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ABOUT US
Faith and Fear in Flushing made its debut on Feb. 16, 2005, the brainchild of two longtime friends and lifelong Met fans.
Greg Prince discovered the Mets when he was 6, during the magical summer of 1969. He is a Long Island-based writer, editor and communications consultant. Contact him here.
Jason Fry is a Brooklyn writer whose first memories include his mom leaping up and down cheering for Rusty Staub. Check out his other writing here.
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by Greg Prince on 1 July 2014 4:04 am “Let’s see, this team lost 99 games last year, 96 the year before and 98 the year before that, right? This is a much greater challenge than the one I faced in Baltimore in 1965.”
—Frank Cashen, introduced as New York Mets general manager, 2/21/1980
Rome wasn’t built in a day. It was built in just under seven years, between February 21, 1980, and October 27, 1986. Its civic planner, architect, contractor, foreman and chief stonecutter was Frank Cashen.
Cashen, who died Monday at 88, created the greatest empire our people have ever known. What a joy it was to revel in its glories, to thrive under its protection, to believe it would endure for all eternity.
It has, in its way. It’s 2014, yet we who were there live to tell the tale of 1986 — our collective memory’s seat of government and Frank Cashen’s most astounding structure. True, we are moved to talk about 1986 so often because we haven’t lived through anything very much like it since, but had there been a dozen 1986s constructed in its wake, there is little chance we would ever forget the one that would forever tower over everything else that followed.
Cashen famously modeled a bow tie as he general managed the Mets from outcasts to emperors. It was a sartorial habit he picked up from his days as a newspaperman (neck ties just got in the way of layout). Yet given the stature he attained in his 12 years as GM, he probably should’ve been outfitted in a purple toga and laurel wreath. Well, maybe not, because he likely wouldn’t have cared for the Animal House overtones. It wasn’t what the man wore, anyway. It was what the man did.
He did us solid after solid after solid. You can’t build something that stands so strong in the consciousness without employing the most solid of material. Frank went out and got us the best. He drafted. He traded. He cultivated. He built. That’s what it came down to. He started with almost nothing — a handful of minor leaguers and a dollop of goodwill — and he got to work ASAP. You couldn’t necessarily see the finished product forming unless you peered far into the horizon, but here came the pieces…
Strawberry. Sisk. Mitchell. Dykstra. Darling. Gooden. McDowell. Heep. Hearn. Aguilera. Hernandez. Fernandez. Santana. Added to holdovers Backman, Wilson and Orosco, the Mets entered 1984 on the heels of seven consecutive losing seasons — four of them on Cashen’s watch — but with more than half of the 1986 World Series roster secure in the system. Some were up, some were coming.
As the first kiss of success brushed the Mets fan cheek in the first blush of summer 1984, the procession continued. Elster drafted and signed. Knight acquired for the franchise’s first legitimate stretch run in more than a decade. Within 10 weeks of a 90th win not being aspired to but actually achieved, Johnson from Detroit. Three days after that, Carter from Montreal. Then Niemann. Then 1985 and 98 wins that proved 1984 no fluke and presaged 1986 as no year anybody who loved the Mets could have imagined prior to Cashen.
A little more building remained to be done. Ojeda in December. Teufel in January. Top off with Mazzilli in August.
Celebrate your 108-54 champions in October.
One man, one mind, one skilled dialing finger, one keen judge of talent, one executive unafraid of a little creative tension with his field manager, one old-school soul who gritted his teeth through what he must have considered the coarser developments of contemporary baseball. Frank Cashen did his building without resorting to the tools of big-money free agency. He delved into the financial resources available to him, yet never made much of a show of parting with dollars. His era and that in which he had to do business barely overlapped after a fashion. He remained resolutely tweedy in an age when Members Only jackets were considered high style.
Frank was the right person at the right time — and probably not five minutes longer.
Post-1986, the empire Cashen built couldn’t have appeared sounder, but its foundation didn’t sustain. Maybe nobody’s could have in those days. The playoff format wasn’t the pliable version we know today. Dispatch the wrong character, depend on the wrong personality, cede control to lesser lieutenants, run into some lousy luck, suddenly you’re not tending the empire you thought you were. You deal gingerly with decline, you watch from the sidelines when fall inevitably occurs. Down the road, they’re lamenting your failure to forge something more tangibly dynastic.
You won it all once; when you slipped to winning but not winning enough, there wasn’t much opportunity to appreciate what winning once the way you won meant. Amidst decline and fall, who’s got time for perspective?
That’s what eternity is for. And the Mets fan who was blessed to have lived deep in the heart of the empire Frank Cashen built will always be eternally grateful for the privilege of permanent citizenship there.
by Greg Prince on 1 July 2014 1:52 am What a kick in the ol’ Brian Bohanons that was Monday night in Atlanta. Three pitches in, the Mets lead on a Curtis Granderson home run. Three innings in, the Mets are ahead, 3-0. Zack Wheeler isn’t sharp but he isn’t exactly shaky, either, at least once he gets going. The Mets, per usual, stop hitting, but Zack expertly nurses a 3-1 lead into the seventh. He is succeeded eventually by Josh Edgin, who exterminates a creeping first-and-second terror when he flies out Shea Freeman, a.k.a. Son of Chipper.
What could possibly go wrong from there?
Turner Field is what could go wrong. Can you believe the Braves wish to depart this House of Horrors? Did a Mets fan infiltrate their board of directors? Is torturing us such old hat that they decided it wasn’t worth the upkeep on the oversized video screen and cola bottle?
After everything that could possibly go wrong went wrong and the Mets aided and abetted Atlanta in turning that 3-1 edge into a three-error, four-run home eighth en route to a sadly predictable 5-3 loss, the Mets’ all-time record at Turner Field fell to 52-96. That’s regular-season only. If we throw in the delightful road results from the 1999 NLCS, it’s 52-99, which means that after 18 seasons of visiting the pit presumably on or near Peachtree (everything down there is on or near Peachtree), the Mets sit on the cusp of losing 100 games in that one particular ballpark.
You know where Monday’s loss — the one in which Jeurys Familia fired a double-play grounder straight into the dirt in front of second base, Juan Lagares overran a single and a chopper (of all Tomahawk-tinged things) ate up Eric Campbell — ranks among the 99 to date in terms of pain delivery system?
Probably not even in the Top 20…or Bottom 20, depending on how you score these matters. Maybe if this were September 1997, when the hell was fresh; or July 1998, when it was codified; or the stretch drives of 1999 to 2001, when it carried genuine competitive consequences; or some more recent campaign more blatantly stripped of hope and dignity, it would have truly stung. Maybe if this were last June, even, when Freddie Freeman was rebranding himself as Larry Jones for a new century.
But this? The Mets taking the wrong message from the World Cup and showing us what experts they’ve become at flopping? They’ll have to do better than give away a highly winnable game if they want to simultaneously impress and depress us. We’ve lived through nearly a hundred of these Turner Field debacles.
What’s one more?
by Jason Fry on 29 June 2014 10:25 pm The National League East is a mess. In every other division, run differential is a pretty fair predictor of W-L record. In the NL East, the run differentials by place in the standings currently look like this: 0, +39, -5, -1, -40. The 0 squad is the Braves, in first place by the thinnest of margins over the Nats, who run differential would predict would have a substantial lead. The Marlins are at -5, about the same as the -1 Mets, but neither team is as far ahead of the crummy Phillies as you’d expect.
Statistics, obviously, aren’t destiny: The Mets aren’t 41-41 but 37-45, just as the Nats aren’t 11 games over .500.
But it’s asking a lot to imagine destinies that fly in the face of the stats.
Which brings us, in a roundabout way to the 2014 Mets. They lost today because a) Bartolo Colon had one of his off-days when his location wasn’t great and his fastball command wasn’t sharp, making him very hittable; and b) because they went limp when looking at a runner on third and less than two out. Daniel Murphy, Juan Lagares, and Ruben Tejada all failed in that spot today; convert those runs, and perhaps the team’s ninth-inning rally results in extra innings instead of lipstick smeared on a pig. (Believe it or not, the Mets are in the middle of the baseball pack when it comes to converting such situations — it only seems like they’re 0 for the last 74,000.)
For all their problems, though, the Mets’ mess of a division makes it difficult to abandon hope of a ’73-style run from worst (or near enough) to first.
But we should. Because trying to thread that needle is a distraction from the real business at hand.
The Mets have solid starting pitching — a surplus of it, in fact. Their bullpen has gone from a horror show to a strength, with Jenrry Mejia, Jeurys Familia, Josh Edgin and Vic Black all looking solid. (And Bobby Parnell presumably returning next year.) But the offense remains painfully thin: Left field, shortstop, first base and catcher are all question marks if you’re feeling kind and holes if you’re not.
Above all else, the Mets need more potent bats. Help is potentially coming with Kevin Plawecki and Brandon Nimmo and Dilson Herrera, but it’s coming next year at the earliest, and even if those players pan out it will take patience to develop them — witness Lucas Duda and Wilmer Flores and Travis d’Arnaud.
To me, it’s clear that the Mets should deal some of their surplus of starters: Next spring, the Mets can expect to have Matt Harvey, Jon Niese, Dillon Gee, Zack Wheeler, Colon, Jacob deGrom, Noah Syndergaard and Rafael Montero as starting candidates along with Familia and Mejia. I think the last two have shown they should stay in the bullpen, but that’s still eight guys for five spots. You don’t want to deal away all your depth — there will be guys who need more time and injuries — but the Mets can still make a deal.
What kind of deal? That’s up for debate, and potential partners would have something to say about it too of course. But I’d listen if the Mets were asked about Colon, Niese, Montero or Daisuke Matsuzaka — and absent a charge into first place, I wouldn’t look at the standings before having that conversation.
The same goes for Daniel Murphy. I love Murph, invisible ninja fantasies and all. If the Mets signed him to a long-range deal that would be great. But if they think they can get more value by moving him, they should do that. (Sandy Alderson’s free-agent picks have been hit and miss, but his record as a summer trader has been pretty good.) And again, if someone has an offer for Murph, the Mets should consider it without wondering why the Nats keep sputtering or whether luck will naturally bring them up four or five games in the standings.
The starters are here. The relievers have emerged. But the bats are still missing. The Mets’ top priority should be finding them, not daydreaming about what might be if everything breaks right. Because it probably won’t. Fantasies are fun; building good realities is better.
by Greg Prince on 29 June 2014 11:32 am Saturday began with soccer, which is how absolutely none of my Saturdays have ever begun and perhaps will never begin again. I came downstairs to find the Brazil-Chile match on the living room television. Stephanie had it on with the sound off while she was reading. It remained on with the sound off for quite a while, neither of us exactly enraptured by America’s newest favorite spectator obsession.
Eventually, I turned the sound up and grew surprisingly absorbed into a contest gone into extra time. It’s sports — overtime is overtime, even if overtime doesn’t necessarily end a soccer match the way it ends most sports. I found myself rooting for Chile, partly because I almost always gravitate to the underdog, partly because I suddenly remembered writing a report about Chile in sixth grade (they have great sea bass, you know). Some Chilean guy I never heard of hit the crossbar in the waning seconds of OT (ET?) and I could feel my fan heart breaking for a country I hadn’t thought about in nearly four decades.
It was still 1-1 after 120-plus minutes of play. I’d gone from casually glancing at the screen and gently mocking the fuss raised worldwide over a game that is not my national pastime to wondering if maybe Brazil had some version of Keith Hernandez (Hernandinhosa, he would be known as) challenging a teammate to a fistfight should he call for anything but the soccer equivalent of a slider. This thing was surely going 16 innings…or to a shootout.
After five kicks apiece, to put it in terms I’m equipped to understand, the Brazilian Orosco struck out the Chilean Bass and the announcers were going on Astro-nomically about how the losing side could exit the tournament with its head held high. For someone who not 24 hours earlier was bonding with his dad over how freaking pointless all this World Cup nonsense was to our American sensibilities, I reveled a little in finally comprehending what all the fuss was about.
I’ve attended exactly one soccer match in my life. It was April 1982, the closing weeks of my freshman year of college, the Toronto Blizzard visiting the Tampa Bay Rowdies. Student tickets at the University of South Florida were severely discounted and a free orange-sleeved 98 ROCK baseball shirt sweetened the deal. I spent most of the game chatting with the two guys from my floor who convinced me to go. With no warning whatsoever, the conversation would get dropped because an unforeseen commotion overtook the sparsely filled stands. Something akin to action was actually happening down on the Tampa Stadium grass. I couldn’t discern anything that looked anything different from the moment before, but a GOOOOOOOAL! was developing right before our eyes.
It was? It was. The Blizzard or perhaps the Rowdies scored. I saw it but I couldn’t see it, you know? I just didn’t have the properly honed vision for it. It all just looked like guys endlessly kicking a ball back and forth when I should’ve been back at the dorm studying for finals.
Baseball, on the other hand, is something whose intricacies I came out of the womb recognizing. Right after my first words of “Metsie! Metsie!” the next thing I said was not mama, not papa, but “maybe Casey shouldn’t get too comfortable with Larry Burright in the leadoff slot.” And because I’m so sophisticated when it comes to baseball, I can see everything unfolding infallibly and project exactly what course any given game will take.
Yeah, sure I can.
The latest episode of the more I watch baseball, the more I know how little I really know took place Saturday in Pittsburgh, after Chile and I parted ways until the next World Cup/sixth-grade report. The Mets and Pirates dressed up as the Royal Giants and Crawfords — I always thought the most effective Negro League tribute would have been offering major league uniforms to black players prior to 1947 — and had me, like keeper Claudio Bravo on one too many Brazilian penalty kicks, guessing wrong.
I guessed the all-blue Mets were in trouble when I saw a lineup that had Ruben Tejada batting second and David Wright batting nowhere. But the Captainless Mets lineup was quite effective in the early going against Gerrit Cole, starting with Ruben singling, continuing with Lucas Duda doing the same and cresting when Wright’s replacement Eric Campbell doubled Tejada home and Duda to third, from whence Lucas would scamper home on a wild pitch. There were three Met and Royal Giant runs in the first plus two more in the second, thanks to Eric Young stealing twice and Daniel Murphy driving in two.
I guessed the Mets were going to build their 5-0 lead to one of blowout proportions in the fourth when Young was on again and stealing again and Tejada reached base and Murphy was coming up, but instead Cole squirmed out of trouble.
I guessed Jon Niese was going to cruise to an easy victory regardless, given how dependable he’s been for so long. Yet the Pirates started pecking away and Niese completely lost the strike zone and here came the Buccos and there went Niese’s command, and it was 5-1, then 5-2, then I braced for the PNC walls to come down around the Mets as they do with annual regularity.
I guessed Niese was screwed, but he got a strike three call from Toby Basner that was as generous to the Mets as the one the night before that said Josh Harrison was permitted to flop on the grass in a rundown was to the Pirates. Somehow Niese righted himself and went a solid six, giving up just three runs and maintaining the Met lead.
I guessed when Stolmy Pimentel — presumably no relation to any Primanti Brother — totally shut down the Mets for four innings (two hits, seven strikeouts) that the Pirates were destined to make them pay for never adding on to a run total that had stayed stuck at five since the second. But it turned out the Mets fought bullpen fire with bullpen fire very effectively. Jeurys Familia and Jenrry Mejia combined to retire the final nine Pirates on 20 pitches over the last three innings and the Mets monochromatically prevailed, 5-3, baffling me at every turn…which I was fine with, because I don’t have to understand everything about a sport to appreciate what an Amazin’ spectacle it can be.
Under the prevailing rules of MLB, both the Mets and Pirates advance to the Round of Sunday.
***
I’m proud to announce an edited version of my 2010 FAFIF essay on Comiskey Park is included in a new book paying tribute to my favorite ballpark ever. There’s a lot of great stuff in this volume. Please check it out here.
by Jason Fry on 27 June 2014 11:45 pm Welp, the little black cloud is back.
This was a 2014 Mets game concocted from all-too-familiar ingredients: The recipe calls for mostly good starting pitching, a pretty good bullpen, no offense, some fundamentally dumb baseball, a dash of tragedy and a pinch of farce. Stir for nearly four hours and you get an aggravating, annoying loss.
I said a dash of tragedy, but for all I know it could be a bucket: David Wright was scratched from the lineup with a sore shoulder, which he’s apparently been dealing with for a couple of weeks. He’s headed to New York for an MRI; I’m going to tentatively assume all will be fixable with a cortisone shot and a couple of days off, largely because Wright’s been hitting well recently. On the other hand, David’s a Met, so it’s entirely impossible the team doctors will strap him to a gurney and accidentally push it into an elevator shaft.
Without Wright, one was struck by just how threadbare and miserable this lineup is. The hitters did next to nothing, and further reduced that miserable output by a) hitting the ball to Andrew McCutchen; and b) making dumb mistakes. The first is going to happen; the second shouldn’t happen but all too frequently does with this bunch. There was Chris Young getting picked off first, Daniel Murphy taking the bat out of Lucas Duda‘s hands with one of his chronic “WHEE I’M AN INVISIBLE NINJA!” delusions and Jacob deGrom short-circuiting an inning with a terrible bunt.
On the mound deGrom acquitted himself pretty well, as did Josh Edgin and Jeurys Familia and Jenrry Mejia (more on him in a bit). But deGrom failed to cover first on a ball that Duda knocked into foul territory. That gave the Pirates an extra out, and Jordy Mercer took advantage with a two-run single that tied the game and turned it into a bullpen battle.
A bullpen battle that the umpires crashed, but don’t be fooled: The real villain was Ruben Tejada. In the 10th, Tejada thought he’d tagged Josh Harrison trying to steal second. Unlike last week, Tejada signaled aggressively that the Mets should challenge the call. Progress! Unfortunately, Tejada was wrong and Harrison was safe. Beat head against wall! Harrison then got too frisky on a grounder to Mejia and was caught in a rundown between second and third. Runners aren’t allowed to depart from the basepaths by more than three feet, but Harrison’s journey to third resembled something out of the Family Circus crossed with the Israelites in the desert. The umpires, in their modernist wisdom, ignored niceties such as Harrison having taken a detour onto the infield grass and ruled him safe. It was a ludicrously bad call even by 2014 standards, but the Mets were accessories to the crime: The rundown was a disaster, a 1-6-5-6 farce that ended with Chris Young waiting for a throw at third that never came because Tejada decided Harrison was out of the baseline and waited for the umps to call him out. Ruben was correct, but that’s not the way you do things, and it’s high time someone told him that.
That bit of wacky hijinks left Mejia facing second and third and none out, but he went to work, fanning Travis Snider and Neil Walker and getting Russell Martin to fly to right. It was impressive and heartening and inspiring … and mattered not at all about 10 minutes later, when Vic Black allowed a walk and a walk-off double to Harrison.
Harrison was out of the baseline again while getting dogpiled by his happy teammates, but the umps didn’t call that one either, and so it goes.
by Greg Prince on 27 June 2014 10:47 am The baseball season gives the fan 162 opportunities to reach definitive conclusions — or a million or so snap judgments that are subject to change. Take the one I came to during the 79th game of this Met season as you will.
Watching Thursday night, as the recently hot Mets receded into coolness versus Gregory Polanco’s Pittsburgh Pirates, tumbling back into last place and plunging seven games below .500, I was reminded of an episode of The Mary Tyler Moore Show from forty years ago. It was the one in which producer Lou Grant gathers his WJM news team — associate producer Mary Richards, news writer Murray Slaughter and anchorman Ted Baxter — and expresses his concerns over their newscast’s recent unimpressive track record:
“For the past three years, our ratings have been, week in and week out, absolutely terrible. But lately they’ve started to slip.”
Lou’s solution is to hire a consultant named Bob Larson to shake things up around the newsroom. Nobody trusts the outsider, everybody resents his input, yet he seems to make a genuine difference. Practically overnight, The Six O’Clock News’s ratings shoot up an entire point. That’s a big deal — as Lou explained at the outset of the October 12, 1974, episode, a single ratings point is worth $125,000 (a.k.a. “a quarter-of-a-million bucks,” by Ted’s swift calculation). Given this indisputable improvement, the previously wary Mary comes around to fully appreciating Bob’s impact:
“Y’know something, Murray, I still might not agree with some of Bob’s ideas, but, boy, it sure feels good to be a winner.”
“Yeah, you can say that again.”
“Y’know, yesterday, I opened a charge account, and for the first time, when the girl asked me where I worked, I didn’t mumble.”
“I know what ya mean. For the past two mornings, I’ve been leaving the house humming. Marie thinks I’m fooling around.”
Yup, everybody’s excited and assumes more good times are ahead…which is why it comes as a terrible shock when Bob immediately announces his imminent departure. Lou demands to know why the consultant all of a sudden wants to leave:
“Well, I just figure my work here is over.”
“Whaddaya mean over? We got the ratings up one point, let’s keep goin’, let’s get ’em higher.”
“Well, frankly, with the budget you have and the facilities and the personnel…I don’t think it’s possible.”
“Are you tellin’ us this is as good as we can get?”
“Well, I’m afraid so. I mean this is a nice, friendly, little station. But I’ve done all I can here, and I just feel I’m ready to move on to bigger things, y’know?”
With that, Bob exits and the staff is left to wonder if that’s all there is to their professional existence — until Mary thinks fast and invents a story about a letter the station manager might very well have received from Eric Sevareid. According to Mary’s tale, the CBS Evening News commentator had been in Minneapolis a few weeks earlier — before Larson began consulting — and let it be known he thought the WJM newscast was “the best-written, best-announced and best-produced show he had ever seen locally.”
Their self-esteem properly buoyed, everybody decided to be happy with being a nice, friendly, little station whose ratings were never going to climb a whole lot higher.
Tonight, after the 80th game of this Met season, perhaps I’ll be reminded of something else.
by Jason Fry on 26 June 2014 12:58 am It’s dangerous to saddle wins or losses with caveats. Wins are good, losses are bad. You depart from this simple equation at your peril.
The Mets put themselves in an eight-run hole tonight against the A’s, as Zack Wheeler had no feel whatsoever for his curveball and iffy location with everything. (He also claimed the A’s had his signs.) Brandon Moss hit a ball into the Pepsi Porch that wound up bouncing up to the plaza above it, which I don’t believe I’ve ever seen at Citi Field before and don’t particularly want to see again. Then Yoenis Cespedes whacked a three-run double and Wheeler was done as soon as his spot in the lineup came around. The Mets didn’t do much against reclamation project Brad Mills until it was too late, and that was all she wrote.
Except I detected silver linings — or at least aluminum alibis — in a hopeful number of places.
- If you’ve been paying attention, you know Wheeler’s a young pitcher who’s still learning his craft. He’s going to have nights when he throttles opposing hitters and nights when his mechanics are a mess of popping springs and grinding gears. When it’s the latter, a team as smart, aggressive and good as the A’s will do cruel things to him. Nothing to see here but the learning process.
- The Mets lost, but they hit in a fashion we aren’t used to, particularly not at Citi Field. Lucas Duda clubbed a home run. The beleaguered Chris Young hit his third in two days. Ruben Tejada — who hasn’t been bad at all for a month now — collected a pair of hits. Eric Campbell had two, which probably means his exile to the bench is nigh. (Though with Wilmer Flores sent down to make room for Juan Lagares, Campbell’s our only backup shortstop. Yipes.) Oh, and Curtis Granderson had three, which would have been extraordinary a couple of weeks back but now, happily, is not.
- Met relievers acquitted themselves rather well. Dana Eveland did his bullpen mates a service by soaking up three innings. Gonzalez Germen worked out his issues over two innings of so-so work (hey, that’s what blowouts are for), and Josh Edgin and Jeurys Familia were solid for an inning each. Familia’s frame was particularly fun, highlighted by his successful duel with Cespedes, which he won by moving 97 MPH sinkers in and out and mixing them with the occasional slider. There’s talent there to be harnessed.
- The A’s are the best team in baseball, but tonight they were also pretty lucky defensively. Josh Reddick made a circus catch at the perimeter of the stands and survived a misadventure in right. Dan Otero‘s deflection turned a Daniel Murphy single into a double play. Moss corralled a popup that had disaster written all over it. Add an inch here or subtract one there and the Mets could easily have had four or five additional baserunners, and then who knows.
This isn’t to say the Mets are suddenly good; they still have a bevy of problems. But they’ve been playing without the little black cloud of doom that accompanied them earlier in the season. That makes them a heck of a lot easier to watch, and to root for. Even after a loss, that seems worth noting.
by Greg Prince on 25 June 2014 2:08 am Now I’ve been happy lately
Thinking about the good things to come
And I believe it could be
Something good has begun
Perhaps it’s because once Marcell Ozuna threw out Kirk Nieuwenhuis at home plate to end Friday night’s game one brick shy of a tie, the baseball gods had simply run out of quintessentially Metsian ways to saddle the Mets with losses. “Tying run cut down at the plate on a sure sacrifice fly, we’re not gonna top that one for a while,” they reportedly said before going on a well-earned vacation.
Nieuwenhuis was improbably out and the Mets had predictably lost, yet from that moment forward, it’s been Mets 25 Opponents 6. Amazingly, the 25 runs have been wisely distributed so it wasn’t like there was a 1-0 loss tucked between a couple of 12-run blowouts.
The Mets have won three in a row, five out of six. That doesn’t sound all that impressive, but it sure feels like something. They pounded the almighty Oakland Athletics, they of the best record in baseball, the best run differential in baseball, the best storylines in baseball on a recurring basis.
The Mets are 8-1 in the village of Flushing against the Oakland Athletics since Game Three of the 1973 World Series, when Tom Seaver’s 12 strikeouts couldn’t keep the Mets from losing, 2-1, in 11 innings. Don Hahn couldn’t feel his way around Shea Stadium’s desodded warning track, Jerry Grote couldn’t hold on to strike three from Harry Parker with Ted Kubiak on first…yes, there was more to not winning that World Series than not pitching George Stone four days later.
So where was I? Oh yeah, we’ve been beating Oakland at Shea and Citi pretty consistently ever since even though some regrets refuse to fade with time. We took the next two in 1973, all three in 2007, two of three in 2011 and Tuesday night, too. We’re not just regular hot; we’re cosmically hot.
Take that, Charlie Finley, wherever you are.
Now I’ve been smiling lately
Thinking about the good things to come
And I believe it could be
Something good has begun
There is little daylight to be found streaming through the Tuesday night box score, cluttered as it is with heavy Met hits. Everybody who started, including Bartolo Colon, put a dent in Oakland pitching. There was a homer from Travis d’Arnaud, who offered more proof for my new theory that the most consistent offensive weapon the Mets maintain is Whoever They Called Up Just Now. There were two from Chris Young, who made an excellent case for Being Threatened With Removal From The Premises. Word conveniently leaked out that Young’s salary wasn’t going to save him, so he’d better get to belting ASAP. By some crazy coincidence, he belted a whole bunch.
Absorbing most of the Met pounding was Johnny Narrative, a.k.a. Scott Kazmir. George Stone’s got nothing on Scott Kazmir when it comes to Met lefties whom hindsight insists should’ve been handed the ball. We’re about a month away from the tenth anniversary of being reminded (again) the Mets mindlessly traded Scott when he was a lad full of hiss and vinegar. For what it’s worth, the Mets made the playoffs two unrelated years later anyway. Also for what it’s worth, Victor Zambrano pitched a handful of good games for the Mets before his aching left elbow got the best of him.
It was still an insipid trade and nothing like it should be repeated late this July, but the transaction deserves maybe a touch of forgiving revisionist history if only for accuracy’s sake — and just so it doesn’t need to be dredged over when the Mets visit Oakland in August.
Besides, I’ll need that time to dwell on George Stone being skipped some more.
Get your bags together
Go bring your good friends, too
’Cause it’s getting nearer
It soon will be with you
Hey, how about those towels? Kind of silly, kind of super, I’d say. Nice to detect a note of enthusiasm from our occasionally detached millionaire heroes. Waving towels (even if they are mostly surrender-white) strikes me as good, clean high school jock behavior. It’s even kind of creative.
“Mets towel waving party after hits has turned into towel waving car wash after home runs,” tweeted the Star-Ledger’s Mike Vorkunov, who wrung from Curtis Granderson a perfectly sensible elaboration on what else they’re doing with their Terry cloth:
“Once you finish, you gotta get dried off.”
These rituals are all a matter of taste. By my reckoning, waving the towels beats giving buzzcuts. It’s not quite as excellent as that business with the claw or the spotlight or whatever they were calling it when Jose Reyes and Justin Turner were instigating a fleeting whale of a time in 2011. I’ve always liked the dancing and the curtain calls and such. I like anything that indicates the Mets are winning.
If the Mets keep winning, they can stage The Nutcracker between innings for all I care.
Now come and join the living
It’s not so far from you
And it’s getting nearer
Soon it will all be true
Cynicism will not die easily if at all around here. As I watched the homers fly and the towels flutter Tuesday, I could picture the Mets marketers, quick studies that they are, scheduling a Rally Towel Night for August 28 or thereabouts. Branden and Alexa and possibly Christina would crank up their collective charms and excitedly inform us that “there’s nothing better than coming to the ballpark and waving a tow…” before SNY’s automated brain cut them off in favor of a Cambridge Pavingstones commercial (pavingstones are not to be confused with George Stone). By the time Rally Towel Night finally arrived, the Mets would be umpteen games under .500 and umpteen-and-a-half games out of the second Wild Card and nobody would remember that night in June when Chris Young was still on the Mets, let alone hitting home runs. Grumpy Guest Relations staff would be handing out sad, sponsored towels to handfuls of patrons who wondered what any of this had to do with baseball.
On the other hand, I also allowed myself to think that whatever has gotten into this team over the past week — Ozuna’s temporarily deadly peg notwithstanding — is utterly fantastic and I’m giddy as hell and what fun it is to be a Mets fan when five of six have been won, including three in a row that have been taken by four, six and nine runs, respectively. There were so many long, awful games for such a long, awful time until very recently. Now we win by a ton and it takes no time at all and you wouldn’t mind evenings like these lasting into perpetuity.
Maybe we’re not so great just yet. Maybe we’re just that crappy team that happens to give a much better squad inexplicable fits. That’s not unfun, either, y’know. However this train rolls, what’s the point of a baseball season if it can’t carry you away now and then?
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Though you suddenly can’t wait for first pitch, there are suitable diversions to help occupy you between now and 7:10:
• Monday night I returned to the Rising Apple podcast, where host Rich Sparago, John Coppinger of Metstradamus renown, Mets Musings’ Gary McDonald and I swapped recipes and gardening tips. No, actually, we talked about nothing but the Mets for an hour. Listen in here.
• In March, I took part in a wonderful event that explored Storytelling as Good Medicine, the kicker being that all the stories were baseball stories. A second edition is coming to Bergino Baseball Clubhouse on July 17. Learn more about attending here.
• The best time to induct Gil Hodges into the Baseball Hall of Fame is right this very minute. Wish it was that easy. If you believe the manager of the Miracle Mets and the cornerstone of the Boys of Summer — and by all accounts one of the greatest gentlemen the game has ever known is worthy of enshrinement — there is a petition you should know about right here.
• If you’ve worn out your copy of A Year To Remember, there is a new movie coming together about your 1986 World Champion Mets. Learn more from filmmaker Heather Quinlan here.
• And you’ll want to play this little ditty from 45 Adapters at least 45 times today. As the band in question advises, Let’s Go Metropolitans!
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.
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