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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 25 July 2014 12:23 pm Need a scapegoat for your favorite fourth-place team in the whole wide world? Blame Dillon Gee for the pounding the Mets absorbed Thursday night in Milwaukee. Blame Matt Garza for maintaining the deep freeze at such a cold temperature where the New Yorkers’ bats were concerned. Blame gravity for pulling the Mets down to earth since the All-Star break ended.
Blame me for getting a little too excited lately.
It happens every summer of recent vintage. Take any season since the current endless era commenced and you’ll know where I’ll be: watching cynically, blogging morbidly, rooting as if the pocket schedule was printed solely for the purpose of tracking a Met-aphorical Bataan Death March. Nevertheless, when I detect the tiniest speck of sustained Met momentum, you can’t find the bulk of me, because my heart, my soul and a chunk of my head have jumped out of my skin.
Where did most of me go? Why, to meet the unrealistic expectations.
Yo! I’m right here, hunched over the standings with a loupe pressed to my eye searching out signs that this latest Met run is fo’ reals!
And when I’ve determined to my satisfaction that it is indeed for real (to say nothing of fo’ reals), I do two things:
1) I get quietly but almost completely carried away.
2) I bring the ayin hora upon the Mets. For you nice ladies and gentlemen out there who didn’t grow up around random scraps of the Yiddish language, that’s more or less “evil eye” in American.
In any tongue, my enthusiasm has been bad luck dating back to 2010 (I had no enthusiasm in 2009).
• Began to take the Mets’ chances as legitimately serious in late June of that modestly promising campaign. They were laughable before July was over.
• They impressed me as on the come in late July 2011. They came and went come early August.
• I held out against pervasive giddiness across the exquisitely pitched June of 2012, yet found myself exploding with hope shortly after the Fourth of July. The twilight’s last gleaming was the next sight I saw.
• A pretty good six weeks between mid-June and late July of 2013 tentatively pulled me back in. The evil eye spit me back out ASAP in one distasteful phlegm globber.
In 2014, I didn’t wander terribly far off the reality-based reservation, but I will cop to having spent last Saturday morning and afternoon in the deepest state of Mets euphoria I had known since the weekend of the no-hitter, even though I knew by lounging there I had pretty much wrecked whatever hope remained for the rest of this year. The way they won last Friday night in San Diego…the way they didn’t lose last Friday night in San Diego…the way they looked as good right after the All-Star break as they had for a week before…the way they’d been getting one good start after another…the way the latest iteration of the youth movement was coalescing…the way the youth movement that came before it was finally maturing…
I could end every thought with a kine ayin hora as a buffer against the jinx of excessive optimism, but it was too late. I was too happy. I knew the Mets couldn’t handle it. And they haven’t. At least not in the short term, going 2-4 since winning that first game at Petco Park, hitting barely a lick in that span and appearing as dreadful, deflated and defeated last night as they have all year.
All you kids out there may not believe me, but there was a time when you could get excited about a Mets team getting its act together and not reflexively expect the show to close. Instead the excitement would lead to more excitement because the show kept getting better and better.
Such a time revealed itself to me in full exactly 30 years ago last night in a ballpark far, far away. It was the Shea Stadium of 1984 — an edifice that had survived an epic of despair so despondent that it made these present mediocre Met days at Citi Field seem like a Brewer cakewalk in Miller Park.
On July 24, 1984, I was at Shea Stadium for the first time since July 8, 1983. In late July of 1983, I was so overcome by disgust that the Mets had failed to materially improve across seven incompetent seasons that I pledged to keep my distance for the rest of that summer. Though the last-place Mets shook off their cobwebs on the last day of that July and finished as strong as they possibly could (albeit still in last), I stayed true to my word. I was due back at college by the last week in August, anyway, which made my resistance of rebuilding’s siren song academic after a few weeks. But I felt I’d made my point.
When the next Opening Day rolled around, I was still away at school and the Mets were still an aggravating enterprise. They were clobbered by the Reds in Cincinnati and it didn’t seem much of anything that had defined the franchise since 1977 had changed. But then they won the second game of the 1984 season. And the third game. And in the fourth game, they took the wraps off a kid named Dwight Gooden and won that one. And after seven games, the New York Mets — whose composite record since their last winning season was 434-641 — were playing .857 ball.
The Mets were 6-1 to start 1984. It would be a bit of an exaggeration to add “…and they never looked back,” because there were spells when the downs outnumbered the ups, and as late as June 1, the Mets were in fourth place, having won no more games than they had lost (22-22). Yet it’s barely any exaggeration to say once they reeled off those six consecutive wins succeeding the Opening Day loss that I never looked back. I took the Mets to be as real as real could be.
This was based primarily on staring at box scores and peering a hole through wire service accounts, because not only did my spring semester run to the end of April but I was already committed to a humid summer term in Florida that would keep me away from Shea clear through the All-Star break. Save for stray appearances on the NBC Game of the Week and ABC’s Monday Night Baseball (plus the good graces of the Atlanta Braves radio network), the 1984 Mets’ ascendancy was broadcast mainly in my imagination.
I imagined that their climb up the National League East ladder — no lower than second place by July 1, an extended stay in first place beginning July 7 — was exactly what was supposed to be happening. I didn’t fret overthinking their rise. I didn’t have any sense that confidence could beget karmic cockiness, with pride going before a fall, or anything like that. And it never occurred to me that the Mets playing this well was a temporary condition.
If the Mets were good, they were supposed to be good.
If the Mets were good, they were going to get better.
If the Mets were good, they would eventually be the best.
On Tuesday night, July 24, 1984, you might say I went to the apex of my leap when I finally made it back to Shea. Everything had changed since my last visit. There were people. There was noise. There was hope. There was a first-place team in the home uniforms. I had never seen that. I had never seen a game like this, one in which the Mets and Cardinals slugged it out, exchanging leads like they were wrong-size sweaters from Alexander’s. Mets up, 3-0, in the third. Then the Cardinals ahead, 4-3, in the fourth. Then the Mets scoring three in the bottom of the inning to go up, 7-4. The Cardinals with two in the seventh and two in the eighth to lead, 8-7. Then a Met run that tied in the eighth.
Then the hit I can still see thirty years and a day later, Keith Hernandez lining a tenth-inning pitch from none other than Neil Allen up the middle to plate Mookie Wilson with the winning run. Mets 9 Cardinals 8. Plus the Cubs lost in Philadelphia, so our lead had expanded to 3½. The Mets were 20 over .500 for the first time since the blessed year of 1969, a year I remembered a little, but I was all of six then, so I couldn’t say I remembered all that much. This, at 21, I was soaking up so I would never forget it.
Hernandez theatrically getting the best of the pitcher for whom he was traded thirteen months earlier.
Keith proving himself forever the clutchest of Mets, not only coming through in an RBI opportunity in the tenth, but also in the third, the fourth and the eighth. The Mets scored in four innings and Keith drove in a runner from scoring position in each of them.
The cheers. Ohmigod, the cheers as Keith triumphed over Neil. The paid attendance was listed at 36,749, which seemed light compared to how it sounded and felt in the Upper Deck. Whatever the total in the house, I’m convinced 99% of the crowd had, like me, spent the previous seven years waiting and waiting and waiting for a night like this and was holding back its cheers for just this moment. Boy did we let them out.
And the chants. Ohmigod, the chants as we floated down those ramps. I never heard chanting in any of the previous 29 games I’d attended at Shea dating back to 1973. After 1973, all potential relevant chants would have been unfit for Family Sundays had such animals existed then. In 1984, the resounding ramp chant that exclaimed “STEINBRENNER SUCKS!” probably wouldn’t have passed muster for inclusion in the next day’s papers (not even the Post), but it rang out loud, clear and spiritually appropriate. And there was no disputing accuracy of “WE’RE NUMBER ONE!” whether the allusion was to the standings or the city.
Funny, I don’t remember “LET’S GO METS!” on the ramps. I think it was implied.
One other thing I remember from that night. It happened long after Joel Lugo and I finally escaped the parking lot (more than 36,749 cars there, I’m pretty sure). We were almost back to Long Beach, riding in relative silence, when I couldn’t help myself to pose a riddle of sorts:
“You know who’s in first place in the National League East? The New York Mets are!”
Joel kind of grunted, as if to ask, “Yeah, so what else is new?” I could see where he’d be blasé. He’d been around all summer. The Mets had been a first-place team on and off since the middle of June all around him. Though I hadn’t seen it up close until that Tuesday night, I had known it as fact even if I didn’t completely appreciate its depth until I was embedded in the middle of it.
Nevertheless, I had gotten so used to the Mets leading their division that — except for the “whoa!” moment in the car — I hadn’t really stopped to pinch myself. Historical perspective would be saved for decades later. For now, it was about sweeping the Cardinals the next day (30 years ago today) and Doc taking care of the Cubs when they came to town on Friday night and the 1984 Mets reaching the apex of their leap at 59-37, 4½ ahead.
When their unstoppable momentum inevitably sputtered and the Cubs blew by them, there was no immediate inclination to step back and appreciate all the progress that had transpired. The Mets were good, yet finishing 90-72, 6½ back in second, wasn’t good enough. The season the Mets improved by 22 games and wiped away seven years of stone misery concluded, in real time, as a little bit of a disappointment.
Of course it did. After living through a night like the one I lived through 30 years ago last night, it was impossible to imagine anybody but the Mets in first place.
by Jason Fry on 23 July 2014 10:12 pm You know things are strange when Greg Prince violates a baseball taboo.
The email arrived about midway through Bartolo Colon‘s attempt at retiring 27 straight Seattle Mariners, with the subject line HERESY. “I’m not feeling more than minimally emotionally invested in Bartolo Colon’s particular effort today,” Greg wrote to me.
He didn’t spell out what that effort was, and he acknowledged still being superstitious, but this is asterisk stuff. Because there was the email, its subject matter very plain. And what did I do? I didn’t scream about jinxes and respect and losing one’s mind. Instead, I laughed. Because I was feeling the same way. I’d noticed that Colon hadn’t allowed a hit, walk, error or other imperfection, but I wasn’t glued to my iPad as he chased history. I was working, with somewhere between half an eye and one and a half eyes on the game.
Why the relative lack of psychic urgency on both our parts? I can think of a ton of reasons.
First of all, it’s Mets-Mariners, which is not the kind of thing that gets the blood pumping. It’s the stuff of shrugs and eye rolls.
Second, 3:30 pm for a midweek baseball game is just bizarre. My internal baseball clock is pretty well-calibrated, but it has no setting for 3:30 pm.
Third, it was so far away. We’ve joked in these parts about San Diego being West Kamchatka, but if so then Seattle is Ulan Bator. (Some disclosures of sorts: Seattle is lovely and you should visit, and the West Kamchatka joke’s on me since I’m heading to San Diego tomorrow morning.)
Fourth, no insult whatsoever to Colon, but he’s Matt Harvey‘s understudy, brought in on an emergency basis with the understanding that we shouldn’t count on him seeing a second April 1 … or even a first September 1. “A perfect game would enhance Bartolo’s trade value,” I thought at one point, which should be horrifying but still strikes me as fairly sensible.
Anyway, when Colon got into the seventh my blood finally stirred to sluggish flow, because despite all of the above, wouldn’t that be a thing? A Mets perfect game? Or even a Mets no-hitter that would survive the age of instant replay? The combination of At Bat and my iPad left me about a minute behind game action, so I was hiding from Mets Twitter and getting impatient with At Bat’s freezes and dropouts, yet I was too superstitious to switch to a real TV.
Then Robinson Cano lined a clean single to left and I thought, “Oh well.” Which is good — Johan Santana cured Mets fandom of waiting to lament a terrible curse, leaving us free to cheer for perfection because it’s kind of neat. Which is less epic but so much healthier. When Cano’s ball touched down, we all moved on — and being Mets fans, we were soon caught in the familiar trajectory that moves inexorably from WOW MAYBE PERFECT to OH NO A HIT to UGH WE COULD LOSE THIS ONE. (Happily, we didn’t.)
With Colon thwarted, the most compelling part of the game was watching the Mariners’ talented young hurler Taijuan Walker go about his business. Walker is big and dripping with talent — he’s got a nice arsenal of pitches and natural movement. But he’s also raw — next time you grumble about Zack Wheeler, compare him with what you saw from Walker today. Walker has so much movement that he’d probably be better served trying to back off his adrenaline, throwing the ball down the middle of the plate and letting physics take care of the rest. But he can’t do that … maybe not ever, but certainly not yet. He was wild in the first, escaping with just one run surrendered, untouchable in the second and third, then wild again in the fourth. There are no guarantees in baseball, but sometimes you are pretty sure a young pitcher is going to come unglued again and stay that way. That’s what happened to Walker, in scary fashion: In the fifth, he cracked Ruben Tejada‘s helmet with a fastball to the right of the NY decal, one that left Tejada dazed but one hopes unhurt. (A diagnosis the Mets should make very conservatively.) Walker clearly shied from throwing his fastball in anger after that and was gone after a sixth-inning meltdown.
Walker’s got a lot of talent. He doesn’t know what to do with it yet, which isn’t any kind of sin. Contrast him with Colon, who works with a much smaller arsenal but has learned how to make amazingly effective use of it, outfoxing hitters by joining pinpoint location with slight changes in fastball velocity. The difference? A big part of it is that Bartolo Colon is 41 and Taijuan Walker’s 21. Seriously — Colon signed a pro contract with the Indians when Taijuan Walker was a year old.
Pitching’s tough. It’s great to be given a lightning bolt for an arm, but it can be the work of a baseball lifetime learning how to use that weapon to perfection. Or near enough to perfection, anyway.
by Greg Prince on 23 July 2014 10:27 am You know that feeling of serene confidence you get as a Mets fan when they give their pitcher an early lead? Probably not, but it’s been known to exist. It existed for me Tuesday night. I was as surprised as anybody that it did.
In the second, Mariner center fielder James Jones’s eyes proved bigger than his glove, enabling a Travis d’Arnaud sinking liner to triple its word score and drive home Bobby Abreu. Soon-to-be-dinged Ruben Tejada — who apparently serves as his own backup on the infielder-deprived Mets — proceeded to single Travis in from third, putting the Mets up, 2-0. I assessed the situation and very matter-of-factly thought, OK, we’re good. They gave deGrom two runs. He’ll do the rest.
Serenity now? What an odd sensation, but it proved prescient. True, a few more runs off the otherwise impenetrable Erasmo (a.k.a. AWESOM-O) Ramirez would have been welcome…and, yes, Daniel Murphy did try to make it more of a contest than it had to be when he received a relay from Juan Lagares and fired it clear to Walla Walla…and, sure, eventually I assumed all would go to Pacific Northwestern hell, a dark nether region that I imagine reeks of coffee and mildew…yet when the Mets supplied Jacob deGrom with a two-run margin, I figured all would end well.
And it did. The Mets captured their first-ever win in Seattle, thanks mainly to the pitcher who’s making a strong case to supplant C.J. Wilson as baseball’s primary shampoo pitchman. The Rapunzel of the Met rotation went beautifully long once again — 7 IP, 1 ER, 5 H, 1 BB, 7 SO — and as he commenced to mow down every teammate of Endy Chavez’s (who are these American Leaguers we keep bumping into?), Gary Cohen would intermittently refer to this or that freshman hurler from the Metropolitan mists whose precedent deGrom was meeting and matching. No Met rookie pitcher had done what Jacob’s been doing as a matter of course since Dwight Gooden! Or Nolan Ryan! Or Jerry Koosman!
Those are names that’ll grab your attention even as you’re crossing midnight and drifting into a field of dreams.
DeGrom really has been quite effective. Over his past six starts, he’s posted an ERA of 1.59 in 39.2 innings, striking out 45 batters while allowing only 45 baserunners. He’s been the best pitcher the Mets have sent moundward every five days for a solid month, which explains why Terry Collins was publicly contemplating shoving him into the bullpen for his own good; keeping his most talented kids from filling primary roles is a critical component of the skipper’s mediocrity protection program.
Given the various pains that have afflicted every other starter this season, whether they’ve been physical (Gee, Niese), growing (Wheeler) or the result of growing inexorably older (Colon), deGrom has begun to feel like the ace around here. I usually consider “ace” an overblown title. You know who you need to be the ace of your staff? Everybody. You need an ace every night. Or you need whoever’s pitching to pitch like an ace when it’s his turn. Since late last August, the Mets have had several guys live up to that description for stretches.
Gee finished 2013 as the most dependable of Mets. There was a spell earlier this season when Colon could calm your nerves and disrupt a losing streak. Niese, when not appraising the caliber of our fandom as something quite ordinary, bordered on the extraordinary. And on occasion Wheeler’s leaps forward have dazzled us enough to make us forget the stumbles and falls he’s taken along the way. These days, it’s deGrom getting his ace on, proving it’s never too soon to a) get carried away by a rookie pitcher on a roll and b) blow away batters in opposing uniforms.
You know when I didn’t consider “ace” an overblown title? Last year until August 26 when we had an ace who pitched like an ace every five days and I looked forward to that fifth day and even when his offense didn’t sufficiently support him, I didn’t much fret because I looked at Matt Harvey and decided with long dormant but deeply ingrained Seaverian certainty, “He’s got this.”
What he got soon enough was his unsettlingly common Tommy John surgery, followed by his own brand of Tommy Hilfiger rehab. Though Matt’s on the scene half the time (I live for those stray shots of him just chillin’ in the Citi Field dugout), he’s not on the mound at all. You can’t say starting pitching hasn’t been a strength for these otherwise scuffling 2014 Mets, but you can’t tell me Harvey’s injury and absence didn’t create a void, at least spiritually. Matt not pitching certainly torpedoed my spirits.
Jacob pitching as he has and evoking so many past masters in the process has undoubtedly lifted them.
by Jason Fry on 22 July 2014 11:20 am An unwelcome thought crept into my head somewhere between the 45th reference to it being David Wright‘s 10-year anniversary as a big leaguer and the moment the Mets stopped losing and crept away into the mossy Northwest night:
How many lousy nights like this has David Wright gone through, anyway?
The answer, as best I can determine: 824.
The Mets are 802-824 in Wright’s tenure, which is probably a bit better than you’d expected, and should make us all stop for a moment and think about how bad we’d be without him. Which is something we don’t do nearly enough.
I was there that first night, July 21, 2004 — I cajoled my friend Tim into going to see this heralded new Mets rookie at Shea. He didn’t get a hit but I recall him making a mildly perilous catch of a pop-up near the enemy dugout. That enemy was the Montreal Expos, soon to go extinct at Shea with the Mets as their final adversary. (I was there for that too.) Wright didn’t get a hit, but the Mets won, 5-4, bringing their record for the season to 47-47.
They finished the year at 71-91.
After opening the Wright Era with a win, the Mets promptly lost four in a row. Their season imploded thanks to a 2-19 horror show that spanned late August and early September, which led to the team firing Art Howe and Howe agreeing to stay on until season’s end anyway, which says a lot about all involved. In retrospect, Wright should have lit out for the territories somewhere around the time the Mets were getting drubbed for a fourth straight day by the 2004 Padres, perhaps popping up on an independent-league team with a fake name and a pasted-on mustache. That way he might have landed a job with a real outfit.
He stayed, though, of course. Oh boy, did he stay. Within a year he was the heir apparent to what passes for glory in Metsian precincts, a young slugger whose ability to drive the ball was matched only by his ability to work a count and ensure he got a pitch to hit. Down the stretch of the marvelous 2006 season, I kept telling anybody and everybody that the player Wright really reminded me of was my departed favorite Edgardo Alfonzo — if a pitcher got Wright in an 0-2 hole, you still had faith that he would ignore sliders diving away from him and foul off tough fastballs until the count was 2-2 or 3-2 and the pitcher finally surrendered and gave him a ball he could drive.
That David Wright doesn’t really exist anymore, and where he went is one of the more puzzling questions about the Mets. Possibly he vanished with the departure of the supporting cast that let Wright grow into the polished hitter he was. Maybe he disappeared when the Mets put Wright into a park seemingly engineered to turn his homers into doubles and his doubles into outs. Perhaps he was last sighted when Matt Cain hit him in the batting helmet with a fastball. An 0-2 count on David Wright is no longer the prelude to a long at-bat — Wright goes fishing now, trying to do too much.
And that’s the way we should put it: trying to do too much. Because Wright’s work ethic and desire are unassailable even when all around him is in shambles. I suspect if I somehow woke up in Wright’s body I would immediately gasp and call for an EMT. He’s played with a broken back, a busted shoulder and all manner of non-routine baseball injuries he shrugs away as routine. He’s always been dutiful at his locker, patiently answering annoying question after annoying question after cruddy loss after cruddy loss. Behind the scenes, we’ve learned, he can be both a hard-nosed leader and a thoroughly decent employee. Recently we read about Wright yanking Matt Harvey aside for a talking-to about the responsibilities that would come with rehabbing his elbow in New York instead of in St. Lucie. The key to this epic tale of Jay Horwitz’s butt-dialing? It’s that Horwitz kept mistakenly sending flight itineraries intended for a Mets administrative assistant named Dianne to a Mets third baseman named David. Because he’s who he is, Wright figured out who Dianne was and patiently emailed each misdirected message to her. Stand on the field near Wright before a Mets game and what will strike you most of all is the exhausting frenzy of attention that surrounds him. Every time Wright moves, dozens of eyes follow him. Every time he pauses, voices call out his name frantically. Mets people are always at his elbow, quietly asking him to do one more thing. Which he invariably does, gracious where any of the rest of us would have snapped and put up a indignant stop sign or fled.
(My favorite David Wright memory will never make the Diamondvision, because it’s a little thing no one else remembers: Last summer the Mets were in Washington, and Wright wound up near the stands with a ball that had landed foul. He looked into the seats and looking back were a) a pretty young woman in a Nats top and b) two schlubby dudes in Mets gear. The pretty woman in the Nats top beamed at Wright. The dudes stood there being schlubby. Wright looked at the woman, hesitated … and handed the ball to one of the Mets fans.)
And hey, David Wright’s still pretty darn good. Some time next season he’ll overhaul Darryl Strawberry in career home runs and claim the only all-time team batting mark that still eludes him. One can’t say he’s on his way to a Hall of Fame career, because you never say that at the 10-year mark. But you can say that if Wright comes anywhere close to his last 10 years over his next 10, he’s a shoo-in. Similarly, you can’t say he’ll finish up a storied career in our uniform, because the future remains stubbornly unwritten. But you can say that it’s clear the Mets want him to do that and Wright wants to do that.
Will he be rewarded for that decision with meaningful games in September, return trips to the playoffs and a World Series ring or two? You’d have to ask the Wilpons, the baseball gods and Sandy Alderson, in that order. One certainly hopes so, for his sake. (We’d be happy too.) I can imagine a graying, slightly thicker David Wright putting his first baseman’s glove in his locker and talking about how great the fans have been and how much he’s loved New York City. Then someone asks him if he regrets never playing in a World Series. Wright nods, his brow knits for a moment and his eyes go far away. And then he starts talking about fate and luck and enjoying the game and playing it right. His answer isn’t illuminating, but he doesn’t duck the question, and he smoothly steers the discussion back to how great the fans have been and how much he’s loved New York City. And then when nobody needs anything else from him, the lights turn off and he can finally go.
by Greg Prince on 21 July 2014 10:30 am Steve Gelbs seems like a capable enough young broadcaster. We know him mostly from filling in for the singular Kevin Burkhardt on SNY, which, in the realm of roving reporting, is a little like starting Todd Pratt on Mike Piazza Poster Day. Pratt may perform ably — more than ably at his best — but let’s face it: everybody came to see Piazza.
By the way, did you see Kevin yesterday take a middle-innings shopping trip to the Seaside Market at Petco Park? Fill a plastic bottle with fresh-squeezed OJ? Haul a picnic basket of gluten-free goodies out onto the grass beyond the outfield fence? Bring a hot plate of gourmet beef to Gary and Keith? It takes a special talent to enhance a 1-0 pitchers’ duel with such diversions, yet Kevin somehow manages to tour the edges of enemy ballparks for our entertainment purposes without allowing it to detract from the game experience. He’s the only roving or sideline reporter I’ve ever watched make a ballgame better. We are indeed going to miss that multifaceted maestro when he’s gone for good to Fox.
But we were talking about Gelbs, whose task Sunday was less challenging than understudying for Burkhardt. He was hosting the postgame show with Bobby Ojeda. There’s not as much danger of being a distraction in the studio, just as there isn’t quite the opportunity to shine. Attempting to retain the interest of viewers who’ve just spent three-plus hours seeing how everything turned out so you can ell them all over again what they just saw is a more fundamentals-oriented assignment. You introduce highlights; you feed salient points (rather than meat) to your expert analyst; you segue between segments; and maybe you add an insight here or there. Gelbs, Syracuse Class of ’09, is honing his craft right in front of us and evincing a comfortable presence while doing so. The man does not lack for potential.
But historical perspective on Metsiana may not be a strong suit for Steve Gelbs just yet. Or perhaps he’s just too fresh and therefore too callow to truly know from which he speaks. Whatever the case, Steve said something Sunday that got my attention — in that way you don’t notice an umpire until he gets your attention. And when was the last time you noticed an umpire for getting your attention in a positive way?
Gelbs was giving the highlights of an admittedly unusual game. Burkhardt rolling a cart through an upscale in-stadium grocer was the least of it. There was Zack Wheeler pitching quite well, going at least six and giving up no more than one run — on a Yasmani Grandal round-tripper — for the fourth outing in a row. There was Odrisamer Despaigne outdoing Wheeler and maybe every Padre starting pitcher in whose brown, yellow, blue, orange, white and sand footsteps he followed to the mound Sunday. Despaigne (which is pronounced with a little help from one’s friends) took a no-hitter into the eighth inning, threatening to put “7,264” in the Friar books the way Johan Santana made “8,020” so indelible for us a little more than two years ago. He’d hit two batters and walked three, even loading the bases in the seventh, but he was clean in the column we fetishized for more than 50 seasons.
Five starts into his major league career, Despaigne was six outs from turning the late Clay Kirby into a trending topic and presumably dimming the lights on the world’s only Mets-turned-Padres blog. Odrisamer struck out pinch-hitter Kirk Nieuwenhuis to start the eighth. Then he struck out Curtis Granderson. He was four outs away from San Diego immortality…four outs from fame as least as large as Seaside Market’s.
Alas, the Padres will have to keep rolling their cart in search of the item they just can’t find. Daniel Murphy doubled and broke hearts at Petco the way everyone from Orlando Cepeda off Tom Seaver in 1968 to Kit Pellow off T#m Gl@v!ne in 2004 did at Shea. Unlike those eighth-inning no-hit bids gone double-y awry, however, this was a close ballgame. Murphy wasn’t just getting in the way of a milestone. He was getting the tying run into scoring position. And David Wright was getting him home on a single.
Despaigne was no longer the story and the Mets were no longer losing…though that appeared ready to change when Jeurys Familia gave up a triple to leadoff hitter to Will Venable to begin the bottom of the eighth. Who doesn’t score after a leadoff triple? Well, Murphy in that game the last week of 2008, but who else? Will Venable, it turned out. Familia recorded a strikeout, issued an intentional walk and induced a skintight 5-4-3 double play to squirm out of trouble.
The Mets cleverly avoided reaching base in the top of the ninth to preserve the 1-1 tie, setting up some dramatic highlights for Gelbs to narrate minutes later. Vic Black came in and walked the theoretically dangerous Carlos Quentin. Quentin was run for by Cameron Maybin, who caught the final out at Shea Stadium, speaking of residual pain from September 2008. Alexi Amarista then bunted to Black, who wanted no part of the ball and let it trickle between his legs Buckner-style.
Oh, all right, Vic probably didn’t choose to channel Billy Bucks, no matter how happy the thought of the original makes us. “I kicked my glove and I just missed it,” he said later. Instead of getting two outs or settling for one, he got none. Maybin was on second, Amarista was on first and Black nearly atoned. He drew a grounder to the right side from Chase Headley that yielded a less artful double play than the one from an inning earlier (you don’t really want to take your chances with a rundown there, though that’s what Murph instigated), but two outs were somehow achieved and Maybin remained anchored on third. Maybe Maybin would stay stuck there once Josh Edgin entered to tame the tongue-twisting Seth Smith.
Say it three times fast: Seth Smith; Seth Smith; Seth Smith. Not easy, huh? Also not easy: the bouncer Smith chopped to Edgin’s left, especially considering Edgin, a lefty, falls off to his right upon his follow-through. But it wasn’t impossible, either. It appeared more like a sigh-of-relief third out. Smith slugs .509, yet he was kept in the infield. Good job by Josh.
Except the infield grass surrounding the pitcher’s mound in the ninth inning may as well have been the Octagon, as the ultimate fight seeped out of the Mets. Edgin, by his own account, “stumbled”. He also fell. Nevertheless, he had a shot at nailing Smith, but he couldn’t pick up the ball fluidly and was late (and high) throwing to Duda as Maybin scored the winner. “I rolled over it and it was on the ground,” Edgin explained in defeat. “When I went down to snatch it, I missed it. If I would have got it the first time, I would have got him out.”
Tough breaks. You almost get no-hit but you escape ignominy. You’re held down all day but you struggle and attain parity. You nearly let the game get away once but you reel it back in. Then two of your developing stud relievers — guys who’ve helped make your recent run of good play possible — look far more amateurish fielding their position than that slick Padre ballgirl did fielding hers.
All of it was recounted dutifully by Steve Gelbs, and I probably wouldn’t remember any of what he had to say except for how he summed up what happened with Edgin:
“The most bizarre walkoff you’ll ever see.”
Steve…really? Most bizarre? Ever?
Steve…these are the Mets. This wasn’t the most bizarre walkoff we’d ever seen at Petco Park. In 2009 and 2010, we saw Frankie Rodriguez and Raul Valdes surrender game-ending grand slams in consecutive years there. We saw Scott Schoeneweis hit Paul McAnulty with the bases decisively loaded there in 2008. Just up the coast this past April we saw Familia do the same to Hank Conger of the Angels, thus undesirably concluding an eleventh-inning.
Three years ago, we saw D.J. Carrasco balk home the winning run in Atlanta.
Three times in this decade, we’ve seen the Mets lose on wild pitches…twice to the Marlins.
We saw something eerily similar to — but somehow worse than — yesterday’s fielding mishap when Aaron Heilman couldn’t handle an infield squib from future sage Bobby Abreu in Philadelphia in early 2006.
And, though you may have still been busy celebrating your graduation from Syracuse University at the time, on a Friday night in June of 2009, we saw money-sponge Luis Castillo keep one hand free while in pursuit of a bottom-of-the-ninth, two-out, first-and-second pop fly at Yankee Stadium, the Mets up by one until they were, in a blink, defeated by one.
So there’ve been some pretty substantial other “most bizarre” walkoffs to which the Mets have been party, and that’s taking into account only losses and relatively recent history. The Mets have won their share of “most bizarre” walkoffs, too. The fleeting Bill Buckner allusion several paragraphs ago should have been a tipoff where that’s concerned. Pratt’s, too, considering the source.
Like Seth Smith, I could go much deeper, but I think I’ve accomplished my mission here.
Steve and all you kids out there: beware the lure of the blanket statement. I realize hyperbole is the coin of the sportscasting realm, but knowing your subject matter as well as knowing your audience should take precedence prior to framing the very last thing we saw as something nobody’s ever seen before.
We’re Mets fans. We may not have seen it all, but when it comes to walkoffs like Sunday’s, we’ve certainly seen enough.
by Jason Fry on 19 July 2014 11:37 pm Here’s a second-half resolution I’ll never keep: I need to be more even-keeled as a Mets fan.
The Mets began the year looking hopeless. Then they looked pretty good, maybe even better than pretty good. Then for a long stretch they looked both bad and boring, even as some were insisting they weren’t really that bad, that they were being undone by an unlikely run of bad luck. And then they looked pretty good again – so that, to my surprise, the All-Star break came as an unwelcome guest. Stop playing baseball? When we were finally enjoying it again? Why would someone do that to us?
The Mets returned from the break on Friday by rolling out to a 4-0 lead over the Padres, who are normally hapless but somehow not against us. (Or at least not while contained by Petco Park.) They blew the lead, then regained it behind a key single from Travis d’Arnaud, whose season has been a microcosm of his team’s. So of course tonight they got steamrolled by those very same Padres.
For the most part, credit Tyson Ross, who rode his evil slider through seven very effective innings. If you’re feeling pessimistic, apportion some blame to Dillon Gee, whose elevated pitches fueled a massive home run by Yasmani Grandal and a lesser shot that still counted by Will Venable. The Mets loaded the bases in the seventh, but Ruben Tejada turned in a poor at-bat, and that was essentially it.
What does this mean? Basically nothing. The Mets are going to get dismantled by good pitchers – it happens routinely in baseball – and sometimes by their own mistakes. They’re going to have bad days and cold streaks to go with laughers and hot streaks.
Baseball players know this, and try not to get too high or low about it – the noted philosopher Rod Kanehl once observed that “the line drives are caught, the squibbles go for hits. It’s an unfair game.” We refuse to believe what the players know, and attribute agency to what’s mostly chance – a team on a hot streak has chemistry, desire, grit, heart, etc., while the same team on a cold streak lacks leadership, is listless, doesn’t care, isn’t meshing, etc. We ought to take a long view, demanding to know if our team has been properly assembled and if its key players are being put in situations that give them the best chance of growing and succeeding. If that’s true, well, it guarantees nothing. You hope your squibbles get through the infield and the other guys’ line drives find gloves.
The Mets still face fundamental questions about ownership’s willingness to field a competitive team, as well as the usual arguments about whether prospects are ready and veterans are shot. But amid the ebb and flow of a schizophrenic season, there are positive signs: Lucas Duda, Travis d’Arnaud, Ruben Tejada, Kirk Nieuwenhuis, Zack Wheeler, Jenrry Mejia, Jeurys Familia and Vic Black all look like they’ve taken steps forward in their development, and a number of hitters in the minor leagues have pushed their way into conversations about the future. I should keep my eye on that story, instead of letting my emotions run wild in response to day-to-day dramas.
I won’t do that, but it’s nice to imagine that I might.
Insult to injury: I’m up in Maine visiting my kid at camp, and so was following tonight’s game on Gameday Audio, part of the MLB At Bat app. Gameday Audio has gone from godsend to problem child this year, with chronic crashes and freezes. Tonight the WOR feed got stuck on the last bits of Mets pregame, refusing to advance to the game itself. Which left me listening to the Padres’ radio guys.
Wow. Just wow. The Pads’ play-by-play guy is Ted Leitner, who might be the worst announcer I’ve ever heard. Where to start? He’s a hopeless homer, for one, but I’ll grant that’s a matter of taste. Unfortunately for Padres listeners, Leitner also has an annoying, choppy style that’s frequently behind the play – he repeatedly described great pitches, their action, etc. before circling around to the rather important fact that said pitch was strike three. He was ill-prepared – he consistently mispronounced “Nieuwenhuis” and “d’Arnaud,” which could have been remedied by simply asking the guys in the next booth. And he’s a bundle of lame shtick, from his irritating “ball going, ball gone” home run call to rambling stories that have nothing to do with baseball and random outbursts. (Come for the stuff Mel Brooks told Leitner about “Blazing Saddles,” stay for Leitner making a “Camptown Races” reference for Lucas Duda. It was like someone gave an eight-year-old a microphone.)
Here’s another resolution, one I really can keep: Every night I will be grateful for Gary, Keith and Ron on TV and Howie and Josh on the radio. The Mets may be mediocre with dreams of something more, but the guys who chronicle them are already championship caliber.
by Greg Prince on 19 July 2014 8:32 am The baseball rhythms were back Friday night at 10:10, albeit uncomfortably time-shifted. You’d have preferred them back at 7:10 PM. You’d have preferred them back at 7:10 PM the previous Monday, actually. Who wanted a pause when the cause was so glorious, when the momentum was so momentous? Who wanted the Mets to pack up their homestand hotness only to see the team luggage diverted south to Santiago when it was supposed to be headed west to San Diego?
We worried a lot and we stayed up a little and we were rewarded for our nocturnal vigilance sometime after 1 AM Eastern. The Mets stayed hot. Or the Padres stayed cold. Together the two melded just right.
I looked forward all evening to finally getting baseball back. Then, as the first two pitches were thrown to Curtis Granderson, I missed them. I was looking down at the second segment of my two-screen experience, not noticing my passion had returned in full. “What — there’s two strikes already?” So I looked up from the iPad and squarely at the television. The Grandopolis (my new private nickname for our dynamic leadoff hitter — I don’t think John Sterling ever called him that) shook off those two strikes and singled to ignite things in earnest. There was Curtis on first, twirling an imaginary towel, as if to cool off the heat that successfully arrived on the same flight as the Mets’ winning streak.
Three runs were generated with two out in the top of the first and a fourth came to be in the top of the third. The Mets held a commanding 4-0 advantage, our Not Terrible team well out in front of one of the few collectives a person should feel prohibitively confident about leading. Yet the Padres are nobody’s patsies. Not ours, anyway. Petco Park has been a stealth Turner Field for the Mets over the past decade, seemingly every game there ending 2-1, usually when Scott Hairston hits a home run in the wrong uniform or Scott Schoeneweis hits somebody I’ve never heard of and will hear of again with a bases-loaded pitch.
Still, 4-0 versus a team whose batting average was .214 and whose on-base percentage was Why Bother? Figuring the Mets had everything under control, my attention wandered. A bowl of cereal called me into the kitchen.
Somewhere between sprinkling the Truvia and pouring the Lactaid, the opposition replaced its ripe bananas with actual bats. The offensively somnambulant Padres woke up and etched four runs onto the board versus the previously machinelike Bartolo Colon. Colon may not be streamlined but he’s usually efficient. Yet the Padres put all their Sisyphean might behind pushing a quartet of tying tallies up his hill. Watching them grind away reminded me of watching us struggling to score during the first three months of this season. It took forever, it was fraught with doubt, but somehow it eventually got done.
Dismayed that the game had gone to 4-4, I snuck over to Channel 5 to watch the conclusion of the two-part 30 Rock whose first half ran the night before (Liz and Criss go to Ikea on Valentine’s Day). Part I aired when there was no baseball. Now there was baseball and it was feeling uncomfortably familiar. The Mets’ first game after the All-Star break is when the orange and blue boulder traditionally begins to rumble downhill. We hadn’t won the first game of the so-called “second half” since 2008, which also happened to be the last season when both Met halves came together for a winning record.
So for a half-hour of flipping back and forth, I watched more 30 Rock than I watched Mets. If I was going to be sitting up after midnight for a rerun, it might as well be something that made me laugh.
The Padres feature several distinctive relievers. Inconsequential 2011 Met Dale Thayer, whose hirsuteness Keith Hernandez compared to President Chester A. Arthur’s; Alex Torres, who wears the big, ridiculous, unwieldy cap but may laugh best when he’s still standing from a line drive roaring straight at his noggin; Kevin Quackenbush, who’s got the name “Quackenbush,” plus he went to my alma mater, so I’d be rooting for him against anybody else, I suppose. The distinction the guy with the hair, the guy with the hat and the guy formerly with the USF Bulls have in common is they tamed the Mets, who all but quit hitting between the fourth and the eighth. Then again, once Colon malfunctioned, Dana Eveland and Jeurys Familia successfully reset the Padre order to sleep mode.
Which was something I was contemplating entering once the shredded wheat was safely digested. But this was the Mets on the West Coast, one of those crosses a fan must bear in the course of a season, particularly a season that was just unnecessarily interrupted for five long days.
Must stay alert…
Must make it to the final if potentially disappointing result…
But this trip to Petco brought treats! The kind my cats gleefully roll around on the floor over and hopefully don’t throw up five minutes later! The ninth inning saw the Grandopolis land on first with a walk, take second and third on two consecutive outs and zip home when Travis d’Arnaud had one of those at-bats that will become part of his SNY highlight montage for the rest of the year. Wisely laid off Joaquin Benoit’s tempting two-one pitch. Swung through high likely ball four to make it a full count. Then went the other way with élan.
Not sure why the opposite of pulling the ball is “going the other way” as opposed to “pushing the ball,” but that’s for thinking about when I can’t sleep. As the Mets took a 5-4 lead, I was growing plenty drowsy but was glad I maintained alertness so as to witness Travis’s maturation process (3-for-5, pair of ribbies) continue apace and Jenrry Mejia dance away with another save.
Td’A made t’dAy a good day when it was in its wee-est of hours. The Mets extended their winning streak to five and cobbled together their first eight-of-nine in four years. The last time they were 1-0 post-break they improved their overall record to 52-44. At 46-50, that lofty level thus far eludes them, but maybe not for long, probably not forever.
The late-night start times can unmercifully challenge the eyelids, but you don’t need Annie Lennox to tell you sweet dreams are made of this.
by Greg Prince on 18 July 2014 4:09 pm People ask me what I do during the All-Star break when there’s no baseball. I’ll tell you what I do. I stare out the window and wait for Friday night at 10.
The Mets finished beating the Marlins, 9-1, at approximately 4:30 Sunday afternoon. Remember that? It was so long ago, I can understand if you don’t. Since then we’ve been without baseball. I mean real baseball, not just a prime time tribute to the winner of the First Annual Allan Huber “Bud” Selig Award for Outstanding Achievement in the Field of Excellence.
Here’s what I’ve done on my forced baseball-less vacation, besides channeling the wisdom of Rogers Hornsby.
• I tried to ignore the real world. Harsh place.
• I shook my head that Gil Hodges isn’t in the Hall of Fame. If you shake your head at that unfortunate fact, too, perhaps you’ll sign this petition.
• I paused to appreciate Elaine Stritch, who passed away yesterday at age 89, though I’d like to think I’ve always appreciated the consummate showwoman. Here’s to the lady who lunched.
• I finished watching Lincoln, which had nothing to do with the Mets. Presidential biopics that might: Washington. Jefferson. Jackson. Taylor. Buchanan. Johnson. Wilson. Another Johnson. Nixon. Carter. Maybe Tyler, if we’re not sticklers for format.
• I started watching the Home Run Derby, but never finished. Is it over yet?
• I watched as much of the actual All-Star Game festivities as I could in and around the four-hour salute to a certain shortstop. Applauding Daniel Murphy as he tipped his cap and squealing when he came in to pinch-hit remains my personal highlight and probably yours. Baseball ruins many things about itself if given the chance, yet naming an All-Star from every team remains the right thing to do and they keep doing it. Would we talk about John Stearns as much as we do if not for a generation waving its bona fides? “I remember waiting for John Stearns to be introduced…” is basically the All-Star cue for every Mets fan who came of age in the late ’70s and early ’80s. Swap out Stearns for Pat Zachry or Joel Youngblood, if you so choose. All you kids at home can swap out for Daniel Murphy. That’s the stuff dreams are made of when you’re waiting for bigger dreams to coalesce.
• I wondered why MLB and/or Fox couldn’t take a minute from reminding us that this was Derek Jeter’s Final All-Star Game to acknowledge the recent passing of 15-time All-Star Tony Gwynn. Seemed like something that would come up in conversation if not ceremony. (On a related note, Joe Buck’s a sensational baseball announcer, isn’t he?)
• I sensibly feared the San Diego Padres will rally around the Gwynn snub and take their heartfelt anger out on the Mets this weekend. The Mets have only won one series at Petco Park since it came into existence in 2004, thus it’s not a longshot that the Mets might have trouble in San Diego. But that was before the Mets implied to us that they’re not terrible.
• I tried to get used to the idea of the Mets as not terrible, what with their current 7-1 skein, even their 14-10 mark dating back to one month ago today in St. Louis. It wasn’t the first time they’ve exceeded competent in 2014, as they ran a 15-8 stretch after getting swept by the Nationals to start the season. In between not being pretty good for several weeks at a clip, they went 16-29, which is godawful, whatever their run differential. And in between the 7-1 so giddily fresh in our minds and the mostly already forgotten 5-1 from late June, there was that troublesome 2-8 spell that depressed the spit out of us. So now I have to get used to the idea of the not terrible Mets not necessarily reverting to sub-.500 form. Technically, at 45-50, they’re still sub-.500, but in my mind, they’re not. They can’t be. They’re not terrible.
• I viewed the baseball segments of an hourlong C-Span interview with George Will, not my favorite guy by any means, but he was on mostly to talk about his Wrigley Field book and the Mets weren’t playing, so what the hell? Will’s rap wasn’t much different from whatever he’s had to say about his woebegone Cubs in various forums over the years. Still, it was interesting to hear a person who isn’t immersed in baseball step away from what he is immersed in to swoon over what we stubbornly continue to consider the National Pastime. There are days when I think if I were less immersed in the Mets I might like them more — as opposed to intensely loving them and simultaneously getting incredibly irritated by them. But I wouldn’t want to not be immersed in them. Letting their flaws overwhelm me is the collateral damage wrought by my relationship with them. Conversely, a good seven-out-of-eight dash of winning makes me far happier than it could if the Mets were something I processed only tangentially.
• I visited with the New York Baseball Giants Nostalgia Society last night in the Bronx. The guest speaker was Ed Randall, who is as smooth talking to a room of baseball fans as he is to a radio audience of them. Randall’s a truly gracious sort who also took time to promote a very righteous cause (besides banning the DH). One thing I noticed in this gathering in which the nominal common denominator was the eternal torch lit for a beloved baseball team of yore: the beloved baseball team of yore didn’t come up very much. But when it did, I did learn that you could get into the Polo Grounds bleachers, at various junctures and/or memory points, for merely 50 cents, 75 cents or a buck and a quarter.
• I finished reading a book about another beloved baseball team of yore, Jonah Keri’s history and remembrance of the Montreal Expos, which deserves its own column in the near future, but I can recommend it if you like recovering memories of both Pepe Mangual and Pepe Frias. OK, maybe not Pepe Mangual, if you were around for the Met version in 1976, but has it been ten years since there were last Expos? Since I first met Bill Kent and began going to those Giants meetings? And could Vladimir Guerrero have thrown out Willie Mays at third if 1954 met 1997?
• I looked at yesterday’s date, July 17, and realized today, July 18, was going to be my late mother’s birthday. She’d be 85. And, I decided, she’d be unimpressed by Jon Niese, probably writing him off as a latter-day Danny Heep (she wasn’t impressed by Danny Heep, either; family trait). If Mom were around to read Niese’s mostly harmless yet still unfortunate take on Mets fans in Andrew Marchand’s hack job masquerading as analysis piece — the one in which Niese questions the notion that Mets fans have stuck with their team through Dairylea-style thick and thin — she’d probably tell him what she used to tell me. “Think before you open your mouth.” Except she’d say it in far more colorful terms and she’d work in a far-reaching appraisal of his entire life and values system.
• I exulted in learning there’d be no Long Island Rail Road strike. Sometime after this road trip that finally gets under way at 10 o’clock tonight ends, I can look forward to riding an LIRR train to Woodside so I can board a 7 to the stop the MTA persists in referring to as Mets-Willets Point, but I still think of as Shea. When I arrive, make my way down the stairs, across Mets Plaza and through security, I’ll heartily cheer Niese’s arm if it’s healthy. The rest of him, too — even the part that speaks before it thinks.
• I finished staring out the window. Or at least I will by 10 o’clock tonight.
by Greg Prince on 16 July 2014 4:39 am They shoved Derek Jeter’s final All-Star appearance so far down our throats that it induced nausea. Or NAU2EA.
We were complicit, at least those among us who clicked or punched his name a composite 3,928,422 times out of desire or obligation to see the perennially underexposed shortstop at last get a little prime-time promotion. None of those All-Star votes came from yours truly. I channeled the average unreconstructed Deep South voter circa 1876 and declared, “As God is my witness, I shall never cast a ballot for a godforsaken Yankee.” If I were the type to plaster bumper stickers on the rear of my car, mine would read, “Don’t Blame Me. I Voted For Alexei Ramirez.”
But there he was, elected and, naturally, canonized. The night they announced who would play in the Midsummer Classic, it was reported as a done deal that Target Field would be the site of the “Derek Jeter All-Star Game”. That wasn’t speculation. It was a promise or perhaps a threat sure to be made good on. Those who frame these things colluded on an angle and that was that. The other 67 All-Stars — by definition the very best the sport has to offer — were playing for second place.
America, if you wanted Jeter, you got him. Perhaps in far-away precincts this was considered a rare treat. Around here, not so much. We who persevere in the New York Metropolitan Area have experienced no Jeter-coverage shortage since 1996. Elsewhere you could have called it the Derek Jeter All-Star Game. Here we referred to it as Tuesday.
The concept of the farewell All-Star Game is at once both a grand tradition and a recent phenomenon. Now and then through the years, a living legend who was no longer playing like one would be granted an invite to one more soirée, providing a chance for a grateful nation to stand, applaud and thank that player for long and superlative service to its pastime. Our own Willie Mays was favored with such a slot in 1973. It was a nice gesture.
In 2001, however, it became a thing. Cal Ripken didn’t need to be ushered by fiat onto the American League roster. The fans voted him the junior circuit’s starting third baseman. Fair enough, it’s the fans’ game. He was batting .240 and wasn’t anywhere near the player he had been, but that wasn’t the point. The point was he was Cal Ripken.
The point was hammered home like a son of a gun that July. Alex Rodriguez, then generally considered that nice young man from Texas, graciously switched positions with Ripken so Cal could play shortstop once more. The old Oriole more than earned his keep with a home run in the American League’s 4-1 win over Bobby Valentine’s National League squad.
In the age of Selig and Fox, however, it wasn’t enough to sit back and enjoy Ripken’s final moment in the nocturnal sun. The network kept pounding away at the significance of St. Ripken and the commissioner stopped the game midway through to give him (and unjustly parenthetical Tony Gwynn) a special award, not to be confused with the MVP trophy and car he was given at the end of the night. Not long after, I distinctly recall Joe Morgan, then of ESPN, conflating Ripken’s third-inning solo job off Chan Ho Park with Bobby Thomson’s pennant-winning Shot Heard ’Round The World from 50 years earlier as two very similar spine-tingling baseball moments.
Sure. They were both home runs and images existed of each. Same thing, right?
I liked and admired Cal Ripken, but I remember being dismayed that MLB couldn’t leave well enough alone, that we the fans couldn’t be trusted to make the most out of a legend stepping out of the spotlight. Through no fault of Ripken’s, the whole affair wasn’t classy. It was excessive. It was shoehorning Super Bowl-style hype into a sweet summertime tradition.
Take that sense, multiply it by a hundred and you got Mariano Rivera’s All-Star swan song from 2013. Then take that, set your calculator app on “tilt,” and you got the Jeterama of 2014. The best that can be said about the latest edition of the practically mandatory lovefest — aside from it having the decency to take place somewhere other than Citi Field — was that Jeter played well, reminding the involuntarily Jeterated viewer of why he certainly rated a bit of fuss if not necessarily an enormous glob of it. “Playing well” boiled down to a diving stop that didn’t result in an out, along with two hits — only one of which wasn’t shrouded in suspicion after Adam Wainwright admitted to grooving him a pitch, à la Denny McLain to a nearly done Mickey Mantle late in 1968, but then kind of, sort of recanted. For a reduced-range 40-year-old batting a power-free .272, it was a perfectly fine performance…even cap-tipworthy.
But that couldn’t be left be. Fox’s voices couldn’t shut up about Derek Jeter for nine innings, including the several conducted after he exited to one more hearty ovation. The biggest upset of the night had nothing to do with the A.L.’s 5-3 victory. It was Mike Trout capturing the MVP. I was sure it would go either to Derek Jeter for what he did on the field or Derek Jeter for sitting on the bench and deigning to interact with his teammates — for which Fox praised him lavishly.
Surely this All-Star Game was somebody else’s final All-Star Game, too. Lots of somebodies. We have no idea whether Daniel Murphy (0-for-1 plus a harmless flip over the first baseman’s head) will ever qualify for another one of these affairs. You go back to the Ripkmarole of 2001 and you note all kinds of names that never saw another Starry, Starry night. Rick Reed, half of the Mets’ contingent 13 years ago in Seattle, never made it back. Neither did ex-Met Mike Hampton or future Mets Cliff Floyd, Roberto Alomar, Tony Clark, Mike Stanton and Ripken victim Park. (Hey, we sure were skilled at collecting guys who stopped being All-Stars, huh?)
Many of those players probably exulted in being part of Ripken’s night, just as the never-again All-Stars of this year will someday say, yes, as a matter of fact they were present that time in Minneapolis when Fox mainlined Derek Jeter and the home audience overdosed early and often. Nevertheless, it’s not supposed to be any one player’s game unless that player makes it his own. Baseball isn’t well served when it pours on the adulation for us. Show some “RE2PECT” for the process. We’ll figure it out without a script.
Then again, I’ll gladly accept being aggressively spoonfed one Yankee Legend for one mostly meaningless exhibition game in July in exchange for being completely spared the lot of them come October. Nothing made me appreciate Mariano Rivera more last season than not being commanded to appreciate him — and his team — in yet another postseason.
by Greg Prince on 14 July 2014 12:12 pm Vast stretches of the current season could have served nicely as an All-Star break. Four days? The Mets could’ve taken off almost any four weeks there for a while and not have been much missed. But now? Now that we’ve decided we love them again? Now that they’ve decided to express their affection for us by elegantly executing baseball like it oughta be?
Guys! Guys!
Don’t go! Stay!
And keep the Marlins here with you!
A lovely weekend sweep capped off a ten-game homestand that grew — to use a highly technical term not normally applied to this franchise’s actions — funner and funner as it went along. Sunday couldn’t have been much more fun, what with nine runs scoring and just one being allowed and the fourth-place Mets becoming the third-place Mets and a tangible sense materializing that this is no passing fancy, that this is…
Well, who the hell knows what it is? It might have been a matter of catching the historically bad Rangers, the due-to-go-flat Braves and the not-so-hot Marlins at consecutive fortuitous junctures, but the prosecution wishes to direct the court’s attention to Exhibit Cubs, a.k.a. the series we were swept at Wrigley in June at the hands of an allegedly inferior opponent. The Mets play lousy teams and listless teams throughout the season. They have a way of propping them up.
That didn’t happen on this homestand, did it? They beat their lessers from Texas, their betters from Atlanta and their peers from Miami. Boy did they beat Miami on Sunday. And Friday. And in between, they snatched Saturday away from them late and clutch. Good teams find an array of ways to win. Coincidentally, that’s what the Mets did against the Marlins.
Not that we’d ever want to mistake these guys for a good team. Start doing that and you let yourself in for grave disappointment. Or so it has seemed since [use any instance you like from this or the previous century]. Then again, with an All-Star break that looms as long as Jacob deGrom’s tresses, permit yourself a flight of fancy if you like. Allow yourself to believe that the Mets won’t spend their upcoming trip to San Diego, Seattle and Milwaukee making you regret what you believed on the heels of that last 9-1 thumping of the Fish.
Go ahead. Believe, if you so choose. You don’t gotta. Not yet anyway. But maybe you can.
Sixty-seven games remain (interesting MLB math that reserves 41.4% of the schedule for the so-called second half). I don’t necessarily believe that the 45-50 Mets are going to storm the Bastille clear through to September 28; or double their win total per certain misguided preseason projections; or relentlessly ratchet up the passion factor from the Field Level to the Promenade the way they did over the past week. What I want to believe is that they won’t totally disintegrate on contact upon their West Coast swing and that they won’t limp deep into the heart of oblivion on their succeeding homestand.
Met postbreak records of recent vintage are not suitable for framing. So don’t produce another performance along those lines, OK? As you’re playing ’em one game at a time, maybe think to win more than you lose. That would be a sweet prize at the bottom of the “second-half” Cracker Jack box. Win no fewer than 34; lose no more than 33.
You do better than that, outstanding.
You do worse than that, then, god, Mets, I don’t even want to know you.
All the stuff about developing the young pitchers and d’Arnaud and Lagares still stands, but for the ongoing tease party to show signs of a truly happy ending, let’s get some over-.500 up in here. Not necessarily for the entire season. That would take 37-30. They haven’t cultivated that kind of faith in me, not after just these three series, invigorating as they were. No, I’ll take one more win than loss and call it victory.
Though it wouldn’t snap the sub-.500 string that extends back to 2009, 34-33 would indicate genuine accomplishment is legitimately in progress. It would be the step in the direction that we desire. It would echo resonantly the final two months of 1983, when a dismal start of 37-65 could be immediately consigned to the past because the 31-29 finish that followed foreshadowed the brighter future we so very badly craved. Thirty-one and twenty-nine to close out ’83 was when I knew in my heart the Mets were on the verge of escaping the mine shaft in which they’d been trapped since 1977.
History can’t be asked to repeat itself on demand, but after so much lousy baseball over so many lousy years, is it too much to ask of precedent, “yo, a little help here?”
That’s my Christmas In July wish. Not an extrapolation of the .875 winning percentage of the past eight games; not 1973 reincarnated; not 1984 2.0 on the fly; not every cylinder firing to unreasonably enhanced expectation. Simply win more than you lose over an extended period. And no losing 33 straight after winning 34 in a row. Keep us reasonably engaged to the end of the campaign. Don’t make September at Citi Field so lonely. Don’t leave each of us to assume we’re the only ones still watching. Hover above awfulness for the remainder of 2014.
Ya think ya could do that? Because if you could, it would be really great.
Also great: this extremely flattering shoutout from a couple of extraordinary voices. Thanks to Jason Bornstein of Remembering Shea for providing the audio.
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