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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 12 July 2013 1:02 pm Perhaps I need to be more cynical, but I’m genuinely excited that All-Star Week is upon us and around us. Is it called All-Star Week? I can’t believe it’s not. I assume it’s trademarked and MLB is cashing in on it.
MLB will be cashing in off me in two scoops when I visit FanFest twice. I know what I’m in for in terms of temptation thanks to the dry run of 2008. Even for an All-Star Week that wasn’t properly Mets-themed, that one was pretty exciting to have around.
 How ya like this apple? I’m in for FanFest. I’m in for examining apples should I wander across them. I’m down for most whatever’s televised. Not totally down for the ancillary stuff Sunday and Monday, but I’ll tune in. Didn’t succumb to the “strips” when I finally drew a chance to buy in for SRO access. I can sit at home for less. But you never know.
I’m letting the evanescent controversies wash over me, because a week from now they’ll be stored away. Should David Wright have picked Michael Cuddyer for the Home Run Derby? Of course not…unless he really wanted to. Should Matt Harvey be rested in deference to a blister that just happens to coincide with his opportunity to start the first All-Star Game the Mets have hosted in 49 years? Yes! No! Maybe! Whatever!
It’s all pretty silly, just like the concept that This One Counts or that Everybody Must Play or that Nobody Cares Anymore. The first All-Star Game, in 1933, was tied into the Chicago World’s Fair. Our first All-Star Game, in 1964, was played adjacent to the Flushing World’s Fair. Come see the greatest baseball players on Earth! It’s a cute, quaint concept, like picture telephones and Belgian waffles. They have the former now. Perhaps they continue to have the latter, even if you have to concoct them yourself. And we still have the All-Star Game. It’s cute, quaint and I still care as long as they care enough to dust the middle of the season with stellar powdered sugar. I mean why not? It’s just one night in July, except for us in Metsopotamia it’s a week more or less. It’s baseball all around us, colored orange and blue. It’s pretty sweet.
And what I’m really enjoying about this All-Star business, as a charter member of the Mets Fans Who Like To Read club, is the plethora of feelgood articles it has spawned. Say, you’re a Mets fan who likes to read, aren’t ya? Well, in that case, I recommend the following.
A visit with Ron Hunt, from Anthony McCarron in the News.
Great news regarding first-pitch pitcher Tom Seaver, via Bill Madden in the News.
Darryl Strawberry’s new path, marked by USA Today’s Bob Nightengale.
Willie Mays’s way, courtesy of Christian Red in the News — complete with long overdue street signs.
Johnny Callison’s moment in the Shea sun (and his unlikely role in the 1969 World Series), captured by ESPN’s Steve Wulf.
The forgotten All-Star Game at the Polo Grounds, from after the Mets left but before Shea opened, remembered by the News’s Robert Dominguez.
And if you haven’t picked one up yet, grab a copy of the 2013 All-Star Game Program, chock full of Amazin’ Mets content (including an article on Mets captains through the years in which author Jon Schwartz quotes yours truly among several others).
When you’re done reading, check out the Bergino Baseball Clubhouse for a truly extravagant All-Star Extravaganza Saturday between 11 AM and 4 PM.
by Greg Prince on 11 July 2013 4:18 pm Today is the 40th anniversary of my first appearance in a major league box score. There I am…look closely. See the part where it says the attendance was 18,776? I’m one of the 18,776. Without me, it’s 18,775.
I was just one fan in one seat at Shea Stadium on the afternoon of July 11, 1973. The Mets scored just one run in nine innings on the afternoon of July 11, 1973, or six fewer than did the visiting Houston Astros. The Mets’ record fell to 36-47 for the season. Mine dropped to 0-1 lifetime. We’d each bounce back.
I’m sometimes asked how I remember dates so precisely, a question that still surprises me even though I politely pretend to understand that not everybody’s mind works like mine. Even my mind doesn’t always work like mine. We all need a little Baseball-Reference to help us sometimes. But as for July 11, 1973, of course I remember July 11, 1973. It was my first ballgame, my first Mets game. How do you forget something like that?
The date was communicated to me in the weeks prior to the big event. We from Camp Avnet in Long Beach would be going to the Mets game on Wednesday, July 11. It was the second week of camp. I didn’t really want to go to day camp that summer, yet it was paying dividends immediately.
July 11. I was 10 years old. What else did I have to look forward to besides my first Mets game? The date imprinted itself on my brain before July 11 and stayed there forever after. Simple, to me, how I remembered it.
Save for the Diamond Club, there was little exclusivity to Shea Stadium in 1973. Our tickets were in the Upper Deck, yet otherwise all 18,776 in attendance were in this thing together. Us; the broadcasters; the players on both sides; whoever sold me my Official Yearbook; whomever I couldn’t buy an ice cream from because Camp Avnet kept kosher (even if I didn’t), thus I was confined to the salami box lunch that didn’t keep very well on the bus, as I would learn to my gastric sorrow later that evening.
This was Shea Stadium. This was the Mets game. This was where the action was. This was the thing that was on Channel 9 unless it was only on WHN, but it was always on WHN even if it wasn’t necessarily on Channel 9. This would be in the papers the next day. This was news. I, by extension, was a component of instant history. They couldn’t print 18,776 without me.
Though I could see the action much better on the portable black & white Sony in my room, I loved being a part of the box score, being a part of the crowd, being a part of the game. Jerry Koosman was tiny down there on the field. He threw to a tiny Duffy Dyer. This place was huge. You never saw these seats on TV. There was no camera angle directed toward them. But I was inside the same physical space as my beloved New York Mets. I’d been watching the Mets, listening to the Mets, reading about the Mets since I was six. My identity was the Mets. If you asked me who I was, it wouldn’t be long before I would tell you I was a Mets fan. The only thing I had yet to do was meet the Mets. Or wave to them from a theoretically manageable distance. On July 11, 1973, they welcomed me fully into their world.
I’ve yet to leave it.
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.
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