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ABOUT US
Faith and Fear in Flushing made its debut on Feb. 16, 2005, the brainchild of two longtime friends and lifelong Met fans.
Greg Prince discovered the Mets when he was 6, during the magical summer of 1969. He is a Long Island-based writer, editor and communications consultant. Contact him here.
Jason Fry is a Brooklyn writer whose first memories include his mom leaping up and down cheering for Rusty Staub. Check out his other writing here.
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by Jason Fry on 9 September 2013 1:54 am Joaquin Andujar, a quotable pitcher from a bygone era, famously remarked that his favorite word in English was “you never know.” Which is a good way to break down Sunday’s Mets-Indians finale:
* Daisuke Matsuzaka was good. No really, he was. Though as Scott Kazmir showed, that’s what happens when you’re facing a club that let you go — Matsuzaka was so amped up his curve was hitting 79. Ha ha.
* Justin Turner is a hitting machine. Turner homered, the second time he did so at Whatever It Is Field this series to go with the zero times he’s homered anywhere else this year. He jawed with former Met Joe Smith, giving us the odd spectacle of a beef between a) a guy who specializes in shaving-cream pies and Carly Rae Jepsen and b) a clean-cut submariner renowned as one of the nicer players in the game. It was like watching Archie woofing at Richie Cunningham, and no, the benches didn’t exactly clear. Turner also got tagged in the jaw by Asdrubel Cabrera, who mollified Mets fans by looking sorry though I’m still not sure what he was doing — Turner was out by a large enough margin for Cabrera to run to the dugout, get a Sharpie and write O-U-T on Turner’s uniform. I must confess that I’ve come around on Turner — he has no hidden virtues beyond playing hard and being moderately useful at a few positions, but these are qualities that shouldn’t be snarked at as much as they are.
* Frank Francisco got the win. Activated from the 180-day Malingerer’s List, Frank Frank promptly walked the first guy he faced, and some medium-sized part of me was looking forward to savaging him after his miserable failure. So of course he got the next guy to hit into a double play and wound up with the W. This may prove that the win is the dumbest statistic in a sport with no lack of them, but I was still awfully glad to see that W, even if it did wind up next to the name of the guy no one particularly wanted to return.
Mets win! And in crisp, taut fashion, no less! Like Joaquin said, youneverknow.
by Jason Fry on 7 September 2013 11:24 pm Well.
Your New York Mets, losers of five of six, will send Daisuke Matsuzaka to the hill on Sunday in an effort to prevent the Indians from sweeping, a tactic that summons up visions of the Maginot Line. Anything’s possible — Dice-K may author the Mets’ second no-hitter for all we know — but the Mets’ best hope for tomorrow is that nobody back in New York is bothering to watch.
Which seems all too likely. Beyond a full slate of games from an inferior sport, once again the Mets are limping down the stretch of a busted season, not just a bad team but once again a deeply boring one.
This time, at least, not all of the lack of fireworks is their fault. David Wright, Matt Harvey and Ike Davis are hurt. Zack Wheeler is nearing his innings limit. So are the minor-league arms one might want to see. Wilmer Flores is struggling to adjust to big-league pitchers who have adjusted to him. (One also suspects he’s a little tired.)
Beyond those guys, what drama is left? If you’re eager to track Lucas Duda’s relative progress at first (crappy calls by all-too-human umpires aside) or keep score as Aaron Harang toes the rubber next week, my cap is doffed to you. My reaction is a shrug. Small sample sizes being what they are, I can’t work up much enthusiasm about Matt den Dekker’s success with the bat or Travis d’Arnaud’s lack of it. I’ll note the debuts of Harang, Sean Henn and perhaps Juan Centeno or Francisco Pena for The Holy Books, but if my calendar’s not clear don’t look for me to rearrange my plans.
Barring some unforeseen significance, the Mets have exactly one feel-good story ahead of them: their Closing Day honoring of Mike Piazza. The rest is shaping up to be a September you don’t want to remember: fuss over Ruben Tejada’s return from exile, the activation of Frank Francisco from the 180-Day Malingerers’ List, and the revelation that Harvey will indeed have Tommy John surgery. (Nicknames aside, Roy Halladay ain’t no doctor.)
And I didn’t even mention the possibility that the Mets will once again kowtow to MLB on 9/11.
The Harvey news is a disaster, though by now it’s a familiar one. The rest of the Mets’ late-season woes don’t particularly impact their future one way or another. But they do leave a sour taste, when we need baseball the most.
by Greg Prince on 7 September 2013 9:45 am The first day of Rosh Hashanah includes a sweet little ritual that involves the symbolic casting off of sins from the previous year. In a tradition known as Tashlich, you stroll to the nearest ocean, river or what have you; you recite a prayer; and you toss a few bread crumbs therein. You have, in essence, cast your sins upon the water.
Then, as the second day of the Jewish new year observance comes to a close, you turn on SNY and find that one of the sins that you thought was cast off long ago has somehow washed up on the shores of Lake Erie and it’s coming to get you.
As the sun began its Friday night descent over Cleveland, Scott Kazmir loosened his left arm in advance of facing the visiting Mets, a team he had never pitched for or against yet was woven deep into their psychological tapestry. Somewhere back in biblical times, Kazmir was going to be part of a new dawn over Flushing. He was the Mets’ top draft pick of 2002, regularly striking out more than a batter an inning as he worked his way up to Double-A Binghamton by the summer of 2004. Norfolk loomed as his next pit stop, New York as his can’t-miss ultimate destination.
Instead he was cast off in the name of quickly fixing Victor Zambrano and indulging the fantasy of a playoff chase that had already gotten away. Or maybe Kazmir had a bad attitude and needed to be dispatched ASAP à la Kevin Mitchell, lest he infect the clubhouse with his taste in music or lust for life. As noted, it was long ago. The details blur into myth. The overriding memory is the Mets suddenly, almost impulsively traded a young gun who had yet to fire a single big league bullet for a physically underexamined control issue on the fast track to becoming a damaged good.
Enthusiasm of stray myopic weirdoes notwithstanding, the trade with the Devil Rays was a kick in the shins to an already limping Mets fan base. Whatever paper-sense it made if you were willing to give the acquisition of a “proven veteran hurler” the benefit of the doubt, the whole schmear began to look genuinely bad in the time it took to learn to spell “Bartolome Fortunato”. The trade was announced July 30. Zambrano went out for the season on August 17. Kazmir was promoted to Tampa Bay on August 23 and shut out the Mariners for five innings. The Mets were out of the pennant race, but the Kazmir-for-Zambrano narrative was off and running.
The Mets would atone as best they could, overturning the front office dysfunction of 2004 and christening the New Mets of 2005, who soon grew into the juggernaut Mets of 2006. Kazmir would’ve been mighty handy to deploy in the meaningful games that awaited them in Septembers to be named later, but otherwise the Mets managed to morph into something splendid and briefly unembarrassing. They acted rashly in trading Scott Kazmir. They reacted crisply by crafting a contender immediately thereafter.
So let Kazmir find himself in St. Petersburg — which he did: Scott was twice an A.L. All-Star and once led his league in strikeouts. And let Zambrano pound the zone at Shea — which he didn’t often enough: Victor started 35 games as a Met; exited two of them early due to injury; threw his last pain-wracked Met pitch in May of ’06 at the age of 31; and bounced among five organizations over the next two years en route to trying what was left of his luck in the Mexican League for two more. The important thing was we were going in the right direction at last. If the High Holy Days compel the true believer to ask a Higher Power for forgiveness in advance of clearing the slate for the year ahead, the least mere mortals could do is grant Metropolitan authorities a pass for what had transpired before everything turned out just fine in the end.
And then? Oy vey iz mir for Kazmir, oy gevalt for his former employer.
Those promising mid-’00s Mets and the potential lefty stud they sent away both had their moments, but most of them were over by 2008. Each would be forced to cope with injuries and disappointment. Neither recaptured prominence as the late 2000s became the early 2010s. Kazmir-for-Zambrano faded into a ghost story suitable for telling around the campfires of desolate second halves. Scary to consider, yet no more relevant to the modern age than Ryan-for-Fregosi. Kazmir had bigger things to worry about as he threw for the Sugarland Skeeters in hopes of making himself major league viable again. The Mets? The Mets always have bigger things to worry about.
Friday night, Rosh Hashanah wound down and Scott Kazmir heated up. In his 204th start since his first professional organization decided he wasn’t worth keeping, he gave the Indians’ unlikely playoff hunt a solid boost and Mets fans an antacid flashback. Kazmir pitched for six innings at Progressive Field. The Mets regressed like crazy, striking out twelve times, walking not at all and failing to score until the 29-year-old southpaw was deemed done for the evening by Terry Francona. The whole mishegas disintegrated into an 8-1 loss. All the bad vibes of the trade that was instigated at the behest of some alleged unholy alliance encompassing Jeff Wilpon, Jim Duquette, Rick Peterson and/or Al Leiter came flooding back via rushing rapids.
The relevant calendars may now read 2013 and 5774, respectively, but some ancient sins aren’t so easily cast upon the waters.
In need of a mitzvah? Enjoy Anthony DiComo’s profile of the best team in baseball: Gary, Keith, Ron, Kevin and the entire SNY telecast crew. How is it possible baseball that’s so routinely bad spawns broadcasting that’s so consistently good?
by Greg Prince on 4 September 2013 9:02 pm When Dillon Gee pitches, the Mets maintain an excellent chance to win even though he doesn’t overpower hitters. And when multiple Mets hit home runs when a pitcher of Gee’s caliber pitches…well, look for yourself in case you forgot there was a game Wednesday afternoon.
I didn’t, because I generally don’t, and I enjoyed the resulting 5-2 Met triumph. Between you and me, I enjoy most midweek afternoon baseball games, regardless of outcome. No such thing as a bad day to keep tabs on a ballgame, as a sticker adorning some bumper somewhere must suggest. But if you get effective pitching intertwined with a burst of power hitting, then the enjoyment transcends the conceptual. It’s Kool, it’s the Gang, it’s celebrate good times, come on!
What, you’re not celebrating a 63rd win achieved on the cusp of Erev Rosh Hashanah? Don’t be a stick in the Turner Field mud, bud, and leave that lame “at least football is here” mentality on the bus, Gus. The Mets won today! It was a meaningful game in September!
It means they won’t lose 100 games in 2013!
It’s not quite up there in fashionable statistical marveling alongside the Pirates not losing 81 games, but the Mets, so often assumed inordinately inept, have in fact been ept enough to steer clear of triple digits in their right-hand column 20 consecutive seasons now…and 45 of the last 46!
So we’ve got that going for us. We’ve got 63-75. We’ve got Gee, who reportedly possesses the fifth-lowest ERA in the National League since May 30 (there’s some finely sliced categorization for ya). And in Atlanta, Andrew Brown launched a two-run home run in the very first inning and Lucas Duda blasted a solo homer run in the very third inning. Two swings, three runs!
(Wow! I must’ve picked up an exclamation point bug from @Mets!!)
Now and then when you root for a mostly power-free team, it pays to be reminded how helpful home runs can be to your cause. Gee doesn’t fire with Cholula but that doesn’t mean he can’t get batters out. The Mets’ batters, on the other hand, shy away from hoisin and horseradish alike and don’t put all that much on the ball. That’s not necessarily deathly detrimental, for you can score by not taking pitchers who aren’t Kameron Loe deep, but it’s simply more difficult to pile up runs if you can’t send a ball screaming over an outfield wall more than once in a while.
The Mets temporarily don’t have David Wright available to them. They contractually don’t have Marlon Byrd available to them. Ike Davis, whatever value we place on his core competency versus his ability to unleash it, has taken his bat and gone home for the season. Eric Young can zip around the bases and Daniel Murphy is expert at half-homering, which is to say doubling, but unless you can guarantee optimal alignment of Young’s and Murphy’s intermittent hotnesses in immediate succession, your chances of registering on the scoreboard are immediately reduced.
Hence, you’re happy when Duda feels comfortable enough to swing and connect. You’re gratified that Brown can deliver downtown. And if anybody else wants to chip in more than once in a while, why, we could be in for quite the efficient onslaught.
If not, we’re counting our blessings that we’re not counting to 100 losses.
Remember Monday? Good for you if you can’t, ’cause that was the day Daisuke Matsuzaka helped Freddie Freeman demonstrate the efficacy of the home run (though who in a Mets uniform doesn’t?). It’s hard to look past Dice-K’s deleterious effect on a given game of baseball’s aesthetic appeal, but peer past his most recent effort to stop time in its tracks and try to recall the batting order to which Terry Collins applied his finest penmanship on Labor Day. It went a little something like this:
Young 7
Murphy 36
Satin 2
Brown 10
Lagares 4
Turner 6
Flores 1
Recker 7
Matsuzaka 0
You recognize the names. Do you get the numbers, though? Those were the respective career home run totals chalked up by each batter the Mets started at the moment Collins handed home plate umpire Tim McClelland his lineup card. Go ahead and add ’em up. What do you get?
If your arithmetic is anything like mine, you come up with 73. On Monday, Collins fielded a lineup that had 73 home runs in its collective major league past.
Daniel Murphy had almost half of them. Brown was a distant second. The rest were the rest.
The Mets lost Monday, 13-5 mostly because they didn’t get any starting pitching. Any starting pitching at all, to borrow from that prescient fan Leonard Shecter tracked down in the Polo Grounds toward the end of a 15-5 defeat during the Mets’ first homestand of 1962, and “you could say they woulda won.” Eternally perfect quote notwithstanding, the Mets have gotten plenty of pitching more years than not since 1962. It’s usually the lack of hitting that keeps them from claiming victory.
Perhaps it’s the ability to create lineups out of hitters who haven’t among them pooled their resources to have come up with more than 73 home runs.
Seventy-three home runs on the résumé of a big league lineup. Even if we allow for Matsuzaka’s zero in that department — essentially the only one he’s put up since he got here — that’s eight position players averaging a lifetime total of nine home runs apiece. That’ll happen when you don’t have access to Wright’s 220 and you’ve traded away Byrd’s 103 (now 104) and Davis’s 67 require a cortisone shot and you’re sitting Duda’s 40 (now 41) against lefty Paul Maholm. It’ll also happen when you’re more interested in finding out what you’ve got in a Satin or Lagares and Flores as opposed to relying on what’s left of a well-credentialed Gary Sheffield type…assuming we have one of those on hand…which we don’t.
Nevertheless, 73 home runs. From one batting order. In 2013. How bad is that?
It’s bad, but in Met annals, it’s not the worst. It doesn’t appear to be close to the worst. I can’t tell you definitively because I haven’t combed every starting lineup across 52 seasons to be able to definitively declare a specific one-through-nine an absolute zilch when it comes to power, but I definitely found worse than 73.
I found 1963. The dim stars were aligned late that summer to produce lineups that didn’t contain enough juice to fry an egg. As the Mets’ second season wound down, they were edging away from their inaugural-year philosophy of luring fans to the Polo Grounds with established names. Established names usually meant established numbers. In 1962 and most of 1963 that meant you’d see at least one hitter who’d hit enough home runs to fill a bushel basket or two in his career: Frank Thomas; Gil Hodges; Duke Snider; Charlie Neal; even Casey Stengel’s stylistic nemesis Jimmy Piersall. Piersall raised Ol’ Case’s ire by circling the bases backwards when he belted the 100th home run of his career on June 23, 1963. Lost in the historical fuss over Jimmy’s alleged clown act was he had a hundred home runs in his career — or 27 more than the nine Met men of 9/2/2013 had through 9/1/2013.
But age and injuries and the seedlings of an ultimately necessary youth movement systematically deleted these kinds of sluggers from the Mets’ plans as August was becoming September and the Shea future began bearing down on the 111-loss Polo Grounds present. Suddenly Stengel wasn’t penciling in old favorites but unknown quantities. What was known was that the quantity of home runs they had produced to date were minimal.
August 31, 1963
Joe Christopher 8
Rod Kanehl 5
Ron Hunt 8
Jesse Gonder 7
Jim Hickman 26
Tim Harkness 9
Duke Carmel 3
Al Moran 0
Carl Willey 2
TOTAL 68
There — a lineup less powerful than Monday’s, one that fell to the Braves under Coogan’s Bluff, 4-3. That’s five home runs fewer than Murph & the Miniatures could claim almost exactly a half-century later.
Yet that’s not the worst I found as I continued combing Baseball-Reference. The Mets would hit a few home runs between taking on Milwaukee on Saturday the 31st (which was the occasion of Moran’s only major league dinger) and challenging the Cardinals in St. Louis the following Thursday, yet the resulting net was not kind to that night’s nonet.
September 5, 1963
Ed Kranepool 2
Tim Harkness 12
Ron Hunt 8
Jim Hickman 27
Pumpsie Green 12
Dick Smith 0
Chris Cannizzaro 0
Al Moran 1
Grover Powell 0
TOTAL 62
Look at that: 62 lousy home runs. No wonder those Mets succumbed to the Cards, 9-0. It couldn’t have gotten any worse from a power resource standpoint.
Could it have?
Yes. It could have. It did. Two days later, in Cincinnati.
September 7, 1963
Ed Kranepool 2
Ron Hunt 8
Pumpsie Green 12
Tim Harkness 12
Duke Carmel 4
Joe Hicks 11
Choo Choo Coleman 8
Al Moran 1
Tracy Stallard 0
TOTAL 58
Well, then. There ya go. Casey cobbled together a lineup that in its entirety hit no more home runs to that point than Hank Greenberg had in one season a quarter-century earlier, yet somehow lost to the Reds anyway, 4-2. The key to plunging beneath 60 seemed to be playing Hicks instead of Hickman. Maybe our intrepid manager meant to go with Hickman and his 16 more lifetime home runs, assessed the overall state of his 45-96 Mets heading into this not-so-crucial matchup at Crosley Field and figured, “Close enough.”
For what it’s worth, when the careers of those nine men were over, they totaled 210 home runs in the major leagues, or ten fewer than David Wright has hit since 2004. Kranepool would turn out to be the Murphy of the group, socking 118, a Met record from 1979 until Dave Kingman surpassed it in 1982. Hunt wound up his career in 1974 with 39. Nobody else would accumulate more than 14, which is to say the seven other members of that lineup that didn’t beat Jim Maloney on a long-ago Saturday night in Cincy homered a cumulative five more times…ever. Alas, some youth movements take as much time to blossom as Daisuke Matsuzaka does to throw a single pitch.
Is that 58 home run total that turns 50 this Saturday the least the Mets have sent into battle in any one game in their offensively challenged history? I couldn’t say. I scoured a few scattered lineups from some years when I thought 58 could be taken down from below, but no nine proved nearly as unslugging as that which swung for the fences and completely missed them on 9/7/1963. Honestly, I don’t think I want to know. It’s bad enough that a Mets lineup from just the other day got me this curious.
Benny Ayala didn’t wait long to add a home run to his lifetime stats. Read the powerful story of his first at-bat, as told to David Jordan of Instream Sports here.
by Jason Fry on 4 September 2013 12:13 am A year is a perfect amount of time to forget stuff you think it’s obvious you’ll remember.
Example: We go to LBI every year. For years we returned with lessons learned about what to bring next time, what not to bring, when to depart to avoid traffic and other tips. We never wrote them down, because they were fresh in the mind and surely we’d remember when late August came around again.
Yeah right. After about seven or eight years of making the same mistakes, we finally got home and immediately made a list. Problem solved long after it should have been. Maybe one day we’ll do the same thing for our annual spring party so we stop having too much of this and too little of that, just like last year and the year before that. Ask me in a year if we’ve managed it yet.
This talk of forgetfulness and lassitude brings us to the Mets, because this is about the time of year that two things inevitably spring to mind.
The first always comes out of nowhere — a sudden stab of regret that the last truly memorable game of the year may be behind us, that there is no stirring comeback or sterling pitching performance left on the shrinking schedule. It always pains me to think that the rest of the year may be a mix of plodding wins and dispiriting losses, all of them instantly disposable. The prospect of having the Mets yanked out of my life is bad enough without thinking that there may be little left to make me want them to stick around.
Remind me of this when Zack Wheeler is sitting on the bench and Aaron Harang is doing what even the Mariners got tired of watching Aaron Harang do. Aaron Harang, sweet Jesus. Why not just let Anthony Recker give it another go?
The second thought often comes right on the heels of the first — a grim certainty that the Mets are done, cooked and spent, destined to be speed bumps and roadkill for better teams preparing for October. Certainly that’s what they looked like tonight in Atlanta. Carlos Torres pitched, well, bravely until he ran out of gas and started getting whacked around. (This was immediately after Terry Collins let him bat with two outs and runners on the corners. I think Terry should return, but some of his on-field decisions should go whereever he sent that high-strung, overamped personality we were all warned about when he arrived.)* Daniel Murphy was stronger than dirt as usual, but it wasn’t enough. As for Travis d’Arnaud, he fought former Met Luis Ayala through a lengthy at-bat in the eighth. I was ready to anoint him a Met hero, but he popped out to second, and since the eighth is really the ninth with Craig Kimbrel out there, the rest was an exercise in pointlessness even by the Mets’ current low standards.
It was a better showing than Monday’s disaster, but that’s not much praise. And one wonders how much praise there will be to offer until this strange see-saw of a season is over. Just like one wonders whether I’ll be startled by the same milestones a year from now.
* Unfair on further review. Torres was at 66 pitches, bullpen got clobbered cleaning up Matsuzaka’s latest mess yesterday.
by Greg Prince on 3 September 2013 3:52 am Final Score: Braves 13 Mets 5.
Time of Game: 3 minutes and 41 hours. Experientially, that’s not a typo.
Attendance: Well, I sat my ass on the couch and watched the whole thing, though my mind wandered off into other Met Septembers whenever it was given the proper reminiscent cue.
Monday’s Belabored Day matinee was played on the 41st anniversary of the greatest and most underknown mammoth comeback in the Mets annals. On September 2, 1972, the Mets spotted the Astros an 8-0 lead — what a great cliché that is, as if the team that roars from behind intended to bury itself underneath a daunting deficit — and then scored 11 runs to win. The Mets celebrated the anniversary of their unlikely triumph by now and then stirring thoughts that they weren’t completely out of it against the Braves, managing to trail at various intervals by margins of “only” 2-1, 6-3 and 10-5, with runners on base and batters at the plate and hallucinatory possibilities in the on-deck circle.
They were out of it all day, though. Daisuke Matsuzaka started. They were out of it from there.
This Matsuzaka thing may not work out. Drove in a run in the second; pitched a 1-2-3 third; yet his manager couldn’t wait to pinch-hit for him when the opportunity presented itself in the fourth the day after using three relievers and then arriving in Atlanta with dawn on the horizon for a 1:10 first pitch. So no, this Matsuzaka thing and its 10.95 ERA may not work out.
Daisuke Matsuzaka is this September’s George “Doc” Medich. For all the washed-up, post-glory, WTF? veterans the Mets traditionally collect for the purpose of handing baseballs and inevitably spotting large leads, Medich is the proper precedent here. Doc, who was studying medicine when not going over signs, had been a competent pitcher for various clubs for several years. M. Donald Grant splurged $20,000 of waiver fees to give Joe Torre a closeup look at the potential free agent righty in late September 1977. The Mets were 37 games out of first place as they asked this rented stranger with the familiar name to start the 157th game of their sorriest season in a decade. Medich and the Mets lost in Pittsburgh, 5-2; the Phillies also lost, so the Mets remained 37 back with five to play.
Doc didn’t pitch again in 1977 and signed with Texas in the offseason. Despite getting to try on the Mets’ uniform for seven innings on September 29, Medich turned down the Mets’ contract offer so he could test free agency. Grant’s reaction to this perceived breach of loyalty from his weeklong employee, according to Medich: “Well, it looks like we wasted our $20,000.” Medich’s reaction to Grant: “That was a hell of an attitude to have.”
Object of Dickeyan gratitude Aaron Harang has an excellent chance of becoming the Mets’ second Doc Medich this month, unless Sandy Alderson is forced to swing by the Home Depot parking lot and see if he can find somebody who’ll pitch for hire cheaper. How does a team run low on pitchers in September, the month when you can carry oodles of them? Why, I haven’t seen anything like this since — since 2010, actually, when injuries and whatnot conspired to compel Jerry Manuel to assign the second-to-last start he’d ever manage to reliever Raul Valdes. Valdes acquitted himself quite decently, but how does this keep happening to the Mets after the rosters expand?
Maybe it’s because the Mets aren’t just any major league club. They’re a major league club that entered September with a potentially terrific pitching staff under contract, albeit in various states of unavailability: Harvey, Santana, Mejia, Hefner, Parnell, Francisco, Edgin, Familia, Byrdak…
Hey, Tim Byrdak returned post-September 1! I suppose it was heartwarming, if not quite on the level of John Stearns rehabbing for two years and getting a big hit in what was left of the 1984 pennant race following all those seasons he spent as the hardest charger on the perennially lousy pre-’84 Mets (catching, among many others, Doc Medich). Still, Byrdak, 39, endured anterior capsule surgery, rehabbed his buttocks off and pitched for the Mets again Monday. With so many guys coming and going since he last answered the call from the dugout phone, I’d kind of forgotten how busy Terry Collins kept him in 2011 and the first two-thirds of 2012.
To be honest, I generally overlooked “Byrdak” at those moments I would stop and try to count the bullpen. “Who am I missing…oh, right, Byrdak!” (I also regularly forgot “Beato” in this intermittent exercise.) Terry said something after Tim’s first appearance in 13 months about what a big part of the team he’d been. I guess that was intended as a compliment, even if these were the 77-85 2011 and 74-88 2012 Mets to which he was intrinsic.
The Mets are now harnessing their three most recent lefthanded specialist workhorses in one bullpen: Scott Rice, Byrdak and Pedro Feliciano. Can Eric Gunderson be far off?
Also seeing Met action for the first time in 2013 Monday was Vic Black, who has declared himself all in for the closer’s job (don’t tell Parnell; he seems so fragile). Black looked good for the one batter he faced, so sure, why not, give him a shot. We will pretend that whatever he does well in September is a solid indicator of Vic’s ceiling and write off his shortcomings as proof that you can’t trust what you see in September. Seventeen Septembers ago, the Mets were warming up a new closer, too: Derek Wallace. On a Friday night late in the 1996 season, Derek came on to preserve a 6-4 lead and struck out four Braves in the ninth inning to earn his second save. The first K got away from Todd Hundley and the batter, Terry Pendleton, took first. The next three strikeouts (surrounding a non-RBI double from Fred McGriff) were all handled cleanly.
Derek Wallace went on to save one more game and strike out two more batters that September before injuries prevented him from ousting John Franco from his closer-for-life sinecure. Yet before his brief audition went for naught, I found time to associate a hit song of the day with Wallace. “Machinehead” by Bush played at the Vet while he warmed up the weekend after his four-strikeout inning, moments before Stephanie and I bolted the ballpark so we could make sure we made our train home out of 30th Street Station. “Derek ‘Machinehead’ Wallace,” I thought, and then promptly forgot, as Wallace went the way of Beato and so many other Met relievers who had their moments but hardly their hours. Yet in early July of this year, at one of those extra-inning games the Mets were so expert in contesting versus the Diamondbacks, “Machinehead” came on the PA at Citi Field in the tenth or eleventh and I thought it again: “Derek ‘Machinehead’ Wallace”.
If your potential warmup music is still playing, you’re not necessarily done. Tim Byrdak turns 40 on Halloween. LaTroy Hawkins will be 41 a few days before Christmas. Good ol’ Pedro Feliciano has embraced Perpetuity. Scott Atchison remains a dead ringer for the 1963 version of the late Duke Snider. Thus, I’m thinking Vic Black, 25 and Cholulish, may not be as good a fit for this crew as Derek Wallace, who turned 42 on Sunday.
It’s September. We need pitchers.
Most of my September reminiscences have veered toward the less stellar Septembers in Mets history, probably because this isn’t shaping up as a great one and the Mets have been involved so many of this ilk. But there have been a few fantastic Septembers, and arguably the best of them — if, in fact, people argue such things — is now in milestone territory.
I’ve withheld my participation in most of the “This Date In…” action where 1973 is concerned to this point because until literally the other day, there was no point to it. The 1973 Mets of pre-August 31 were not worth commemorating; the1973 Mets of pre-August 31 were dreadful. But on August 31, 1973, the last-place Mets strung together five consecutive singles in the tenth inning at Busch Stadium to top the Cardinals, 6-4. Combined with the Phillies’ 5-2 loss to the Expos, the win pushed the Mets out of the cellar and into the most competitive fifth place position imaginable. They trailed the division-leading Cards by 5½ games entering September. They trailed three other teams by lesser amounts. They were next-to-last, yet clearly not out of it.
It is no wonder, then, that on Labor Day 1973, which was forty years ago today but on my mind yesterday, I was carrying a radio around with me to listen to the suddenly all-important Mets-Phillies holiday doubleheader. My sister and I were on the boardwalk in Long Beach getting a last blast of carefree afternoons before twelfth and fifth grades, respectively, would conspire to conscript us that Wednesday. Down on the sand, somebody had thought to decorate a bedsheet with a pertinent message: not “YOU GOTTA BELIEVE” but “GOODBYE SUMMER ’73”. On a radio that wasn’t airing Jerry Koosman’s 5-0 shutout, I could hear the group Stories — No. 1 on Billboard and WABC’s Super Hit Survey — lament the doomed romantic fate of “Brother Louie”. Summer’s swan song needed only a bit of tinkering to apply to the standings. The Mets’ hopes had been black as the night, but now their pitching was righter than right.
Unfortunately, Labor Day’s real Swan song faded in the nightcap as callup Craig Swan lost his major league debut and the Mets remained in fifth, 5½ back with four weeks to go. By the time young Swannie was pulled by Yogi, we were off the boardwalk and into the car, whisked to TSS to secure school supplies. And if that didn’t tell a 10-year-old fall was bearing down, nothing could.
GOODBYE SUMMER ’73, perhaps, but it was hello to the September of a baseball lifetime.
by Jason Fry on 2 September 2013 12:34 am 1. When the Mets seem to have the game won but the Nats keep hanging around in the rearview mirror, you’re not being paranoid. They really are closer than they appear.
2. Particularly if it’s happening at Nationals Park.
3. I guess it’s nice that David Wright and Ryan Zimmerman are buds and all, but I hate seeing Zimmerman anywhere near the plate in the late innings. He will find a way to do us in.
4. I hate Jayson Werth no matter what he’s doing. He’s up there with Cody Ross in the Michael Tucker Hall of Shame, reserved for players whom I never want to see in Mets uniforms and will boo and want to fail if such a dreadful thing should ever come to pass.
5. Let’s imagine that Ruben Tejada is in Las Vegas right now having another heart-to-heart talk with Wally Backman. It’s been a strange summer for Ruben, but one he will often speak of during his years as a solid, reliable if not flashy Mets shortstop known above all else for his fearsome work ethic. Whenever given the chance, Tejada will praise Backman, explaining how a summer under Wally’s thumb taught him to appreciate baseball and to take nothing for granted, paving the way for everything that followed.
6. I have no idea if such a drama is actually taking place, but I sure hope it is, because Omar Quintanilla, while undoubtedly a fine person, is not a major-league shortstop. I get that Tejada is being punished. I am willing to accept that Tejada’s punishment is not over yet, and that this might actually be doing him some good. But right now we’re the ones getting punished.
7. Matt den Dekker’s first big-league home run was nice to see, though the pace of his apres-dinger trot was more suited for someone who’d just hit his 500th. (Yeah yeah, get off my lawn.) But I was kinda bummed to not get a look at new Met Vic Black. Why? Beats me. I was excited to see Daniel Herrera once too. Any new Met suggests possibilities, I suppose.
8. Did I mention that I really, really hate Jayson Werth?
by Greg Prince on 1 September 2013 6:21 am More than a few media outlets have let it be known they don’t plan to refer to Washington’s football team as “the Redskins” this fall. And in an unrelated development, it’s highly unlikely that the name “the Washington Nationals” will be mentioned in many baseball stories come October.
Let us enjoy this brief period of tangible Metropolitan achievement wherein we are helping to render the Nationals irrelevant to postseason coverage. Perhaps it’s more an anti-achievement. It’s whatever you want to call the Mets planting themselves between a nominal contender and its long-shot hopes of advancement. The traditional phrase is “spoiler,” though it may be a tad too early to anoint a couple of wins over Washington as devastating to National playoff aspirations, considering a) four weeks remain of this regular season and b) the heretofore hot-as-heck Nats were still pretty far off the pace as our boys arrived in D.C.
You want to know what spoiling looks like? Spoiling is what the 2007 Nationals did to the 2007 Mets in the last week of that besotted September. We get historically hung up on the Marlins and Game 162, but who could overlook Games 156, 157 and 158 when Manny Acta’s Los Natos showed up at Shea and swept the Mets by respective scores of 13-4, 10-9 and 9-6? A division lead of 2½ games with one week to go was reduced to a single length over three increasingly dark nights of the soul.
Now that’s some spoilin’. And though only Ryan Zimmerman remains among the opposition from that series, it did my grudge-bearing heart good to think Nationals fans were processing the Mets’ easy handling of their allegedly outstanding club Saturday with the same sense of disbelief we evinced a half-dozen years ago when their club was undoing our best-laid plans.
In other words, eat it Wily Mo Peña, wherever you are.
The Nationals aren’t dead yet, I suppose, but they ought to be discouraged. To put it in Met terms, they’re having themselves a 1987 kind of 2013. Two steps up, one step back and then another step back. All that talent generating what seems like solid momentum…and then some subpar team playing out its silly string reminds them they really should’ve won more games between April and two weeks ago. The Nationals were supposed to run away with the Eastern Division or at least stand their ground against the Braves. At the moment, the Mets are closer to catching the Nationals than the Nationals are to reaching the Wild Card.
Poor Nationals. Their pitchers allowed the Metsies 17 hits, every one them recorded using the bow from the world’s tiniest violin.
Gosh, I’m enjoying the Mets’ consecutive conquests of the Nationals all out of proportion to our traditional rivalry with them — which last I checked was essentially nonexistent. It probably still is. I think I was stirred to a resentful froth by my friend and perpetually reluctant Washington-area resident Jeff’s pregame report from Nationals Park Friday night. He told me that during BP their version of DiamondVision was airing the MLB Network and that one of MLBN’s talking heads referred to the Nationals having an “easy schedule,” one that explicitly included those powderpuff pushovers the Marlins, the Phillies and, yes, the Mets.
“The Mets were playing catch,” Jeff related, “but some turned around and looked at the board.”
They woke the sleeping giant! Or the groggy Lilliputians! Or the Mets just happen to be firing on most cylinders while the highest-profile National keeps running his team out of innings and into the ground. Friday night Bryce Harper couldn’t be bothered to run out a grounder Daniel Murphy bobbled and it cost them their best chance to tie. Saturday night Harper was either attempting to compensate or just being cocky when he opted to try to take third on right fielder Juan Lagares. Perhaps Harper guessed Lagares isn’t as good in the corner as he is in center. Perhaps Harper doesn’t waste his time on scouting reports. It was a meaningless play, given that the Mets led by about a million runs when young Bryce decided his leadoff double wasn’t sufficient, but oh how satisfying it was to watch him flick off his helmet, turn up his afterburners and be thrown out rather easily, 9-4-5.
Davey Johnson didn’t see Harper’s basepath negligence on Friday, having taken to his office with lightheadedness. Back in the managerial saddle Saturday, he had to watch his nascent superstar make the first out at third base, the sin of McCarver sins, not to mention Dan Haren surrender seven runs in less than three innings. Reflecting on the 11-3 pummeling the first franchise he managed had administered to the last team he’ll manage, he quarter-kidded, “That one put me back in the hospital.”
Davey should live and be well when he hangs them up at season’s end. Too bad for him he’s on course to go out with another 1987.
Not too bad for the Nats. Cue those tiny violins one more time!
The only thing unlovely among the exploits of Lagares, Murphy, Satin, Quintanilla, d’Arnaud, den Dekker, Young and, most thrillingly, Wheeler, was the apparent loss of Ike Davis for the rest of 2013 and perhaps all Met time. Ike strained an oblique as he drove in his 33rd run of the season on August 31. “I was eating some seeds on the bench and I coughed and it felt like someone stabbed me, so I don’t think that’s a good sign,” he recounted, painting a scenario that sounds straight out of 1962.
Ike should live and be well, too. Where he hopefully lives and is well is up for speculation. Davis was barely done clutching his side and coughing on his seeds when all of Metsopotamia wondered aloud if this was his last game as a Met. Wish-fulfillment in action? Our erstwhile First Baseman For The Next Ten Years has surely been playing his best ball of the season, yet it’s added up at this late date to 33 RBIs, a .205 batting average and a .660 OPS. Because he’s a nice person, we’ll miss Ike in September definitely and — pending the non-tendering that could be in his future — forever after. Because every time he attempts to turn a corner he falls down a manhole…hey, Ike, live and be well!
Replacing him in the interim will be mostly Lucas Duda, speaking of perfectly swell fellas who’ve done next to nothing in 2013, and partially Josh Satin, who hits a whole bunch when he plays enough, even if he’s not much with a glove and couldn’t beat Bryce Harper in a foot race if Bryce Harper spent the entire foot race sitting in the dugout pouting. Wilmer Flores might be a logical candidate to try at first, but Terry Collins is rarely a proponent of logic and has thus ruled out Wilmer at first for the time being. Then again, the Mets generally say one thing and do ten others when it comes to their ever-revolving personnel door, so maybe we will see Flores play first base. Or Satin. Or Duda. Or somebody else altogether in 2014 who’s not Davis. Or we will see Davis.
Idle thought on which to chew until ESPN2’s starry, starry start time of 8:05 PM on what is essentially summer’s final Sunday: Wouldn’t it be great if we could get a power-hitting first baseman in his prime and stop stitching together carpet remnants? As uplifting as crimping the style of a division rival with something on the line is when there’s nothing much else for us out there, it would be so much better to have something truly tangible on the line for ourselves.
by Jason Fry on 30 August 2013 11:21 pm For a decade now Emily and Joshua and I have spent a week at the end of the summer on Long Beach Island, the 18-mile strip of beach just north of Atlantic City.
Greg and I traded assignments this week; he got stuck with Wednesday night’s game and the interminable spectacle of whatever it is Daisuke Matsuzaka does between pitches, while I drew tonight’s game and Dillon Gee facing the Nationals.
Emily and I went to dinner, which took much longer than expected because it’s Labor Day weekend and everything here is packed. We watched the early innings unfold via Gameday, frowning at Wilton Ramos’s homer and nodding happily at Ike Davis’s answering shot. By the time we left the restaurant we were in the middle innings; Gee and Jordan Zimmermann were setting hitters down in the time Dice-K uses to contemplate the rhythms of the universe before turning his mental energies to the possibility of throwing a pitch. We headed up the island for our last ice cream of vacation (boo) with Howie painting the word picture of an urgently needed insurance run thanks to Daniel Murphy’s hustle and Ryan Zimmermann’s excess zeal, and returned home to find Gee in trouble and the game in the balance.
This is what I get for marveling at how quickly things have gone I thought as Steve Lombardozzi slapped a homer to right and Scott Rice faced off against Bryce Harper. It seemed obvious to me that Harper would tie the game and the Mets and Nats would play into the 15th or 16th, with some disaster awaiting us as it always seems to in Nationals Park.
But no: Murph bobbled Harper’s grounder. But wait: The Nats star was too busy emoting to watch the play and make it dangerously close. Nifty plays by Omar Quintanilla, Ike Davis and a called strike three from LaTroy Hawkins sent the Nats home, and in regulation to boot.
All very good, but as I gave a somewhat perfunctory fist pump I realized something unhappy: It’s been five years and five LBI vacations since the Mets had anything to play for while my family was giving summer a last hurrah and sendoff. LBI means garbage time, with the Mets playing something fiddle to the beach and dinner and ice cream and bike rides and most everything else. The sole remaining intrigue of games watched here concerns possible waiver-wire deals and September call-ups. (Well, OK, and occasional aces going for MRIs, which proves no news really can be good news.) If we’re here, it means the Mets are done and the next season is starting to come into view.
That’s a pattern I’d love to see broken. The Mets should be leaking out of radios (or iPhones) on the beach and causing craned necks in bars and being debated nervously by like-minded folks across the aisles at breakfast, instead of being reduced to a shared hat or jersey that leads to a sympathetic nod and eye-roll and a grunt about waiting till next year. Vacation is wonderful, but mine could use some more drama — I’ve had quite enough of sitting pennant races out.
Pennant races? We’ve even fought for pennants! Relive Game 6 of the 1999 NLCS with Jason and others, via SNY.
by Greg Prince on 30 August 2013 10:42 am “[A]nd in 1912 I won 26. That’s the year I won 19 straight — I didn’t lose a single game in 1912 until July 8! Actually, I won 20 straight, not 19, but because of the way they scored then I didn’t get credit for one of them. […] Well, at any rate that record has stood up for a long time now. Over fifty years.”
—Rube Marquard to Larry Ritter, The Glory of Their Times (1966)
Late summer, mid-afternoon, Queens. Carlos Torres rents out Harvey Day and keeps up the address nicely. Anthony Recker comes galloping out of the Triple-A shadows to deliver a long home run as well as a diving catch for a foul pop that’s even more impressive — on his 30th birthday, no less. Andrew Brown proves a deep thinker, too. Eric Young has speed to burn the Phillies. And Daniel Murphy…well, Daniel Murphy has gotten Ralph Kiner’s attention.
Ralph Kiner, for those of you just tuning in, played major league baseball for ten years, the last of them 58 years ago. Seven years after a bad back truncated his career at one decade and 369 home runs, he joined a fledgling outfit called the New York Mets as one of its three announcers. For the next 30 or so years, Ralph broadcast nearly every game. Then most of the games. Then some of the games. Nowadays, if you’re lucky, you get Ralph for two, maybe two-and-a-half innings in the middle of an afternoon affair should the Mets’ schedule meet up with his. Sometimes Gary Cohen introduces him as a special analyst. Usually Ralph Kiner needs no introduction whatsoever.
“This is Ralph’s 52nd year of broadcasting Mets games,” his half-page biography in the club’s media guide states without embellishment. Ralph doesn’t show up more than ten times per season, if that many. His cumulative 2013 on-air presence won’t add up to a week’s worth of Kiner’s Korner from when he was full-time. But when he’s there, as he was this late summer mid-afternoon in Queens, you know he’s there. The Mets can beat the Phillies, 11-3, as they did Thursday. The Mets can go in the other direction, as they too often do. For two, maybe two-and-a-half lucky innings, it really doesn’t matter.
For two, maybe two-and-a-half innings, Al Simmons is a bucket hitter again. Philadelphia Athletic left fielder Al Simmons that is. You know: .334 lifetime average, two-time world champion, batting fifth for the American League in the first All-Star Game in 1933 — directly behind Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig. You’ve probably heard of Ruth and Gehrig. If you haven’t heard much of Al Simmons, Ralph will casually tell you that Al Simmons was a bucket hitter. That’s not a good thing in baseball, yet Simmons — Bucketfoot Al — made it work for him.
This came up while Carlos Ruiz stood too far back in the batter’s box Thursday for Ralph’s liking. Ralph hasn’t broadcast too many of Ruiz’s games. But he knows batting stances. He knows swings. He knows greatness. He knows from Al Simmons. He seems amazed that Simmons could collect 2,927 hits hitting the way he did. He’s aghast that Keith Hernandez regularly lobbies for a level swing. It’s a good way to ground out to the shortstop, Ralph says. Swing up, he urges one and all.
Ralph pays attention. He’d been watching and listening to Keith advocate level swings. He’d been watching Murphy slump and was now pleased that Daniel was breaking out of it with a 4-for-5 day. He was less pleased when it was pointed out to him that on this date in 1965, Willie Mays broke his National League record for most home runs in a month — Willie topped Ralph at Shea Stadium in a game Ralph was broadcasting. Ralph had to have him on Kiner’s Korner. Oh, the indignity! Ralph made it mischievously clear then as now that his records were not meant to be broken.
Ralph has told the Willie Mays story before. Ralph has told nearly every story before. Gary Cohen and Ron Darling toss him BP as Torres mows down the Phillies and Ralph gets in his cuts. He doesn’t ground out to short. The Choo Choo Coleman nickname story (short version: Choo Choo had no idea why he was called Choo Choo) gets a little garbled in 2013, but that’s OK. Gary told it the night before. Why does Gary know it so well? Because Ralph lived it in 1962 and made it a staple forever after.
Ralph’s had three times as many birthdays as Anthony Recker and hit more than 50 times as many home runs. Long homer and nice catch notwithstanding, the name Anthony Recker won’t summon stories echoing down the corridors of eternity as the name Choo Choo Coleman has. Choo Choo is an exception anyway. Ralph deals in immortals mostly. Of course he effortlessly invokes Al Simmons. Of course he’s an authority on Willie Mays. Of course he offers high praise for the late Gary Carter. Of course he believes Ted Williams and Joe DiMaggio are too casually overlooked in the 21st century. Ralph saw them. Ralph can tell you about them. Ralph suggests you learn more. “Pick up a book once in a while,” he urges his audience. (I’m gonna assume he means this one.)
It took Ralph Kiner every last ballot of eligibility to be elected to the Hall of Fame by the baseball writers, yet he’s been a Hall of Famer eight years longer than Anthony Recker’s been alive. He’s been a Hall of Famer longer than all but four of his fellow living human beings: Yogi Berra, Sandy Koufax, Monte Irvin and Whitey Ford. Only Irvin and Bobby Doerr are Ralph’s seniors among living Hall of Famers. Among the dozens of certified legends who congregated on the stage in Cooperstown this summer, chances are slight that anybody besides Ralph could have elaborated on Al Simmons’s batting stance.
And I’d bet with great certainty that none of them had ever seen Rube Marquard dance.
Rube Marquard’s name came up during the Mets game Thursday because Max Scherzer was pitching in Detroit. Five days earlier he had defeated Matt Harvey for his 19th win against one loss. Scherzer’s 19-1 record is a rarity. Only a couple of pitchers had crafted one at any juncture of a season in the long history of baseball: Roger Clemens in 2001 and Rube Marquard in 1912. Nobody wants to talk about Clemens, so Ralph talked about Marquard.
Ralph didn’t see Rube pitch for the Giants that year. Even Ralph has his limits. But Ralph mentioned without pretension that he had met Rube — who was born in 1886, recorded 201 victories between 1908 and 1925, was elected to the Hall of Fame in 1971 and lived until 1980 — at an Old Timers Day and its attendant festivities somewhere along the way. Rube Marquard of the 1912 National League champion New York Giants was quite the dancer, Ralph informed us. He and his wife cut a rug presumably as impressive as any catch for which Anthony Recker could dive.
That was a new one.
Gary and Ron were dumbfounded. Ralph was just being Ralph. He has a million of ’em but isn’t the type to advertise it. He could talk about what Daniel Murphy is doing right to be on his way to four hits against the Phillies, but you don’t perk up to Ralph’s infrequent appearances for contemporary chalk talk…though you’re reassured he can always bring that if so requested. You get excited because Ralph says he has a story about Dick/Richie Allen. While John McDonald prepares to hit with two outs in the top of the fifth, Ralph’s about to step into the box, too. He’s going to avoid the bucket. He’s going to swing up, not level. He’s gonna tell the hell out of this story.
But McDonald bunts to Torres, who forces him at first. The third out made, Gary is suddenly thanking Ralph for having joined them in the booth. That’s it? Ralph lodges a good-natured protest. He really wanted to tell the Richie Allen story, he says. “Next time,” Gary promises.
Yes. Next time. Please.
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