 seconds and told him, no, I would not. We have one actual Seaver (if no Seaver statue) after more than fifty years. Except for Cespedes, he’s our one authentic all-time Met great. That’s got to be worth one hypothetical championship.
• A unanimous decision that the Met who looked strangest to us in a non-Met uniform was Cleon Jones as a White Sock. My friend and I are roughly the same vintage of Mets fan. We knew as kids that there were such things as trades, but we didn’t really believe they could happen to “iconic” Mets. Once in a while they did — Swoboda to the Expos, Agee to the Astros — but icons were icons. Icons weren’t simply cast off. Then one summer day in 1975, Cleon was. He resurfaced in 1976 with the Chicago White Sox. He played in only a dozen games for them, but it was long enough to be photographed in one of those blousy Bill Veeck jerseys that are looked back on with revisionist fondness four decades later…but what the hell was Cleon doing in one of them? Yeah, that was the strangest sight these eyes ever did see as Mets in the wrong clothes go. (My friend says he’s seen Cleon in the slightly older White Sox red-pinstriped jersey he never actually played in, but I can’t even process that possibility.) Bud Harrelson as a Texas Ranger is a distant second.
We were finishing up the strange-looking expatriate Met topic as Tuesday’s game ended. We kept talking about it while our section cleared out. The players were in their respective dugouts, the PA had stopped blaring and the ushers were clearing their throats at us. The Mets had just lost, allowing their inevitability to bog down a bit, but I wasn’t fixated on that. I was fixated on a final point my friend was making about Ken Boswell having been the only 1973 Met to have worn the earliest iteration of the Astro rainbow getup. It occurs to me now that Boswell’s manager, Yogi Berra, wore a later version as a Houston coach in 1986. For that matter, except for throwbacks, you never saw the rainbows in National League action again after NLCS Game Six. Same deal for our old road grays with the racing stripe down the side and script Mets across the chest. It’s like Game Six was so intense that they had to burn all the uniforms.
Honestly, I could have sat there for another hour and continued to talk about all that stuff that makes baseball baseball with my friend. This was fun. Maybe not the kind of fun the attainment of first place has been, yet fun on its own merit. It wasn’t precisely what we came to Citi Field for this September evening…no, that’s not true. It’s exactly what we came to Citi Field for, pennant race notwithstanding. First place and a seemingly imminent clinching is plenty nice, but where else besides the old ballpark do you find yourself planning statues that will never be built, vetoing acquisitions of imaginary championships and dwelling on what Cleon Jones wore worst? Yes, we could have gone on another two hours if left to our own devices.
Alas, the men in the red and green polo shirts were emitting impatience like Dee Gordon had been recording base hits, so reluctantly we put a lid on our musings, rose and left, having derived all the meaning we required from this one September game.
Someone else I spoke to very recently: Richard Sandomir of the New York Times, regarding the shifting sands of the city’s baseball scene. Read my two cents on the potentially emerging Mets town in our midst here.
by Jason Fry on 15 September 2015 2:23 am Let’s go back to the top of the sixth Monday night, with the Mets facing the eternally irritating Marlins at a cheerfully rambunctious Citi Field. With the game tied at 1-1, two outs and runners on first and third, Derek Dietrich popped up a 1-1 pitch from Sean Gilmartin. It drifted over the Marlins’ dugout, where David Wright was pressed against the railing, glove seeking ball.
If Wright had been a couple of inches taller, or a bit more of whatever the measurement is for stretchier, he would have caught the ball. Instead, it just eluded his glove for a foul ball and strike two. Dietrich singled on the next pitch and the Marlins led 2-1. Then J. T. Realmuto floated one over a leaping Wilmer Flores and it was 3-1.
Worried? Pshaw. These are the 2015 Mets 2.0. With two out in the bottom of the frame, Juan Uribe doubled. Three pitches later, Travis d’Arnaud blasted a home run into the first row in right-center. The Marlins had led for all of 11 pitches. In the bottom of the seventh, with two men on, Wright recreated his long-ago hit over Johnny Damon‘s head at Shea for a double. It scored Eric Young Jr. (who now has four at-bats as a ’15 Met, six runs scored and no hits — pretty much the way one should use Eric Young Jr. in baseball games) and it would have scored Curtis Granderson except it hopped into the stands.
That’s a stupid rule — anyone who’s watched more than a week of baseball knows Granderson would have scored even if he’d been helping a pal move a sofa around the bases — but never mind that now. The 4-3 lead was enough for a Mets win and a sudden urge to salute Hot Rod Kanehl, Duffy Dyer and Rusty Staub.
This is one of the sweetest stretches of baseball you can watch — the mid-September variety that doesn’t have particular urgency because things are going really well. (Goodness knows we’ve seen plenty of sour stretches that lacked urgency because things had gone fatally badly.) For Terry Collins, these games are testbeds for specific relief roles and opportunities for the strategic resting of veterans; for us, they’re sandboxes for reviving one’s dormant sense of Mets optimism. The Mets haven’t been in this position since 2006, except they’re playing better now than they were back then.
Enjoy it. Enjoy being cheerful about a two-run deficit, about pondering which uniform-related salute to break out next, about spending more time eyeing the Dodgers’ doings than the Nationals’ results. Because soon, very soon, this will be over. This string of crazy, Midas-touch games will end, as all such things must, and you will have doubts and worries again. And then those doubts and worries will be hugely magnified overnight. Every pitch will be life and death, joy or agony. Which will be awesome, of course, even as you’re certain it will kill you whatever the outcome.
You’ll enjoy that too. But it’ll be different. So savor this.
* * *
Well, wouldja look at this? Amazin’!
by Greg Prince on 14 September 2015 3:40 am World War II ended in 1945, yet there were handfuls of particularly stubborn Japanese soldiers in far-flung outposts who hadn’t gotten word or refused to believe what they were told about their nation’s surrender. One, Hiroo Onoda, was found to still be fighting a war that was no longer in progress as late as 1974.
And if you’re waiting for a Met collapse, there might be a jungle in the Philippines with your name on it.
The eight-year battle against inevitable humiliation is about to be settled in earnest, comrades. Come in from the isthmus and grab a remote control so you can watch the glorious conclusion for yourselves. The post-September 30, 2007, world we’ve inhabited far too long is rapidly giving way to a brighter day.
Technically, the Mets haven’t won anything in 2015 besides 82 games (for the first time since 2008) and a commanding advantage over whoever our archrival was supposed to be six weeks ago. But we know for sure the Mets haven’t lost a damn thing in seven games, no matter how hard they seemed to try not claim the seventh.
For those of you who believe a practically prohibitive divisional lead serves as no more than a Trojan horse brimming with bad news poised to leap out and stab us in the proverbial heart, Sunday appeared to be your Day of Karmic Rebuttal. Bad enough that Washington actually won a game. The Mets were sloppily assembled — all kinds of regulars were simultaneously seated for the Turner Field finale — and they treated their time in the field as defense-optional. For the vast majority of the afternoon, it felt like one of the most ostentatiously mediocre games a Mets team above or below .500 had ever played.
The provisional result was a 7-4 deficit in the top of the ninth with nobody on and two out. Although one could have rationally argued everybody is entitled to an off day (let alone a day off), the experienced Mets-Case Scenarioist could have just as justifiably ranted that a team preoccupied with resting pitchers in September should make absolute certain there is an October to rest them for, therefore enough with the piggybacking starts chatter and sitting significant starters during getaway games. The bit about “…a third of your games you’re gonna lose…” is tough enough to accept without presenting one of those allegedly predestined losses to ancestrally detested Atlanta on a veritable silver platter.
Turns out the Braves are allergic to silver and thus dropped the gift the Mets so generously attempted to give them (though like all episodes of clumsiness Sunday, it was officially scored a hit for Nick Markakis). In baseball, you can’t fall on the ball and run out the clock, but on the first Sunday when baseball endured pigskin company, Fredi Gonzalez basically called Joe Pisarcik out of the Braves’ bullpen and ordered him to hand off to Larry Csonka.
It didn’t work for them. It sure as hell worked for us.
The details for those hiding in a tree and waiting for definitive orders from the emperor were as simple as they are beautiful: Gonzalez, having seen Peter Moylan give up a double to Juan Lagares (a double almost but not quite caught by Cameron Maybin, perhaps paying penance for having caught the final ball ever hit at Shea Stadium), replaced his veteran reliever with rookie Ryan Kelly; Kelly walked Curtis Granderson; Kelly then faced Daniel Murphy, who had spent the day otherwise disguised as a minus sign.
Murphy then launched a three-run homer to tie the game at 7-7.
It was exhilarating. It was breathtaking. It was, as Casey Stengel surely described it from wherever he was observing the action, Amazin’ cubed.
Also, it was as close to business as usual as something forged from completely out of thin air could be for this team. This was, what, the fifteenth or sixteenth comeback like this in the past week? Maybe more, maybe less. Who can keep track anymore?
We’re past the point of counting them or ranking them. We simply ask that they keep arriving regularly at the correct address. We promise to send thank you notes in the offseason.
After the Mets scored the three runs in the tenth that would provide them a 10-7 triumph — their seventh consecutive victory overall, not to mention a four-game sweep at formerly intimidating Turner Field (cripes, I almost felt sorry for the Braves fans in attendance) — I saw a stat that identified Murphy’s shot as the third of its kind in Mets history. The only other home runs that made up a shortfall of three or more runs with the team down to its final out previously were those hit by Carl Everett in September 1997 and Victor Diaz in September 2004. Those were touchstone home runs of their era, each a cherished memory for me as a fan.
Murphy’s? Yeah, his improbable game-tying dinger was swell, too. Just toss it on the pile with Nieuwenhuis’s from the other night. And Johnson’s. And all of those from Cespedes. It’s September 2015. We’re growing harder to impress.
OK, I’m not that jaded yet, but as Roger Angell put it regarding the deciding contest of the 1986 World Series, “It was another great game, I suppose, but even noble vintages can become a surfeit after enough bottles have been sampled.” We still anxiously await the bottling, corking and ultimate uncorking of 2015 — it’s been a very good year — yet the mind-boggling comebacks are beginning to blur.
Never, however, has my mind been so willing to expand to accommodate them all.
I was certainly happy with the outcome. I imagine every Mets fan worth his or her blue and orange was similarly delighted. Yet I also imagine that somewhere somebody — maybe even a reader of this humble blog — had a sharp-tongued comment all cued up and ready to post. Now, we’d see, that the Mets were just setting us up. Now, we’d see, disaster was about to unspool. Now, we’d see, the worst was yet to come.
Then the Mets had to go and spoil it all by doing something sublime like reshaping destiny to fit their own giddy purposes. Alas, for the naysayer out there, there was no nay to say on Sunday. Instead we high-fived across the virtual universe and subtly saluted the likes of Wayne Garrett, Lenny Randle, Frank Taveras and Tim Teufel, some of our most distinguished wearers of 11, for what that number’s worth.
The Mets continue to lead the National League East by 9½ games, except now with only 19 to play. Nobody can vouch for what might transpire in the playoffs, but nobody in his right mind would suggest the Mets won’t be a part of them.
If your mind tells you otherwise, grab a sweater. A lonely jungle might get chilly at night.
by Jason Fry on 13 September 2015 1:07 am Noah Syndergaard had just finished retiring 19 of his last 20 batters faced and was sitting in the visiting dugout in Atlanta, perhaps thinking about his ninth win of the season. Tyler Clippard was on the mound, squinting in at Travis d’Arnaud with that little lip curl of his, trying to navigate through some wildness. The tying run was at the plate in the person of Adonis Garcia. I was sitting on the couch, watching the proceedings with moderate interest.
And then Garcia connected, a ball that was not just instantly and obviously gone but a candidate to land in the Atlantic Ocean. The game was tied. This was not a drill. Perhaps it was time to come down from our little orange and blue cloud.
Except a couple of minutes later d’Arnaud had whacked a long fly that Nick Markakis played into a double, Eric Young Jr. had run for d’Arnaud, and Kelly Johnson had coolly slapped a ball into right to restore the Met lead and order.
Just kidding, everybody! It really was a drill!
(Perhaps this would be a good time for a historically minded wave to Edgardo Alfonzo and Ken Boswell?)
The Mets’ nominal pursuers, the Nationals, will be playing tomorrow to stay over .500. If the Mets go a wretched 7-13 the rest of the way, the Nats will have to go 17-4 to claim the division. That’s not impossible, but there’s being cautious and there’s being crazy. I once saw the Mets hit into an unassisted triple play to end a game they’d seemed poised to win. It sucked, but it doesn’t mean that every time there are Met runners on first and second with nobody out I go into the fetal position.
If you want to gnaw your fingernails about something, it would be far more logical to look at the Dodgers, currently boasting an 81-60 record compared to the Mets’ 81-61. That unofficial mini-race could determine if home games are played at Citi or in Chavez Ravine; the Mets hold the tiebreaker, having won the season series four games to three.
Beyond that, here’s a cool little fact I want to mention now, because I suspect we’ll be too busy/frantic/euphoric/miserable to care much about it later: Forty-eight men have played in a game for the 2015 New York Mets. By the time the regular season ends, the count will rise to 49, unless Tim Stauffer becomes the 10th ghost in club history.*
Of those 48 (or 49) Mets, an amazing 19 are alumni of the Brooklyn Cyclones. Here’s the list, in order of 2015 matriculation: Lucas Duda, Daniel Murphy, Wilmer Flores, Juan Lagares, Kirk Nieuwenhuis, Jeurys Familia, Rafael Montero, Dillon Gee, Eric Campbell, Daniel Muno, Kevin Plawecki, Hansel Robles, Jack Leathersich, Darrell Ceciliani, Bobby Parnell, Akeel Morris, Jenrry Mejia, Michael Conforto (last year!), and Dario Alvarez. And none of those players wore a BC on their caps during some asterisk-worthy rehab assignment — those 19 residencies are all legit.
When the Cyclones opened for official Met-related business in 2001, we were warned to temper our expectations, to keep in mind that out of a given year’s crop of players, one or two might eventually make the majors. Now, nearly 40% of this year’s big-league roster came through Brooklyn. That’s a fun thing to keep in mind next summer, as you’re biting into a Nathan’s dog and eyeing the Wonder Wheel beyond the fence down in Coney Island.
* The ghosts will be listed here for posterity, and because further research has shown previous Faith and Fear in Flushing posts on the subject to be lamentably incorrect. The Met ghosts are Jim Bibby (1969 and 1971), Randy Bobb (1970), Billy Cotton (1972, never played in major leagues), Jerry Moses (1975), Terrel Hansen (1992, never played in major leagues), Mac Suzuki (1999), Anderson Garcia (2006), Ruddy Lugo (2008), and Al Reyes (2008). Justin Speier, once counted as a Met ghost, turns out to have spent his entire Met tenure in procedural limbo, never having been added to the roster, and thus must content himself with being a ghost of a ghost. Good luck to the aforementioned Mr. Stauffer in escaping the spectral ranks.
by Jason Fry on 12 September 2015 1:26 am When the Mets and Braves finally squared off in front of nobody Thursday night, I found myself watching with the intensity I normally bring to a split-squad game in mid-March. I had to remind myself that, hey, this one counts — in fact, it’s pretty damn important.
I wasn’t being arrogant — I remember late leads that seemed plump until late September ran them through the funhouse mirror. (Believe me, I remember.) No, it’s that I was tired — mentally spent from three nights of watching the Mets break the Nats’ spirit in ludicrous fashion over and over again. It’s been a long time since I watched September baseball that mattered; the soaring euphoria and gnawing anxiety was immediately familiar, but I’d forgotten just how exhausting all this is.
I think Terry Collins and even most of us would have forgiven the Mets a letdown game against the Braves on Thursday — Terry rested plenty of guys with an eye towards rebuilding emotional reserves that had been tapped in D.C. But the Mets coolly dismantled the Braves anyway, shoving the Nationals another half-game back, and then sent the regulars back out again Friday night behind Steven Matz.
Matz was OK, but it wasn’t a good night for David Wright, who twice left runners at third with less than two outs. But here’s the thing — Wright’s poor night didn’t matter. Not with the bullpen sending out Erik Goeddel, Addison Reed, Tyler Clippard and Jeurys Familia to scatter three hits over four innings, and not with Yoenis Cespedes being Yoenis Cespedes.
We call ourselves the blog for Mets fans who like to read, but words fail me trying to describe Cespedes. All I can do is recite his deeds. He opened the scoring with a ringing double over Michael Bourn‘s head that chased home Curtis Granderson from first, and then bookended that with a simply ridiculous clout in the ninth into the left-field seats, a ball that soared above and beyond whatever spectators were left. As Cespedes glided around the bases, the fans started clambering up the concourse in the direction of the shadows that had swallowed the ball, like mountaineers plotting a course to a distant, wind-whipped flag.
The Mets spent a good chunk of this year asking complementary players to shoulder burdens best reserved for stars, which went about as well as it usually does. In that state, the team had to play close to perfectly to win, beginning each game with a worrisomely thin margin for error.
But that was the 2015 Mets 1.0, a team that no longer exists.
The 2.0 release — remade from both within and without — is the opposite, a mix of solid complementary players around a superstar who’s playing this game about as well as it can be played. It won’t last forever, but Cespedes can do anything right now, and it’s let every other player in the lineup relax and surf along in his slipstream. If one guy doesn’t execute, there’s another dangerous hitter strolling to the plate. If a starting pitcher falters, the resulting deficit seems more like an interesting challenge than an impossible task.
The Mets had to overcome some offensive fizzles and crazy-good plays from the Braves Friday night, but they did, forging a slim lead from a clutch hit and an Atlanta balk and then a passed ball. And then Cespedes recreated Sherman’s March to the Sea with a baseball, and you knew the game was over. Meanwhile, down in Miami, the Nats lost again — in five days the Mets have added 4 1/2 games to their lead. Anxiety has yielded to respectful caution, which will be maintained here, but even superstition allows salutes to bygone Mets that just might have some not-so-secret relationship to relevant mathematics. (Tip your hat to Jerry Grote! This fist raised to the sky is for you, Gil!)
Cespedes wears No. 52, a uniform number that even the most ardent future Mets fan probably won’t invoke in a pennant chase. If they do, it’ll be a pretty amazin’ year indeed. But that would be fitting — because whatever happens the rest of the way in 2015, we’ll remember this time, and what it was like to watch a player who seemed borrowed from a league of the imagination.
by Greg Prince on 11 September 2015 6:42 am Bartolo Colon presumably sets eight or nine major league records every time he steps on a major league field, so it’s understandable if this one escaped the bookkeepers’ notice. To be fair, it’s probably not a record, but I’m gonna say it is.
By defeating the Atlanta Braves, 7-2, on a rain-delayed Thursday night/Friday morning at Turner Field, Bartolo brought home his club’s 79th victory for the second consecutive season. He was the pitcher of record when the Mets put a 79th win in the books in 2014 and the pitcher of record on that same numeric occasion in 2015.
Probably not a record. More like a coincidence. But it’s worth noting because in 2014, the 79th win came in Game 162, a.k.a. Closing Day, a.k.a. the last game of the year. It took Colon and those Mets an entire season to round up 79 wins. Fans of arithmetic — and the Mets — probably realize 79 wins left room for 83 losses, making 2014 what is known as a losing season.
Which was nothing new when Colon was throwing six innings of eight-hit ball at the Houston Astros at Citi Field last September 28. The Mets went on to win, 8-3, sending the last of us Flushing pilgrims off into winter on a pleasant note. We had watched our team equal its high for most wins since it had stopped winning more games than it lost as a matter of annual course. The 2014 Mets matched the 2010 Mets by going 79-83, which served to bracket records of 77-85, 74-88 and 74-88 while offering little satisfaction in the process. Some progress was clearly evident on the road to a zero-sum gain across four years. Some was well hidden. It was up to us to infer what we could about future performance based on the sample size we had just witnessed.
I doubt any of us peered ahead to the following September and saw a 79th win posted with more than three weeks remaining in the schedule. Not that anybody exactly aims at 79 wins as a benchmark, but for the Mets who had been losing more games than they had been winning with sickening regularity since 2009, 79 wins had been the top, their veritable Tower of Pisa.
Today, at 79-61, it is a pit stop. Seventy-nine is an incidental total about to be surpassed. The Mets will capture an eightieth victory in short order; then an eighty-first, which will ensure they will not lose more than they win this season; then an eighty-second, which will guarantee their first winning record in seven attempts.
And then? Then, we will have the gall to predict, those numbers — 79, 80, 81, 82 — will look smaller and smaller as bigger and better totals, milestones and achievements move into their grasp. It’s what happens when you’re winning far more than you’re losing. The relative accomplishments represented by what looked enormous in one era will appear insignificant in the next one.
We are firmly entrenched in the next one. We are in the bigger and better era that can be traced in part to what went on in the smaller and lesser era that directly preceded it…but just in part, because these are very new, different and welcome times for this ballclub. These are times that would not be occurring if some astounding changes hadn’t been effected as this present era was rapidly developing into its own self.
If you need someone to link the era we left behind with the era we have entered, you could do worse than Bartolo Colon as your bridge. He is sturdy enough to handle the traffic. It is tempting to say he is bigger and better in 2015 than he was in 2014, but that probably applies mostly to his presence.
When Colon downed the Astros to end last year, it raised his won-lost mark was 15-13 and his ERA was 4.09. Thursday night, as he took care of the Braves on seven hits in six-and-two-third innings, Bartolo went to 14-11 and 4.13. There are more advanced metrics one could explore, figures that indicate he tends to drift onto the wrong side of average over the span of the long season, but Bartolo Colon predates the conception of most of those statistics. Measure Bartolo by traditional standards. He looks sharp as can be that way.
Bartolo’s basically the same pitcher he was when he arrived from Oakland at the beginning of 2014, charged with replacing an injured ace starter and maybe helping to lift a 74-88 outfit to slightly bigger and better things. He’s the same, but more so, you might say. He stays settled into his grooves longer, as attested to by his 31 consecutive scoreless innings, a streak snapped at last by a brief Brave uprising. He has become a perfectly decent-for-a-pitcher hitter, with his average of .148 demonstrating basic competence and his fourth-inning RBI less exotic than it would have seemed in the recent past. He still handles his position like a pro, hustling to first in the sixth to complete a 3-6-1 double play.
Colon’s doing what Colon does, except now he’s doing it for a first-place team that leads its division by a larger margin (7½ games) than at any juncture since 2006, back when he was a lad of 34 pitching for somebody else. Bart is 42 now, pitching his best baseball of the past two seasons for us at exactly the right moment. A moment when the bullpen needs a blow. A moment when the magic number could stand a little reduction. A moment when even a logical person intermittently in thrall to baseball superstition has to acknowledge there is a magic number at play and that it ticked down from 17 to 16 shortly after 12:30 Friday morning. Somewhere in the middle of all this activity, Bartolo Colon gave the Mets quality, distance and another nudge toward a title that was unthinkable a year ago at this moment.
The connection between the Mets striding almost unassailably atop their division and the presence of Colon among those very same Mets probably isn’t altogether coincidental.
by Greg Prince on 10 September 2015 6:00 am For consistency’s sake, we shall continue to refer to the state of affairs in which we’ve been thoroughly immersed as a pennant race, even if ours is the only team any longer racing.
Mathematical niceties demand we maintain on our faces an expression of severe purposefulness when the subjects of games ahead and games remaining arise. Well-entrenched protocols insist we at least attempt to appear thoroughly engrossed in scoreboard-watching until a handy little ‘x’ appears to the left of the line in the standings to which our eye is instinctively drawn. We have been on both sides of the IAO = TIO equation. There is no benefit in declaring as over anything that ain’t technically over.
But between you, me and the ghost of the most famous black cat in baseball history, this thing we call a pennant race in the National League’s Eastern Division…it’s over.
We know it’s over. I’d say they know it’s over, yet I’d have trouble identifying a “they” in this dynamic.
The New York Mets are in first place by seven games with 23 games remaining. Those figures alone aren’t enough to ensure an optimal outcome. What lends the prevailing sense of overness its necessary emotional clout is how we’ve arrived at seven up with 23 to play.
Oh, how we’ve arrived.
On September 9, 1969, that aforementioned black cat strode in front of the Chicago Cubs’ dugout at Shea Stadium. The Cubs had been spiraling downward, the Mets scratching and clawing upward. The ebony feline’s choice of path made the outcome of the race in progress spiritually official. Never mind that the Cubs were a game-and-a-half ahead of the Mets when the cat got a load of Ron Santo, then Leo Durocher, then scurried off. Never mind that the Cubs would cling to a half-game lead for the next 24 or so hours. Legend decided on the spot that September 9 was the night that the Mets, like their cat, ran away and hid for good.
On September 9, 2015, the home dugout at Nationals Park represented the locus of all the world’s bad luck. This time you couldn’t blame a cat. Who needs superstition when you’ve got a manager named Matt staring stoically from beneath a crisp Nat hat? The Matt in the hat had guided his team to the edge of going “splat!”
The Mets in the other dugout simply gave Matt’s Nats a merciful tap. From there, the splat was inevitable.
After the Mets stormed from behind forcefully on Monday and almost (almost) shockingly on Tuesday, there was no reason to believe the Mets couldn’t mount a third consecutive comeback on Wednesday. These are the Mets in one of those Septembers when if we’re not peeking around alleys for cats, we’re fiercely engaged in the act of Belief. It’s like we Gotta, or something.
What distinguished Wednesday’s game from its immediate predecessors was that for the first time during this set of games in which the Nationals let leads of 5-3 and 7-1 slip away, they actually looked almost unbeatable, living up at last to their Natitudinal self-image. The concept that their franchise is something special is built on three core elements:
1) Having drafted Stephen Strasburg first overall in 2009.
2) Having drafted Bryce Harper first overall in 2010.
3) Supplementing the presence of Strasburg and Harper with enough ancillary talent to ensure that almost any idiot could manage them successfully.
Almost any idiot.
For the vast majority of one night, the plan was working without flaw. Strasburg was everything Bob Costas cracked him up to be when, during Strasburg’s maiden start as a major leaguer, America’s Announcer elbowed Walter Johnson aside in the quest to identify the greatest pitcher the District of Columbia had ever called its own. With the exception of a Travis d’Arnaud home run in the second, the Mets couldn’t do a thing with Strasburg, whose curveball broke across home plate with disturbing regularity.
Meanwhile, when the Nationals batted, Bryce Harper’s quality matched the advertising thereof. Statistics suggest Harper is the league’s leading MVP candidate. Nobody who wasn’t Strasburg was more valuable in keeping the 2015 N.L. East race conceivably viable than Harper on Wednesday. There was a homer, a double and two runs scored off an otherwise sound Jacob deGrom. There would later be a second homer, that one off Tyler Clippard. Harper resembled the one-man wrecking crew we’d heard so much about, just as Strasburg — a dozen strikeouts and zero runs allowed from the third through the seventh — was Acela Express enough to make Washington forget the Big Train.
Plus, all Williams had to do was sit back and watch his platinum studs in action. Let Harper hit, let Strasburg pitch, let Williams make no decisions whatsoever. An event as rare as bipartisan comity seemed imminent in our nation’s capital: the Nationals were going to take a crucial game from the Mets.
Ah, but the Nats were up against a wrecking crew whose thickness in numbers was matched by its fortitude. The Mets roll out a pretty studly outfit of their own these September nights. DeGrom was outshone by Strasburg, but by no means outclassed. Jacob went seven, permitted two runs on five hits and two walks while striking out nine. In the one inning that could have slipped from his grasp, he was supported by his teammates in an episode that hinted at where this game would ultimately go.
This was in the fourth, the inning when Harper doubled and scored on Clint Robinson’s single. That made it 2-1 Nats, with one out and the home team threatening to do more. Anthony Rendon, instead of being ordered to bunt (!), swung away and belted a base hit to right. Robinson, a truck horse in the Keith Hernandez vernacular, decided to challenge the throwing arm of Curtis Granderson. A few months ago, a tree stump could have challenged the throwing arm of Curtis Granderson and succeeded. But Granderson, like all the Mets, has kept getting better at his craft. He fired a strong peg to third. It was a tad too late to nail the lumbering Robinson…but wait just a sec…did Robinson come off the bag while David Wright kept a tag plastered to his person?
Why, yes he did. Robinson had just run the Nationals into the most unnecessary of second outs. The next batter, Wilson Ramos, lined out to center to end the fourth. After that, deGrom settled in and matched zeroes with Strasburg. If it wasn’t a classic turning point of the game, it was a subtle clue that the Mets were prepared to pounce on the next available opportunity to turn the entire thing to their favor.
The eighth inning was pouncing time. Terry Collins decided he’d like Kelly Johnson to match up against Strasburg to lead off, so he pinch-hit Kelly for Wilmer Flores. On the radio, Howie Rose mused the Mets would need a modern-day Ron Swoboda to step up if they wanted to get to this Stephen the way their predecessors got to Steve Carlton that night in 1969 when Carlton was striking out Mets like crazy but forgot to mow down Rocky, who blasted the two two-run homers that have since taken their place alongside the black cat in Miracle lore.
Maybe a nanosecond after Rose invoked Swoboda, Johnson evoked Swoboda, taking Strasburg over the wall and causing Howie to commit (for him) near-sacrilege. “Who needs Swoboda?” Howie exulted. “The Mets have Johnson!” They also had a tie game, thanks to perhaps the most clutch home run the Mets hit all season until the next one.
The next one wasn’t far off. After Strasburg fanned pinch-hitter Kirk Nieuwenhuis for his thirteenth strikeout, Granderson singled. Williams removed Strasburg and opted to send Drew Storen to handle Yoenis Cespedes. The previous time we had seen those two face off, the night before, Cespedes was lining a three-run double to left. But it’s Williams’s ballclub, so let’s let his move speak for itself.
Better yet, let’s let Howie Rose speak for the Storen pitch Cespedes proceeded to crush to kingdom come:
“It’s goin’ for a ride! It’s not comin’ back!”
Peerless Yo from south of Manzanillo (Cuba) had done it again, launching a two-run home run that changed the complexion of another Mets-Nats game and hastened the conclusion of the rapidly receding Mets-Nats race. It was, according to Elias, Cespedes’s millionth enormous extra-base hit since he came ashore at the Port of Flushing on August 1. The Mets now led 4-2. A distinct “meow!” could be heard over where the Washington team sat and stewed.
No black cat was spotted. No black cat had to be.
Harper would bat again, which makes for dangerous terrain, but if you pitch to him in the circumstances Clippard did — two out, bases empty — you can deal with Bryce being Bryce. Bryce did go deep for the second time in the game, but that made it only 4-3. Rendon then beat out an bunt hit to make the situation a bit dicey, particularly when Robinson looped a ball into left field, but there would be no dice for the Nationals. Cool customer Michael Conforto fashioned a shoestring grab reminiscent of one Cleon Jones made in the 1969 World Series to end the bottom of the eighth.
Did I mention 1969 again? Seems to have been in the air, especially when Lucas Duda doubled off Jonathan Papelbon to commence the ninth inning and Conforto ultimately singled in pinch-runner Eric Young to make the score 5-3. That’s the same score by which the Mets won the deciding game of that ’69 Series, also the same score that Jeurys Familia went on to preserve with his 39th save of ’15.
Coincidentally, the Mets won Monday’s game against the Nationals, 8-5, the same score by which the Mets won the deciding game of their other jubilant World Series, the one played in 1986. Yes, just another coincidence.
1969…1986…apologies if we’re subliminally getting ahead of ourselves in the giddy wake of a spectacular sweep. The only entity the 2015 Mets explicitly meant to get ahead of this week was the 2015 Nationals.
That they seem to have done decisively.
Remember the Matt Harvey controversy? Me neither at this point, but I did join Robert Brender and Toby Hyde to discuss Matt’s contretemps and other matters of interest on SNY’s Mostly Mets podcast. Listen in here.
by Jason Fry on 9 September 2015 2:16 am My pal Will likes to strip away the sepia Valhalla folderol around baseball and replace it with a simple rule: “When my team wins, I am happy, and when they lose, I am sad.”
Pretty much. But there are degrees of happy and sad. There’s the sad of losing a ho-hum game in August when you’re a dozen games up and next month’s call-ups won’t be any better than what you have. And balancing it, there’s being happy because it’s May and you left your coat at home without checking the weather and you had hot dogs and ice cream and sang “Take Me Out to the Ballgame” and the team looks a little better than you thought and they won 5-1, or maybe it was 6-2, you’d have to check but they definitely won.
A lot of games during a typical year are like that — thumbs up or thumbs down, part of the day. But some are exceptions. For instance, there’s the sad — some would rate it devastating, others merely disappointing — of having everything come down to a single game in which your veteran starter gives up seven in the first while recording one out. You know it’s just baseball, but that kind of sad gets into your guts and bones somehow and sticks there, to seep back out at 3 AM or ambush you in your car or breathe down your neck while you’re minding your own business walking down the street. Did you really just spent 20 minutes muttering “fucking Timo” or actually cackle at the idea of Kenny Rogers sitting on a tack? Of course you did — and it’s not the first time either.
Fortunately that kind of sad has its opposite too.
Tonight was why we act stoic amid fizzled comebacks and stare heavenward after extra-inning stumbles and bear witness to second and third hours of laughers in which our guys are the laughees. Because every so often your stubborn, even stupid faith is rewarded, and baseball hands you a night of pure and utter joy — a gift that makes you remember that one audacious, world-turned-upside-down comeback feels better than a dozen gag jobs feels bad.
And every so often, one of those every so oftens comes when it matters most to a team, a season and a fanbase.
A billion years ago, at the beginning of Tuesday night, the story was Matt Harvey, seeking redemption amid a self-created storm about his innings limit, his commitment to his team and whatever the hell it is his agent thinks he’s doing. Harvey actually didn’t pitch that badly — he didn’t give up an extra-base hit, for instance, and a lot of balls found holes. Not to say that he was blameless by any means: His location was off in the early innings and he compounded a physical error with an unwise play to get that awful sixth snowballing. But turn Yoenis Cespedes‘s error and the resulting Little League grand slam for Michael Taylor into the RBI single it should have been and Harvey’s line might have looked a lot different.
None of this would have mattered if the night hadn’t taken many incredible turns. But before we go on to subsequent events, let’s take a minute to point and laugh at this dummy:
Actually I was playing to the Twitter cameras there. Yeah, it was 7-1, but the Mets had gnawed away at Jordan Zimmermann with relentless at-bats and would get into the Nats’ highly flammable bullpen. And, well, there’s something about the ’15 Mets 2.0 that makes you hope even when things seem bleakest.
Harvey was excused from scapegoat duty because of his teammates; the Mets’ seventh delivered redemption for Cespedes and then brought me back to another risen-from-the-dead inning that was a slow-motion nightmare for the other team, an endless parade of ball fours and a slow wheeling of baserunners that kept grinding along, with a third out seemingly at hand but repeatedly postponed. I’m thinking, of course, of the 10-run inning — a Shea night rivaled only by the Grand Slam single and Mike Piazza‘s post-9/11 blast in terms of sheer transformative joy experienced at a ballpark. And when Travis d’Arnaud stepped up to the plate with Drew Storen having unraveled into a pile of red and white yarn on the mound, the parallel seemed perfect. Surely this catcher would blast one over the fence, releasing the accumulated tension in a crazy big bang of an instant, just as that catcher did 15 years ago.
D’Arnaud got his pitch and clobbered it, but this line drive didn’t go over the left-field fence. It vanished into Bryce Harper‘s glove.
Storen had looked like there wasn’t enough air out there on the mound — I felt sorry for him, enemy status and all, as I think you feel for anyone struggling in the grips of a nightmare. That looked like it was happening to Addison Reed too, but the latest Met reliever auditioning for seventh-inning duties found enough on his fastball to escape a jam. Ironically, Jonathan Papelbon — the closer who displaced Storen and was summoned to pitch the eighth — was the only reliever out there for either side who didn’t look like he had a bit of jelly in his knees. Amid all this ludicrous drama Papelbon was his usual self, hunched over and glowering at home plate like a vulture.
Up stepped pinch-hitter Kirk Nieuwenhuis, whose 2015 has been ridiculous even by the standards of wacko baseball narrative: a three-homer game bracketed by not much. Kirk failed as a pinch-hitter in New York and was sent through waivers so he could be sold to the Angels, which worked out so well that he came back through waivers and got stashed in Las Vegas. And now here he was, pinch-hitting again.
Papelbon missed with a fastball for ball one, then aimed another one at the inside corner. It slid over the heart of the plate instead and the moment bat hit ball you knew it was gone. Nieuwenhuis raised his head, appreciated the trajectory for a moment, set his bat down gently and floated around the bases and into Met lore.
Magic, though, isn’t magic until there’s an F by the score. The Mets had six outs to get. Tyler Clippard, whose little squint and lip curl always makes him look perturbed, put down his old team in the eighth. The Mets rather meanly refused to put up four or five runs worth of insurance in the top of the ninth, and so in came Jeurys Familia.
It didn’t start out well — Jayson Werth lined an 0-2 quick-pitch slider up the middle for a single, barking at Familia as he went. But Matt Williams then inexplicably handed the Mets one of his three precious remaining outs by having Anthony Rendon bunt and then keeping the bunt on with Familia struggling to find the plate. Rendon, perhaps protesting having to be a party to Neanderthal idiocy, bunted so poorly that Lucas Duda forced Werth at second. The Nats probably don’t have enough season left to salvage things by firing Williams, but if I were their GM that’s what I’d do posthaste.
Familia dueled Harper, trying to tempt him into swinging at splitters that sought at his ankles, but walked him instead — which baseball orthodoxy deplores but I didn’t particularly mind, because I’d had visions of Familia hanging a splitter and Harper doing cartwheels around the bases, after which I’d have to spend thirty or forty years reading about how Harper’s ascent to the Hall of Fame and every American home’s Wheaties box really began the night he saved the Nats’ 2015 season and kick-started their dynasty.
Up came Yunel Escobar, who whacked an 0-2 fastball into the ground, a high bounce to David Wright. When Wright returned in Philadelphia you could see the game was too fast for him, and it was painful to watch him struggle to force his brain to speed up and command his body properly. But that was a while ago; Wright’s glove shot up to spear the ball and he flung it to Murphy, who surrounded second and heaved the ball to the mitt waiting at one end of the massive outstretched bulk of Duda. It found its target for the most beautiful two outs we’ve seen around here in a very, very long time.
Remember this one when baseball makes you sad, when cold rain’s falling and you’re huddled under a plastic poncho that smells like a refinery, or when it’s sunny but a Met starter’s trudging off the mound with one out in the second and the stands a-growl. On that day, remember this night and have faith that good things can happen, that this may be the game where the misery is but a prelude to a bolt of joy out of the blue. And even if it isn’t that day, take solace in the fact you’re closer to the next improbable burst of happiness that will make all of all of this worthwhile — the day that will remind you of why you love this confounding, unpredictable and beautiful game so much.
by Greg Prince on 7 September 2015 5:36 pm The team that was a surefire bet to cruise to another division title got off to a rocky start. But then they began to right the ship, they had their pitching lined up, and once September rolled around, they took dead aim at first place, inching closer and closer day by day until they were presented with an enormous head-to-head opportunity against their direct rivals.
But, alas, the 1987 Mets couldn’t overtake the team that had run in front of them all summer long, the St. Louis Cardinals.
See? Not every historical comp revolves around the 2007 Mets blowing an unblowable lead. Sometimes teams that enter September in front stay in front. Sorry I had to drag Terry Pendleton into this, but don’t you get it?
We can be the 1987 Cardinals. Or any number of LOTS of first-place teams that didn’t become second-place teams. It happens. It happens more often than the opposite. You build a lead and you earn a cushion. The Mets went into their Biggest Series In Seven Years with a cushion of four games.
They are one-third through it with a cushion of five games because they beat the Nationals, 8-5, after taking an early lead of 3-0 on solo homers off Max Scherzer by Michael Conforto, Kelly Johnson and Yoenis Cespedes; ceding a grand slam to Wilson Ramos and then another enemy tally (oy, Niese); and then storming back. The Mets made it 5-4 and 5-5 and 6-5 and 7-5 and 8-5. The best part — besides the five runs added to the three previous runs through the offensive machinations of Cespedes, David Wright, Daniel Murphy, Curtis Granderson, Travis d’Arnaud, Ruben Tejada and let’s mention Cespedes again because it’s so much fun to realize he’s a Met who was obtained to do exactly what he’s doing — is that the Nats’ total stayed steady from the fourth through the ninth.
Jon Niese gave up five runs in the fourth, the 15th time in his career he’d given up five runs in a single inning, something no Met pitcher had ever done. Niese is a problem right now. Niese could have represented a fatal error in the company mainframe this Labor Day, but his co-workers came to his aid with vital tech support. Five Met relievers kept those five National runs very lonely. Carlos Torres (whose unmatched endurance and left calf I didn’t intend to curse), Erik Goeddel, Dario Alvarez, Hansel Robles and Jeurys Familia shut out an opposition that had gobbled up our starter and looked ravenous for more.
Well, good luck with that, Washington. No, actually, rotten luck to you. Our guys had the good luck and skill today, as the pen was mightier than the Niese (and the Nats). Hats off in particular to Goeddel for having to come in on a moment’s notice in place of a limping Torres; Alvarez for pulling a modern-day Rich Sauveur in striking out Bryce Harper after coming out of close to nowhere and making his first pitches of the season count like crazy; and Rapid Robles, whose quick-pitching drove Ryan Zimmerman to distraction…and the bench.
That was some good relief pitching. That was some good hitting, Cespedes’s (three extra base hits) and otherwise. And mostly that was some outstanding not giving up. This Mets team hasn’t heard of the 2007 Mets team. This Mets team creates its own precedent. Particularly lovable was Wright, after scoring the seventh Met run, gesticulating in fist-pumping approval in similar fashion to how he did during the last season when the Mets played games like this. That was 2008. That was seven years ago. Wright has waited a long time for this.
So have we.
Sitting down to a Labor Day contest in which the Mets were a) in first place and b) preparing to beat back the team in second place was a refreshing change of pace from all the Labor Days and all the September days we have known during this decade. I flashed back briefly to what I was doing on Labor Day two years ago. The Mets were playing the Braves. The Mets got their ass kicked slowly and repeatedly. I soaked up every goddamn pitch, wondering why I was sitting through a game as bad as that.
Now I know. It was to get to games like this and appreciate them fully.
More to come, too. We are granted no guarantees, but we have every chance to prove that 2015 is its own thing, is its own year, is its own precedent. Tomorrow night we have Harvey going. Six or twelve or some undetermined number of games after that, we might have Harvey going again. Somewhere in between, Niese might find himself. Or Niese might find himself keeping company with the other extant 2008 Met pitcher Bobby Parnell, asking from the shadows of the back of the bullpen, “Whatever became of us?” Harvey’s still a member in good standing of this rotation, just as Niese shouldn’t be professionally dead to us yet. As Jason pointed out, it was easy enough to write off Colon when he waned and he’s presently our most dependable and dynamic starter. I’m willing to give Jon the Veteran the benefit of one more start’s doubt. If he doesn’t flourish, then I’ll personally petition Scott Boras to sign him and instigate the immediate capping of his innings.
That’s a dark thought. Today is a day to look at the sunny side of life. On a Monday holiday, the Mets beat exactly who they had to beat and extended their first-place lead to five meaningful games in September.
by Greg Prince on 7 September 2015 3:45 am Throughout my childhood and into my adolescence, if I had to see the dentist, I was dragged from Long Beach to some deteriorating section of Brooklyn. We stayed loyal to our family dentist even though our family had left that deteriorating section of Brooklyn six months before I was born (later I’d find out that my mother dated the dentist before she met my father, which might explain the endless drives she was willing to endure to continue these appointments). Probably the last time I visited the dentist in question, it was the spring of 1978. I was 15, close to finishing ninth grade. While sitting in the dentist’s waiting room, I picked up a copy of Esquire, then known as Esquire Fortnightly. Flipping through, I found an article about the Olympic figure skater Dorothy Hamill. I was never terribly interested in Dorothy Hamill, figure skating or the Olympics, but something about the article — or how I recall it — stayed with me.
The headline was, “The Exploitation of Dorothy Hamill,” and it suggested, two years after she won her 1976 gold medal, that the innocence was gone. America’s winter sweetheart was now, according to reporter Philip Taubman, “a lonely frightened figure, lost on the road to fame and fortune.” Those who handled her squeezed her into unflattering costumes and disregarded her true skating talent in service to the showbizzy routines of the Ice Capades. It wasn’t a happy fit.
Dorothy was making a nice living from the arrangement, but it just wasn’t what it once was. She was an athlete, first and foremost, but to her sponsors, she represented a corporate bonanza. The shift in priorities didn’t make for a smooth transition. “Sure, it seemed so wonderful at first,” she reflected in 1979, a year after the Esquire piece came out. “I was famous. I was going to be rich. But then the lawyers came rushing in, telling me what I ought to do and with whom. I was depressed, confused. I ended up in the hospital with a bleeding ulcer within a year.”
I’ve been thinking about the state of post-Olympic Dorothy Hamill, not just this weekend but really the whole season. I’ve thought of her when I’ve watched Matt Harvey being Matt Harvey away from the mound. I think back to the Matt Harvey with whom we all fell in baseball love. I think of those first starts in 2012, when if he gave up two runs, he’d berate himself because the Mets scored only one, and one should have been enough for him. If the Mets scored no runs, then he insisted his job was to keep them in the game by putting up zeroes. It was unrealistic, but it was endearing.
No pitcher could put that much pressure on himself and succeed across the long term, but when 2012 became 2013, we got the sense that Matt Harvey could do anything he set his mind and his right arm to. He put up zeroes almost exclusively. He allowed his team every chance to win, and for a while the Mets never lost when he pitched. He threw an almost perfect game while his nose bled. It was revealed he stared down a bully of a veteran teammate. When he needed a run, he drove it in himself. We created a cause around him and we rallied to it.
That Matt Harvey was one of the most awesome Mets I ever rooted for. I adored that Matt Harvey. I miss that Matt Harvey.
If you saw ESPN’s documentary profiling Harvey’s comeback, you’ll realize that an easy, Hamillesque narrative — it was all so simple when it was just Matt and a baseball, before there was money to be made off him — doesn’t quite click here. One of the most compelling segments of The Dark Knight Rises was how Harvey, a high school kid, wouldn’t sign with the Angels, the club that first drafted him, unless they met his price. It was almost heroic the way he didn’t take a lot of money because he thought he was worth a whole lot more money.
Heartwarming, eh?
It worked to our benefit because Matt went to college, was drafted by the Mets, signed with them and we benefited. We’re still benefiting. No matter the explanations he seemed to ship to Guantanamo Bay for enhanced interrogation, he’s been a terrific pitcher for our first-place New York Mets all year. You couldn’t fill your palm with the number of bad starts he’s made.
But even before he expressed poorly timed concern for his future self’s earning ability, this Harvey wasn’t that Harvey, the one from late in 2012 and early in 2013. Frayed invincibility on the field is one thing. We all get that. Nobody’s elbow is repaired and rehabilitated and expected to come back as good as was right away. In that regard, Harvey appears to be a medical miracle. If he hasn’t been invincible, he’s been close enough.
What I miss is his belief that he’s supposed to be invincible, his not accepting setbacks as inevitable. It was ridiculous that he thought he shouldn’t ever give up a run, but I swooned at that kind of talk. After a generation of pitchers excusing their shortcomings on the altar of having done all they could and being satisfied with wherever the chips fell, Harvey didn’t take “no decision” for an answer.
Maybe he couldn’t go on like that. What am I saying? Of course he couldn’t go on like that. But even a wiser, more mature, literally scarred Matt Harvey could have given us the impression that nothing mattered to him but him and the baseball and the winning. I liked that he acted the part of the privileged character. I liked the defiant tone he set, informing us he planned to operate and succeed on a higher level. I liked that he stood out from his talented peers. Let deGrom and Syndergaard and Matz be amiable and amicable. Let Wheeler camp out in St. Lucie for a lost season. I wanted Harvey to stare down everything that was brought at him…including innings limits.
That aura was altered over the course of 2015. The Matt Harvey who said whatever occurred to him now spoke in bland platitudes, as if Dorothy Hamill’s old lawyers came rushing in, telling him what he ought to do and with whom. The Matt Harvey who you figured was His Own Man seemed to have gone through some (rather ineffective) media training. The Matt Harvey who would give up a start only if you pried it from his cold, dead fingers, gladly stepped aside for Logan Verrett a couple of weeks ago.
It was the sophisticated way to be, not rocking the division-leading boat, being on board with management, maybe keeping an eye on a workload that lurked in the back of our minds, so it probably lurked a lot closer to Harvey’s frontal lobe. But I have to admit, I was a little disappointed that Matt didn’t raise a fuss when he was bypassed in Colorado and agreed to cool his heels for an extra five days. That wasn’t the Harvey I developed a Met crush on. It may have been a saner, safer Harvey, but it wasn’t that Harvey.
I didn’t dwell on it, but deep down, I think I suspected something was awry — though I surely didn’t imagine the Dark Knight voluntarily receding.
Not my arm. Not my payday. I keep reminding myself of that. Matt Harvey’s life intersects with mine only in that I began rooting for the enterprise that employs him two decades before he was born. Sure I want him to strike out the moon. Sure I want him to shut up and pitch for me. But it’s not my arm and it’s not my payday.
It’s his life.
But it’s our team. There’s an implied provision in the fan-team covenant that says we care about your well-being if you perform for us. Even if you don’t perform all that well for us, we’ll probably be decent to you, provided we’ve gotten the chance to feel we know you. We make exceptions, but we’ll usually remember you’re human. We sort of get that you can’t be the best every time we watch you. We just want you in there trying.
Or trying to try. Or insisting you’ll try if only you were physically able. There’s nothing shameful about being physically unable. Most of us are physically unable to throw a baseball hard enough for our elbows to notice our exertion. Major League pitchers have very different anatomies from us. We’re surprisingly perceptive on that count. If you’re Harvey and something’s bothering your arm — if something’s making you literally sore — speak up (softly, so the Nationals can’t hear you on the eve of a major series). A diminished version of yourself yields diminishing returns. I think back ten years ago to Braden Looper hiding some kind of injury for six months, preferring to pitch through the pain to help the team. It didn’t help the team. It did the opposite. That’s the kind of thing that makes me feel indecent toward you.
If Matt Harvey is aching, then cater to the ache. Work to soothe it, to heal it, to possibly function with it. If a limb is about to fall off, take it back in for repair and get Verrett up in the pen. Proceed with utmost caution.
If Matt Harvey is thinking that nothing aches unusually now but you can’t be too careful, the winter of 2018-19 is practically around the corner, I wish he’d think about something else.
Not my arm. Not my payday. But it is our passion. Don’t you or your agent go out of your way to screw with that. And for your own good, consider what you signed up for. This is the business you’ve chosen, the business of pursuing championships (the riches tend to follow). When I’ve been in the presence of champions or just heard or read them talking about what being a champion meant and still means to them, they rarely if ever mention the check that accompanied the ring.
I haven’t been asked to pitch since I played tee ball, and if you know tee ball, you can infer what kind of pitching ability I was blessed with, so don’t listen to me. Maybe somebody who won a Cy Young Award and a world championship knows the subject better. Maybe Dwight Gooden, who has said, in essence, take the ball and pitch, Matt. Maybe T#m Gl@v!ne, who has said, in essence, the exact same thing. Hell, take somebody like Shaun Marcum, a former Met attached to no trophies and no jewelry. He went through Tommy John surgery. We haven’t seen him up close since 2013, but he’s still trying to catch on and hang on. He’s just one pitcher, but like Gooden and like Gl@vine, he lands on the side of “sacrific[ing] the long term to try to get to the World Series.” Another former Harvey teammate currently at liberty, the recently DFA’d David Aardsma, threw in his veiled two cents as well: “I’ll pitch…just saying.”
Just saying isn’t the same as just doing. Harvey, in his attempt to Qualcomm a question that had only one answer appropriate for mass consumption, finessed it to a crisp and got rightly burned. It sounded so out of character to hear him say anything other than a slight variation on “give me the ball, I’m here to win.” Finesse is for changing speeds, not derailing Septembers. Agents are for negotiations, not surrenders. Call off your mouthpiece, Matt. Let Scott Boras blow hard on your behalf behind the scenes. Him hinting you wouldn’t pitch come hypothetical October, and you kinda, sorta confirming it without actually saying so, was neither a good look nor sound.
Nevertheless, so what? New York has long been graced by marquee players who were just saying things that played very badly in the moment. Reggie Jackson insulted the captain of his team during his first Spring Training in pinstripes. Darryl Strawberry advised us Los Angeles sure looked like a nice place for him to play full-time on the eve of a playoff showdown with Los Angeles. They were more accomplished than Matt when Matt deferred all relevant questions in the same manner Wimpy promised to pay Popeye for his hamburger: to “Tuesday,” the date of his next scheduled start (sporting of him to concede he’d keep his appointment). Reggie and Darryl shook off whatever heat they took for aggravating their teams and fans by coming up big when it mattered. That’s all that matters. But to come up big, you have to show up big.
You have to show up in October if October presents itself. You don’t fool around with that. If you can’t make it, we’ll worry about it then. But don’t give us the idea it’s of secondary importance to you a month in advance. Don’t break our covenant.
Harvey, having failed the oral portion of his exam on Saturday, took to his handy Players Tribune perch Sunday and announced in headline form, “I Will Pitch in the Playoffs.” Since he’s the New York City Bureau Chief, I assume he writes his own headlines. He can write his own ticket by helping ensure there are playoffs for him and his less controversial colleagues to pitch in. The Mets encountered another Martin Prado-shaped speed bump on their way out of Miami, so they can use all the help they can get.
Our overly branded young man has enough formal advisers on the business end and medical side, but I’ll extend a second opinion nobody requested. Matt: Talk like you pitch; don’t pitch like you talk.
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