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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 4 May 2014 10:47 am No matter which hitters constitute the heart of the Colorado Rockies order in a given series when the Mets play in Denver, the most daunting presence in the home team lineup remains Coors Field. The 20-year veteran may not intimidate in the fashion it did when it was a brash rookie, yet you can never completely shake the lurking sense of dread that if you give this ballpark the chance to beat you in the late innings, it will.
Though every stadium the Mets visit is bound to evoke its own singular set of deep-seated horrific memories (Angel Hernandez quite clearly on the take behind the plate at Turner Field in 1998; Jimmy Rollins going 12-for-12, more or less, on getaway day at Citizens Bank Park in 2007; Jeremy Reed throwing a mile past home while manning first at Dodger Stadium moments after Ryan Church’s foot couldn’t find third as 2009 descended definitively into the fiery pit of Hades), with Coors Field, everything always resets in my mind to the very first game.
April 26, 1995: both the ballpark and the season were brand new. Both were sights for baseball-deprived eyes. The long strike of 1994-95 had been settled only after the farce spring of replacement exhibitions had worn our faith in humanity down to the nub. There would be just 144 games to the upcoming schedule, but the first two for the Mets would be in this gleaming jewel of a throwback. Coors Field was the National League’s first so-called retro park, a mold-breaker along the lines of Camden Yards, Jacobs Field and the Ballpark in Arlington. When you considered how rabid the fans of Colorado had been when their expansion team played at Mile High Stadium and then combined that passion with the beauty of a cozy, old-fashioned, baseball-only playpen, well, you couldn’t believe how lucky the Mets were to be the first team to come to bat there.
Fourteen innings later, you discovered the flaw in the design of Coors Field, namely that the Mets didn’t get to be the last team to come to bat there.
• Dallas Green’s scrappy pups fell behind, 5-1, in the fifth but Todd Hundley launched a grand slam to tie it in the top of the sixth.
• The Rockies scored a run to go ahead in the bottom of the inning.
• The Mets grabbed a 7-6 lead in the top of the ninth on Bobby Bonilla’s RBI single.
• The Rockies scored a run to tie it in the bottom of the inning.
• In the top of the thirteenth, Jose Vizcaino drove in Brett Butler from second on a base hit to put the Mets up, 8-7.
• The Rockies scored a run to tie it in the bottom of the inning.
• Come the top of the fourteenth, Joe Orsulak doubled to left to bring home Ricky Otero and the Mets held a 9-8 lead.
Guess what happened in the bottom of the inning.
Bichette happened. An overgrown Cody Ross who called himself Dante Bichette — pumping his obnoxious fist in instant triumph — belted a three-run homer that soared far above Otero’s head and landed in a nearby mountain range, winning the game for the homestanders, 11-9, and giving birth to the most haunting maxim in American sport:
No lead is ever safe at Coors Field.
Not the three different one-run leads the Mets gripped on Opening Night 1995;
Not the 6-0 advantage Jenrry Mejia was seemingly cruising aboard in the fifth inning Saturday night;
And not the hard-earned 10-9 edge the Mets took into the bottom of the ninth long after Mejia gave up eight in the fifth to shove the Mets into a Bichette-sized hole.
What appeared to be shaping up as a rare 2014 Mets romp had become a 1995-style nightmare, yet it was on the road to redemption, fueled by the kind of gumption that would have made my main mid-’90s man Joe Orsulak proud.
It was in the top of the ninth that Bobby Abreu lumbered off the bench with one out to face LaTroy Hawkins for only the sixth time in a pair of careers that stretch back to the Orsulak Era. Good old Bobby (40) got the best of good old LaTroy (41) and doubled to left. Abreu was exchanged at second for Eric Young, Jr., the pinch-runner whose namesake father drove in a go-ahead run against Mets lefty specialist Eric Gunderson as a pinch-hitter when Coors Field was all of six innings old on 4/26/95. The younger Young proved fast and wily enough to take third on Josh Satin’s groundout to Nolan Arenado, whose first name I mysteriously decided was Nelson — like Casey calling for one Bob Miller or the other, I suppose — but, in light of the platinum-level glove he employs, might as well be Andrelton.
Throughout this series the Mets had been failing to cope with the rockets hit at or by the National Arenado and Space Administration. When he wasn’t robbing Chris Young (no relation to anybody as far as we know), he was mauling Mejia. Nolan’s fifth-inning grand slam was the jolt that sent Jenrry’s hair really flying out from under his cap. Arenado, Blackmon, Tulowitzki, Gonzalez…a humidor may have been installed at Coors Field to keep baseballs from acting unnaturally up, but these were the new Blake Street Bombers in the Mets’ midst. Once the fourth became the fifth, what with Ryan Wheeler leading off with a homer to make it 6-1, Jordan Pacheco singling to reset the table and everything immediately unraveling in a blur of bloops, bleeders and blasts, Mejia might as well have been taking on the reincarnations of Burks, Walker, Gallaraga and Castilla.
But even as the home side was lighting up the scoreboard like something out of a Pacheco Palace, the Mets kept fighting back admirably: first from 8-6 to tie it at 8-8 in the top of the sixth, then from 9-8 to make it 9-9 in the top of the eighth. Save for their historically futile swinging and missing pitchers (0-for-48 this year and counting), the Mets were honest-to-god hitting for once in their lives. Abreu’s double was the Mets’ fifteenth hit of the evening. Juan Lagares — who could conceivably go into the defense contractor business with Nolan Arenado and Andrelton Simmons and keep America secure for a generation — registered the sixteenth when he singled to plate Eric Young, Jr., with the run that put the Mets up, 10-9. Daniel Murphy made it seventeen Mets hits on the night, and the bases eventually loaded up for Chris Young, but Hawkins found his way out of trouble and gave the Rockies a chance to come back in the bottom of the ninth.
Of course they had a chance. They got to bat last. Batting last is the Rockies’ most potent offensive weapon. No less an authority on analyzing defeat than Terry Collins referred to Coors Field as “a park that’s known for getting your last at-bat. The last team that gets up can be the most dangerous.”
By the accepted rules of baseball, the last team that gets up at Coors Field is inevitably the Colorado Rockies. And inevitably the Colorado Rockies have Dante Bichette waiting for Mike Remlinger. Doesn’t matter that the Met closer nineteen years later was Kyle Farnsworth or that the batter who strode to the plate with a runner on second was pinch-hitter Charlie Culberson. Charlie Culberson was going to hit the home run that beat the Mets on a night like this, 11-10.
Why was it plate accompli that Culberson would successfully scale Mt. Farnsworth? Because sooner or later Bichette happens to the Mets at Coors Field. It just does.
by Greg Prince on 3 May 2014 3:24 am When I was a newly minted sophomore, I indulged my small extrovert streak and went out for a part in my high school’s Theatre Wing production of Heaven Can Wait. I read for the second lead of Mr. Jordan, but wound up with the far smaller role of Inspector Williams. I wasn’t much of a tenth-grade actor, yet when you put a suit on the 15-year-old version of me, I had a knack for appearing middle-aged. I played a series of police inspectors, senators and doctors during my brief scholastic dramatic career. If the suit fit, I wore it.
No matter that I was more utilityman than star. I was in the play. I was also in the stage crew, something I had no particular predilection for. If I wasn’t an actor by nature, I really wasn’t a handyman in any sense of the phrase. I wasn’t good at building things and I wasn’t good at moving things. I had no eye for where things went. I didn’t like tools and tools didn’t like me. But my best friend from junior high decided he wanted to be in the stage crew when we got to high school and I liked being able to hang around with somebody familiar to me, so I opted to pull double-duty.
Acting I could fake my way through (it was acting). Stage crew I was largely useless for, but I hung in there with it for however many weeks my friend remained interested. I was impressed by the job the rest of the crew was doing even if I wasn’t much of a factor in its incremental accomplishments. After a couple of afternoons of attempting to not get in the way of those who knew what they were doing with a hammer, I could see the outlines of a set coming together. I was so proud of the work to which I was nominally contributing that I suggested that night at rehearsal to our director — a very, shall we say, theatrical English teacher by day (when the kid playing Mr. Jordan suffered an injury, he cast himself as second lead) — that the stage crew was making terrific progress and fairly soon, we’d be ready to start painting.
Our director, for whom Heaven Can Wait was his umpteenth rodeo, stared at me in disbelief and informed me, “There’s a long way to go before we can start painting.”
Y’know what? He was right. And y’know what else? There’s a long way to go before the Mets can start acting indignant that every seat in their theater isn’t being filled.
They’ve begged our patience for too many years to grow antsy that they can’t move more inventory after a few weeks of solid baseball. The solid baseball is most welcome. It was so solid pre-Coors Field that I’m willing to chalk up the second consecutive messy loss at high altitude as just another of those things that materialize out of thin air. Besides, Juan Lagares is back with such force that I’d suggest officially redubbing this outfit Juan Lagares & the New York Mets, except that would probably rub at least a few of his 24 supporting players the wrong way. Plus Juan might think about going solo.
Anyway, decent start to the season 28 games in. Maybe not terribly sustainable. Or maybe sneakily sustainable. Hell, Curtis Granderson now has a second home run and a batting average (.156) that can no longer be mistaken for a Field Level seating section. With 95.67% of his contract remaining to be played out, we might eventually have something to connect him to besides his miserable April and whatever he said when he came aboard the good ship Metropolitan.
Granderson’s employers must’ve been really enamored of that business about “true New Yorkers” being Mets fans last December. They’ve produced apparel with that message, available in the Citi Field team store, and now, as you might have noticed, they are e-mailing people who are presumably Mets fans to urge them to declare that they are definitely Mets fans… or “True New Yorkers” in the Grandersonian dialect.
The come-on is very weird, and that’s grading on a steep Metsian curve for weirdness.
After adhering to a strict policy of paying minimal homage to their past, the Mets have scanned the signatures of ten Mets players associated with more successful times and pasted them to the bottom of an open letter that reads like a cry for help. They couldn’t be bothered to reunite the surviving Mets of ’62 or ’73 on their respective 50th and 40th anniversaries, but at least they gathered these guys together on a virtual page.
The message? “Update your contact information so you can be sent more commercial e-mails from mets.com and mlb.com” is implicit. The prize of two tickets to the May 14 game against the Yankees — complete with the honor of presenting Internet signatures to David Wright — is fine enough, though the sweepstakes aspect seems secondary here. The consciousness-raising of Mets fans who might be dismayed that, according to published reports, there aren’t more Mets fans amounts to an unbecoming pile of insecurity.
Somebody had a meeting and determined Mets Fan Equity lies dormant in the True New York State of Mind and the Mets marketers decided they’d be damned if they couldn’t rile it up through emotionally manipulative cues:
• “We made history together…”
• “Stand up and say you’re a true New Yorker.”
• “…players and fans together, believing in each other…”
• “We couldn’t have won without you.”
The stilted missive raises more questions than it answers…
Is there a Mets fan who hasn’t spent a lifetime feeling Met-symbiotic already?
Do the Mets not understand that this is the way a Mets fan thinks most days?
Why would I feel the need to tell the Mets I’m a Mets fan?
Putting aside the Kabuki of filling out required fields, adding an optional 50-character maximum message and showing some unspecified straw men that, gosh darn it, I believe…what is the purpose of this?
I get the purpose from the Met management side. Harvest fresh e-mail addresses. Guilt us into buying more tickets for the provisionally uplifting 2014 Mets — “We’re calling on you to give today’s club the same chance we had.” And maybe sell a few of those “True New Yorker” t-shirts that I haven’t seen worn by anybody in any of my six trips to Citi Field thus far this season. But other than the minuscule shot I would have of winning admission to the no-longer hot Subway Series and shaking Captain Wright’s hand, why would I, your average fan, feel the need to affirm a blue-and-orange oath upon a stack of revised Mets yearbooks?
With all love and respect to the vintage Mets who assure me I “have a role to play in making amazing things happen,” if this franchise doesn’t know us by now, it will never, never, never know us.
Want our loyalty, our allegiance, our Trueness? Play hard right now, improve the product as soon as possible and win like you did we looked for Ed Charles’s name on poetry rather than form letters. We’ll be there. We’ll be so present you’ll be tempted to nudge us along because Citi Field will be like a midtown coffee shop at lunch hour and you’ll need our table for those new customers lining up by the cash register.
The first line of that letter is a hoot: “The victory you earn is sweeter than the victory you’re given.” What have you, my dear Mets, done to earn our loyalty lately? 15-13 is swell, but come now. Surely you know we give you our loyalty. We gave it to you ages ago and you’ve been enjoying its residual payouts ever since. Don’t like the diminishing returns? Invest a little on your end.
We’ve met you more than halfway over this past half-decade. Now it’s your turn: continue to shape a production we swear by instead of at and don’t automatically expect us to storm the box office before the sets are truly ready to be painted. In other words, keep getting better. That will earn you so much goodwill that you can send us all the silly e-mails you want and we won’t be tempted to unsubscribe.
by Jason Fry on 2 May 2014 2:08 am Well, here’s another 2014 first: the first game that made you want to discover the ability to reach into your TV and smack Mets several time zones away.
This was the game I’d feared the Mets would play on Tuesday in Philadelphia, and was pleasantly surprised to be wrong about: a dead-eyed, slumbering, miscue-filled mess. Every team has a dozen or so of these a year, and it’s better just to avert your eyes and move on as quickly as possible. And so that’s what we’ll do, after a few pro forma observations:
- Sympathies that the Mets sat around in Philadelphia and then flew out at an ungodly hour, arriving in Denver at 5 a.m. But since the game was an early evening affair in Colorado, why the heck didn’t they stay in Philadelphia and leave in the morning? Size of the party to be accommodated? Sleep isn’t necessary for #TrueNewYorkers? EY Jr. knew this awesome breakfast place in Colorado Springs?
- Welp, when Bartolo Colon is bad, he doesn’t pussyfoot around, does he? He’s all-in bad.
- Nice to have Juan Lagares back, who looked as if he’d never left. Can the idea that Eric Young Jr. is anything more than a bench player please progress as soon as possible to the “polite fiction” phase?
- Besides Lagares, Travis d’Arnaud gets a pass for a bolt into the left-field stands that was a no-doubter in any park. Lipstick on a pig, to be sure, but any step in d’Arnaud’s development is something to applaud.
- Keith was a little dull himself tonight, though his ninth-inning fuming about Digger, the Rockies’ annoying mascot, was entertaining. (Oh wait, it’s Dinger. Not that I give a shit.)
Let’s see … that’s 317 words more than I wanted to write about this mess and you wanted to read. Lagares and d’Arnaud, you’re excused. The rest of you fellas take a lap.
Or better yet, go back to sleep.
by Jason Fry on 30 April 2014 1:13 am In recent history, the Mets haven’t led the league in much, but they’ve been a powerhouse when it comes to excuses.
Terry Collins would always sound philosophical when he noted the conditions, the weather, the late arrival, the flu, or whatever bogeyman had snuck in to sink its teeth into the Mets. It was never quite an alibi — more something Terry was noting in passing. But it grated nonetheless, because what never seemed to get discussed was how the other team had also been dealing with poor conditions, cold weather, the flu or whatever malady was at hand — none of which had prevented them from beating the Mets rather handily.
So I approached tonight’s inaugural throwdown with the Phillies with a certain dismay. It was a wretched night, rainy and packing the kind of damp chill that gets into your bones, with both the seats at Citizen’s Bank and the virtual amphitheater of Twitter all but empty. (Something to do with Rangers-Flyers, I guess.) But the Mets seemed to collectively shrug and get to work on old pal Cole Hamels, who was armed with nothing but his change-up. They worked counts and waited for fastballs they could serve over the infield, cornering Hamels until that ineffective pitch was his only option. The display of patience culminated in a three-run fifth, with the crowning blow a single by Ruben Tejada after Ryne Sandberg tried to coax one more batter out of Hamels than he was capable of. After that the Mets had an official game and the Phillies seemed content to get on with it and wait for a sunnier rematch. Which will take a while — tomorrow’s weather forecast is Biblical, with the chance of a game being played essentially 0%.
It was a messy affair from the get-go — early on a hapless ballgirl set the tone by pulling her stool out of the way of a Tejada double off the sidewall, then inexplicably trying to field the ball she’d just tried to avoid.
Well, messy except for Jon Niese.
Niese is far from my favorite Met; he gives the impression that he’s only minimally interested in the craft of pitching or anything else happening around him, which I find deeply annoying. But he was terrific today, maintaining his focus in horrific conditions while Hamels came unglued. (It’s not the first time — Niese has been good pitching in high winds at Citi Field and in Minneapolis and Denver starts that might as well have taken place in a walk-in freezer.)
It was an awful night to do anything, let alone try to play baseball. And only one team seemed ready to do that. For a change, that team was the Mets instead of their opponents. No excuses necessary. I could get used to this.
by Greg Prince on 29 April 2014 8:15 am Friend of FAFIF Caryn Rose has not one but two baseball books out that you should know about. There’s the e-book anthology, One Girl, One Team, One City: The Best of Metsgrrl.com, collecting a series of evocative blog posts from her site’s 2006-2012 heyday. And there’s the novel, A Whole New Ballgame, which is available in print as well as electronically. The fiction involves a protagonist who falls in love with baseball c. 2006, which is not wholly dissimilar to Caryn’s real-life story.
I’ve always enjoyed Caryn copping to midlife regret that she didn’t come to our game (and our team) sooner, but when she got here, she made the most of it, stoking her readers’ baseball appreciation along the way. She added a valuable perspective to Metsopotamia when she was blogging regularly and her sense of what you might call jaded wonder as the Mets rise, fall and periodically resuscitate is fun to revisit.
Just as Caryn proved regarding the Mets, it’s never too late to dive into something you didn’t really know about until recently. Dip a toe into the anthology here and the novel here. Next thing you know, you might very well be immersed.
by Greg Prince on 27 April 2014 7:24 pm Happiness is Dillon Gee throwing eight innings of three-hit shutout ball.
Happiness is Gee pitching every fifth day, instilling nothing but confidence by his very appearance in the Mets rotation.
Happiness is nodding off in the seventh when the Mets are up, 4-0, and stirring in the ninth to see the Mets are still up, 4-0.
Happiness is Carlos Torres’s right arm remaining attached to Carlos Torres’s right shoulder after completing the ninth inning for the Mets’ 4-0 win.
Happiness is David Wright finally driving a ball to the wall and having the ball go untouched for an RBI double.
Happiness is Wright being so splendid defensively that if you didn’t know better, you’d just assume he’s one of those good glove/no hit guys, except you know better.
Happiness is the unconscionable pop fly that falls in among Gee, Wright and Anthony Recker — with Lucas Duda nowhere in sight — yet causes nothing in the way of scoreboard damage.
Happiness is the Mets threatening early, leaving runners on base and not having those uncashed opportunities come back to bite them.
Happiness is Chris Young hitting long home runs when he’s hitting anything at all.
Happiness is Curtis Granderson motoring around the bases faster than his batting average (.129) is plummeting.
Happiness is Daniel Murphy stealing and never getting caught.
Happiness is Anthony Recker starting and the Mets never losing.
Happiness is a winning homestand that at least temporarily allays the anxiety that the Mets can’t prevail at Citi Field.
Happiness is regardless of what happens in Philadelphia, the Mets will end April with a winning record.
Happiness is anticipating rather than dreading the months that follow April.
Happiness is a precarious proposition when you’re a Mets fan…but it’s definitely worth a provisional revel for now.
by Greg Prince on 27 April 2014 2:50 am To put it in Verizonspeak, I’m “nowstalgic” for Friday night, the night I went to Citi Field and left toting a sack full of ebullience that fit my mood better than any single-sized free shirt will ever fit me. Friday night was my fifth game of the year. It was on target to be my fifth loss after the anti-Will Rogers, Gonzalez Germen, met a couple of bats he didn’t like. Then came the bottom of the ninth, when Steve Cishek was shelled at the seashore of Flushing Bay and the 3-2 defeat I dreaded having to enter in my Log morphed into a 4-3 victory I couldn’t wait to get home to ink for personal posterity.
Even the route home was giddy, from the unusual boister of “LET’S GO METS!” ringing the ballpark stairwells and concourses to my LIRR change at Jamaica when we Mets fans from Woodside converged with the Nets fans from Atlantic Terminal. They’d come from a playoff basketball game whose conclusion I followed on my phone just as the bottom of the ninth got to bouncing. The Nets had won and then the Mets had won and here on the platform, in my Nets hoodie (worn for solidarity and warmth) and my Mets cap (worn because it’s my Mets cap), I was happy for my basketball team but I was dreaming for my baseball team and speculating on just how soon we might be the ones crowding Jamaica after a postseason triumph of our own.
My baseball team was a robust 13-10, never mind that I was a scraggly 1-4 in games attended this year. The 13-10 felt a little more real than I would’ve dared imagine even a few games earlier. Since the last time the Mets had swung and completely missed, they had held on to a win via a 7-6-2 putout that giddied me up; and then proceeded the next afternoon to ride a very experienced horse of a starter to a series win over the N.L. champs; and then came back to quell the Marlins, who traditionally make their living quelling the Mets. Friday night, when we were down, 3-2, one of the guys I was with had to bolt, but he assured me, “They’ll win in the bottom of the ninth.” And they did!
Yeah, Friday…those were the day.
Saturday wasn’t. Saturday I was back at Citi Field at roughly the same hour I was Friday, which was too bad, since Friday night games are perfectly normal creatures on every patch of grass that doesn’t grow on the Near North Side of Chicago, but Saturday night games almost always feel alien to the baseball fan’s soul. Saturday afternoon is a most swell time for a baseball game, especially in April when your stadium is built by a body of water where stiff breezes come at you like line drives. Saturday afternoon implies sunshine and relative warmth and an ideal tableau for the distribution of plastic batting helmets.
Saturday night is when it gets dark and cloudy and cold and then it rains. It’s also when the one-game winning streak you’ve etched into your Log ends.
My Saturday night at Citi Field wasn’t all for naught. I got a batting helmet for my trouble — more suitable for my eight-year-old self, but a giveaway is a giveaway. I got a peek at a pregame rainbow. I got plenty of use out of my umbrella. I got the unforeseen pleasure of applauding a Bobby Abreu home run, the kind of event that used to cause only aggravation; live long enough and there’s no telling who you’ll cheer. I got a Blue Smoke grilled chicken sandwich which was a little dry but offered a nice little kick of chili or something tangy to it. I got reminded, as if I’d forgotten since the night before, that anything Chris Young has got is not a rental, that Eric Young, Jr., seeks eternal youth and that Travis d’Arnaud prefers to arrive in Queens by cruising down the West Side.
You go to enough games, you become intimate with every regular’s walkup music. You go to enough losses, you grimace at the opening strains of “New York State Of Mind” following the final out because it is defeat’s walkaway jingle. And indeed, I walked away from Citi Field cold, wet and 1-5 on the season. The Mets were down to 13-11 and not inspiring many dreams. They led by four runs early and I allowed myself to ever so tentatively plan the post I’d be writing in six months about how I didn’t believe at first, but when the Mets had that great homestand in late April, even I had to stop being so crabby and admit something kooky was cooking with this 2014 club we are now celebrating for having won…
My bad. The moment I get presumptively cheery is when games go to hell, which, if you check that Times map real closely, is where the Marlins have their most loyal fans. It was positively devilish how Abreu homered in the first, Mejia dominated through five and everything fell apart anyway, as the Mets basically quit hitting over their last couple of dozen at-bats. Because the Marlins were the opponent, proceedings had to be extended into at least a tenth inning. Because we were banking on Kyle Farnsworth the way we were banking on Jose Valverde a couple of weeks ago, there didn’t seem much chance an eleventh inning would ensue. Jarrod Saltalamacchia’s home run appeared to have been a double from where I sat but then the catcher with the name that looks like it could go 20 innings was waved home and nobody put up any kind of fuss, and that was pretty much that, 7-6.
I was impressed that for the penultimate out Daniel Murphy argued strike three and got himself ejected from a game that was about to end. His dismissal allowed me to hope against hope that another of the Mets’ patented Opportunitease-type rallies would succeed just enough to plate a tying run. That way we could find out if Kirk Nieuwenhuis could play second in the eleventh, because every other potential reserve infielder had already been used, but there was no eleventh. There was just dampness and dourness and the fading feeling of Friday’s fun giving way to a sour Saturday approaching midnight, another L to reluctantly register in my Log and another lesson proffered that 162-game seasons rarely reveal their true intent before May makes its initial appearance.
by Jason Fry on 26 April 2014 12:41 am Now THAT was an entertaining game.
Late April is still a period where you’re acknowledging first times, and this was one I’d been waiting for: the first exhilarating win that leaves a contact high, so you’re up for hours watching replays and reading recaps and searching for hashtags with a goofy, slightly dazed grin.
But man oh man, it was a game where every single inch mattered.
First up, some respect for Zack Wheeler and Travis d’Arnaud. You could see tonight why Wheeler will be a top-of-the-rotation ace if he can master his mechanics — he has four plus pitches, the best of them a 95 MPH fastball with movement, which makes up for a fair number of mistakes. And d’Arnaud brought Wheeler along like a veteran instead of his contemporary, by turns congratulating him and chiding him. Plus his pitch-framing was, as usual, sublime. The high point was the 1-1 pitch to Adeiny Hechavarria in the sixth, with the Marlins down one with two out, but with runners at first and third and Wheeler having thrown 108 pitches. D’Arnaud called for a fastball on the outside corner, sat motionless as always, and caught the pitch on the black, receiving it like it was an egg. Strike? Maybe, maybe not — but d’Arnaud ensured home-plate ump Andy Fletcher saw it that way. Instead of hitting with a 2-1 count, Hecheverria was looking at 1-2, and Wheeler’s next pitch (his last of the evening) was an evil diving slider dipping below the same spot. Hechavarria had no chance — none.
Incidentally, the 1-2 change-up Gonzalez Germen threw to Jarrod Saltalamacchia with two out in the seventh? Very similar in terms of location, and also perfectly framed by d’Arnaud. Germen took two happy steps off the mound before realizing Fletcher had called it a ball, which I didn’t think it was. Can’t win ’em all, as we found out two pitches later, when Saltalamacchia slammed a ball over the fence to scuttle Wheeler’s win. Germen then promptly served up another homer to Garrett Jones for a shocking, thoroughly unpleasant Marlins lead.
But hey, every satisfying story throws a shocking reversal at the audience in the final reel, leaving the good guys in mortal peril.
I wouldn’t like to rewind to the beginning of the ninth inning and try to win again, but it worked out.
Lucas Duda dropped a little parachute in front of Christian Yelich for an excuse-me single off Steve Cishek. Terry then asked d’Arnaud to bunt, and then Bobby Abreu sliced a ball into left, but Yelich was perfectly positioned and we were down to our last out. No worries, because Omar Quintanilla continued to make me feel bad by turning in a terrific at-bat, working the count to 3-2 and slicing one a little more sharply than Abreu had. Yelich — who was busy in the ninth — cut it off nicely and had Duda dead to rights, but fell down. Tie game, Quintanilla on first. Up stepped pinch-hitter Kirk Nieuwenhuis, who blasted a ball up the gap in left-center. It looked like it might win the game for the Mets, but Marcell Ozuna sprinted over and just managed to cut it off on the warning track, forcing Tim Teufel to reluctantly but wisely hold Quintanilla at third.
No matter, because Curtis Granderson was coming up — Curtis Granderson whose skinny batting average and fat contract have not worried Mets fans in the least in the early going, no siree. An optimist might have said Granderson had been hitting in bad luck of late, and that optimist might have been right. Granderson hit an 0-1 offering from Cishek hard on the ground … right to Jones at first.
Correction: right under Jones at first. Ballgame.
Ain’t baseball marvelous sometimes?
by Greg Prince on 25 April 2014 1:34 am I missed being in the house for Weather Education Day Thursday afternoon, but I recognized its sound over the air after inadvertently attending several since the Mets inaugurated them in 2007. Weather Education Day means a noisier, shriller, noticeably younger crowd, albeit one that reacts without much relation to what’s going on in the game. That’s what you get when you haul in 8,000 schoolkids who are just happy to not be in class and willing to volubly respond to whatever the scoreboard demands for at least the first few innings.
Not that there wasn’t plenty to squeal and/or shriek over at Citi Field if you were a Mets fan…
• You had Chris Young formally introduce himself to the Left Field Landing with a mighty first Met home run.
• You had a Daniel Murphy fly ball drop in front of Jon Jay to break a 1-1 tie, making up for the ball that got behind Young earlier in the game to put St. Louis on the board first.
• You had a graspable Curtis Granderson grounder gather just enough spin to flummox Mark Ellis and drive in another run; it was ruled a hit, presumably out of pity for Granderson’s batting average, which, at .137, is still low enough to be mistaken for a section of Field Level.
• You had seven innings of Bartolo Colon demonstrating great movement — and if you take a look at Bartolo Colon doing anything but pitching, the last thing that would spring to mind would be great movement.
• You had Bobby Abreu on hand to start in right, double for his first Met hit and potentially regale kids with pre-global warming tales of what it was like to play for Houston Astros manager Terry Collins in Andre Dawson’s final game as a big leaguer. (With Colon and Abreu on the roster, is it any wonder the Mets have Dinosaur Education Day planned for May 28?)
• You had Daisuke Matsuzaka emerge as the Mets’ fourth closer of the 22-game season and do a splendid job of it, completing a most satisfying 4-1 win over the thoroughly addled defending National League champion Cardinals, the third win in four games over St. Louis, or three of three when I stay the hell away from Citi Field.
• You had the Mets ending Weather Education Day two games above .500 and, along with San Francisco, tentatively claiming a Wild Card spot in the National League if you’re unhinged enough to check on such matters after 22 games.
You also had 8,000 Tri-State Area students born well after Andre Dawson retired engaged in an interactive program about weather patterns by Channel 11 stalwarts Mr. G and Linda Church. Whatever these kids learned about climate change may or may not stick with them.
Whatever most of them got out of seeing the Mets up close likely won’t. Not if we are to judge by the long-term patterns that have hovered over New York since Bobby Abreu was first called up to the majors in 1996.
Ah, 1996. The selective memory recalls the highlights: Lance Johnson’s 227 hits…Bernard Gilkey’s 117 RBIs…Todd Hundley’s 41 home runs…Rey Ordoñez throwing from his knees…
And the Mets down on theirs.
What a terrible year to be a Mets fan by objective as opposed to aficionado standards. The Mets posted a record of 71-91 and they finished nowhere. Technically they finished fourth, but they disappeared from the local sports consciousness altogether before the last of those losses was filed away on September 29, the day Florida Marlin Andre Dawson called it a career at the Astrodome (also the last day Terry Collins managed the Astros). As Bobby Abreu was breaking into the National League that month, the Mets were falling deeper into the abyss they drifted into a few seasons earlier and now they were completely obscured by something insidious that was about to win the impending World Series, not to mention four of the next five and a berth in all but two of the next umpteen playoff tournaments.
Kids in New York, New Jersey, Connecticut and everywhere else saw what the Mets weren’t doing in the 1990s and saw what their nearby other-league counterparts were doing. Strangely enough, if they decided they liked baseball, most of them decided to like the other-league counterparts. Later, the Mets improved. Then diminished. Then improved. Then diminished. Then talked about improving without actually tangibly improving. Then, twenty years into this cycle, they treated 8,000 schoolkids to a nice Thursday at the ballpark and a 4-1 win over the Cardinals but probably didn’t immediately convert too many of them to their cause.
As mentioned, this was the eighth of these Weather Education Days. The Mets reach out to the Youth of America pretty consistently with promotions like these. They’ve long been sending Mets into city schools to remind them reading is fundamental. They’ve been busing children to the Acela Club every December, dressing select players as Santas and elves, handing out presents and attempting to brighten the holidays of all concerned. The Mets revved up kid-friendly Mr. Met in 1994 (he’s got quite a story to tell) and remembered he was married to Mrs. Met in 2013. They telecast Kids Clubhouse on SNY, built a Kiddie Field somewhere near McFadden’s and inevitably tell parents they can bring their sons and daughters to sit in otherwise unoccupied seats for free when August rolls around.
Does any of it matter? Does anybody except the oddball and the iconoclast grow up to be a Mets fan anymore? Or is all the Mets get for their trouble a bunch of jaded teenagers wearing Yankees caps as they make informed small talk about barometric pressure?
I’ve watched these kids’ groups file in and file out of Citi Field and before it Shea Stadium over the past decade. Hardly any of the kids is wearing a Mets cap or a Mets shirt or a Mets jacket. Inevitably one junior wise guy is dressed for a day in the Bronx and ignores his teacher’s (or, in summertime, his counselor’s) on-message directive to chant “Let’s Go Mets” by booing or chanting something entirely inappropriate to the environs. Mostly the kids gets distracted. Kids will do that, I suppose, particularly in this odd century when baseball is far from the national let alone Metropolitan pastime.
Then the kids get old enough to join Facebook and click a “Like” button for a baseball team and they don’t pick the Mets. Though to be fair, few kids of any ages — including us crusty adults — pick the Mets.
After the team I chose as my own in prehistoric times defeated the Cardinals Thursday, I celebrated by visiting the New York Times’s Baseball Nation map, an interactive feature that allowed me to see which teams are most popular in which ZIP Codes in the United States, based on preferences expressed by Facebook users. It may not be definitive, but it is vast and it’s as good a reflection as any available of allegiances sliced and diced to micro levels.
By these parameters, do you know in which ZIP Codes the Mets are the favorite baseball team of a majority or plurality of the population? Neither do I, because according to Baseball Nation, we are fans without a country.
The Mets are No. 1 nowhere. Nowhere in these United States is there a ZIP Code where the Mets are the most popular team in town. They’re not No. 1 where I live, they’re not No. 1 where you live, they’re not No. 1 where they live. Anybody old enough to remember Ralph, Bob or Lindsey telling you where to send away for the Revised Edition of the New York Mets yearbook (a beautiful addition to your baseball library) should remember Shea Stadium’s and now Citi Field’s ZIP Code is 11368. In ZIP Code 11368, the Mets are the choice of 25% of the baseball fans.
The Yankees are slightly ahead, at 53%
This goes on all across the Weather Education Day radar. Scroll and roll all you like. You won’t find a municipality where the gap is close. The highest Met proportion I could suss out was a few towns over from me here in ancestral Mets Country. Bellmore, Long Island, checks in at 33% Mets — 19 points behind the Yankees. It doesn’t narrow appreciably anywhere in Nassau or Suffolk or Queens or Brooklyn or anywhere. And that’s the heart of what we used to think of as hardcore Met territory.
There are all kinds of little kicks to the ol’ Matsuzakas if you look closely enough. In ZIP Code 11309, for example, the Mets are not only hopelessly outstripped by the Yankees, they fall behind the Red Sox. What’s so special about 11309? It’s the ZIP Code of the Polo Grounds, first home of the Mets, old home of the Giants. National League legacies don’t help, either, in 11225 —the site of Ebbets Field. And as you head into the northern and western suburbs…well, it’s like Mr. G would tell you in winter: watch out for heavier amounts of what you don’t want to shovel.
The Times map gives the top three finishers in each ZIP Code. The Mets are consistent distant second-place finishers in commuting proximity to Citi Field but plunge to third in too many places too soon. Somewhere in Jersey, they fall behind the Phillies. The Red Sox overtake them before you get too deep into Connecticut. They do hang on here and there as a minuscule No. 3 upstate behind the Yankees and Bosox, and do manage to register kernels of support in isolated pockets of Delaware, Pennsylvania and Vermont, but there’s no sign that the Mets have a sizable regional following à la the tradition-nurturing Cardinals or any kind of national profile.
They don’t place or show, never mind win, in spots where you’d think there might be some faint orange and blue undertones. For example, you find no evident love for the Mets in Fresno or Virginia Beach, in case you imagined the implied endorsement of Tom Seaver or David Wright — not to mention 37 years of Tides affiliation — meant anything. Nothing in or right around Port St. Lucie (though a Mets-liking blip appears to the northwest in Palm Bay, Fla.). Nobody bets on them in Las Vegas despite the presence of the 51s. There’s a little low single-digit action around Buffalo, but that’s probably as much about being a New York State team as it Bison-born loyalty.
Our Mets are joined by the A’s and the Jays as teams that don’t show up as a first choice on the map at all. The Blue Jays are no ZIP Code’s favorite team, which is kind of understandable given that they’re a Canadian enterprise. The Athletics are suffocated by the Giants, even in the East Bay. The Giants have won two of the past four World Series and the A’s would prefer to leave Oakland for San Jose (which is overwhelmingly pro-Giants).
The Mets are the Mets, but there is no default Met geography that the Times and Facebook were able to chart, not like there is for 27 other major league franchises. Though the data didn’t exist as such, I can assure you there was in 1969, when I came along, and there sure as hell was in 1986. It’s hard to believe every bit of it evaporated in the ensuing 28 years, but it doesn’t exist in 2014, apparently.
Those of us who are among the no more than 33% who choose them first in any given postal district cope by being our own ZIP Codes. It works fine in virtual spaces like these. It usually works inside the only facility most of us frequent within 11368 — unless it’s September and the Giants are in town…or it’s 2010 and the Phillies are visiting…or the Subway Series takes place. But it’s no way to cultivate the next New Breed. Peer pressure isn’t gonna bring on board the kids of today, considering how few of their peers are Mets fans. Fun days when they don’t have to go to school don’t seem to have lured too many youths, either.
What’s it gonna take? It’s gonna take a lot of 4-1 wins; a lot of threes of fours; a lot more than a pleasantly surprising 12-10 start; a lot less worrying about the few players who have personalities expressing them. It’s gonna take new owners, probably, but good luck with that.
It’s gonna take a while. We who are Mets fans, including those who have successfully raised Mets fans or who are trying to, may not fully recognize how little reason there’s been to become a Mets fan since Bobby Abreu was a kid in Venezuela. I mean, sure, we know there’s nothing better to be, but try telling that to young people with their social media today.
by Jason Fry on 24 April 2014 1:33 am It’s a big world with lots of people of it. Even our little part of it — in which people in the New York area cheer for a baseball team — is pretty big.
No, I wasn’t specific about the baseball team. For one night, I’m going to expand our circle to include Yankees fans. Only for a night. And it’s for a reason.
See, the numbers are big enough that somebody out there in the scruffy Met Marches or the iron-walled Empire of the Yank had a friend of a friend or a guest or an exchange student or a pitiful hitchhiker or somebody in tow for one reason or another, and decided that this was the night that this new arrival would be initiated into the cult of baseball. That’s happened to me a few times — this ancient post captures one of my favorite such memories — and it’s a more intense version of having someone plop down on the couch next to you to see an episode of one of your favorite shows, one you adore but they’ve never seen. You pray it’ll be one of the high points of the series and not the Christmas special or God forbid a clip show. (This probably doesn’t happen in the age of Netflix and TiVo and DVDs, but stay with me.) Baseball’s like that, but even more so. You hope the newcomer gets a 10-9 epic or at least a 2-1 nailbiter, instead of some 4-1 mess that doesn’t seem to even engage the participants, because you’ve certainly seen your share of those.
Given the numbers, someone out there wound up watching either tonight’s Mets-Cardinals game or tonight’s Yankees-Red Sox game as their first-ever glimpse of baseball. I wonder what they thought. Did they think it was woolly and goofy but fun? Or write it off as a garbage bag of surrealism?
The game in Boston took a hard right into goofballdom when John Farrell sent the umpires out in the second inning to check on Yanks hurler Michael Pineda, who was either a) molting; b) had just crawled away from a collapsed oil rig; or c) had a rather large smear of pine tar on his neck. After a period of deduction that wasn’t exactly CSI: Boston, the umps concluded the answer was c) and ejected Pineda, who will now be suspended for 10 games. I’m pre-weary of the both the wide-eyed handwringing and cynical sports-radio trollery about cheating and unwritten rules and but why are there unwritten rules, so I’ll leave it at this: Pineda was caught and will be suspended not because he’s a cheater, but because he’s dumber than a rock.
I mean, two weeks ago Pineda pitched against the same team and it was blindingly obvious that he had a large smear of pine tar on his hand, which led to a lot of not-so-subtle huffing that he be less obvious next time, which is the kind of omerta violation baseball despises. So after receiving this stern collective warning, Pineda’s answer was … to do the same thing but make it much more obvious. It boggles the mind to imagine what would have happened if the Red Sox had done nothing this time, too — I’m picturing a mid-May Pineda start in which he lobbed balls homeward while sprawled naked in a Cialis-style bathtub overflowing with dark brown gunk.
Such was the majesty of baseball at Fenway Park tonight.
If you were at Citi Field tonight, well, first of all my sympathies. It was Shackletonian, with an insane wind blowing hither and yon, turning pop flies into circus acts and even snatching off Michael Wacha‘s cap. It was also bizarre even without the weather — one of those games that’s so instantly and obviously weird that you don’t so much watch it as you witness it, hoping to make sense of it later.
Over the first three innings Wacha faced 12 Mets. One of them (Curtis Granderson, somehow) singled. Two of them (Travis d’Arnaud and Jonathon Niese, somehow) walked. The other nine struck out. It was simultaneously boring and fascinating, which I wouldn’t have thought possible. The mind skittered around like blowing wrappers: Would Wacha strike out 27? Would the Mets manage a pop-up? Would the stolen hat be the greatest damage Wacha suffered?
Meanwhile, Niese was pitching well, but fell behind 1-0 when Ruben Tejada did something dopey that I never quite figured out and don’t care to revisit. That seemed likely to be fatal — Remember that game on that crazy windy night that the damn Mets lost 1-0 because Tejada made that stupid play and that Wacha kid struck everybody out? — but Wacha was the hare and Niese was the tortoise. Between the conditions and the pitches expended, Wacha was running out of gas. Daniel Murphy singled to start the fourth and was retired on a fielder’s choice — WOO, NOT A STRIKEOUT!!!11!!1!!!1! — but then Wacha imploded. He walked Lucas Duda, gave up a single to d’Arnaud, walked Tejada to even the game at 1-1, caught Niese looking at a close pitch, then walked Kirk Nieuwenhuis to give the Mets the lead. An inning later he was gone, like a snake-oil salesman whose brightly painted wagon had vanished in the night.
The game was still to be played, though. Duda hit a bomb of a home run, and the ninth was handed over to Kyle Farnworth, protecting a two-run lead.
Farnsworth, you might recall, saved Monday’s game and then was caught by the TV cameras shaking his arm. Asked about it, he said “I’m old,” which was cute but not reassuring. Yes, pitchers shake their arms when old. They also shake their arms when something inside them has tightened in an ominous way and hurts. Earlier today Terry Collins made noises about Daisuke Matsuzaka being able to close, which might have been Terry’s usual Sgt. York act but might also have been him signaling that Closer No. 4 is already a hot topic in Metland.
Farnsworth did zero to dispel these concerns by throwing nonstop sliders, then mixing in a couple of sub-90s fastballs. With one out Jon Jay (clad in a red balaclava like a G.I. Joe villain) singled, then moved to second on the inevitable Matt Carpenter base hit. That brought Daniel Descalso to the plate, and he lashed a ball over Nieuwenhuis’s head and off the wall, sending masked Cardinals scurrying around the bases.
In came Jay, and here came Carpenter, with d’Arnaud receiving the ball to the third-base side of home, with the runner already by him. He spun like a top, arm extended for the tag. You see this play all the time, and it never works — it ends with the catcher lying disconsolately on his belly while the runner dusts himself off and trots away to be congratulated.
Except Nieuwenhuis had corralled the ball barehanded and fired it to Tejada.
And Tejada had spun, staggered and thrown a strike above Duda’s head to the waiting d’Arnaud.
And d’Arnaud had caught it at ground level while already in motion, smacked Carpenter in the shoulder, and held on.
Instead of a tie game and God knows what horrors (IT COULD STILL BE GOING ON), it was 3-2 Mets. And an out later, Farnsworth found a fastball of sorts, Granderson ran down a terrifying windblown fly ball from Matt Holliday, and the Mets had won.
It wasn’t majestic — majesty was in short supply for New York baseball teams tonight — but it was pretty marvelous.
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