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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 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 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.
by Greg Prince on 14 June 2014 3:18 am Friday night in Dyersville, Ia., the 25th anniversary of Field Of Dreams was celebrated. That’s the movie in which legendary ballplayers of yore stream out of a cornfield in the full flower of youth and play the game that made them iconic as if no time at all had passed.
And in a wholly coincidental development, Bobby Abreu went 4-for-4 and Bartolo Colon pitched 7⅓ four-hit innings in the Mets’ Friday-the-13th victory over the San Diego Padres…on Zombie Night at Citi Field.
Our youth movement may not be amounting to much, but the Mets of the living dead seem to be alive and well.
 Those New Faces of 1997 can still amaze audiences nearly two decades after their debut. Abreu and Colon were rookies in 1997, when Field Of Dreams was eight, Wilmer Flores was five and Interleague baseball was being born. Friday night also marked the 17th anniversary of the first regular season N.L.-A.L. game the Mets ever contested, versus the Red Sox. They lost to Boston at Shea, 8-4. By then, Colon had pitched six times for Cleveland and Abreu had accumulated 169 career at-bats with Houston. They were both already older than Interleague play, not to mention Derek Jeter, Alex Rodriguez and the Red Sox’ winning pitcher of June 13, 1997, Jeff Suppan. Today, they are older than dirt.
But dirt’s still got a few tricks up its well-worn sleeves. Colon was whacked around a bit in the first two frames he threw Friday against the Padres, who seem even more Metsian than the Mets in their offensive ineptitude. They got to Bartolo early but not often. Then they were completely shut down. Bobby, meanwhile, was open for business in the cleanup spot all night: doubling and scoring; singling and scoring; singling home Murphy; singling home Murphy once more. Together, the B-Boys — with a bit of help here and there from their more callow teammates — combined to overcome an early two-run deficit and secure a post-midnight 6-2 win.
The game crept beyond the witching hour because two hours of rain postponed its first pitch. That meant Abreu and Colon, each of them already past 40, grew yet a little more wizened as they waited to do what they’ve been doing since the middle of the Clinton presidency. Abreu would be playing in his 2,385th big league baseball game. Colon would be making his 418th start. What was a couple of extra hours against almost half a lifetime of experience?
It’s not like these guys quiver in the face of time’s inevitable march. Colon (6-5 for a 30-37 team) missed the entire 2010 season because of injury. Abreu (.319/.386/.472) was presumed done after not playing anywhere in 2013. The Phillies released him on March 27 of this year. The Mets picked up him up four days later and sent him to Las Vegas. So far he’s been their most promising minor league callup of 2014.
If you build it, maybe they will come. Some nights, though, there’s something to be said for renovating.
by Greg Prince on 13 June 2014 1:39 am Jon Niese looked like he wanted to strangle Terry Collins. Anthony Recker was all set to deck Angel Hernandez. Carlos Torres appeared ready to tear his own head from his neck out of frustration.
Who says the Mets don’t have any fight left in them? Hits and runs are another matter, of course, and few of either were produced by the home team across an unlucky 13 innings Thursday night at Citi Field.
This was the one with the three-minute rain delay that never made it to the tarp stage. The one with few commercials and many SNY gimmicks, the best of them Kevin Burkhardt joining the grounds crew (pre-rain) for a drag of the infield, not to be confused with this drag of a game. The one that featured Niese and Kyle Lohse mowing down each others’ teammates, which was probably a more impressive feat for Niese, considering he wasn’t the pitcher permitted to face the Mets. The only obstacle Jon Seether couldn’t overcome was his fireplug of a manager leaping out of the dugout with two out in the eighth to remove him when he was in full cruise mode.
Niese came out despite his well-earned objections (1 R, 6 H, 1 BB, 8 K), Jeurys Familia went in and the 1-1 status quo remained intact. Extra innings rolled around, not unlike the tumbleweed that presumably blew through the Promenade food court. The Mets still didn’t hit. The Brewers still didn’t hit. The commercials still didn’t air as SNY got in touch with its inner public-access self. The rain still didn’t stop but there were no more microdelays. All bullpenning from both sides proved impenetrable for the longest time, though Brandon Kintzler needed a little help, first from his Roenicke-rigged five-man infield, which cut down a run at the plate, and then from a one-man dispenser of vigilante justice who would never be tolerated in civilized society.
The bases were loaded with Mets in the eleventh — you could already guess that wasn’t going to end well, but still. Anthony Recker worked a two-two count before taking the world’s first low, outside strike…as called, of course, by Angel Hernandez, truly an innovator in the art of creative officiating. Recker was so disgusted that he didn’t get the chance to strike out honorably like most Mets that he furiously and instantly informed Hernandez of the myriad shortcomings he displays in his chosen profession. Giving Angel Hernandez an excuse to eject a catcher in extra innings is like giving an ape a banana. Of course he’s going to take it and stuff it in his umphole. So no, Recker shouldn’t have gotten himself thrown out, what with Collins’s bench down to Taylor Teagarden and splinters, but it’s Angel Hernandez in the eleventh. Who among us could resist vocally assaulting let alone bodily harming that arrogant piece of inaccurate dreck for one mist-soaked second if he was standing inches away…or closer than “strike three” was?
Anthony Recker: player of the game. Well, him or Burkhardt. We’re gonna miss that entertaining young man when he’s gone.
After the Mets allowed Angel Hernandez his chance to get the Brewers out of that jam (though, to be fair, they didn’t exactly help their own cause by sucking at hitting), Carlos Torres came in and walked a pretty nifty tightrope himself, stranding a pair of Brewers in the twelfth. Whereas Collins couldn’t help but pull Niese, he also couldn’t help but leave Torres in, and Carlos the Workhorse finally paid the price for overuse, getting clobbered in the thirteenth and then commencing to clobber himself. Trailing 5-1, the Mets proceeded to go down to characteristically efficient Francisco Rodriguez, 1-2-3, which, coincidentally, was the total crowd by the time the game was over.
Abandoned stadium. Lineup cobbled together from minor league callups. Manager and ballclub playing out the string. It was just one of those all-too-familiar late September evenings at Citi Field. Too bad it took place in the second week of June.
by Greg Prince on 12 June 2014 10:57 am The Mets didn’t win last night. Oh well. What were they going to do with a win if they’d attained it, anyway? Throw it on the pile of wins that never quite measures up to their taller pile of losses? Then what? Win again?
Come now.
Much as youth is said to be wasted on the young and plate appearances are almost certainly wasted on the Youngs, it occurred to me during Wednesday night’s tight but not exactly tense game against Milwaukee that wins are wasted on the Mets. I root for them to win, I find their winning preferable to their losing, but if they do win an odd game here or there, it’s not like they’re going to start winning them in volume. The Brewers, who won despite squandering multiple tack-on opportunities in classic Metsian fashion, seem like a team that could make good use of a win. They’re exceeding expectations and holding off the Cardinals as they maintain first place in their division. It’s hard to begrudge them an extra victory, even if it was earned at mostly vacant Citi Field in opposition to our beloved New York Nine. By contrast, when the Mets won the night before, what did it add up to? One more square x’d out on the pocket schedule, one more day until whatever year it is when wins and losses will severely matter to this franchise.
My favorite moment of the 2014 season to date, next to Ike Davis’s pinch-hit, come-from-behind, walkoff grand slam that beat the Reds (back when who won or lost a given game could still be interpreted as figurative life and death), may have been this past Sunday when Terry Collins removed Zack Wheeler with two outs and two on in the fourth inning in San Francisco. Zack had struggled some, ratcheting up his pitch count to an unsightly 86, but he wasn’t flat-out awful — but he also appeared not fully in control of his pitches or his emotions. He was in that zone talented young pitchers sometimes drift into, not having things go his way after two consecutive starts when he was mostly untouchable. The last hit he’d given up was a Tim Lincecum grounder that snuck by Ruben Tejada. The next batter due up was lefty Gregor Blanco, who had driven in a pair in the second when he doubled convincingly off the righty Wheeler
The develop-now, win-later handbook suggests you let Wheeler learn on the job. You let him face Blanco because as you’re cultivating one of your theoretical handful of aces, you know he has to deduce how to retire a troublesome lefty in a tough spot. You assume this is a moment that will tell you something about Zack and maybe in few decades, Zack will be announcing a baseball game on TV and telling his partners about the time he had to grow up in a hurry in San Francisco. If Zack Wheeler is this generation’s Ron Darling — his career trajectory to date feels fairly similar — this is where Davey lets Ronnie go after Leon Durham or Dave Parker.
Plus, to use the reigning manager’s favored vernacular, it’s only the stinkin’ fourth inning, for cripes sake.
But this was where Terry, saddled with a five-game losing streak and momentarily stripped of his pitching coach (Dan Warthen was off attending a graduation), decided not to be Davey Johnson in 1984, but Casey Stengel in any number of years when Casey saw the chance to pounce. Stengel was known to pinch-hit for his pitcher ASAP if he thought he could break a game open, no matter the inning. He did it for the dynastic Yankees of the 1950s and he did for the dreadful Mets of the early 1960s. The longest relief stint in Mets history, Larry Bearnarth’s ten innings thrown against the Cubs just over 50 years ago, was a result of Stengel sending up Rod Kanehl to bat for Bill Wakefield, who had already replaced Al Jackson, in the second inning. Kanehl singled to continue a rally that gave the Mets a lead…that they promptly gave up; these were the 1964 Mets, after all. The larger point is Casey understood a game could be won or lost in the early innings as much it could be later on. The Mets, as it happened, won that particular game on June 9, 1964, 6-5, in twelve, and Kanehl, like Bearnarth, played a huge role. (Read all about it here!)
The Mets have emphasized “later” seemingly forever. On Sunday Terry opted to be about now, albeit on defense. He could’ve let Wheeler find himself. Or he could’ve decided the long flight back to New York would be even longer if the Mets had to schlep a sixth consecutive defeat onto the plane. He decided the paramount goal in the moment was not letting Blanco extend a 4-2 Giant lead until it was out of Met reach. So he patted Wheeler on the ass, called on his newly rediscovered lefty toy, Josh Edgin, and Edgin took care of Blanco to keep the Mets viable a little longer.
A loss was in the offing anyway, but I liked the move. Wheeler not getting the opportunity to redeem himself is as much a lesson as anything he would’ve gleaned from another encounter with Blanco. And Collins, for at least an instant, shook things up in a meaningful, competition-minded way.
Sending down Travis d’Arnaud sent a similar message, though it shouldn’t have been a difficult one to transmit. “Don’t hit .180 and expect to start in the big leagues” should be self-explanatory to a rookie, no matter how much of a can’t-miss prospect he’s been labeled forever. I don’t worry that d’Arnaud is a “bust” based on 2% of precincts reporting any more than I worry about Wheeler not being Matt Harvey. Jerry Grote, John Stearns and Todd Hundley all turned into stalwart Met catchers who ranged from competent to spectacular as offensive contributors, yet they were all overmatched by opposing pitchers when they came up to the majors. Hundley was yo-yo’d for a couple of years between AAA and MLB and split more assignments than he would’ve liked with Charlie O’Brien and Kelly Stinnett before fully establishing himself as a legitimate starting backstop. Chronic viewers of Mets Yearbook: 1976 will recall Stearns asked to be optioned to Tidewater so he could hone his skills daily rather than sit behind Grote. Catchers not named Piazza or Posey take time. The Mets, based on their fierce lack of urgency, have plenty of that.
The only part of d’Arnaud’s d’Emotion that didn’t sit right was reading that he and his teammates were “shocked” that it happened. At .180 and showing zero power, they should have been shocked that he hadn’t been Vegas-bound sooner. I suppose their reaction is indicative of how little emphasis the Mets place on the Mets winning ballgames. Travis is hitting again out west. Swell. Keep hitting and come back soon. Taylor Teagarden’s Tuesday night swing for the ages notwithstanding, we’re gonna need Travis d’Arnaud like we’re gonna need Zack Wheeler.
Someday it’s not going to be a question of eventual development versus immediate performance. For now, though, it’s nice to be reminded that winning means a little something in the short-term.
Terry Collins clearly wasn’t brought in to mold a winner. The best thing anybody has to say about his skill set is he communicates well with his players and that he doesn’t lose the clubhouse. Apparently keeping replacement-level talent calm trumps getting much out of it. As of last night, Collins had managed 551 Mets games without compiling a winning record in any of his three-plus seasons at the helm. If he leads these Mets to at least 53 wins in their final 97 games this season and finishes at 82-80 (or better), then he’s off the board in that regard. Until that happens, here are the most Mets games managed without as much as a winning season in the portfolio:
Joe Torre: 706
Casey Stengel: 579
Terry Collins: 551
Dallas Green: 512
It’s unusual to get to hang around if you don’t win anything. You couldn’t tell from the Mets and Collins, but winning usually means something in baseball.
Stengel was a singular figure in unprecedented expansion circumstances. It was a broken hip that took him out of the game. Torre, as new to managing as Stengel was old but ultimately a Hall of Fame skipper just the same, was given yards of rope in light of his hollow roster and reasonably glamorous name (yes, even then). Joe also benefited from Frank Cashen not having quite enough time or juice to immediately eliminate him when Cashen took over as GM basically five minutes before Spring Training heading into Torre’s fourth season. Green’s charge was to clean up a bleach-stained mess; he had the Mets noticeably improving for a couple of years before they regressed into unquestioned mediocrity. At that point, like most managers who guide teams to terrible records, he was replaced.
Sooner or later, somebody takes the fall for 77-85, 74-88, 74-88 and (current winning percentage pro-rated to 162 games) 72-90. We’ve seen all our lives it’s usually the manager. It’s not boorish to begin to wonder what Terry Collins brings to his role if it’s not an ability to win a lot or just win a little more than has been the case. All that vaunted communication doesn’t explain why young players come up, are touted as real helps to the lineup and then get glued to the bench within two games. On Sunday, Collins had a reasonably better option in the moment when he removed Wheeler and summoned Edgin. Most nights he’s not exactly sitting Andrew Brown or Wilmer Flores because he’s blessed with Billy Williams and Barry Larkin. It’s a fine line discerning what you do, with limited personnel, to win this very game right in front of you, as opposed to what you do with an eye on what underknown quantities might become if only you gave them more consistent reps.
In our Metsopotamian world, you get whatever’s left to be wrung out of Bobby Abreu’s last legs and the amortization of Chris Young’s megamillions deal and the increasingly untantalizing teases provided by Lucas Duda and Ruben Tejada. You get a gratifying grand slam out of nowhere from a journeyman catcher but not an actual solid backup option who could mentor your projected star receiver. You don’t get the most for your roster-construction dollar, even considering this is a team operated on a shoestring, so you don’t get all that excited by an individual win or loss, yet you still wonder whether that’s a case of the team being bad, or you, the fan, being not as good as you could be because you’ve stopped taking losses to heart the way you always used to.
You see the ranks churn — only four of the 21 players used in the 20-inning game of just over one year ago are on today’s active roster — but you don’t see much change. You remember grumbling like this when the Mets were wallowing at 24-39 last season, but then, a week after that marathon loss to the Marlins, your spirits were hoisted sky-high when Kirk Nieuwenhuis hit a home run off Carlos Marmol and the Mets took 22 of 37 and you thought things were turning for real. But since that invigorating stretch expired in late July, the Mets have gone 57-71, which is the mathematical expression of More Of The Stinkin’ Same, For Cripes Sake.
And though you’re happy to watch on TV because the announcers are so much fun, and if you’re not near a TV you’re fine with the radio because those guys are fun, too, you notice you’re thoroughly unmoved to get up and go to the ballpark. You think about going, but then you decide, what fun is that?
by Jason Fry on 11 June 2014 1:02 am You can all thank me now.
In the bottom of the sixth, with the bases loaded and two outs and 981st Met in history Taylor Teagarden at the plate, something I’d been wondering about for a day or two finally coalesced in my head, and so — as happens these days — emerged as a tweet.
I got there because they say it takes two points to make a line, and I found myself with three.
The first point had shown up on Metsblog a couple of days back: a note that the Mets were 8-17 in one-run games. Every baseball fan knows such extremes aren’t sustainable: Here’s some proof if you’re feeling mathy; if not, the lowdown is that too good or bad a record in one-run games suggests luck is at work, and a regression to the mean is on the way. And that’s important: Metsblog noted that if the Mets had even managed a mediocre 12-13 record, they’d be tied for first place. In the underwhelming NL East, granted, but it counts.
The second point arrived via ESPN’s Mark Simon, who posted this during the afternoon:
Basically, the Mets are in the middle of the pack in terms of balls hit hard, but at the absolute bottom when it comes to converting those balls to hits. When I asked Mark if he hadn’t essentially posted a Luck Index, he warned that big ballparks could have an impact too. (And indeed, you’ll find the A’s and Giants a bit lower than you might have expected.) But it seems safe to say that there’s a fair amount of luck involved — I wasn’t surprised to see the Blue Jays in the top spot.
Then, finally, there was a note tonight from the SNY booth, not long before Teagarden stepped into the box: The Mets were ranked third in baseball at getting runners into scoring position, but 24th in on-base percentage with runners in scoring position.
You can chalk that last one up to ill-advised hitting philosophies, the fear of fans booing, or mental toughness. (If you must. Perhaps sunspots and the Illuminati are involved too.)
Or maybe that one is also shaped by a fair amount of luck.
Anyway, all this came together in my head, I tweeted my serious question, and approximately two seconds later Teagarden hit a liner over the right-field fence for a grand slam, turning a 2-1 lead you figured wouldn’t last into a 6-1 prelude to a rare and incredibly welcome laugher.
We don’t like to think too much about the role luck plays in the outcome of baseball games, let alone seasons. Or at least I don’t — it makes watching baseball feel a bit too clockwork, like I’m staring at some kind of flesh-and-blood version of Pachinko. So instead we do something that’s more satisfying but no more logical: We make up stories to fit the data. You know the drill: Good teams are resilient and well-led and have chemistry; bad teams are lazy and rudderless and selfish.
This isn’t something we do just with sports. We’re wired for it as humans — we’re extraordinarily good at finding patterns and ferreting out connections. Most of the time that helps us learn and plan and succeed. But the side effect is we’re also pretty good at finding patterns where there aren’t any, insisting we hear signal when there may not be anything but noise. And that can lead us to silly conclusions — or sometimes ones that are unfair and/or dangerous.
Look, the Mets have a lot of problems that are definitely signal: a withered payroll, untrustworthy owners, and too many ABs and innings given to subpar players. But on top of that, they sure look like they’re contending with more than their share of lousy luck — noise, in other words. If that sorts itself out, as such things tend to do, perhaps things aren’t quite as bleak as they appear.
And if not, what the heck — at least it’s a nice thought to kick off the Taylor Teagarden Era.
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