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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 Jason Fry on 28 August 2015 1:08 am Five weeks ago, if the Mets had been down 5-0 I would’ve found something better to do with my time.
But that was five weeks ago, and that team that no longer exists. Tonight, when the Mets fell five runs behind, I figured they’d come back and was curious how they’d do it.
It’s remarkable — it’s as if the lineup that wore Mets uniforms until late July was not just from another season but from another decade, and their stats had been grafted on to this season’s through some bizarre act of nouveau recordkeeping.
It was a funny night as a chronicler, too. We’re finishing up our annual week on Long Beach Island, and schedules aligned to give us a chance to catch up with old friends. We took it and so I spent the early innings admiring the beauty of a spectacular sunset, content to let whatever the Mets were up to wait a bit. When I checked briefly it was 0-0 in the third, so I figured the Mets could wait a little more.
I love the way baseball rewards both careful watching of each and every pitch and a casual eye or ear on the game while you attend to whatever life’s brought you. So after parting ways with our friends I found myself riding through the Beach Haven night on a bicycle while Howie Rose and Josh Lewin spoke from my pocket. Those voices in the darkness informed me that things had not gone well in my absence; Good New Niese had yielded to Bad Old Niese for an inning that left the score Phillies 5, Mets 0.
That wasn’t good, but it was early yet. And, indeed, by the time I put my bike in a rack outside the restaurant it was 5-2. By the time the food came it was 5-5. I smiled but wasn’t surprised — we’ve come to expect such nightly miracles from Mets 2.0.
5-5, of course, was just the beginning. The Mets had ridden home runs from Travis d’Arnaud, Yoenis Cespedes and Kelly Johnson to a tie, and the game was in the hands of the bullpens.
Which seemed scary, but as Greg noted yesterday, the usually suspect have turned trustworthy. Recent hero Logan Verrett was first out of the gate with a spotless inning, Hansel Robles stared down quick-pitch debaters Jeff Francoeur and Darin Ruf, Sean Gilmartin made the Phils look downright foolish with slow curves and sliders, and then Carlos Torres came on.
Torres has lacked whatever magic he seemed to have in previous campaigns — which is just another way of saying he’s a middle reliever — but he immediately pulled a rabbit out of his hat. Francoeur shot a ball up the middle, which hit off Torres’s back foot. The ball took a crazy bounce into no-man’s land between first and second, where Daniel Murphy smothered it, lost the handle and flung it blindly in the direction of first — the same location where Torres just happened to be arriving. If you didn’t see it, don’t fret — it’s here, and you’ll be seeing it on highlight shows for the next decade or so anyway.
Torres survived the 11th and the 12th, helped by David Wright scooping up a short hop with two outs and Cesar Hernandez steaming homeward from third. Oddly yet also somehow inevitably, Torres then teamed up with Murphy again for the rally that would win the game.
The Phillies had been doing their damnedest to lose, sending out palooka reliever after palooka reliever to walk some Mets and give up bullets to others. But that’s no guarantee of a loss — the bullets went right to Phillie fielders and the walked became the stranded.
Until the 13th, when Torres led off and hit a shot of his own up the middle, one which Freddy Galvis was able to field and juggle but not throw. Curtis Granderson‘s single sent Torres to second, and after a Cespedes flyout, Murph laced a double up the left-field line, chasing home both runs. By the time the Phils were done falling apart, the Mets had a lead they wouldn’t relinquish.
Murph, of course, is the Mets’ own avatar of chaos — a Loki figure who somehow bends the laws of baseball physics by his mere presence.
Sometimes this is a bad thing — Murph can run the bases as if he thinks he’s invisible (to quote Wright from a couple of years back) or double down on a defensive lapse to create a disaster that simple inaction would have avoided.
Sometimes these Murphian emanations are merely odd — the camera finds Murph wearing an oversized expression of elation or depression, or catches him yapping frenetically to no one in particular, or spots him contorting his body to express triumph or self-loathing.
And sometimes, well, it’s great. Such as when Murph hurls a ball in what he believes is the direction of first base and this time he’s not only right but a teammate has also sprinted there in the nick of time. Or when he lashes out at a baseball and sends it shooting up the line or arcing into the seats.
Murph is our Ron Swoboda — a player whose emotional commitment to the game is infinite even if his talents for it are not. As fans, we live and die with the Mets’ victories and defeats. But watch Murph play ball for even a little while and you realize that as deeply as you may feel such things, you’ll never be lifted up or crushed by them the way Murphy is.
When Murph’s reality-bending force field makes him the hero, no Met fan in existence is as thrilled by what’s happened as Murph himself is. When those same redrafted laws of physics turn him into the goat, no Mets rooter is more horrified and disappointed. It’s hilarious and endearing and a little worrisome all at the same time, much like Murph himself.
And now Murph has the perfect season for his unique talents — one studded with epic wins and losses, runs of invulnerability and incompetence, and no certainty except that what happens next will be wilder and stranger than anything we’ve let ourselves imagine so far.
by Greg Prince on 27 August 2015 4:17 am “I don’t know. I’m open to new ideas.”
—Mets fan Josh Lyman, “Stirred,” The West Wing
Of course I grew antsy as Eric O’Flaherty made his case for being Eric D’FAherty (I’ve also heard Eric D’OH!Flaherty and a less family-friendly version of Eric O’Dear.) Eric, who may be the salt of the earth in real life, has absolutely no currency with us. During our relatively brief exposure to his advertised skill set, he has shown himself to be the kind of pitcher who, when handed a six-run lead against a last-place team, you instinctively hold on for dear life.
Those instincts weren’t off Wednesday night in Philadelphia. Dude’s here to get out lefties and dude wasn’t getting out lefties. Thanks to his core competency being completely overstated, a snowball commenced to rolling downhill at the intersection of 11th and Pattison. 6-0 became 6-1, then 6-3 (the remaining Tsuris Brother, Carlos, carrying on in the spirit of his not-so-dear departed spiritual sibling, Hattie), then 6-4 (Wilmer Flores made an error, but who has the heart to blame Wilmer Flores for anything?). Meanwhile, in our nation’s capital, the Padres had just allowed their hosts to scooch comfortably back into their game, turning what had been a 6-2 cruise into a 6-5 frightfest.
Five-and-half, which was so close to expanding to 6½, was threatening to contract instead to 4½, and if the second-place Nationals could pick up ground on the first-place Mets, then who knew what might tumble down should the earth move under our feet?
The O’Flaherty inning — a.k.a. the jackpot frame as it’s known in bowling — was an unnerving disaster.
And then, with little more than a pause for station identification on the WOR Mets radio network, driven by your TriHonda dealer, everything was jam up and jelly tight. 6-4 became 7-, 8- and 9-4…and down in D.C. 6-5 stayed 6-5, permitting the Mets’ divisional lead to go up an entire shoe size. Tyler Clippard’s right arm may soon be long enough to unlace his spikes without him having to bend over, but on Wednesday night, it was exactly the proper length to finish what Bartolo Colon started and Michael Cuddyer (among others) bolstered.
Despite the benefits inherent in facing off against the old gray mares of the National League East — those Phillies ain’t what they used to be, ain’t what they used to be, ain’t what they used to be — Citizens Bank Park remains a Binkley-size closet of anxieties for any Mets fan with mental muscle memory, particularly at this time of year. It’s late August in Philadelphia. An entire era of Met dismay and disgust was foreshadowed in late August in Philadelphia eight late Augusts in Philadelphia ago. Back then, Mets were Mets until they all of a sudden weren’t. Then came the September that followed, followed by the year that followed that September, and down a hole we went. So you can understand the inclination to clutch your steering wheel, your rosary, your vintage Lady Met figurine or whatever it is that gives you comfort when you find yourself in times of trouble.
Except there’s this: We’re well out of the hole as this September approaches. It’s taking a stream of positive reinforcement to pound that message home for me. It’s taking a 6-0 lead in the middle of the eighth inning and a 9-4 decision after nine innings. It’s taking a lump or two with a lefty specialist whose specialness has failed to materialize and keeping calm/carrying on because he’s not alone out there.
These Mets take leads and proceed to insure them, which would explain the surfeit of Geico commercials. These Mets, at least not of late, don’t let their fate boil down to their obviously weakest link. And these Mets are loaded with players who’ve looked terrible for months only to turn it on when needed. I wouldn’t bet on Eric O’Flaherty making himself super useful (or making any roster that would need to be submitted for use after October 4), but I wouldn’t rule it out. Baseball players with track records have an odd way of eventually or at least occasionally living up to them.
How many days ago had we dismissed Cuddyer as dismal? How many hours ago did we decide Colon could be eased to the curb? Now we recognize them as charter members of the vaunted C&C Club, an elite organization whose ranks include Cespedes, Clippard, Conforto and, because we’re not sticklers, Curtis. Remember when this team was defined by its M&M&M Boys of Mayberry, Muno and Monell?
You do, don’t you? You remember believing the worst would inevitably trump the best the Mets could conjure. The foundational tenets of your convictions were strong. You experienced everything from a four-game sweep at the hands of Jimmy Rollins this week in 2007 to what happened at the end of the succeeding two Septembers to all the indignities foisted upon your franchise once its home ballpark changed but its bottom line barely budged. All that institutional memory certainly conditioned me to consider most any Met lead (in the standings, on the scoreboard) suspect until proven trustworthy.
I’m working on instilling some new memories into my consciousness. The ones generated by the Mets taking full advantage of the kindnesses offered them by the 2015 schedulemakers seem like they’ll be worth reflexively revisiting in the late Augusts ahead; I might as well enjoy them right now. Therefore, I’m going to try to see if these new memories condition me to adjust my instincts and point me on a path of confidence and assuredness and not expecting figurative roofs to metaphorically cave in just because that’s what figurative roofs used to do all over actual Mets. It may take a while for me to match my worldview to the world around us.
Nevertheless, I’ll let you in on something I had to admit to myself while the worst possible outcome loomed as a legitimate possibility. I was worried when O’Flaherty was no more death on lefthanders than Gene Walter ever was. I was worried when the Mets saw their edge temporarily shrink from six runs to two in Philadelphia. I was worried when the Nationals were forging a comeback in Washington. Because I’ve been a Mets fan for so long, I was definitely worried.
But because I’m a Mets fan at the present time, I wasn’t that worried.
by Jason Fry on 26 August 2015 1:25 am The Mets won. That, as always, is the big thing.
On Monday night they won by clubbing balls into the stratosphere, delivering a 14-run beatdown that turned a 7-2 deficit into a 16-7 rout.
Tuesday night was different. The Mets got off to a fast start, with a Yoenis Cespedes homer making the score 2-0 before most of the seats were warmed. But the Phillies came back to take the lead on Noah Syndergaard‘s youthful mistakes, and there was a different feeling in the air — this was a game that was going to come down to bullpens and a critical at-bat or two.
Unfortunately, a lot of what will be written about this game will concern Hansel Robles‘ quick pitch to an ill-prepared Darin Ruf, which was followed by Jeff Francoeur screaming and yelling and Larry Bowa having a Someone Taser That Scary Man-level fit, though that’s pretty much Bowa’s default way of interacting with the world.
Let’s get this out of the way, shall we?
I try to stay away from weighing in on unwritten rules of the game, because a) I stopped playing baseball competitively before puberty, so what the fuck do I know and b) such discussions are inevitably pointless and boring.
What I do when a dreaded unwritten rule pops up is try to put my emotions and loyalties aside and look at how normally level-headed baseball people reacted in the moment.
Francoeur may have trouble with the concept that four balls means a trip to first base, but he never struck me as a hothead. Home-plate ump Dan Bellino didn’t allow the pitch to Ruf despite being in position. And d’Arnaud himself seemed to be telling Robles to wait. (Indeed, he confirmed as much after the game.)
If “make sure the batter’s looking up” is one of those unwritten rules of baseball, it seems like a sensible one to me — and, far more importantly, it seemed that way to the actual baseball people involved. (As for Terry Collins‘s note about the legality of the pitch, that was for public consumption; I’ll bet you $100 he said something else in private. Which is as it should be.)
Bowa’s freakout — during which even an amateur lip-reader could discern “fuckin’ bat flip” — turned out not to be a reference to d’Arnaud after his bases-loaded walk, but to Daniel Murphy, whose bat flip on Monday night was … well, let’s say memorable. Hell, I was surprised Murph didn’t tote a boombox around the bases blasting the theme from “The Natural.” Not to sound like Tim McCarver, but in 1965 or 1975 or 1985, the next Met would have been on his back, and he would have blamed Murph, not the pitcher.
I’m glad that batters are less likely to be hit in the head for the crime of doing what they’re supposed to — I still get angry thinking about Piazza and Clemens in Yankee Stadium all those years ago. Nor do I particularly mind celebrations — this game’s fun, dammit. But there’s a difference between trying to hit a guy in the head (which not even Bowa suggested Murph had coming) and showing a bit of anger when being curb-stomped.
What happened to the Phillies Monday night was a truly humiliating ass-kicking — 14 unanswered runs. By the end, Mets batters were diving across the plate, swinging from their heels, and sending a record number of balls up gaps and into seats.
The Phillies’ response? Nothing. No batters sat down, no inside pitches, nothing. They stood there glumly like they were waiting for an unpleasant commute to end.
Maybe I’m just getting old, but I thought it was very strange. I can only imagine what Bowa thought. After Tuesday night’s game, Phils manager Pete Mackanin said — I suspect both wryly and wearily — that he guessed Bowa “just got mad at everybody.”
Yep. Starting with his own ballclub.
More important to me by far was the aftermath of the jawing and the milling about. And that was Robles — a young pitcher still learning his craft, with a penchant for blowups — erasing Ruf with a beautiful breaking pitch on the outside corner at the knees.
Or Tyler Clippard in the eighth, battling Domonic Brown with fastballs and then fanning him with a change-up. Hopefully Syndergaard was taking notes — our young Norse god has a bad habit of abandoning his breaking pitches early and throwing nothing but fastballs, which he’s repeatedly seen doesn’t work. The 2-0 pitch Syndergaard threw to Freddy Galvis in the third? It was a 97 MPH fastball, which is impressive. Galvis also knew it was coming, and so turned it into a souvenir. This keeps happening to Syndergaard, he keeps acknowledging it, and then five days later he’s throwing nothing but fastballs. It’s a bit confounding.
Anyway, Clippard got the out he desperately needed and then gave way to Jeurys Familia, who looked better than he has since the first half, with both the sinker and the slider essentially unhittable.
But let’s go back to the little thing that turned the game. No, not Michael Cuddyer‘s two-run single in the top of the sixth, though that was wonderful. (Imagine this lineup if Cuddyer gets going too!) It came a few pitches before, while d’Arnaud was facing Jeanmar Gomez.
With two strikes, d’Arnaud ticked a sinker back into Carlos Ruiz‘s glove. It stuck there for a moment and plopped to the ground. Chooch smacked his fist into his mitt, angry that his failure to hold the ball had turned a third strike into another chance for d’Arnaud. Given that chance, d’Arnaud worked the count full and then walked, tying the game and bringing Cuddyer to the plate.
Three pitches later, Gomez threw a sinker that didn’t sink and the Mets had the lead for good. It was a little thing, but not every game is a home-run derby. Most of them turn on a little thing.
Update: The Robles thing doesn’t seem to be an unwritten rule, but an unenforced one. Hat tip to Craig Calcaterra for digging up the relevant portions of the rulebook. Hansel, stop doing that. Now on to more important things, I hope.
by Greg Prince on 25 August 2015 2:53 am This happens, right? Against all playoff probability odds, let alone preseason projections, some team finds the field and proves itself better than imagined, better than its competition, better than its most fervent and loyal supporters dared to dream.
This is happening…right?
Wright.
Brothers and sisters, rub your eyes, pinch your extremities, do a double-, triple- and quadruple-take. Those are indeed our New York Mets sitting atop the National League East with nothing directly beneath them except five-and-a-half games’ worth of stratosphere and four teams incapable of dislodging them in the very short term. Three of those teams are spiritually if not mathematically eliminated, while a lone, legitimate competitor lurks on the decreasingly elastic edges of possibility’s realm. The Nats remain within spitting distance of the Mets, but mostly they keep slipping on their own saliva.
Honestly, though, it’s beginning to not matter what the Washington Nationals do. It’s the Mets who are doing what needs to be done, the Mets who are, night by night, doing what no Mets before them have ever done.
If you’ve treated yourself to a viewing of That Thing You Do! every blessed time it comes on the air, then you know The Wonders (originally The Oneders; eventually revealed as classic one-hit wonders) had themselves a song called “Dance With Me Tonight,” which included a timelessly relevant lyric, whether you are listening in Erie, Pa., in 1964, or anywhere across Metsopotamia in 2015.
Tell everyone in Philadelph’ya
There’s a party goin’ on.
Is there ever. It’s thrilling. It’s bracing. It’s ecstasy over SNY and WOR. And boy oh boy, is it powerful.
• The Mets hit eight home runs Monday night at Citizens Bank Park. That’s a franchise record, breaking the old mark that was established in the very same setting on another night the Phillies didn’t have a prayer.
• The Mets added seven doubles to register fifteen extra-base hits in toto. That’s another franchise record, surpassing the thirteen collected exactly ten years earlier in Arizona — and completely outdoing that thing their predecessors didn’t do exactly forty years earlier in San Francisco, which was the day the 1975 Mets were no-hit by Ed Halicki, who, if he’s so tough, why doesn’t he come out of retirement at age 64 and face this powerhouse of a batting order?
• The Mets won by a Namathesque final of 16-7. You who are now trained to keep your eyes peeled for the rare and elusive Unicorn Score can mark down yet another one. It was the first 16-7 win in franchise history. Maybe it will be cloned. Maybe it will be dwarfed.
They are farther above .500 than at any time since 2008. They lead the pack by more lengths than at any time since 2007. They look and feel, by every measure, more like a playoff team than at any time since 2006. Those years ended in various shades of pain and horror. This year is coming in on an altogether cheerier frequency. Try to tune in fear and all you get is static.
Who knows anymore what this team can do? Who knows what they will do? It’s folly to pretend to know. Throw out your formulas and resist the pull of magic numbers. Here’s all you need to lean into: If the Mets play 1.000 ball in their next game, everything will be one game closer to taking care of itself quite nicely.
When this particular Unicorn Score has gathered dust, it will likely be inferred to have been the result of something resembling a hard-fought sluggers’ duel. To a certain extent, that will be a reasonable inference, for the Mets actually trailed in this game. They trailed by a lot. They trailed by the kind of margin teams like the 2015 Mets of the part of 2015 that isn’t this one don’t usually come back from. What’s more, they were trailing on the tattered tresses of Jacob deGrom, whose ERA is normally as short as his locks are luxuriously long.
DeGrom, however, didn’t have whatever it is deGrom usually has: command, feel, touch…you name it, it wasn’t at his fingertips. When you can’t rely on your best pitcher, who can you depend upon?
How about everybody else, starting with your Captain, whose presence has just turned on the Fasten Seat Belt sign?
The Mets’ starting lineup encompassed in its cleanup slot the player who’s been in more Met starting lineups than any Met ever. On the kind of night when copious amounts of “more” and “ever” were bound to dot descriptions of what the hell (or heaven) just happened in Philadelphia, it was, too, the kind of night that called for the return of David Wright from spinal stenosis purgatory. The Mets had been doing dreadfully without him for the longest time. Then they were doing phenomenally without him for the latest time. Now that they are phenomenal and he has returned, could there be any doubt the two of them together would be explosive?
Doubt all you want. Your lack of faith will be blasted over any of several Citizens Bank Park walls.
David launched a long home run in his first at-bat. How long? Long enough to cover the distance between his uneasy removal from the game of April 14 to his welcome insertion into the game of August 24. His homer put the Mets on the board and pointed them in the…this is no night to resist the obvious…Wright direction.
Don’t waste another minute
Step into the light
This one was for David, whose team it was when nobody else wanted it. And this one was for David’s devotees, all those Ghost Wright-ers in the Stands who bought their No. 5 jerseys sometime after July 21, 2004, and continued to wear them through his and the Mets’ ascent in 2005 and 2006 and their trauma-fraught decline thereafter. Even when he appeared in no Met lineup as April became May became “maybe Tejada can play third,” you couldn’t miss his presence on the backs in your midst.
There were 33s. There were 48s. There were very lately 34s and 52s and 30s. There were still faded 57s and 45s and 15s and 7s left over from the last batch of good times. But the 5s kept coming throughout 2015, even during the titular bearer’s extended absence.
It turns out the one 5 that counts most of all is still around, still swinging, still connecting and, at last, winning.
David isn’t doing it alone. There is no stenosis in that Met lineup, just miles and miles of spine.
• At 3-0 Phillies, Wright homered to make it 3-1 Phillies.
• At 4-1 Phillies, Lagares homered to make it 4-2 Phillies.
• At 7-2 Phillies, Flores homered to make it 7-4 Phillies.
• At 7-4 Phillies, d’Arnaud homered to make it 7-5 Phillies.
• At 7-5 Phillies, Flores homered (again) to make it 8-7 Mets.
• At 8-7 Mets, Cuddyer homered to make it 9-7 Mets.
• At 9-7 Mets, Murphy homered to make it 11-7 Mets.
• At 11-7 Mets, d’Arnaud doubled (piker) to make it 13-7 Mets.
• At 13-7 Mets, Lagares singled (how precious!) to make it 14-7 Mets.
• At 14-7 Mets, Cespedes homered to break the round-tripper record, deliver a bouncing baby Unicorn and make it 16-7 Mets.
Talk about your extra-base hit wonders.
Sean Gilmartin didn’t homer, but he did single and hold the Phillies scoreless during that blink of a transition period between it being a ballgame and a runaway American dream. The whole thing’s rather surreal (W)right now, except when you scour the standings and see for yourself that there’s nothing quite like these New York Mets. I could throw historical comparisons at you — and you can throw them at me — but as we speak and as we soar, these things these Mets do appear to be without precedent.
We join our history, already in progress.
by Jason Fry on 23 August 2015 9:53 pm All the Mets wanted from Logan Verrett was two things. The first was for him to not be Matt Harvey for a day. The second was for him to do more or less what Jon Niese did on Saturday — keep the pain to a moderate level and let the bats do their work.
I’m the first to answer the bell when Niese needs denigrating, but that’s not what’s happening here — Niese did just fine pitching without oxygen with Coors Field’s famed humidor apparently on the appliance DL.
Verrett, though, is a veteran of pitching under ludicrous conditions and exceeded expectations by a fair margin. He looked shaky in the first inning, as Charlie Blackmon and DJ LeMahieu singled, but then got himself out of trouble, racing to the first-base bag and putting himself in perfect position for a 3-6-1 double play. Nolan Arenado ripped a ball up the middle, but shortstop Wilmer Flores — more about shortstops in a bit — smothered it and fired to first.
Given a reprieve, Verrett settled in, mixing a diving slider with a sinking change and using his fastball to make both look better. David Hale, meanwhile, was striking guys out left and right. Unfortunately, his most frequent victim was his own catcher, Dustin Garneau. (Whose name keeps tripping me up — it sounds like some weird mash-up of Justin Turner and Travis d’Arnaud.) It’s possible I’ve seen teams score two runs on consecutive wild pitches before, but if so I’ve blocked it out for the good of baseball.
The Rockies had looked wretched all weekend, but Sunday they commenced to play particularly stupid. If it wasn’t Carlos Gonzalez air-mailing throws, it was Blackmon making terrible baserunning decisions. It was all to our benefit, but it was still discouraging to watch baseball played in such a chronically lunkheaded fashion.
For all that, though, it wasn’t half as depressing as the sight of Jose Reyes falling vaguely near balls or running at three-quarters speed to first.
The Sky Fell the Night Jose Went to Miami narrative has annoyed me for years, because it’s a product of fans being determined to ignore both reality and good sense. The Mets were never going to pay Jose anywhere close to the absurd amount of money Jeffrey Loria gave him in bad faith, and that contract was pretty much a guaranteed stinker for a player so dependent on speed. If this weekend doesn’t make the Jose fantasists cut it out already, I give up: We just saw firsthand how age has eroded Reyes from a great player to a merely good one who’s hugely overpaid, and we also just saw him going about his duties in a way that would have had Gil Hodges walking slowly out to his position.
Reyes is obviously miserable as a Rockie and told the Denver Post at this stage in his career he just wants to win. I sympathize and hopes he gets that chance one day. But he’s running out of days, and no team watching Reyes play this weekend would conclude he’s an ingredient in a winning recipe. That’s nobody’s fault but Jose’s.
More impressive was a player in his final years, one whom I’m happy to have on our side. In the ninth, Hansel Robles came on for Verrett and promptly walked LeMahieu. That brought Juan Uribe to the mound for a conversation. It was short and pointed: The veteran third baseman spoke, his jaw bulging, and the wet-behind-the-ears pitcher listened and held very still.
Robles, chastened, got down to business. He fanned CarGo, got Arenado on a tough chance that became an out because of Uribe’s soft hands and calm demeanor, and then fanned Ben Paulsen for the victory.
Another win, another day off the schedule, six or seven innings Harvey can pitch later, Verrett showing he deserves a chance to play substitute again and/or help the relief corps, and a first-place club doing what first-place clubs need to do to play in October.
It’s only a day, but each game is only a day. And this day was everything the Mets could have wanted and much more.
by Greg Prince on 23 August 2015 3:21 am You don’t see too many games like we saw Saturday night at Coors Field, and — as the Irish Rovers could tell you — you’re never gonna see no unicorn. But if you see the Mets win by a score you’ve never seen them win by before and there’s no telling if or when you’ll ever see them win by it again, well, lads and lassies…just wait a day.
Recent evidence suggests your modicum of patience will be rewarded
The Unicorn Score the Mets won by on Friday, which instigated a deep dive on the topic in this very space on Saturday, is no longer a Unicorn Score. A Unicorn Score, we have established, is a score by which the Mets win once and never again. Through the games of August 21, 2015, we could identify 23 distinct Unicorn Scores in Mets history. Through the games of August 22, 2015, we can revise our list to include only 22 — the same 22 we had through the games of August 20, 2015.
In short, the Mets had never won by a 14-9 score in their entire freaking lives until Friday. And then they won by another 14-9 score on Saturday. This is a positive reflection of the Met offense, not very good news concerning the workload of the Met bullpen and an indictment of the Coors Field humidor, assuming the Rockies still store baseballs and not cigars in that ineffectual container.
Mostly, though, it means the Mets’ 14-9 Unicorn Score is dead. It died as it lived, scoring 14 runs while allowing 9.
Long live the 14-9 Uniclone Score.
What’s a Uniclone? A Uniclone is a score by which the Mets win twice and never again (“never” obviously being a malleable concept). They are so named because they are clones of erstwhile Unicorns. As it turns out, Uniclones are rarer than Unicorns. There are fewer than half as many scores answering to the call of Uniclone than there are that can be identified as Unicorns. Only 10 known Uniclone Scores exist.
The Mets have been cloning winning scores since 1962. On May 15 and May 16 of our inaugural season, the Mets won back-to-back 6-5 games, both at home, both in extra innings, marking the first time the Mets had won twice by the same score. The hot streak elevated the Mets into eighth place, dizzying heights for a team that wasn’t on the verge of winning many games by any scores. But 6-5 didn’t stay a Uniclone Score for long. In fact, the very next Met win, on May 19, was also by 6-5. Perhaps 6-5 should be the official score of Met victories. The most famous Met victory of them all, October 25, 1986, over the Red Sox, was by 6-5.
There have been 108 regular-season and four postseason 6-5 wins, so we can assume the cloning of 6-5 was conducted successfully enough to no longer be considered experimental. But you have to wonder about the 10 Uniclones. Why were those scores cloned once and only once?
Like most movies whose plots hinge on cloning, the whole process is shrouded in mystery. Nothing is as mysterious as deducing how it took until deep into the 54th season of Mets baseball to see a 14-9 Mets win and then exactly one more game to see another 14-9 Mets win. Clearly, something has gone awry in the laboratory.
While nefarious forces try to tamp down the questions that surround the sudden cloning of 14-9 Met wins, we will reveal the identities of the other nine Uniclone Scores (with, as always, an assist from Baseball Reference).
1) 14-4
Unicorn Born: May 31, 1970 (1) vs Astros.
Unicorn Cloned: July 7, 1984 vs Reds.
About the Uniclone: The resurgent, first-place Mets were in the midst of sweeping a five-game series from Cincinnati, the only five-game series they’ve ever swept at home. This was the fourth in a row. It was a beautiful time to be alive and a Mets fan.
2) 14-7
Unicorn Born: April 17, 1975 vs Cardinals.
Unicorn Cloned: August 8, 1985 vs Expos.
About the Uniclone: There was a very brief baseball strike in the summer of 1985. As soon as it was settled, the first-place Mets streamed through customs and came out swinging at the Big O, scoring in each of the first six innings.
3) 15-10
Unicorn Born: July 21, 1985 vs Braves.
Unicorn Cloned: June 13, 1990 (1) vs Cubs.
About the Uniclone: These were Buddy Harrelson’s Mets fully revived and busting out all over after sagging through the last days of Davey Johnson. The day before produced the Unicorn Score of 19-8. The nightcap that followed this doubleheader opener was a 9-6 triumph. In a little more than 24 hours, the Mets had blown out the Cubs by a combined score of 43-24.
4) 14-0
Unicorn Born: July 29, 1965 (1) vs Cubs.
Unicorn Cloned: April 19, 1998 vs Reds.
About the Uniclone: It was a fairly conventional 5-0 game through six, when the Mets got Methodical, adding three runs in each of the final three innings. By matching their largest shutout margin, the 1998 Mets climbed into first place by a half-game. They didn’t stay there.
5) 14-11
Unicorn Born: April 26, 1966 vs Cubs.
Unicorn Cloned: April 30, 2000 vs Rockies.
About the Uniclone: Just guess where 25 combined runs scored on 25 total hits and 14 total walks. Just guess. Why, yes, it was Coors Field! It would probably not shock you to learn the Mets led, 11-3, heading to the bottom of the eighth. The Rox knocked around Met pitching for six in the eighth and — after the Mets cushioned their margin with three in the top of the ninth — two more in their last licks. Armando Benitez held on, though officially it wasn’t a save situation.
6) 11-8
Unicorn Born: September 2, 1972 vs Astros.
Unicorn Cloned: June 30, 2000 vs Braves.
About the Uniclone: The Uniclone was the Ten-Run Inning capped by the Piazza Homer. It doesn’t need a bit of elaboration. The Unicorn, however, deserves more light shed on it. It was, literally, the greatest comeback in Mets history. As impressive as the Mets were in 2000 roaring from an 8-1 deficit to defeated the hated Braves, those 1972 Mets spotted Houston an 8-0 edge and then kept charging and never stopped, shoving 11 runs down old nemesis Leo Durocher’s throat. Why wouldn’t you want to clone a result like that?
7) 15-6
Unicorn Born: August 27, 1997 vs Giants.
Unicorn Cloned: June 27, 2008 (1) vs Yankees.
About the Uniclone: ¡Viva Delgado! Carlos the First Baseman, shaking off a year-plus slump, exploded for nine runs batted in during the final game the Mets ever played at Renovated Yankee Stadium. It’s still a team record, Yoenis Cespedes’s best efforts notwithstanding.
8) 18-5
Unicorn Born: August 14, 1979 vs Braves.
Unicorn Cloned: September 5, 2010 vs Cubs.
About the Uniclone: If you score 18 runs, there’s a good chance even your No. 8 hitter is heavily involved. Sure enough, rookie Ruben Tejada was The Man in this one, with five runs batted in, including his comical first major league home run. What was so funny about it? Ruben was so certain he couldn’t have hit a ball out of any park (even Wrigley Field, birthplace of so many Unicorn Scores), that he slid into third base before being informed by the umpire that he could get up and trot home. Well, at least he hustled.
9) 14-3
Unicorn Born: July 21, 1966 vs Giants.
Unicorn Cloned: June 28, 2011 vs Tigers.
About the Uniclone: Remember how the Mets went forever and a day without hitting a grand slam? This was the game when forever and a day announced their departure with authority. Jason Bay homered with the bases loaded in the fourth — and Carlos Beltran did the same in the fifth. Most electric, though, was Jose Reyes, going 4-for-4 and raising his league-leading average to .349.
And now we have the tenth Uniclone in Mets history. Whereas the first 14-9 game was all about Cespedes, there was a torrent of offense to go around for the rest of us in the second.
• 21 hits
• 9 doubles
• A third inning in which the first nine batters — that’s all of them, including starting and winning (5.1 IP) pitcher Jon Niese — reached base. I believe that’s known as batting round and round and round.
The first-place, five-games-up Mets led, 14-3, after the top of the fifth. Inside the incubator that is Coors Field, there was no telling what the final score was going to be. There was no telling it would be the final score from the night before, the final score that, to that point, had never represented a Mets victory.
Now it has twice.
In a tangentially related development, the Mets have reacquired Eric Young, Jr. EYJ figures to bring the team some much-needed speed once he’s promoted from Las Vegas, though you might question how big the need for speed is. Just look at how lightning-fast our assumptions tend to change around here.
by Greg Prince on 22 August 2015 4:30 pm You don’t see too many games like we saw Friday night at Coors Field, and — as the Irish Rovers could tell you — you’re never gonna see no unicorn. But if you see the Mets win by a score you’ve never seen them win by before and there’s no telling if or when you’ll ever see them win by it again, well, lads and lassies, I believe we can call that a Unicorn Score.
To be clear, let’s define our term.
Unicorn Score: a score by which the Mets win once and never again. There are scores by which the Mets have lost once and never again (26-7 springs immediately to mind from June 11, 1985), but we’re not worried about those right now and will leave those unnamed. This is all about the Mets winning. As we’ve learned this season, the Mets winning is a much more embraceable topic than the Mets losing.
We’ll take the Mets winning by any score we can get it, of course. With immense help from Baseball Reference, we know the Mets have won 286 regular-season and three postseason games by a score of 3-2, the most common tally of triumph in franchise history. As you’d expect from baseball in general and this team specifically, when they win, they win without a lot of runs being scattered about. The next-most common path to prevailing is by 2-1: 240 in the regular season, three times post. Then it’s 4-3, 4-2, 5-4…you know, baseball scores.
Shutouts are a little less regular. We haven’t seen a 1-0 win this year, but there have been 128 overall, the last of them coming courtesy of Zack Wheeler in Miami on June 19, 2014. You’re about as likely to get a 3-0 win as you are one by a final of 5-1 or 6-2 or 6-3. The Mets have won games by those fairly mundane numbers just a bit less than a hundred times each.
It begins to get a bit more unorthodox as the run totals commence to piling up. For example, the Mets have won 7-3 seventy times, none more recently than August 16, 2014. A 6-0 whitewashing has occurred to the good 57 times, though the last of them transpired September 26, 2012 (David Wright set the Met career record for base hits).
Pot luck kicks in when offenses heat up. There have been 35 wins by 8-7, for example; only a half-dozen 11-7 wins; and 33 rather random 9-3 victories. Some scores are definitely infrequent and seemingly out of fashion. The Mets have won five 13-2 games but not one in the past fifteen years. They’ve been waiting for their tenth 12-4 win since 2007. Their last 13-3 Happy Recap was their seventh, but it came when Bob Murphy was still on call, in 2000.
On June 28, 2011, the Mets pounded the Tigers, 14-3, marking the last time a Unicorn Score was removed from the books, for it was the second time the Mets had won by 14-3. Call it a Uniclone, perhaps. If it’s happened more than once, it can’t be a Unicorn Score.
There are now 23 Unicorn Scores in Mets history. There were 22 until Mets 14 Rockies 9 on August 21, 2015. Think about it: the Mets are in their 54th year and have won 4,103 games in the regular season along with 43 in the postseason and it took them this long to register a 14-9 victory. How is that possible?
How is it possible that some people think they’ve seen a unicorn? Sometimes you don’t ask why, and you go with the legend.
Make no mistake: the games attached to some of these scores are the stuff of legend.
• 19-1. If you’ve been even a modestly attentive student of Mets lore, you’ll recognize that as the score by which your beloved Amazins crushed the woebegone Cubs on May 26, 1964, which was the breeding ground for the most oft-repeated possibly apocryphal tale in team history. Guy calls newspaper; guy asks how Mets did today; guy is told Mets scored 19 runs; guy asks “did they win?”
• 16-13. Fireworks Night. Atlanta. Nineteen innings. The Fourth and Fifth of July. 1985. Need we say more?
• 11-10. You know that doubleheader in which Robin Ventura belted a grand slam in each game? You know that first game SNY shows now and then as a Mets Classic? That’s the final score from May 20, 1999.
Other Unicorn Scores may not ring instant bells, but several of their games are intrinsic to Mets history. Take the 15-5 victory over St. Louis from October 3, 1964. That was the Saturday after the Friday when the Mets beat the Cardinals, 1-0, just as the Cardinals were on the verge of clinching the National League flag. Suddenly the lowly Mets were clipping the wings of those soaring Redbirds, allowing Cincy and Philly a last gasp at tying for first. Eventually, Bob Gibson restored order, but oh how that 15-5 Unicorn gave ol’ St. Louie a scare. It was the first time the Mets injected themselves into a pennant race, even if it was just as prospective spoiler.
Or maybe you’re aware the most runs the Mets ever scored in a given game was 23, on August 16, 1987 (the day of the so-called Harmonic Convergence, appropriately enough), at Chicago. You think there’s been another 23-10 game in Mets history? There hasn’t. That total broke the previous record, accomplished in a 20-6 thumping of the Braves at Atlanta on August 7, 1971. It was also the only 20-6 thumping the Mets ever issued.
The first Unicorn Score, ergo the oldest, surviving Unicorn Score is 13-12, achieved in the second game of the May 12, 1963 doubleheader at the Polo Grounds against the Reds. Duke Snider blasted a three-run homer, Hot Rod Kanehl absorbed a bases-loaded hit-by-pitch and Tracy Stallard pitched a scoreless ninth, striking out rookie second baseman Pete Rose, who had reached base four times in the game. It was the 54th win in franchise history, meaning the Mets have won more than 4,000 games since, yet none of them by a 13-12 final.
You never know when you’re gonna see one of those Unicorns and you never know when you’re never gonna see it again.
Given that these Unicorns have a mind of their own, it’s little wonder that whole eras will pass without a single sighting. Between 1964 and 1985, there was only one. Between 1992 and 1999, there were none. Yet since 1999, we’ve had thirteen, a veritable Unicorn stampede. The last before the night Yoenis Cespedes went satisfyingly deep three times occurred on May 13, 2014, the 12-7 smackdown of the Yankees at Yankee Stadium, during the series when Curtis Granderson remembered how to hit. That was the fourth consecutive Interleague Unicorn, following the 16-5 shellacking of chilly Minnesota on April 12, 2013, and veritable home-and-home hat-handings to Detroit (16-9 at Comerica Park on June 29, 2011; and 14-6 at Citi Field on June 22, 2010).
Shea’s last Unicorn Score was a 13-10 slugging of the pre-hype Nationals, on September 10, 2008, which sounds about right for those bullpen-deprived Mets days. Dodger Stadium, like Shea, forever carries a reputation as a pitcher’s park, but tell that to July 19, 2007, when the Mets loved L.A. by an unprecedented and since unmatched 13-9 score. New York staked starter T#m Gl@vine to leads of 6-0 and 9-4, but the future Hall of Famer couldn’t make it out of the third. Bartolo Colon, who couldn’t make it out of fourth in Denver, at least had the excuse of pitching in infamously thin air. Aaron Sele, who almost never pitched when the Mets weren’t losing, was credited with the win Gl@vine was incapable of capturing eight years ago.
Mike Pelfrey’s debut appeared amid a big, strapping Unicorn Score of 17-3 over the Marlins during the nightcap of the July 8, 2006, doubleheader. Eight days later (7/16/2006), the Mets anagrammed that score, taking their only 13-7 win ever, again over the Cubs, again at Wrigley, this time by scoring eleven runs in an inning for also the only time in their history. Less than a year earlier (8/24/2005), with Mike Jacobs in his finest fettle, the Mets mashed the Diamondbacks into Diamondbits, 18-4.
You never saw that again. Or all that much of Mike Jacobs.
Unicorn Scores disprove assumptions. For example, “Bobby Bonilla never did a bleepity-bleep thing as a Met” is disproved by the 15-1 proceedings of June 6, 1992, a Saturday night at Pittsburgh when Bonilla stuck it to his old team by going 4-for-4 and driving in four runs. Unicorn Scores have also been shown to make Mets teams dangerously giddy. The Mets posted their one and only 15-11 victory at Philadelphia on June 16, 1989. So carried away were they that the next day they swapped Lenny Dykstra and Roger McDowell to those very same Phillies for Juan Samuel.
You can’t say the Mets never won a 19-8 decision — they did, once, over the Cubs on June 12, 1990. Dave Magadan drove in six runs and, ultimately, Mike Marshall out of the organization.
You can’t say the Mets never high-fived voluminously after delivering a 13-1 thrashing — they did, once, against the Cardinals, on September 7, 1989. Reliever Julio Machado made his debut, backing his first batter, Tom Pagnozzi, off the plate right away, despite entering the ninth with a twelve-run lead. The “Iguana Man” might have had more of a taste for blood than could’ve been imagined.
You can’t say there’s no 15-8 throttling in the Mets’ portfolio — there is, one, throttled upon those historically hapless Cubs, on April 23, 2000. Five Unicorns have bitten the Cubs hard over the years, though this was the only episode in which they got chomped on in New York, thus no alibis about the wind blowing out will be accepted.
And you can say the Mets beat somebody, 13-5. They did it to the Cards on August 3, 2003. Unlike most of the action I’ve described above, I have no particular recollection of this game, nor has it ever jumped out of the archives in my research. But it really does exist. Tony Clark homered twice and drove in five; Jason Phillips and Cliff Floyd chipped in three hits apiece; and Jeremy Griffiths picked up on his one and only major league win…in the one and only 13-5 game his team ever won.
It doesn’t get much Unicornier than that.
by Jason Fry on 22 August 2015 2:41 am I’m not sure what game the Mets and Rockies were playing out there in Denver, but it sure didn’t look much like baseball.
“Playing pinball,” Keith Hernandez blurted on a night he seemed alternately entertained and horrified by the bloodletting down there on the field. That’s pretty close, I suppose. Still, whatever the game was, I’m glad the Mets won it — even if they had to sandwich mini-laughers around a near-death experience to do so.
I mean, my goodness. Twenty-three runs on 29 hits. Sixteen of those hits were for extra bases. Eight of them were home runs. There was no full inning without scoring by one team or the other. There were just three 1-2-3 innings — Christian Bergman in the top of the fifth, Sean Gilmartin in the bottom of the sixth, and Jeurys Familia to end the game. All three of them should receive miniature Cy Young awards. If you took your eyes off the action for a minute you’d turn around to see outfielders chasing a ball up the gap or a pitcher turning away in disgust. It wasn’t safe out there for anyone paid to throw a baseball in anger.
The apex predator to worry about was Yoenis Cespedes, who’s probably thinking that Coors Field might be a pretty good place to set up shop next year. After his second-inning grand slam off the luckless Jon Gray, I asked Twitter how one says “throw that weak-ass shit again, meat” in Spanish. (If you’re curious, I’m told it’s Tirela Otra vez y come mierda, which roughly translates as “pull again and eat shit.” Definitely the spirit.)
Cespedes wasn’t done — he’d crack two more home runs, resulting in the curious stat that the generally underpowered Mets are the first team since the ’11 Brewers to have three different guys hit three home runs in one game. (Lucas Duda and Kirk Nieuwenhuis are your other ’15 fence-busters.) With Cespedes rather terrifyingly locked in, it seemed entirely possible that he might become the first Met (and 17th player in big-league history) to hit four. In the top of the eighth Cespedes poked a single through the right side against Tommy Kahnle (pronounced KAIN-lee, for some reason), making him 5-for-5. He came up again in the ninth with a chance to a) hit that fourth home run; b) tie Edgardo Alfonzo with a 6-for-6 night; or c) stroke a triple for the Mets’ 11th cycle. Unfortunately the outcome was d) watch the ball just get intercepted by Carlos Gonzalez‘s glove, because CarGo hates fun.
It was a good night to be a pitcher; not so much to be a pitcher. Poor Bartolo Colon looked like an infantryman sent out to clear mines even before he threw his first pitch; a flyball pitcher and this particular night was not a kindly combination. Colon was excused after 3 2/3 rather terrible innings and being hit by a pitch that made his forearm look like someone had inflated a water balloon beneath the skin.
The heroics of Cespedes and his supporting cast (including Michael Conforto, who hit the most impressive homer of the night) somewhat obscured the fact that the Mets managed give up a six-run lead. It was 8-7 when Gilmartin arrived to try to clean up Colon’s mess and should arguably have been worse than it wound up. In the fifth Gilmartin gave up a single, followed by a game-tying triple. He struck out Brooks Barnes, but pinch-hitter Kyle Parker hit a medium-depth to Curtis Granderson, who has a shallow-depth arm. Say what you will about Granderson, but he makes the most of his abilities: He Granderson positioned himself perfectly and put everything he had behind a one-hop throw to Travis d’Arnaud, but the ball took an odd bounce and Nick Hundley gave d’Arnaud a neat little deke as he slid into home, with one leg coming forward and one pulling back and a hand emerging from the windmilling legs to snatch at the plate. D’Arnaud tagged something, at some point, and after a lot of to-ing and fro-ing in New York while Schrodinger’s Mets were half-on and half-off the field, the out was confirmed as such.
Was it so? Well … they said it was, didn’t they? Let’s leave it at that. They said it was, and so it was the Mets’ turn to blast away at the paddles and plungers and hope nothing flashed tilt so that someone unplugged the machine and sent everybody home to do something more productive. It wasn’t elegant, but we ended the night with the high score. Hell, you could look it up, even if you’ll barely believe it.
by Jason Fry on 20 August 2015 2:51 am For whatever reason, that game had loss written all over it the moment Jonathan Schoop hit Noah Syndergaard‘s worst pitch of the night over the fence. The Mets kept whacking away at the Orioles, but Syndergaard was gone (nearly 100 pitches on a soppingly hot night) and the bullpen was doing bullpen things, and you knew there were teeth out there in the darkness somewhere.
I didn’t think the fatal blow would be a 365-foot homer tucked neatly over the left-field fence by a guy who’d never hit one in the big leagues before, but that’s for the coroner to note. The Mets were beaten, and a couple of hours later so were the Rockies. You can’t complain too vociferously when losing four of five only means a game off your lead, but ouch — the Nationals in our rearview mirror are now 20% closer than they were last time we checked.
Syndergaard’s evening was an interesting one. If the Mets were scuffling along at .500 and fighting the Braves for scraps, I suspect I’d wax lyrical about bumps in the road and lessons learned by young pitchers, like I did last time but more somberly. Syndergaard struggled through the first, survived it somehow, then seemed to find some extra ticks and movement on the fastball and locate the release point on the curve. Then he was untouchable for a long stretch, with Schoop in particular looking pitiably helpless against the curve.
“Noah could throw that pitch all night,” I told my wife, “and that guy would never hit it.”
Which was true. But by “that pitch” I meant the breaking ball that darted sideways across the plate, away from a right-handed hitter, and dove out of the strike zone. Not that same breaking ball fired from the wrong release point and with no break, so it hung like an autumn moon on Schoop’s hands for a long terrible moment before becoming a souvenir.
Ouch, like I said above.
An August pennant race means there are no moral victories, no sage commentary about the future of young pitchers. There’s just a loss coupled with an enemy win, and however much profanity you need to add to that.
But let’s talk about what’s probably really worrying you. How about the fact that our bullpen has given up 13 earned runs in the last 18 1/3 innings? That’s … not good.
Here’s the key question: Is that the sign of a decent bullpen having a bad stretch, or a bad one showing its true face? In other words, is the glass half-empty or GODDAMNIT THERE’S A CRACK IN IT AND IT’S HALF-EMPTY BECAUSE THE WATER’S RUNNING OUT AND WHAT’S THE USE IF YOU NEED ME I’LL BE SULKING IN THE GARAGE. <DOOR SLAMS>
Relief pitchers, just like lineups, have stretches where all the individual pitchers can do no wrong and stretches when they can’t get out of their own way. The Mets are possibly just dealing with one of the latter periods. In which case I feel at least cautiously optimistic that they’ll come out of it — that we’ll get better things from Hansel Robles, and less scary shakiness from Jeurys Familia, and continued decency from Tyler Clippard, plus maybe Sean Gilmartin getting more responsibility and doing OK with it, and some help from new faces such as Logan Verrett and Erik Goeddel. (If you want to be mad at someone, once again, be mad at Jenrry Mejia, whose astonishing idiocy kicked over a whole line of dominoes.)
The numbers so far this year would back up that optimism — the Mets’ pen’s been pretty solid.
But on the other hand, maybe the Mets’ pen isn’t that good, and those numbers indicate we’ve seen the best of it, and the next five weeks will be a painful regression to the mean. I’ve seen that scenario too — it was called 2008, and it sucked.
Positivity, right? We’re still playing with house money, and there’s a soft schedule ahead, and an off-day tomorrow, which the Mets could use. Except, well, I just caught myself thinking that the Mets could sure use Monday’s off-day.
Buckle up. Whatever happens, it’ll make sense when it’s done.
by Greg Prince on 19 August 2015 2:55 am  Instead of settling an old score, the Orioles wound up losing by it to the Mets all over again. O’s, say, they could see. The O’s could see the first-place Mets coming. It was more twilight’s last gleaming than dawn’s early light, considering the overcast skies and 46-minute precautionary delay before a single pitch was thrown Tuesday night, but once a second pitch was thrown, the Mets led Baltimore in Baltimore, 1-0. Curtis Granderson’s seventh leadoff home run of 2015 had seen to that.
Baltimore had seen worse. Baltimore had been seeing worse since September of 1814, when the British attacked and the Americans defended and Francis Scott Key was inspired. Baltimore hung in there those nights. The town withstood 5,000 enemy troops and a royal bombardment. Surely a solo blast cheered by an invading 7 Line Army wasn’t necessarily cause for calamitous concern.
But modern-day Baltimore might never have anticipated anything so perilous as the pitching of Jacob deGrom, whose broad slider and bright fastball will take the fight out of any batting battalion. Backed by another Grandersonian rocket aimed squarely over Camden Yards’s ramparts — and aided by Jonathan Schoop’s less than gleaming defense — deGrom gallantly streamed to a 3-1 lead through seven-and-two-thirds innings, his ERA descending to the nearly unheard of depths of 1.98.
Jacob’s commander proceeded to nervously remove him from the Interleague fight, much to the Mets’ potential peril (Brigadier General Collins certainly drew my red glare). Tyler Clippard and Jeurys Familia each gave signs of bursting in air, but with the bullpen having been buttressed by another couple of runs in the top of the ninth, the scoreboard gave proof that our lead was still there.
In the end, the Mets defeated the Orioles, 5-3, the same glorious score by which the same combatants completed the final battle of their War of 1969. Oh, say, that championship banner did yet wave o’er the land of the Shea, where the Mets had ten days earlier secured a flag at home from the Braves. A new one so proudly we’d hail might wave somewhere nearby soon, but one baseball skirmish at a time.
History doesn’t always repeat itself, but sometimes it provides a damn fine echo.
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