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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 30 April 2015 9:17 am The phone rang while I was catching up on my Nashville — Juliette Barnes is quite the handful — after I finished watching whatever it was I watched the bulk of Wednesday evening. It was the copy desk calling. Apparently I was keeping them waiting.
“Yeah?”
“Where’s your recap?”
“What recap?”
“It’s your night to recap the Mets game.”
“No, I only do wins.”
“What do you mean you only do wins? You do games.”
“I do winning Mets games.
“Yes, when the Mets win, you do those. And when the Mets lose…”
“I don’t know what that is.”
“Don’t know what what is?”
“That phrase you used. ‘The Mets lose.’”
“Stop kidding around. The Mets lost to the Marlins, 7-3, Wednesday night. It sucked, but it’s your turn to write it.”
“I told you, I only do wins. I haven’t done a loss since April 8, which was the second game of the year, and I was pretty prickly about it then. I don’t think I know how to do that kind of game anymore.”
“Don’t give me that. You’ve been doing losses forever. They come with the territory.”
“That was the old me.”
“The old you?”
“Yeah, the one who could relate to the Mets losing, the one who’d figured the Mets were more likely to lose than not, the one who sometimes was vaguely disappointed when a win would get in the way of what I was planning to write about a loss. That’s not me anymore.”
“It’s not?”
“Hell no. The new me has been writing up wins and nothing but wins for eleven consecutive game recaps. The new me writes from a position of elation. The new me walks around in a state of bliss, accepting observations from strangers who see my Mets jacket and say things like, ‘You must be loving this,’ to which I say, ‘Oh, I definitely am!’ And I definitely have been. Now you want me to go back to moping around and nobody saying a thing to me when they see my Mets jacket or saying something like, ‘Tough break for you guys’? You want me to go back to that losing mindset after weeks of practically uninterrupted winning?”
“I want you to write about the game is what I want. Cuddyer homers, Leathersich debuts, Ichiro ruins everything. Plenty of angles to pick apart. Win or lose, it’s what you do.”
“But I like the new thing I do, where I write about the win and everybody reads about the win and we all congratulate each other on the win and then there’s another win. The Mets on a two-game losing streak? That’s beyond my current scope of comprehension.”
“Enough with the excuses. We need your recap. The Mets lost, deal with it.”
I hung up on the desk, finished watching Nashville and a couple of other things on the DVR, then fell asleep not wanting to think about the Mets not necessarily winning every single game, which I swear I had begun to think of as the norm, contrary to precedent, evidence and logic that said it couldn’t go on forever like that. That’s how I dealt with it.
Then I woke up and they still lost. Oh well, gotta deal with it eventually.
by Jason Fry on 29 April 2015 12:24 am First off, why do I always have to recap the losses? I need to speak to management.
If you thought a 15-6 start meant a moratorium on asking what Terry Collins is thinking, well, you weren’t checking in with Mets Twitter as tonight’s game got away.
Why pitch to Giancarlo Stanton when you don’t have to? Why have Ruben Tejada bunt with Daniel Murphy on second and no one out? Why, after it turned out Terry gave Ruben the choice to bunt or swing away, let Ruben Tejada choose to do anything? Why leave a struggling Carlos Torres in for the fatal pitch with Michael Morse? WHY GOD WHY?
I asked all of those questions myself, and agreed with some of the insta-rage when things went badly. But not all of it. Deep sigh. Where to start?
How about with the fact that Rafael Montero pitched pretty well? Unlike the loss in Atlanta, he mixed his pitches effectively instead of trying to set a record for most consecutive fastballs thrown. And the confrontation with Stanton came down to one missed location — Montero had craftily worked Stanton in and out on both corners, but one pitch drifted a little too far and one of the best hitters in the game didn’t miss it. The end result wasn’t good, but it seemed like a step forward for a pretty talented young pitcher.
As for Tejada bunting, well, I wasn’t against the idea. (I’ll take Tepid Endorsements for $100, Alex!) You’re trying to maximize the chance of scoring at least one run and thereby accepting less of a chance at a big inning, but with a cold Kirk Nieuwenhuis, Anthony Recker and the pitcher’s spot behind Tejada I was OK with trying to grab the lead and keep it for six outs. What I wasn’t OK with was Tejada bunting horribly so that Murph was a dead duck at third. The next time I’m for that idea will be the first.
Then there were Torres’s labors. Carlos walked Martin Prado, popped up Stanton, walked Marcell Ozuna and then gave up the liner up the middle by Morse. Ironically, for all that Terry’s been guilty of riding relievers into the ground, the problem might have been that Torres hasn’t worked enough recently and so wasn’t sharp. As for Terry preferring a veteran trying to figure it out on the fly to Erik Goeddel or Hansel Robles (let alone Jeurys Familia), what can you say? Definitely conservative with a hint of mustiness, but not out-and-out crazy.
Maybe I’m just tired, but I find it hard to get too worked up about managers’ decisions and tics. Managers do a lot more damage consistently giving innings and at-bats to bad players then they do selecting matchups and bunting in specific situations, and these days the Mets seem to be keeping Terry on a tight leash in terms of personnel by denying him the likes of Eric Young Jr. and Bobby Abreu. (No, I wouldn’t put Michael Cuddyer in that group — dude can still hit, and has had some terrible luck so far this year.) A good manager might get you a win or two over a season and a bad manager might take one or two away, but over 162 games that’s probably too little to worry about compared with the drift you’ll get from simple luck. (The same goes for batting orders, which simply don’t matter enough to get worked up over.)
Managing is also one spot where I think we get too hung up on quantitative analysis as the ideal lens for everything. We can’t see what managers are doing in the clubhouse, in their offices, and on the field during workouts, and having never spent eight months as a traveling band of baseball players we don’t know the importance of all that — we have to rely on beat writers’ reports and then infer stuff from there. I can’t quantify the value of Collins having a heart to heart with Dillon Gee about his unpleasant winter, but I’m glad he did it. Along the same lines, I don’t know what a guy heralded as an instructor’s doing at 5:30 pm before games, or how he navigates players’ expectations about their roles, decides when to give them days off, selects when to push them into spots they may not be ready for and when to pull them back, and so forth.
I can’t measure any of that stuff, but it has to have some effect on the Mets and whether they win more than they lose. So is Terry good at that stuff? It seems to me that he is. Is the effect of all that more important than the cumulative effect of in-game moves that make me throw the remote? I wish we had a way to measure that.
As for losing to the Marlins in front of Loria and his Red Grooms sculpture, I don’t need a quantitative lens. Because that sucks any way you measure it.
by Greg Prince on 28 April 2015 3:50 am Your baseball instincts weren’t hopelessly off and you weren’t necessarily wrong. Well, for one night, yes, but don’t worry. There’s still plenty of time for what you were sure was going to happen to happen. It usually does — 24 separate occasions over the past 19 seasons are evidence that you weren’t concocting worst-case scenarios from thin, humid air.
In 2002, 2005 and 2011, the Mets visited the Marlins and didn’t lose a game in the bottom of the final inning played. In every season besides those three between 1996 and 2014, they did. How did it keep happening? By singles, doubles, homers, sac flies, a base on balls, even a couple of wild pitches. Your muscle memory shouldn’t be blamed for assuming that the first game the Mets played in Miami in 2015 would be the scene of a similar walkoff crime.
The game was just waiting to be lost. Or won, I suppose. But who in his Met mind is conditioned to think like that in South Florida?
Consider at the circumstances. For seven-and-a-half innings, there couldn’t have been less scoring. There couldn’t have been less anything, actually. Dillon Gee and Jarred Cosart swapped zeroes like kids frantically trading cards at recess, wary that the bell will ring them back to class before their transaction can conclude. Got it…got it…need it…no, got it…got it…c’mon, what else ya got?…got it…got it…
Both pitchers got everything they needed and didn’t much wait around to find out if they needed anything else. Neither hurler had a no-hitter going, but it was a perfect game if you’d made reservations for a not so late supper. Gee, in particular, found his groove and threatened to never leave it. No jams, few baserunners, hardly any pitches at all. Eight pitches in the first. Eight pitches in the second. A relatively mammoth eighteen in the third, but then six in the fourth, ten in the fifth, all of five in the sixth, only seven in the seventh.
A beautiful pace from a beautiful pitcher. Dillon Gee (ERA of 5.60 as he entered the fray) has the least impressive stuff in the New York Mets rotation, unless you count the stuff he’s made of, in which case, he’s every man’s equal. Sometimes he struggles. Monday night he did not. For seven innings, he was a clockwork orange and blue, a Metropolitan metronome who took the ball, threw the ball, got the batter, usually on the ground. Dillon stayed electric through two outs in the eighth.
Then he was unplugged just enough to remind you that when Dillon Gee works this deep into a game, something tends to go wrong. Granted, that’s mostly a symptom of Freddie Freeman in Atlanta two Junes ago, but we have long if selective memories. Thus, when Gee didn’t immediately nail down the third out of the eighth — Justin Bour dropped a single into a Lagares-free zone in center and Dee Gordon followed with a hit to left — the desire was to allow Dillon one more batter. The internal voice, however, was clearing its throat and grabbing a megaphone.
“GET HIM OUT OF THERE! GET HIM OUT OF THERE NOW! SOMETHING’S ABOUT TO GO TERRIBLY WRONG!”
Gee stayed in. Martin Prado lined the third consecutive single of the inning into the outfield. Pinch-runner Reid Brignac raced home with the first Marlin run, which was a genuine problem, because it was also the first run of any kind Monday. By official pitch count, Gee was the more conservation-minded of the starters, underpitching Cosart 70 to 93, but Cosart had gotten through his eight scoreless. Gee had to give way, with two out and two on in the eighth, to Carlos Torres, who fortunately proved himself the new market efficiency. He threw one pitch to Giancarlo Stanton and secured one out, thereby preventing three runs from the one swing we assumed would produce them.
If we don’t expect the Mets to lose in the bottom of the ninth or later at Miami, we expect to lose between the first and eighth to Stanton. That didn’t happen here. But would anything happen in the top of the ninth? We still needed a run, y’know. Recent data in the form of all those zeroes presented grim precedent.
Cosart was done. Steve Cishek was on. Cishek must be good in that he’s remained the Marlins’ closer since they opened Marlins Park. That dates back to 2012, which isn’t all that long ago, but in the transient world of the Loriatorium, it’s practically a lifetime. The most solace to be taken by his appearing on the mound to start the ninth was at least he wasn’t the guy who’d stymied the Mets for eight.
Juan Lagares led off and lofted a double to deep center where Juan Lagares would have tracked it down, but happily that was a competitive impossibility. Marcell Ozuna’s not being Juan Lagares proved key here, lending credence to the sense that the only man who could’ve caught the ball that was in play was the man who put it in play. And that man wound up on second with a double.
The Mets were in motion. The 2015 Mets, that is, the fellas who maybe aren’t a sure thing to blow a blowable game to the Marlins in Miami, where, as noted earlier, games get blown practically every Met year.
This year is a different year, though, huh? It’s a year when after Lagares doubles, Lucas Duda walks. It’s a year when after Michael Cuddyer doesn’t come through, Daniel Murphy does.
Murphy launched a one-one pitch to right that carried and carried and carried some more and you thought to yourself as it carried, “You know, I do believe that thing’s gonna keep going, and when it crosses the airspace directly atop the outfield fence and remains on the fly…yes, I do believe that’s a three-run homer Daniel Murphy just struck.”
Your belief was highly accurate. Murph had crushed a three-run bomb. It was 3-1, Mets, despite it having one pitch earlier been 1-0, Marlins. You wouldn’t call it unfathomable, given the Mets’ position in first place and all, but after expecting something to inevitably go wrong because it was the Marlins and because it was Murph (.174/.247/.333, even including the home run), you were delighted to build a new set of expectations.
Like the Mets can come behind in 2015. Like the Mets can swat away an unpleasant annoyance like the Marlins in 2015. Like a little stumble that ruins a weekend in 2015 won’t necessarily augur ill tidings for the week ahead.
It was the Mets’ 20th game of the season. There are no must-wins 20 games in. But this was one definitely worth having. And the Mets were about to have it. It would require the services of Jeurys Familia and an enormous assist from the recently heroic Daniel Murphy — deep in the shifted hole, throwing as he spun like a December dreidel, retiring Michael Morse for the penultimate out — but they got it in the bottom of the ninth. They won, 3-1, and they did it in two minutes less than two hours. They had their first “WHOA!” win of 2015, not just a stingily pitched, tightly defended effort, but one you didn’t have to be a practiced fatalist to be pretty sure they were about to lose. Hell, you basically knew they were going to lose, but then…WHOA!
The fates can change in a New York minute, though sometimes you might require 118 to be fully certain.
***
My joy over the exploits of Gee and Murphy (plus the Nets’ sudden Lazarus act versus the Hawks) stands in compartmentalized contrast to having to say a definitive good night to the New York Islanders of Uniondale, permanently installed four miles up the road from me as my home team until the Washington Capitals altered Nassau County geography for good. The Caps changed the Isles’ address in an excruciating seventh game that evoked the sting of October 19, 2006, except without the saving grace of a redemptive illusion that it’ll be better next year. It may be on the ice, but it doesn’t figure to be anywhere near the same when the Islanders are working out of another rink in another jurisdiction. They’ll be reasonably close by and they’ll still be the ones I root for when I’m moved to involve myself in non-baseball activities, yet I’ll miss them, if mostly on local principle. I’m no hockey maven, but their revival truly brightened the winter in these parts. If the last band of Islanders from Long Island did not ultimately live up to the accomplishments of the perennial Cup winners of my younger days, I think they somehow meant more to me on their way to the exit.
by Jason Fry on 27 April 2015 3:20 am Let it be chronicled that on their way back to the postseason, renewed relevance, New York supremacy or wherever it was we thought they were going, the 2015 New York Mets hit an obstacle.
Themselves.
Sunday night’s rubber game against that other New York team started well enough, with Curtis Granderson blasting a home run off Nathan Eovaldi. And everything the Mets hit in the first two innings was struck ferociously hard, making you think Eovaldi wasn’t long for occupancy of the mound.
But Eovaldi stuck it out, finding sanctuary in a pretty good slider, and my favorite Met Jon Niese showed he was more than capable of competing with Eovaldi to get the least out of his stuff. Niese surrendered a home run to Alex Rodriguez in the first (No. 659, but don’t tell the Yankees) and then started handing out doubles like party favors in the second, turning a 2-0 Met lead into a 5-2 deficit in no time.
Niese was lousy, but he had company. Daniel Murphy made a physical error instead of a mental one, which for the 2015 edition of Murph counts as progress; Wilmer Flores had an error of his own and a number of erratic throws; Michael Cuddyer gave the Yanks an extra run when he made an error in left, where he didn’t need to be given the existence of a DH; and Eric Campbell made an error at third and forgot how many outs there were, bringing an inning to a premature end.
In other words, everything was fine until, to quote Casey Stengel, the Mets commenced to play stupid.
Bumps in the road happen, and if you want to look for silver linings you can observe that a) Lucas Duda continues to mash everything in sight and b) Erik Goeddel and Alex Torres turned in very capable bullpen work. If you prefer your linings un-silver, the Mets are probably landing in Miami as I type this and tomorrow night tangle with a Marlins team that seems to have righted itself, with Giancarlo Stanton back to his usual hobby of murderizing baseballs. (Look at this clip from Philadelphia — Stanton’s home-run ball could have killed a fan in left field.)
Turn in the kind of flat, we-flew-all-night performance that’s happened all too often in recent Met years and our 11-game streak of bliss will have turned into dumping three of four. Which wouldn’t be fun at all.
Sleep well, boys. There’s work to do.
by Greg Prince on 25 April 2015 9:03 pm Thanks for coming along. I know you hate when I drag you shopping, especially when there’s been so much riveting local sports on TV, but with all I needed to pick up for my Saturday night paragraph, I needed somebody’s opinion on how it all goes together.
I’m gonna try all these facts on for size. Be honest and tell me what you think.
• “The first-place Mets…”
Ah, you already knew that fit.
• “The first-place Mets, who recently won eleven consecutive games…”
That’s not too much, is it?
• “The first-place Mets, who recently won eleven consecutive games, broke their losing streak at one….”
One wasn’t technically a streak, but it doesn’t look bad to have it tucked in the back where you can barely see it, right?
• “The first-place Mets, who recently won eleven consecutive games, broke their losing streak at one and began a new winning streak…”
A little showy, but I think it works.
• “The first-place Mets, who recently won eleven consecutive games, broke their losing streak at one and began a new winning streak by defeating their crosstown rivals, the Yankees, 8-2, at Yankee Stadium…”
I can’t help it — I love to accessorize!
• “The first-place Mets, who recently won eleven consecutive games, broke their losing streak at one and began a new winning streak by defeating their crosstown rivals, the Yankees, 8-2, at Yankee Stadium, behind eight and two-thirds innings of solid pitching from undefeated ace Matt Harvey (4-0)…”
You know that it’s the details that make the outfit.
• “The first-place Mets, who recently won eleven consecutive games, broke their losing streak at one and began a new winning streak by defeating their crosstown rivals, the Yankees, 8-2, at Yankee Stadium, behind eight and two-thirds innings of solid pitching from undefeated ace Matt Harvey (4-0), home runs off the bats of Lucas Duda, Kevin Plawecki (the first of his career) and Eric Campbell…”
Y’think that overdoing it? I don’t think you can overdo that sort of thing. It makes a very powerful statement when you see them one after another.
• “The first-place Mets, who recently won eleven consecutive games, broke their losing streak at one and began a new winning streak by defeating their crosstown rivals, the Yankees, 8-2, at Yankee Stadium, behind eight and two-thirds innings of solid pitching from undefeated ace Matt Harvey (4-0), home runs off the bats of Lucas Duda, Kevin Plawecki (the first of his career) and Eric Campbell, along with four hits from Juan Lagares and a pair of RBIs from Wilmer Flores…”
You can’t say all of this doesn’t go together.
• “The first-place Mets, who recently won eleven consecutive games, broke their losing streak at one and began a new winning streak by defeating their crosstown rivals, the Yankees, 8-2, at Yankee Stadium, behind eight and two-thirds innings of solid pitching from undefeated ace Matt Harvey (4-0), home runs off the bats of Lucas Duda, Kevin Plawecki (the first of his career) and Eric Campbell, along with four hits from Juan Lagares and a pair of RBIs from Wilmer Flores, extending their lead over the preseason division favorite Nationals to seven games…”
I think I have a pretty complete ensemble here, but I feel a little something’s missing.
• “The first-place Mets, who recently won eleven consecutive games, broke their losing streak at one and began a new winning streak by defeating their crosstown rivals, the Yankees, 8-2, at Yankee Stadium, behind eight and two-thirds innings of solid pitching from undefeated ace Matt Harvey (4-0), home runs off the bats of Lucas Duda, Kevin Plawecki (the first of his career) and Eric Campbell, along with four hits from Juan Lagares and a pair of RBIs from Wilmer Flores, extending their lead over the preseason division favorite Nationals to seven games and completing a joyous day in New York sports that began with the Brooklyn Nets prevailing over the Atlanta Hawks at Barclays Center and the New York Islanders downing the Washington Capitals at Nassau Coliseum in their respective playoff matchups.”
Perfect! Isn’t it?
Yes, yes, yes, I’ve got a lot going on here, but you know how I feel about these things. I truly believe there’s no such thing as a paragraph being overdressed for a Saturday night on the town, especially a Saturday night after a Saturday afternoon like that.
by Jason Fry on 25 April 2015 12:52 am Winning streaks end, from the innumerable one-gamers to the historic 11-gamers. One day we’ll have an even longer one. It’ll end too.
There are all sorts of ways to lose a ballgame — insane Gotterdammerungs that end with one team barely standing, nail-biters that don’t go your way, slothful snoozefests that never get started, relievers-hiding-under-the-stands fiascos that can’t end soon enough.
Tonight’s game? It was lost for a pair of intertwined reasons: Jacob deGrom wasn’t very good, while Michael Pineda was.
DeGrom’s pitches were consistently too high, and as a result they went too far, with Mark Teixeira depositing two fastballs down the right-field line and into the stands at Yankee Stadium. Despite my crabby tweet about parks that ought to have major-league dimensions, both would have been gone at Citi Field too, though Jacoby Ellsbury‘s third-inning solo homer would have been a moderately difficult catch in the right-center alley. And even the cleverest complaints about the Yankees’ ludicrous park can’t make up for the unhappy truth that the Mets were taking aim at the same fences the Yankees were.
The difference was the Mets weren’t reaching them, and they weren’t reaching them because Pineda was fabulous, carving hitters up with a truly evil slider. Kevin Plawecki‘s at-bat in the top of the fifth was simply cruel. Plawecki arrived at the plate with one out and Mets on first and third. The Mets were down 6-0, it’s true, but an 11-game winning streak allows you to fantasize a bit. It was early … OK, it was relatively early, the Mets’ only out of the inning had come when Teixeira made a nice play to rob Daniel Murphy of a double, and it was Yankee Stadium. Pull one over that silly porch and it would be 6-3 with 14 outs left to play with, and who knows?
Pineda got a first strike on Plawecki with a darting, vicious slider. Then he threw another one that was even more hellacious. Plawecki straightened up and you could forgive him if he was thinking, “They sure don’t throw shit like that in Triple-A.” The situation was still the same, but Plawecki was doomed. He knew it and I knew it and you did too. He was pre-out, with the only question how the sentence would come down. He took a pitch, fouled one off, and Pineda erased him on another unhittable slider, one that bore down on the center of the plate at the knee and then swerved sharply at Plawecki’s foot.
Sometimes your pitcher is overamped or doesn’t have the feel or things just don’t come together. It happens — hell, it happens 25 times a year or so. Sometimes the other team’s pitcher has all his pitches working at once and can hit a dime over and over again at 60 feet six inches. That happens 20-odd times a year too. Sometimes these things coincide and nothing but loyalty holds you there until the loss is official.
I found exactly two positives from the night. One was the flawless debut of Hansel Robles, Met No. 992 in our fitfully illustrious history, who arrived with nobody out and men on first and second and none other than Alex Rodriguez awaiting him. A-Rod reached on an infield single to load the bases, but no problem: Robles coaxed a foul pop from Teixeira, gunned down Brian McCann with a fastball, and got old friend Carlos Beltran with a slider. The game’s not that easy, but no reason to tell the newest Met that. He’ll find out soon enough; for tonight, he earned the right to be happy.
The other positive? It was that the Mets got waxed by the Yankees and I was annoyed because they lost and not because of who they lost to.
The Yankees are a perfectly fine 10-7 and tied for first place. (Plus, you know, rings and shit.) But they’re old and fragile, they play boring baseball, their announcers are terrible, their park’s a corporate mausoleum, and their self-awareness of their own undeniably rich history has curdled into an embarrassing haste to frantically dry-hump anything they can monetize. Bernie Williams, a nice guy and respectable member of the Hall of Very Good, signed a minor-league deal and then retirement papers this afternoon despite having not thrown a baseball in anger since before the world first saw an iPhone. He threw out the first pitch and will be back next month so the Yankees can a) sell more tickets; and b) retire his number, which I think even Yankee fans would admit isn’t a slam-dunk. I kind of hoped the Mets would bring out, say, Rusty Staub to announce he was retiring too, but they chose the high road.
Relatively harmless, I suppose, but the odd counterpart was this: If it had been Alex Rodriguez hitting two homers tonight — and thereby tying Willie Mays for fourth on the all-time list — some Steinbrenner would have pulled a fire alarm and evacuated the stadium so the Yankees didn’t have to admit it was happening. This is part of a bizarre legal battle between the team and its best player. The Yankees have had to be shamed into even noting in agate type that A-Rod is nearing one of those baseball numbers whose significance nearly every fan can instantly identify: 660 means Willie Mays, and if you’ve got a player doing anything that puts him in the same conversation as WILLIE FUCKING MAYS it’s notable, even if you’re pissed about steroids and everyone agrees A-Rod is kind of a tool and most importantly of all you don’t want to pay him $6 million.
But look, everybody — there’s Bernie Williams.
You know what? Whatever. The Yankees have always been a bizarre mix of vainglorious and petty, but in the last couple of years they’ve become a parody, a funhouse-mirror version of themselves. Rather than be enraged by them, I just find them embarrassing. We lost to them and I shrugged.
Here’s hoping we win tomorrow — and then win the next 11 games after that.
And if not? Well, it happens.
by Greg Prince on 24 April 2015 1:50 am And on the eleventh day, they did precisely what they’d been doing on the ten days that preceded it.
They won.
It’s a daily exercise with these Mets, now historically so. In front of your frozen but grateful blogger, his shivering photographer pal and scattered others who — like Sharon Chapman and me — value excellence over warmth, our team tied its franchise record for most consecutive wins: eleven. They also completed the first-ever homestand in which ten Mets games were played and ten Mets games were won.
By the Mets, in case you require clarification.
The size of the crowd at the moment the current winning streak reached 1969, 1972, 1986 and 1990 proportions might not have numbered 7,917, which is the sum total you get when you add those four sets of digits. Hardy as those of us who stayed in attendance to the final out were, this occasion deserved a grander setting, or at least a warmer one.
Then again, these are the 2015 Mets. They play through any conditions and they win through all of them.
 Unseasonably chilly. Unreasonably sizzling. (Photo by Sharon Chapman) It was as frigid at Citi Field on Thursday as the Mets are hot. Three prolonged replay challenges were issued by the two managers, but they paled in comparison to the challenge presented to we loyalists who stared — bundled or otherwise — into the face of Flushing Bay’s killer winds. But who cares about the unseasonable chill when the season is unreasonably sizzling? How often do you show up to an atmosphere reminiscent of (as Sharon observed) Sharknado 2 and not wind up feeling like you’re an extra in a disaster movie? More to the point, how often do you watch the Mets polish off the Braves on the heels of burying the Marlins right after sweeping the Phillies?
You gotta stick around to bear witness to the conclusion of the 10-0 homestand responsible for 90.9% of the eleven-game streak. This is history that’s been unfolding before our rapidly believing eyes. That “eleven in a row, achieved four times, first in 1969…” business is strong stuff in Met lore. I’ve been hearing about eleven straight wins my entire sentient fan life, a period that began a few months after the first of those four-now-five streaks. The Mets never winning more games than precisely that many consecutively was established for me as canon by Lindsey and Ralph and Bob and drilled into my consciousness forever more. It was the untopped therefore untoppable benchmark, the puffiest cumulus cloud of franchise flawlessness imaginable. When the Mets are as hot as hot can be, they win eleven in a row.
Maybe the record will stand in perpetuity, set and/or tied five times, never to be bettered. Or perhaps we’ll be able to use the number that comes after eleven in less than 24 hours. That would be wonderful.
For now, though, eleven consecutive wins is utterly Amazin’ to consider, while the ten out of ten at home is its own piece of heaven. I’ve been keeping track, since the very first time I entered Shea Stadium in 1973, of how the Mets do when I’m there. I jot the result and the essentials down in a steno pad. I filled one for Shea and am in the process of doing the same for Citi. I’ve never started a season by going to four games as I have in 2015 and writing down a W all four times.
Until now.
It almost feels like cheating. “Geez,” I hear myself think, “I’m 4-0 only because I could’ve gone to any four games of the ten they’ve played at home thus far and seen a win. If I could’ve gone to all ten, I’d be 10-0 at Citi Field this year, just like the Mets.” As if there’s something wrong with that.
There’s nothing wrong with that. That’s living the dream. We go to Citi Field — no matter how nightmarish the weather — and we see our team win. It’s a dream come true. It’s not rigged, it’s not scripted, it’s not preordained. Despite the reboot of those splendid “The Magic is Back” t-shirts via the visionary entrepreneurship of The 7 Line, it’s not sprinkled with blue and orange pixie dust. It’s simply deserved. I don’t mean we’re swell guys and gals and therefore have this coming to us (I’d like to think that, but so would 29 other packs of fans). I mean the Mets go after each game determined to win it and they suss out every possible route to victory, working toward it and earning every bit of it.
“They find a way to win” is one of those phrases you usually hear applied to scrappy underdogs who have to repeatedly come from far behind and rely on supernatural breaks to keep getting lucky, The Magic is Back-style. These Mets don’t really proceed like that. Finding a way to win seems like the crux of their job description. The difference between them and the “they pulled it out” type of enterprise that “finds a way to win” is the 2015 Mets find a way to win virtually every half-inning.
They yield no ground in their search for an edge. They swing away immediately. They work the count interminably. They (usually) throw to the right base. They appear to have thought every situation through before it occurs. They generally display terrific instincts. They are logical in their approach. They are breathtakingly daring. They choke off the opposition’s rallies. They are impossible to foil. They take what the other team gives them. They go after what they have to have.
And, as is implicit in an eleven-game winning streak, they don’t lose.
I’ve studied up on 1969’s eleven-gamer and how it turned the franchise around. I remember the broad outlines of 1972’s record-matcher and the statement it was making until the fracturing of essential bones spoke louder. I have very clear and specific memories of how eleven straight got powerfully strung together in 1986 and again in 1990. I have just lived through the eleven wins in a row, already in progress, from 2015.
All have a stretch of 11-0 in common, yet I don’t see many similarities now to how things coalesced exactly as statistically beautifully as they did then. There is little sense of the “God took an apartment in New York City” explanation that defines the spirit of 1969’s initial surge. Rusty Staub and Willie Mays haven’t alighted among mere mortals to elevate a latter-day 1972. Nobody talked about this team being poised to “dominate” as Davey Johnson promised 1986’s Mets would (which they did). And when the 1990 Mets decided to rejoin the living, it was obvious how capable they were of reeling off win after win after win. Those were the Mets of Strawberry at his peak, Jefferies when he wasn’t his own worst enemy, Viola on a roll and a bunch of teammates who were either awesome as a rule or astounding for a while. The surprise wasn’t that the 1990 Mets won eleven in a row. The surprise was that the 1990 Mets didn’t win eleven in a row every eleven games.
This edition, the 2015 Mets, was supposed to be competitive to the point of maybe contending for that theoretically graspable second Wild Card, the least brassy of the brass rings available to a competent ballclub with a modicum of aspiration. If these Mets weren’t 13-3, nobody would be asking why the hell not?
Instead, they’re 13-3 — in first by 4½ games, best record in the majors — and, after continued exposure to their matter-of-fact charms, we are asking, well, why the hell not? They may not strike the impartial observer as great. But it can’t be argued they’re not good to the extreme.
On Thursday, every time something threatened to go wrong, the Mets dispatched the threat with ease. A bases-loaded situation presented itself in the bottom of the first to their least effective hitter to date, Daniel Murphy. Murphy made the most of it, doubling in all three runners, commencing a four-RBI day. Daniel also made a poor defensive decision that led to an unnecessary run in the fourth. That was two innings after a blockheaded interpretation of the can’t-block-the-plate rule awarded the Braves a run that had been legitimately cut down at the plate.
Bartolo Colon surely noticed he was pitching in a 3-3 game that shouldn’t have been any worse than 3-1, but it didn’t distract him from his myriad tasks at hand. Like skillfully bunting a runner over in the fifth. Like brilliantly picking a runner off first (by himself) in the sixth. Like never giving up another run after fleeting misfortune bit him. With Colon keeping Atlanta’s runs at three through six, the Mets could stroll to glory.
Brave pitchers weren’t nearly so disciplined. The Mets’ first inning was built on three walks from Julio Teheran to the first four batters he saw. The Mets’ fifth inning — a three-pitcher production, directed by hacky Fredi Gonzalez — took a misplayed grounder; a steal on a strikeout; a wild pitch; and another three walks to another set of four batters, and turned it into the go-ahead run. Two singles, a fielder’s choice, a balk and another single provided tack-on insurance in the seventh.
By then, it was 6-3. Bartolo had already passed the baton to Buddy Carlyle. Buddy would slap it in the left palm of Alex Torres, who in turn relayed it to Jeurys Familia for the final sprint. In the seventh, eighth and ninth, Atlanta sent eleven batters to the plate. They produced a single and a walk but no runs. It never felt like they couldn’t come back (they still model tomahawks on their jerseys and they still pay Freddie Freeman to stoke our anxieties), but the more you watched the Mets, the more you were certain the Braves wouldn’t come back.
There were enough unstable elements darting about this gust-ridden eleventh consecutive win to suggest an alternate outcome was possible, but the Mets fan who stayed at his seat until he was standing and vigorously clapping his gloved hands while history beckoned with two out in the ninth knew no such answer was blowing in the wind. The Mets were going to win this one, like they’d won the previous ten.
With no doubt from them and oodles of joy for us.
A podcast appearance of a different stripe: I joined Yanks Go Yard to talk Subway Series and generally obsess on the Mets some more. Listen here, if you dare.
by Jason Fry on 23 April 2015 1:10 am I’ve been thinking of this one game. I was in Connecticut. The Mets were in Atlanta. They were playing the Braves on a Saturday night and Dillon Gee wasn’t very good.
Since that game I’ve driven back to New York, worked my butt off for three days and nights, flown to California where I spent three days at a Star Wars convention, flown back and gotten un-jetlagged. I’ve done a lot of things. You have too. There are Mets fans who’ve come down with really nasty flus, been laid out, started feeling better and declared themselves fit for duty. Somewhere out there babies have been born, watched over in hospitals, sent home and their parents are getting the hang of this wonderful new thing. At least three big movie trailers have set the Internet a-flutter. I haven’t paid attention but I’m sure at least three eye-rolling political kerfuffles have done the same. Another Saturday night’s come and gone and now another one’s in view. The aforementioned Dillon Gee’s rested up, started another game, rested some more, had a heart-to-heart with his manager and started yet again.
You know what hasn’t happened during that time when lots of other stuff has happened?
The Mets haven’t lost.
Not once. Not at all. They’ve won 10 in a row. They’re playing .800 ball on the season. They’re in first place by a but-wait-it’s-April 3 1/2 games.
They’re playing nearly perfect baseball, and they’re doing it despite losing guys like it’s World War I.
These are pinch-me days and nights.
Last night was a perfect example. The Mets seemed flat after a half-hour’s rain delay, falling behind the Braves 1-0 and then 2-1. But they hung in there. And they kept making plays. And things kept happening that made you raise an eyebrow.
Like Ruben Tejada making a leaping catch at second that ended with the ball perched atop a waffle cone of glove. As he returned to Earth, Tejada snapped his mitt and the ball nestled itself obediently into the leather, because that’s what happens when you’re winning 10 in a row.
Or Gee facing trouble in the fourth, springing off the mound to seize a grounder, firing the ball to second base at an awkward angle, not taking off the umpire’s head and pumping his fist at the 1-6-3 double play.
Or Wilmer Flores looking brave afield and stalwart at the plate, rifling a home run into the party deck to draw the Mets even.
Or Juan Lagares making a catch for the ages, somehow looking behind him and tracking a ball cutting to his left and putting his glove in the perfect position to reel it in. “That’s over his head,” I said to Emily with the ball in flight. “The heck it is,” said Juan Lagares.
Or Sean Gilmartin running into trouble retiring lefties, which is the sum total of his job, and exiting to have Buddy Carlyle coolly dispatch Jonny Gomes. Carlyle would be rewarded with a W, and deservedly so.
Or Curtis Granderson getting his Eddie Gaedel on, crouching beneath a 3-2 pitch and completing the journey from 0-2 count to base on balls. (And, along the way, serving as Exhibit A if you need to explain to your kid why batting average is a dumb stat.) Of course Lagares then executed a perfect hit-and-run, with poor Jace Peterson reversing for the ball he could no longer reach, like an extra in a Bugs Bunny cartoon and Lucas Duda smacking the go-ahead single.
Trouble? Nah. Jeurys Familia dispatched the Braves with no drama in the ninth, and the good guys had won, again.
We’ll now to the obligatory cautions. This isn’t to avert the baleful eyes of the baseball gods, but because the only way to survive baseball is to remember it’s an unfair game.
The Mets aren’t going to win five out of six one-run games the rest of the year. They had a 10-game winning streak in 2008, a year that ended about as painfully as one might imagine. The 2010 Mets went 21-7 over one giddy stretch in a thoroughly ungiddy season. The ’72 Mets started out 30-11 and didn’t win a thing. There will be weeks where nothing goes right and you can feel doom tiptoeing closer with every ball booted and batter walked. The manager and the players will talk about grinding it out and being a little flat and we will scoff and mutter and call for heads to roll. When those days arrive — and arrive they will — remembering how we floated through April will be no comfort whatsoever. Keep that in mind now so you’re not so torn up by it later, even though you will be.
But that’s not to say you shouldn’t be enjoying what’s happening now. You should be enjoying it even more. Go outside and laugh into the blue sky. Grin at Yankee fans. Declare to everyone who asks and even those who don’t that you’re a fan of the best team in baseball. (Hey, you could look it up.) Suggest that hey, let’s play two. Take your broom to Citi Field.
Baseball’s an unfair game. Right now it’s being unfair to our opponents. Just enjoy the pinch-me days, however long they last.
by Greg Prince on 22 April 2015 7:47 am If you’re a sports fan, the best Aprils are the most stressful Aprils. In competitive context, such Aprils are the least cruellest of months, but they can play on your nerves.
The two teams I root for in winter, the Nets and the Islanders, have made it to spring’s playoffs. It beats their having to go home with the Philadelphia hoi polloi — which is often on their respective agendas this time of year — but their graduation to postseason doesn’t come without a cost. Every inbounds pass, every puck not cleared, every turn of momentum is a potential killer. One too many wrong moves and their Aprils are suddenly over. For that matter, any given right move is tricky to emotionally handle. When the Islanders grab a one-goal lead or the Nets improbably slice a lead to a single bucket, I just assume everything’s going to be French fries and gravy from here on out. They’ll win this game, they’ll win this series, I wonder how much I should put aside for commemorative t-shirts. I simply can’t envision anything going awry, so when the slightest thing inevitably does go off course, I am practically shattered inside.
And that’s just hockey and basketball, which are mere diversions from my true fan calling.
The Mets on a nine-game winning streak in April is approximately nine kajillion times better than the Mets on a nine-game losing streak in April. That’s probably understating the difference given the time of the season we’re in currently. You get this hot this early then you’re atop the heap from practically the get-go (for proof, please examine this morning’s edition of the 2015 National League East standings). On the other hand, a nine-game winning streak that plops itself down toward the tail end of a campaign that’s already been spayed or neutered serves mostly to stick its tongue out at you. Where, I can remember asking myself as the Mets went on hollow win binges in the latter stages of 1992 and 2002, was this when we needed it?
To approach the kind of finish for which the Nets (unlikely) and the Islanders (who knows?) are angling, you need to have a massive rollout. The proportions of the Met start to date are positively and historically ginormous. Everything’s coming up Howie Roses, you may have noticed.
At Citi Field against the second-place Braves Tuesday night, the night when the first-place Mets won their ninth game in a row, 7-1, and extended their record to a nearly unprecedented 11-3 — a standard happily shared with 1986 — they were their typical unstoppable selves. Jon Niese (6.1 IP, 1 ER) was smooth enough to pass for silk. Curtis Granderson remembered to retrieve his bat from cold storage and drove in four runs, thus increasing his season total to exactly four. Kevin Plawecki…well, what can you say about a major league debut that includes two hits, a bullet of a throw to second and the handling of five pitchers who gave up five hits among them?
We already had a fairly state-of-the-art catcher, yet you know how it is when they release the sleeker, shinier model, especially when the not so old one gets a little dinged around the edges and needs to be reset; it’s just hard to resist such an enticing upgrade. Right now you can’t blame us for being mesmerized by the Plawecki demo. Might we still come across some bugs that will impede its apps? Ah, ring it up and we’ll figure that out once we get it home.
Transfer the rate at which the Mets are going to a participant in the NBA or NHL playoffs and you’d have a team legitimately on the verge of a championship. But April in baseball is only the beginning, and that beginning, no matter how it sizzles, leads to a whole lot of middle that isn’t nearly as neat to forecast. I can’t imagine the Mets will maintain their 9-0 or even their lesser 11-3 pace forever, but the thing is, when they’re going this well, I can’t imagine they won’t.
That’s a scary way to think. Fun, but scary.
by Greg Prince on 20 April 2015 5:20 am This, I thought as I sat in Promenade Box 405 during the sun-soaked bottom of the fourth on Sunday, is where the dream has at last arrived to meet reality. All those computer-generated images of bustling new Mets Ballpark from 2006 tried to capture what the future would look like. It would have people and enthusiasm and, presumably, winning. It was what everything was leading up to.
 There used to be the idea of a ballpark here. At last, it actually exists the way it oughta be. The path, we know, went astray. But now, nine years after we were shown our first glimpse of the concept that would soon be dubbed Citi Field — and six since everything about the team and the facility it inhabits had begun to reliably disappoint us — the course corrected itself.
Met after Met was reaching base.
Run after run was crossing home plate.
Seat after seat was filled.
Cow-Bell Man, modeling the jersey of the day’s starting pitcher, was hustling from section to section and leading whole groups in chants of LET’S GO METS!
Whole groups were responding to his cue.
The Mets, in turn, were responding to them.
To us.
I wanted to freeze the moment. I have, I suppose. I will keep it with me for at least the rest of this season. The fourth inning on April 19 was the instant when either:
a) the Mets once and for all transcended the miasma that had defined them for more than a half-a-decade and elevated themselves onto a whole new level of competence, competitiveness and contention that would stoke our inner fires for the foreseeable future and make us proud for the rest of our days; or
b) the Mets experienced their high point of 2015, because it was all about to go achily downhill from there.
It was a fine half-inning, that bottom of the fourth. The Mets just kept coming against the Marlins until they couldn’t be held back. Singles and walks and singles and walks and a booming three-run double and the starting pitcher lining out and another walk and another single and when the dust cloud that had been hovering over the joint since 2009 evaporated, the Mets were leading the Marlins, 7-1.
They were in first place, they were undefeated at home, they were riding their longest winning streak in five years and they had their ace taking the ball to protect a six-run lead against an surprisingly inept and seemingly demoralized opponent. We, the fans, had found our voice in the preceding week, remembering what it was like to pour ourselves into baseball games again, taking our team seriously and blissfully.
Going to the fifth, how could it get better than that?
It couldn’t. It could only get worse.
The good news, when the afternoon was over, was that the Mets remained winners. They secured (barely) their eighth consecutive victory, matching two such spurts from 2010, a season nobody associates with uninterrupted winning, but it actually happened. It happened in the first half. The Mets went to hell in the second half. We weren’t surprised. Here, in 2015, we’ve seen the calendars and understood it was April, but we’ve proceed in the vein of “if April’s like this, we can’t way for May and June and everything that follows.”
And maybe we still will see it like that when our schedule resumes Tuesday night against second-place Atlanta. If you were in Promenade or anywhere at Citi Field on Sunday as I was, I suspect you maintained that vibe when Jeurys Familia was grounding out the perpetually looming Giancarlo Stanton to seal the four-game sweep and create the eight-game streak. You couldn’t have not been caught up in the momentum that was still in the air from the bottom of the fourth, when those seven runs scored and the ball was returned to Matt Harvey to make the rest of the affair academic.
At the same time, your life as a Mets fan had gone through myriad changes in the innings it took to complete the journey to eight straight.
First, there was the matter of Harvey himself, who it turned out was pitching under the influence of some horrible virus. Mind you, he wasn’t getting lit up by the Marlins the way had had been the last time I sat in Promenade to see him pitch. That was in 2013, against the Tigers, the day he didn’t have it, the day that led to the announcement he wouldn’t be on the mound again for an indeterminate period of eternal waiting. But the Marlins were getting hits, and I couldn’t help but think, “I sure hope the Mets add to this 7-1 lead.”
Second, there was the Mets lineup not adding to that 7-1 lead. Harvey got a hit. Juan Lagares got one later. That was it. The unstoppable Mets from the fourth went into sleep mode from the fifth onward.
Third, the effort to push Harvey through the seventh backfired. We didn’t know he’d been sick that morning. We just figured he ran out of gas. That’s OK. He is still technically coming back from an extended absence; it just seems like he’s been throwing shutouts without pause forever.
Fourth, after Harvey exited with two on, nobody out and his lead down to 7-3, Jerry Blevins entered to settle down our simmering nerves. He retired Ichiro Suzuki on a little line drive to first. He then induced a liner to the mound from Dee Gordon, and it, too, resulted in an out. Well, two outs, sort of. The ball bounced off some element of Blevins’s body and he was able to glove it and toss it to first to get the runner. So Gordon was out.
Fifth, Blevins was out. That liner fractured Jerry’s left forearm, the one he uses for pitching. We didn’t know that yet in Promenade. We just saw him leaving for what we decided were precautionary reasons. It had to be a precaution, right? You can’t be too careful with the newly obtained glue to your bullpen. Besides, it was still a four-run lead, we were still headed toward an eight-game streak and (for some of us) there was the added bonus of learning the Islanders had just defeated the Capitals in overtime. I was in YES YES YES mode. I did not want to insert an OUCH into the middle of my Sunday euphoria.
Sixth, Alex Torres replaced Blevins in one of those “he’ll get all the time he needs to warm up” situations, which never sit well. Sure enough, Torres threw a wild pitch that made it 7-4 before striking out Christian Yelich.
Seventh, why didn’t Lucas Duda blast a three-run homer to cap the bottom of the fourth when he had he chance? Three innings had passed since he had the golden opportunity to put the game away (as if a six-run edge and Matt Harvey weren’t reassurance enough) and I was still desperately mentally seeking tack-on runs.
Eighth, Brad Hand started the bottom of the seventh hitting Travis d’Arnaud’s hand. I would’ve preferred Travis d’Arnaud had hit Brad Hand’s d’Arnaud. It doesn’t work that way. D’Arnaud was instantly removed. This didn’t look like a precaution. This looked like a truckload of trouble.
Ninth, Buddy Carlyle, the bullpen savior from Opening Day and Saturday night, had nothing in the eighth, but where was Terry Collins going to turn? He’d already used his top two lefties, he was saving his closer for an inning later and what happened to our overloaded eight-man bullpen anyway? Even our seven-man bullpen, now that Blevins was being examined somewhere in the stadium bowels, seemed amazingly inadequate to the task of extinguishing the Miami Marlins. Buddy, who’s been persevering in baseball since Dallas Green was making the calls to the Met bullpen, persevered to finish out the inning, which was great. Less great: It was now 7-6.
Tenth, my briefly recharged phone had enough juice left in it to bring me up to speed on the Mets missing in action. Blevins had suffered a fracture. D’Arnaud had suffered a fracture, too. His right hand was broken. Anybody within earshot of me who didn’t know this news knew it soon enough by my repeated use of a particular four-letter word. The Mets were going for eight wins in a row. I may have racked up a dozen consecutive expletives.
Eleventh, the Marlins got the tying run to second off Familia. It all came down to Stanton. It always comes down to Stanton. Fortunately, the final encounter in which he was involved came down on the side of Familia and the Mets. What was once a 7-1 romp ended a 7-6 nailbiter…with casualties.
A win being a win, I was more celebratory than mournful. I willfully ignored what happened to our budding star catcher and our essential lefty reliever. I tried to forget that d’Arnaud and Blevins had joined the unparticipating ranks of Edgin, Wheeler, Black, Mejia and Wright. I temporarily overcame my inevitable tetherance to the past and tamped down my impulse to invoke 1972, the year when a superb Met start (25-7) was obliterated by an outbreak of injuries. I wondered a little about what Kevin Plawecki would show as the new catcher and Hansel Robles would add to the bullpen, but neither of those pending callups would appear at Citi Field until Tuesday, and on Sunday that was a world away.
I wanted to stay in the world we’d been building since last Monday, when the Mets came home and took three of three from the Phillies and four of four from the Marlins while we urged them on with the kind of passion previously thought to have fallen victim to deep-seated cynicism and a diligent demolition crew. I wanted this week to go on forever, or at least into next week. I wanted the fourth inning to stay with me.
It did. It has. It will.
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