The blog for Mets fans
who like to read
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.
Got something to say? Leave a comment, or email us at faithandfear@gmail.com. (Sorry, but we have no interest in ads, sponsored content or guest posts.)
Need our RSS feed? It's here.
Visit our Facebook page, or drop by the personal pages for Greg and Jason.
Or follow us on Twitter: Here's Greg, and here's Jason.
|
by Jason Fry on 4 September 2014 1:28 am The best thing about tonight’s 4-3 victory over the Marlins? It was a relatively normal baseball game.
It wasn’t Monday night’s six-error shitshow in which the Marlins won by sucking less. Nor was it Tuesday night’s ludicrous display of non-pitching, with Jon Niese pitching as badly as he could without actually losing and old non-friend Brad Penny getting whacked around. It was a relatively normal, crisply played ballgame. Which was a relief.
You had some good storylines, of course — baseball always provides those. There was Matt den Dekker chipping in three hits and Kirk Nieuwenhuis walking three times — a skill he didn’t seem to have even heard of two years ago — while Curtis Granderson protected his .210 average on the radioactive green pine of Lorialand. There was Jacob deGrom pulling a Wheeler by pitching well but threatening to run out of bullets by the fifth inning. There was Giancarlo Stanton hitting a line drive into the left-field seats that might have behanded the fan who was lucky enough to not catch it, and the oddity that Stanton’s blow wasn’t the most impressive of the night: Nieuwenhuis hit a ball into the second deck that disappointed me only because it didn’t send a satellite tumbling out of orbit to destroy that Red Grooms monstrosity.
Oh, and you had your nightly trigger for grumbling about Terry Collins. Collins threw poor Dario Alvarez into the fire for his first major-league appearance with the tying run on third and Christian Yelich up, which didn’t work — Yelich promptly singled in the tying run and Alvarez was gone after two pitches. Collins then let Carlos Torres bat in the top of the eighth with the bases loaded and two out and the Mets trying to extend a 4-2 lead. Torres struck out, then gave up the Stanton homer in the bottom half of the eighth anyway. The alibi for Terry is that the Mets are short-handed (as they always are), what with Josh Edgin and Daisuke Matsuzaka suffering cranky elbows and the team reluctant to strip Las Vegas for the playoffs. Plus Terry might be belatedly worried about Jeurys Familia‘s arm falling off, or perhaps concerned that Familia’s next throw to a base might actually maim one of his infielders.
I won’t claim any of those moves made much sense to me, but I’m not on the Fire Terry bus. Why not? Well, a few reasons, none of which is exactly a ringing endorsement:
1) The Mets aren’t going to do it, and I’m too old and tired to waste my energy campaigning for something that isn’t going to happen. Jeff Wilpon probably forces his employees to search the couch cushions for nickels each night; you think he’s going to pay Terry a million bucks to go fishing next year?
2) I think we overrate how important managers are to on-field results, and vastly overrate how much of a difference changing them will make. If you told me Joe Maddon was available, I’d take to Twitter and start baying at the moon for Terry to go. Failing that, though, every manager does pretty much the same stuff: He bunts despite the math indicating bunting is stupid, picks a pet reliever and tries to destroy his arm, and gives bland answers to obvious questions asked by bored beat writers. Baseball is undergoing a strategic renaissance in everything from player development to roster construction and on-field strategy, but it’s front offices that are the agents of change. Managers? Please. If you beamed in your average manager from the 1950s, you’d have to tell him to manage to the save rule whether or not it makes sense and forbid him to let a starter throw 180 pitches. (Unless you’ve rehired Dusty Baker, in which case tough luck.) If he followed those rules you’d probably never notice the change.
3) What is the attraction of Wally Backman beyond his not being Terry Collins? I will listen if you give me a reason, backed with data or a number of well-chosen anecdotes, that you think Wally would be a superior tactician to Collins. I will most definitely not listen if you give me an answer that’s an ode to passion, grit, the aura of the 1986 Mets, the fact that “he’s a winner,” or one that mentions Gil Hodges yanking Cleon Jones out of a game. (By the way, Gil’s long walk out to left happened nearly a half-century ago, in an era without monster salaries, agents playing watchdog or hourly media firestorms.) Wally’s chief contributions to the Mets would be to get ejected in more entertaining ways and to be beeped on SNY more often. I’m not taking to the barricades for that — not because I’m a Collins defender, but because it strikes me as deeply pointless.
Anyway, you had a reasonably crisp game, some nice contributions from the kids, a pair of Hey honey ya gotta see this homers and a Terry Collins headshake. Not bad entertainment for a couple of hours in Lorialand, right? If you wanted more than that — a .500 team, say, or a real payroll — well, sorry. You signed up for the wrong outfit, my friend. Better take what you can get.
by Greg Prince on 3 September 2014 3:39 am Over the past three games, the sub-.500 Mets have scored 20 runs and allowed 20 runs against the sub-.500 teams directly adjacent to them in the standings. It’s been like a sporadically entertaining round-robin of mediocrity.
But they’ve won two of these three games, which is good news for those still keeping track of the Mets’ daily doings, yet must rattle the front office’s fealty to the sacred nature of run differential, at least for the small sample at hand. What’s the point playing .667 ball across 27 innings when the scoreboard suggests you’re no better than a .500 enterprise?
It’s September. All we have left are small samples. On Tuesday night, when the Mets’ eight runs withstood the Marlins’ six (the math checks out, even in arithmetically challenging Miami), there were a couple of delightful small samples one might be tempted to extrapolate to high heavens. Juan Lagares, for example, went 4-for-4, was on base five times, scored three runs, drove in two runs, stole two bases and robbed himself of a triple at the wall. Only the last part isn’t true. The David Wright who’s been bumming us out for months ceded his spot in the lineup to the David Wright we vaguely recall revering for most of the preceding decade. David registered three hits (including two of the extra-base variety, for goodness sake), drove in three runs and pronounced himself “dangerous,” which is the David Wright equivalent of holding third base high above his head and unsubtly hinting that Lou Brock could take a seat.
Lagares is unstoppable and Wright is reborn. All our problems are solved. When you watch the Mets, you tend to take the good and decide it’s a permanent condition. Unless you’re the type who watches the Mets and decides only the bad is indicative of reality. You could be forgiven for the latter, but you might as well go with the former. It’s September. It will all be gone soon, so enjoy what there is to be enjoyed.
You know when I knew the season was over in every sense except officially? When I received the annual Metropolitan Hospitality e-mail telling me I could book my holiday party at Citi Field. The invitation showed up on August 21. At a juncture of the calendar when other ballparks are accepting tentative reservations for postseason galas, the Mets are already clearing their ballroom for the next affair.
Then last week, I shared 7 train and LIRR space with the U.S. Open flock. Visitors from all over the world wondered what that other facility with the red bricks was for — the one few of their fellow mass transit passengers were streaming toward. It was another sure sign that the season doesn’t have much season left to it…and a cruel reminder that we’re light years removed from how George Vecsey described the Flushing Meadows ideal in 1986:
“The Open is still my favorite two weeks of the year — tennis in the afternoon, baseball a few nights at Shea, no bridges to cross, no Bronx, no New Jersey, everything coming true for the Mets…”
Nothing comes true for the Mets anymore, except the truth that September serves as a vestigial appendage left over from happier times. The team goals are nonexistent. The individual goals are all that’s left. Aside from the annual vague desire to “see what the kids can do,” maybe three specifics remain.
1) Get Lucas Duda to 30 home runs.
Duda has 26 dingers. He has also stopped being Wally Joyner or whoever it is we have rushed to anoint him the second coming of since he lit the West Coast ablaze. If Duda reaches the big three-oh, he’ll deserve our applause, but also our pause. Remember the last first baseman whose second half propelled him to 30 homers? He plays for Pittsburgh these days. Not that Ike Davis’s precedent is destined to equal Lucas Duda’s near future, but I’d insist on two consecutive solid years before comfortably declaring a void has been effectively filled on a going basis.
Sidelined Daniel Murphy gave us consecutive solid years and by all rights should be going for 200 hits and/or league-leadership of said category this month, but lots of shoulds go unanswered around here.
2) Get Jacob deGrom the Rookie of the Year award.
Jakey’s been coming up on the outside, his Mane ’n Tail flowing in the late summer breeze, but will it be enough to catch speedy Billy Hamilton and whoever else among the freshman class has been galloping along since April? This is one of those individual goals that is out of the individual’s sole control. It’s been fun watching deGrom insinuate himself into the ROY conversation; it’s been less fun realizing players from New York’s National League franchise appear not as favorites in these races but dark horses.
Also conceivably in the running are Jeurys Familia and Travis d’Arnaud, each of them having accomplished a decent amount of self-establishment in the second half of 2014, but both probably off the pace as a result of uncertain starts. If we have a horse in this, it’s the one in whose name and number some depleted department is selling four otherwise unfillable Field Level seats.
3) Get Lagares the Gold Glove.
Our big hope here is Juan has become such a cult sensation among the set that actually pays attention to spectacular defense that the buzz that surrounds his every grab filters up to the managers and coaches who vote on the totally meaningless but indisputably glitzy award. Again, how sad is it that we have this all-world center fielder in New York — Willie! Mickey! The Duke! — and he’s relatively obscure? More highlight footage, more provisional praise and more 4-for-4 nights would surely help his cause. (Also, to be brutally frank, Carlos Gomez being hurt doesn’t hurt.)
What, you might be wondering, does Juan Lagares’s hitting have to do with him winning a Gold Glove? You must be new to the Gold Glove. Charitably speaking, offense serves as subliminal advertising for a player’s defense. Mostly, names are made at the plate no matter how many runs are saved in the field.
Drive for show, putt for dough, or something like that.
Let’s say all our individually wrapped goals are met. Duda totals 30 homers and, if he fully reheats, 90 ribbies (just like Ike!). DeGrom becomes the first Met to accept Rookie of the Years honors since Dwight Gooden three entire decades ago. Lagares glitters like Carlos Beltran and Tommie Agee did in their day. Their quests will fill September with a little something besides undistributed Curtis Granderson Poster Day posters (somebody in promotions has his finger on the pulse of the fans), and that would make the annual countdown to inevitable oblivion a wee bit more palatable.
I’d prefer September revert to its intended role as potential conduit to October — when “Metropolitan Hospitality” is supposed to be expressed via “ladies and gentlemen, welcome to Citi Field for the first game of the National League Division Series” — but we can’t have everything. Or all that much of anything.
by Jason Fry on 2 September 2014 12:47 am I hope everybody had a good Labor Day. Which is another way of saying I hope you didn’t waste a perfectly good holiday witnessing whatever it was the Mets spent their afternoon doing. Terry Collins said it wasn’t a big-league baseball game, and he was right. The Marlins were horrible too, with Marcell Ozuna managing to heave a ball from center into his own dugout and making a number of lazy plays in the field and on the basepaths, but they weren’t as horrible as the Mets.
Few things could have been. The record books show the Mets also made six errors a couple of years back in Colorado, a horror show I vaguely remember. In 1996 they made seven against the Pirates, which I’m glad to say I no longer recall. Certainly today was one of the worst ballgames I’ve ever had to endure. It was bad enough that MLB should burn the tapes, expunge the game from its records and consider contracting both franchises.
Where do we start? David Wright made a horrible error that undid Zack Wheeler when it looked like he’d manage to inch across the fifth-inning mark as starter on the long side. Jeurys Familia has emerged as a wonderful pitcher, but few things are more frightening than seeing him preparing to throw to a base. Travis d’Arnaud has reassured us about his future as a hitter while worrying us about his future as a receiver, sending far too many throws sailing into right-center and letting far too many balls past him at home. Dilson Herrera made two errors in the field himself and dropped a throw at first, though he earns a pass because he’s adjusting to the faster pace and better fields of a game two professional levels above where he was just playing. (Not to mention that he slammed his first career homer today and followed it with a triple, causing me to pause and hector the Mets’ Twitter person about where my HERRERA 2 t-shirt is.) Eric Campbell made a gallant dive for a ball in left that hit him in the palm and kept going. It was just miserable and endless.
With the Mets have crawled off into the rubble they’d created, Emily and Joshua and I met up with friends to watch the Brooklyn Cyclones’ final regular-season game in Staten Island against the Yankees. The Cyclones entered the day tied with the Connecticut Tigers in the race for the New York-Penn League wild card, but that familiar scenario came with an asterisk: Connecticut had the tiebreaker in the season series, so the Cyclones had to beat the Yankees (who’d been eliminated earlier in the week) and have the Lowell Spinners beat the Tigers.
The Cyclones did their part, beating the Yanks 3-1 in a game that wasn’t one for the Staten Island annals — one Yankee got called out for missing first base, which is dunderheaded even by the anything-can-happen standards of short-season A ball. Throughout the game I was on Twitter and milb.com, suddenly very interested in the outcome of a Lowell-Connecticut tilt up in Norwich. The Spinners were up 3-0 and then 3-2 and then 4-2 and then 4-3 and then 5-3 … and then the roof caved in. It was 5-5, and then 6-5 Tigers, the latter score announced gleefully by SI Yanks fans in the grandstand. (The half of the crowd that wasn’t pro-Brooklyn was openly and in fact operatically rooting for Connecticut while essentially ignoring the sub-.500 home team. Stay classy, Yankee fans.)
The Cyclones won, but as the ferry pulled in it was 9-5 Connecticut, and on Twitter the Cyclones themselves sighed and suggested we wait till next year. Which was premature: It was 9-7 Connecticut, and then 9-8 Connecticut, and the Spinners had the tying run on third and the go-ahead run on second with two outs in the ninth as the Statue of Liberty loomed to port, and hey, yaneverknow.
It’s true that you never know. But you can usually guess. Connecticut escaped and the Cyclones’ season was over. Having had my fill of farce, I didn’t really need a side of tragedy. But baseball makes no promises. You might see things that make you question your sanity, like Marlins heaving balls into dugouts and Met relievers heaving them past teammates. You might see runners miss first base. You might wait for reports of an astonishing, death-defying comeback … and you might be brought short by a rally that ends with you mourning what might have been, if only this little thing or that little thing had been different.
Baseball makes no promises. That’s part of what makes it so much fun … and most of what makes it so crushing.
by Jason Fry on 31 August 2014 10:19 pm So I’ve been reading this great book by Scott Weidensaul called The First Frontier, about the wars between the early colonists and the Indians. And a stray passage in it reminded me of something I’d forgotten: Connecticut’s 1662 charter claimed its western boundary was the “South Sea,” AKA the Pacific Ocean. This strikes us as ridiculous today — imagine the Nutmeg State as a long sliver unspooling west through Cleveland and Chicago, claiming mountains and plains until finally ending among the redwoods of Northern California. But Connecticut took its charter seriously: Its settlers fought with Pennsylvanians in the late 1700s over land around the upper Susquehanna, and the state didn’t surrender its “Western Reserve” in Ohio until 1800.
What does this have to do with Dilson Herrera, born in the seaport town of Cartagena, Colombia 332 years after Connecticut’s charter? Nothing, really — but stick with me for a bit, will you?
The glory of prospects is that their histories have yet to be written and can be imagined as many bright tomorrows extrapolated from a few successful yesterdays. We imagine ourselves being awed by prospects’ talents instead of learning to accept their limitations. Dilson Herrera could be the next Daniel Murphy or Wally Backman or Brandon Phillips or Joe Morgan, with potential extending to some marvelous baseball Pacific. We look at him at 20 and wonder if we’ll proudly tell people that we saw his first game and his first hit and his first RBI. We dream of him adding thousands more, becoming a fan favorite and having his number retired. It’s ridiculous, and we know it, but it’s fun to get carried away like this.
Besides, we know the occasional prospect does live up to this lofty billing — according to the geographical conceit above, Mike Trout would be the freaking Louisiana Purchase. But most prospects turn out to be the equivalent of Connecticut or Delaware, possibilities truncated and dimensions familiar, the vast promise once foreseen for them reduced to a shake-your-head footnote. Mike Vail was going to make us forget about Rusty Staub. Alex Escobar and Fernando Martinez were going to be superstars. Gregg Jefferies would lead a Mets dynasty and wind up in Cooperstown. Izzy, Pulse and Wilson would be the new Seaver, Koosman and Matlack — and not, say, three variations on Gary Gentry.
We love Dilson Herrera because he’s new and has done nothing to disappoint us. We watch him show a good eye at the plate and a compact swing and soft hands in the field and imagine we’ve got something here.
And hey, maybe we do.
But for a reality check about prospects, all we had to do today was look to either side of Herrera. To his right was Wilmer Flores, greeted as a pure hitter and then touted as a better answer than Ruben Tejada at shortstop and then dismissed as just a different problem. It still isn’t clear what Flores is, exactly, but he collected three hits today and made a couple of nifty plays in the field — bailing out Jeurys Familia with a smothering grab in the eighth and then rescuing Jenrry Mejia an inning later, turning the double play over an onrushing Chase Utley after taking a strong feed from Herrera.
Or if you looked to Herrera’s left you saw Lucas Duda, praised upon his arrival as a big slugger with a good eye, dismissed as a galumphing non-outfielder with confidence issues, greeted skeptically after winning the first-base competition over Ike Davis, and now accepted, however warily, after showing serviceable defense and pursuing what looks like a 30 home-run campaign.
All these storylines were at work today in a matinee that was a lot of fun — the Mets racked up their 13th win of the season against the Phillies (versus just six losses) as the teams played the kind of back-and-forth game more typical of their tilts at Citizens Bank Park. There was Anthony Recker swatting a home run and the Phillies coming back again and again behind nemeses old (Jimmy Rollins, Ryan Howard) and new (Domonic Brown, Ben Revere). The good guys prevailed thanks to youth (besides Flores and Herrera, Kirk Nieuwenhuis and Matt den Dekker had key hits) and former youth, as David Wright leapt out of the coffin with a pair of hits. And it was fun watching an outfield of three plus centerfielders with den Dekker and Nieuwenhuis flanking the always-marvelous Juan Lagares.
I don’t know what Dilson Herrera will turn out to be — just as I’m not sure about Wilmer Flores, or Lucas Duda, or even the autumn years of David Wright. But all of them were fun to watch today, and it makes me happy to think about getting to watch them tomorrow. And that’s the promise that keeps us thinking the best about all the tomorrows yet to arrive.
by Greg Prince on 31 August 2014 3:47 am I attended Curtis Granderson Bobblehead Night despite feeling no affinity whatsoever for Curtis Granderson as a New York Met. My bobble-enthusiast friend Joe talked me into going.
By “talked into,” I mean he had to ask twice. Usually it’s just once.
Curtis Granderson Bobblehead Night coincided with a hollow 7-2 loss to Philadelphia that coincided with Granderson striking out with the bases loaded.
It might not have been a coincidence.
Curtis Granderson makes for a better bobblehead than he does hitter.
More lifelike, too.
The Phillies scored seven runs, and that’s with the AARP discount.
Never mind retrofitting Nelson Cruz into a Mets uniform while willfully ignoring the bargain he became for the Orioles once he went untouched during the peak of the free agent market. If the Mets had committed the same two years and $16 million to Marlon Byrd during the last offseason as the Phillies did, Saturday night would have been different.
We’d have a productive right fielder who keeps proving he can hit in Citi Field.
We’d have a much better bat than Granderson’s; Granderson and Byrd have nearly identical on-base percentages, but Byrd’s slugging percentage is more than a hundred points higher.
We’d have, by Baseball-Reference WAR’s reckoning, 2.5 wins more for much less money.
We wouldn’t be stuck with a massive contract ($47 million) for three more years after this one for a player in frightening decline.
We’d have, essentially, the outfield version of Bartolo Colon’s relatively sane deal, except cheaper.
We’d still have Dilson Herrera and Vic Black because Byrd could have been signed after being rented out to Pittsburgh at the end of last season.
And we would’ve received Marlon Byrd bobbleheads, probably.
After the Phillies hung their five-spot on Colon in the sixth, I spent nine dollars on twelve ounces of beer, not because I was thirsty but because I was in that rare space in which I felt I really needed one.
Never have I so fully understood those vintage 7 Line shirts that declared, “This Team Makes Me Drink.”
Consumption of that beer lightened my mood considerably for approximately fifteen minutes.
The Mets’ lone scoring threat seemed to coincide with the draining of my beer cup. Maybe I need to drink more beer.
Or watch less of the Mets.
Granderson surely isn’t the only Met not doing anything at the plate. He’s also not the most expensive Met not doing anything at the plate.
David Wright’s been hurt, except he insists it has nothing to do with his endless slump.
All right, then. When is Wright going to be placed on the Able List?
And when might Granderson join him there?
There was a celebration of Taipei before the game. A festive dance was performed that was supposed to ward away evil spirits, according to Joe.
Jimmy Rollins refused to leave the ballpark, so I don’t think it was danced correctly.
Herrera drew the most sustained applause of the night for recording his first major league hit. The second-most, at least from me, was directed at Matt Harvey for presenting the Veteran of the Game with one of the American flags that flew over Citi Field.
Harvey appeared ready to activate himself when the rosters expand Monday and pencil himself in to start in Miami Tuesday.
I always get the feeling that the presentation of “an American flag that flew over Citi Field” is meant to glorify Citi Field more than it is to salute America.
Is the Veteran of the Game supposed to be overwhelmed by the gesture? “Y’know, I served my country under an American flag in a dangerous part of the world, but this one is nice, too.”
Wilsonianism strove to make the world safe for democracy. Dilsonianism might make the Mets feel secure enough to trade Daniel Murphy.
I don’t necessarily want to trade Murphy, the one guy on board who piles up hits like the Big Apple Brews stand must pile up profits. But I do want somebody acquired to bolster this lineup in the role of rising tide that lifts all boats. Murph may be the most tradable commodity we have.
We’re finishing fourth or fifth with him. Branch Rickey advises we can finish fourth or fifth without him.
Though you could say that about many, many Mets.
All our boats, at least the ones that carry our bats, are sinking.
Or are docked out by the World’s Fair Marina.
Joe and I sat to next a couple of dozen hearing-impaired fans. There was a lot of sign language flying back and forth. If I’d been paying attention, perhaps I could have learned a new way to communicate how much the Mets sucked.
A bad sign: there was a wave picking up momentum during the Mets’ one and only rally of the evening, in the seventh. I’d criticize the priorities of the participants, but, really, they weren’t missing anything.
Or were they supposed to be using their energy to wave the Mets toward victory? In which case, watch the game, people.
After the dramatic comeback I envisioned while in the middle of my beer failed to materialize, we met up with Paul from North Carolina, a Twitter pal of mine making his first Citi Field appearance. Sunday will be his second.
He sounded regretful about it already.
Paul expressed a healthy philosophy on remaining loyal to the cause from hundreds of miles away, not to mention light years from first place: If you lose your kid in the mall, your best bet is to wait for him or her to come back to find you instead of going off half-cocked searching.
Paul’s waiting for the Mets — the contending version with whom he fell in love nearly thirty years ago, that is — to meet up with him at the Pretzel Tide by the Gap, I guess.
I had to ask Paul, who speaks with an accent not often detected in Flushing, how he decided to get lost with the Mets when it was pretty obvious he didn’t grow up around here. The answer was WOR-TV when it was a superstation. He watched the Mets rather than be tempted by the WGN Cubs or TBS Braves.
He was quick to note the Cubs and Braves weren’t very good when he first got cable, while the Mets were on their way to the World Series.
Good call in 1986. Debatable now, though he’d never change the channel spiritually. Or try to find a new kid at the mall.
I may be mixing his metaphors. My apologies to Paul if I am. I’d blame the beer, but it was only twelve ounces and many hours ago.
Nine bucks for twelve ounces. What a racket.
Speaking of unmistakable accents, I’ve been at Citi Field enough in this year of in-game hosts to notice whenever Branden introduces a contestant from Merrick or Syosset or any one of our fine Nassau and Suffolk communities, he refers to that person as being from “Lawn Guyland”.
I doubt he really talks like that.
Friday night, I noticed Branden on a refreshment line just like a regular person before the game. There’s something discouraging about that.
Our in-game hosts are our second-tier royalty. When Jerry Seinfeld doesn’t show up to use his box, they’re the biggest celebrities we’ve got (next to Mr. Met and Cow-Bell Man, anyway). I really wouldn’t have a problem with Branden, Alexa and/or Christina being given behind-the-counter access for the quick pick-me-ups that keep them so darn perky in-game entertainment after in-game entertainment.
Now I’m wondering whether their open bottles of water are taken away by security as mine was Saturday night.
Because open bottles of water represent a threat to all those flags flying over Citi Field.
Every wiseass in creation has already pointed out that by posting their 73rd loss of the season, the Mets won’t win the 90 games they never promised anybody but everybody assumes they did.
Damned if you do, damned if you don’t…though if they had won 90 games, they wouldn’t have been damned.
It’s a bit of a shame word got out about the 90-win thing, because if the Mets had gotten there without hyping it, they could have gloated, in their best Pee-wee Herman, “We meant do that.”
Here’s what I would’ve liked to have heard out of the general manager when he was asked the first time about 90 wins:
“Our goal on a daily basis is to win the game in front of us. Do that, and the totals will take care of themselves.”
And when that was greeted by inevitable smirks and eyerolls, I would’ve liked Sandy Alderson to have added the following:
“Obviously we still have a ways to go. Everybody here is going to work very hard to get us where we want to be as soon as we can get there.”
His actual explanation, that 90 wins was neither a goal nor expectation, was more discouraging than watching Branden treated like a mere commoner.
I glanced at the out-of-town scoreboard at some point late and was overcome by sadness that on the second-to-last night of August none of it affected the Mets.
Of course they are making a race out of dibs on fourth place, which sits squarely on the line with Sunday’s game, the final Mets-Phillies battle of 2014.
The Mets hold a half-game lead over the Phillies with 26 to go.
My how times have changed where Mets-Phillies showdowns are concerned.
The Mets won 40 of 59 games in the best stretch of Shea’s last summer. When they were done playing the Phillies for the year, they held first place.
We spent the rest of September playing scoreboard, as they say.
That was the last September during which we looked at the out-of-town scoreboard out of anything but passing curiosity for what others are up to.
That was six years and one stadium ago.
That was when we had a team whose core talent almost provided a sufficient counterweight against its telling flaws.
My god, things have gotten so bad on the edge of September 2014 that I’m getting nostalgic for September 2008. And September 2008 was, by Metsian standards, a kick in the ol’ Ricardo Rincons.
Things will get better.
Eventually.
Or so I’m told.
Or so I sometimes tell others.
Some days I believe it.
Tonight I’m dubious.
Going to another game in which no Met accomplishes much of note will wear on your tenuous long-term optimism, no matter how nice the bobblehead you bring home.
by Greg Prince on 30 August 2014 2:49 am Anybody who knows his or her Brady Bunch will remember when Greg, Marcia, Peter, Jan, Bobby and Cindy formed a singing group in order to go on the Pete Sterne Amateur Hour and win the money to buy their parents a sparkly anniversary present. They named their act after the gift they had their eye on: the Silver Platters.
The Silver Platters didn’t win the grand prize of a hundred bucks, but several decades later, the New York Mets — featuring a half-dozen fresh-faced kids of their own — did win a baseball game handed to them on a silver platter by a man named Grady.
Now as then, we’re talking good wholesome Friday night entertainment for the entire family.
It’s usually a sunshine day when the Mets play the Phillies. It’s Us 12, Them 5 thus far this season, including an 11-3 mark dating back to Mother’s Day, which would make Carol Brady pleased as punch. This is the matchup that’s kept the 2014 Mets barely aloft. Subtract the Phillies from the Mets’ schedule and we’re rooting for a team that’s on pace to win a paltry 70 ballgames for the entire year. Thanks to Philadelphia not withdrawing from the National League East, we’re looking at a good 76 victories, not to mention gripping a place other than last.
You take what you can get. What the Mets got Friday was a success born almost entirely of their opponents’ failure. Not that Jacob deGrom didn’t comb the Phillies out of his ’do with little ado over seven one-run innings (none earned), but since when does that matter to a Mets starting pitcher? He wasn’t getting supported by his hitters, which made him no different from his lesser-coiffed buddies Niese and Wheeler the last two nights. Jacob seemed destined to put in his curlers burdened by a no-decision when lightning struck.
There was no lightning over Flushing, actually, but I’m assuming something got between Grady Sizemore’s glove and the two-out short fly ball Juan Lagares popped into his general vicinity. The Mets had the bases loaded, which sounds more impressive than it was. There was a walk, a steal, a hit by pitch, and another walk. By standing in place, three Mets converted their existence into a potential collective scoring threat.
They would have provided no more than the basis for philosophical pondering — if the Mets fall to Phillies, should they be left in a forest? — had not Sizemore’s glove proven so cooperative. A putout that appeared to carry no more than a 10% chance of Castilloing turned into a drop that put two runs on the Mets’ half of the board. Then, for extra fun, Lagares from first and Eric Campbell from third effected a double-steal, which translates to WHOA, A STEAL OF HOME, an achievement that is always astounding.
So a little baserunning, a little contact and some well-advised taking added up to three runs that turned a 1-1 deadlock into a 4-1 Mets lead that that Jeurys Familia and Jenrry Mejia sewed up for deGrom. Perhaps newbie second baseman Dilson Herrera, the 14-year-old called up from a nearby playground, thinks the Mets win like this all the time.
No moment like this one to inaugurate a new tradition. What does Herrera (who’s actually 20 and alighted from Double-A Binghamton) know from the Mets not winning? He was the most neo of the neophytes, but he wasn’t exactly alone in being relatively new on the MLB scene. Six of the nine players in the Met lineup had never participated in the big leagues before last year. They may not all work out in the end, but when your immediate goal is not falling a half-game behind the decrepit Phillies, you might as well trot out your youth and commence to judging whether it’s capable of maturing.
Tough break for Daniel Murphy going on the DL with one of those injuries the Mets didn’t initially indicate was any big deal, but as long we don’t have our hits leader available, it was a nice surprise to be greeted at Citi Field by Dilson Herrera rather than the twenty-third coming of, say, Omar Quintanilla. Nine years ago next month I was similarly delighted to show up at Shea and find Anderson Hernandez starting at second base. The Mets were out of it then, too, and whatever there was to glean from another gander at Miguel Cairo or Jose Offerman could not equal the simmering excitement of a watching a rookie who had it all in front of him.
To be discouragingly accurate, there turned out to be not a whole lot in front of Anderson Hernandez, a slick-gloved middle infielder who barely hit, went away, came back around and then slipped into the annals of inconsequentiality. Nevertheless, you can’t but help want to look ahead to something when all you have to look down on is the Phillies. We’ve looked ahead, since 2013 started going nowhere, to Juan Lagares, Wilmer Flores, Travis d’Arnaud, Matt den Dekker, Jacob deGrom and Dilson Herrera. Friday night we looked at all of them on the same field. And they won. Or they accepted the win when it was presented to them by a Phillie who, like most Phillies, seems old enough to be their father.
***
The only downside to the unanticipated debut of Herrera, besides Murphy having to get hurt for it to happen, is it brings to an end a somewhat historic streak. I say “somewhat,” because I’m the only one who probably noticed or cared about the history that was being made.
As mentioned a few weeks ago when it first drew my attention, the Mets had gone quite a spell without inducting a wholly new player into the Metropolitan ranks. On June 10, Taylor Teagarden made his Met debut. Then, from June 11 through August 28, nobody made his Met debut. In this era when somebody we’d either waited breathlessly for or had barely heard of was disrupting our personnel files on a semi-regular basis, the silence grew eerie. Nobody had followed Teagarden onto the all-time roster, which sat frozen at 981 across the summer.
Herrera broke the ice when he donned No. 2 and became Met No. 982. The drought or deep freeze or whichever climatological Met-aphor you choose was over after 71 games. How did that stack up against similar dearths of debuts?
Pretty impressively. With help from Baseball Reference and some source material Ultimate Mets Database graciously shared with me, I am able to tell you the Teagarden-to-Herrera fallow period was a) the longest by a Met club in 26 years; and b) the sixth-longest in team history. Because you’re dying to know more, here are the Top 10 gaps between Met debuts.
1. 91 Games — Al Weis on April 15, 1968 to Jim McAndrew on July 21, 1968 (1st game)
2. 82 Games — Mackey Sasser on April 10, 1988 to Bob McClure on July 14, 1988
T3. 79 Games — Keith Hernandez on June 17, 1983 to Ron Darling on September 6, 1983
T3. 79 Games — Rick Anderson on June 9, 1986 to Kevin Elster on September 2, 1986
5. 74 Games — Charlie Williams on April 23, 1971 to Jon Matlack on July 11, 1971 (2nd Game)
6. 71 Games — Taylor Teagarden on June 10, 2014 to Dilson Herrera on August 29, 2014
7. 70 Games — Bob Apodaca on September 18, 1973 to Jack Aker on June 16, 1974
8. 69 Games — Bobby Pfeil on June 26, 1969 to Jim Gosger on September 7, 1969
9. 63 Games — Dale Thayer on May 28, 2011 to Mike Baxter on August 8, 2011
10. 62 Games — Darren Bragg on May 16, 2001 to Gary Bennett on July 24, 2001
The common thread that ties each of these streaks together, as far as I can tell, is absolutely nothing. You see some great Met years (including the two best) and some uninspiring Met years. You see names you identify as all-time Mets and names you’ve likely purged from your memory if they ever floated up there at all. You will perhaps note the oddity of the gap Teagarden-Herrera passed last — Apodaca-Aker — and wonder if it’s correct. Yup, it is: the Mets entered 1974 without committing a wholly new player to their roster, the only time that’s ever happened in these parts. Imagine waiting until June to mint a Met in 2015 and then discovering that it’s a journeyman reliever à la Aker.
Hmm…maybe I shouldn’t give our habitually lethargic front office any ideas.
Also worth noting, since we’re noting any of this, is two of these spells were punctuated somewhere in the middle by Recidivist Mets (onetime Mets who, like Anderson Hernandez in 2009, found their way home from some other team to their natural Metsian habitat). Bob L. Miller returned from eleven years spent elsewhere to add his Stengelesed right arm to the pennant push on September 26, 1973; exiled heartthrob Lee Mazzilli resumed wearing the only uniform that ever suited him (tightly) on August 8, 1986. Miller had last been a Met in 1962, Mazzilli in 1981, so they felt new, but they weren’t really.
The Mets having a man named Dilson, however, is pretty novel.
by Jason Fry on 28 August 2014 10:41 pm Emily and Joshua and I have spent a week in this apartment on Long Beach Island for 11 years now. We’ve been here since before there was a Faith and Fear in Flushing. We’ve been here when the Mets were in first place and when the Mets were close to last place. But we’ve rarely if ever been here when the games have meant something.
I’ve seen a few great games — Carlos Beltran hitting a grand slam to beat the Marlins comes to mind — and some horrible ones, such as Shingo Takatsu bringing the funk against those same Marlins. But what I’ve rarely seen is baseball that matters.
The Mets’ drive for relevance stalled in 2005 while we were here — we arrived with them on the fringes of the race and departed with them exposed as not ready. In 2006 it was clear they were going to win and the drama was done. 2007 and 2008 brought real pennant races, it’s true, with Beltran’s blast a big blow struck for truth and justice. The fact that I don’t remember them that way says more about those years’ slide into disappointment/devastation than about how events actually unfolded.
But since then? The Mets have been utterly and completely irrelevant by the time we’ve arrived. This is the sixth straight year of games at the beach that matter not a whit, and I watch accordingly. Last night I registered that the game had started while we were getting ice cream, but didn’t bother turning it on until we got home. Tonight I followed along via At Bat, came back and watched Daisuke Matsuzaka let every available horse out of the barn. If you want more of a recap then that, well, Jon Niese pitched well but Mike Minor pitched a little better and hit a lot better, and the Mets — typically — hit not at all.
[SOUND OF NEEDLE GETTING RIPPED OFF RECORD]
Whoa. We interrupt this boredom to announce that the Mets are daring to be interesting.
David Wright and his busted shoulder are still in the lineup for no reason, but Daniel Murphy and his busted calf have been excused further duty for a while … and Murph will be replaced on the roster by Dilson Herrera.
Herrera has moved very rapidly from Other Dude You’d Never Heard Of in the John Buck/Marlon Byrd rental to top prospect, seemingly going 3 for 4 every night for Binghamton. (And making the Byrd trade look like another fleecing by Sandy Alderson.) Now we’ll get to see him, and a sleepwalking September suddenly looks a lot more interesting.
It’s not an earthquake of a move — Herrera needed to be added to the 40-man roster in the winter anyway, and his great season had earned him a look. But I hadn’t expected him before next summer, and it’s exciting to get a chance to see what he can do. The Mets have properly let kids such as Wilmer Flores and Matt den Dekker play. Now we get to see a 20-year-old join them … and suddenly the beach doesn’t feel quite so boring.
by Greg Prince on 28 August 2014 4:25 am There were nearly as few available Mets as there were visible Mets fans at Citi Field Wednesday night. The “25-man roster” was as hyperbolic a calculation as “paid attendance of 22,014”. Terry Collins fielded a Quadruple-A lineup, relied on a three-man bench and came up a run short of victory.
On the plus side, boy was there room to stretch out.
I was one of the “22,014” in attendance, commemorating Braves Night, the annual late-season trip my friend Kevin and I make to…well, see the Mets play the Braves. This little tradition of ours began in 2012 when we decided to wish Chipper Jones a fond farewell (except for the fond part) and we’ve kept going to greet the Atlantans in the hopes that all of them will retire. It hasn’t happened yet.
The Braves and I weren’t exactly strangers before this subgenre of games entered my Log. I’ve seen at least one Mets-Braves game every year since 1995, a personal record for self-inflicted frustration. They used to be a big deal, showdowns for N.L. East supremacy. Then they were reminders of the glory that was Flushing at century’s end/millennium’s debut. Then they were just the Mets versus another opponent we don’t beat nearly enough. But as long as the Braves insist on visiting, it wouldn’t be hospitable to not show up and seethe in their direction.
Of course when you have your own team at whom to fume, you might forget to find out Freddie Freeman’s real name and chant it derisively at him (“FREEEEED-er-ick,” in case you’re wondering). Actually, come August, you don’t really get up in arms at the Mets, either. You might as well curse the darkness for not containing enough light. Or players.
No David Wright. No Daniel Murphy. No Vic Black. No Josh Edgin. Would their presence have made a difference in what became a 3-2 loss once the three-man bench that shoved Ruben Tejada into a pivotal role proved surprisingly inadequate? Who knows? A Terry Collins team can always find a way to lose, even at full strength.
For those of you who like your moments defining, the Mets had runners on first and second against Craig Kimbrel with nobody out in the ninth, down by one run, with Wilmer Flores coming to bat — the same Wilmer Flores who had, in the second inning, launched his maiden Citi Field home run. With his most recently productive power hitter up, Collins ordered Wilmer to bunt, because…I’m back to who knows? Flores bunted, the fellas on first and second moved to second and third, but now there was an out nobody asked for.
Nobody except the Braves and Terry Collins, that is.
I know you already know what happened next, but indulge me when I dramatically nudge, “Guess what happened next.” Tejada grounded into a fielder’s choice — the fielder chose to throw home to cut down the tying run for which Collins was so adamant about giving up an out — and then there was a third out. If the Mets had prevailed, it would have been their third straight win. Perhaps by the fact that I’m about to ask, “Do you know how many three-game winning streaks the Mets have stitched together since the All-Star break?” you can divine the answer.
The answer is zero. The Mets haven’t won more than two in a row since the All-Star break, which was quite a while ago. The Mets haven’t won more than they’ve lost in a season since 2008, which was quite a while ago. When the Mets were en route to winning records at this time of the season between 2005 and 2008, you got pretty good crowds at Shea Stadium. I’ve not seen a pretty good crowd at Citi Field in the last several late Augusts nor a compelling reason to attend games there in late August.
Oh, except that I really like going to Mets games with the likes of Kevin, which is good enough for me, Braves or otherwise. We spend 8½ innings (I’m inevitably running late for first pitch and the Braves inevitably take an immediate lead as we’re being patted down by security) dissecting what the hell’s wrong with our franchise, never quite nailing a solution for what ails it, but passing a summer’s evening pleasantly nonetheless.
This year we enjoyed the novelty of sitting in the first row of the Left Field Landing, a splendidly isolated level I don’t think I’d visited since 2011 — and one the Mets initially announced would be known as Coogan’s Landing as homage to their Giant bloodlines. But then they conveniently filed the classy historical gesture under “N” for Never Mind. (Y’know, it’s not too late to call it Coogan’s Landing. Or Cleon’s Landing. Or Kiner’s Korner.) I’m certain I’d never sat right on the edge of the action, balcony-style. Row 1 of Section 336 brought one closer than expected to Flores’s home run into the Party City festivities; gave one a unique angle on Juan Lagares’s glove conducting its nightly memorial service for opposition fly balls; and, sadly, allowed one to watch Andrelton Simmons dash into the hole in the eighth to snuff out the Mets’ other rally that didn’t go very far. Once I saw Simmons make his move, I knew cleanup hitter Travis d’Arnaud’s would-be RBI single wouldn’t be anything besides a 6-3 on your scorecard. D’Arnaud neglected to hit like Mike Piazza in the four-hole, but he sure as hell ran like him.
Zack Wheeler pitched long and well and deserved a better fate, but so did all of us among the “22,014”. I did. Kevin did. The world-famous Chasins — who briefly abandoned swanky Field Level accommodations and searched out the dedicated Landing escalator so as to come up and say “hey” — did, too. In addition to this being Kevin’s and my annual Braves game, this was FAFIF correspondent Ryder’s final night at Citi Field for quite a while. He’s off to college the week after next, packing a 3-2 loss and no concrete memory of the Mets ever going anywhere except home come October. That doesn’t seem right. Then again, he and his parents Rob and Holly looked like they were having at least as good a time as Kevin and I were having, and that’s the sort of result that doesn’t show up in the Log.
Those of us who love the Mets enough to step right up and meet them repeatedly inevitably wind up sating ourselves with everything but final scores and elevated standings. The company, the view, the food, the breeze…would you trade it for a legitimate pennant race? You shouldn’t have to.
by Greg Prince on 27 August 2014 9:15 am We gather today to mourn the passing of our spherical brother Rawlings Official Major League Baseball, or as he was known to those who watched him in action, Rawly.
In many ways, Rawly was just like you and me, stitched together from the same materials that comprise us all. His most basic chemistry was standard-issue. Science tells us Rawly had an inner core made of rubber-coated cork that was surrounded by three layers of wool yarn and a winding of cotton.
But if you weren’t close to Rawly, you couldn’t really tell what was on the inside.
To the world at large, Rawly didn’t appear remarkable. Spectators saw his cowhide cover, his 108 raised red cotton double-stitches and the Delaware River mud in which he was rubbed, and they thought they knew Rawly. Yet Rawly was about more than what he was made of. Rawly lived his too-short life in search of what he wanted to be.
And what Rawly wanted to be more than anything else was a fly ball.
Rawly grew up idolizing fly balls. Fly balls that landed in the gap for a double. Fly balls that scooted into one corner or another for a triple. Fly balls that climbed over the fence for a home run.
Rawly was raised on legends. The Homer in the Gloamin’. The Shot Heard ’Round the World. Mazeroski…Fisk…Joe Carter…Todd Pratt. Rawly spoke often of the autumn night in 2011 when he and his young teammates gathered in front of the television in Costa Rica and watched one of their own fly off the bat of David Freese to create yet another chapter of indelible history.
That was the kind of history Rawly was determined to make when he got the call to the majors. That was the kind of history likely on Rawly’s mind that fateful Tuesday evening in New York when he took flight.
Thrown by Dillon Gee. Hit by Alex Wood. Yes, the pitcher. It was the National League, the league where Rawly always wanted to be. He didn’t have to come into contact with the lumber of Jason Heyward or Emilio Bonifacio. He knew any player with a bat in his hand was capable of turning him into the ball he was born to be.
That was what the wood of Wood did. It’s all right to chuckle at the irony. Rawly would have wanted you to. I suspect Rawly wouldn’t have even minded that when he met Wood’s bat in the third inning of his final plate appearance, he didn’t soar through the clouds as he had in his dreams, but rather line-drove his way toward the outfield grass. Rawly wasn’t judgmental. He would have embraced becoming a single or, perhaps with a little luck, a double that bounded to the wall.
Alas, luck wasn’t on Rawly’s side, for his fate was to be that which was the fate of too many of his comrades. He was headed for the place where fly balls go to die.
It had happened to the balls struck a mere two innings earlier by Heyward and Bonifacio. Those seemed destined to be something more than outs, but they met their demise in the glove of Juan Lagares.
Juan Lagares’s glove — where fly balls go to die.
Brothers, sisters…please. Rawly would ask you to refrain from booing Juan Lagares’s glove. Jeers were offensive to him; deeply offensive. We all have our purpose in this game, and Juan Lagares’s glove, not unlike the gloves of a few special fielders before him, was put among us for a reason. Perhaps as a cautionary sign to each of us as we attempt to go as far as we can in life. Perhaps as the natural run-saving yang to our run-producing yin. Philosophers east and west have tried to understand why gloves like those belonging to Juan Lagares exist and have yet to figure it out. We must accept that there is a mystery to all this.
How could Rawly sink so rapidly yet not hit the ground? How could Lagares’s glove appear from as if out of nowhere and snatch Rawly from the hit column of the box score? Why is it that at a time when so many bloops fall in front of so many fielders, this one didn’t or couldn’t? What kind of Commissioner allows a creature so insatiable as Lagares’s glove to snare from this mortal coil so many good and decent fly balls?
We don’t know the answer…any more than we can comprehend how Juan Lagares’s bat can create a long fly ball that goes for four bases in the very same contest that Juan Lagares’s glove ends the life of fly balls long, short and everywhere in between.
We mustn’t hate Juan Lagares’s glove for being the final resting place of a fly ball like Rawly. We must instead remember Rawly as he wished to be known: elevating unencumbered; descending safely; elusive to all manner of leather; the signature of Allen H. Selig visible to thousands amid the luminescence of the Citi Field floodlights.
Rawly lived as he died, in a baseball game defined by the 360-degree brilliance of Juan Lagares. We can all take comfort from that.
by Greg Prince on 26 August 2014 3:48 am Did I hear the manager of the Mets say he expects his team to lose more often than it wins? I did.
I watched the postgame show on SNY Sunday after a rousing 11-3 win. I stayed tuned for the media scrum with Terry Collins, which, by dint of logistics, appears less stage-managed on the road than it does at home. Following games at Citi Field, Collins is seated at an elevated table at the front of a room dedicated to his fielding questions from the press. It’s all relatively dignified for him there. He’s literally placed above the crowd. After away games, however, Terry might have to do his business crammed behind the desk of the visiting manager’s office or standing up against a jury-rigged backdrop of dancing logos. At Dodger Stadium, it was the latter. Such a setting makes the manager look less like a head of state and more like a cornered animal.
Still, there was no reason for Collins to feel uncomfortable under interrogation on Sunday. His club was an eight-run winner, his cleanup hitter pounded two homers, his infield turned a triple play and his starting pitcher put aside his personal grief to deliver six quality innings. True, the manager had to deal with the possibility of no longer having Bartolo Colon by the trade deadline, and there were issues stemming from the early achy exits of slumping David Wright (neck) and steady Daniel Murphy (calf), yet given that this was the 131st Mets game he’d managed this season and his 617th dating back to 2011, the drill should have been familiar to Terry.
Questions came. Questions went. One that was fairly innocuous brought a response I found jarring. It didn’t seem to get written up in any of the game accounts I read (and I checked as many as I could find). Maybe it didn’t seem like news next to Lucas Duda’s slugging, Yasiel Puig’s baserunning, Colon’s status and the injuries. Maybe it didn’t seem like news because if the Mets are playing out another losing season in a forest, nobody who covers the team notices it. But I did.
A reporter asked about the Mets not just winning but beating a team that had captured its previous three games. After acknowledging the Dodgers were “playing good,” here (at 3:20 on sny.tv) was where Collins took his reply:
“As I was telling the coaches in the dugout today in the eighth inning, when we started this road trip and you said, ‘Hey, you’re gonna go two and three and playing two of the teams that are heading for the playoffs, you’d take it.’ Three and two would’ve been a tremendous road trip. After losing the first two here, things didn’t look very good, but we stepped it up today.”
If I’m reading that correctly, the manager of a major league ballclub thinks it’s acceptable to lose three of five games. “You’d take it,” in advance of the road trip. You’d get on a plane for California with the notion that if you didn’t get swept by the A’s or the Dodgers — or that if you won a pair against either of those teams, it was OK to lose three others altogether — you were doing all right.
That wasn’t news coming out of Sunday. Maybe it’s not news after six years of losing baseball, four of them on Collins’s watch. Maybe it’s not news in a Mets culture that seems to put no premium whatsoever on winning any sooner than eventually. I do believe it’s noteworthy, though. The same manager who said he told his team following its most recent sweep at the hands of Washington, “Let’s go win seven of the next eight” (after which they won three and lost five), is content going 2-3 against solid but hardly immortal competition.
Not simply content after starting the trip 1-3, but happy to have been theoretically guaranteed it when everything was still 0-0. So thrilled by it, apparently, that he was sharing this insight with his coaches during the second of those two wins and relating it later to reporters.
This is what it’s come to. Our team’s manager admits our team isn’t good enough to accidentally win more games than it loses against a couple of playoff contenders. Baseball games, mind you. Not once-a-week football games. Not the 0-12 expansion Tampa Bay Bucs of 1976 bundling up and flying to Pittsburgh to run straight into the teeth of the Steel Curtain defense. Those Steelers had given up a total of 28 points in their previous seven games — all victories — when they hosted the legendarily futile first-year Buccaneers.
Y’know what happened at Three Rivers Stadium on Sunday afternoon, December 5, 1976? The Steelers won, 42-0. Because that’s football. Y’know what happened when the first Dream Team played Angola during the 1992 Olympics? The USA won, 116-48. Because that’s basketball. Sometimes in some sports you know your lousy team has almost no chance against their fantastic team.
This is baseball. The gap is almost never so wide that you give up in advance on a week; that you decide not quite breaking even is OK. You certainly don’t do it when you’re on the inside and you don’t casually mention it later. Not when you’re the titular leader. It’s one thing for you or me to sit here and decide we’ll be lucky if the Mets come home from California 2-3. It’s another thing for the manager to come to that conclusion. And it’s absolutely mind-boggling that he’d share it without reservation in front of a passel of digital recording devices and notebooks.
The Mets flew west with a record of 59-67. The A’s they met were 73-51. The Dodgers they’d see next started their series versus New York at 72-57, at which point the Mets were 60-68. The A’s and Dodgers had better records, more talent and home-field advantage. But the Mets had a history of playing better on the road than they do at home, all their pitchers lined up in rotation and every motivation to prove themselves worthy of roster consideration for 2015. In other words, there was no reason to write off a winning trip before the trip commenced. Yet Terry Collins reviewed the situation and explained that’s basically what he did. He turned five days’ worth of .400 ball into the moral equivalent of going .500.
Which doesn’t connote winning, either.
He does this a lot. Listen to his postgame remarks after losses (of which there will be plenty between now and September 28, the manager has helpfully implied). The Mets are always “one or two hits” from winning instead of losing, he likes to say. “We were in it all the way,” is another common refrain, as if partial points are awarded for proximity to the most runs. Collins doesn’t have his team positioned to win. He has them prepared for pats on the head.
Lousy teams beat better teams regularly enough in baseball so that it’s not a novelty. Ask the 1964 Cardinals, who almost saw their National League pennant pulled out from under them when the tenth-place Mets came to St. Louis and took the first two games of a crucial three-game series. Ask the 2007 Mets, who didn’t fend off the fifth-place Marlins at Shea Stadium and saw their postseason plans crumple up and blow away. Ask anybody who’s watched baseball for more than five minutes. It’s baseball. One-game-at-a-timing the sport is probably the ideal course of action, but if you’re going to insist on mapping out your near-term future, you can expect to win three of five as easily as you can expect to lose three of five at any juncture of the schedule.
It’s not the losing three of five amid 162 that particularly bothers me. It’s that the manager is quite comfortable framing it as an adequate outcome…never mind that winning three of five would’ve qualified to him as “tremendous”. We know the stakes are low with little more than a month remaining to this season, but is the bar for success with this organization that low, too? Collins can pretend his key player’s performance isn’t hindered by a nagging shoulder injury, yet he can’t keep himself from admitting he’s fine with losing three of five? He couldn’t have just confined his remarks regarding beating the Dodgers to “We stepped it up today”?
Going 2-3 against two of the teams that are heading for the playoffs is not something you should so readily take, unless you’re thoroughly beaten down from guiding a losing team that never substantively improves under your leadership — in which case maybe you shouldn’t be leading that team any longer.
|
|
