The blog for Mets fans
who like to read
ABOUT US
Faith and Fear in Flushing made its debut on Feb. 16, 2005, the brainchild of two longtime friends and lifelong Met fans.
Greg Prince discovered the Mets when he was 6, during the magical summer of 1969. He is a Long Island-based writer, editor and communications consultant. Contact him here.
Jason Fry is a Brooklyn writer whose first memories include his mom leaping up and down cheering for Rusty Staub. Check out his other writing here.
Got something to say? Leave a comment, or email us at faithandfear@gmail.com. (Sorry, but we have no interest in ads, sponsored content or guest posts.)
Need our RSS feed? It's here.
Visit our Facebook page, or drop by the personal pages for Greg and Jason.
Or follow us on Twitter: Here's Greg, and here's Jason.
|
by Greg Prince on 28 September 2013 9:41 am Y’know that saying about how you have to be a pretty good pitcher to lose 20 games? Well, if I can take the liberty of substituting that supposition with “supporter,” I think I’ve proven myself one of the better Mets fans of 2013.
I am Jerry Koosman, 1977.
I am Jack Fisher, 1965.
I am Tracy Stallard, 1964.
I am Roger Craig, twice.
I am Al Jackson, twice.
I am a 20-game loser at Citi Field this year.
Your New York Mets, it has been noted, are a surprisingly decent road team or at least seem to be because they are so dreadful when not living out of a suitcase. On the road they finished the season at 41-40. If they had played to the concept of breaking even in their away games while making hay at home, we’d be talking about them in terms that are, at the moment, reserved for Atlanta, St. Louis and Los Angeles.
Instead, we’re attempting to figure out where they’ll draft (and how it theoretically affects who they might sign) within the context of Colorado, San Francisco, Philadelphia and every other club for whom 77 wins is an aspirational figure. Our Mets — the same Mets who toughed out a .506 winning percentage away from Citi Field — are 32-47 at home. At this time of year you can basically double that and deduce that if the Mets never left Flushing, it would always be something like 1977 in the 2013 standings.
The Mets have lost 47 times in 79 tries where they theoretically hold home-field advantage. As of Friday night, 20 of those losses belong to me, too. I’ve personally spectated/supported my favorite baseball team 33 times in 2013 and have come away whistling a happy tune about the result on a scant 13 occasions.
I’m 13-20 at home. Or 13-20 when I leave the house. It didn’t necessarily seem preordained. When Jordany Valdespin landed a grand slam on the roof of the Mo’s Zone on April 24, I was 5-1. Then came nine consecutive losses that left me, as of June 30, at 5-10. Yet when Jonathon Niese shut out the Phillies on August 27, I was 13-14, leading to the possible conclusion that my year was more streaky than sickly.
But one final skein came to clarify matters for me in September: three losses to the Nationals, two losses to the Giants, one loss at least to the Brewers, Closing Day’s mercies pending. It was Friday’s misstep versus Milwaukee that sunk me to 13-20 and has me keeping less than celebratory company with Kooz & the Gang.
It’s not the first time I’ve absorbed a 20th loss. In 2008, I registered 21 setbacks in The Log, but that had more of a Phil Niekro 1979 (21-20) or Wilbur Wood 1973 (24-20) vibe to it. Five years ago, when I threw myself into Sheaing Goodbye, I attended an unprecedented and since unmatched 44 games and came home from the last of them, on this very date one half-decade ago, 23-21.
So while there have been more losses for me in other seasons — I lost an entire stadium in ’08 to go with those 21 official setbacks; and worse proportions percentagewise — 6-10 in ’93 just about perfectly mirroring how bad that 59-103 team played home and away; and a handful of ohfers when my attendance was sadly and severely limited — three 0-1s and one 0-3 between the ages of 13 and 17…this 13-20 jumps out at me like the ball jumps off the bat of whoever leads off against Carlos Torres every time he starts and I’m on hand to observe it.
13-20 is a bad mark. The only worse one I can think of to have potentially garnered would have been 0-0.
Better, I think, to have lost 33 straight than never to have gone at all.
I didn’t go to Citi Field on Friday night to stave off 20 losses. I could have done that by confining myself to SNY. I went to spend eight lovely innings with the perennially Most Valuable Chapmans of Central Jersey. I went to exchange a few minutes of gratifying greetings with the Patersons of somewhere in Scotland — yes, people cross the Atlantic to enjoy Mets baseball, even this version of Mets baseball. I went to secure (thanks to Sharon Chapman’s characteristic generosity and attention to the special-promotions calendar) a gleaming Oktoberfest glass in the shape of a boot that will hold 42 ounces of beer or any beverage. I went, too, it turns out, to add an unadvertised Collector’s Cup to my cup collection after the Mets apparently had a gross or two left over from their last rousingly successful Collector’s Cup Night.
I went to pick peppers off my only sweet sausage with onions of the season when it occurred to me, with Oktoberfest in the air, if not now, then when? I went to exchange drink vouchers for our little group, patiently working with the concession stand personnel until we had two sodas and one Stella secured safely in one carton — it sounds simpler to arrange than it actually is. I went to alternately butter up Juan Lagares and Carlos Gomez from the second row of the Big Apple seats so maybe one center fielder or another (or both!) would throw Kevin Chapman a ball the way Angel Pagan did four years ago under similar circumstances (neither bought it). I went to loudly advise the guy on the video screen who’d been chosen to partake in the Topps guessing contest to hold his arrow “UP! UP!” when the clue was 1983 Rookie of the Year and his previous card had been Gil Hodges.
I went to keep an eye over left field on what R.A. Dickey was doing to the Rays as a Jay one year after he defeated the Pirates as a Met for his 20th win (how novel!) and to see if the Tribe could take advantage against the Twins. I went for probably my 54th chance meeting of the season with Matt Silverman. I went to make the 10:19 with ease facilitated by a game that was over in 2:40 at the end of a season that always expires sooner than you can fathom.
I went to witness starter Carlos Torres give up a leadoff home run to Nori Aoki the way I saw our best long reliever give up leadoff home runs to Andrelton Simmons in July and Denard Span earlier this month when he was also pressed into starting. I went to watch Martin Maldonado simultaneously put a dent in the Parts Authority sign and Scott Atchison’s ERA. I went to shake my head at Justin Turner batting cleanup. I went to marvel at Desperate Daniel Murphy showing more aggressiveness than discretion in the sixth when he ran and tumbled the Mets out of their last best chance to cobble together a genuine rally as he tried to score from third on a pitch that was undeniably in the dirt but easily accessible to the catcher.
I went so I could stand on the Shea Bridge for the ninth, the Chapmans having recently departed in deference to NJTransit, myself positioned to beat whatever line might develop at the Bullpen Gate exit for the beer boot since the beer boot wouldn’t be handed out until the game was over, which struck us as fairly sound if slightly inconvenient policy. I went so I could stare hard at Andrew Brown, Juan Lagares and Travis d’Arnaud and wonder if, at 4-2, they could keep me standing by a little longer, keep me waiting to pick up my glassware, keep me from making my first available train, keep me in the ballpark for as long as they could before there are suddenly no more records to keep after Sunday…but a foulout, a strikeout and a flyout quashed that fleeting fantasy in no time at all.
No avoiding 20 losses. No hint of the Mets being capable of playing in October or Oktober. Create your own sense of festiveness at Citi Field, however, and you can head for the 7 in a far better mood than your record would indicate.
by Greg Prince on 27 September 2013 3:13 am Would it have disturbed some grand plan to have allowed Dillon Gee to pitch the seventh inning Thursday night? The man threw 193 innings entering his final start of the season after missing almost three months in 2012. He’s been our only starter to take the ball every turn of the rotation from the first week forward. He pulled his stuff together in late May and made himself nothing but reliable the rest of the way. He earned one inning of special consideration after filing away six innings against the Brewers at Empti Field.
Could Terry have given it to him? The Mets trailed mighty Milwaukee, 4-1, on a night that mimicked Dillon’s year. Some trouble early — a four-run second — and then everything was Geerrific. The pitcher was due up fourth in the bottom of the sixth. With 89 pitches behind him, there was no reason he couldn’t pitch the seventh unless the Mets had a serious rally cooking when it was time for Dillon to bat.
Let’s see, there was a runner on first with two out. I guess that qualifies as a serious Met rally. So Terry grabbed the first wad of Silly Putty he could find and pressed hard down on whatever page of The Book says PINCH-HIT FOR THE PITCHER HERE. He sent up Zach Lutz. Lutz grounded a ball up the middle that a competent shortstop might have handled, but Jeff Bianchi didn’t. It was ruled an infield hit. Gee would not get his 200th inning, a milestone he’d said he hoped he could reach after returning from shoulder surgery, but maybe he could still be pitcher of record on the winning side or at least avoid a loss.
No such luck. Eric Young flied out and Dillon was definitively done, a single inning shy of where he strived to be, because the universe couldn’t handle a pitcher being left in to hit with one on and two out down by three in what we’ll charitably label an implications-free game. Even as he paid respectful lip service to his manager’s obeisance to The Book, Gee’s unhappiness was apparent afterwards:
“I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t a little disappointed. I wanted it for sure. It was a big goal. It would have been a nice milestone to hit […] I worked extremely hard to come back and make every start this year. And to fall one inning short is tough.”
Dillon has been the quintessential grinder from April to now. To reward him with one additional inning would have been right and proper, especially in late September. This is when you allow yourself to look away from team-first orientation and toward individual achievement if it’s not too unseemly. This is where, if you’re completely out of the race, you permit EY to run every time on because he’s chasing stolen base glory; where you arrange your rotation to give your Cy Young candidate every chance to win 20; where you do what you can to help maintain the league batting leader’s average (though you could do it more artfully than was done two years ago); where you insert Joe Hietpas behind the plate for the ninth and, if the nepotistic pressure is unbearable, Mike Glavine at first. Hell, let the Greatest Closer of All Time be visited on the mound by an active pitcher and a disabled shortstop and then tell him he might play center field on Sunday as long as we’re on the subject of personal quests and teams that are completely eliminated from championship consideration.
This is where you urge Dillon Gee to swing as best he can to help his own cause in the sixth because either way he’s getting the seventh and his 200th. How bleeping hard is that?
About as hard as hitting the ball and running to first, which was a skill set that abandoned pinch-hitter Josh Satin in the ninth. It was a comedy of presumption that unfolded as Josh lofted a fly ball far down the left field line versus closer Jim Henderson. Was it fair? Was it foul? Josh, whose job is to immediately steam counterclockwise to the nearest available base without pausing to ask questions, appointed himself judge and deemed it foul.
Except it was ruled fair and in play.
The “fair” part was accurate, which became a tad embarrassing for lead-footed Satin to realize since he had already begun to wander away from the plate to clear his head and await the next pitch. When he understood that he swung better than he thought, Josh dash-trudged to first, where he had to stop since he took his sweet time getting going.
But the ball shouldn’t have been “in play,” as it actually cleared the fence and bounced back into the outfield. Instant replay cleared up the umpires’ muddle. They emerged from their comfortably appointed video review lounge to signal “home run”. You know the gesture — it’s where you twirl your index finger in the air as if to indicate you’re not impressed…“whoop-de-doo,” in other words.
Which was how it felt watching Josh Satin score the reluctant run that turned a 4-1 loss into an eventual 4-2 loss.
If the whole business of Gee being prevented from pitching 200 innings and Satin brain-cramping in front of 200 people sounds grim, at least there was this good news: David Wright was hit in the head in the third inning.
Wait, that’s not the good news.
The good news is that he took a pitch off the ear flap from erratic Brewer starter Johnny Hellweg but later swore he felt fine, all potential disasters considered. The pitch wasn’t fired nearly as fast as the one with which Matt Cain beaned him in 2009 and it struck him in a different spot on his noggin. They checked him for concussion and he doesn’t seem to have one. He did jam his thumb when he fell to the ground, but that was also not terrible, reported The Captain, who chalked up the entire episode to “just one of those bad-luck things, you know?”
Yeah, we know, David. We know.
Hellweg didn’t tip his cap in frustrated stupidity as Cain did four years ago and proceeded to demonstrate that he was genuinely as “wild as a March hare,” per Keith Hernandez’s phrase of choice, by hitting Lucas Duda on the leg and walking Mike Baxter directly after plunking Wright. He also issued a wild pitch in the fourth, lending credence to his insistence that his accidental delivery “got to me a little bit because it’s David Wright. That’s their guy.”
Johnny is correct in that the Mets basically have one player, singular, and David Aardsma was even more spot-on when he came very much inside on catcher Jonathan Lucroy to start the eighth inning because some Brewer sooner or later had to take one for his team. It was all handled in full accordance with the section of The Code that declares you send one of ours to the trainer’s room, we send one of yours to first with a slight bruise. The Mets kind of inverted that simple transaction in May when they offered up Jordany Valdespin as a Pirate piñata. Glad to see, with three games remaining in 2013, that they’re finally up to speed on The Code.
Now if only they could put away The Book until spring.
by Greg Prince on 25 September 2013 10:21 pm American League update:
Yankees.
Eliminated.
No playoffs.
Just like us.
Carry on, October.
by Greg Prince on 25 September 2013 8:05 pm You know why you should pay attention to your Metsies 162 times a year, even between 12:35 and 3:26 in the afternoon of the 158th time they play in a lost year like 2013? Because if you do, you might find yourself immersed in the unlikeliest of debates, such as the one my friend and I had via email sometime after 3:30.
HIM: Terry shouldn’t have taken out Dice-K so soon.
ME: I thought it was the right move.
We went back and forth on the merits of leaving in Daisuke Matsuzaka, who had pitched a splendid seven and two-thirds innings but had allowed a hit to open the eighth, versus removing him for Pedro Feliciano with two lefties, Shin-Soo Choo and Joey Votto, due up. Whether I was right in light of Feliciano stranding Derrick Robinson on second or my friend was right because Matsuzaka theoretically earned the chance to get out of the inning suddenly struck me as irrelevant.
Can you believe, I asked, that after all we’ve seen from this team that our big issue today is that we aren’t sure whether Terry Collins left Daisuke Matsuzaka in a game long enough?
Dice-K’s come a long way, baby, and the Mets…well, they won a Matsuzaka start, 1-0, in less than three hours; they took a series against a playoff team; and they finished up a road trip 5-1, bringing them to 9-4 in their last thirteen outings overall. The numbers mean only what you can make them mean by now, but still.
Pay attention and you see things. You see a catcher whose name existed on the farthest periphery of your Mets consciousness four weeks ago throw out an instantly legendary basestealing sensation with a ready-made Hall of Fame moniker. Juan Centeno? Gunning down Billy Hamilton? Who had been 13-for-13 in his core competency since coming up to Cincinnati in early September? Who had swiped a typographically correct 333 bases in his last three minor league campaigns? With Dice-K of the notoriously leisurely pace on the mound?
Yeah that thing happened in the fifth, and it was important in the context of a game in which only one run was scored and it wasn’t scored by Hamilton or any Red. It scored only because Wilfredo Tovar — a high-profile personality compared to Juan Centeno — was kind enough to get hit by Mat Latos, move along to second on a Matsuzaka bunt, take third when Latos threw a pitch that eluded the grasp of Devin Mesoraco (speaking of names that loiter in the back of your baseball awareness) and dash home when Eric Young broke his bat to produce the tricklingest of grounders that snuck into right through a drawn-in Red infield. The Mets went up, 1-0, in the third without anything that could be remotely mistaken for a component of an offensive attack and Matsuzaka, Feliciano and LaTroy Hawkins made it stick.
That thing happened, too. I wasn’t expecting it but it was worth paying attention for when it materialized. Call it the magic of the final weekday afternoon game of the year. Call it the Reds in a slump at the worst possible juncture for them; they’re all but eliminated from winning their division and they’ve fallen dangerously behind in their quest to host the Wild Card game. Call it Dice-K in renaissance mode, making each of us who doubted him, scoffed at him and napped to him very slowly eat our words.
Y’know what? They’re delicious.
73-85 with four to go isn’t so tasty, but it could be worse. This entire Met season has been an exercise in replacement-level baseball, maybe not in the strictest statistical sense of the phrase but in that the Mets have continually replaced guys who’ve replaced guys who’ve replaced guys and they somehow don’t own one of the ten worst records in the sport. Should that ranking hold and the crossroads of free agency and draft position grow muddy in the offseason, so be it. That’s for fretting over from November to February. All we have left to deal with in the near term is late September and the small satisfactions to be derived from winning a little more than we had been in mid-September.
In the last week of the season, when one of your allotted 162 games arrives inside your attention span on a Wednesday afternoon and delivers you a most pleasant victory, you take it, you grab it and you try to hold onto it a little tighter than if it showed up much earlier. You do it because you know damn well you won’t get another opportunity like this for a very long while.
by Greg Prince on 25 September 2013 10:25 am  Most indelible image ever. Vic Black’s my kind of Met. I haven’t felt this kind of simpatico with a September callup reliever since Julio Machado arrived 24 years ago and brushed back Tom Pagnozzi, his very first batter. True, things didn’t work out so well for Machado in the long term, but he knew how to announce his presence with authority…at least until the Venezuelan authorities got hold of him for a crime far worse than coming in high and tight on a Cardinal catcher.
Black hasn’t been quite so bold since arriving from Pittsburgh’s suddenly fertile farm system, but he’s put Cholula on the ball, he’s thrown it by plenty of batters and, as he proved Tuesday night in Cincinnati, he might very well be the Closer of the Future (sorry Bobby Parnell, we have conveniently short memories when it suits our whims).
But that’s not why I’m into Vic Black at the moment. We’ve had our share of Closers of the Future who eventually disappeared like Derek Wallace or receded into a sad state of Heilmanhood. I’m into Vic Black because of what he told reporters following the notching of his first Met save.
“We never liked the Reds.”
Huh? A player admitting disdain for a particular opponent? A veritable five minutes after his promotion? They can do that?
Mind you, Black was smiling when he said it, but he was serious. The “we” in question wasn’t the Mets, but his family. The Texan explained he has an uncle who had a particular distaste for Cincinnati’s baseball enterprise; young Vic simply adopted it and apparently relishes it. Closing out a game that did damage to the Reds’ playoff position was an achievement that rose above clichéd icing on the cake. It was, in a promising touch of Dickeyspeak, “watering that flower of hatred.”
I will not be kissing Vic Black, but I almost want to. Yes! Those guys on the other team…HATE THEM! Not hate to a point where you’re Julio Machado in a rage and going to prison for it, but don’t be blasé about your opponents. Pick a team and make them your rival.
Hey Vic, I still hate the Cubs the way you hate the Reds. I picked up on hating the Cubs when I was six. They were the nasty bear on the back page of the Post my father brought home from the city every night. The Mets were the duck. Together they represented the National League East race, my first chance to choose sides. Of course I chose the duck. The duck was from New York. I was from New York. The duck was lovable. The bear was unlikable. The Mets trailed the Cubs. They passed them.
And I still hate the Cubs from that seminal exposure. I hated them in 1970 when both they and the Mets unsuccessfully chased the Pirates. I hated them in 1973 when — spoiler alert! — they were the last obstacle between us and a second division title. I hated them in 1979 when they were atrocious but we were more so. Oh, how I hated them in 1984 for turning 1969 on its head; I took special pleasure in the Pirates clinching their 2013 playoff berth at Wrigley Field because I ruefully remember the Cubs clinching theirs 29 years ago at empty Three Rivers Stadium, thereby ending a beautiful Met dream.
I relished stomping on the disintegrating Cubs in the summer of 1985, sweeping them four straight at Shea, a series the AV squad capped off by blasting “The Night Chicago Died” loud enough to intrude on Tim McCarver’s postgame report. I hugged and high-fived that much more forcefully because we clinched our 1986 N.L. East title in their ursine faces — take THAT, Chico Walker! I was extra disgusted that we finished second to them instead of Pagnozzi’s Cardinals (about whom I’m still not crazy) in 1989. I laughed hysterically at Brant Brown dropping a fly ball in 1998, grumbled mightily that they won the Wild Card over us days later and Sheadenfreuded in my heart when Steve Bartman showed better defensive form than Moises Alou in 2003.
Nine years ago today I danced a jig in my soul as Victor Diaz took LaTroy Hawkins over the wall at Shea and sunk the hearts of probably 20,000 Cubs fans in my midst. I literally skipped to the 7 train on the afternoon of May 17, 2007, when the Mets scored five in the ninth to stun the Cubs, 6-5. And on June 16, 2013, when the Mets and I were as mopey as we’ve ever been together, Kirk Nieuwenhuis raised Western Civilization to new heights and we as a people experienced a spiritual renaissance that lasted clear to the final week of July.
Yeah, I still have no use for the Phillies and Braves in the same way I have no use for the Cardinals. Those are legacy hatreds, but they feel too recent to fully resonate in my deepest, darkest recesses and the Mets were lousy at keeping up their end of the bargain against them on the field. The Marlins are the Marlins, which speaks a volume or two, but they’re also just the Marlins. The Nationals’ existence is grating, but we’ve never competed for anything but our dignity with them (which we lost two weeks ago). Current era of good Bucco feeling notwithstanding, I haven’t forgotten Pirates fans howling obscenities at Lenny and HoJo in the summer of 1988 — or the idiot who sat behind me in May who incessantly repeated “C’mon Cutch!” for nine miserable innings — but to mine the residue of that scab at this late date seems counterproductive.
And yes, the Yankees. But that’s the other league.
What I guess I’m saying is if I was reincarnated as a hard-throwing youngster just called up to the hopelessly out-of-it Mets and I had my choice of impeding any team’s playoff plans, it would be those of the Cubs. Can’t water that flower enough.
by Greg Prince on 25 September 2013 8:12 am Forty years ago today, the Mets were hosting Montreal, sitting in first place, one half-game ahead of the second-place Pirates in the N.L. East with a record of 79-77…and they were about to post one of the 500 most Amazin’ wins of their first 50 years.
From The Happiest Recap (First Base: 1962-1973)…
***
What mattered most, per the parameters of any pennant race, was how the game ended, and on this Tuesday night, it ended spectacularly well, with Tug McGraw coming on to throw two-and-a-third innings of shutout ball to seal Jerry Koosman’s 2-1 victory over the fast-fading Expos. Sparked by yet another Cleon Jones home run, the Mets won their seventh in a row, stretching their lead over second-place Pittsburgh to a game-and-a-half with five to play. McGraw was doing everything in his power to back up his You Gotta Believe credo. From September 5 to September 25, as the Mets took 15 of 19, McGraw made a dozen appearances. Every one of them was a personal and team success: he saved nine games and won three more. Eight of the outings were at least two innings long.
Tug’s pitching put the usual exclamation point on the Shea festivities, but nothing could have made more of a statement about the magical properties of this Met month than the way the evening began. Hours before Tug bid au revoir to the team from Canada, his most revered teammate was issuing a memorable signoff to a whole other nation.
It was Willie Mays Night, marking the end of a career surpassed by nobody for utter brilliance. Mays began it in 1951 in the same place where the Mets learned to crawl, at the Polo Grounds in Upper Manhattan. Six years and a slew of indelible images later, Willie and his team, the New York Giants, were whisked away to San Francisco. Their departure, along with the Brooklyn Dodgers’, facilitated the birth of the Mets, which was a good thing for the millions wrapped up in total Belief by September of 1973, but old-timers would tell you there was always a little something missing from the New York National League baseball scene as long as the quintessential New York National League baseball superstar was plying his trade on the West Coast.
Mrs. Joan Payson attempted to turn back time and make all right with the world in 1972 when she plied a trade of her own: Charlie Williams and cash to the Giants in exchange for Willie’s homecoming. It was a dramatic success from the Say Hey get-go… though after the euphoria of Willie Mays in a New York uniform settled down, it couldn’t help but be noticed that a season later, the Mets were left with a 42-year-old legend who had never been anything but a legend — but had never been 42 before.
Willie contributed a few timely hits in 1973, but after going 0-for-2 in Montreal on September 9, his batting average sank to a most unMayslike .211, accompanied by six homers, 25 RBIs and a mere 24 runs scored in 66 games played (Willie had scored more than a hundred runs annually from 1954 through 1965). He was hurting physically after cracking two ribs on a metal rail at Jarry Park in pursuit of a foul ball, and mentally, not being the Willie Mays whom fans from coast-to-coast idolized and idealized finally caught up with him. Thus, he announced his retirement at a press conference in Shea’s Diamond Club on September 20.
Phil Pepe covered the SRO event for the Daily News, reminding any readers who were perhaps momentarily dismayed by Mays’s descent into cranky mortality — a couple of times as a Met, he hadn’t shown up when and where expected, making Yogi Berra’s managerial tenure no easier — what Willie represented beyond his 660 home runs, 1,903 runs batted in, 2,062 runs scored, 3,283 base hits and .302 lifetime average. “[It] is not the records or the statistics or the awards that distinguish him,” Pepe wrote. “It is the memory of the way the man played the game, with a zest and a daring, with an excitement that is unmatched.”
“I’ve had a love affair with baseball,” Mays told the media, but acknowledged, “you just can’t play at 42 the way you did at 20.”
The Mets had already scheduled Willie Mays Night before his retirement went official. When they announced their intention to honor him, it was before there was any inkling that it would serve as a sidebar in a sizzling-hot pennant race…or that a pennant race might provide the backdrop to Willie Mays Night. Where No. 24 was concerned, it was unfathomable that he wouldn’t be the main attraction.
Sure enough, a full house of more than 53,000 showed up at Shea to bestow its appreciation on Mays. After a 45-minute tribute in which Willie was showered with all manner of gift and applauded by a veritable Hall of Fame cast of his Giant, Dodger and Yankee contemporaries from the golden age of New York baseball, it was the man of the hour’s turn to speak.
***
What happened next?
You’ll find out when you read The Happiest Recap (First Base: 1962-1973).
Print edition available here.
Kindle version available here.
Personally inscribed copy available here.
Pick up The Happiest Recap and get the whole Amazin’ story of the Mets’ most unbelievable stretch drive ever…and everything else.
by Greg Prince on 24 September 2013 9:40 am You’d have to be made of iron, or perhaps impaired by Iron City, to not feel absolutely overjoyed for Pittsburgh Pirates fans this morning. You know the figures. They’ve been drummed into you ever since they coalesced into a thing: not in the playoffs since 1992; not even a winning record since 1992; not much of anything since 1992.
Check your since-ing at the door (or darrgh!). The Pirates are in the now again. They’re now in the postseason, having had their ticket validated at Wrigley Field Monday night. Heartiest congratulations to those who’ve rooted unrelentingly for a team without receiving any kind of tangible reward for more than two decades. My short-term hope is that Pittsburgh somehow supercedes Cincinnati for home field in the Wild Card game if they can’t win the N.L. Central outright. This Buccaneer breakthrough won’t be nearly as sweet without PNC Park sparkling for, at minimum, one high holy night of nationally viewed baseball.
Not exactly helping to reserve a glimmering October evening along the banks of the Allegheny were the Mets, who spent Monday night 250-some miles west of Pittsburgh, where the mighty Ohio flows practically up to right field. In Cincy, the Mets — conscientious objectors to playoff participation since 2006 — succumbed to the Reds in ten innings, 3-2. The score and the length imply a competitive contest, which I suppose it was. Mostly the Reds found creative ways to not score (15 LOB) before ensuring their own postseason berth in extras, while the Mets dutifully marked time just long enough for their manager to be dissonantly self-congratulatory about it afterwards.
“I’ll tell you one thing you can’t ever say, and that is we don’t play hard. We come out and we play nine innings or ten innings or twelve innings or twenty innings, and we play hard. They care. The guys do the best they can.”
Remember Jerry Manuel’s occasionally infuriating cackles as he tried to explain away losses? Those weird little laughs tended to be taken as a manager finding something funny about his team suffering a defeat. I generally saw them as a nervous tic, a flummoxed skipper’s way of throwing up his hands and rhetorically asking, in essence, whaddayagonnado? I don’t miss it, or Manuel, but Terry Collins’s mantra of how hard his Mets played, how they don’t give up no matter how many innings it takes and how we ought to remember the guys on the other side are good major league players, too, is just as infuriating to listen to after a loss. He repeats these lines constantly as if the Mets are to be commended for not jogging into the dugout and forfeiting by 7:30 (though that would leave more time for wacky wedding picture planning, the one category in which the Mets seem to be blowing away the competition).
The Mets tried to beat a better team Monday night. They couldn’t. They loomed as a spoiler, but wound up serving as a freshener for the Reds’ autumnal intentions. But, no, they didn’t abandon the field in the process. I will not add, “good for them,” as their manager reflexively does, even if it’s probably just his version of the Manuel cackle. Whaddayagonnado? Sandy Alderson is gonna retain Terry Collins for 2014. Here’s hoping a decent guy who’s been a decent manager is granted better material with which to work and we get to hear him elaborate engagingly on how the Mets just won yet another ballgame. Or he can be boring as all get-out in victory. To paraphrase Al Davis, just win already yet, baby.
“We haven’t won and that’s always an issue,” Alderson added to an otherwise glowing non-confirmation of Collins’s return. I’d say it’s a glaring one, along with the Mets’ pre-existing condition when Sandy and Terry arrived three years ago to ever-so-slowly turn this hulking vessel of dismay around. Given the Minayan and Wilponian circumstances under which Alderson and Collins took their respective reins, patience and understanding are reasonable requests to make of a fan base that is only one-third as starved for tangible reward as the Pirates’ was until Monday night. I didn’t expect results in 2011 or 2012 or 2013, thus I haven’t been terribly disappointed when they’ve failed to materialize.
Still, I could do without the outward organizational satisfaction that things are going along swimmingly because everybody’s giving it their best. Their best adds up currently to a 71-85 record, which fits snugly with the preceding seasons’ 77-85 and 74-88. It may not be Terry’s fault. It may not be Sandy’s fault. It may turn out to be well-disguised progress when we are able to view these days with the benefit of hindsight. In the interim, however, I’d ask the fellas to please tone down the “we played hard” stuff, at least until MLB adds a Good-Natured Effort column to the official standings.
by Greg Prince on 23 September 2013 9:50 am Forty years ago today, the Mets were hosting St. Louis, sitting in first place, one game ahead of the second-place Pirates in the N.L. East with a record of 78-77…and they were about to post one of the 500 most Amazin’ wins of their first 50 years.
From The Happiest Recap (First Base: 1962-1973)…
***
Tommie Agee was in the house, but there was nothing ceremonial in his role. Sure he was a Miracle Met, but the franchise he helped make famous wasn’t honoring the 1969 club’s feats this Sunday at Shea.
But they sure seemed to be replicating them.
It may be heresy to suggest what the 1973 Mets were in the midst of attempting to do was tougher, more unlikely and every bit as thrilling as what their Amazin’ predecessors pulled off a quadrennium earlier, but consider that Agee’s Mets, for all their underdog status, had lit their fuse by mid-August and weren’t too bad in the months before that. When the 1969 Mets reached the end of the penultimate week of their schedule, the magic number count was in full effect and a division-clinching was inevitable.
Nothing was inevitable for the 1973 Mets as they prepared to play the second of their two-game set against Agee’s Cardinals. Tommie’s post-Flushing campaign had been anything but miraculous. He didn’t thrive in Houston (where the Mets sent him for instant washout Rich Chiles and minor leaguer Buddy Harris) and he didn’t exactly ignite for St. Louis when the then first-place Redbirds picked him up for the stretch drive in August. But he was still Tommie Agee and this was still Shea Stadium in a pennant race, so it was little wonder that the center fielder who almost single-handedly won a World Series game on this same field in 1969 would come through for his team when they desperately needed a lift. With one out and Ted Sizemore on second in the top of the first, Agee belted a George Stone pitch over the familiar Shea wall to stake starter Mike Thompson to an instant 2-0 lead.
It was a fitting locale for what became the final home run of Tommie Agee’s big league career. The rest of the day, however, would be devoted to a blend of new and old Met heroes coming through for a new Met miracle.
Stone, one of the Mets’ opponents in the 1969 NLCS as a Brave, had provided an unexpected boost to New York fortunes all year long, but the lefty didn’t have it against the Cards. Yet as things continued to click for Yogi Berra’s bunch, a pitcher from whom even less was anticipated in 1973 emerged to dash St. Louis’s hopes. Harry Parker, given up on by the Cardinals a couple of years earlier, became a bullpen stalwart for Berra in his first full season on a major league roster. The righthander took the ball from Yogi in the third and stayed on the mound through the sixth, allowing only two Redbird baserunners.
While Parker pitched, the Mets did a bit of walking at the expense of another former teammate. Rich Folkers, who was part of the eight-player trade that brought Parker to New York, was on for the Cardinals in the third and went wild. He walked Wayne Garrett, Felix Millan and Rusty Staub to start the inning. Folkers wouldn’t be around by its end when a Cleon Jones sacrifice fly cut the Cardinal lead to 2-1. Staub (a .387 batter over the Mets’ final fifteen games) tied the score in the fifth on an RBI single off Folkers’ immediate successor, Orlando Peña.
In the sixth, Mr. September — Garrett — tripled to bring home Bud Harrelson and Ken Boswell, making it Mets 4 Cardinals 2. In the seventh, Jones, having his own magnificent month, homered. Before his finishing kick would be over, Cleon would notch six homers and 14 RBIs in the Mets’ final ten games.
All that was left was for someone to close out the Cardinals in style, and in September 1973, that could only be one person. To the glee of the 51,926 You Gotta Believers on hand, Tug McGraw emerged from of the bullpen buggy to pitch the final three innings.
***
What happened next?
You’ll find out when you read The Happiest Recap (First Base: 1962-1973).
Print edition available here.
Kindle version available here.
Personally inscribed copy available here.
Pick up The Happiest Recap and get the whole Amazin’ story of the Mets’ most unbelievable stretch drive ever…and everything else.
by Jason Fry on 23 September 2013 12:07 am The Mets would be better off continuing to lose — if they finish in the bottom third of teams record-wise, they can sign a free agent who’s received a qualifying offer without surrendering their first-round draft pick. (This is, of course, assuming the team will sign decent free agents this winter, which I’ll believe when I see somebody awkwardly button a jersey over a dress shirt.) Right now the Mets are in a three-way tie for the ninth-worst record with the Phillies and the Blue Jays, with the Padres and Giants within a game futility-wise. It’s gonna be close. We should be hoping for a string of Ls.
No, really — strip away the caveats about ownership and draft picks working out and everything else, and it’s simple: If we stay bad, we can spend money and still keep a high-value draft pick. That will do far more for the long-term interests of the ballclub and our sanity than the rosy afterglow of winning 75 games instead of 73.
I kept reminding myself of this during the afternoon, but it didn’t matter. Because there were the Phillies, before a packed house on their final home date of the year, and there we were poised to sweep them, take the season series by a skimpy 10-9 and move into a tie for third place. I wanted the Mets to win, and I wanted it badly.
The thing is, I’ve never really disliked the Phillies that much. This is mostly because I grew up being tortured by Yankees fans instead of Phillies rooters. (See this post before the World Series From Hell, still our recordholder for comments.) It’s also that for most of my life as a Mets fan, the Phils didn’t matter — as a team they could be relied upon to tune out their manager and fold every summer, and their stadium was hideous but accessible provided you didn’t rile up the surlier denizens, the ones for whom an on-site jail had been built. There wasn’t much point to wasting hate on the Phillies, because they were never really in our way — if we were good they were bad and vice versa.
Things changed with the coming of Jimmy Rollins and Cole Hamels and Chase Utley and Shane Victorino, and the change has been good — franchises a mere 100 miles apart should feel more for each other than a vague shrugging dislike. But I’m still getting used to it, just as the Phils are facing another long stretch of irrelevance. This is a rusted and broken team, locked into crummy long-term contracts — in 2015 the Phils will owe $25 million to Cliff Lee, $25 million to Ryan Howard, $23.5 million to Hamels and $13 million to Jonathan Papelbon. The Mets may be cash-strapped, but they should volunteer to pay Ruben Amaro Jr.’s salary as Phils GM for life.
Anyway, it was sweet denying Lee the win and denying those Phils fans a last hurrah. It was fun watching Carlos Torres battle his way past Rollins and Utley and Chooch Ruiz and other guys whom I haven’t managed to classify as Phillies quite yet. (Where did Roger Bernadina come from?) It was great watching Juan Lagares continue to hit, and give us some hope that the Great Outfield Puzzle might be solvable after all. It was heartening watching Anthony Recker soldier on with a season that’s quietly gone from a debacle to not really so bad. And best of all, it was a blast seeing Wilfredo Tovar — the first No. 70 in Mets history — collecting his first big-league hit with a liner over short that scored two runs, giving the Mets the lead back for keeps. (Though boo to SNY for missing the ritual of the precious ball being tracked down and removed for safekeeping — they apparently covered it entirely with replays.) Tovar would follow with another hit, steal a base, and he looks better than you’d expect when crammed into a little black dress.
Was that all worth a draft pick? In the chill of January I’m sure the answer will be no. But it’s not January — not quite yet. It’s still September, and winning was wonderful.
I’m off to California for a week — see you for Piazza Day. Will leave you in the capable hands of Mr. Prince. May all your recaps be happy … and if not, think of the draft pick.
by Greg Prince on 22 September 2013 12:00 pm Forty years ago today, the Mets were hosting St. Louis, sitting in first place, a half-game ahead of the second-place Pirates in the N.L. East with a record of 77-77…and they were about to post one of the 500 most Amazin’ wins of their first 50 years.
From The Happiest Recap (First Base: 1962-1973)…
***
Wayne Garrett proved himself worthy of regular’s status as September intensified. He was practically a star by the time the Cardinals came to Shea this Saturday, doing his best Brooks Robinson impression on both sides of the ball. While taking care of the defense just fine, the redhead’s bat caught fire. He would hit .422 over the season’s final dozen games and produced the biggest blow of his biggest month in the third inning when he homered with Bud Harrelson on second to give Jon Matlack a 2-0 lead.
Matlack was so appreciative, that he never let it go, tossing a four-hit, nine-strikeout complete game gem to solidify the Mets’ grasp of first place. The 1972 National League Rookie of the Year experienced some sophomore rough patches but hadn’t lost a decision since August 13. He won this one, 2-0, extending the Mets’ winning streak to five and their lead in the East to a full game over the rained-out Pirates.
***
What happened next?
You’ll find out when you read The Happiest Recap (First Base: 1962-1973).
Print edition available here.
Kindle version available here.
Personally inscribed copy available here.
Pick up The Happiest Recap and get the whole Amazin’ story of the Mets’ most unbelievable stretch drive ever…and everything else.
|
|
