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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 9 August 2015 4:19 am In the top of the first inning Saturday night at Tropicana Field, Curtis Granderson homered, Daniel Murphy doubled, Yoenis Cespedes singled and Lucas Duda doubled. The Mets led the Rays, 3-0, with nobody out.
This, I said to myself, is in the bag. Not just the game, but the season, the postseason and the dynasty to come. It was time to place every last one of my chips on this sure thing to win the 2015 World Series, maybe the next five if they’d let me. With Juan Uribe coming to bat to drive in Duda and keep the score tilting eternally the Mets’ way, I booked passage to Vegas, packed a bag, got a ride to Kennedy, boarded my flight, flew cross-country, found a cab and was taken to my favorite sports book on the strip.
As I inquired about placing my wager, I was told the first inning was still in progress in St. Pete. Of course it was. The Mets were never going to stop hitting because the Mets were never going to stop winning. The Mets had won seven in a row. As we all know, seven comes before eight, just as eight comes before forever. Forever and ever, amen, when it comes to the Mets’ success.
Oh no, I must’ve misunderstood what I’d just been told, somebody said. The first inning had continued while I made my continental sojourn, but it had nothing to do with the Mets continuing to score. In fact, the Mets had stopped scoring the moment Uribe came to bat. They went down 1-2-3 after that resounding start. Noah Syndergaard then took to the mound, threw a thousand pitches, fell behind, 4-3, and was still trying to get out of the inning.
Did I still want to place that bet?
I shook my head, turned around, reversed my trip and returned home in time to see the Mets lose, 5-4, ending their winning streak at seven and beginning their losing streak at one. A one-game losing streak, as all followers of the Mets have learned through bitter experience, encompasses a 50% chance of becoming a two-game losing streak. These odds suggest the Mets are doomed. Doomed, I tell you. They’re 0-1 in their last one, losers of one of their previous eight.
What a discouraging trend. It must be nipped in the bud ASAP. Here is what must be done to commence nipping pronto:
1) Trade Syndergaard and Travis d’Arnaud for prospects. See if we can salvage something out of the wreckage of these two once-promising careers by bringing in a couple of fresh faces who aren’t responsible for this monstrosity of a one-game losing streak. The culture must be changed. Noah was ineffective over four innings. Travis went oh-for-four. It is there-four a four-gone conclusion that they are beyond repair. While I was in Las Vegas, I heard about a couple of kids named Black and Herrera; we might want to trade for them. Doesn’t matter who we get. Syndergaard and d’Arnaud are 0-2 as a major league battery. They are ruining each other’s futures just by being on the same field at the same time.
2) Remind Wilmer Flores he’s not so special. A Milwaukee Brewers uniform in his locker would be a wise first step. Then the installation of a Groan-o-meter at Citi Field for every time he steps to the plate. Wilmer was 0-for-1 as a pinch-hitter Saturday night. The adulation has gone to his head.
3) Relabel the nickname on Terry Collins’s parking spot. Previous plans to stencil in TONALLY CORRECT, TENACIOUSLY CONFIDENT and TERRIFICALLY COMPETENT were obviously premature. Collins, like his ballclub, is 0-1 in his last one. TOTALLY CLUELESS it is going to have to be.
4) Adjust Cespedes’s contract immediately. The Mets must negotiate a clause that allows them to release the outfielder five days before the World Series and then never re-sign him again. A World Series can go as long as seven games, and in his seventh game as a Met, Cespedes was among fourteen players who could not prevent the club’s first loss in eight games. Clearly, we have learned, he is not a November player.
5) Decline use of designated hitter in Sunday’s game. This isn’t necessarily a season-salvaging move. This is just good taste.
All of the above may seem rash, panicky and unjustified. But the first-place Mets lost while the second-place Nationals won, representing the opposite of what had been going on mostly without pause for the preceding week. During that week, when everything was going beautifully, no reaction of ours was anything but calm, cool and considered.
When the Mets do nothing but win, everything makes sense. When the Mets lose…don’t ask.
by Jason Fry on 8 August 2015 2:32 am It should be said that for the first eight innings that was a dull, lousy game.
Seriously. It was like soccer — no action but solo homers, with the Rays seemingly hellbound to one-up us in the Department of Dingers. Grady Sizemore homered (and later took a cheapie away from Wilmer Flores), Juan Uribe matched him, but then James Loney led off the very next inning with a solo shot off Jacob deGrom. Daniel Murphy erased that deficit with a home run in the eighth, but then in the bottom of the inning Evan Longoria homered right back at him, launching a ball that kissed the top of the wall and skimmed over it, like some antimatter version of the ball off the wall.
It sure looked like the Mets were going to lose by one lousy skinny run, and I was philosophical about it. You can’t win every game, and a six-game winning streak was nothing to be sad about.
But there are nine innings to play. No really. You could look it up.
The top of the ninth came with blinking signs of disaster — but they were for Tampa Bay. Normally reliable Brad Boxberger threw away a ball, leaving Lucas Duda safe at first. Then a ball in the dirt ate up catcher Curt Casali (hey, that’s fun to type!) for a wild pitch that moved Duda to second.
Uribe fouled out, leaving Michael Conforto facing the biggest at-bat of his life. And the kid delivered, slicing a low outside pitch up the left-center alley, a ball that seemed to accelerate in flight. Duda rumbled home with the tying run and Conforto saw Kevin Kiermaier‘s momentum had taken him away from the field, and so alertly grabbed second. The Rays’ Logan Forsythe rescued Tampa by smothering Travis d’Arnaud‘s ball up the middle, a hit that stayed on the infield and so left runners at the corners. Then Kelly Johnson lashed a ball that nearly took off Asdrubel Cabrera’s head at short, but wound up in his glove. Fortunately, it was hit so hard that neither Conforto nor d’Arnaud could be doubled up — they’d barely strayed from their bases.
Two outs, tie game. Would we play until dawn?
Up stepped Flores, supported by baying Mets fans — the Trop felt like an asterisked home game all night, and at that moment it was loud for us. Flores blooped a ball to right, seemingly destined for Brandon Guyer‘s glove … but Guyer was scrambling and the ball was losing altitude quickly, and it touched down just in front of Guyer’s mitt for an RBI single.
I expected the Mets to immediately give back that one-run lead, which wasn’t lack of belief in Jeurys Familia and his still-absent sinker/slider combo but a grim certitude that the game would keep following the night’s script. But no, things were about to get even wackier.
I’ve been watching baseball for a long time. I’ve seen tons of batters hit potential double-play balls to the third baseman, only to have them called foul. I’ve seen the occasional instance where the play progresses only to have all involved realize the umpire is signaling that there’s no purpose to what they’re doing. I’ve seen managers miffed about whether the ball was really foul or not.
But for all those things to happen twice in a row? I don’t believe I’d ever seen that until tonight. Guyer was bound and determined to hit the ball to Uribe, and Uribe was bound and determined to extract two outs from it, and the umpires were bound and determined to tell all involved that they had to do it again. It was like the Tampa Bay player had saved the game before Guyer’s at-bat and kept hitting RESTORE in hopes of a better outcome.
Guyer hit a third grounder to Uribe, of course. This one was fair, and Uribe settled for a fielder’s choice that still sapped the Rays’ rally. Two outs later, Familia had struck out Casali to save it, the Mets had won seven in a row, and the Rockies — bless their little purple hearts, at least until next week — had come back to take the lead against the Nationals. (Bryce Harper struck out to end it, and yes, Bryce, we most certainly do give a crap what the Nationals are doing.)
Seven in a row. It won’t last — these things never do — but for now just enjoy the fact that a bizarre, utterly unpredictable season has turned our way again.
by Greg Prince on 6 August 2015 8:23 am The constantly vigilant, uncommonly retentive (not to mention preternaturally anxious) baseball fan’s mind comes fully equipped with hyperlinks. He sees something and it reminds him of something he’s seen before. It may or may not be worth the trouble of clicking on, but he know it’s there.
For example, Wednesday night the Mets were ahead of the Marlins, 7-0. It was as glorious a setup as one could desire. Matt Harvey had been cruising. Juan Uribe had belted a three-run homer in the fifth. Yoenis Cespedes, Lucas Duda and Michael Conforto had combined to plate four in the third. The Nationals were cooperating by falling behind the Diamondbacks in D.C. You couldn’t have asked for a more ideal evening.
Terry Collins removed Harvey after seven. In another era, you wouldn’t take out your ace (or co-ace) after he’d given up two hits and walked nobody, especially after he’d thrown only 88 pitches. In that other era, nobody would know how many pitches had been thrown. But that era doesn’t exist today. Nobody’s concerned about burnishing individual credentials like complete games or shutouts. Everybody wants to limit wear and tear on a valuable surgically repaired right elbow. The Mets hope to need that elbow and the arm it’s attached to beyond the confines of the regular season.
Fine. Harvey’s out with a seven-run lead and two innings to go. It didn’t even feel controversial. Yet one of the hyperlinks in my mind clicked back on a game from ten years ago this month involving a situation at least passingly similar.
On August 20, 2005, at Shea Stadium, the Mets led the Nationals, 8-0. Neither team was in first place, but both were scrambling for a Wild Card. It was the Mets’ night, to be sure. Ramon Castro, Jose Reyes and David Wright had all homered with runners on base, chasing Liván Hernandez. The beneficiary of all this offensive largesse was the usually run-starved Pedro Martinez. He had taken a no-hitter deep into his last start, only to have the Mets score practically nothing for him and saddle him with a 2-1 loss. Even then, the primacy of the won-lost record was being severely questioned, but still, it was going to be satisfying to see Pedro get a win he deserved against the Nats and raise his record to 13-5.
Willie Randolph took Pedro out after six innings and 78 pitches. Martinez was feeling a bit of stiffness in his back, though that supposedly wasn’t the problem. Just a desire to “save some bullets,” according to the manager, who added, “We’re also going to try and be cautious with Pedro when we can. I understand we’re in a pennant race and every game’s important, but I just felt real comfortable at that point.”
Yes, at that point, quite comfortable. At points to come, less so. Danny Graves, Dae-Sung Koo and Aaron Heilman each pitched a third of an inning in the seventh. Willie getting his relievers some work? Not exactly. Among them, they gave up six runs. The Mets’ lead was down to 8-6. Heilman got through the eighth all right, handing the two-run edge to closer Braden Looper in the ninth. Looper recorded two quick outs before future Met Ryan Church singled, former Met Preston Wilson singled and future Met Brian Schneider doubled them both home.
It was 8-8. Or as Pedro termed it in his inimitable way, “It seemed like it was going to be an easy day at the office for the whole team. Seems like it was only easy for me.”
Ten years after the Mets blew that eight-run lead but not the game in which it had been mounted (Roberto Hernandez pitched a scoreless tenth and Chris Woodward drove in Gerald Williams with a walkoff single), another easy day at the office ensued unremarkably. In the top of the ninth at Marlins Park, Duda lifted a sacrifice fly and increased the Mets’ advantage to 8-0. All they needed to do was not give up eight or more runs in the time it took them to compile three outs and a series sweep and sixth consecutive victory would be theirs.
The only other thing that needed to happen was for nobody to assume it was a done deal…which is where I found myself bristling at beloved SNY analyst Ron Darling.
Oh, Darling. You were an All-Star 30 years ago; a World Champion 29 years ago. You know more about how the game is played than I ever will. So how is it you could breach protocol as you did in the bottom of the ninth inning when you said something to the effect of “If the Mets win…” and interrupted yourself to ask Gary Cohen, “Why do we have to say ‘if’?”
AAUUGGHH!!
That was me screaming superstitiously from my couch. My hyperlinks were all clicking at once to every time I or anybody prematurely declared a win was in the bag when the bag had yet to be sealed. Darling, with 136 more wins than I have in the big leagues, seemed to forget that when you’re sizing up a baseball game that has yet to encompass a final score you can’t…you can’t…you just can’t do that. You can’t do that if you’re some schlub muttering to yourself on a couch somewhere on Long Island and you can’t do that if you’re speaking into a microphone somewhere in Miami.
You just can’t. The baseball gods are always listening, and the baseball gods don’t care for that stuff.
Ronnie seemed to catch himself and tried to walk his presumptuousness back, but it was too late. The win wasn’t in the bag and the cat was out of it. Here came the stupid Marlins. Here came an unexpected flurry of Met relievers. Eric O’Flaherty quickly wore out his welcome by allowing hits to four of five batters to open the ninth. It was only 8-2 when Collins hooked him. No biggie, right? We’d learned our latest LOOGY maybe should be limited to one batter, like he was in the eighth.
Hansel Robles entered, but didn’t get out alive: an out, a walk and a three-run double. That made the proceedings 8-5. It wasn’t an easy day at the office for Hansel Robles.
But all right, 8-5 was still a cushioned margin. It was a charmed score, in fact. The Mets won their last World Series by taking an 8-5 decision from the Boston Red Sox. (Ron Darling stuck the Mets in a 3-0 hole in that game, but never mind that right now.) Robles was removed in favor of the closer, Jeurys Familia. Familia has stopped being automatic, but maybe he’s also stopped being perilous. He came through against Washington last weekend, which was a more recent example of his capabilities than that awful Thursday afternoon in the rain against San Diego when he turned a 7-5 lead into an 8-7 loss between tarpings.
Besides, that was in the Before Time. Before Cespedes. Before Citi Field became the beating heart of baseball. Before first place. Jeurys Familia would settle this nonsense ASAP and the slight difficulties in nailing down this win would be forgotten. It would be a win. That would be the important thing.
There was another single, which came attached to another RBI, making it Mets 8 Marlins 6, tying run coming to the plate. Then a little defensive indifference followed by another infield single. This brought the winning run to the plate with two out and two on.
Cue internal monologue:
Holy crap, it’s last week against the Padres again. It’s ten years ago against the Nationals again. It’s…no, no, no! It’s the present day. It’s not a game that will get away. It’s still a lead. It was an eight-run lead for a reason. It was an eight-run lead so in case the Mets somehow gave up as many as seven runs, it wouldn’t matter. It wouldn’t look good, it wouldn’t feel good, it was a bad idea to suggest “when,” rather than “if,” but we’re still up. Jeurys Familia is still Jeurys Familia. I still have faith in him. I still have faith in us.
Infield grounder to Duda.
Lucas steps on the bag.
Ballgame.
First-place Mets win again.
Second-place Nationals eventually lose again.
First-place Mets ahead by two.
That’s the important thing.
Nevertheless, consider the ninth an celestial warning issued to the proverbial “both dugouts,” specifically whichever dugout the Mets happen to occupy in a given game
.
Never give up if you’re losing by a lot.
Never let up if you’re winning by a lot.
And for crissake, Ronnie, if.
Not when.
If.
by Jason Fry on 5 August 2015 10:41 am Super-exciting spine-tingling headline-grabbing narrative-changing straight-to-the-SportsCenter-open wins are great, of course. But the key to playing in October is racking up the more mundane sort of victories. Which is exactly what the Mets did Tuesday night.
Of course, only by recent pinch-me standards could the Mets’ 5-1 dispatching of the Marlins be considered dull. Jon Niese pitched a terrific game, as has been the rule since Memorial Day, except for one night when his mind was understandably elsewhere. It looked like Niese might get nothing to show for it, however, as the Mets were hitting in buzzards’ luck, smacking balls right at Marlins when it most mattered.
But this is the 2.0 release of the 2015 Mets. In the days of lineups with Danny Muno and Darrell Ceciliani and Eric Campbell, I might have written off Florida’s 1-0 lead as too high a mountain to climb. Last night, though, I simply shrugged and waited. The Mets were getting good pitches and whacking them. The game, one imagined, would come to them.
Which is what happened. In the top of the eighth, with the game tied, Lucas Duda hammered a ball over the head of right-fielder Cole Gillespie, one of many Marlins who looks like he’d have trouble getting a legal drink. It was hit too hard to be a double, but Travis d’Arnaud promptly followed with a parachute over Adeiny Hechavarria‘s head to put runners on first and second with nobody out.
Enter Wilmer Flores, and a Terry Collins call that seemed far too conservative: He had Flores bunt. First and second with nobody out is the one situation where a successful sacrifice does increase the chances of scoring at least one run, but Flores has been cracking balls off and over walls. Curious. Wilmer popped up the bunt to the catcher, followed by a swinging strikeout from Ruben Tejada.
Terry then made another interesting decision, sending Campbell to the plate as the pinch-hitter.
Campbell didn’t hit the ball hard, but he hit it in exactly the right place to drop in, and the Mets had taken the lead. Then, merrily, the game’s luck sought its median, with Juan Lagares and Curtis Granderson rifling extra-base hits for a 5-1 lead that stood up.
If I sounded dismissive of Campbell earlier, it wasn’t in reference to his being on the Mets roster; rather, it referred to the role he was put in, something that wasn’t really his fault. Campbell isn’t an everyday player, at least not in this stage of his career. But there’s no shame in that; he has good baseball instincts and a sense of how to approach an at-bat, which makes him pretty valuable in his current, proper role as a reserve.
Before the Mets finally reloaded their offense, nearly every Met had been pushed into a role that was too much for him, with Quad-A guys asked to hold down starting jobs and poor Lucas Duda told to anchor an offensive attack that consisted of nothing but Lucas Duda. Now it’s different — guys can look up and down the lineup and see capable bats. Lone missed opportunities were frequently enough to kill the Mets earlier this year; now, they’re bumps in the road.
Which brings us to the title of this post. If you were thinking it referred to the pennant chase, well, absolutely. But I was also thinking of the original meaning, the one which puzzles kids and civic-minded adults reading the Declaration of Independence today. Jefferson and his fellow drafters didn’t mean “happiness” in the sense of gamboling about on a picnic, but something that reached back to Locke and Aristotle. Their meaning was more akin to using one’s talents fully in pursuit of excellence. Figuring out where you fit, essentially.
Which is what the Mets are finally doing.
And are still doing. After the game, the Mets sent away Alex Torres, he of the anti-concussion turban (laudable) and excessive walks (less so), for newly imported Eric O’Flaherty. David Wright (remember him?) plans to work out with the team this week and then start a rehab stint next week if all goes well; Terry is already talking about where he might fit in the batting order. And on the off-day, Terry will be in Port St. Lucie, explaining to Rafael Montero why the Frank Francisco Plan for Injury Management (remember this?) is unacceptable. If Montero emerges from that Come to Jesus moment the way the Mets hope, he could be another power arm to the pen and help keep his fellow young guns away from their dreaded innings limits.
Will all of that work out? Probably not — it’s baseball, after all. But if enough of it does, the Mets could wind up happy indeed — in every sense of the word.
by Greg Prince on 4 August 2015 9:52 am “Essentially, though, these were young men, seizing the opportunity to make the careers all normal ball players yearn for — victory, earning power, fame, respect. They were no different from the dozens of other young clubs that had suddenly found themselves, all through baseball history, in some dramatic season. The comic origins of the name on their shirts did not really relate to them.
“However, what was untrue for the players was true for the hard core of old Met fans. For them […] it really was fulfillment after seven years in the desert. In their memories and emotions, there was an unbroken line back […] — and the glory now within reach was anything but sudden. They, it was true, were the lowly raised high — but only after several agonizing eternities.”
The above could have been written 45 minutes ago, but it dates back 45 years, with the bracketed ellipses inserted today to purposefully conceal the passage’s true vintage. The author was Leonard Koppett, from the book, The New York Mets: The Whole Story, originally published in 1970 to reflect (and cash in on) the touchstone events of 1969, such as the first night the Mets spent in first place.
We still touch its mystical properties more than four-and-a-half decades later when contemporary circumstances so dictate. We still haul out as talisman the single sentence that lit up the Shea Stadium scoreboard on the evening of September 10, 1969, one of the most definitive directives ever issued in the entire history of the star-crossed franchise we call our own.
LOOK WHO’S NO. 1
That’s what it said once the Mets eked past the Cubs by percentage points, having captured the first game of their twinight doubleheader against Montreal. It was just percentage points’ worth of difference and the situation couldn’t have been more provisional, given that Chicago’s contest in Philadelphia remained in progress and the Mets and Expos had a nightcap penciled onto their dance card. But because it was 1969, all the decimals continued to fall into place. The Cubs lost. The Mets won again. The night ended with New York one full game ahead of their rivals, sitting atop the standings of the National League East.
The Mets had never sat atop any standings before. They would stay atop these for the duration of 1969. The would now and then return to that position in the dozens of seasons ahead, sometimes for a moment, sometimes for keeps. The slate is wiped clean every year, so no one maintains it on a permanent basis.
But when you initially arrive there late enough in a given season so that it’s deemed competitively significant after you haven’t been there for a very long and arid stretch, you can’t help but light up like that scoreboard of yore.
Look who’s No. 1 now!
Go ahead, look!
Why, it’s the New York Mets!
The most famous attainment of first place in New York Mets history remains the first attainment of first place in New York Mets history, September 10, 1969. It will always be preeminent in our thoughts on nights like Monday’s in Miami. But nights like Monday’s in Miami should also be kept somewhere where they can be readily accessed and referenced and treasured. Nights like Monday’s in Miami don’t come around nearly enough.
The New York Mets pounded the Miami Marlins in Miami on Monday night, 12-1, while the Arizona Diamondbacks were holding off the Washington Nationals in Washington, 6-4. The combination of results untangled the virtual tie the Nats (winning percentage .52427) and Mets (winning percentage .52381) found themselves knotted in at the close of business Sunday night. Being sort of in first place in early August wasn’t exactly a knotty problem of baseball compared to where the Mets were stuck the previous six Augusts of their lives. From 2009 to 2014, if you wanted to find them around this time of year, you’d start scanning at the bottom and end no higher than in the middle. After being nowhere near the entrance ramp to the last half-dozen pennant race stretch drives, virtual definitely had its virtues — though not so many when you’re mentally good and ready to get back…get back…get back to where you once belonged.
We finished first the first year there was a National League Eastern Division. The Mets’ pursuit of and ascension to No. 1, during the September when I was six, represents my first specific memory of what our team can do and, therefore, my unshakable exemplar of how a pennant race is meant to unfold. Several agonizing eternities notwithstanding, you’ll never convince me first place isn’t our virtual birthright.
Standards and expectations transform in a flash when you find yourself angling for the lead. After this past weekend — the best weekend Citi Field has ever seen — it was difficult to fathom that the team from whom few of us had expected anything beyond recurring frustration dotted by occasional heartbreak wasn’t already the best team in the world, let alone the best team in the East. They raucously and joyously took three of three from the Nats, serving notice to onlookers everywhere that a new broom was poised to keep sweeping its way up the divisional pecking order. All that needed to be tidied up were those nasty little fractions of percentage points.
Consider those whisked away, too.
Fate in the form of Kirk Nieuwenhuis’s pinched nerve rescues Michael Conforto from a demotion to the minors, and the rookie rescues the Mets right back with his first major league home run, good for an almost-immediate 3-0 lead. Yoenis Cespedes reveals what the fuss is all about with three doubles, four ribbies and a medallion nearly as large as his presence in the batting order. Travis d’Arnaud (2-for-5) emerges anew. Curtis Granderson (3-for-5) stays steady. Bartolo Colon goes eight innings for his tenth win. At 10:14 PM, it is official.
Washington is first in war, first in peace and second in the National League East.
The romp that vaulted the Mets past the Nats by a full game was a team effort worthy of a first-place team, and it included a single, a run and a pair of particularly professional third base plays (each cutting down the nettlesome Dee Gordon) from Daniel Murphy, who rates a mention here not merely for the sake of issuing gold stars to one and all.
On the night of September 10, 1969, that night of LOOK WHO’S NO. 1 legend, Ed Kranepool took two turns batting in the second game against the Expos after he pinch-hit for Donn Clendenon. Krane didn’t do anything of note, but that was all right. The Mets were already well on their way to the 7-1 win that sealed their standing. In Koppett’s summation, where I edited in those bracketed ellipses, the sentences that were printed actually read like this (italics added):
“For them, as for Kranepool, it really was fulfillment after seven years in the desert. In their memories and emotions, there was an unbroken line back to 1962 — and the glory now within reach was anything but sudden.”
Thirty-nine years later, on Friday night, September 19, 2008, Murphy — in his second month in the big leagues — was inserted by Jerry Manuel to pinch-hit against Julian Taverez at Turner Field in a 5-5 game. Carlos Delgado was on second. Argenis Reyes, safe on an error committed by Brave second baseman Kelly Johnson, was on first. There was one out. Young Murph saw one pitch, a slider, and he lined it into left-center to score both runners. The Mets led, 7-5, and were on their way to winning, 9-5. Combined with a Philadelphia loss to the then-Florida Marlins, the Mets moved into first place.
For the last time relatively late in a season until August 3, 2015.
Kranepool had seen most everything the Mets had to offer from when he joined a relentlessly tenth-place club in September of 1962 to the moment it all began to pay off in September of 1969. Most everything the Mets had to offer was mind-boggling and not until very recently the least bit successful. “If I could have seen ahead in 1962,” Ed admitted seven years he broke in, as the Mets approached their maiden divisional title, “I would have signed with another club.”
Murphy is the current Mr. Longevity on the active roster. If he’s ever felt any regret about remaining a Met through the bad and the worse that followed September 19, 2008, he’s kept it to himself. He, too, has seen it all since the Mets fell out of first place on September 20 seven years ago. At least he probably thought he had until the last week or so of wonders that he, like us, has been experiencing in a state of blue moon gobsmack. In fact, he was just asked if he has previously witnessed an array of events and emotions akin to those that have accompanied the Mets on their merry way to first place.
“No,” he said after Sunday night put the Mets on the precipice of sole possession. “To answer your question in the simplest terms, I have not.”
The team to which Murphy was promoted in 2008 was similar to the one Kranepool was called up to in 1962 in name only. The 1962 Mets were the shakiest of construction projects, to put it kindly. The 2008 Mets were built to contend. They were supposed to play for first place. When they entered it on September 19, they had only last vacated it on September 16. It was less a cause for celebration than relief when they moved back in after a three-day absence. You know: standards and expectations.
One can infer from how soon the Mets were gone from first again and how long it has taken them to get back to where they once belonged that we should appreciate every second of our stay at the top. It may last from here to October 4. It may be over on August 4. There’s every decent chance we and Washington will swap places multiple times between now and the end of the season.
As playoff seedings aren’t awarded or denied based on who beat who on August 3, this isn’t quite the occasion to break into a victory lap. But do feel free to add a spring to your step clear to 7:10 tonight. You’re a fan of a first-place team in August after not having been a fan of a first-place team in August or September for seven years. Per Koppett’s timeless assessment of the Metsian condition, the glory that is now within reach has been anything but sudden. Given the unbroken line we have walked, a little jauntiness is surely in order.
by Jason Fry on 3 August 2015 12:33 pm I no longer remember the exact circumstances, but years ago there was a newspaper story featuring a Yankee fan who didn’t understand why any franchise would adopt “Ya Gotta Believe” (or one of its non-spontaneous, corporate-approved descendants) as a rallying cry. Terrible slogan, she snorted dismissively: “Believe? That’s lame. We know.”
That always struck me as a perfect way to describe the two New York fanbases, because strip away the condescension and that long-ago fan got it right.
Yankee fans expect dollars to flow and moves to be made to ensure a full calendar in October and a ticker-tape parade a month later; anything less than that is a failure, for which there will be consequences.
Mets fans? We love ticker tape as much as the next guy and gal, and we’ll take a wire-to-wire regular-season cruise that doesn’t require too much heavy breathing. But dismissing anything less than a World Series trophy as a failure? We don’t get that — it’s entitled hubris that sounds deeply and dreadfully boring.
Knowing? Where’s the fun in that? Give us wild hope and a stubborn belief that refuses to be extinguished, no matter what obstacles the baseball gods throw in our way. (Tug’s call to arms was as much battered defiance as it was optimism.) Those are the things that power our baseball dreams.
Still, there are limits to even a Mets fan’s belief. This season began with the Mets under the same old shadow cast by Madoff and the Wilpons’ serial dishonesty about payrolls and financial flexibility. Then injuries decimated a team that had been expected to at least battle for a wild card.
Which should have meant 2015 was like too many recent years, except the big, bad Nationals — all but anointed National League champs in February — got off to a sputtering start and then proved unable to accelerate away from an unimpressive divisional field. The Nats have had injury problems of their own, but that hasn’t been everything that’s wrong with them — they’ve got a push-button manager and the absence (so far) of a certain undefinable something. You look at them (again, so far) and are struck that as a team they’re less than their component parts.
There was an opportunity there, but the Mets limped along for months with a makeshift lineup of mismatched Triple-A guys and played extended periods with key players in that curiously Metsian limbo that might be called the pre-DL. The team’s failure to summon reinforcements went from puzzling to maddening, until finally it seemed like the powers that be were pointedly ignoring a chance to depart from their plodding plan back to contention.
We don’t need certainty, but that doesn’t mean we take kindly to mulish inaction.
But then things changed. Sandy Alderson decided to trade off some of his impressive stockpile of young pitching. The Wilpons agreed to let him. Reinforcements started to arrive. First came Michael Conforto from the farm. Then Kelly Johnson and Juan Uribe. Then Tyler Clippard, just in time to replace recidivist dunderhead Jenrry Mejia. And, finally, Carlos Gomez Yoenis Cespedes.
Actual ballplayers! From major-league rosters!
This spasm of activity led to the Nationals arriving for a three-game series, on the field where they’ve kicked us around for the last few years. The Mets commenced hostilities three games back, and you had to forgive us if we were a little amped: These were the first meaningful Mets games since George W. Bush was president and Shea Stadium was still standing.
What would happen? This was the 2015 Mets, so who the hell knew? We’ve seen the Mets look godawful against second-division clubs (at least with bats in their hands) and stand toe-to-toe with playoff contenders.
They won the first game on a ludicrously dramatic bit of soap opera starring new Met cult hero Wilmer Flores.
Then they won the second game behind the heroics of an apparently resurrected Lucas Duda.
By the time the third game arrived, at 8:05 ESPN Hijack Time, every Mets fan on Earth was just a little high-strung. A sweep of the Nats was possible, along with an at least technical share of first place.
So what happened in a Citi Field that’s found out how to be loud?
For openers, Noah Syndergaard happened.
Syndergaard hit a bump with the second batter, as Anthony Rendon swatted a fastball over the center-field fence for a 1-0 Nats lead. But watching Syndergaard, I didn’t think that was any kind of harbinger of trouble. He was hitting his spots — something Jacob deGrom and the relief corps struggled to do — and the fastball had its usual scary velocity and movement. Rendon’s a good hitter who’d gotten a 2-0 pitch and turned on it; it happens.
Syndergaard’s only 22 and still learning his craft, but when he’s on I find myself thinking he might have the best stuff of anyone on this very good staff. He doesn’t have Matt Harvey‘s slider or assassin mentality (yet), but the fastball’s ungodly, the curve dives with authority and the change amplifies both pitches’ effectiveness. In one sequence, Syndergaard shoved Ryan Zimmerman away from the plate with a 97 MPH fastball at the chin, put a 100 MPH fastball on the outside corner at the knees, then picked off that same spot with a vicious breaking ball. Zimmerman just looked morose and trudged away; there was nothing whatsoever he or anyone else could have done.
Syndergaard’s pitches lost their crispness in the middle innings, probably because the adrenaline had stopped firing. But he found a way through it and finished the night with a flourish, daring Bryce Harper with a fastball on the inside corner. Harper is the furthest thing from overrated (so stop chanting that, you fools), but not even he could do much with a fastball thrown at 98 with movement that could have chewed through bedrock.
The other thing that happened was a fast-forward flurry of Mets offense that came almost too quickly to appreciate.
In the third, Jordan Zimmerman walked Kevin Plawecki (who quietly had a very impressive game on a big stage) and Syndergaard sacrificed him to second. The inning seemed destined to fizzle after Ruben Tejada hit a scorching liner right into Zimmerman’s glove, but Curtis Granderson swatted a 2-2 hanging pitch over the Mo Zone for a 2-1 Mets lead. Daniel Murphy then hammered Zimmerman’s next pitch deep into the Pepsi Porch, one of those monstrous shots with which Murph occasionally ambushes pitchers. Cespedes singled (his first Met hit) and then Duda hit a ball on the inner edge of the plate, practically off his hands. Duda peered at it as it arced towards the stands, waiting for it to go foul … but Duda is so strong that the ball wound up clanging off the pole and just like that, in five pitches, a 1-0 Nats lead had become a 5-1 deficit.
“I’m not really sure how it’s physically possible to hit that ball where I put it,” Zimmerman said of Duda’s drive; the only answer I can think of is that right now nothing is impossible for Lucas Duda.
The Nats made a little noise, but Clippard put them down in the ninth and that was that — a three-game sweep that left the Mets technically in second place, but only if you want to be a spoilsport about it.
The Mets played a grueling July schedule and came out of the month 13-12; they now play subpar competition for most of the next month, while the Nats play much tougher teams on the road. The Mets should also add more reinforcements, with Travis d’Arnaud shaking off the rust, Michael Cuddyer starting a rehab assignment, Erik Goeddel working his way back, Jerry Blevins throwing and perhaps even David Wright suiting up on the minor-league side.
I’d be more confident if this team hadn’t spent 2015 succeeding when I expected them to fail and failing when I expected them to succeed. But that’s not to say I’m not hopeful.
I’m hoping. I’m dreaming. We’re all even with two months to go; why not us? I don’t know, but I don’t need to know. Because I’ve got something better: I believe.
by Greg Prince on 2 August 2015 3:10 am The key to winning Saturday night’s game against the Nationals can be traced to the moment the Mets determined they needed to plant a genuine slugger in the heart of their batting order. Of course I’m referring to Lucas Duda, who the Mets acquired for future considerations last week, as in Lucas being told by his manager, in essence, genuinely slug or consider your immediate future limited.
According to Terry Collins, the conversation went something like this:
“Listen, we’ve got to start producing some runs, or we’ve got to find somebody else.”
“I got it.”
Sounds about right. I assume Lucas stopped hitting home runs for a spell because he forgot he was supposed to. He just needed a friendly reminder.
Glad somebody said something. We needed his bat. We needed Yoenis Cespedes’s bat, too, but without Duda doing what we remember him doing so well and so frequently last summer, we’d lack the one-two punch we are relying on to complement our one-two-three starters in this critical series and the rest of the season beyond.
Cespedes showed up and didn’t do any hitting to speak of, but he served a pair of mammoth purposes. First, I suppose, he helped sell out Citi Field and plug it in so it could go electric. Most importantly, though, he stood in the batter’s box in the bottom of the eighth, imposingly enough to get himself ordered intentionally walked by Matt Williams, super genius. Curtis Granderson was on second, the score was tied and the specter of the Mets’ new slugger filleting or perhaps fricasseeing Matt Thornton was too frightening for Washington’s Leader of Men to contemplate.
Williams might have been so immersed in staring at The Book (specifically the Lefty Must Face Lefty chapter) that he didn’t notice waiting right behind the new bat was the bat that had been there all along, the same bat responsible for the Mets’ two runs already on the board. Lucas Duda homered in the fourth. He homered in the seventh. Why would a manager go out of his way to bring him to the plate with two on so soon after he homered twice?
“Why ask why?” the makers of Bud Dry once asked, and I’ll go with that answer. Williams was nice enough to invite Lucas to an RBI party and our cleanup hitter RSVPed with a long double to left that brought Granderson home with the go-ahead run, soon to be known as the winning run.
Duda drove in all three runs the Mets scored Saturday. He’s been doing a lot of that sort of thing lately. He’s hit eight homers in seven games, though none was quite as big as the two-base hit he delivered in the eighth. Mets starter No. 1A, Jacob deGrom, was a little off early, allowing two runs in the first, but then nothing else. Joe Ross was mostly untouchable, except for Lucas touching him meaningfully twice, both times with no runners on. Only a mope would observe seven of the eight home runs Duda’s launched dating back to last Saturday were solo shots…or that he’s hit only three home runs all year while a runner’s been on base.
Then again, since when did the 2015 Mets have baserunners until the last week or so? Cespedes was granted a base based solely on reputation. Think anybody was walking John Mayberry to get to Lucas Duda? Still, Duda had to swing and connect to make Williams live to regret his fealty to conventional wisdom, and that he did. It was been the biggest hit in the history of Citi Field, exceeding the last biggest hit in the history of Citi Field — which for now I’d say was Duda’s second home run of the game, the biggest game in the history of Citi Field, surpassing Friday’s on a list marked mostly by brevity.
I don’t believe there’s a Top Three Biggest Games in the History of Citi Field, at least not until tonight’s unfolds.
We’re in that zone where every good thing that happens at Citi Field is the biggest thing to have ever happened at Citi Field because, to date, not nearly enough has happened at Citi Field. Not nearly enough you’d call big, anyway. A handful of individual and milestone oases notwithstanding, it’s been six seasons spent trudging through the Flushing desert. As I mentioned in the wake of the latest Worst Loss Ever, I’ve attended precisely 200 games at Citi Field. There’s been plenty to see, but little that’s mattered profoundly.
The last two games have offered a refresher to Mets fans everywhere what it’s like to watch a game your team absolutely must win and simultaneously must not lose. You might have forgotten how those work in the post-2008 period during which you’d nod politely at wins, shrug cynically at losses and wonder if you’d ever be moved to care deeply again.
That’s over for now. I hope it’s over forever, but let’s work on now for now. It’s early August and you look at the standings and…well, there ya go. You look at the standings. You pore over the N.L. East and stare at the Mets’ position and it bumps practically right up against that of the team that leads the pack. Objects one game back in second place, whether Matt Williams realizes it or not, may be closer than they appear.
Friday night, when not embracing the incredible, edible Wilmer Flores from my couch (honestly, he’s so frigging adorable you could just eat him up), I was on the phone offering hybrid play-by-play/analysis to my permanent bandwagoneer friend Chuck, who had called in from Illinois so we could watch the game together. We used to do that when the homers were belted by Piazza and Ventura, when it was Cook and Wendell holding the fort after Leiter or Reed had given it his all. Maybe it was Chuck’s presence in my ear provoking my dormant expert color commentary skills (“What the fuck? He didn’t hit him! WHAT THE FUCK?”) or Wilmer’s blue moon peering in from outside my living room window, but I knew I was occupying a headspace I hadn’t often visited in the past fifteen or so years, and I was reveling in it.
This was the Bobby V era version of me on the line, unironically, unabashedly convinced that the next pitch would surely determine whether our world had any reason to continue its trip around the sun. It was all highly stressful before it all became highly rewarding, yet it pleased me no end that I could still get the old angst churning on behalf of a baseball game. That feeling ensued throughout Saturday night, too. I don’t anticipate chasing it away any time soon.
“Listen,” the pennant race seems to be telling me, “we’ve got to start producing some stomach acid, or we’ve got to find somebody else.”
I got it.
by Jason Fry on 1 August 2015 3:43 am There have been more exhausting 48-hour stretches in the life of a Mets fan — the desperate scramble at the end of the ’99 season comes to mind — but not for a very long time. And perhaps there’s never been such an insane rollercoaster of emotions over so few hours, with euphoria, anger, confusion, despair, and pure joy shoving each other out of one’s brainpan almost too rapidly to be processed.
To review, in case you’re too muddled or exhausted:
On Wednesday night, while losing feebly to the Padres despite three home runs from Lucas Duda, the Mets acquired Carlos Gomez from the Brewers in return for Zack Wheeler and Wilmer Flores. Or at least that deal was reported by many media outlets, subject only to the usual pending review of medical records, which means nothing 999 times out of 1,000. The bizarre, digital-age twist was that Flores found out he’d been traded during the action, from fans on their cellphones. Instead of being removed, he played the rest of the game in tears, upset at being sent away from the only organization he’d known since signing up to be a professional baseball player at 16.
Then, shockingly, it turned out Flores hadn’t been traded after all. The Mets had gotten cold feet about the medical records, or perhaps had an 11th-hour change of mind about taking on payroll. While Terry Collins ranted about fans looking at their phones instead of the game, a visibly angry Sandy Alderson explained there was no trade with Milwaukee and would be no trade.
On Thursday, with an understandably rattled Flores excused active participation, the Mets racked up a 7-1 lead over the Padres, which had eroded to a 7-5 lead in the 9th by the time Jeurys Familia faced Derek Norris with two out and nobody on. It began to rain hard, but final batters have suffered through spitting lava and hurtling meteors in the name of concluding things. Not this time — the umps pulled the teams off the field. Forty-five minutes or so later, Familia went back out there and gave up two singles and a three-run homer to Justin Upton before it started raining again, leaving the Mets to wait for nearly three hours before succumbing meekly to Craig Kimbrel and so complete an unimaginably disastrous loss. (You can witness my astonishment as it occurred on the latest I’d Just as Soon Kiss a Mookiee podcast with Shannon Shark of MetsPolice — we were recording as everything crashed down around us.)
For some fanbases, that would be enough drama for a month, but the Mets were just getting warm.
On Friday afternoon Alderson pulled off a pretty fair Plan B deal, adding slugger Yoenis Cespedes from Detroit for Michael Fulmer and Luis Cessa, two capable minor-league arms who might or might not amount to anything. The only disappointment was that Cespedes was in Baltimore, just slightly too far away to arrive for the night’s tilt with the first-place Nationals. (Or at least for the beginning of it, but let’s not get ahead of ourselves.)
Cue euphoria in Metsdom — which, a bit oddly, was amplified by the fact that it might not have been the best long-term thinking. Cespedes’ contract was engineered to make him a free agent — he has to be released five days after the World Series, merits no qualifying offer, and the Mets then can’t negotiate with him until May 15. In other words, he’s almost certainly a rental — which means the Mets are going for it this year, finally pushing chips into the pile instead of talking vaguely about long-term plans and stockpiled prospects. That’s not normally something to be praised, but a summer in which one’s team seems determined to pass up a chance at a division title will lead to some odd reactions. The Mets haven’t won anything in the last week of dealing, but they have wiped away a corrosive narrative.
Exhausted yet? Too bad, because all of that was just a prelude for one of the most entertaining, riveting and ultimately rewarding Mets games in years — the kind of game that proved baseball can craft an odder storyline than anything a fan’s feverish brain could come up with.
Once upon a time tonight, Matt Harvey had a perfect game in the sixth inning. It went by the boards, and in the eighth Harvey’s skinny 1-0 lead did the same. With two outs, the Mets ace was undone by a series of small events, as tends to happen when a starter is only given a lone run for offense.
Harvey had been great, darting fastballs to the outside corner and mixing them with a sharp, rejuvenated slider. But I’d sensed disaster coming — in part because the land beyond 100 pitches is often hostile territory for Harvey, but also because it was the Nats at Cifi Field.
The first sign of trouble was a ball in the dirt that the umpires ruled had hit pinch-hitter Clint Robinson in the foot, though replay seemed to show no such thing. That apparent injustice (with the usual five minutes of standing around) was followed by a sharp grounder hit by Anthony Rendon to Juan Uribe‘s left, which Uribe could corral but do no more with. Harvey seemed to have Yunel Escobar at a disadvantage, having hobbled him with a foul off his foot, but then Escobar smacked a single up the middle, tying the game and ending Harvey’s night.
But the fun was only beginning. Tyler Clippard came in and bore down against Jayson Werth, he of the Grizzly Adams beard and Oscar the Grouch disposition. Armed with a change-up and a fastball, Clippard attacked his old teammate up and down and side to side, with Werth shortening his swing and spoiling pitch after pitch after pitch. I stopped trying to predict pitches after seven or so and stopped exhorting Clippard to beat Werth at around the 10-pitch mark — I was simultaneously worn out and enthralled by their Dunstonesque battle. Clippard’s 13th pitch was a fastball at the very bottom of the strike zone on the corner — a perfect pitch that ended the threat and sent Werth off glowering and muttering.
The bad news as the game ground along through the ninth and into extra innings was the Nats’ bullpen was looking very sharp, with longtime superbrat Gio Gonzalez having been replaced by Tanner Roark and Aaron Barrett. Both Nats relievers looked unhittable, as did Felipe Rivero, who had an unnerving but effective habit of missing with 95 MPH fastballs that swerved right at left-handed hitters.
The Mets’ pen, meanwhile, seemed to be succeeding in spite of itself. Clippard’s curve was MIA and he kept leaving change-ups too high in the strike zone. Familia’s been a mess for some time, and his slider was consistently elevated. Behind them you had Hansel Robles, last seen giving up a grand slam to San Diego that turned out to be more than cosmetic damage, and the nerve-gnawing prospect of one or both Torri.
But the Mets survived. They survived pitches in bad locations and Nationals hitters who approached their at-bats like surgeons turned assassins. Did they get a little help from home-plate ump Jerry Meals? Yep — but then Meals’s strike zone had been equitably odd all night, and Bryce Harper‘s ejection following an 11th-inning tantrum was more than justified, with Meals giving the mercurial young star plenty of chances to walk away and gesticulate from the relative safety of the dugout.
Harper’s departure left Matt Williams with a distinct lack of outfielders, a problem he tried to solve by sending Dan Uggla to first and moving Ryan Zimmerman to left and Werth to right. This seemed ill-omened, as Zimmerman has a bad foot and Uggla had never played first before, though in fairness Uggla often plays second like it’s new to him, too. It turned out not to matter — the Nats would face four batters with their makeshift defense, recording two flyouts to center and a K.
That accounts for three of the batters faced. The fourth, leading off the 12th, was Wilmer Flores — the same Wilmer Flores who’d cried over being traded away, then found himself untraded.
Because baseball generates stories more wonderful and ridiculous and wildly dramatic than anything mere mortals can think of, the third pitch of the 12th inning was a Rivero fastball that had a little more plate and a little less steam than his previous offerings. Flores hammered it to left, a line shot that seemed to gain altitude as it traveled, bending back a fan’s oustretched hat in the Party City deck. A wide-eyed Flores floated around the bases as the Nats skulked away, then shucked his helmet and vanished into a scrum of his lost-and-regained teammates at home.
The crowd roared, of course. But while that ovation for Flores was wonderful — I’ve watched the clip of his homer six or seven times already tonight — I liked an earlier show of fan affection even more.
Way back in the first, Wilmer dove on his belly for a sharp Escobar grounder that he converted into an out. It was the first thing he’d done since the wrenching events of Wednesday night, and the Citi Field crowd rose and gave him a standing ovation.
It’s interesting to unpack what went into those cheers.
Part of it was that Flores has been treated roughly this year by his own club, sent out to a position he’d been told he couldn’t play and then unceremoniously dismissed from it, all amid the never-ending glare and blare of New York sports fandom. You heard an acknowledgment of that in the park Wednesday night as the crowd cheered what certainly appeared to be Flores’s last AB as a Met.
It was the tears too, of course — in a sign of at-least-fitful progress for humanity, Wilmer’s raw emotions Wednesday night weren’t derided as a sign of weakness, but welcomed as a reminder that ballplayers are human too.
Would a Dodger or a Yankee have been cheered for being overcome by his emotions in such circumstances? I don’t know. Maybe. Probably, even. But I think a big part of the cheers for Wilmer had to do with the uniform he was wearing.
Wilmer Flores signed with the Mets on August 6, 2007. It wasn’t very long after that when things started to go very wrong for his team. Not one but two collapses. Injuries endured, mishandled and ignored. A financial calamity, followed by serial dishonesty about its extent. Promises about expanded payrolls and competitive rosters … but not quite yet. Players sent away with anonymous knives in their backs. And losing. Lots and lots and lots of losing.
Through it all, the devoted and/or insane among us have kept the faith, have remained Mets fans despite that avocation being the emotional equivalent of taking up smoking. We’ve coped by turning to nostalgia, by exhibiting gallows humor, and by gritting our teeth and insisting that this time that bright light ahead isn’t a train.
Being traded away from all that seems like something a player would greet with clicked heels instead of red eyes. Yet Wilmer Flores, who’s never seen anything except Metsian chaos and calamity, wanted to stay and was moved to tears at the idea of being sent away.
You better believe we’ll cheer for that — win or lose.
But we didn’t lose, not tonight. We didn’t lose because the player who endured all that was granted the role of hero in a ridiculously dramatic finish.
And that’s a tale to make our own eyes a little red. Because if Wilmer Flores can be rewarded like that, who knows? Maybe there’s a storybook ending out there for us too.
by Greg Prince on 31 July 2015 5:34 pm Hey, the Mets made a trade and got a guy they needed. Is that too optimistic a thought to express before Yoenis Cespedes does a thing in blue and orange?
Cespedes come to the Mets from the Tigers for highly regarded pitching prospect Michael Fulmer and fellow minor league hurler Luis Cessa. Even if Cespedes tanks and the two kids turn into Hal Newhouser and Dizzy Trout for Detroit, this was a shot worth taking. Yoenis can hit, and the Mets are already covered for pitching.
Still Mets: Zack Wheeler; Wilmer Flores. Nice to keep them, too.
Three games out of first, three games coming up against the first place team. Cespedes joins the fun Saturday. Let’s greet him with a winning streak of one.
Fun times ahead? More fun than we’ve lately been party to would be a great spot to start.
by Greg Prince on 31 July 2015 1:53 pm One look at the dark clouds encroaching from the west led me to an unassailable conclusion, which I shared with my friend Joe as we sat waiting in the third row of Promenade, section 508, for the top of the ninth inning to commence Thursday afternoon.
“End times,” I declared mostly seriously, “are coming.”
Joe glanced up from his scorebook, assessed the atmosphere and tacitly agreed.
“It’s been nice knowing you, Greg.”
Then there was a clap of thunder emanating from, I’m guessing, the Mr. Softee cart in the food court behind us. It was a little too close for comfort, especially considering how little comfort had been available to us all day. A six-run Mets lead had recently been whittled to two; I was drenched in enough sweat that you’d have thought I’d just hustled over from opening for Bette Midler at the Continental Baths; and Camp Day — because the Mets aren’t camp enough every day — was still going surprisingly strong and surprisingly loud. Since 12:10 Camp Day kids had been responding to every Noise Meter tickler the Citi Vision board had put before them, as if they needed the challenge. Their screams weren’t as loud as the thunder, but they were unnerving in their own way. They were still screaming nearly three hours after they’d begun.
Put it all together, and it was enough to drive a diehard toward a life preserver.
“I’ll meet you down in the concourse after the last out,” I told Joe, hoping “last out” wasn’t to be taken literally, as in the last out prior to the impending rapture.
I watched Jeurys Familia make quick work of two Padres and get one strike on a third — Derek Norris, the devil Friar who personally changed the score from 7-1 to 7-5 two innings earlier — from veritable safety. I could see it was starting to rain, but baseball games with only an instant or two left to them could withstand a shower, even a downpour. The Dodgers eliminated the Phillies from the NLCS in that kind of rain in 1977. The Giants did the same to the Cardinals in 2012. This was just the Mets and the San Diego Padres in the heat of nothing more than a summer’s day. Surely they could dance another couple of steps between the raindrops and give Joe and me and campers from all over the Metropolitan Area something to enjoy on our respective ways home…assuming we weren’t all being Called Home in a different vein.
There would be no next instant for Familia, no oh-one pitch for more than half-an-hour. The weather started getting rough; Citi Field was tossed; if not for the courage of the Mets ground crew, the infield would be lost.
The next thunderclap was more like a standing ovation, and not for a shortstop who thought he’d been traded. This one said get out of the stands, get off of the field, get out of the monsoon that is about swallow Flushing whole. I was met down in the concourse by Joe and by everybody else. Hundreds of campers remained and now needed to be corralled by counselors who probably didn’t sign up for this particular duty. Every boom of thunder, every crack of lightning was met with shrieks you hadn’t heard since Luis Castillo circled under a pop fly one borough away.
The counselors tried to distract their campers by leading them in repetitious chants, somehow skipping Let’s Go Mets. At their and our feet, lagoons like you’d see at Shea Stadium…lagoons the size of Shea Stadium…formed. To call them puddles is to refer to the Atlantic Ocean as your bathtub. The rain blew in horizontally. Security shooed the curious from sticking as much a head out from under for a clearer look at the thick, gray skies. They could not be held responsible for your imminent extinction if you did.
The video screens showed 1986 Mets: A Year To Remember, as if to give us one final pleasant memory before we were washed away for good.
As it turns out, the rains subsided, then evaporated. The camp groups were able to depart. Citi Field grew quiet, save for Larry Keith’s expert narration and the Duran Duran soundtrack that emphasized just what wild boys Lenny Dykstra and Wally Backman were back in the day. Dozens remained along the first base side of Promenade, Joe and I among them. The seats were too wet to sit in, but that wasn’t a big deal. We weren’t going to be long.
At 3:15, when we’d been standing around for about 20 minutes, it was announced the two teams would retake the field at 3:30. One more out would be recorded and we could all go home. The grounds crew was diligently sweeping away the water that sat in front of the Padres dugout, which I thought was a lot of trouble to go to for just one out’s worth of baseball. This, I suggested to Joe, must have been what it felt like at Yankee Stadium that night in 1983 when they opened the place up to play the final four outs of the Pine Tar Game.
Around 3:25 the field looked fairly immaculate. We were antsy to see the end of our 7-5 Mets win. Did they really have to wait until 3:30? Couldn’t Norris get his ass up to the plate now? Couldn’t Terry send in…
Hey, who was Terry going to send in? Familia looked fine getting those first two outs, but we were staring at something like a 35-minute delay. Jeurys was going at it in the Flushing tropics and then he was sent, I’m guessing, to cool his heels in an air conditioned room. Aren’t pitchers supposed to not be left to their own devices for that long a period? Wasn’t Carlos Torres fresh and capable of a single out with nobody on? (Yes, I realize I was advocating for one of the Tsuris Bros. over our de facto All-Star closer, but this was a first guess based on circumstances more than personalities or track records.)
Familia returned to the mound. Oh well, I tried to rationalize, Terry might actually know his pitchers better than I do. Maybe the rain delay won’t have an effect on Jeurys. “Water and rain have always been a blessing to me,” Pedro Martinez said in his memoir, referring to the night Shea’s sprinklers surprised him in the midst of pitching. “That’s what this felt like.” Perhaps it would feel the same for Familia.
Six minutes later, all blessings had turned cursed. As we stood behind an unoccupied Promenade Box section, Norris stayed alive on an oh-two count before dropping a hit into short right field; he was now 5-for-5. Matt Kemp, who’s been around long enough to have played in a playoff series against the New York Mets (but didn’t, despite having been a rookie on the 2006 Los Angeles Dodgers), poked a fast grounder through a hole just right of Ruben Tejada at short. Next up was Justin Upton, or “The Upton,” as Joe and I would come to label him in short order when we decided his secret identity could be that of Batman archvillain.
Not so secret, I suppose. The Upton lined Familia’s second pitch far and deep to center, through the raindrops — for they were falling anew — and over the fence.
The Mets were trailing the Padres, 8-7. The only worst-case scenario we had conjured while waiting in the concourse had come to pass. It might as well have been end times.
Familia got the third out.
Joe, as peaceful a sort as you’d be fortunate to know, punched the hell out of an abandoned Goose Island Beer cart.
The rain intensified.
The grounds crew attempted to unroll the tarp.
The tarp attempted to devour the grounds crew.
The game was on pause yet again.
We weren’t. We decided we’d had enough.
Joe hardly ever bolts before the conclusion of affairs — I think our last mutual early exit was the nightcap after the Craig Counsell Game in 2002 — but there was no sign the rains would ever slacken and there was no stomach to endure what was likely to occur if they did. Joe’s got this great optimistic streak. Every one of his freakish hypotheticals always has the Mets coming back to win, but even he couldn’t sell that kind of sunny outcome to himself. I’m not nearly as sanguine. I was there the night before, which should indicate that my goodwill toward best-case scenarios was already well frazzled.
Wednesday represented my annual moment of Ben. Ben is a friend who was good enough to stop on his way to starting law school to invite me, as he does every year, to see a game with him. Ben’s an optimist, too. Ben was an undergrad at the University of Arizona and cheered his heart out for their teams, most of whom did a lot of winning. I don’t want to tamp down his enthusiasm as he tries to apply the ol’ school spirit to the occasionally amateurish Mets. Thus, when we watched from 310 on Wednesday night, I attempted with every sweat-covered ounce of enthusiasm I could muster to partake in his patented six-run rally in the bottom of the ninth way of thinking. Once we saw Lucas Duda sock his third home run, it didn’t seem all that crazy.
Then, of course, it did.
Alas, all I wound up with at the end of the 7-3 Met loss was a little more shvitz and a lot more wear on my phone’s battery, as together we tried to follow the Wilmer Flores saga, featuring Carlos Gomez and guest-starring Zack Wheeler, from our seats and then the 7 Super Express. We were among those who made Wilmer emotional by standing and applauding him on his presumed way out. We thought we were contributing to a beautiful, spontaneous moment of fan support. We didn’t know we were part of some nefarious social media plot to undermine our manager’s and general manager’s best-laid plans or lack thereof.
I’ve been asked several times since Thursday’s inevitable loss went final — the Mets waited about three hours to make three more outs, by which time I was home and slightly drier — if this had been the worst or strangest or Metsiest 24 hours I’d ever seen. That’s a lot to put on one blown six-run lead (granted, the first of its kind in Queens since 1970) and one colorfully aborted trade. As is usually the case with those kinds of questions, the answer is if you’re having the conversation, it doesn’t really matter where it ranks. What matters is you’ve been motivated to have the conversation.
Thursday they lost. Wednesday they lost. Wednesday you know from in terms of the Met trade that wasn’t, the Met internal communications that went every which way but between anybody who could have clarified things internally and the Met infielder who still is a Met infielder until otherwise notified. There’s no need for me to add to the abundance of analysis of what is bound to wind up in public relations class text books as a “what can go wrong will go wrong” case study for a generation to come. But I will say I wish the Mets had handled the aftermath differently.
Instead of harumphing it away, the Mets should have embraced their debacle. You’ve heard the expression, “Stranger things have happened”? This is a franchise built on the strangest things. And the day after the story broke would have been perfect. It was July 30. July 30 is a charmed date in Mets history. On July 30, 1890, Casey Stengel was born. He’d grow up to manage Mets who drove him to (probably) ask, “Can’t anybody here play this game?” It’s a query that’s never far from our tongues as we watch his Amazin’ descendants. On July 30, 1969, the Mets were getting blown out of a doubleheader at home against Houston. Gil Hodges didn’t like the level of Cleon Jones’s defensive commitment. Hodges marched out to left field and removed Jones at once. Long story short, a message was sent and from that nadir grew ultimate victory, with Cleon standing in the same vicinity of where he’d been unceremoniously removed, this time catching the year’s final fly ball. Like Casey’s pithy quote, Gil’s purposeful march to left is legend.
The night we thought Wilmer Flores had been traded, moving us to move him to tears, is already legend. I say expand on it. Here’s what I would have done yesterday, July 30, 2015:
• Put Wilmer Flores merchandise (if there is any) on closeout special in the team stores, but just for one inning. Attribute the sudden sale to an unavoidable misunderstanding
• Splice 2007 Carlos Gomez highlights into the usual rally reels and see if anybody notices.
• Retire Wilmer’s No. 4 in a touching pregame ceremony…and then unretire it in a slightly less touching pregame ceremony five minutes later.
• Record a PSA in which Terry Collins urges all fans to use their mobile devices with utmost caution — “or better yet, just watch the game while you’re at the game.”
• Get Wilmer to endorse GroundLink Transportation, the official ground transportation provider of the New York Mets: “I may not know whether I’m coming or going, but I can always depend on GroundLink to get me somewhere.”
• Set a montage of Wilmer’s home runs (assuming they are adaptable to modern technology; he hasn’t hit one since kinescopes) to a loop of Gary Cohen’s “OUTTA HERE!” calls. And then bring the soundtrack to a screeching halt.
• Make Zack Wheeler the answer to every trivia question, since it seems we’ve all kind of forgotten who he is. Or was.
Instead, the Mets pretended nothing happened, built a six-run lead, blew a six-run lead, waited and waited and waited and lost. Ben, glutton for Metishment, was at Thursday’s game, too, but unlike Joe and me, he stuck around to the bitter, bitter, bitter end. I predict that when he graduates from law school, he will pursue a career in which he tirelessly advocates for the underdog.
Though I skipped that final half-inning, I’ll keep rooting for the team that came up short. End times? Ha! Once you get into this, there is no end to this. This week marked two personal Met milestones that absolutely nobody forced on me. Thursday was my 200th game at Citi Field — that was fast — and Wednesday was five years since the last Mets game I entirely missed. I napped through the action of July 29, 2010, also a 12:10 start, except one that followed a thirteen-inning marathon the night before that I got home from late, wrote about until dawn and then stayed up some more to drive my wife to the station and then resume my other work. I then opted to lie down for just a few minutes that became the entirety of a swift R.A. Dickey start, one I blogged anyway.
Since then, I’ve watched or listened to or attended at least a small portion (usually more; usually most) of every regular-season Mets game that’s been played. Regardless of what else I’m doing, it’s what I seem to do. It’s a hard habit to break. As disgusted as I was after The Upton foiled Familia, I’m not seeking to break it. I’d just like possibly positive trades to be consummated; seemingly prohibitive leads to be maintained; and potential pennant race showdowns with the likes of the Nationals to live up to their tentative billing.
After these past five years of uninterrupted observation, when only massive rains and astounding frustration have served to sidetrack me, I don’t think that’s a lot to ask for.
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