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ABOUT US
Faith and Fear in Flushing made its debut on Feb. 16, 2005, the brainchild of two longtime friends and lifelong Met fans.
Greg Prince discovered the Mets when he was 6, during the magical summer of 1969. He is a Long Island-based writer, editor and communications consultant. Contact him here.
Jason Fry is a Brooklyn writer whose first memories include his mom leaping up and down cheering for Rusty Staub. Check out his other writing here.
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by Greg Prince on 11 July 2013 4:02 am “Never once in his eight seasons of cheering for the Mets has he felt so good. For the first time, he doesn’t miss Willie Mays quite so much.”
—Regarding Joseph Ignac, The Year The Mets Lost Last Place, July 8, 1969
You couldn’t miss the chip on Megan Draper’s scantily clad shoulder as she briefly took her marital frustrations out on her penthouse apartment’s unclean white carpet. “You don’t get to have this,” she snarled at her husband, referring to neither her cleaning supplies nor the carpet. “Go sit over there. All you get to do is watch.”
What Don Draper heard in the premiere episode of Mad Men’s fifth season must be what the San Francisco Giants felt Wednesday as they ogled at someone young, attractive and, for the balance of their regret-tinged afternoon, incredibly hot.
 All the Giants got to do was watch. Of course the Giants once had Zack Wheeler, but they relegated themselves to you can look, but you can’t touch territory when they shipped the talent-laden lad, then all of 21, to the Mets in exchange for two months of Carlos Beltran. The Jints had won a World Series the year before and they’d win a World Series the year after, but neither had anything to do with Carlos’s 2011 contributions. Beltran’s gone from San Francisco. Wheeler’s ensconced in New York. The Mets own a better record than the Giants as we speak. The Mets seem to own better starting pitching at the moment. Shoot, the Mets may even have a better starting outfield than the defending world champions.
These are giddy days for small sample sizes, though in the interest of full disclosure, the sample sizes have continued to grow bit by bit. After sweeping San Fran, the Mets are 40-48, but it’s a robust 40-48. Since June 16, they’re 16-9. Since May 27, they’re 23-19. Both marks are the best in the National League East during those spans. For the entirety of 2013, even including their miserable 17-29 start and the lapse that dumped them to 24-39, the Mets have tiptoed into sixth place among Wild Card pretenders. This doesn’t really mean anything in that they’re 9½ behind the Reds for said second postseason slot, but y’know, it wasn’t long ago that the Mets had only the Marlins behind them in the National League. Now they’re better than five whole teams.
Only a deranged soul would read a ton into any of this, but it sure beats being worse than the Cubs, Padres, Brewers, Giants and Marlins. Being one game behind the Phillies in the loss column is of no particular competitive consequence, but it’s undeniably better than a multiple-defeat deficit (and the Mets wish to apologize to Philadelphia for having absentmindedly scheduled Good and Decent People Night for when the Phillies visit Citi Field this month and certainly hope no offense is taken from the obvious snafu). Receiving far better than replacement-level production out of everyday right fielder Marlon Byrd…well, he might wind up being no more than quasi-Beltranian trade bait should this Amazin’ ride run off its rails sooner than later, but let’s just say that where right field is concerned, for the first time in my last several seasons of cheering for the Mets, I don’t miss Carlos Beltran so much.
You know what might really mean something, though? Zack Wheeler, when paired with Matt Harvey; and Harvey, Wheeler and a few other live arms currently in development someday consistently frustrating opposing lineups. That’s day’s not here yet. Wheeler may not be all the way here yet. Zack’s had five starts. The one versus San Francisco — a single run surrendered over seven dominant innings — was easily the best of them to date. It’s a template for what he’s supposed to be. It’s what you theoretically get for giving up Carlos Beltran when you know your star right fielder’s not returning. It’s a marker, if nothing more, in 2013, but it’s also a glimpse for what the future might involve, provided the sample sizes expand and the outbreaks of giddiness turn epidemic.
In the meantime, we get to sit over here and watch. Considering what we’ve been subjected to as Mets fans in this decade, that, not unlike Beltran for Wheeler, looms as potentially not such a bad deal.
by Greg Prince on 10 July 2013 8:45 am Nine innings? Three hours and twenty-three minutes? What a gyp! What kind of Mets game is that in the middle of the night? Surely it was only the opener of a twidawn doubleheader. Surely they had to replay the sixth to the thirteenth from the night before in deference to Bruce Bochy attempting to make an illegal pitching change. Surely there had to be more nocturnal shenanigans than a relatively simple, only moderately schleppy Mets victory.
Apparently we’ll have to settle for a 10-6 win whose inevitable tie was decisively broken in the eighth inning, thus leaving us shy of more records and more weirdness if not more grogginess (West Coast’s still the West Coast). Dillon Gee bulling his way through 108 pitches, Marlon Byrd hatching four runs on one swing, Anthony Recker bucking up at and just in front of the plate, Omar Quintanilla, Andrew Brown and Daniel Murphy all doing what had to be done…sorry, that’s all we got Tuesday night/Wednesday morning. Just a hard-fought victory that was closer than the final score would indicate yet plenty resounding just the same.
The Mets have won 15 of their last 24 games. If they hadn’t lost 39 of their first 63, that would be really exciting. If they weren’t ruggedly outlasting opponents who have been mostly playing like they were for the bulk of April, May and early June, that would be incredibly encouraging. If their manager would leave the litany of bizarre circumstances to interested observers instead of frightfully reciting the circumstances that have failed to daunt his recently indefatigable team, I wouldn’t be left with the nagging feeling that there’s a built-in excuse brewing here for the Mets’ traditional second-half descent. (To be fair, time-lapse exhaustion figures to make for a more valid alibi than, “There was no way we could ever recover after being deprived of Shaun Marcum’s services.”)
Yet all that stated, these are some unexpectedly good times in Metsopotamia. And if anybody understands that good times can emerge at literally any time, it ought to be Mets fans, because we have a team that’s played literally at most every hour of the day or night.
 Good luck with that, Mets fans. You’re familiar, I trust, with games from San Francisco that end at 3:42 AM in New York. Damn thing about Monday night’s/Tuesday morning’s seagull-infested festivities was those sixteen innings didn’t come close to setting the predawn TV and radio standard for endurance. For that, you have to go back 40 years, to May 24, 1973, when the Mets and Dodgers kept New Yorkers up for nineteen innings that didn’t conclude until 4:47 AM Eastern, or 52 minutes later than the only other nineteen-inning game in the Metropolitan annals. Historical recognition of the Mets’ 7-3 triumph from L.A. has been obscured by its more famous nineteen-inning successor that hatched all manner of wildness and wackiness in Atlanta, but May 24-25, 1973, was the moral equivalent of July 4-5, 1985, even if it lacked precipitation, explosives and homering relievers, among other outsize memorable elements.
OK, so we know the Mets have provided baseball entertainment for their hometown viewers until thirteen minutes before five o’clock ante meridiem. That means there’s no more than a Rosemary Woods-style eighteen-minute gap on our perpetual tape near sunrise because we also know that in the year 2000, on March 29 and 30, the Mets played the Cubs in Tokyo in games that started locally at 7:05 PM but were beamed to New York at 5:05 AM. The second of those contests — the good one — climaxed on Benny Agbayani’s eleventh-inning grand slam and ended at precisely 9 AM in favor of the Mets, 5-1. Thus, we also know the Mets have played pretty close to around the clock.
Pretty close? Try closer than you realize. On July 4, 1969, the Pirates hosted the Mets for an Independence Day doubleheader. And y’know what time they started holiday twinbills at Forbes Field? Why, at 10:35 AM. The opener of that affair, won 11-6 by the eventual world champions, took a not-so-crisp (for the era) 2:57 to complete. By the time it was over, the Mets and Bucs were headed for a “normal” afternoon start time for the nightcap. Common experience tells us anything from 12:05 PM on constitutes the norm when it comes to a first pitch.
To review, the Mets have never played ball between 4:47 AM and 5:05 AM Eastern Time. And they’ve never played ball between 9 AM and 10:35 AM Eastern Time. And that’s it. Otherwise, you might say, the Mets have always played ball…or been capable of playing ball always for the folks back home. All day and all of the night, just about. There are 1,440 minutes in a given day. The Mets, at some point in their life, have plied their craft during approximately 1,357 of them. What we’ve witnessed lately may represent aberrant behavior but it’s not completely without precedent. The travel, the delays, the concentration of games that almost routinely wend their way into a sixth hour…all of that certainly adds a layer of novelty and sleepiness to the proceedings, but by playing until literally all hours, the Mets are just doing what the Mets always do.
But unlike last week, they’re winning while doing it, so that’s refreshingly different.
by Jason Fry on 9 July 2013 10:50 am “Neither rain nor snow nor gloom of night stays these couriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds.”
You might know that as the U.S. Postal Service’s motto, though actually it just adorns one of their temple-like buildings here in New York City. (And is a translation of Herodotus, who was talking about messengers in ancient Persia. Anyway.)
But it would sure seem to describe this year’s Mets, who have specialized in rainouts, snowouts, delays and lengthy battles in the dead of night or dolor of hot afternoons.
Certainly it’s a good summation of last night’s game against the Giants, which started after 10 p.m. here in New York and threatened to carry on until dawn. It’s the fourth time this season that the Mets have gone 15 innings or more, and much as I love baseball that’s about enough of that, thank you.
Partially it’s that the Mets’ extra-inning affairs remind you more of Verdun than some ancient clash of daring scouts and speedy armies, with all involved waiting for a telegraph announcing that no exhausted troops remain to be felled. Last night ground on and on, and the oddity was that the Giants first let the Mets back into the game by playing stone-gloved defense, with old friend Andres Torres front and center on the list of offenders, then walled the Mets off from victory with terrific defense. (Tim Lincecum was probably not amused.) The Mets, meanwhile, followed up a merely good Matt Harvey start with smothering bullpen work, with temporary stalwarts Greg Burke and Josh Edgin particularly deserving of praise.
Harvey, by the way, has a blister problem, though since he’s Matt Harvey he has labeled it a trifling issue that should not distract anyone from the fact that he is not doing his job and is deeply dissatisfied with himself for not being perfect. On a team where plenty of players dream of an intrepid ascent up the slopes of Mount Adequate, this is yet another reason to love Matt Harvey. Let’s just hope the blister thing, however it’s labeled, doesn’t lead to brine being used as a dubious home remedy and Harvey being traded to the AL West for a hulking infielder who’s ready for the knacker’s yard.
While we’re on the subject of Harvey, it was somewhat odd (to say the least) to see him back out there in the bottom of the seventh having thrown 107 pitches. (If you were scoring at home, first of all I’m sorry and second of all you already know that Pitch No. 108 was a Hunter Pence triple and Pitch No. 109 was a Brandon Crawford single.)
Terry Collins explained that Harvey’s final start might be skipped or abbreviated to prep him for the All-Star Game (and maybe take care of the blister thing), which would seem to make sense except that there’s already talk of Harvey facing the dreaded Innings Limit, so why not economize pitches wherever possible? We all might regret Harvey’s absence when the Mets are in the thick of the Little Playoffs, AKA the battle for fourth place. More seriously, come September Harvey could be in the hunt for a 20th win and/or a Cy Young award, and it would be a shame to see him frozen in place while others continue the hunt.
(At this point you should imagine Keith Hernandez sighing into the mic and then explaining, with increasing indignation, that in his day pitchers threw 300 pitches a game and then used their throw day to race steam engines through cliffsides.)
On the other hand, Terry also said that if Bobby Parnell hadn’t emerged victorious he probably would have turned to Jordany Valdespin, so perhaps he just had the vapors.
If so he’s excused, because by then we all were in a somewhat altered state. I was torn between worrying that the Mets and Giants would play on through the ages, eventually passing down their tasks to children and foolhardy volunteers, and fearing that both teams would be eaten by seagulls, turning Whatever They’re Calling It Now Park into a morbidly fascinating ossuary.
In the end neither of those things happened, though the game must have set a record for shots from the center-field camera rendered surreal by passing waterbirds. Crawford had tied the game in the seventh and kept the Mets from winning it with a nifty stop of an apparent go-ahead single for Marlon Byrd (who perhaps would have been spared avian gnawing) in the 11th, but ruined his own narrative of pluck and redemption with a misplay that turned out to be fatal.
The Mets have finally won a marathon. Alas, their appointed rounds involve 85 to 90 losses, which doesn’t seem like something to be immortalized in marble. But give it 2,000 years or so, and perhaps historians will be more forgiving.
by Greg Prince on 7 July 2013 9:06 pm Harvey and Hefner and…does anything rhyme with Hefner? Did you ever think we might need something that does?
The Mets have five starters in their rotation, four who are healthy, three who have proven themselves reasonably reliable and two who are extraordinarily effective. One of them is prospective National League All-Star starter Matt Harvey. He’s so hot that his clothes apparently melt right off his anatomy. The other is Jeremy Hefner. He’s the one nobody’s asked to pose nude in a national magazine — as far as we know.
Presumably no relation to the man who made a fortune making those sorts of proposals to buxom young women whose vital measurements aren’t nearly as attractive as Harvey’s have been in the first half of 2013, our Hef has been smoking like Hugh’s jacket since late May. An ERA that weighed in at five runs per nine innings has been reduced by approximately a third over his last nine starts. It’s now 3.39, or utterly presentable in mixed company. Jeremy’s going out there practically every turn, generally lasting six, seven innings and giving up no more than a couple of runs. Those are consistently quality starts, which we may mock as a metric, but when we’re talking about someone whose signature performance in 2012 encompassed seven batters, six hits, one walk and zero outs, consistent quality demands more than perfunctory admiration.
Shaun Marcum is going in for an MRI, so chances are we’ll never see him again. Zack Wheeler dares to be a work in progress. Dillon Gee is pretty close to being in a groove. Harvey and Hefner, however, are absolutely there already. Harvey was born in one. Hefner had to work to find his. As of Sunday in Milwaukee, where he struck out eight Brewers while allowing them merely two hits and one run, it can be confirmed the search is over. We are happy to learn Jeremy is packing talent to go with his heart and we are pleased to be reminded that Dan Warthen occasionally knows what he’s doing.
Which is all great when it adds up to a 2-1 win as it did at Miller Park, but it doesn’t help our Spahn/Sain cause. Harvey and Hefner and…and what? In April, Mets pitching projected as Harvey and Niese and Lord bring us peace. In our long-term dreams, we envision Harvey and Wheeler, each quite the dealer. If Dillon keeps up his end, it could be Harvey, Hefner and Gee, let’s group all three. But right now, it’s Harvey and Hefner and…and I’m still not sure what rhymes with Hefner.
Alternatively, as a Twitter pal suggested, we could just drop the whole Spahn and Sain legerdemain and dub our two top pitchers H&H Bagels in light of all the zeroes Harv & Hef are posting on a scoreboard near us. Think of the local sponsorship opportunities! Think of the Banner Day possibilities! Think of Jeremy Hefner trying to explain to the folks back in Oklahoma what the heck a bagel is! And, no, whatever it is that’s sitting in their grocer’s freezer doesn’t count.
In the meantime, Hef, just continue to schmear the batters like your teammate Harv and you’ll both be lox for the All-Star team next year.
by Greg Prince on 7 July 2013 7:56 am May my blood stop running orange and blue if I can’t deliver unto you an assessment of Shaun Marcum’s pitching, so here goes, albeit borrowed from John Adams as he critiqued a portrait intended to preserve Benjamin Franklin for posterity in 1776:
“It stinks.”
As ever, the soul of tact.
This blogger may be no Botticelli, but the subject of this blog is no Venus. I didn’t see every pitch Marcum threw Saturday night, but I got the gist early and often as he remained tethered to the Miller Park mound clear into the sixth despite his surrendering runs in most every inning possible. When the production he headlined was over and its predictable conclusion reached, it was revealed the righthander is prone to “numbness, tingling and coldness” in his right hand, sensations that grow worse the more he uses it to pitch. The decent human being in me thinks that’s probably a sign he shouldn’t be pitching. The Mets fan in me thinks 1-10 with a 5.29 ERA makes that case quite nicely, too. I’m not sure who would take his place at this point, but if you can’t dig up someone to replicate those numbers for a couple of turns in the rotation, you might want to reconsider your membership in Major League Baseball.
The Brewers cracked the shell of the egg that Marcum laid and I watched as little of it as bloggerly possible. The Mets, you see, had gotten in the way of the Princes’ proper Fourth of July observance, and we couldn’t wait any longer to get in our own makeup game.
 Not actually Shaun Marcum’s ERA. Every Independence Day, Stephanie and I devote a chunk of our holiday to an annual viewing of 1776, the story of how America decided to become America, set as all grand historical sagas should be: to song. I first saw 1776 upon its theatrical release in 1972, reveled in a junior high assembly showing of it prior to the Bicentennial and dropped whatever I was doing whenever it appeared on television thereafter. I introduced my then-fiancée to its considerable charms on July 4, 1991 (a double feature, actually; An Amazin’ Era opened our VHS twinbill). The Mets had a night game in another country, so our afternoon was devoted to the Continental Congress imploring John Adams to sit down and shut up…which of course John Adams was never going to do. From there, as measured by the director’s cut DVD released in 2002, it takes a hardy band of patriots not more than 2:46 and 13 musical numbers — one for every colony, come to think of it — to form a new nation.
A tradition was born. Once in a while on the Third, occasionally on the Fifth, but usually on the Fourth, it was William Daniels as Adams batting leadoff, Howard Da Silva as Franklin moving him along and Ken Howard as Jefferson driving them and the concept that all men are created equal and endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights home. Through the commands of Generals B. Harrelson, J. Torborg, D. Green, B. Valentine, A. Howe, W. Randolph, J. Manuel and T. Collins, our viewing was inviolate. We would work around Mets game as needed/desired, but 1776 always got its due.
Then along came the Mets of 2013, who piddled, twiddled and resolved for five hours, forty-six minutes and fifteen innings this July 4. Their marathon loss to the Diamondbacks ran so long that it bumped 1776 from its projected late-afternoon/early-evening time slot. We just couldn’t get to it on Thursday. Then we couldn’t get to it on Friday. The Third, Fourth and Fifth of July had passed without confirming, per a proposal set forth by Virginia’s Richard Henry Lee, that these united colonies are (and of a right ought to be) free and independent states, that they are absolved from all allegiance to the British Crown, and that all political connection between them and the state of Great Britain is (and ought to be) totally dissolved.
Hence, our tradition got pushed back to the Sixth of July, which is to say the Princes chose freely to immerse themselves in the spirit of 1776 Saturday night and otherwise kept no more than light tabs on the spirit of 7 to 6 emanating from Milwaukee. I observed a little on Fox (what a great network for baseball!), mostly followed the bouncing diagrams on ESPN Gamecast and supplemented where necessary via Twitter. I’ve now seen 1776 23 summers in a row and paid mostly uninterrupted attention to the Mets for 45 consecutive seasons. I generally know how both are going to come out in the end. Our patriots round up enough votes for victory. Our ballplayers come up a run shy in defeat.
I could tell you all you want to know about the movie. As for further details on the game, Faith and Fear in Flushing abstains. Courteously.
by Jason Fry on 6 July 2013 12:53 am I’m sure there have been worse showcases for baseball. I’m sure I’ve even seen a few of them. But it’s hard to think of any at the moment.
My God, that was a horrible, horrible, horrible baseball game inflicted on blameless fans and viewers by the Mets and the Brewers. I gave up trying to keep track of the atrocities sometime around the third inning, throwing up my hands and letting the game degenerate into a blur of Brewers being thrown out by 10 feet, kicking balls into the outfield, flopping in the general vicinity of balls they should have had, and otherwise commencing to play stupid. The Mets had their own problems early on, but they seemed to right the ship, while the Brewers kept scooping up buckets of seawater and pouring them into the boat. It was like a “Benny Hill” sketch with all the roles played by Jar Jar Binks, a travesty so profound that eventually even Keith was overwhelmed — his metronomic sighs lapsed and then went silent, leaving him to stammer out a meek protest every so often about the decline of everything. When Carlos Gomez got himself thrown out at third with Milwaukee down four in the seventh, I just shook my head sadly. All that was missing was Dallas Green staring gape-mouthed at the field, so shocked that he momentarily couldn’t remember how to be outraged.
Amid the mess, some quick notes on Mets who managed to attract attention for positive reasons.
Ike Davis: Shalom y’all, he’s back. (Hey, Ike greeted everybody in the clubhouse with “shalom.” Just using the material I’m given.) My first glimpse of the prodigal son was disappointing — he still has that crazy hitch and 53 million other moving parts to his swing, making you wonder how he ever hit in the first place. But then I asked myself what, exactly, I thought I’d see — Ike was still going to look like Ike, not Pete Rose or Jerome Walton or Jeff Bagwell. Guys don’t retool a lifetime’s worth of batting over a couple of weeks wandering in the desert, no matter what commandments Wally Backman has to offer. He looks more patient, and that’s not nothing — his at-bats got better as the night went on. At his worst earlier this year, you felt like Ike was out before he stepped in for the first pitch. For a night at least, he wasn’t being baited into launching a long swing at junk he could only tap to an infielder, and it showed in the box score. Progress? Ask again in a day, and then in a week. But for a night? Sure. Progress.
Zack Wheeler: Reason 19,346 that it’s great to be a power pitcher is that you can survive on nights you don’t look particularly good. Wheeler was wild early, with his fastball leaping out of the strike zone in every conceivable direction, like a dog who’s been in the house all day straining at the leash. Fortunately for Wheeler, he was also throwing 96, meaning most of those misdirected fastballs went for balls or walks instead of shots up the gap. Like Ike, the most encouraging thing was that he got better, culminating in his 1-2 punchout of Juan Francisco as the tying run in the bottom of the fifth. The last pitch Wheeler threw all night was also the best pitch he threw all night. Can he build on that? I don’t know, particularly with the Mets braintrust giving him wildly contradictory advice nearly every day. (Don’t throw all fastballs! Throw more fastballs! You’re tipping your pitches! Quit worrying about tipping your pitches!) Tune in five days from now and we’ll begin to find out.
Kirk Nieuwenhuis: It’s probably just a hot streak, but the mulleted one has a pretty good thing going between his late-inning heroics against Arizona and his four-hit, two-walk, five-RBI performance tonight. Granted, massive hurler Johnny Hellweg and his successors were handing out walks to everybody who asked, but as with Ike, the most promising sign for Nieuwenhuis is that he’s doing fewer bad things — namely, getting himself out without making pitchers break much of a sweat.
But you know what? Enough. We won and they all count — even the ones where the entire other team plays like someone’s spazzy nephew mashing all the buttons on the controller at once.
And now that we’ve won, let us never speak of this one again.
by Jason Fry on 4 July 2013 8:41 pm A very long time ago, the Mets and Braves played 19 innings on the 4th of July in Atlanta. Keith Hernandez hit for the cycle, while Davey Johnson and Darryl Strawberry got ejected. There were rain delays, key blows by Ray Knight and Howard Johnson, pitching performances brave and determined and desperate by the likes of Doug Sisk and Roger McDowell and Tom Gorman and finally Ron Darling. There were fireworks that went off at 4 a.m., terrifying some residents of Georgia into thinking Sherman had returned.
And most indelibly, at least for me, there was utterly anonymous Braves middle reliever Rick Camp, who batted with the Braves down to their last out and behind 11-10 in the 18th. Earlier this week I met a fellow journalist for beers and it took us only a few minutes to go from checkpointing that we were both Mets fans to laughing incredulously at what Camp had done 28 years before. Facing Gorman, Camp swung and connected and the next sight was left fielder Danny Heep clasping his hands on his cap in a spasm of involuntary horror. The teams would play on, the Mets would score five in the top of the 19th, the Braves would claw back with two and damned if Camp didn’t come again as the tying run against an understandably disoriented-looking Darling.
Mercifully, the second time Camp struck out.
Greg, just out of college, watched and listened to it from a patchwork of Long Island locales. I, halfway through high school, watched in increasing disbelief from my parents’ couch in St. Petersburg, Fla., then wrote up a somewhat-crazed account of the game and sent it off to the local paper — the first time, now that I think of it, that I was ever moved to chronicle a Mets game and what it had been like to be simultaneously apart from it and trapped inside it.
The game has become legend, and deservedly so. But it’s a legend that still echoes through team history, perhaps never more oddly or eerily than today.
Today’s game was only 15 innings, was thankfully rain-delay-free (we’d had enough of those this week) and did not feature fireworks that will be mistaken for an enemy bombardment. And it wound up with the wrong team winning by a mere 5-4. But it had strangeness aplenty for all that — and lots of little brief-lived lessons in pluck and bad luck and inevitability.
First of all, can the Geneva Conventions be extended to ban Cody Ross from baseball? I’m sure fans of the cities where Ross has plied his trade like him just fine, but I’ve never been able to stand him — I haven’t loathed an opposing player this much since Michael Tucker. Wherein lies a terrible inevitability: Tucker, to my outrage, eventually became a Met. And Jim Leyritz also wore orange and blue, though mercifully only in spring training. I am grimly certain this means that Ross will arrive in a deadline deal one year, probably in conjunction with Greg Dobbs, the only guy I hate with vaguely comparable intensity. When that happens, it really might kill me, for I cannot abide Cody Ross’s smashed-up porcine features, his showboatery or (of course) his habit of beating us with apparent effortlessness. He’s an excrescence, an abomination, an ex-Marlin. In a couple of hours, when a chunk of blue ice falls out of the sky and smashes your car’s back window, you’ll know Arizona’s charter flight was overhead and Ross was using the lav.
Games like today’s leave you wondering if you’re watching a really taut duel or just gaping at crummy teams flailing spastically at each other, until you’re too tired to make up your mind. So both starters were good and then both bullpens were good, at least until the opposing managers found the unlucky relievers who didn’t have it. For them, it was Heath Bell and Chaz Roe; for us, it was David Aardsma, the currently dreadful [edit: and now pink-slipped] Brandon Lyon and finally Scott Rice.
But there was heroism too! Start with Anthony Recker, who walked to the plate in the 13th as the Mets’ apparent final out. Recker was 0 for 5 but had acquitted himself well in a couple of at-bats, lacking only the desired results. When he connected off Bell to keep the Mets alive, I flashed back to the game Recker lost against Florida with one of the worst innings I’ve ever seen for a catcher. If that had been Recker’s final appearance in a Mets uniform, suffice it to say there wouldn’t have been a rush to the barricades. Two months later, Recker’s not exactly lighting the NL East on fire, but he’s shown you enough to make you think he should get a chance to play more, or at least more than John Buck. Patience is a virtue!
Fairness then compels me to admit that the same gentle reminder should apply to Kirk Nieuwenhuis, whose strike-zone judgment has been pre-Vegas Ikean but who has shown a knack for pinch-hitting and late-inning homers — an inning after Recker kept the Mets alive, Nieuwenhuis hit a tracer that just topped the orange wall and somehow rattled through the bars of the fencing of the Party City deck. Amazing, though the amaze was brief-lived — Nieuwenhuis was the final out of the game, an anecdote that will give him something to discuss with Rick Camp should they ever wind up bending elbows together.
Plus there was a generous heaping of weirdness throughout: the misadventures of Arizona’s Tony Campana, whose speed is as startling as his ability to do dumb things on the bases; Gerardo Parra’s bunt double that just happened without being anyone’s fault; and Parra then short-circuiting the D-backs’ 13th by getting called out for running inside the line on his way to first. Even with six extra innings, that’s a whole lot of never-seen-that-before.
To say nothing of Keith Hernandez’s slow-motion meltdown as the game dragged on, punctuated by doleful sighs and Gary Cohen jabbing well-placed needle after well-placed needle into his broadcast partner. We were about an inning away from Keith collapsing into Dadaist poetry, which would have been entertaining provided he’d stayed away from thoughts on gender roles and kitchens, which is always a clear and present danger.
Oh, and then there were the kids who’d left the stadium in the eighth to run the bases, unaware that the game was in fact barely past the halfway mark. Presumably a good number of them were hauled off by exhausted parents before getting to run; I assume the rest grew up, went to college and started families, now and again stopping to wonder if anyone ever won that eternal and slightly interminable Mets game they attended once upon a time.
If so, those kids are luckier than we are. When Nieuwenhuis grounded out and the Mets had lost in a cool 1,776 346 minutes, I found myself surprisingly disappointed — and I realized something. It’s Independence Day, but being a Mets fan is a life sentence.
by Greg Prince on 4 July 2013 4:43 am Things that still suck, in case you thought there’d been a change:
• The Mets
• The MTA
• Cody Ross
• Fireworks Night
The Mets and their 5-3 loss in which Matt Harvey couldn’t rescue them and they couldn’t rescue Matt Harvey speaks for itself (and I believe the word it spoke was “feh”). Wednesday was yet another night of waiting, though unlike Monday and Tuesday, there was nothing worth waiting for.
Cody Ross…no further elaboration needed; I felt terrible watching Gerardo Parra bounce his head off the warning track Monday night but am not sure I wouldn’t treat Cody Ross in the same situation like a sizable plurality treated Jason Bay under similar circumstances, which is to say deplorably. So there goes my shot at the B’Nai Brith Humanitarian of the Year Award.
The MTA is on my The Out-of-Towners-style list of those people Jack Lemmon as George Kellerman planned to bring to justice. Their transgressions were…
a) not having a Super Express available after the game for those of us who preferred leaving Mets-Willets Point at 12:30 AM instead of sticking around for displays of colored lights;
b) having what appeared to be a local that would get me to Woodside in ample time for the 12:50 AM whoosh through the station without stopping;
c) the Long Island Rail Road not noticing a 7 pulling in upstairs at Woodside and holding the 12:50 to, oh, 12:52 when the next train where I, among many others, was going wasn’t coming until 2:04 AM. Nice coordination, fellas.
Oh, and Fireworks Night can blow itself. Or blow itself up. I have nothing against fireworks per se and if the Mets want to treat loyal Mets fans to fireworks after a Mets game — ideally after one that wasn’t delayed for nearly two hours at its start by omnipresent rain — that’s fine. My problem with Fireworks Night, in brief, is that it apparently attracts tens of thousands of people who wouldn’t ordinarily attend Mets games, people whose interest in the outcome of the Mets game is minimal, people who do a very aggressive wave in the third inning of Harvey Night, people who sit behind me who don’t shut up for a second and start vociferously rooting out of the blue for Cody Ross to hit one out “so we can have some action” and then Cody Ross hits one out. It was swell to have Citi Field full. It was lousy to have Citi Field full of what a dear friend aptly refers to as bananaheads.
How much did Fireworks Night 2013 suck? So much that I even briefly found myself regretting having attended Fireworks Night thirteen years earlier, for if the memory of Piazza capping off the ten-run inning didn’t burn so brightly, I might not have fallen for, “Well, they came back once before…” and made the 12:50.
And with that Metstivus litany of all the ways what should have been a splendid evening disappointed me, we reach the halfway point of this mostly miserable season on a pace for 70 wins, which sadly sounds much better than I would have expected. Besides the revelation of Matt Harvey and the plethora of weird-ass games, the big story of the first half to me is how replaceable almost everybody on this roster has been. I used to love Ruben Tejada. Now I all but forget about Ruben Tejada. My “WE LIKE IKE” t-shirt just makes me sad. If I could trade it in on a “WE DON’T NECESSARILY DISLIKE IKE, BUT, UH…” model, I would. And for all my fleeting fondness for the recent crop of retreads, I can already feel their magic wearing off. Sure, I’ll take Josh Satin (the Bronx and Staten Island) as well as EY and Brownie and whatever Omar Quintanilla’s cute nickname might be, but I can see throwing them overboard at the first sign of stagnation. If not for Harvey’s majesty and our sturdy standard-bearer Wright, I might not qualify for the fan loyalty program that would entitle me to those hypothetical earned fireworks nights.
Who am I kidding? They’ll stop blowing stuff up and Citi Field will revert back to being the province of me, Joe (who invited me Wednesday night when he lucked into primo seats and had no inkling of how much everything would suck), the dozen or so like-minded individuals I keep running into, some camp group in matching shirts, a cadre of overserved underage LIRR commuters who’ve been pounding Bud Lights since Massapequa and the occasional condescending Cardinals fan. Yeah, I’ll be back in the second half — the second half of this season and the second half of my first century. That is if my train’s on time and they start to play by nine.
by Greg Prince on 3 July 2013 10:47 am  Casey and Joan get together again for a little Mets baseball. Mets fans wait. It’s what we do. We waited through four barren seasons to have National League baseball in the first place, only to wait seven seasons stuck in ninth or tenth place. The Jobian patience mandated by the minute progress of the earliest of those years may best be summed up by Jimmy Breslin’s story regarding No. 1 Mets fan Joan Whitney Payson. Mrs. Payson owned the club, sure, but that was merely a technicality of immense wealth and exquisite taste. OK, questionable taste, as it turned out once her investment showed more liabilities than assets, but she was never a boardroom kind of gal when it came to baseball. In 1966, she told the Associated Press that she was happy to be known as “just a fan”.
Just a fan who annually summered in Europe, but never a fan who could handle being completely disconnected from her team, ocean or not. Thus, in her Mets’ inaugural year of existence, pre-Internet 1962, she left instructions back in New York that she wished to be informed of how the Mets were coming along. The No. 1 fan got her wish, of course…and of course all the news wired her way was dreadful. It became a bit too much for so dedicated a Mets fan, so she wired back from the Greek isles new instructions:
PLEASE TELL US ONLY WHEN METS WIN
“That,” Mrs. Payson told Mr. Breslin, “was about the last word I heard from America.”
The waiting paid off for Joan Payson and the Mets fans who lined up behind her in 1969. “When we won first place,” she told the AP on the eve of the World Series, “I just sat there and cried. I’m still numb about the rest.”
The rest of the Mets story has encompassed plenty more waiting and not a little numbness from time to time. The franchise that famously gave us losses of 23, 24 and 25 innings in its first thirteen seasons won a West Coast contest at 4:47 AM Eastern Daylight in 1973, recorded a last out in Atlanta a dozen years later at 3:55 AM and has tried our stamina, never mind our patience, in a thousand little ways on our endless journey in their unpredictable company.
The Mets have ensnared us in waiting game after waiting game throughout 2013 in particular. The snow delays. The rain delays. The run delays. The innings upon innings when much happens but nothing occurs. The deluge of frustration. The drizzle of elation. And still more waiting. But at least it’s not surprising in that it’s not unprecedented.
One night after it took five hours and thirteen minutes to fall behind, stay within reach of, reluctantly tie, again fall behind and ultimately surpass the Arizona Diamondbacks, the New York Mets were at it again. You wouldn’t have thought so at first. Things were actually zooming right along Tuesday evening. Phenomenal Patrick Corbin and dogged Jeremy Hefner pitched quickly and effectively, which would indicate a brisk night’s work for all concerned, except for two considerations:
1) When a Met is immersed in a pitchers duel, usually the lack of scoring foretells the arrival of more zero-infested innings than the Citi Field scoreboard is capable of displaying at once;
2) If the Mets are involved, the game will probably stop for a spell in deference to inclement climate concerns.
There was hope for a breakthrough, however, on the first count. The Diamondbacks had pulled even at 1-1 in the top of the seventh, but the Mets were poised to make definitive things happen after Lou Monte roused Lazy Mary from her nightly nap. Josh Satin had driven home the go-ahead run and Andrew Brown walked to load the bases. Anthony Recker, who had homered earlier, was up. Nobody was out. It was all on the table for Hefner and the Mets to mar Corbin’s heretofore immaculate mark, cruise to a big inning and forge a situation as close to resolution as one could one hope for in this sodden season.
Ah, but the second count…the weather. It had been raining for quite a while. The umpires ignored it, the way umpires ignore baserunners sliding under fielders’ tags. Yet the skies at last demanded their attention. Here came the tarp. Here came an indeterminate pause in the action. Here came a flashback to a gloomy Sunday afternoon in July of 1987 — the Mets and Reds, tied at five in the bottom of the eleventh. Bill Almon is on second, Keith Hernandez is on first, Darryl Strawberry works Bill Scherrer to three-and-two…
And the umpires decided it was too rainy to play. Fifty-eight minutes went by before the heavy showers let up and the field could be groomed. Straw returned to the batter’s box and received ball four to put three Mets on. Pete Rose sent in a new pitcher, Bill Landrum, to face Kevin McReynolds with the bases loaded. Big Mac, never one who cared to wait around Shea Stadium or any ballpark, lined Landrum’s fourth pitch to center to create Almon joy at home plate. Mets won, 6-5, in what the box score says took 3:26 but what the rain pushed to 4:24.
“OMG I was there!!!”
Thus emanated a Tweet from a dry corner of Citi Field in response to my own Twittered communiqué of how this soggy interlude on July 2, 2013, was similar to that rain-soaked interlude of July 19, 1987. No surprise it came from @Coopz22. No surprise the Coop, as my friend Taryn likes to be known, was at a Mets game that required waiting. She was at this one. She was at the one 26 Julys before. She was at the one 22 or so hours before as well.
I knew about that last one. I was there with her. I’m often there with her, albeit for no more than maybe two innings at a time physically or 140 characters spiritually. Coop and I are always at games together. Monday night, however, was the only second time in seven seasons of knowing each other that we’d actually sat through an entire game in tandem. The last time was in July of 2009, when the Citi Field home run apple was so new and little-used that it couldn’t handle two Mets dingers in three at-bats and failed to rise punctually for the second of them.
 Casey, perhaps pleading for just one run. We didn’t have that problem Monday. The Mets did not test the home run apple, only our ability to endure. And that we could do. We’re Mets fans. If Mrs. Payson could do it in the days of Casey Stengel, Coop and I could surely honor that legacy. Fittingly, the seats Coop invited me to share are in the outfield section that slope down from a large Nikon-sponsored image of the Ol’ Perfesser. Every time I got up to use the restroom, Casey greeted me from the concourse wall, index finger in the air, prepared to make a salient point that the listener knew was eventually coming, albeit embedded in a torrent of Stengelese…or perhaps he was simply suggesting that it would sure be nice if his Metsies could score one run already yet.
It wasn’t my first encounter with our first manager Monday. Coop asked me to meet her outside the Left Field gate, which felt as far from where I usually enter as Coogan’s Bluff is from Citi Field. Since I arrived early, I carefully inspected this surprisingly unfamiliar side of the ballpark’s exterior. I was shocked to discover a Polo Grounds plaque had been installed amid the Fanwalk bricks last year, a plaque I took it upon myself to polish a bit with a paper towel. I was delighted that the skipper had earned a lamppost banner alongside Jay Payton. I was puzzled as to why the man who invented the Mets as we know and love them was paired with — though I liked him fine — a relatively unremarkable outfielder who came along several decades later, until I decided “Payton” is pretty close to “Payson”. That’s probably not the real reason they hang together outside left field, but I’ll take it.
“If a nice lady like that calls and asks that you help her,” Casey Stengel reasoned upon his hiring in October of 1961, “what can you do?”
 Stengel and Payson…almost. The Mets for most of Monday night were a team Joan and Casey would have recognized from when they first went into business with one another. I had the distinct feeling Coop and I were sitting in for them as nine innings proved not nearly enough. Shaun Marcum provided Arizona with an early lead and reportedly looked uncomfortable in the process. Mets runner upon Mets runner remained stubbornly on base. John Buck showed himself more Throneberry than Strawberry when he failed to take second on what should have been a passed ball that would have put Josh Satin on third except Buck needed to stay on first. If he had, maybe the Mets would have won in nine.
But then they wouldn’t have made us wait. And if they hadn’t made us wait, they wouldn’t be the Mets, would they?
So Joan and Casey, version 2.0, stuck it out. What else were we going to do? Not stick it out? If 650 people were going to stay in the stands as Monday became Tuesday — and I believe my attendance estimate to be generous — it was going to be 648 plus us, me barely managing to conjure the slightest optimism that I wasn’t about to extend my personal record onsite losing streak to ten, Coop owning her essential Coopness as only she could. Coop has authored a Merriam-Webster’s worth of essential Mets aphorisms, most of which she sprinkles casually into conversation, some of which are suitable for repeating in polite company. One of my favorites involves something or other being done with a rusty nail to those who would deprive the Mets of victory. The most on the nose addresses Post Traumatic Mets Disorder, an affliction with which we all deal. Oodles of innings and hours devoted to the Mets and Diamondbacks daring each other to win a game in which nobody deserves to prevail only contributes to this Coopyrighted condition.
Extended extra innings can bring out the punchiness in some, the irritability in others. Coop stays Coop, just more deeply. I learned a handful of biographical details between blunders and strandings. I learned Two Boots’ meatball sliders are well worth their $8.75 price tag. I learned you couldn’t pay Coop enough to become a Yankees fan for even a day, though she amended her stance that maybe you could, provided she could turn around and use her newfound wealth to buy a significant share of the Mets.
The rest of us should be so lucky.
When the real/first Mrs. Payson wasn’t on European holiday, she generally took her box seat at Shea wired to a transistor radio. “Only between innings,” the AP reported, “does the plug leave her ear. That’s when Mrs. Payson gives her attention to the fans around her and discusses the action on the field.” In that spirit, the Coop is never far from Twitter, which keeps her in touch with her thousand-plus acolytes, most notably her statistically nimble hubby Ed, who I suppose was part Charles Shipman Payson, part Arthur Friedman in our reincarnation scenario Monday night. It was via Ed via Coop that I learned I showed up a few times on SNY when its cameras followed a fly ball in our direction, which will happen when the seats well outnumber the fans. It was Ed who noted after the eleventh that Kirk Gibson and twelfth innings are a bad mix where all of us are concerned. Not that Ed suffers from PTMD, too.
It was via Citi Field acoustics (which is to say you can hear every conversation in an empty ballpark late at night) that I learned from one kid in the next section that Buck was traded here from Toronto for “R.A. Dickey, Josh Lewin and somebody else”. Also nearby: that young fellow who lives to grab foul balls, home runs and attention — he magically appeared a few rows behind where Cody Ross’s bat-flipping disgrace landed. Moments like that are what Coop’s rusty nail is for…and exactly the type of the episode that exacerbates PTMD. At least the guy who wore an Arizona Diamondbacks wrestler’s mask all night seemed happy. You’d think an Arizona Diamondbacks wrestler’s mask wearer would’ve been more demonstrative in celebrating the taking of a 4-3 lead in the top of the thirteenth, maybe furtively slipping a foreign object out of his trunks or bonking somebody with a chair when the umps weren’t looking, but no, he just politely applauded Cody Ross.
Which in itself is pretty offensive.
Well, as you know, the Mets flipped the figurative bat and any handy rusty nails right back up our old Marlin nemesis and whoever the hell is in first place with him in the National League West (where apparently they’re not too picky about such positioning). It took some more waiting in the bottom of the thirteenth: for Satin’s one-out double; for Gibson’s hilarious intentional walk of Buck, whose bat isn’t worth a dime; for 650 people — give or take the guy in the Arizona Diamondbacks wrestler’s mask — standing and applauding the pinch-hitting debut of Matt Harvey; for Terry Collins to sap the moment of its momentum let alone its optimal utility by ordering Harvey, who can hit, to bunt; for Harvey to bunt successfully, as there is nothing that man can’t do; for another intentional walk; and, finally, for Andrew Brown to turn out the lights on all of Gibson’s brilliant tactics.
Mets 5 Diamondbacks 4. My losing streak was over. I was no longer the Susan Lucci of Citi Field. Shed of the pain of channeling Erica Kane, Coop and I hugged and/or high-fived everyone in our section. It didn’t take long.
 Harkness! Who goes deep there? Mets 5 Diamondbacks 4. Similar circumstances, Ed confirmed, as surrounded Tim Harkness overcoming the Cubs with a grand slam just over 50 years ago at the Polo Grounds. Chicago had taken a lead in the top of the fourteenth. Harkness took it back and then some, homering the Mets home, 8-6. The next regular-season occasion on which the Mets overcame a lead in thirteenth inning or later to win in walkoff fashion? Monday night. The Mets have been around long enough to have things happen 50 years apart. Maybe not the same thing, but close enough things. Collins had to resort to Harvey to pinch-hit in the thirteenth because he had used every position player? Stengel on June 26, 1963, explained why Harkness needed to be a hero when he did:
“We just about had to end it there because I’d run out of men.”
Mets 5 Diamondbacks 4. Same score, as Ed certainly immediately recognized, by which Gibson’s Dodgers beat our Mets 25 years ago on a night better known for what Mike Scioscia did to Doc Gooden and the rest of us sans rusty nail. In the course of what Josh Lewin (who, it turns out, was never traded with R.A. Dickey and somebody else to Toronto for John Buck) referred to as “five hours and thirteen mind-numbing minutes,” Coop and I revisited that playoff night at Shea from 1988. Coop traces much PTMD to Game Four. I countered that Scioscia didn’t beat the Mets in that series — the Mets beat the Mets in that series. Either way, October 9, 1988, was a very long game and Coop was there.
Of course she was. Or as Mrs. Payson said in 1969, “I’m with the Mets forever.”
The Coop was back Tuesday night, with she and Ed plowing through the rain delay, apprising their followers of what was going on inside Caesars Club. They found seats once the umpires decided another crowd of 650 strong had waited long enough. The grounds crew rolled up the tarp and revealed Recker still waiting to take advantage of the bases that had remained loaded through the raindrops. Brad Ziegler — who hit Justin Turner with the sacks full of Mets in my last thirteen-inning win, a shade over two years ago — was on for Corbin. Anthony singled. The Mets were up, 3-1, and if you’ll excuse the unfamiliar expression, the rout was on. Coop and Ed and their 648 companions would be released shortly thereafter on their own recognizance with a 9-1 triumph that took 2:24 in the box score and more than four hours in reality.
You wait, sometimes good things happen. More often the Mets happen. And they haven’t even visited the West Coast yet.
Follow the Coop @Coopz22 on Twitter and read her always entertaining take on the Mets and a couple of other teams at A Gal For All Seasons. Follow Ed @Studi_Metsimus and immerse yourself in his historical perspective on all things Amazin’ at Studious Metsimus. Boy, were these two Mets fans made for each other.
Photo of Casey Stengel from Citi Field concourse courtesy of Sharon Chapman.
by Jason Fry on 2 July 2013 1:15 am First reaction: We endured more than we won. And man were the other guys dopey.
If Miguel Montero doesn’t drop the ball at home plate on Josh Satin’s single with one out in the ninth, Marlon Byrd is out by seven or eight feet and we probably lose in regulation and mutter a lot. Up one in the 13th, after Satin’s leadoff double, why on earth did Kirk Gibson put the winning run on base, particularly when the winning run was John Buck, who’s been basically useless since the beginning of May and had just managed to get himself thrown out at second as the winning run +1, i.e. the run no one in the stadium cared about? Terry Collins, determined to beat Gibson to the bottom of the managerial ladder, then blithely discarded one of the Mets’ two remaining outs by having Matt Harvey bunt, but won anyway when Andrew Brown lined a high fastball up the gap. We’ll call this one Collins 0, Gibson -1, and agree that Brown spoke for all of baseball history when he told Kevin Burkhardt the game was “nerve-wracking and annoying” and he was just glad it’s over. I can’t possibly top that.
Second reaction: What the hell, we won. They all count. Oh, and pigface Cody Ross flipping your bat on your later-revealed-as-meaningless home run? YOU LOST SO HAHAHAHA.
P.S. Josh Satin is awesome. Go away, Ike. Oh, wait. Stay away, Ike.
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