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 Greg Prince on 22 June 2014 7:44 pm The Mets recorded 17 hits on Sunday afternoon. I didn’t know they had 17 players. They also won their fourth game in their last five. At that rate…nah, I’m not gonna pin my hopes on .800 ball played across the final 91 games of the season working out to a win total of 103.
Though you’ll notice I did just go to the trouble of doing the math.
It was a fun day in Miami, a fun day to filet the Marlins (do those piscatological puns ever get old?). We were overdue for an 11-5 Fish fry (no, apparently, they don’t), the kind where the Mets score early, score often and score after ever-so-nearly allowing the Marlins to score a few too many themselves. First it was 7-0. Then it was 7-3 with the tying run at bat. Then it was no problem whatsoever, something you never hear yourself say deep in the heart of Loria.
When we look in the mirror, we see a team that we believe should be immune to the teal terror that lies beneath all that black & orange angst. On some level, we can live with overall sucking — and we sure have — but the part where we inevitably find a way to have our tying run thrown out in the bottom of the ninth versus the South Florida Pisces People goes against our core conception of self.
Remember Baseball Like It Oughta Be? Well, we oughta be taking three of four from the Marlins. And we just did. We oughta not be getting swept by anybody, and we cleared that minimal hurdle versus the Cardinals. Thus, we’ve reached at least a temporary State of Should. We’re gonna need to stock up on Should, however. Winning a little more than we lose at home is a Should must, though a two-game Citi Field series against best-team-in-baseball Oakland might not be the ideal proving ground. Sneaking up on so-so outfits like 37-38 Pittsburgh and 38-37 Atlanta is another Should must when we hit the road again. And when the next lengthy homestand commences…
Ah, the biggest Should is taking ’em one game at a time, one inning at a time, one pitch at a time. I’ve been preaching this, mostly to myself but occasionally to others, for the past 34 years, dating back to that five-game series against the Phillies I imagined the 7½-back Mets sweeping at Shea in August of 1980 as prelude to bigger and better things. Instead, as I am required by law to point out annually, the Mets were swept, their previously promising season was in ruins and I swore I’d never again get ahead of the schedule in my thinking. I still do sometimes drift forward a few games, but I try my darnedest to stay in the moment when I’m not vacationing in the 1980 of my selective memory.
(I’m also required by law to annually invoke Steve Henderson’s home run that beat the Giants, the 47-39 record from May 13 to August 13 and how real The Magic Is Back felt, I swear it did.)
I doubt too many of us are hitting refresh at Mets.com/Playoffs because we’re a robust 4-1 in our last five, but I have an inkling of insight into how the Metsopotamian mindset operates. We just received routinely stellar starting through one full turn of the rotation. The bullpen has stopped looming like a final resting place for lost leads. Granderson is no longer a colossal misallocation of resources. Duda’s bursts of power almost make up for his unfamiliarity with the nuances of his sport. Wright is in full Davidocity at last. Murphy’s playfully tapping coaches’ faces. The rejuvenated D’Arnaud and the exalted Lagares are slotting back into the band imminently. EY isn’t without his assets. Even Tejada the Uninspiring doesn’t quite make one long for his eternally unproven replacement so much some days.
Hell, the endlessly depressing manager, whom I tend to consider the endlessly depressing personification of this most endlessly depressing era, got some genuine use out of his No. 8-hitting pitcher’s bat-handling skills and put the squeeze on at a juncture in Sunday’s game when it truly mattered. Niese bunted, Nieuwenhuis scored, nothing went seriously awry thereafter. It was a Mets kind of day at the end of a Mets kind of weekend, perhaps kindling the notion that a Mets kind of year could gather steam, given that they’re only five back in a slack division and…
You do remember that a reasonable facsimile of these very same Mets won 15 of 23 to end April, don’t you? They were so hot that True New Yorkers everywhere were asked to commit blood and treasure to their cause. Next thing you know, the Mets went out and captured 16 of their succeeding 45 contests, leaving what’s been an almost irrevocable deposit on the cozy basement apartment they are currently graciously sharing with the Phillies.
Now they’ve taken four of five. It could be a hint of brilliance to come. Or it could represent a few decent days from a team that hasn’t been above .500 since May 5. Almost every team finds a way to win four of five in the course of 162. What you gotta do if you’re 35-41 is find a way to vault over the break-even point, take up permanent residence above a couple of your divisional neighbors and get not just plausibly close to the top, but actually close.
Also, 17-hit outbursts notwithstanding, take ’em one game, one inning, one pitch at a time. Trust me — it works better that way.
by Greg Prince on 22 June 2014 3:55 am Summer and Jacob deGrom’s first big league win each arrived in good stead on Saturday. Summer, as the artificial-lemonade commercials used to tell us, is only here a short while. DeGrom, one hopes, will stick around so long that the length of his career will rival the length of his locks. Paradoxically, time of game for Jacob deGrom’s entry into the legion of Winning Pitchers was 2:38, much quicker than baseball usually takes in this century. That means one of the shortest games of the season occurred on the longest day of the year.
Though we can all agree the crediting of individual wins isn’t the definitive metric by which to measure a pitcher’s effectiveness, a win is a win is a win. A win lasts forever. When young Jacob accepted a stream of congratulations from his teammates after the decision he’d been waiting his entire life went final, it wasn’t for improving his FIP. Kid’s a winner, just like Rick Wise was 50 years earlier to the day. Wise notched his first W on June 21, 1964, at Shea Stadium against the Mets. One assumes Rick Wise, then 18, never forgot it, even though 187 more wins (plus one in legendary Game Six of the 1975 World Series) awaited him, even though at his moment of triumph, the 18-year-old Phillie was the embodiment of an afterthought.
See, Wise’s first win came in the nightcap of a Sunday doubleheader. In the opener, Jim Bunning threw a perfect game. The regular season hadn’t seen one since 1922; there had been none in the National League since 1880. It couldn’t help but trump Rick Wise’s welcome to the win column, could it?
The cellar-dwelling Mets, 20-47 and 21 behind front-running Philadelphia by the close of business, weren’t much competition most days — “People would say to me it didn’t really count because it was against the Mets,” Bunning later acknowledged — but 27 up, 27 down, was something to behold. That the pitcher seeking perfection was wearing a visitors’ uniform didn’t much bother the 32,026 at Shea. They sportingly (or perhaps fatalistically) took Bunning’s side once history neared. As Bob Murphy observed during the ninth inning that sealed this result for the ages, “They’re Mets fans, but they appreciate a great performance.”
Talk about a win that lives forever.
Ten years later, summer commenced in conjunction with a much more common occurrence. The sagging, last-place, 26-39, defending N.L. champion Mets beat the resurgent, first-place, 35-32 Phillies, 3-1, Tom Seaver defeating Steve Carlton (for whom Wise was wisely dispatched to St. Louis a couple of years earlier). Tom winning was nothing out of the ordinary in the annals of Metsiana. This was the 139th victory of Seaver’s career. Winning was what Tom did as a matter of course. But that comfortingly familiar course was all askew as of June 21, 1974, when Tom entered the game at the Vet with a most unTerrific mark of 3-6. Even on this particular Friday night, something had to go wrong. Tom asked out after five innings, the sciatic nerve in his left buttock strained. “It hurts like hell,” he put it postgame.
Seaver’s path to the Hall of Fame, after seven seasons, had been littered by few obstacles. In his eighth season, though, little was going smoothly. His first 15 starts had produced a 3.80 ERA, and if there were interior numbers that revealed he was pitching better than his record indicated, nobody who might have devised them had yet disseminated them. A 3-6 pitcher was a 3-6 pitcher, even if he was Tom Seaver. A Shea crowd saw fit to boo him in a 7-0 loss to the Pirates in April. He opted not to speak to the press after losing a 4-3 complete game to the Giants in May. Now, having won his first game in three weeks and four starts, an injured, 4-6 Seaver couldn’t enjoy it in the least.
Literally and figuratively, 1974 was a pain in Tom’s ass.
The summer solstice emerged amid much cheerier Met cosmos on June 21, 1984. Whereas a decade earlier the Mets were on the verge of falling apart for a very long time to come, the Mets on this first summer day were coalescing as they hadn’t since the moon was in the Seaver house and Jupiter aligned with McGraw. By chance, the Mets were again playing the Phillies, this time at Shea. At stake was the top of the division. Philadelphia (37-29) owned it coming into this Thursday matinee. But it belonged to the Mets (36-27) when nine innings were over.
New York’s starter was Walt Terrell, who carried a 6-1 lead into the seventh. But the Phillies awoke and began to rake. Terrell was chased, replaced by Jesse Orosco, who allowed the Met lead to be erased. Suddenly the home team was down, 7-6. Yet just as suddenly — keyed by a run-scoring single Rusty Staub stroked when he pinch-hit for Orosco — the Mets returned fire with three in the bottom of the frame. They led, 9-7, turning the game over to Doug Sisk for safe keeping (which you could do during the first half of 1984). The Mets won, 10-7, taking over first place by a half-game and setting the tone for the first of several scintillating summers at Shea.
The winning pitcher? Because he had been on the mound directly before his club rallied, Jesse Orosco, the Met who gave up three hits, a walk and three runs in his one inning of work.
Now that what’s I call a nondefinitive metric!
Fast-forward another decade, to June 21, 1994, and you’ll find the last-place Mets (32-38) playing not the Phillies for a change, but the first-place Braves. And they’re winning, 3-2, going to the bottom of the ninth on a Tuesday night in Atlanta. Thus, this should be the heartwarming story of Mike Remlinger, making his second Met start, going six-and-a-third and edging toward his first win in a New York uniform, his first in the majors since going 2-1 for San Francisco in 1991.
Ah, but perhaps you’ve forgotten how the Mets of the 1990s attempted to secure most leads. They tasked the assignment to John Franco, who certainly piled up his share of saves, but also had a knack for allowing a few to slip away. True, every closer shares that knack on occasion, but if you lived through Franco Follies, you’re sure it happened at an alarming rate. At Atlanta Fulton-County Stadium, it happened like this: with one out, Franco walked ex-Met Bill Pecota; Bobby Bonilla made a two-out error at third; two singles ensued. The Braves won, 4-3. John Franco was the losing pitcher. The winner was Atlanta reliever Mike Stanton.
Ten years minus one day later (the Mets were idle that June 21, so we’re gonna have to use June 20, 2004, as our benchmark), Stanton was Franco’s teammate in New York. John didn’t pitch in that Sunday series finale versus the Tigers, but Stanton did, which I probably wouldn’t remember, except Stephanie and I were in the process of moving into our new home. It was that day I discovered we lived a few blocks from a street known as Stanton Avenue.
Hey, I said, look — maybe it’s a good omen.
True, I wasn’t much of a fan of Mike Stanton, given his Brave and Yankee pedigree that had never quite worn off to my satisfaction, but he had just helped Steve Trachsel and the third-place Mets sweep Detroit and reach .500 (34-34), and if we can’t live on Trachsel Terrace, Piazza Plaza or Wigginton Way, Stanton Avenue will just have to do.
Then, as we approached our tenth anniversary of living in what is now the old homestead, summer dawned at 6:51 AM on June 21, 2014, and first pitch was to be televised from Marlins Park at 4:10 PM. Usually the latter is enough to sew me to my couch for the duration, which can go on forever, but here it was, the longest day of the year, and it was nice out, so Stephanie lobbied me for an in-game walk around the neighborhood. Somewhat surprisingly, I agreed to her request, even with Jacob deGrom and the Mets clinging to an unfamiliar 1-0 lead, even with, you know, the game on TV. What the hell, I thought, it’s only the first day of summer once a year.
Naturally, I brought my radio, because I always bring my radio. And just as I was getting acclimated to Howie and Josh — and just before David Wright extended deGrom’s lead to 2-0 — a lady stopped us on the sidewalk to comment on the commemorative t-shirt I just happened to be wearing.
“1986 Mets,” she said. I nodded, expecting I’m not sure what next. “The Mets won the World Series in 1986,” she offered enthusiastically.
Yup, I was thinking, that’s what the shirt says.
She went on to tell us that she was in high school then, and when the Mets won, everybody yelled and screamed and was so excited, and just seeing that reminder emblazoned across my torso made her think of all that. She seemed extremely happy to have thought of the 1986 Mets for the first time in a long time. I didn’t mention that I think of the 1986 Mets several times a day. It makes me extremely happy, too.
Our walk proceeded without further pedestrian interjection. When we had to decide just how far we were going to stroll before turning for home, I set our boundary as Stanton Avenue. “Do you remember,” I asked, “how ten years ago almost to the day we first drove down Stanton Avenue? Mike Stanton was pitching for the Mets. And now the Mets are playing a team with Giancarlo Stanton, who used to call himself Mike Stanton.”
Stephanie didn’t remember any of that, but that’s OK. That’s what I’m here for.
Elevated by heretofore unremarked-upon historical significance, we took a perfectly lovely walk across that perfectly lovely thoroughfare that is named for neither Met nor Marlin. Then we got home in time to see the fifth-place, 34-41 Mets go up on the Marlins, 4-0, and ensure Jacob deGrom (1-4) would find two game-used baseballs in his locker when the contest was over. Presumably one of them was thrown by Jenrry Mejia to record the final out that made deGrom — who pitched seven shutout innings against G. Stanton and the Marlins in his eighth career start — what we on the sidelines like to call a winner at last. But the man of the hour couldn’t be sure.
“I don’t know which ones they are,” Jacob admitted to reporters, but as long as the MLB authentication sticker was on each of them, that meant they were most certainly from his first win, and “that’s fine with me.”
A little over forty years earlier, as Seaver the veteran was negotiating his unprecedented struggles and nobody had yet thought to apply official stickers to any of the equipment, Jerry Grote saved another Met rookie pitcher a ball from his first win. Craig Swan, 23, had lasted six innings in the rain at Wrigley Field and earned a W on May 11, 1974, when Ray Sadecki didn’t give back too much of the lead the Mets had built when Swannie was the one instigating the action. It wasn’t a Seaver-style shutout let alone a Bunningesque burst of perfection, but a win was a win was a win. Pitchers have always cherished everything about them and — no matter how many advanced statistics surface to better illustrate the depth and breadth of a given pitching performance — probably always will.
Especially the balls they came in on. “I’ll keep it,” rookie Swan promised after grizzled Grote handed him his. “I’ll keep it forever.”
Forever’s an intriguing concept on the day we call the longest of the year. As the lemonade commercials and every schoolkid will attest, summer doesn’t last nearly long enough. Yet the way it starts now and then has every chance of lingering in the mind’s eye.
by Greg Prince on 21 June 2014 3:05 am Each Mets game lately seems to come preordained with a finite number of runs. Friday there was no way there were going to be more than five altogether. Pity, then, that the Marlins got to three first.
The tiny glint of optimism I still allow myself told me this was going to be a more productive weekend. Here are the Marlins, a team that has thus far surprised the league by maintaining a legitimate finhold in its slow-motion playoff scramble, showing off some of that young talent we hear about every spring and persevering over .500 despite the loss of their Harveyesque ace Jose Fernandez. If I’m a Marlins fan…well, mostly I’m extremely lonely, but then, when I get used to being all myself, I’m thinking that we — the Marlins — are on the cusp of making hay. We’ve got the Mets coming in and, hell, we always beat the Mets, right?
Perfect setup for the Marlins fan(s). A setup for a fall. The presumed patsy instead makes like the dog in those Coppertone ads, immodestly wrapping its teeth around the bottom of that child’s bathing suit and exposing those heretofore sizzling contenders as the pale-ass pretenders they really are. It’s a perfect theme for a team that plays somewhere near South Beach and a satisfying outcome for us psyche-battered snowbirds.
And my slightly optimistic theory was working for one night, thanks to Zack Wheeler and David Wright, who combined to assure the one-run maximum was deposited and defended safely in the Met column. But then came Friday, when the arm of Marcell Ozuna delivered not one but two messages maybe urging us we should take these Miamians a little more seriously than we usually do.
Listen, we’ve spent too many evenings watching the tasteful lime-green walls of the Loriatorium come crashing down around Met hopes to disrespect the Marlins’ mischief-manufacturing capabilities. But that was when we viewed the Fish as a definitively lesser life form. They, not we, are the ones hanging legitimately close to the Braves and Nationals these days. We’re in last place, clinging to no more than sad “you know, they’re only ‘x’ games out” numerology. The Marlins are, until they start sinking, as real as they need to be.
And the Mets are the Mets. The Mets are the team that can’t score a third run because twice that third run is gunned down at the plate. The first time David Wright was out by a mile, and all attempts to litigate his way to a safe call came up against a wall of sound judgment by way of murky interpretation. This was in the eighth, when David attempted to tie the game on Eric Campbell’s pinch-hit. He was doomed as soon as left fielder Ozuna’s laser beam beat him home. But wait…was Jarrod Saltalamacchia’s tiniest toe blocking David’s sliding lane? The Mets challenged (the out call, not the Marlins’ pitching) and, no, there was no overturning to be had.
Nor should there have been. A noble concept about keeping catchers from crumpling into Pinky Tuscadero at the hands of an onrushing Malachi Crunch has revealed itself, in practice, as ludicrous. Nobody knows how to slide. Nobody knows how to block. Or if they should slide. Or if they should block. It’s not baseball. It’s touch and feel and maybe somebody will phone somebody at the home office and ask if the scoreboard should change.
So the Mets found a way to not tie in the eighth, and they soon found another way to not tie in the ninth. This time it was Kirk Nieuwenhuis getting the tease party started with a pinch-double in his first at-bat back from the minors. Have you noticed how well the legion of marginal Mets perform the moment they’re recalled to the majors and then never again? Surely the geniuses in the front office can manipulate the system to keep a shuttle of Nieuwenhuii coming and going, squeezing from each that first precious drop of adrenaline that inevitably sparks instant if fleeting offense.
We got what we were destined to get from Kirk. Then we got a sacrifice bunt from Ruben Tejada, which, all things considered, wasn’t the worst thing to ask from him. It put Nieuwenhuis on third with one out and brought up Chris Young, whose task became the hitting of a deep fly ball to brink Kirk home.
You know that old proverb that warns, “never depend on Chris Young to do anything to help you win a ballgame”? Technically it’s still true, but CY did his job. He lifted that fly ball, and it was indeed deep. Perhaps it wasn’t as deep as it could’ve been, but it sure seemed sufficient. Though the longer that ball hung in the air, the less deep it appeared to be. And when Ozuna caught it with a little forward momentum and Clemented it home at the instant Kirk tagged up and took off…
In another season, Nieuwenhuis would have crashed into Saltalamacchia and consonants and vowels would have flown hither and yon. But in this season, when even the best of baseball instincts have been muted between third and home (and, let’s face it, Nieuwewnhuis already runs like he’s trying to inch his field goal kicker a little closer to the hashmark on third down), all it took was a phenomenal throw to end the game. Make no mistake, it was a phenomenal throw. Vladimir Guerrero, Dwight Evans and Joel Youngblood would all tip their caps to Marcell Ozuna, even if they fired their rifle-arms from right rather than left. The ball couldn’t have soared to the plate on a more deadly trajectory had it been sent by drone.
That said, I thought Nieuwenhuis could’ve slid a little more effectively, even in 2014 when no one knows how to slide anymore. Maybe he could’ve tailed to his right, tried to grab the plate from the outside. Maybe he could’ve sprinted instead of trundled. Maybe Wright could’ve been held up by Teufel the inning before. Maybe Tejada, who also made a phenomenal capture of a grounder, could’ve cleared his throat and protested, “I GOT HIM!” and set a replay review in motion when Jake Marisnick came off the bag on a stolen base attempt that instigated what proved to be the winning Marlin rally in the seventh. But like I said, five runs had already been scored, so, as with my idea that the Mets were going to deflate the Marlins’ ascendant balloon from below, it’s all just another theory for theory’s sake.
As long as we’re exploring the theoretical, let me lay an exercise on you. I thought of this before the Mets’ recent heady two-game winning streak, directly after Monday’s incredibly dispiriting loss and the resultant “what’s the point?” round of reflection I posted Tuesday morning. My Met mood was dour enough that a concerned friend was compelled to ask me, “Are you OK?”
I was fine, but the Mets were the Mets, so I wasn’t as fine as I could’ve been. In the hours after Monday night’s game ended, I found myself thinking that if there was some mechanism by which the Mets had to lose a player — they just couldn’t have him anymore — honestly, I wouldn’t care who it was. Take one, take ’em all, I decided.
In the light of day, I revised my outlook a little and framed it this theoretical way:
Let’s say Major League Baseball holds a draft every June. Besides the amateur draft, I mean. It’s something of a random affair. Every June 21, in honor of the onset of summer, MLB chooses one franchise out of a hat and subjects it to provide one player from its current active 25-man roster to another franchise, also chosen out of a hat. The deal is whoever’s chosen to give up a player doesn’t know who’s going to get to pick a player from them, so there’s no telling in advance whose needs you might take into consideration. All that the providing franchise knows is it won’t lose a player to a division rival or its so-called “natural” Interleague rival. It’ll hurt, but it won’t sting.
The other elements of this draft are if you lose a player, you gain the first-round draft pick of the team that takes your player plus a sandwich pick next June; and you get to protect exactly ONE player from your 25-man roster.
For our theory’s sake, the Mets, given their Metsian luck, are chosen to be this year’s summer piñata. Somebody — and it could be anybody but the Braves, Nationals, Marlins, Phillies or Yankees — gets its choice of 24 current Met major leaguers. No minor leaguers are involved; nobody on the disabled list is involved. Names like Matt Harvey, Juan Lagares, Travis d’Arnaud, Dillon Gee, Bobby Parnell and Noah Syndergaard are immune to all of this.
But from there, the Mets can only hold one player back. Everybody else is ripe for the picking. Mind you, the Mets will lose but one player as a result of the Summer Solstice Roulette Draft (sponsored by Caesars), but it could be anybody…except for the one player you are entitled to string a velvet rope around.
And you don’t know who is going to be doing the picking. You don’t know if you are going to have to give up a pitcher to a team that needs pitching or a position player to a team with a specific glaring void.
So, who do you protect among the 25 current Mets?
Here’s who I don’t hesitate not to protect: Almost everybody, even after that heady two-game winning streak.
Here’s who I do have to think about:
• Jon Niese: Never exactly a personal favorite, but he’s finally rounded into what we’d hoped he would be. He’s got a favorable contract, he’s entering his prime, plus he’s lefthanded, which is one of those things you always have to emphasize when you’re discussing a pitcher who isn’t righthanded.
• Zack Wheeler: According to Matthew Cerrone of MetsBlog, I’m a fount of wisdom regarding Wheeler’s development. We were chatting during BP one night last month when I said to Matt, in so many words, don’t worry, Zack’ll be fine. Now I’m a prophet, too, at least since Thursday night’s 1-0 shutout. Despite not being lefthanded, Wheeler’s young, he’s talented, he’s been part of your master plan practically forever and who wouldn’t grab him if given the chance?
• David Wright: No longer quite as over the hill as he was rumored to be heading earlier this week. Even in the most stubborn slump of his career, he’s never been less than the second- or third-best Met player on the field at any point this season. Now he’s emerging from his slump, it seems. And he’s David Wright, who slots snugly in the batting order of all that is Met-sacred between mom and apple pie. He’s the franchise player (and losing your Franchise player is never any fun). He’s the first and only Met of extraordinary note to have a chance to play an entire lifetime as a Met. If he’s not quite our Tony Gwynn or our Stan Musial, he’s in that realm for us. He’s almost all we’ve ever asked him to be. Then again, he’s 31, is due a ton of money and has been quoted on the subject of loss more than anybody since Elisabeth Kübler-Ross.
That’s it for the active roster. Yeah, Josh Edgin has shown wonderful progress, Jeurys Familia has closer written all over him, Daniel Murphy pounds out hard-earned hit after hard-earned hit, Bartolo Colon is a reborn five-tool player…but this team, mired in mediocrity, is giving attachment a bad name. I’m still mostly where I was the other night. Take whoever you want, mystery team who gets to take away one Met in my theoretical draft. I can get by swimmingly without most of these Mets.
But I get to protect one. Which one do I save?
by Jason Fry on 20 June 2014 12:34 am Hey, sometimes you can develop players and win games at the same time!
It helps when the young player in question has the arsenal of Zack Wheeler and the command of that arsenal shown by the Zack Wheeler we saw Thursday night. I differentiate the two not to be snarky, but because that’s the way it goes for most young pitchers. Wheeler just turned 24, and he’s still working on the mechanics, memory and mentality of being a consistent winner, any of which can desert a young hurler on a given night. Pitching is always difficult, occasionally dangerous and often maddening, which we forget watching on TV and listening to postgame Just So stories about grit and toughness. Wheeler’s been a Met for a year and a day, and has already been ushered into Cooperstown and ticketed for the minors multiple times by the yowling hordes on talk radio and Twitter. A little patience would go a long way for all of us.
But if young pitchers can test your patience, now and then there are games that make you dream — nights when everything clicks and a pitcher looks like he’s toying with the opposition. Wheeler was ridiculously good tonight — the fastball, slider and change were all excellent; his location was spot-on; he mixed his pitches masterfully; and when he made a mistake he got lucky. And he got better as he went along, torturing Giancarlo Stanton and Casey McGehee and Garrett Jones in the late innings. (Unfairly relegated to second-banana status: Andrew Heaney, the latest in a depressingly long line of Marlins phenoms. Heaney gave up a long David Wright home run off L’Excrescence d’Loria in his first inning, but nothing else. We’ll see him again, and wish we hadn’t.)
With the eighth inning in the books, I was a wreck — and odds are so were you. My reasons were threefold, ranked in reverse order of anxiety:
1) Wheeler had faced the minimum number of batters — 24 — through eight. Which seemed like it should mean something, as no Met had ever faced the minimum of 27 over nine, but really didn’t. Call it a date with statistical oddity. I wanted it to happen, of course, but kept reminding myself that it wouldn’t mean Wheeler leaping into Taylor Teagarden‘s arms, or ESPN and the MLB Network showing the final inning live, or the AP sending out alerts, or any of the other delightful frippery of a no-hitter.
2) I was wondering how Terry Collins would screw this up. The Met skipper has shown an unfortunate La Russan propensity for frantic !!!MANAGING!!! of late, as witnessed by his yanking Bartolo Colon after eight and then yanking Jenrry Mejia after 2/3 more on Wednesday. Surely he would turn the ninth into some kind of object lesson about leaving well enough alone.
3) The Mets only led 1-0, and this was the Marlins in Lorialand, spiritually built atop the unrelocated graves of a billion undead Marlins that once prowled Soilmaster Stadium. Would it be a 2-1 loss in regulation, or a sadistic 2-1 defeat that would last until the wee hours of Friday? Or some calamity as yet unglimpsed in Metsian nightmares? I didn’t want to know but had a feeling we were all about to find out.
When Wheeler gave up a single to Met nemesis Reed Johnson I actually decided I would not howl for blood if Terry appeared to remove Wheeler — veteran Mets fans may remember Dallas Green and Paul Wilson and a 2-1 Met lead at Wrigley with 26 outs booked that turned into a 4-2 loss when Wilson made his only bad pitch of the day to Sammy Sosa. That was 19 years ago, but I still catch myself thinking about it, and wondering if Wilson might have been better served leaving with his work unfinished but his record unblemished.
Wheeler then gave up the hardest-hit ball of his night, but Rafael Furcal slapped it right to Chris Young in center. Young didn’t drop it, Terry didn’t have to exert himself, and we’d won. Baseball like it oughta be? A preview of what to expect regularly from a slightly more experienced Zack Wheeler? Let’s not get ahead of ourselves — once again, patience is a virtue. But it sure was fun.
* * *
If you’re interested in the latest theory that tries to see baseball through a new perspective and figure out its secrets, I highly recommend this SBNation piece by Jason Turbow on effective velocity. It’s super-smart and fascinating, an attempt to reverse-engineer some of the wiliest pitchers’ instincts and study generations of pitching wisdom through a scientific lens. Plus, for possibly the first time in the history of the Internet, the comments make the piece even smarter and better.
by Jason Fry on 19 June 2014 12:39 am I called the Mets boring yesterday, and I’ll stick with that — if the Mets are exciting, it’s generally because something horrible is happening to them, and more often than not the horrible thing that’s happening is their own fault.
But there is an exception: Bartolo Colon is not boring.
He’s not exciting either, and that’s the joy of him. The man may look like a sumo wrestler, but his craft is jujitsu, waged at a distance of 60 feet six inches. What Colon does seems like it shouldn’t work — he throws almost exclusively fastballs, varying the speed between not particularly impressive and average. It should be a recipe for chronic failure — you can see that in the frustrated faces of hitters heading back to the dugout — but most of the time it isn’t.
It helps that Colon has very good control, of course. And his taxonomy of fastballs is united by natural movement, which helps too. But mostly Colon baits hitters into outthinking themselves. He throws his fastballs in and out, up and down, slow and less slow, and more often than not hitters remain a step behind him, until somehow it’s the sixth or the seventh inning and they’re 0 for 3 against the guy who looks like a beer leaguer.
Occasionally Colon takes the mound without his precise location, or the ability to dial his fastball up or down minutely. When this happens he is as ordinary as all those hitters imagine he must be, and tends to be gone rather quickly. He doesn’t beat himself up excessively about such days — they’re a hazard of his variety of work.
Colon does other things you might not expect, too — such as field his position extremely well, moving with surprising grace and quickness.
He even, every once in an enormous while, gets a hit. He has 11 of them, in fact — and on June 18, 2014 he collected a double off Lance Lynn of the Cardinals, slapping a ball down the third-base line that hugged the corner.
No, I don’t believe that last part either. It sounds like that tale of Mister Koo and the day he defeated Randy Johnson, or Al Leiter tripling while all of Shea laughed merrily.
Colon doesn’t get too worked up about any of this. Oh, you’ll catch him wearing a slight smirk after a particularly hopeless AB, or even jiggling his belly for comic effect when he thinks no one’s watching. But mostly he lets others tell the jokes, just like he makes hitters do the work.
Once you accept the Zen of Bartolo, the rest of the world can seem like a frantic and somewhat disreputable place. Which brings us to Terry Collins.
The Mets skipper took Colon out of Thursday’s game after eight innings despite the big man having thrown only 86 pitches. (Albeit in jungle-like heat.) Jenrry Mejia promptly got into trouble, then appeared to have dodged the worst of it, getting a double-play ball before giving up an infield single that brought up Matt Adams with the tying run on first. Collins then pulled Mejia in favor of … Dana Eveland?
Now, if after the game Collins had talked about not being wedded to the traditional closer’s role, that would have been one thing. But instead he said he was concerned about Adams’s recent string of game-winning hits and wanted a lefty to face him, despite Mejia being better against lefties than righties. Small-sample size stuff, in other words, and not the way one molds a young pitcher into a closer. Yes, Eveland got the final out and secured the win, but the entire process was suspect: There was no reason to take Colon out, and not much of a reason to take Mejia out. It felt like Collins was managing for the sake of it, acting like a kid mashing down all the buttons on the videogame controller.
If that was annoying, his pregame comments were downright disturbing: Asked why Wilmer Flores was being used so sparingly, Collins said “we’ve got to start winning. We don’t have time to develop players right at the moment. … Unless the time comes where all of a sudden, hey, we’re going to go with our young players and get them better, right now we’ve got to try to win some games.”
Wow. Earth to Terry: Your team’s bad. The entire season should be about developing players, because the Mets aren’t winning anything that matters. One wonders if Sandy Alderson needs to have another talk with his manager about the organization’s goals and how to achieve them. (Hint: It doesn’t involve anyone named Young being a starting outfielder. Yeah yeah, I know Eric Young Jr. had a good game today. Fantastic — since his value’s now so high, trade him posthaste.) Or perhaps Collins is just getting frustrated — understandably — and frantic.
If that’s the case, I’d suggest he take some deep breaths and watch Bartolo Colon go about his business.
by Jason Fry on 17 June 2014 11:28 pm Thanks to the technological marvels of the day, I didn’t go Mets-less during nearly a week in Iceland. Maybe we don’t have flying cars yet, but I did use my phone to sit out in the post-midnight sunshine in rural Iceland listening to the Mets playing baseball on the other side of the world. My childhood self would have wanted that a lot more than a flying car anyway.
Still, I only heard an inning here and an inning there, so I was happy to get to spend the evening with my team tonight — the same team that arrived at Busch Stadium with a lineup Terry Collins had reportedly spent 75 minutes constructing.
Seventy-five minutes, really? That was funny on multiple levels.
First of all, batting order isn’t worth arguing about — an ideal one would be worth about one win over 162 games, meaning Terry would have better off spending 7.5 seconds on the lineup and the other 74 minutes and 52.5 seconds writing “I WILL NOT KID MYSELF THAT ERIC YOUNG JR. IS A STARTING OUTFIELDER” as many times as possible.
Secondly, because 75 minutes was about how long it took me to go from mildly interested in the Mets to disgusted once again.
The details of the evening? They’re hardly worth recording, but OK, here they are for posterity’s sake: Jonathon Niese pitched pretty well, the Mets didn’t hit with runners in scoring position, the Cardinals did, and a mild tragedy of a game curdled into a farce when Lucas Duda failed to cover first and Daniel Murphy then inexplicably gave the Cardinals a fifth out by not tagging a runner at second, a play so boneheaded that Anthony Recker and second-base ump Bob Davidson were left competing to see who could look most startled.
But like I said, the details don’t matter. Here’s what does: The Mets are fucking terrible, and they’re fucking boring.
When will that change? Terry is getting a lot of heat, but I can’t see Wally Backman getting much more out of this roster. Sandy Alderson is taking his share of snark, but the GM has never been given a budget that didn’t turn out to be a bit of Wilpon misdirection. Bud Selig isn’t going to make the Mets’ crippled owners sell, or do anything else that needs doing in baseball. Whoever replaces Selig will be another corporate stooge who listens to owners and not fans, so don’t look for help there.
The best-case scenario? It’s that the Mets’ minor-league hitters arrive before the Wilpons’ payroll restrictions dictate that their solid starters depart, and they sneak into the playoffs one year. It’s not impossible — the Royals are in first place, after all. But everything has to go right for that to happen, and it generally doesn’t.
So in the absence of a baseball miracles, expect more of the same — a Mad Lib in which you can fill in a different name for the pissed-off starting pitcher and identify lunkheaded fielders A, B and C and record six or seven names of guys who didn’t hit when it mattered.
Baseball that’s fucking terrible and fucking boring, in other words. Can’t wait!
by Greg Prince on 17 June 2014 11:46 am Unless the San Diego Padres were in your direct line of sight, you tended to not talk about Tony Gwynn when it came to the great players in the game in his era. He overlapped Schmidt and Murphy during the first segment of his two decades, Bonds and Griffey as he wound down. He wasn’t classically toolsy and he was rarely featured in prime time. He was perennially an All-Star but never an MVP. Yet when the Padres were in your line of sight, all you could think of was Tony Gwynn. He was gonna be coming up in the next inning and he was gonna get a hit. Even this past weekend, no more than vaguely aware of the rapidly deteriorating state of his health, I thought about Tony Gwynn when the Padres were at Citi Field. Gwynn was the Padres like Musial was the Cardinals, like Williams was the Red Sox. Except Cardinals fans and Red Sox fans usually had and eternally have others to whom to cling.
The San Diego Padres fans have Tony Gwynn. Thirteen years retired and he was still their biggest name. He was still who I thought of first if you said Padre to me. I don’t think I knew until yesterday that his nickname was actually Mr. Padre, but I’m not surprised.
From 1982 to 2001, you recognized the greatness of the hitter even if you probably had to be situated on the other side of the country and then nestled toward its bottom corner to be completely cognizant of the quality of the person. People from San Diego knew it. People who make their living in the game knew it. For the rest of us, the greatness of the hitting and the sense that he seemed like an awfully nice guy would have to do.
Before reams of statistics were commonly available to the typical fan, I had access to what I believed to be thoroughly accurate information regarding the Hall of Fame hitting of Tony Gwynn. I knew, without needing to look it up, that he batted exactly .900 against the Mets. That’s nine hits in every ten at-bats. Of that figure, which I calculated during the back end of his lengthy prime, I was certain. Further, in every game the Mets played at Jack Murphy Stadium, Gwynn batted a thousand. He might have made an out at Shea. He might have made two. I doubt he made more.
You think I’m kidding. I’m serious. This is how I remember Tony Gwynn, who deserves to be talked about for the all-time great he was, but what a shame he’s being talked about in the past-tense right now. Learning Tony Gwynn died yesterday was a shock. He was only 54. He was only playing, I could swear, a few years ago. And when he was, he was going four-for-four, perhaps five-for-five against a forlorn Met staff late at night on the West Coast.
If it was midnight and the Mets were in San Diego, Tony Gwynn was singling. Unless it was almost one in the morning. Then he was doubling. More than any Met opponent I can viscerally recall, Tony Gwynn always got a hit against the Mets. We say “always” out of frustration when we want others to know, with a slice of woe-is-us, that something never went well for our team. For Gwynn, “always,” as in “always got a hit against the Mets,” was literal.
Or as close to literal as possible.
From 1993 through 1998, spanning a period when the Mets were everything from historic embarrassments to legitimate contenders, Tony Gwynn’s always-ness was in full effect whenever we saw him. In a career in which Gwynn batted .338 overall, he hit .356 against the Mets. And for six years when chronology suggested he might be in decline, Gwynn ascended to a whole other plateau whenever he spotted blue and orange:
1993: 45 AB, 20 H
1994: 49 AB, 22 H
1995: 54 AB, 22 H
1996: 50 AB, 20 H
1997: 46 AB, 19 H
1998: 37 AB, 20 H
Across those six seasons, when Tony Gwynn was aging deep into his thirties, he hit .438 against Met pitching in 69 games. That’s about as many games as the Mets have played to date this season. Imagine somebody batting .438 from March 31 to the present.
Because he made his name in San Diego, Gywnn drew comparisons to native San Diegan Ted Williams. It also didn’t hurt that he was the greatest hitter for average since Teddy Ballgame, who of course was the last man to hit over .400 for a season. No one’s come closer to Williams’s .406 from 1941 than Gwynn, who batted .394 in strike-shortened 1994. An average of .438, though, is beyond Ted Williams. When it came to torturing our team, it was the stuff of Stan Musial. When the Mets were born, Stan the Man was on hand in the delivery room to spank them to the tune of .468 in 1962. One shudders to think what Gwynn would’ve done to that Original corps of Met hurlers. As it was, he went up against their 37th edition in 1998, encompassing a pretty decent bunch of arms, and batted .541.
Including, I’m certain, 1.000 at Jack Murphy Stadium after midnight.
You know how there are Met-killers you can’t or couldn’t stand? Did anybody feel that way about Tony Gwynn? Gwynn was so incredibly likable, never mind so incredibly astounding, that it never occurred to me to snarl in the slightest when he was due up. I wasn’t going to care for the immediate result as it affected the Mets’ chances of winning a particular ballgame, but what were you gonna do? He was Tony Gwynn. He hit Met pitching. He hit everybody’s pitching. If you were watching him hit, you were informed enough to understand it wasn’t worth getting mad at what was about to happen. If you were too young to have seen Williams or Musial, you were being treated to the contemporary iteration of their brand of immortality.
What, you were gonna get mad about that?
by Greg Prince on 17 June 2014 9:08 am The Mets’ starting pitcher, a talented lad with a stick in his hand, batted eighth Monday night in St. Louis. This slight adjustment in offensive alignment embodied unprecedented innovation and welcome aggressiveness, so I considered it a slight tick in the correct direction. Unfortunately, Mets “hitters,” as they’re known by default, batted first through seventh as well as ninth, so it was gonna take a lot more than Jacob deGrom to generate a serious attack against the Cardinals. Also, deGrom appeared more poised to help the Mets at the plate than he did on the mound. The youngster was propelled to dizzying heights in the lineup but plummeted through the floor at his day job.
All of which is to say the Mets lost again. They played a markedly better team — one that demonstrated flaws, but also one that showed the strengths to overcome them — and the Mets couldn’t compete. It was close for a spell, then it wasn’t, then it was all over but the interminable wait for it to be over.
92 games to go. Before Monday, it was 93 games to go. I find myself counting off the games until this season is over. I assure you I’ve never before been overcome by such an impulse in all my now 46 seasons as a Mets fan. Traditionally, I count the days until Pitchers & Catchers; until the first spring telecast; until Opening Day; until (if the first game is on the road) the Home Opener; until the next game I’ve got tickets to. At some point in the course of a morning, I instinctively count the hours until first pitch.
This season I’m counting how many more Mets games remain until I don’t have to keep tabs on this team anymore. That’s not the way it’s supposed to work. That’s not what I’m meaning to do, but I’m doing it. 2014 is not the “worst” season I’ve ever lived through by any means, but its lameness seems utterly entrenched and its pointlessness feels wholly unsurpassed.
So why tune in 92 more times, or even tonight?
Hmmm…
Every game is a new opportunity to at least temporarily flip the script, so we’ve got that going for us.
Every game is a chance to see something we haven’t seen before…like the pitcher batting eighth and being fairly competent about it.
Watching a deGrom or another youngster in whom we’ve invested high hopes get somewhere — despite the bumps, bruises and battering he absorbed last night — is a reason to believe in the future or at least be suckered into the present.
The standings aren’t oppressive, so we’ve kind of got that going for us, too, though I take the mediocrity to date of the N.L. East more as a sign that we aren’t yet completely, officially out of it more than I do that we’re plausibly in it.
Oh, and we’ve got Niese going for us tonight, and that I view as a genuine if muted plus. Jon Niese ought to be this team’s All-Star representative if it has to have one. Whereas the organization for which he pitches has taken a big-league step back and slowly sinks into the competitive quicksand, Niese has forged forward admirably. I’ve come to look forward to his starts, which is a surprising and refreshing development between skeptical fan and slowly yet fully blossoming player.
With Jon Niese on the mound, the Mets have at least half a chance of winning. With eight other Mets batting, the Mets have every chance of losing. But because it’s baseball, you never know.
Mark that down as yet another reason to stick with this season. It’s not much, but at the moment, it’s all I got.
by Greg Prince on 16 June 2014 9:27 am On Sunday afternoon, the San Diego Padres fell from the No. 1 slot they earned Saturday to No. 2, while the New York Mets rose from No. 2 all the way to No. 1…at least if you considered the conclusion of their three-game series not so much a baseball game, but a definitive determination of where the most successful entries in Metropolitan Top 2 ranked.
Which I did, in light of prevailing circumstances.
With the possible exception of Bob Murphy’s, no voice that flowed through a radio speaker ever meant more to me than Casey Kasem’s. On Sunday morning, almost ten years after I learned — from listening to the radio, naturally — that Murph had passed at the age of 79, I was tuned into to SiriusXM’s weekly reairing of a vintage American Top 40 countdown (from this week in 1972, when Sammy Davis, Jr.’s “Candy Man” dislodged “I’ll Take You There” by the Staple Singers at the head of the Billboard chart), only to have it interrupted to inform me Kasem, 82, had died after a long illness.
Like Murph, Casey would warmly tell me about my favorite stuff in the world without a trace of overbearing judgment. They both got me terribly excited to hear what was about to come next, whether it was Frankie Taveras taking off for second on a three-two count or Franke & The Knockouts moving up five notches to No. 23. Whereas I had a rooting interest in whether the Mets placed first or second in any given game, I was more absorbed by the action on AT40 than I was its ultimate outcome. I wanted to know which single had debuted higher than any other this week; how many “foreign-born acts” we’d hear from today, including the two-man, two-woman group from Sweden that won the Eurovision Song Contest, ABBA; and whether Casey would be moved to read from the “AT40 Book of Records,” the all-time stats to which he’d go on behalf of the latest smash hit from the Bee Gees or Elton John the way Bob might reference Ty Cobb or Maury Wills when Lou Brock stepped to the plate.
I loved when we reached the Top 10, the Top 5, the pause to learn what was on top of Billboard’s “other charts” (Soul, Country, Album), and whether the most popular song in the land was the same as last week or — with a drumroll — we as a nation had a New No. 1 Song.
Three hours with American Top 40, Casey promised, and we’d find out where our favorite songs stood on the “national music scene”. It should have been enough to hear our favorite songs and songs we might decide would be our favorites soon. I wasn’t on any national scene. I was in my bedroom on a Sunday morning, sitting with a notebook and a pencil taking it all down, taking it all in. Yet thanks to Casey, I was brought to the foot of a stage bigger than I’d otherwise imagine, discovering that the same songs I liked were liked by a lot of others. I somehow managed to have “popular” tastes, which felt extraordinarily validating when I was 10, 11, 12 and so on.
I understand how some fans of some artists grow disdainful when others who didn’t love “their” music when it first came along squeeze into what felt like an exclusive club. For them, not being alone in their tastes anymore somehow makes experiencing the music less special. I was the opposite. I loved knowing that what I loved was loved by others. I loved learning that my favorite song of a given moment was the favorite song of the whole USA. I loved knowing that if I ever found myself in any of those towns in Minnesota or Oregon or Singapore whose AT40-affiliate call letters Casey shared, there existed an excellent chance that I would hear Paper Lace or Pilot or Maxine Nightingale, just like I would at home.
Casey Kasem made listening to the radio by oneself an inclusive act. Through the expertly detailed counting down, the detours into historical AT40 Extras and, yes, the Long-Distance Dedications (even the ones that went infamously awry), American Top 40 was for everybody. When it was over, my spot along the national music scene was secure for another week. Then, not long after Casey’d sign off with his sage advice about keeping my feet on the ground while I kept reaching for the stars, I might switch from the Non-Stop Music of 102 WPIX-FM (or later 99X) to 1050 WHN (or later 1130 WNEW or later still 570 WMCA) and hear Bob Murphy bring me the starting lineups of the Mets and their opponents. That was for everybody, too.
Not a bad block of Sunday programming.
by Greg Prince on 14 June 2014 11:50 pm Despite the various commercial entreaties of Branden, Alexa and Christina, I can think of no worse place to take my dad for Father’s Day than Citi Field. Also, I can think of no worse place to take your dad. Or anybody’s dad, son, brother, uncle, grandpa, cousin or in-law. I wouldn’t jump to take anybody to Citi Field at this moment unless he — or she — was a 50 Cent fanatic, and apparently that ship has finally sailed.
Of course if somebody’s close relation really wanted to see a ballgame and understood the consequences — accepting a ticket to a Mets game right now is akin to signing a waiver forfeiting all rights to satisfaction — then I’d renounce my better instincts and graciously escort that theoretical family member if the logistical stars aligned. I mean if you can’t get me to go to a Mets game with you, you probably can’t get anyone to go to a Mets game with you.
But not this particular Sunday. I realize that for all the events and occasions for which I’ve planted myself inside Shea Stadium and its relentlessly disappointing successor facility, I’ve never been to a Mets game on Father’s Day. My father doesn’t really like baseball, so it never entered the familial thought process when I was growing up. Other plans were always made and other plans continue to be made. The third Sunday in June is one of the handful of dates when I automatically tell anybody who asks that I can’t go to the game. Come to think of it, it may be the only date that I absolutely know is a no-go.
That’s OK. I’ve got 80 other opportunities during seasons when I’m not turned off by the idea of joining the Mets for a few hours and I’ve got an 85-year-old dad who remains available for other plans. We lost my mother on Father’s Day when he was 61 and she was 60, so parental longevity is something I’m not taking for granted this past quarter-century.
Dad may not have passed along much in the way of baseball wisdom when I was growing up, but he did give me a phrase that pretty well covers the state of the Mets at the moment. It’s something he says when one of our conversational topics reaches the ellipsis stage, when neither of us can express a solution to a given issue.
“What can I tell ya?”
I guess “What can I tell ya?” is an older sibling of a phrase I’ve long disliked, “It is what it is,” but I find “What can I tell ya?” more elegant and less abdicative of responsibility. “You” have told me all there is to tell “me”…let’s move on to the next thing.
I can deal with that. I can deal with that better than I can deal with contemplating all that so distresses and disturbs modern-day Metsopotamia.
The Mets lost to the heretofore punchless Padres Saturday. They were completely rolled by starting pitcher Jesse Hahn, presumably the progeny of Jesse Orosco and Don Hahn. The youngster was making his second career start and, with no track record to speak of — certainly no practice at going deep into a game at any professional level — he stifled the Mets on one hit over six innings. Maybe the one hit was an error. Maybe the error was thinking Jesse Hahn was going to have a problem with a Met lineup predisposed to amateur performance.
Three relievers followed Hahn and gave up one hit among them. The 5-0 final was a nice synergistic nod to 50 Cent, but I doubt that was the idea. David Wright has gone from #FaceOfMLB to #OMG and #WTF during almost every #AB. Chris Young struck out four times and played a little of the emotional victim card afterward, joining the chorus of Mets past and present who discover heat every time they venture into the lukewarm Flushing kitchen and thus wish to scurry out ASAP. Young was characteristically crummy and was instinctively jeered by the first sizable home crowd the Mets have attempted to entertain in weeks. I’ve never been one for booing members of my favorite team, but if you’re modeling the golden sombrero during La Fiesta de Nada, don’t necessarily expect the rousing reception the Mets green-screen into their propagandistic recruiting films to materialize in a live-action setting.
I don’t mean to pick on Young. I don’t mean to pick on Wright. The Mets didn’t mean to pick on Hahn and they stayed true to their meaning. But here we are again, same nothingness gaining traction; same competitive void expanding out into the universe; same “we’re close” claptrap condescended down from on high; same dampening of expectations; same suffocation of aspirations. Except on Saturday, there was a postgame concert, and on Sunday, dads and kids get a cap.
The Mets aren’t very good these days…
What can I tell ya?
Other than — per the immortal words of the physically absent yet spiritually present paterfamilias of the Ralph Kiner Television Booth at Citi Field — happy birthday to all the fathers out there.
Mine included.
|
|
