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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 6 February 2014 5:34 pm Y’know, I had just been thinking about Ralph Kiner. This was before the Super Bowl, when I read Edwin Pope of the Miami Herald wouldn’t be covering the game at MetLife Stadium. Pope, you see, had never missed a Super Bowl. The Super Bowl is still young enough so there are people who can be said to have been directly involved with all of them. The Roman numerals would keep accumulating: X…XX…XXX. Players and coaches and commissioners came and went, but a critical mass of those charged with reporting it to us would reappear year after year. By the IVth decade, however, the ranks of orginals and forevers began to thin noticeably. That’s just how the flipping of calendar pages works.
Every few Januarys in recent years, I’d come across an article about the group of writers who’d covered each and every one of pro football’s championships from 1967 forward and was about to cover another. Their numbers couldn’t help but dwindle as time went by. With Pope missing Super Bowl XLVIII, the corps was down to three, including, I learned last week, two from our vicinity: Jerry Izenberg and Dave Klein, both from New Jersey, and Jerry Green, out of Detroit.
Those guys and their constancy made me think of Ralph Kiner, specifically how Ralph Kiner, 53 years into the franchise’s history, was the only person you could be sure was affiliated with the New York Mets when they started and remained affiliated with them throughout. For the longest time growing up with the Mets, you’d hear this person or that person had been there from the beginning. It wasn’t all that unusual for a while. Then it became a badge of genuine longevity. Bob Mandt. Pete Flynn. Bob Murphy, quite obviously. And Ralph Kiner.
Retirements. Illnesses. Deaths. But Ralph Kiner was still a part of the Mets every year. He was 1962 and 1969, 1973 and 1986, 1999 and maybe a dozen day games right up to the very present. He was Ralph Kiner, voice of the New York Mets when they were new, when they were grand, when they were atrocious, when they were there no matter what. Ralph was there no matter what. Not like he used to be, maybe, but just enough so you didn’t have to imagine he wouldn’t be.
Nobody was more original. Nobody was more forever.
Ralph Kiner will not be dropping by the booth in 2014. I want to say he’s unavailable and leave it at that. It’s too tough to believe, even after he lived 91 years, that the Mets go on without him. There’s never been the Mets without Ralph Kiner calling their games or, per his more recent part-time role, interrupting them. The Ralph of whom we were treated to select innings in the SNY era was the dandiest of intermittent presences. He was a baseball sage who could address any element his partners steered his way, and in doing so, he transported his audience to bundle after bundle of games, years and personalities that nobody else was telling us about anymore. It was a gift he kept on giving, and knowing that the gifts wouldn’t always pile up under the baseball tree made them that much more precious when we were lucky enough to receive them.
Before SNY, before MSG, before FSNY and before SportsChannel usurped most of the function that Channel 9 served, he was Ralph Kiner, voice of the Mets. Ralph with Tim McCarver and Steve Zabriskie on TV. Ralph, of course, with Bob Murphy and Lindsey Nelson, switching between TV and radio for 17 fraternal-triplet seasons. Ralph with others along the way, too. And Ralph, quite naturally, with the star of the game coming up right after the game on Kiner’s Korner. But always Ralph.
Eternally Ralph.
Ralph Kiner, Gary Cohen once calculated, had to have dispensed more autographs than any man alive. Ralph Kiner, as far as I can fathom, enhanced the expertise and experience of more Mets fans than anybody who ever lived, maybe anybody who will ever live. Ralph played it straight, balls-and-strikeswise. Ralph danced among the malapropisms that, for an amiable stretch, became his unwitting signature. Ralph analyzed swings and held forth on hitting. Ralph told and retold stories. Ralph didn’t necessarily kiss and tell, but it was pretty clear fate puckered up when it saw him making his way from Southern California to Pittsburgh to, eventually, us.
Ralph embraced us and embellished our baseball-loving lives while he was here. His statistical standing among all-time power producers may have fallen when homers became commodities rather than events, but when it came to grace and class and style and solid-gold professionalism, Ralph Kiner never vacated his spot atop the charts.
Now and then it would be pointed out Ralph hit home runs at rates almost unmatched in the annals of slugging and was inducted into the Hall of Fame in recognition of his prodigious skills. It was almost like finding out your parents used to have this whole other life. “You mean you were somebody before I was born?” Oh, Ralph was somebody, all right. And he remained somebody, a whole other transcendent Met figure that seemed to materialize independent of what he accomplished as a Pirate, a Cub and an Indian.
He could’ve rested on the laurels of being Ralph Kiner and made hay that way. But instead of being impressed with himself, he transmitted the Mets to us first and foremost. He looked to the plate and described Richie Ashburn and Cleon Jones and Lee Mazzilli and Darryl Strawberry and Bobby Bonilla and Mike Piazza and David Wright. He peered out to the mound and let us know the situations facing Roger Craig and Jerry Koosman and Craig Swan and Dwight Gooden and David Cone and Al Leiter and Johan Santana. He processed the thinking of Casey Stengel and Gil Hodges and Yogi Berra and Joe Torre and Davey Johnson and Bobby Valentine and Terry Collins. He shared air time with Bob Murphy and Lindsey Nelson and Steve Albert and Art Shamsky and Lorn Brown and Tim McCarver and Steve Zabriskie and Fran Healy and Rusty Staub and Gary Thorne and Howie Rose and Ted Robinson and Dave O’Brien and Tom Seaver and Gary Cohen and Ron Darling and Keith Hernandez.
He interviewed every big star for generations or, more accurately, every big star got to be interviewed by him. He made every scrub with whom he crossed paths look and feel like a king for a day.
Because of what he did, how long he did it and how well he did it, Ralph Kiner, as much as anybody, made me the Mets fan that I am today and figure I always will be. I’m guessing he did something similar for you.
by Jason Fry on 6 February 2014 1:34 am Past
Here’s a sign of spring: The 2014 Topps cards are out.
 Let’s not go overboard: This isn’t the greatest set. The photography’s good again, but Topps has developed an unfortunate predilection for novelty shots, with far too many players romping with teammates (and often on dreaded horizontal cards), getting doused with Gatorade or showing off Oscar Gamblean coifs. The card design is boring and redundant — why a little ribbon displaying the team name when the logo’s already there? The strange numbering system in which players once ascended the rank of stardom from 5s to 10s to 50s to the coveted 100s is but a memory. And while I like the idea of adding WAR to the statistics on the back, it just seems like fuel for pointless Internet fights.
But in the dead of winter any sign of spring is welcome, and this one fixes thoughts happily on spring training and changes to The Holy Books. Of which there are four from the first series:
1) Travis d’Arnaud gets his first-ever big-league card, and it’s not bad. Added bonus: It replaces d’Arnaud’s 2013 Topps minor-league card, which Photoshopped him into being a Buffalo Bison. This is one team d’Arnaud never played for: Thanks to affiliation changes that one might expect Topps to keep track of, d’Arnaud pulled off the odd trick of playing for Las Vegas in 2012, getting traded and returning to Las Vegas in 2013.
2) Wilmer Flores gets a card. It bills him as a shortstop. Hrrm. We’ll see about that.
3) Daniel Murphy, long victimized by subpar cards, finally gets a winner in which he’s jogging around the bases with the Apple, um, tumescent behind him. Murph being Murph, he looks intense and mildly put upon. Great shot.
4) Justin Turner finally gets a decent Mets card, replacing some strange Japanese thing I picked up somewhere. Turner, you may recall, is now the newest member of the Los Angeles Dodgers, and it was apparently quite a while ago that he wouldn’t be a 2014 Met. In this case, Topps’ sloth is my gain. (Though I’d trade my 2013 Topps Update Shaun Marcum for never having to think about Shaun Marcum again.)
Present
I’m just going to say it: I don’t care if the Mets sign Stephen Drew or not.
PECOTA forecasts the Mets as once again a 74-win team. With Drew the Mets would net out as … a 75-win team.
PRINT THOSE SEASON TICKETS!
Now, I don’t take PECOTA as gospel. I’m not as pessimistic as it seems to be on either score, but the point is much the same: Drew is not the missing piece of the Mets’ championship puzzle. If Ruben Tejada’s lost it, Drew would make the Mets slightly better, but not in any way we’ll remember a couple of years from now. If Tejada’s annus horribilis was an exception, the two might be a wash. The Mets’ financial health remains an unresolved question, with their payroll still awful paltry compared with what one would expect from the National League’s New York team. But Drew isn’t going to settle that question, or likely any other that we care about. If the Mets projected as an 88-win team and had money to spend, I’d be lighting Twitter aflame screeching for the Mets to add Drew. But they’re not. The whole thing is pointless, and not worth talking about even by the low standards of the hot-stove league.
Future
Despite all that, I’ve been trying to get my arms around an emotion that I haven’t felt in quite a while.
I think it’s hope.
For the third year in a row, the Mets are poised to promote a prized young arm to the big-league rotation come mid-July. In fact, this year there are two intriguing pitchers who could get the call: Noah Syndergaard and Rafael Montero. Nothing is certain, but the team can reasonably expect to have Matt Harvey hurling thunderbolts once more in 2015. Bartolo Colon, Jon Niese and Dillon Gee are all capable or more than that. Zack Wheeler has tremendous talent. Jenrry Mejia and Jeurys Familia are rifle-armed young pitchers with big-league experience. Jacob deGrom ascended three minor-league levels last year and could develop into a Gee type starting this year.
Again, nothing is certain in baseball — and nothing is more uncertain than the health and development of pitchers. But with a little luck — which this franchise is certainly due for — the Mets could approach the trade deadline with a stockpile of TEN very interesting 2015 big-league starters. Teams that go into a season with four of those are generally considered to be worth paying attention to.
The Mets’ farm system has been rebuilt, but that restoration has come with a nagging question: Where are the young bats?
Perhaps the answer is that they’re in other teams’ organizations.
If things go right (and again, that’s not a small if), Sandy Alderson could deal two or three or more arms from that stockpile this summer for the bats everyone agrees the Mets need. If Sandy nets his usual high return, the Mets could report for duty in 2015 looking talented and dangerous. Maybe we could be talking about the difference between 88 and 90 wins, instead of 74 and 75.
And wouldn’t that be the stuff of wonderful emotions?
by Greg Prince on 5 February 2014 2:41 pm Kyle Farnsworth has been invited to Spring Training. Daisuke Matsuzaka has been invited to Spring Training. Taylor Teagarden conjures images of an idyllic spot where those who sew for a living might seek a civilized respite from the drudgery of cuffing trousers, but he’s actually a catcher and he, too, has been invited to Spring Training. So has Matt Clark, a perfectly random pair of first names that apparently amounts to a longtime minor league first baseman who was something of if not all the rage in Japan (if not Genoa City).
They may or may not be part of your 2014 New York Mets when things begin to fully matter, but for at least a spell in February and March, they’ll definitely enter our thoughts, for each of them has been invited to Spring Training.
“Invited to Spring Training” is one of those phrases that rolls off of tongues and into ears this time of year. It sounds so much better than “wintry mix,” for example. But what does it mean to be invited to Spring Training? Literally?
I get the basics. No more than 40 men can be on a 40-man roster, thus the category known as Non-Roster Invitees. You’re with the team via a relatively late deal, labeled “minor league” for bookkeeping purposes; Marlon Byrd and LaTroy Hawkins bought the Mets time by agreeing to that ultimately temporary classification a year ago. Most likely you carry the burden of proof, holding a lesser degree of job security and facing a regular season that’s inherently more to-be-determined than a plurality of your 40-man colleagues. The implication of “invited to Spring Training” can’t help but be that you’re on the “over” portion of the hill where your career arc is concerned. But that’s not always the case.
NRI is also the ticket for prospects who don’t figure to break camp with the big club. Three names familiar from last summer’s Futures Game — Brandon Nimmo, Noah Syndergaard and Rafael Montero — have made the same list as the aforementioned veterans, albeit from a less marginal entry point. Those just approaching the hill are invited to major league Spring Training for a brief taste of what figures to await them for real in springs to come. Unless somebody wows everybody, they’re headed back to the minor league complex in a matter of weeks.
With all that understood, what about the formal extending of the invitation? If you were on the team last year and maintain every reasonable certainty that you’re going to be on the team this year, I assume you know what to do and where to go. But when you’re “invited to Spring Training,” what are the logistics? I’d love to believe there’s a ritual to it, perhaps that some vestige within the Basic Agreement mandates a telegram be personally delivered to each and every Spring Training invitee. Or that teams literally send out invitations packed with RSVP cards and those thin squares of tissue paper that don’t seem to serve any earthly purpose.
Hey, maybe all these years I haven’t realized that those little sheets were redeemable for a tryout at shortstop.
It doesn’t actually seem to work that way, but I figure it’s gotta work some way. Late every August when I was a kid, an envelope would show up in the mail from the local school district. It was the harbinger of doom envelope telling me that on the Wednesday after Labor Day it was all about to end. A strange-sounding room number was listed and a bus pass was thrown in. If I wanted a ride to school, I’d damn well better be standing on the “N.W. Corner” of Neptune Boulevard. It provided an early lesson in geography. To this day, I envision my first-grade bus pass coordinates to gauge north from south and east from west.
Curiosity and the lack of actual baseball got the best of me, so I decided to try and find out the process behind being invited to Spring Training. Or at least extending the invitation. I bothered somebody who works for the Mets and asked, in essence, “How does this go down?” The person I asked was nice enough to walk me through it.
Alas, Western Union doesn’t ring anybody’s bell and invitations aren’t engraved (also, I don’t think there’s really such a place as a tailor tea garden). The whole business doesn’t differ all that much from any other baseball contract. The player’s agent and the ballclub work out the specific language. Once the player is in camp, he doesn’t wear a scarlet NRI to distinguish him from his 40-man roster peers. Same clubhouse for dressing, same clubhouse spread for noshing, same access to weights and measures; the trainers who condition seven-time All-Star David Wright condition the non-roster invitees with just as much care and effort.
Semantics aside, if you’ve been invited to big league camp, you’re a big-leaguer, fella. Contractual status and performance will combine to determine whether you’re still a big-leaguer come March 31, but in the meantime, enjoy it while it lasts.
One note of Spring Training caution comes from someone who knows of life as an NRI, former fringe reliever Dirk Hayhurst, the righty whose fame for writing about baseball exceeds his fame for pitching it. Though we all see reports of eye-popping big league salaries, players who earn them don’t start banking those stratospheric numbers until the season starts. And by no means is everybody invited to a big league camp guaranteed Freddie Freeman’s financial future. Thus, the Basic Agreement calls for a Spring Training allowance — meal money is the colloquialism you’ve probably heard all your life — but Hayhurst pointed out in 2012 that the then-prevailing figure of $140 per week had to go a long way.
Remember, you’re not getting paid during spring training. If you eat beyond your allowance, it’s on you. This says nothing of other investments you might want to make, like chewing tobacco (if you’re a mother reading this article, replace tobacco with bubble gum), alcohol (Gatorade), video games (video games) or poker buy-ins (charitable contributions).
May I humbly suggest that you invest in Tupperware. Sexy? No. Practical? Yes. You can bring home a lot of food from the field in those glorious plastic containers, especially if your organization cooks its meals on site. With meals taken care of, the meal money is yours.
The things we mere non-baseball playing mortals don’t think about, huh?
But I have been thinking about the envelope from the school district, and my source at the Mets says there is a major league equivalent. The team’s director of travel sends a packet of information to every player, from the long-timers to the first-timers. Unless you’ve spent previous springs in St. Lucie County, you’d need something to tell you which corner to stand on, so to speak. Wright likely knows his way around town. The Teagardens and Clarks (let alone the Grandersons and Colons) probably don’t.
No bus passes of which I’m aware in the packet, but it does include reporting dates, contacts for housing and hotels, where to turn if you want cable, places to dine (if you can afford to avoid the Tupperware for an evening), places to golf…a veritable Welcome Wagon brochure for the new seasonal resident. Makes sense. This isn’t fantasy camp. You’re a professional baseball player who’s just been transferred to Port St. Lucie on a corporate fact-finding mission. You and the team need to discover if you’re going to be heading to New York when the mission is over.
It’s a job. It’s an adventure. It’s an invitation to Spring Training. If you want to be a Met, I’m guessing you’re willing to overlook the lack of fancy tissue paper.
by Greg Prince on 31 January 2014 8:01 pm While the Wilpons unscrunch the large wad of cash they’ve allegedly found underneath their couch cushions, I await anxiously the start of the biggest sporting event to ever touch down in our humble Metropolitan Area. I refer of course to Queens hosting the World Series, time of first pitch as yet undetermined.
In the meantime, there’s Super Bowl XLVIII on Sunday, and that figures to make for a decent distraction as we wait and wait and wait for Opening Day LIII to kick off some eight weeks later.
Though the Mets and the Super Bowl debuted less than V years apart, I rarely think of them as being close enough in age to coexist as sporting siblings. The Original Mets were Mad Men season two; the inaugural Super Bowl was Mad Men season five. Stylistically, the gap stretches like the difference between radio spots for Secor Laxatives and a sleek print treatment for the Jaguar XKE.
The Mets were built on the dormant goodwill that remained from 1950s National League baseball in New York. Playing at the old Polo Grounds; guided by old Casey Stengel (the subject of a 2014 bobblehead, Faith and Fear in Flushing has delightedly learned); preserved primarily in old black & white archival footage; and stocked with players whose experience made their presence in the “Senior” Circuit most appropriate, the Mets were an enterprise that echoed yesterday before they could fully anticipate tomorrow.
You don’t have to have followed the evolution of Harry Crane’s haircuts to know the society of January 15, 1967, was cultural light years removed from that of April 11, 1962, which is probably why Cardinals 11 Mets 4 and Packers 35 Chiefs 10 don’t resonate as chronologically related. Yet it was only 57 months after the dawn of the Mets that the Super Bowl came rushing onto the greater athletic scene, never, ever to step out of bounds.
That first AFL-NFL World Championship Game was an event just dripping in what figured to come next, right down to the two jetpack-wearing performers who were launched skyward to signify just how much future was packed into this contest.
The super spectacle’s wow-factor Madison Avenue moniker was not yet codified, but “Super Bowl” was already being informally thrown around by the press. That the game was being played at all foretold of the day when professional football’s distinctions would be streamlined into a single merged entity, the spiritual equivalent of Ned Beatty’s “one vast and ecumenical holding company, for whom all men will work to serve a common profit, in which all men will hold a share of stock, all necessities provided, all anxieties tranquilized, all boredom amused” speech from Network. The National Football League’s showcase was immediately telecast in living color even if everybody’s set hadn’t yet caught up to the available technology. And the whole thing couldn’t have been more made for TV had it been produced by Sherwood Schwartz.
Perhaps the reason I can’t quite reconcile that the Mets and the Super Bowl are of just about the same vintage is the scale that separates them. The Mets may have made a couple of World Series before the Super Bowl had been played VIII times, but even with those express global implications, to us they were still the M-E-T-S of New York town. Of Flushing town. Of little ol’ Shea Stadium. They were ours. The Super Bowl, on the other hand, never didn’t seem ginormous. Life stopped for the Super Bowl almost from the get-go. By the time I saw my first, which was the IVth, it all but overwhelmed the screen. Minnesota was playing Kansas City in New Orleans, yet it mattered everywhere.
That the games were rarely good didn’t much deter anybody. The ’70s were lousy with low-scoring struggles that nonetheless managed to be largely noncompetitive. Regardless of quality, people tuned into those Super Bowls like they tuned into nothing else. The ’80s and ’90s were pockmarked by high-octane blowouts. People kept tuning in to Super Bowls. As the games improved in the new century it became fashionable to announce with equal parts irony and sincerity that one was watching only to check out the commercials…but watch is what almost everybody did and does. That’s not something that can always be said on behalf of our Metsies.
And now the Super Bowl has encroached upon the Mets’ general geography. It is here among us polished urban sophisticates when it is usually assigned to pleasant places in what we tend to graciously consider America’s countryside…which is to say everywhere else. I must admit I can’t fully grasp its presence on these shores.
New York has the Super Bowl. Gosh, that’s strange.
Technically, New Jersey has the Super Bowl and the Super Bowl has asked New York to allow its name to be used in the program. Or so it feels from here on the non-football side of the frigid Hudson. Several decades ago, the Felix sector of New York’s brain decided to tidy up its outer boroughs and store its messy pigskin accoutrements somewhere near Secaucus. The Oscar portion never even noticed they were moved across state lines. Yeah, the Jets shouldn’t have left Shea (nor should have the Mets), but as long as they and the Giants showed up televised every Sunday, we were fine.
And I imagine we’d be fine with the National Football League blessing a different ADI with its winter bacchanalia. New York didn’t really need the Super Bowl. I mean that less in the “New York has a million attributes and attractions, harumph” sense than “more tourists, more traffic…who needs it?” way we have of approaching every interloper who drops by. The dollars are always welcome, but the hassle never seems worth it.
You know who would appreciate this Super Bowl more than we do? Based on thirty-year-old personal experience, I’d say Tampa. The Super Bowl — or what it turned into by the time it reached adolescence — was made for Tampa.
Conveniently adjacent to the springtime home of the New York Mets in St. Petersburg, Tampa was the site of my college years and Super Bowl XVIII (we were both so young then). Though I was a relative newcomer to the vicinity, I figured out right away that nothing bigger had happened to Tampa than being told it was going to host The Big Game. The city’s founding in the 19th century probably ranked a distant second…maybe third, with the 1976 invention of the Tampa Bay Buccaneers lodged in between.
Forget economic impact, at least as measured by hotel bookings and restaurant reservations. Tampa — where “the good life gets better every day,” per the chamber of commerce’s unbiased early ’80s opinion — was just tickled to have its existence validated by an massive outside entity like the NFL. I had never lived in a less than wholly major market prior to my extended stay in Tampa. I was from New York, worldwide headquarters of self-esteem. I didn’t know what it meant for a city to crave “national recognition,” a commodity valued in the local media the way the legendary Gulf Coast pirate Jose Gaspar was said to have lusted for Tampa Bay’s treasures.
Tampans were so taken with the tall tales of Gaspar (no known relation to Rod) lavishing attention on its peninsula that in 1904 it instituted a Mardi Gras-ish festival called Gasparilla in his name. Every year, the city fathers sanctioned an “invasion” of Tampa by businessmen dressed as buccaneers, creating the annual highlight of the municipal social scene, at least until it was trumped by the Super Bowl’s initial West Central Florida appearance in January of 1984. No wonder the eventual home of the Bucs was only too happy be to be invaded by the NFL. The DNA of Tampa cries out to be trampled.
There was a chance it would be only half-trampled, but not a great one. On the eve of the 1983 football season, I watched a pair of co-anchors report on how much it would benefit Tampa to have two teams from somewhere else qualify for the Super Bowl because that would mean more money flowing into town. “I don’t care,” one chirped cheerily to the other. “I still want the Bucs to make it!”
Despite coming off three perennially unlikely playoff appearances in a four-year span, the 1983 Buccaneers courteously stepped aside with a 2-14 record, presumably to ensure the city’s merchants would benefit from the onslaught of visiting fans who would fly in to root on the Washington Redskins and Los Angeles Raiders. This was outstanding for Tampa’s psyche, too, because those conference champions were traditional powerhouses of the period, each of them having won a Super Bowl in recent seasons. If Tampa was good enough to open its arms to nationally recognized football franchises, then, gosh darn it, Tampa mattered!
The Super Bowl roared into my temporary hometown like a monorail salesman through Springfield and was gone to Brockway, Ogdenville and North Haverbrook just as quickly, leaving the purported good life to get better every day on its own steam. For all the life-changing dreams the region harbored in advance of Super Sunday 1984, what Super Bowl XVIII really wrought was:
• a glutted secondary market (tickets bearing the absurdly high face price of $60 were said to be going for five bucks apiece in the Tampa Stadium parking lot right around kickoff);
• a typical-for-the-era lopsided result (Raiders 38 Redskins 9, Marcus Allen trampling every Skin in sight);
• a few silver and black benches branded with the “Commitment To Excellence” motto — residual Raider glory left to linger at scattered HART bus stops long after Al Davis hightailed it back to California with the Vince Lombardi Trophy (Davis’s ego probably functioned more reliably than Hillsborough Area Regional Transit);
• a single Tampa-centric pregame feature on CBS (mostly Jimmy the Greek praising the charms of a good Ybor City cigar);
• and a desire by Tampa to be invaded repeatedly in the years to follow anyway. Tampa has been a Super host III more times, and it’s always giddily bidding for another. If you ever need to swing by Tampa and don’t want to arrive emptyhanded, a well-executed incursion always makes a nice gift.
Maybe it’s testament to the NFL’s knack for conferring legitimization that more than a decade before Jerry Maguire made it a catchphrase, Tampa practically swooned to the league, “You complete us.” The Super Bowl was all anybody talked about for weeks. Everybody felt like they were in on the festivities, which weren’t nearly as festive as they are these days. Where are the Redskins huddling? Did you see which Raiders were out being rowdy? Super Bowl stuff is on sale at Alberstons…I bought ten plastic cups for a dollar!
Why, I can even recall one normally blasé college student turning practically starstruck from his brush with a league official driving by in a Roman numeral-marked car. The guy was seeking the jury-rigged football facilities set up at one of the area’s prominent universities and the encounter left a Joe Jacoby-sized impression. “Wow,” the college kid would tell anybody who listened. “I was walking back from class and somebody from the NFL asked me directions to the soccer field!”
The easily impressed young scholar in question? That would be your not yet so blasé blogger. I may have effected a New Yorker’s detachment on the outside, but that didn’t necessarily mean I was as immune to Super Bowl fever as I’ve grown with age. New York might bundle up and barely blink at the thought of hosting The Big Game, but a Super Bowl was the biggest thing to ever happen to Tampa. And after a few years exposed to another city’s folkways, even a jaded New Yorker couldn’t help but turn into a bit of a Tampan.
by Greg Prince on 27 January 2014 2:09 am In the “seventh inning” of Ken Burns’s Baseball — the installment titled “The Capital of Baseball” — the viewer learns that New York was the epicenter of the universe in the 1950s, at least until two-thirds of the Metropolitan Pastime’s contingent was about to be packed up and shipped west. It’s within that portion of the documentary that Burns brought in John Turturro to voice the letter a concerned citizen wrote to Mayor Robert Wagner as the dastardly deeds were being done in 1957:
I am a man of very few words so I will come straight to the point. I voted for you. I pay your salary. I WANT THE DODGERS IN BROOKLYN. I don’t want any excuses from you or any of your men at the City Hall. I WANT THE DODGERS IN BROOKLYN and you can do it by building the sports center. You had better get it built or you’ll not get a vote from me.
Just as John Turturro channeled the sentiments of disgruntled Wagner voter R. Cucco twenty years ago, his same I-mean-business tone would suit my sentiments presently where the machinations of WOR and, apparently, the Mets themselves are concerned.
I am a man of sometimes many words but I will come straight to the point. I am a loyal consumer of your product. I WANT HOWIE ROSE AND JOSH LEWIN DESCRIBING IT TO ME ON RADIO. I don’t want any excuses from you or any of your people at Clear Channel. I WANT HOWIE AND JOSH BROADCASTING METS GAMES and you can do it by signing them to contracts for the 2014 season and many seasons beyond. You had better get it done or…
Oh, damn, this is where my 50,000 watts of Turturroan indignation turn to static because I am a consumer of your product and you SOBs (that’s Students of Broadcasting, I hope) probably assume a fan like me might raise a fuss over disagreeable details but will ultimately tune in when I need to hear the Mets on the radio because, well, I need to hear the Mets on the radio. You smugly believe that since I put up with Tom McCarthy for two years and Wayne Hagin for four more that you can, for reasons not at all understood by me, potentially replace an announcer I’ve come to enjoy and not pay a price for it.
The price is my goodwill, but perhaps that’s not dollars-and-sensical enough for you to care.
That’s too bad. If you don’t keep Howie and Josh together, I will view it and hear it as an abuse of my trust. It may not mean a thing to your pocketbook in the short term, because I can’t swear I’d ease my foot off the going-to-games gas pedal in any meaningful way or even resist the temptation of orange-and-blue merchandise if there’s a spiffy new item that catches my eye. Yet I will be genuinely pissed off. And I’ll remember it. And somewhere along the way, you’ll have whittled away at our team-fan relationship.
I only know what I read in Capital New York, but the pieces of the story that have emerged — that new flagship WOR wasn’t necessarily anxious to retain Howie Rose (perhaps because they believe putting a shiny 710 stamp on Met broadcasts supercedes Met listeners’ needs) and that Jeff Wilpon hasn’t rushed to secure Josh Lewin’s services (perhaps because Josh’s sparkling chemistry with Howie and his own quick wit elude the COO) — are, as they say in chin-stroking journalistic circles, troubling.
The Mets said they were going to WOR, but I look at Howie and Josh not confirmed to the world at large as the Mets broadcast team of record right now and well into the future, and I’m pretty sure WTF? is the real frequency over which ownership and its new radio partners are intent on transmitting.
by Greg Prince on 24 January 2014 3:09 am Earlier this week, Ron Davis put his proverbial fist through the Mets’ paper-thin veil of pretending they’re happy to have Ike Davis come down to St. Lucie and compete for the first base job. Ron, who was a successful major league reliever before becoming known to a later generation as Ike’s dad, made his points cogently and colorfully, whether you’re prone to agree with them or not.
Ron Davis thinks the Mets “screwed up” because they were so public about shopping Ike Davis and never got a deal done. Ron also expressed dismay with Citi Field’s impact on Ike’s production and stressed that his son should have no illusions about the nature of the business he’s chosen. The veteran of five major league teams resists sentimental attachments at the major league level. “My favorite team is the last one I played for,” he said, indicating Ike should be prepared to absorb the same lesson.
“I told him, ‘You’re like a piece of hamburger meat, just sitting there at the grocery store,’” Ron said before Tuesday night’s B.A.T. dinner. “‘And when you’re first put out there in that wrapper, you look real good — bright and red. And the older you get, you start getting tarnished, a little brownish, and people don’t pick you as much.’”
Davis the elder may be coming at the issue of Ike’s from perspectives both uniquely informed and totally biased, but good for him either way. Ron Davis doesn’t care about what’s best for the Mets. He cares about what’s best for his son. Whether his sharing his thoughts so candidly with the media helps Ike’s cause is another matter, but the man was surely speaking from the heart.
Can’t blame him for that, just like you couldn’t blame Mookie Wilson in October of 2006 for what some perceived as his crime against Metsdom, namely that he wore a Cardinal ski cap as he rooted for his son, Preston, in the World Series. The Mets’ archrivals during Mookie’s heyday were the Cardinals. The Mets’ archrivals the week before, during the NLCS, were the Cardinals. Mookie Wilson, a Met among Mets, didn’t care. Preston was playing for St. Louis, so Mookie pulled for St. Louis. Of course he did.
When Sandy Alomar, Sr., was a Met coach, he pulled down one of the commemorative Shea countdown numbers alongside his sons Roberto and Sandy, Jr., on Fathers Day. All three had been Mets, though one of them — Robbie — made a lasting impression in the wrong direction. As a non-Alomar in 2008, I wasn’t all that keen on Roberto Alomar being given any kind of Metsian honor. Yet somehow I don’t think Coach Sandy looked at the same person and saw a Met who seemed to tank upon his donning the orange, blue and black in 2002. He saw his son, period.
Hell, even über-Cub Randy Hundley was a Mets fan as long as Todd Hundley was a Met.
Blood (or adoption, in Mookie and Preston Wilson’s case) will always be thicker than the fabric the good folks at Stitches use to produce game-ready Mets uniforms. Ron Davis’s spiel is OK. Mookie Wilson’s distasteful ski cap was OK. Sandy Alomar’s choice of number-removing companion was OK. And by the way, my dad, who always asks me about the Mets even though it’s hard to imagine him caring less about them, is OK, too. I mention that because Thursday was his 85th birthday.
Quite a number. Quite a guy.
As long as we’re on father-son terrain — and because my dad reminded me “we” (that is my family before I was born) lived a block away from the Hodgeses in Brooklyn — I want to acknowledge how genuinely gracious it was of Gil Hodges, Jr., to join us at the Queens Baseball Convention for the presentation of the Gil Hodges Unforgettable Fire Award. Seeing as how this was the first QBC and there was no history behind this award, I appreciated that he took it on faith that our intentions were true. Not only did Gil show up to accept the award on behalf of his late father, he brought along his friend Art Shamsky, which overwhelmed the 7-year-old version of myself and was received pretty enthusiastically by the current iteration of yours truly.
 Art Shamsky (speaking) and Gil Hodges, Jr., at QBC 14. (Photograph by Sharon Chapman.) Even better, in my book, is that Gil checked with me the day before to make sure it was all right if Art came with him. What a menschy thing to do…y’know? I’m trying to imagine a scenario in which I refuse the presence of a 1969 Met at a Met event or, for that matter, any square footage I come across in my life. Despite my friend and QBC MC Jeff Hysen’s tongue-in-cheek suggestion that I tell him, “sorry, we only want bloggers and nerds at this thing,” I confirmed we’d be quite honored to have Art on hand. And we were.
MetsPolice has posted audio of this particular presentation on its site, but since we had a little problem with our microphones in the middle of it, I thought I’d print here my brief “official” remarks concerning the award. It also serves to underscore the place Gil’s father holds in our collective heart.
***
Our beloved New York Mets were conceived by Bill Shea, delivered by George Weiss, nurtured by Joan Payson and brought into the world by Casey Stengel. Those were all crucial figures in the development of what Casey called our Metsies and their role in our history shouldn’t be overlooked.
It was Gil Hodges, however, who raised the Mets into an entity of substance; who made them make themselves into something; who guided them into growing up sooner than anybody on the outside would have imagined; and who gave us forever after a touchstone we could always proudly come home to.
What Gil Hodges did for the Mets and for us as Mets fans was and is and always will be enormous.
Gil Hodges didn’t invent the Mets, but he did make them real.
You may think I’m referring solely to winning the 1969 World Series with a team that had never won even half of its games before, and yes, that’s part of it. But Gil Hodges, as Mets manager, transcends even that rightfully legendary accomplishment.
When you read the contemporary accounts from when Gil ran the Mets and you listen, decades later, to the players Gil led, you understand it has to be about more than simply charging forward from 61 wins to 73 wins and then to 100 wins plus seven more in the postseason. You sense the transformation he effected, on a franchise level and within the lives of dozens of individuals he touched directly. When you hear about who Gil was and what he did and how he treated others, you can feel his impact radiate outward to not just a ballclub that played above what was supposed to be its head, but to everyone who cared about that club and who identified with that club.
That’s a lot of people. That’s a lot of Mets fans, then and now. And that means everything to people like us.
There’s plenty more one could add about Gil Hodges, whether it’s his Hall of Fame-caliber playing career for Brooklyn, L.A. and the Original Mets; the home run records he set; the crucial role he played in winning the Dodgers their first world championship in 1955; the splendid job he did managing the Washington Senators; the valiant service he gave his country as a United States Marine in World War II; the impact he had on his community; and, of course, his family.
The only thing that seems to be missing when one endeavors to discuss Gil Hodges is a bad word, because nobody in or out of baseball seemed to have one to say about him.
It was a remarkable life Gil Hodges packed into not quite 48 years and it’s a remarkable legacy we celebrate today with our small token of appreciation for how he raised our team to be all it could be.
The Queens Baseball Convention is proud to inaugurate the Gil Hodges Unforgettable Fire Award, dedicated to the person whose memory eternally warms our hearts, brightens our spirits and lights our way. We plan to present this award annually to someone who casts a truly incandescent glow for us as Mets fans.
For the first one, we agreed there could be no better recipient than the man himself. Therefore, we are incredibly honored that joining us to accept this award is someone who carries on in the name of Gil Hodges and does that name proud.
Ladies and gentlemen, Gil Hodges, Jr.
***
Two recent podcast appearances you might enjoy: I join Desert Island Mets to discern whether The Baseball Encyclopedia qualifies as a bible of sorts (fair warning: I programmed the episode’s music); and the Rising Apple Report for a delightful digression into the Met coaching careers of Sheriff Robinson and Tom Nieto. Thanks to both shows for the thoughtful invitations and exchanges.
by Greg Prince on 21 January 2014 10:56 am Friend of FAFIF Matt Silverman reminds us it’s the time of the offseason to solicit entries for the Greg Spira Baseball Research Award. The award recognizes the “best published article or paper containing original baseball research by a person 30 years old or younger,” which represents an outstanding tribute to Spira, who dedicated much of his all too short life to discovery and dissemination within the sport he loved.
First prize is $1,000, with cash prizes awarded for second and third place as well. Full details on how to submit are here. The deadline for entry is February 15. Please look into it and tell anybody you might think would be interested about it. Thank you.
by Greg Prince on 19 January 2014 1:43 am Major League Baseball has been running a promotion called “Face of the Franchise,” which crossed my mind Saturday night after returning home from the first Queens Baseball Convention. In MLB’s Twitter-based contest, fans are being asked to choose a current player to visually represent each team and, ultimately, the entire sport.
Due respect to whomever this exercise eventually glorifies, this is silly where the Mets are concerned. The face of this franchise is that of its fans. And the face appeared to be enjoying itself at QBC. It smiled. It focused. It pondered. It moved up and down in a nodding fashion (which might be more of a head trait, but the face is in there somewhere). It was surely engaged by all that transpired around it.
 Two of many happy faces found at QBC 14. (Photo by Sharon Chapman.) We’d make for an ideal Mets visage, except for one logistical obstacle: you can’t really fit us all onto one face. Blame it on the individuality that pokes out from underneath our common-interest umbrella. We’re snowflaky that way. Even within the realm of our respective Mets fan identities, we are each a variation of the species.
Y’know what we’re not? A “fan base”. I’ve really come to dislike that term.
Never mind that it evokes political strategy, as in “playing to the base,” which always sounds very cynical. My distaste for the phrase comes from the implication that you can blob us together until you don’t have to bother distinguishing among us. It’s easier to dismiss prevailing concerns by pretending a mob is howling. “Sign a player? Lower a price? Convene a wintertime baseball event? Oh sure, that’s what the fan base wants.”
Send out all the surveys you can generate, cherry pick your feedback mechanisms or just draw your prefab conclusions. You won’t know what your so-called base of fans is about unless you’re fully among them. There may be majorities or pluralities in favor of this or that, but there’s rarely anything close to unanimity, save maybe for winning being considered preferable to losing…and I wouldn’t swear to that one, either.
Our distinctions are good things. They make us multifaceted instead of monolithic. That’s probably why the first QBC succeeded so absolutely completely. There was a little bit of everything for everybody. A lot of everything, actually. It was glorious not just for the triumph of choice, but for watching the choices being made. Not everybody wanted the same thing out of the day, or at least they didn’t behave as if they did.
Y’know the one thing I’m pretty sure we all wanted? To be at a gathering like this. Not every Mets fan might have chosen to spend one winter Saturday with hundreds of other Mets fans, but hundreds did. Once we were there, it seemed the overriding point was to revel in the existence of this unprecedented opportunity. Again, there was a lot of everything for everybody, yet the one item that didn’t formally appear in the QBC program but managed to emerge as Saturday’s common denominator was unfettered access to each other.
We were Mets fans embracing not just the chance to listen to former players, current broadcasters, dedicated historians and garrulous bloggers. We were confirming we’re still in this thing together; that January notwithstanding, we each maintain our unique place within our franchise’s face.
Consider confirmation achieved.
Sincere thanks to all who made Queens Baseball Convention 14 possible and equally sincere thanks to all who made Queens Baseball Convention 15 necessary.
by Greg Prince on 16 January 2014 11:40 pm Over the past few days, arbitration has been avoided between the Mets and Ruben Tejada, Ike Davis and Eric Young, Jr., while instant replay rules have been expanded and adopted.
None of that is exactly insignificant, yet none of it is quite baseball in January, the month when winter drags on without apology. But fear not, faithful followers of the orange and blue: this Saturday comes The Winterlude.
The Queens Baseball Convention is going to break up your winter. It is designed to break up your winter. It is a full day of baseball talk, baseball thought, baseball camaraderie, baseball color, baseball fun, baseball games…
Well, not “baseball games” in the sense of the 162 Alex Rodriguez will be ineligible to play this season, but you know what I mean. There will be, as promised, baseball activities galore, all of them Metsian, all of them enhanced by your presence. And while you’re making QBC 14 even better by being on hand, your January will gain a necessary taste of June and July when it is fortified by QBC 14.
So for goodness sake, come on down this Saturday at noon!
Within the packed schedule of events (detailed here), Faith and Fear is proud to grab a few at-bats:
• You can catch Jason and me on the New Media panel convened by Gotham Baseball’s Mark Healey at 12:10.
• At 1:00, Jason shifts into moderator mode as he hosts Ron Darling of Ron Darling fame in a Q&A session.
• I’ll be delving into Mets history at 2:00, offering a sneak preview of The Happiest Recap: Second Base (1974-1986) along the way. (Copies of First Base: 1962-1973 will be available, too.)
• It will be my distinct honor to host the presentation of the first Gil Hodges Unforgettable Fire Award at 6:15. We’ll be joined for the event by Gil Hodges, Jr., son of our beloved World Champion manager.
Plus, being Mets fans, Jason and I will be around all day taking in as much QBC as we can — and there is going to be a lot of QBC. We look forward to seeing you at McFadden’s this Saturday, when the calendar claims it’s January 18, but it figures to feel much warmer.
by Greg Prince on 10 January 2014 1:00 pm Pitchers & Catchers won’t be reporting to Port St. Lucie for more than a month, but you can look forward to reporting to McFadden’s Citi Field on Saturday, January 18, for the first annual Queens Baseball Convention. When you do, you’ll be joined by a pitcher, a first baseman, your favorite pair of bloggers, their esteemed colleagues and a whole lot of Mets fans like yourself.
So bring your offspring, bring your spouse, c’mon down to QBC and get yourself out of the house.
As outlined in this space previously, QBC is the wintertime fanfest-style event you’ve been waiting for all your Met life, and now it’s about to exist. Conceived by those who love the Mets for those who love the Mets, it shapes up as a full and memorable day of baseball activities, which is saying something when the calendar remains stubbornly ensconced in January.
Come to QBC, you’ll meet Ron Darling. You’ll meet Ed Kranepool. You’ll meet Gil Hodges, Jr., I’m pleased to report. You’ll meet Mr. Met and Sandy the Seagull (and actual non-mascot representatives of the Metropolitan Baseball Club of New York). You’ll hear from some stone-cold authorities on Mets uniforms and Mets pop culture and Mets fantastic finishes. You’ll encounter Mets trivia (with a chance to win prizes) and, speaking of trivial, Jason and I will be taking part in various panels and presentations. There’ll be fun and games for the kids, fun and games for the adults, baseball filling your eyes and coming out of your ears. Consider it total seamhead sensory immersion.
If that doesn’t sound like the best January day for a Mets fan since the Mets signed Carlos Beltran in 2005, I don’t know what does. Carlos required $119 million over seven years to come to Flushing. For you, fellow Mets fan, QBC tickets are a mere $35, which includes access to all sessions and autographs (Darling’s, Kranepool’s and those of anybody else who can grip a pen…which, full disclosure, might be a dealbreaker for Mr. Met’s signature). Children 12 and under get in for just 10 bucks. There’s also a pretty sweet 7 Line-designed t-shirt + ticket deal on queensbaseballconvention.com.
Order your QBC tickets now, pull your jersey of choice out of storage next and then start stretching and long-tossing so you’re ready. No matter what position you play, I’m sure you’ll agree baseball activities can’t resume soon enough.
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