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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 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.
by Jason Fry on 30 July 2015 12:16 am OK, so …
Hmm.
Umm.
Seriously, how the hell do you start?
Wednesday night’s game was weird before it began, but we had No Idea.
Even before Will Venable headed for the plate to start the top of the first, Twitter was buzzing with rumors: The Mets were close to a deal, and it was for a bat — a big bat. The actual game against the Padres was a sideshow — you could hear the tension in Gary Cohen’s voice, and imagine him between innings demanding to know what the heck was going on.
Then, even as Bartolo Colon was unraveling and Lucas Duda was taking aim at fences, the buzz turned into an apparent fact. The Mets were acquiring Carlos Gomez. For Juan Lagares was the first fragmentary report, followed by something definitive: The team had traded Wilmer Flores and Zack Wheeler to Milwaukee.
A Post columnist tweeted news of the deal, followed by a Daily News beat writer. The Brewers beat writer had it too. The national guys had it. From the Brewers’ plane, catcher Martin Maldonado tweeted a photo of teammates saying farewell to Gomez. On SNY, Gary and Keith began talking about the deal. Soon enough we even learned that the Brewers had wanted Dilson Herrera but settled for Flores instead. It was all following the script for a deadline deal in the Twitter age.
Nothing was official pending the usual review of medical reports, but those are formalities. And in an age where most fans have a powerful computer in their pockets, Citi Field was no sanctuary from the news. The fans knew the deal had happened. They chanted Gomez’s name, and, in your nightly reminder that we live in times that seem borrowed from “The Jetsons,” they told Flores he’d been traded.
Which led to one of the more surreal sequences I’ve ever seen: First, Flores got a mini-ovation in what certainly appeared to be his final Met at-bat. We all waited for him to be pulled from the game and get goodbyes from his teammates — #HugWatch is how it’s now described on Twitter — on his way to the clubhouse, street clothes and a Brewers uniform.
Except Flores wasn’t pulled. He stayed in the game, reduced to tears. For which no one with the smallest shred of a heart could blame him: Flores signed with the Mets at 16, busted his butt to make the major leagues, was assigned to a position he’d been told he couldn’t play, played it variously not so well and well enough, was taken off that position, struggled with his hitting and was now being traded. All of it in public, in the cauldron of attention and noise and opinion that is New York City.
It seemed unimaginably cruel that he was still in the game, and at the position where he’d been left to struggle so publicly. What on earth were the Mets doing? How had they managed to turn a great story — a deal for an All-Star, prodigal son and potential pennant-race difference-maker — into yet another self-inflicted embarrassment?
The Mets finally finished losing — the ballgame was all but forgotten before it concluded, even though it saw Colon self-destruct to continue a worrisome trend and Duda club three homers to (possibly) accelerate a hopeful one. Terry Collins addressed the media in full Get Off My Lawn mode, decrying fans looking at their cellphones on a game, players getting distracted by the business side of things, and repeatedly noting that no one had told him anything about a trade.
And then, just when the narrative was seemingly cemented as the Mets making an audacious move but being cruel to one of their own in the process, everything changed.
Sandy Alderson — an obviously angry Sandy Alderson — said there was no trade and would be no trade.
Which is where the needle got pulled off the record, and everyone — players, reporters and fans alike — just sort of stopped and looked at each other in disbelief. Had all that really happened?
It did. But what was the real story of the night the Wilmer Flores era didn’t actually end? We’ll have to wait to find out, while accepting the possibility that we may never know. But here’s my guess: The deal was done as described, and both front offices thought the review of medical records was a formality, as it usually is. So people in both front offices started talking to reporters. Then, with the whole world already knowing about the deal, the Brewers decided they didn’t like something in Wheeler’s reports and pulled out. That infuriated Alderson, to the extent that he’s swearing he won’t revisit a deal with Milwaukee.
Do I have that right? Maybe, maybe not. It’s the best fit for the facts that I can see.
[Updated Already: Maybe not. Now there are reporters saying it was the Mets who backed out, over Gomez’s hip. Which might mean Alderson was mad at the Brewers for something in the medical reports, or for talking early. Or he was mad at social media, or the beat writers, or at Buddy for pooping on the carpet. Good God, what a mess.]
Feeling dizzy? Then brace yourself. Because what happens tomorrow, when the Mets arrive bright and early for a businessman’s special against the Padres? Flores will still be a Met, somehow — and can be forgiven for wondering what on earth will happen to him on Thursday. Travis d’Arnaud will be back, preparing for the Nats series. David Wright will be hanging around on the field, doing baseball-like drills that will get us too excited. Perhaps Lucas Duda will keep swatting balls to Portugal.
The Mets will still be close enough to the Nats that we should be excited. They’ll probably be working on other trades for a bat. Beyond that, though? I’m not even going to speculate — not after five hours that were spectacularly weird even by the surreal standards we’ve grown used to around here.
by Greg Prince on 29 July 2015 7:50 am Noah Syndergaard had a perfect game going. I wasn’t particularly nervous about it. I figured he was going to get it. When the perfect game was broken up by Will Venable’s leadoff single in the seventh inning, I wasn’t particularly upset about it. I figured he’d just keep going for the win and maybe pitch a no-hitter or better somewhere down the road.
That’s when you know you have pitching.
June 1, 2012, pretty much took care of the churning stomach acid where zeroes under the scoreboard’s ‘H’ are concerned, though you’re never going to turn down another one, let alone a perfect one. It would have been sweet to add July 28, 2015, to the pantheon of Met dates, but residing in that golden zone where an outing like Syndergaard’s against the Padres feels more like the norm than the aberration is reward enough. So the rookie (hard to believe, given his poise) goes eight, gives up three hits, strikes out nine, walks nobody and the Mets win, 4-0. That, as Tom Seaver advised Nancy long ago on the heels of a similarly imperfect shutout, is hardly reason to shed a tear.
Lucas Duda ensured there’d be enough runs when he launched, blasted and rocketed — the more verbs the better — a baseball deep into the Big Apple or Apple Reserved or Apple Orchard section, whatever it’s called these days, to stake Noah to an early 2-0 lead. Curtis Granderson removed any ancillary offensive worries with a two-run shot of his own late. Tyler Clippard made us think of him as a helpful Met pushing us along rather than an old nemesis waiting to explode in our faces by keeping the ninth as tidy as it needed to be. James Shields was by no means bad, but Syndergaard was out of this world.
End of story, except for what occurred right before it began, which was the second suspension of Jenrry Mejia after Mejia tested positive yet again for banned substances. These were PEDs, though it reminded me of the night 21 years ago when Dwight Gooden was found to be back on cocaine. The reaction in 1994 versus 1987 for Doc was striking. The first time it had been mostly he’d make a mistake, he’d get his head on straight, he’d come back and we’d welcome him to the mound to pitch for us. The second time it was WTF, goodbye. Although it appeared he’d been keeping his nose clean during the intervening seven years, the second suspension, which ended his Met tenure, seemed inevitable in retrospect. Also in retrospect, it seemed inevitable it would be mostly forgotten in the long run because Doc was Doc — the Thor of his time — and we wanted to embrace him more than shun him.
Mejia isn’t an outsize character in Mets history as Gooden remains, so there isn’t quite the emotional tug here. He made what is generally agreed to have been a dopey error in judgment by taking PEDs (and then getting caught) the first time, but everybody makes mistakes, and once the season got rolling and bullpen depth became an issue, it was sure going to be nice to get Jenrry going again. As recently as Sunday it was very nice.
Then came Tuesday and the announcement that he’d be ineligible for the next 162 games after having been found to have ingested in some form the anabolic steroids Stanozolol and Boldenone. MLB had already gotten him on the former, so the league was testing him a little extra, meaning the chances of Mejia getting caught seemed pretty good.
For the most part we process addiction to a drug like cocaine as a disease and if we are patient and forgiving and haven’t been directly wronged by someone under its pull, we encourage the addict to seek treatment and perhaps salvation. On paper it all looks pretty easy. We look at what we know about PEDs — they can enhance an athlete’s performance and thus enrich his lifestyle but have deleterious side effects that have led to their prohibition within the game — and slap our heads that somebody would keep taking them when the profession they have chosen explicitly forbids it. I can almost hear Norm MacDonald deliver the news: “Mejia was suspended for taking PEDs after the pitcher was told by Major League Baseball to do one thing: ‘Don’t take PEDs.’”
So the sympathy level is understandably low from all concerned, though maybe a little empathy is in order. We all do dumb things. We occasionally do them twice, though probably not so soon after we do them once and were caught for them and were issued a warning that we’d be watched very closely to make sure we didn’t do them again.
I liked watching Jenrry pitch. I liked that his jams were never too tight and he usually wriggled out of them with a flourish. I liked that a kid who grew up shining shoes in Santo Domingo could grow up to polish off the final outs of baseball games in New York City. I liked watching him play Santa for the kids at the Mets holiday party last December. I liked thinking he’d “learned his lesson” and was back to contribute to the Mets’ chase of the Nationals, which finds them only one game out of first at the moment. Jenrry wouldn’t be eligible for a potential postseason appearance, but he could give us a hand in getting there and he’d prove essential to the team he’d been pitching for through injuries and multiple role changes since 2010.
You never can tell, but we probably won’t see him pitch for the Mets again. Nevertheless, I’d like him to simply stop doing that dumb thing that got him suspended a second time, even if “simply” stopping probably isn’t quite as simple as it sounds. It won’t matter in the course of our team’s fortunes. This is just human empathy speaking.
by Greg Prince on 28 July 2015 2:15 pm The Mets’ hypothetical reacquisition of Jose Reyes always goes very well in my head, at least until he pulls a muscle getting off the plane at LaGuardia. I regularly try to see his homecoming happening but I can never see it going well. But now that our all-time shortstop is sort of in flux — having been sent almost as packing peanuts with prospects from Toronto to Colorado for Never Met Troy Tulowitzki — Reyes seems more hypothetically available than ever.
In the sense that he might be traded again by an organization that isn’t necessarily interested in keeping him around, he’s out there for the taking, or at least the talking. As this is the week when even the most nonsensical deal is one phone call from making all the sense in the world, do we want Jose back?
In my heart, yes.
In my heart of hearts, absolutely.
In my heart of heart of hearts…geez, did he just strain a ligament sliding into third heart?
That’s the problem, besides all the compensation he is owed and the ownership that is enormously unlikely (and probably unwilling let alone unable) to court it. Something will go wrong if we rebook the services of 32-year-old Jose Reyes, who only seems forever 23 because that’s how we remember him. If you close your eyes, nobody’s ever been younger longer. When you open them, no matter how much you loved him then and maintain at least a flicker of a torch for him now, Jose isn’t quite the Jose of Jose-Jose-Jose halcyon days.
Maybe he doesn’t have to be. Diminished Jose (Jo-Jo-Jo?) might automatically become, like everybody else who’s come aboard with a bat lately, the best player the Mets have. In essentially a two-month season, his job would be to help our team make up three games. It’s perfectly conceivable he’d hit leadoff like a leadoff hitter, he’d run more than anybody here is capable of, he’d be an upgrade over the revolving incumbents at his position and he’d make us damn glad to meet him again.
Until we regretted reigniting the whole thing, because, as if it needs repeating, he’s not the Jose-Jose-Jose anymore. He could stay in one piece but struggle regardless. Triples of yore could become close calls at second. Defensive outs could become singles. What was once that grin of impetuous youth could, after a week of not succeeding despite really trying, turn sullen, which would be a human reaction, but with Jose, you’re sort of paying for the smiling as much as the stealing.
Also, it’s not going to happen. This ownership only sanctions the slightest of midseason contractual commitments and this front office reportedly has its eyes on everybody but Jose Reyes. If it somehow could happen, I would welcome him back with open arms — and then brace to catch him when he slips, falls, does something to his hamstring and waits to be examined by Ray Ramirez.
Because of our provinciality where Jose is concerned, I might be missing the bigger story, namely that Tulowitzki was shipped internationally in the dead of night. I enjoyed believing for a few minutes this past winter that he might become Troy of Flushing. I thought of him hard when I heard this portion of a Zach Galifianakis monologue in Birdman:
“As soon as we announced he was taking over, the advance doubled, and that took less than a day…this is about being respected and validated, remember?”
This was post-Cuddyer, when anything seemed possible, including the renaissance of Michael Cuddyer (think the Rockies would take him back for Reyes?). I pictured Tulo as a latter-day Gary Carter in terms of stirring up excitement, strengthening the offense, leading us to the edge of the promised land and making us a surefire contender. Now he’s a Blue Jay and we seem to be a contender anyway.
What gets me a little is Tulowitzki was The Man in Colorado and there he goes, off to Canada. That must be a blow to Rockies fans. I’m sure there’s a sophisticated cluster in Denver that will tell you it’s an excellent move for bloodless reasons A, B & C, but he was basically their David Wright and they unloaded him and his sizable contract because he wasn’t getting them any closer to where they ultimately need to go.
It killed me in December of 2011 when Reyes was allowed to walk. It relieved me in December of 2012 when Wright was secured through 2020. I wanted both of them to be careerlong Mets, something we know almost nobody of consequence (ahem) has ever been. Reyes was a really good player, Wright was a really good player and I was a really sentimental fan.
I still am, but the comings and goings of trading deadline time make you think. Juan Uribe got my attention twice this weekend, once for the game-winning hit on Sunday, once for something he said afterwards regarding his new best friends:
“This is my team. It’s a good team. In baseball, you never know.”
That could have been just boilerplate, but consider Uribe’s past. He was part of a White Sox team that had all but plummeted through the floor in September of 2005. A month later they were world champions. In the middle of 2010, he was with the Giants, who were languishing behind the Padres all season long after being playoffless since 2003. They made a few moves, stayed close and clinched their division on the final day of the year. Soon enough, Uribe was wearing a second ring.
Obviously he’s due for another in 2015. Beyond that sound chronological assessment, it strikes me that for all the great Giants of generations past, it was Juan Uribe, Cody Ross (ick) and Pat Burrell (also ick), among others, who brought San Franciscans what they’d been waiting forever for. And for all the legendary White Sox who wore the Pale Hose, it fell to the likes of Juan Uribe, Scott Podsednik and old friend Carl Everett, among others, to end an 88-year drought.
Yes, in baseball, you never know, except you can kind of guess your cast of characters won’t be exactly who you think it will be when you envision the day your fondest dreams come true. You won’t ask for ID as the ticker tape falls, though. You’ll cheer Juan Uribe, Kelly Johnson, Tyler Clippard and whoever else (hypothetically) does it for you.
Trading deadline frenzy coincides with Hall of Fame weekend, which makes for a pair of reminders that baseball is a business, sentimentality be damned. Randy Johnson, the greatest lefthander of his generation, has the names of six franchises engraved on his plaque. Pedro Martinez has five, including ours. John Smoltz, forever and ever a Brave stalwart, has three. Craig Biggio, nothing but an Astro, was the outlier. Craig Biggio never won a World Series. His three contemporaries all won one, then went on to be employed elsewhere. Immortality is no guarantee of permanence, whether you crave it or not.
Meanwhile, as we are borne back ceaselessly into the present, Jose Reyes moves along to his fourth team, possibly en route to a fifth, probably not about to return to his first. Juan Uribe is on his sixth, Kelly Johnson his eighth, Tyler Clippard his fourth. Reyes remains one of my favorite players ever, regardless of fabrics and colors. If he’s still a Rockie when the Rockies come to Citi, I’ll give him a nice hand and root for him to not do all that great. Uribe, Johnson and Clippard I’ve given no more than passing thought to until very recently. I’ll be rooting for them constantly as long as they’re here. I’ll root for whoever Sandy Alderson gets next, too.
Let’s Go Mets, whoever you are.
by Greg Prince on 27 July 2015 7:27 pm We love our Mets so much we can’t wait to replace as many as of them as is viable. Sandy Alderson apparently feels the same way.
No complaints here.
After patching together a roster with masking tape, postage stamp hinges and remainders from fractions homework, the GM has stayed busier than a jaded observer would have expected. Add to Michael Conforto, Kelly Johnson, Juan Uribe and Yutz the Wonder Buffalo (just seeing if you’re paying attention) the notorious T.L.C., a.k.a. Tyler Lee Clippard, infamous for beating the Mets as a Yankee eight years ago and never being forgiven for it.
We’re letting bygones be bygones for now, because Tyler’s done some solid relief work since 2007, even if most of that was for the Nationals and much of was to our pre-2015 detriment. But he comes to us now, from Oakland, to help us attack Washington like a Tea Party congressional candidate. We gave up Casey Meisner to acquire Clippard. If you knew who Casey Meisner was before this trade and have information that augurs future regret for us, please keep it to yourself. Once upon a time, getting Doyle Alexander and Larry Anderson were instrumental in springing contending teams toward playoff positions. That John Smoltz and Jeff Bagwell were surrendered in the process didn’t seem so bad in the moment.
In the moment we’re in now, in case you’ve forgotten, we’re two games out of first place and nine years removed from our previous postseason. Our lineup improved exponentially with the promotion of Conforto and the additions of the ex-Braves. We now lean a little on a former Yankee and National to strengthen a bullpen where Bobby Parnell and Jenrry Mejia are still finding their way back and Jeurys Familia is most always on call. Meisner’s hypothetically marvelous days to come will have to be risked to get us where we need to go this year.
Now, maybe, another bat or glove so this race stays real? Deadline’s not till Friday. Keep the new Mets coming, Sandy. We’ll learn to love them, too.
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