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 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.
by Greg Prince on 29 August 2013 11:17 am 1. Daisuke Matsuzaka receives the ball back from Travis d’Arnaud.
2. Daisuke Matsuzaka is thinking.
3. Daisuke Matsuzaka is still thinking.
4. Like most Mets fans, I’m thinking, “When is Daisuke Matsuzaka going to throw the ball?”
5. Daisuke Matsuzaka sure takes his time.
6. Daisuke Matsuzaka’s reputation has preceded him to Citi Field. SNY was prepared Wednesday night with a chart of the pitchers who take the longest time between pitches. FanGraphs calls it “pace,” which in the case of Matsuzaka means you can pace from here to Pretoria — or at least to Astoria — while Matsuzaka thinks between pitches.
7. According to SNY’s chart, only Josh Beckett takes longer than Daisuke Matsuzaka to deliver, although Brooke Buck probably has them both beat in that regard.
8. SNY put a clock on Matsuzaka. And they put Matsuzaka’s face on a clock while the clock ticked away and Matsuzaka didn’t pitch.
9. They didn’t call it the Matsuclocka, but they should have.
10. Earlier in the game, as hard to believe as it is that a nine-inning game that took 3:32 to play had an “earlier,” Howie Rose explained Daisuke Matsuzaka’s famed gyroball: In the time it takes Matsuzaka to throw one pitch, you can leave your seat, buy a gyro, eat it and return to your seat.
11. Howie’s first-inning exasperation provided an opening for Josh Lewin to invoke “tzatziki sauce” for perhaps the first time in major league broadcasting history.
12. Red Barber almost certainly never mentioned tzatziki sauce while sitting in the catbird seat at Ebbets Field, but he did keep an egg timer handy. It was there to remind the Ol’ Redhead that when its three minutes of sand ran out, he should tell his listeners the score of the game.
13. It was a good idea. Red’s listeners might have just been tuning in or not been paying close attention. Or they might have gone off to purchase and consume a gyro while waiting for Daisuke Matsuzaka to deliver his next pitch.
14. From Red Barber’s egg timer to SNY’s Matsuclocka. Who says baseball is timeless?
15. I’ve heard three different pronunciations for gyro and inevitably the person from whom I’m ordering one corrects me, whether I say “Jigh-roh” or “yeer-oh”. A guy I know from Cleveland once insisted it was “yuh-roo,” but he was from Cleveland.
16. Daisuke Matsuzaka came to us from Cleveland’s top farm club. The Indians are in a playoff chase, but they couldn’t use him. The Mets somehow found work for him.
17. Though I wasn’t the least bit excited to have Daisuke Matsuzaka join our ranks, he does hold an incidental place in the history of Faith and Fear in Flushing. Matsuzaka was on the cover of Sports Illustrated’s 2007 baseball preview issue, the same one that asked readers to choose the blogs they’d like linked on SI.com’s team-specific pages. For the Mets, the choices were Metsblog, Mike’s Mets, Metsgeek and Faith and Fear in Flushing.
18. I remember Matsuzaka being on that cover because a few years later I came across the issue in a pile of papers and wondered why I had saved it. “Oh yeah…” I realized as I flipped through the pages.
19. It was quite a thrill to see our name in Sports Illustrated, but perhaps it was a sign that the jinx associated with that magazine has merit. Matsuzaka was in the minors most of 2013, Metsgeek is now defunct, Mike’s Mets is sadly dormant, we lost the poll to Metsblog and I somehow got talked into recapping Matsuzaka’s endless start Wednesday night even though it was Jason’s turn.
20. In exchange for taking this game, Jason has agreed to take my place at my next colonoscopy, which seems like a fair trade.
21. “As long as the Mets’ trainers aren’t involved” was his only condition.
22. The last time SNY employed a clock on a Mets telecast, according to Gary Cohen, it was to measure how fast Jose Reyes ran from first to third. In the time it takes Daisuke Matsuzaka to deliver a pitch, Jose could march from here to Astoria — or even to Pretoria.
23. I wish Jose would jet from Toronto to Flushing. My pal Joe recently visited Rogers Centre and thoughtfully brought me back a Jose Reyes figurine. The team gave them away previously but later made extras available in the team store (a smart thing to do, dear Mets). Figurine Jose made me miss our all-time shortstop all over again. Reyes looks good in Jays blue, but he’d look even better with splashes of orange.
24. If I can’t have Reyes, I’d welcome back Ruben Tejada…to pitch instead of Daisuke Matsuzaka, I mean.
25. I’d consider welcoming back 42-year-old Steve Trachsel, who, despite all reflexive references to his Matsuzakan pace last night, actually learned to get the ball and throw the ball after a while (albeit a good long while).
26. Twelve years ago — or the rough equivalent of eight Daisuke Matsuzaka pitches — I attended a game in which Steve Trachsel two-hit the Pittsburgh Pirates in two hours and twelve minutes. Granted, it was the end of the season and granted, it was against the Pittsburgh Pirates during their Matsuzaka-like schlep across the sub-.500 desert, but it was as impressive as it was unbelievable.
27. That night the Mets clinched their fifth consecutive record of .500 or better. This year the Mets appear destined for their fifth consecutive record below .500. And if the third-place Phillies don’t get around to falling behind them again, the fourth-place Mets will set a dubious franchise record: five consecutive seasons finishing in the same spot in the standings, though if the spot was first, we wouldn’t call it dubious.
28. Five years of losing baseball. Five years of finishing next-to-last. It’s pretty glum in these parts, but I guess we already knew that. You look at a lineup that went around the horn from third to first with Josh Satin, Justin Turner, Wilmer Flores and Ike Davis, you don’t need a whole lot of statistical support.
29. Plus Daisuke Matsuzaka thinking about throwing his next pitch every fifth day.
30. But even the morning after a desultory 6-2 loss to the Phillies, there is hope if you grope for it.
31. All sorts of Mets farm clubs are headed to the playoffs. That’s gotta be worth something down the road.
32. Hard-throwing Vic Black is the new orange-and-blue reliever in waiting, per various reports regarding the Pirate to be named later from the other day. Black may be an unproven quantity, but you need bullpen depth if you have multiple pitcher injuries and a healthy Daisuke Matsuzaka.
33. The Houston Astros were eliminated from playoff contention last night, August 28. So at least we’re not them.
34. The Pittsburgh Pirates, behind the slugging of new right fielder Marlon Byrd, took another step closer to breaking their 21-year winning-record and playoff-appearance drought. We’re not them yet in either sense of the word, but they present provisional proof that nothing dismal lasts forever.
35. Wilmer Flores might someday learn to field a ground ball at second base. Last night was his first time trying in the major leagues. Give him time. We have nothing but time right now. We have ample opportunity to test anybody anywhere — Ike every day at first, Satin getting comfortable at third, maybe even Tejada playing short should he ever be recalled. We have Daisuke Matsuzaka on the mound getting around to throwing 110 pitches in four-and-a-third innings. And we have a month to go.
36. A month to go between each of Daisuke Matsuzaka’s 110 pitches, according to FanGraphs.
37. A suggestion for filling some of that time, offered on the assumption that you treasure outstanding sports announcing…and I assume you do if you’re a Mets fan who immerses yourself in Gary, Keith and Ron on TV and Howie and Josh on the radio.
38. Watch Glickman if you have HBO. It’s a beautifully done documentary on the extraordinary life and career of Marty Glickman, the man who practically invented modern basketball announcing, perfected the art of calling professional football, taught a slew of successors the ins and outs of the booth and, oh by the way, was denied a chance to run in the 1936 Olympics in Hitler’s Berlin not because he wasn’t fast but because he was Jewish.
39. I heard Marty Glickman’s voice growing up — he did the Giants games my father listened to every Sunday on WNEW — but didn’t know until years later that he was a world-class track star on the level of his teammate Jesse Owens. He never let the anti-Semitism he encountered from Nazi-appeasing U.S. Olympic officials slow him down, and his run as a broadcaster went on nearly forever…or about as long as Daisuke Matsuzaka takes between pitches. Glickman broke into the business while still in college before World War II and called his final Jets game, alongside Dave Jennings, more than a half-century later.
40. Marv Albert learned at the hand of Marty Glickman. Howie Rose learned at the hand of Marv Albert; one of the best parts of Howie’s book is Albert relating in the foreword, “I felt a duty to pass along to Howie what had been passed down to me by Glickman…” Earlier this year, Gary Cohen told Greg Hanlon of New York Capital, “I got an AM radio when I was nine years old, and every night it was Marv Albert, to Lindsey, Ralph and Bob.”
41. There is nothing explicitly Metsian in James L. Freedman’s Glickman, but Marty’s vocal DNA can’t help but crackle through the Met airwaves. So if you need an additional reason to watch this wonderful movie, there you go.
42. Meanwhile, Daisuke Matsuzaka continues to think.
43. It looks as if he’s decided to pitch.
44. And 44 seconds into his thoughts, by the Matsuclocka’s reckoning, Matsuzaka delivers…
It’s just off the plate for ball three.
by Greg Prince on 28 August 2013 12:40 am I went to a baseball game Tuesday night and Jonathon Niese broke out.
I didn’t go to see Niese. I never go with the express purpose of seeing Niese. I went for the Gary, Keith & Ron bobblehead. That was the inanimate object I craved, not Niese. Grass grows, paint dries, Niese pitches. It’s not usually very interesting, but not everything can be interesting. You still need grown grass, you still require dry paint and now and then a little Jon Niese goes a long way.
This time around, Jon Niese was dynamic, omnipresent and went everywhere. He threw a complete game shutout at the Phillies, who suddenly don’t travel so well now that they’re as lame as us; he scored the first run (through Tim Teufel’s stop sign, no less, because he’s been around this offense enough to know better than to count on his teammates); he drove in the three put-away runs on a double Kyle Kendrick unsportingly dismissed as “lucky” after surrendering it; and he made me yammer delusionally on the way out about how, sure, we’ll be missing Harvey next year, but if you have Niese pitching like this and Wheeler pitching like he did last night and Gee pitching like he has the entire second half and Mejia pitching like he did before he went down…well, we have no hitting and we’re gonna have to rely on some Matsuzaka-Marcum type at least once every fifth day, but, uh…
It wasn’t worth finishing the thought. Still, any attention diverted from the looming absence of Harvey Days in 2014 (no matter what the Daymeister himself is Tweeting) is a welcome distraction. Jon Niese distracted us for two hours and nineteen minutes with his one-man show. Ideal length for a well-rounded win.
Swell bobblehead, too. Kudos to Lynn Cohen and her Pitch In For A Good Cause efforts. Always a pleasure to run into so many familiar faces at these events — besides the ones that bobble, I mean. I attended the game with my Crane Pool comrade Paul, whose last name I have yet to memorize, but it’s the Mets and it’s the Internet, so nobody’s too much of a stickler for details. Our conversation across the evening encompassed, among others, Charlie Neal, Chris Cannizzaro, Ron Swoboda, Kevin Mitchell, Chris Jones and, inevitably, Matt Harvey, but we didn’t dwell on The Bad News.
I didn’t dwell too long on Citi Field’s inability to have hot dogs ready to serve in a section where vouchers for hot dogs were part of the deal (I was told I could wait 10 minutes after having waited 10 minutes in line) or the lack of diet cola in the next section. I wasn’t put off by the presence of the U.S. Open invading our sovereign territory despite my annual instinctive resentment that other things attract people to Flushing Meadows besides baseball. As we rode the Super Express toward Woodside, a lovely woman from another country asked how the Mets did. I told her they won. She expressed good tidings. I then pretended I knew who any of the tennis guys she mentioned having seen were. It just seemed sporting. More so than Kyle Kendrick, at any rate.
by Greg Prince on 27 August 2013 4:14 pm I remain amazed, even in my 45th season of rooting for one baseball team, how quickly its personnel turns over. On Opening Day, I applauded 25 active players who were introduced in Mets uniforms. Only four of those men have retained that status uninterrupted since: Daniel Murphy, Dillon Gee, LaTroy Hawkins and Scott Rice. Matt Harvey’s on the DL. Marlon Byrd is on his way to Pittsburgh with John Buck. Of the three guys arriving to take their place, two — Robert Carson and Anthony Recker — we’ve already seen in 2013; and one — Matt den Dekker — is brand new to these environs.
They come. They go. They return from injury, from demotion, from paternity leave. Or they don’t come back at all except perhaps as visitors. Byrd and Buck were everyday presences in our lives as fans for close to five months. Now they are literally yesterday’s Mets news. Perhaps Dilson Herrera will be tomorrow’s Mets news. He’s the 19-year-old middle infielder who is the player already identified as half of what we’re getting from the Pirates. There’s also a player to be named later (though “later” is kind of a funny name for a ballplayer). In the meantime, den Dekker and d’Arnaud and Flores and whatever pitchers whose ulnar collateral ligaments aren’t partially tearing will become the objects of our affection for the next 33 games. It’s fandom’s version of life going on.
Byrd and Buck were total strangers before April 1. They became part of the family until this afternoon. I enjoyed Byrd’s power, poise and professionalism. I reveled in Buck’s April. Now they join a team that’s on the verge of finally making the playoffs after a 21-year absence, which is fitting, given that these two players have been around approximately a decade apiece without ever having gotten a sniff of October. Breathe it in, boys. You deserve it.
Maybe we’ll be on the other side of this type of deal again one of these days. Marlon and John will probably be retired by then. Maybe Dilson will still be around.
A better day from the past: October 17, 1999 — relive it with Jason and some other familiar faces, courtesy of SNY.tv
|
|
