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ABOUT US
Faith and Fear in Flushing made its debut on Feb. 16, 2005, the brainchild of two longtime friends and lifelong Met fans.
Greg Prince discovered the Mets when he was 6, during the magical summer of 1969. He is a Long Island-based writer, editor and communications consultant. Contact him here.
Jason Fry is a Brooklyn writer whose first memories include his mom leaping up and down cheering for Rusty Staub. Check out his other writing here.
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by Jason Fry on 3 June 2013 12:07 am The funny thing is I’m not sure I actually know what Greg Dobbs looks like.
Ask me to picture Chase Utley or Robinson Cano or Brian McCann or Ryan Zimmermann and I can instantly conjure a mental picture for you. Dobbs? I’ve got nothing except a general impression of squatness.
But maybe that’s appropriate. Just as a tornado or a tidal wave or an earthquake looks different depending on your vantage point, Dobbs looks different depending on what havoc he’s wreaking on the Mets. The constant is that he’s wreaking it.
LaTroy Hawkins’ pitch to Dobbs in the bottom of the eighth — the one he blasted down the right-field line for a three-run homer — was the final one I heard today. I snapped my earphones out of my phone, shut down AtBat and declared the finale of a thoroughly misbegotten Mets-Marlins series over a few minutes before it was actually so. The whole game had been a mess for me anyway — my battery was streaking towards empty and the radio feed kept cutting out, much like the Mets’ hitting, pitching and fielding. And when the Mets were at the plate in the middle innings, even a brief interruption could mean quite a few at-bats disappearing: Between the sixth and the seventh inning the Mets saw a grand total of 11 pitches. They then went down 1-2-3 on 10 pitches in the eighth. Way to make ’em work, fellas.
The rest? Matt Harvey was bad — incredibly and then resignedly. So was Scott Rice. And so was Hawkins. All three of those players have been somewhere between pretty useful and amazing this year, so it’s impossible to get too worked up about bad outings that happened to coincide. But that streak of frantic outmaking is harder to shrug off. And so are the galling misplays by Rick Ankiel and Lucas Duda.
Sigh. It feels like that four-game sweep of the Yankees happened around 140 B.C., doesn’t it?
by Greg Prince on 1 June 2013 8:37 pm Tomorrow we’ll start
Matt Harvey
Nothing could be better than Matt Harvey
He’s the one
Just thinkin’ about
Matt Harvey
Clears away the Collin and the feelin’
That we’re done
When were stuck with McHugh
And Super 2 excuses
I imagine an arm
That’s not so useless
Tomorrow we’ll start
Matt Harvey
Hotter than Cholula
Says the gun
Matt Harvey! Matt Harvey!
I love ya, Matt Harvey!
You’re only a day away!
We were squished by the Fish
And Kid Fernandez…
Couldn’t even be cheered
By Keith Hernandez…
Yet tomorrow we’ll start
Matt Harvey
Harvey Day is always marvy
Score a run!
Matt Harvey! Matt Harvey!
I love ya, Matt Harvey!
You’re only a day away!
Matt Harvey! Matt Harvey!
We love ya, Matt Harvey!
Why can’t you
Pitch every day?!
by Jason Fry on 1 June 2013 12:00 pm Howdy, Jupiter Pirates fans!
This is a page welcoming you to Faith and Fear in Flushing, which Jason writes with Greg Prince. It’s a mildly insane blog dedicated to the daily adventures and misadventures of the New York Mets. If that sounds good to you, glad to have you aboard — click here to go to the home page. But first, you should know that this blog sometimes contains bad language — Greg and I get cranky when the Mets lose, which happens way too often.
If this doesn’t sound like where you want to be, click here and you’ll return to the Jupiter Pirates page.
by Greg Prince on 1 June 2013 2:06 am A one-night pass was issued in advance. When the Mets sweep the Yankees, you cannot in all good faith complain about the next loss, even if it is to the frigging Marlins at their frigging boondoggle aquarium in front of a few dozen exotic fish and maybe a few dozen more curious onlookers. Shaun Marcum threw six fine innings but couldn’t quite make it seven. Jacob Turner, of course, turned into the second coming of Mordecai “Three Finger” Brown, except with a fully armed right hand. It made the five-game winning streak a vague memory and reminded us that the 2013 Mets are a precarious proposition on a night-to-night basis, no matter the opponent…but especially when the opponent is the homestanding Miami Marlins, who beat almost nobody ever, but us alarmingly frequently.
I’ll admit that after the Mets had blazed their way from desolation to the fringe of prospective mediocrity, I was kind of perusing the standings with a purpose, scoping out the schedule strategically and wondering about Wild Cards. I might put that project on indefinite hold for now. Too bad the dream of not being terrible has been doused again, but, hey, one-night pass, right? The Mets were going to suck sooner or later. Would you rather it have been Friday night in dim, dull and dreadful fashion against one of the few teams that are palpably worse than they are or have had it happen anytime between Monday and Thursday?
I do know this: We have however many games left this year and they will matter to me as Mets games do. They’ll matter to you within the parameters of your sanity and other plans. I mention this fact — the kind you’ll find on the nose of your face it’s so plain — because during what passes for Subway Series hype these days, I kept hearing and reading a common condescending refrain: this is the Mets’ last chance to be relevant in 2013.
Excuse me? Relevant to who? I’m a Mets fan. The Mets are relevant. Period. Their games may not wind up relevant to a pennant race, which is unfortunate. They may not wind up drawing many eyeballs to their network or fannies to their seats as the months wear on, but I’ll be watching and I’ll (likely) be going and they will be intrinsic to my pursuit of happiness. That’s what being a fan is about. Your team may not captivate you at every given moment, but they’re always relevant to you. I know they are to me.
To those media members who don’t or won’t try to understand how that works, I’m sorry you can’t figure out how to create a decent column or segment out of them. I’m also sorry you lean on the crutch of “this will be the highlight of the Mets’ season” when the Subway Series rolls around, and that’s before you know how it comes out. Listen, I enjoyed the hell — the hell — out of the Mets’ four-game sweep of the Yankees, but at the risk of taking your lazy nonsense too literally, use your heads, for crissake. You don’t know what the highlight of any season is going to be. And you don’t know how it’s going to be processed individually, let alone collectively.
One year ago tonight, you didn’t know that the Mets of 2012 were going to put up a highlight for the ages. I was pretty sure we got our highlight for the season when Johan Santana pitched the First No-Hitter in New York Mets History, but you know what? There were other highlights. There were lowlights, too. I probably haven’t gone a day without happily thinking about that no-hitter (regardless of Terry Collins’s endless buzzkill mea culpas) yet the season went on, y’know? There was R.A. Dickey knuckling his way to 20 wins and a Cy Young. There was Ike Davis occasionally blasting out of his doldrums. There was Scott Hairston doing things from time to time that suggested his might be a valuable bat to keep around. There were moments and innings and games and series that expanded the Mets fan experience for the better…and plenty that contracted it for the worse. The story didn’t just stop. When you’re paying attention, it never does.
The Mets play 162 games in a regulation season. Since we’ve been doing this blog, they’ve never won fewer than 70 games in any one of them. Do you have any idea how many times some above-average win has been referred to as “the best” or “the biggest” win of a given year? And do you have any idea how quickly they are brushed aside by the next one? Some stand the test of time and others need a nudge to nostalgize, but great wins do keep coming. Sometimes they don’t come in bunches, but they do arrive. They’re enchanting as they happen and they’re beautiful in hindsight, but none is ever the last win standing.
In 2004, the Mets swept the Yankees three games at Shea Stadium for the first time. It was such a welcome accomplishment that it felt like history stopped. It didn’t, though. We didn’t sit around dwelling on the heroics of Ty Wigginton and Richard Hidalgo for the next three months. The season continued. There were wins that, at the instant they went final, topped the victories over the Yankees from early July because the Subway Series had subtly receded into the past and this latest win, whatever win it was, was what just happened. And the win that just happened had the added value of obscuring the losses that had more recently mounted. (This was 2004; there were a lot of losses in the second half.)
This doesn’t go just for Subway Series and dismal seasons. Think back to September and October of 1999. Was there a more dramatic win down the stretch than the night the Mets singled Greg Maddux into a corner before John Olerud rocked his world via grand slam? No, nothing could top that…not for another couple of nights until Robin Ventura delivered the must-win run in the eleventh inning of the must-win game versus the Pirates…and not again for two more days when Melvin Mora scored on the wild pitch in the bottom of the ninth to force a one-game playoff. And nothing could top that. Except maybe for Al Leiter’s two-hitter in that one-game playoff. Or besting Randy Johnson in the opener of the actual playoffs. Or Todd Pratt winning that round of those playoffs. Or Olerud keeping the Mets alive in the next round. Or Ventura ending the fifteenth inning the night after that.
Baseball’s genius and generosity is that it’s always giving us more. In 1999, there was every reason for a Mets fan to pay attention to all of it. In 2004 and 2012 and (probably) 2013, your reason is that you are a Mets fan and you shouldn’t want to miss the irreplaceable good thing even if it takes some stoic sorting among the myriad bad things to find it and treasure it. In the end, listless losses in Miami notwithstanding, the effort tends to be worth it.
by Greg Prince on 31 May 2013 2:27 am After more than a year-and-a-half in dental denial that those random pains in my mouth were nothing that couldn’t be artfully ignored, I submitted to inevitable oral surgery this past Tuesday. Though I wouldn’t recommend it for a lark, I put myself in the hands of capable, caring professionals who made it nothing like the horror show I anticipated. They couldn’t tell from my instinctive clenching and whimpering, but I actually handled the procedure pretty well. Still, recovery has been a drag: soreness, ice packs, disgusting salt-water rinses, antibiotics, painkillers, a persistent sinus headache, very cautious chewing on one side and a bonus overnight bout of nausea for my trouble. As Keith Hernandez might suggest (albeit between licks of a Tootsie Pop), let this be a lesson to you kids out there: go find yourself a dentist you like and make regular visits — you can’t mollycoddle your choppers.
In my post-extraction fog, everything that smacks of routine has come to annoy me, including sitting down in front of the television at 7 PM to watch the same old Mets take on the same old opponent night after night after night for…what was it now? Four nights? “Are we playing the Yankees again?” I asked in exasperation.
Then I snapped out of my fog and smiled as much of a smile as 30 teeth hampered by one slightly puffy cheek could generate. Why, yes, we were playing the Yankees again. And because we put ourselves in the hands of capable, caring professionals, it was nothing like the horror show I anticipated. You couldn’t tell from my instinctive clenching and whimpering, but the Mets handled the procedure exceedingly well.
Thus, for those of you who might have thought trying to sweep an entire home-and-home Subway Series from the Yankees would be like pulling teeth, I can assure you it’s not.
It was a lark…a lark in our park and a lark in their park.
We took a bite out of the Yankees and it was delicious, however we managed to chomp down on them. The Mets’ preferred method was by nearly flawless starting pitching, which in 2013 tends to mean Matt Harvey and several days of dreaming about Matt Harvey, yet this week it has meant everybody, encompassing the most unlikely of characters. Like Shaun Marcum, who kicked off this five-game winning streak by mowing down our former rivals, the Braves. Like Jon Niese, who didn’t let his non-serious shoulder issue stop him from elbowing aside the Yankees on Ted Nugent Appreciation Night. Like Harvey, who only counts as unlikely here because he had company in pitching brilliantly. Like Jeremy Hefner, to whom Mets wins are no longer chronically allergic.
And, finally, like erstwhile bulldog Dillon Gee who used to stand and fight until Terry Collins had to drag him off the mound, but this season had this unnerving habit of chasing the bullpen cart into traffic by his third time through the opposition order. That Gee had gone so wayward that we were about to find himself lost from the rotation. Oh, but Thursday, as the Mets’ Subway Sweep that I ordered in 1997 was finally delivered into my waiting lap? This Gee pitched and pitched and pitched some more. This Gee could have gone the full nine and another nine on top of it. I knew it, you knew it, my periodontist knew it.
Except Terry Collins. He somehow knew that removing a starting pitcher who had thrown all of 88 pitches, retired his previous 15 batters and struck out the last five in defense of a 3-1 lead with five outs to go was the move that absolutely needed to be made. If Terry were a contestant on Beer Money, you suspect he’d answer the $10 question and walk away unwilling to risk greater success. His decision to lift Gee while Gee was as completely unhittable as he was suddenly hairless was undoubtedly a minority opinion, but given that Collins is the manager, his opinion was also the only one that counted.
So out went Dillon Gee from the game of his life — and the night we’d all been dreaming of ever since somebody decided forcing the Mets to play the Yankees annually would create an irresistible, platinum-priced treat — and in came Scott Rice. Rice has been used so much that if a teammate gives him a particularly effusive high five, Rice’s left arm will fall off. But the important thing is Rice has earned his slaps and claps this season and, though it was still a weird call to the bullpen, Scott did it again. He popped up Ichiro Suzuki and struck out Brett Gardner, and the Mets were one inning from a sweep.
A four-game sweep of the Yankees. The Yankees of Reid Brignac and David Adams and Chris Stewart, yes, but the recently first-place Yankees nonetheless. The same Yankees whose pinstripes, we’ve been repeatedly informed, transform scrubs into stars; pump youth serum through the veins of dried-out husks of has-beens; and generally demand genuflection based on reputation and presumed intimidation. The current Yankees still have plenty of players who have proven they can beat the Mets, but most of them watched this series in navy warmup jackets from their dugout or, perhaps, luxury condominiums in the Tampa Bay region. The Mets, on the other hand, entered this series mostly with guys who haven’t proven anything anywhere. All told, the only two things the Mets and Yankees of the moment had in common were a city and a talent level.
The neighborhood is still the neighborhood, replete with ill-mannered neighbors who don’t mind letting us know which way the wind usually blows, which is why any of this garners our extra attention. The neighborhood’s playing field, no matter what the respective records say, had been leveled. Ours was a crummy team. Theirs, according to my friend Pythagoras, had been indisputably crummier for three straight nights (because crummy team beaten by crummy team equals crummiest team cubed). Then, in the bottom of the ninth inning on the fourth straight night, Bobby Parnell — who is closing ballgames like he expects to be presented one of those sweet commemorative fire hoses in a dozen or so years — did what Mets closers haven’t done routinely since before there were Subway Series to save. He retired Robinson Cano and two guys who used to be Vernon Wells and Travis Hafner.
Subway Series sweep. For the Mets. Not of the Mets, but by the Mets. The Mets ran 27 rings around the Yankees. Three of the four games were close but all four Mets wins were decisive. It was Gee and Rice and Parnell. It was Byrd with a massive homer and Buck with a perfectly poked infield hit. It was Wright starting a nifty double play to pick up callup Quintanilla after an error and it was Quintanilla walking to set up the all-important insurance run.
It was all about “up” for our Mets of New York, New York, this helluva town. Queens is up. The Bronx…not so much. And Broom(e) Street was where all the action happened these past four nights when the routine of plopping down on the couch in the wake of having my teeth pulled couldn’t have been much more enjoyable unless it had happened in some distant October. Can’t do anything about the calendar, though. We play ’em when we play ’em and we play whoever they suit up in their precious pinstripes. Here at the end of May 2013, we played the hell out of ’em.
As this week ends, I feel I’ve traded two upper molars for four magnificent wins. I also feel I got a very good deal.
And you get yourself a very good deal on some other very great Mets wins right here.
by Jason Fry on 30 May 2013 1:34 am Go figure. After somehow overcoming their own lack of hitting and boneheadedness afield to take two from the Yankees at Citi Field, the Mets made the very short trip north to resume hostilities in the Bronx with the likable but generally luckless Jeremy Hefner on the mound. So of course they leaped on David Phelps like a psychotic jack-in-the-box, barraging him with hits and working walks and hitting balls at pinstriped infielders who booted them. Phelps got one out while surrendering five runs and slunk off to lie down in a dark room, wondering what the hell had just happened. On our couches and barstools and bits of enemy territory we were wondering the same thing, only we were happy and desperately wanted more.
I was still floating from the merry sucker punch Daniel Murphy, David Wright and Lucas Duda delivered to the immortal Mariano Rivera the night before. But this was equally fun — a five-spot to take the edge off immediately and leave Yankee fans practicing their October retreat to the Deegan. Why, even those Mets rumored for imminent visits to Vegas chipped in: Ruben Tejada began the night with a sharp single to left and Ike Davis worked a count and delivered two runs of his own. The infield wasn’t even drawn in.
The first two Subway Series crackled with tensions and subplots, even though the Mets’ happy double application of lipstick couldn’t hide the underlying pig and the current Yankees are a collection of understudies and temps. None of that matters, or ever will. The stadiums and uniforms are familiar and the fans and their dramas are the same: We hate them with the mostly impotent rage of little brothers pushed too far this time and they make a show of dismissing us as beneath their notice while constantly checking to make sure we’re registering their scorn. As long as these things are true, the Subway Series will be immune to fluctuations in attendance or either side’s protestations of being tired of it. The respite came, weirdly, from what actually happened on the field. With the Mets suddenly up 5-0 and then 6-0 and then 8-0 it was still a Subway Series game, but you could actually exhale a bit and just watch the thing instead of spending three hours clinging to the ceiling like an overly caffeinated Spider-Man or curled up in the fetal position.
It got scary of course — you knew it would. Hefner got scuffed up a bit, which is no crime given the Yankees’ assembly line of lefties and that ludicrously short porch in right. The Mets, apparently surprised by their own competence, returned to their normal catatonia with bats in hand for much of the game, allowing the Yankees to creep closer and closer, until you could hear the blue and orange muttering. Ike was striking out again and Tejada was doing lamebrained things and you could imagine all manner of awful hare-and-the-tortoise scenarios.
When I said something to this effect on Twitter, I wasn’t told I was insane despite the fact that the Yankees were mostly tired and wanted to get in their gigantic SUVs and sleep and come back and plot Dillon Gee’s demise, like sensible baseball teams do on the wrong side of a bad night.
No, my Mets tweeps promptly admitted that they too were worried. As a fanbase, we’re so out of practice when it comes to good fortune that we assume it’s a trick.
Scott Rice’s rather wonderful fort-holding pushed this paranoia back, as did Rick Ankiel’s RBI single. But even in a harmlessly weird ninth that saw Robinson Cano wander the bases unmolested and LaTroy Hawkins and John Buck both pursue a foul pop northwest of third base, I was trying to brew up my own little black cloud. When Tejada was mercifully removed before he could further injure himself or a teammate, I was briefly certain that Justin Turner would make 15 consecutive errors and the Mets would lose. Luis Castillo’s sins would be mostly forgotten, but it would be too late for me — I would forswear baseball and blogging, move to Mongolia and live in a yurt, defending its felty confines by hurling stones at anyone who dared approach.
This was of course ridiculous, even by melodramatic Mets standards. Hawkins tamped down a spot of Yankee bother and the Mets had won three straight against Them and four straight against Everybody. They’d won the Subway Series — done, put in books — and earned a chance to try for a four-game sweep.
They’ve done so despite ample evidence that their numerous problems are very far from fixed, but you know what? I’m not going to dwell on that. For the next 24 hours, let’s let that be fine. We can worry about demotions and regression by complementary players and lack of depth and hitting anemia and payrolls and all the rest on Friday. This has been fun, which is why we all started watching baseball in the first place, and more fun for being so totally unexpected. Let’s just enjoy it, whether it’s a sweep or merely a quite satisfying three of four. And let’s remember that sometimes the little black cloud is hovering over the other guys, not us — and if we’d just look up, we’d see a bit of sunshine.
by Greg Prince on 29 May 2013 9:55 am When it comes to last-inning lightning striking where you traditionally don’t want to be standing during a regular-season Subway Series — under a tree in the middle of the Mets bullpen — I can remember the Yankees taking it to John Franco in 1997, Armando Benitez in 2002 and 2003, Braden Looper in 2005, Billy Wagner in 2006, Francisco Rodriguez (by way of freaking Luis Castillo) in 2009 and Jon Rauch in 2012. That’s a lot of relievers and a lot of heartbreak.
When it comes to the Mets turning the tables and finding a way to snatch victory from the clichéd jaws of crosstown defeat/deadlock over these past 17 seasons, I remember Mariano Rivera and little else.
Like the Yankees, Mariano Rivera is all I need.
You can point to his unmatched stack of saves and his drawerful of rings and his one pitch that is normally unhittable by mortals both mere and extraordinary and give him all the fire hoses he can carry home, but I can think of no greater tribute to the universally acknowledged greatest closer there ever was than noting that for a literal generation, if you wanted the Mets to beat the Yankees at a game’s end (give or take an odd Carlos Almanzar sighting), you had to get past Rivera.
I can think of few greater joys than the Mets having done so now five different times. Rivera was the gatekeeper in 1999, when Matt Franco was the one who knocked; in 2001, when Mike Piazza and a bunch of buddies slipped by; in 2006 when David Wright barged in; in 2011 when Ronny Paulino broke on through to the other side; and in 2013 as Lucas Duda uncharacteristically refused to go quietly.
Rivera is supposed to be impenetrable. He usually is. One of his bleepity-bleep rings attests to the Mets’ failure to penetrate his borders. But now and then, whether because you’re gonna get lucky four or five times in 32 attempts or because the Subway Series is the kind of setting given over to sudden and unforeseen lightning strikes, the Mets made their way past the sport’s most vigilant gatekeeper.
It was historically sweet the first time, it’s plenty sweet the fifth time. No, the Subway Series ain’t quite what it used to be from the days of when Shea shook and Francos gleefully roamed its green earth, but even on a soggy Tuesday night in front of a generously reported three-quarters full house, when the Yankees feature few reliable names and the Mets hold no realistic hopes, it’s still Us vs. Them. And when Us is on the verge of losing to Them — especially after wasting eight magnificent Matt Harvey innings (Hiroki Kuroda probably pitched well, too, but who can tell from our lineup?) — and the gate is about to slam shut…
Ah, but it didn’t. It didn’t even come close to closing. This wasn’t a two-out rally along the lines of what arose on July 3, 2011, when Jason Bay crafted a last-gasp walk to set the stage for Duda and Paulino to forge a ninth-inning tie en route to a tenth-inning win…or July 7, 2001, when two outs into a nothing-nothing tenth, Desi Relaford singled and stole second in front of an Edgardo Alfonzo walk and successive singles from Piazza, Timo Perez and Todd Zeile to establish an unlikely 3-0 lead for Benitez to unpredictably preserve. This wasn’t Paul Lo Duca doubling with one out and Carlos Delgado being intentionally walked with two out to get to Wright and Wright, in turn, getting Lo Duca home on May 19, 2006. And this wasn’t exactly Rickey Henderson walking with one out and Fonzie doubling past Bernie Williams (who’s no Brett Gardner when it comes to patrolling center) and John Olerud grounding out and Piazza being passed to set up Matt Franco because nothing will ever be exactly like Mets 9 Yankees 8 from July 10, 1999.
This one didn’t have two outs. This one didn’t have one out. This one had Rivera marching to the mound at the end of a day when the Mets joined the choir of opponents singing from the officially approved hymnal in praise of their staunchest executioner. Mariano Rivera had saved 20 regular-season games against the Mets since 1997 not to mention two more during the 2000 World Series. In the afternoon, Jeff Wilpon handed Rivera a couple of FDNY mementoes and a baseball to throw during first-pitch ceremonies. Because he’s one of the game’s absolute all-time greats on his final go-round, this homage to an adversary was right, proper and classy. Because it was for the guy who symbolizes seemingly unending Yankee hegemony and the hell that’s represented to Mets fans in New York for nearly two decades, it couldn’t help but be a little sickening.
What was it Abe said to Peggy in the ambulance Sunday night after Peggy accidentally bayoneted Abe in the abdomen?
“Your activities are offensive to my every waking moment. I’m sorry. But you’ll always be the enemy.”
Who among us didn’t guess that the ceremonial first pitch would represent a prelude for Rivera, to date enjoying yet another flawless season of closing at the age of 43, even after being inactive for most of the season when he couldn’t be 42? Of course he’d be entrusted by Joe Girardi to fire the last pitch. Of course the Mets would go down meekly to Hiroki Kuroda even as the Yankees would mostly flail against Matt Harvey; of course Brett Gardner would stick pins in his Daniel Murphy doll; and of course, as it all was about to reach its uncomfortable conclusion, the grim reaper would glide to the Citi Field rubber, throw a dozen or so magical, mystical cutters and turn away whatever weak siblings Terry Collins was forced to parade to the plate in another installment of Futility Theater.
Except, as rare Mets luck would have it when trailing 1-0, they somehow had their only three major league-caliber hitters due up in the bottom of the ninth: Murphy, whose Subway Series thus far had been trumped only by Gardner’s; Wright, who must wonder what he was thinking when he signed up for a lifetime pass to these rodeos; and Duda, who effectively keeps his thoughts to himself. Together, these three men, working in the aftermath of Harvey the Unsupported and Rice the Constant, represented the only conceivable combination the Mets could present for potential success.
Rivera threw all of nine pitches. Three of them went for base hits. Murphy placed a ground-rule double down the left field line. Wright singled to center and took crucial advantage of shoddy throwing, fielding and daydreaming by, respectively, Gardner, Chris Stewart and Rivera himself, who was too honored to back up home plate. Duda, the least confidence-inspiring of the trio (but still a better-bet bat than any Met not named Murphy or Wright) singled to right. David romped home with the second and winning run.
Wake up the echoes cheering Matt Franco’s name, for the Mets had done it again, tormenting their tormentor and reminding us that even if Mariano Rivera has inevitably gotten old, taking it to him with the game on the line never will.
by Jason Fry on 28 May 2013 2:56 am We’re stuck in a season that’s either overdue to be part of a transition or is just a discouraging checkpoint amid an ongoing demolition. (Perhaps you’ve noticed.) It’s been wearying, and after watching the Mets get swept by the Reds and mostly missing them nearly getting swept by the Braves, the last thing I wanted to see on the calendar was what awaited us all tonight: Mets vs. Yankees.
Particularly since this year’s Yankees squad is what we deluded ourselves into thinking the 2013 Mets might be — a scrappy bunch of Plan B players sent into battle to hold the line, only to outperform all expectations. Derek Jeter, Alex Rodriguez and Mark Teixeira have yet to play a regular-season game, while Curtis Granderson’s 2013 has consisted of little more than a cameo. And yet the Yankees of Jayson Nix and Lyle Overbay and Travis Hafner and Vernon Wells have been more than up to the challenge.
I told Joshua I figured we’d get swept. I braced myself for the disaster. And I convinced myself that it didn’t really matter, that I was not going to let the braying mooks of Yankeedom make a lousy season feel worse.
That lasted until Brett Gardner leapt high over the Citi Field wall to take a home run away from Daniel Murphy, turning an ephemeral 2-1 Mets lead back into a 1-0 Yankees advantage. That Yankee run had come courtesy of a Mets misplay and a play not made — the former a Lucas Duda special in which poor Lucas dove gallantly but unwisely for a little parachute off Gardner’s bat, turning a single into a triple; the latter a Nix floater that you couldn’t blame Mike Baxter for not catching but also couldn’t help thinking he should have. That was all Jon Niese gave up, but for a while it looked like it would be enough to beat him, an all-too-familiar fate for Mets starters of late.
(By the way, this was Joshua’s reaction to Gardner’s triple: “That’s the kind of play Yankees fans think their guy earned.” I’ve spent thousands of words trying to capture the unique loathsomeness of Yankees fans, but my kid only needed 11 to nail it and them. Raising his allowance.)
Anyway, when Gardner leapt high and came down with Murph’s homer in his mitt, I screamed a versatile bad word loud enough for the kid to hear it in the shower and know something had gone very wrong. And then I stared at the TV and fumed, remembering Paul O’Neill robbing Derek Bell above the right-field fence of now-vanished Shea in 2000. In that game, I was sitting a row behind a Yankees fan in one of their hideous top hats, sandwiched by two Met fan friends. When O’Neill robbed Bell, one of the Mets fans snatched the top hat from his pal’s head and hurled it out of the mezzanine.
It wasn’t worth it.
But the Mets, for once, were not inclined to go quietly. Gardner’s grab — accompanied by a few too many Kevin Burkhardt hosannas for a Mets fan’s taste — ended the bottom of the sixth, but David Wright led off the bottom of the seventh. Wright promptly redirected a Phil Hughes pitch on a high arc, safely beyond the reach of Gardner or any Yankee not flying a helicopter. Wright helped keep the Yankees at bay in the eighth with a nifty stab of a Wells grounder he converted into a double play, setting the stage for some Mets heroics punctuated by a ringing single and celebratory bat slam from Murph.
God only knows what awaits us tomorrow, when I will already be challenged to remain civil and decent in the face of a Mets presentation to Mariano Rivera. (Every team’s having one, he typed while gritting his teeth.) But at least for one night the good guys won, as I’d almost forgotten the good guys sometimes do.
by Greg Prince on 27 May 2013 10:51 am Lucas Duda reclaimed Utley’s Corner. Shawn Marcum finally completed Extended Spring Training. Ike Davis shredded his boarding pass for Flight .143 to Las Vegas. The Mets reaffirmed former NFL commissioner Bert Bell’s theory that on any given Sunday, any team can beat any other team. Bell was talking about professional football, wherein teams traditionally play only on Sunday. The Mets play most every day but hadn’t won since the Sunday before…and hadn’t looked terribly professional in not doing so.
If weekly wins are gonna be what the 2013 Mets give us — remember how they won only on Wednesdays earlier this season? — let’s take what we’ve got and savor it for a few more minutes before we get hot and bothered by the legions of doom invading Citi Field.
Marcum was damn near unhittable, save for Dan Uggla (a born DH if ever there was one). He doesn’t get a win for his seven innings and twelve strikeouts, but he gets something more important, as the narrator of one of those misbegotten Mets highlight videos that don’t end well might put it: he gains a legacy. That is to say in three or four years when Jason mutters to me how Shawn Marcum never did a goddamn thing for the Mets, I’ll have evidence to counter his blanket assertion. “No,” I’ll say in that hand-raising tone I’ve tried to tamp down since my teachers got sick of it, “Marcum struck out a dozen Braves that one time.” Alternatively, Marcum could simply go out and be super competent until the trade deadline, thereby making himself attractive to a contender so we can maybe gain a prospect to bury in the minors long enough to avoid arbitration an extra year because this front office is always thinking ahead if not necessarily anywhere near the vicinity of the moment at hand, but one miracle at a time.
Duda has hit in ten straight games. I’ve watched all ten of those games and I had no idea a ten-game hitting streak was in bloom. Perhaps I missed most of Lucas’s key at-bats because I was busy burying my head in my hands dreading Davis’s upcoming at-bat. But no way you couldn’t notice Lucas landing one in the Mo’s Zone — an old-fashioned Citi Field cheapie before Citi Field routinely gave up cheapies (parallel to how ticket sales have gone the last few years). Chase Utley used to drive us crazy with those kinds of precision home runs. You picture Duda making more of a splash, one that splatters Pepsi Max all over the uppermost patrons in right. Either way, a home run is a home run…and either way, the makers of our ballpark have gotten me to mention three different sponsors in one paragraph. With that homer, his sixth-inning single and his key ground-rule double in the eighth, Lucas with the ten-game hitting streak raised his average to .242. That’s positively robust in this lineup. Ruben Tejada gathered three hits the night before and he’s batting .218. Ike Davis likely saved his ass with a pair of singles and he’s up to all of .158. Two forty-two looks pretty good in these parts, eh?
Davis was going so badly that he was clearly ticketed to legally change his name to Ike Vegas. I was thinking once he arrived on the strip they wouldn’t even allow him in the New York New York casino. That’s how far from the Mets he needed to be — and these are the Mets we’re talking about. But in the fourth, Danny Meyer opened a new concession that prepares home-cooked scoring decisions to order, and Ike was first in line for what it was serving up. He grounded a ball that Uggla and Freddie Freeman combined to make about six errors on (Davis probably thought it was foul) but it was sympathetically ruled a hit. Talk about comfort food. The single in the eighth, however, the one with the bases loaded…it wasn’t necessarily brilliantly struck but it certainly knew how to find a hole and, when it comes to Ike, they all look like mislabeled errors in the box score anyway. Ike drove in the go-ahead runs, Bobby Parnell reminded us that sometimes endless patience with homegrown talent eventually pays off and the Mets avoided taking the field for the bottom of the ninth at Citi Field for the first time in five Sundays.
One in a row rates a “woo-hoo!” but as for gaining traction, we’ll rely on one more cliché: momentum’s only as good as the next day’s starting pitcher being Matt Harvey. Harvey doesn’t go until tomorrow, however. Tonight is Niese Night. At least I hope it is, in the best sense.
So proudly don those Ted Nugent tribute uniforms and bring on the pinstriped hordes! Better yet, fend them off with all the Niese ya got. It’s been a long enough season as is.
by Greg Prince on 26 May 2013 3:17 am “One night against San Antonio, we announced a crowd of eight hundred and six, and I sat there during halftime and I started counting the people in the stands, and my best guess is there were really about four hundred people at the game. And I went up to Rudy Martzke, who was then the Spirits’ director of operations, and I said, ‘Rudy, y’know, it’s bad enough we’ve got an announced crowd of about eight hundred; there’s really like four hundred people here.’ He says, ‘You little wiseass, why don’t you just go back over there and broadcast the game and mind your own business? Did it ever occur to you that maybe some of these people are in the restroom or at the concession stand?’ I said, ‘Rudy, let’s test your premise. Let’s suppose there were ten thousand people here. What are the odds that at any given moment five thousand are relieving themselves or buying a hot dog? There’s no chance of that! There’s four hundred people here!’ He says, ‘I’m gonna belt ya, get out of here!’”
—Spirits of St. Louis play-by-play announcer Bob Costas, Long Shots: The Life and Times of the American Basketball Association (HBO), 1997
When Banner Day was in its heyday, it took place not just between games of a doubleheader, but in the heart of high summer: June, July, maybe August. This year the Mets got it out of the way on May 11 (after originally scheduling it for today, May 26).
When Fireworks Night was truly blowing up, it was slated close to Independence Day, which makes all the sense in America. This year the Mets pinned it to their calendar for May 24, pushing it back one day so the skies could better accommodate the bombs bursting in air.
I realize these are merely promotions being positioned wherever somebody thinks they’ll attract an uptick in audience, but it almost seems as if the Mets are subconsciously just trying to get 2013 over with as quickly as possible…and they’re failing at that, too. If they were succeeding, why would almost every nine-inning game drag more than three hours — and why would it take two days to play ten innings?
And how can this endlessly miserable season be not yet even one-third over?
Friday’s game reached its inevitable conclusion Saturday, though I held out hope that the Mets would surprise us, particularly as long as I decided to join the “32,325” who will forever be in the box score but were never anywhere near this game on either of its two days. My entrée to this affair came eight innings in via the unorthodox suspension of hostilities and my acceptance of the Mets’ poorly executed offer of “two free tickets” to a home game in May. I was already committed to attend many of the Mets’ home games in May when a postcard arrived in my mailbox ostensibly appealing to my desire to see the All-Star Game at Citi Field by informing me it wasn’t too late to become a 2013 ticket plan holder. I assumed the “two free tickets” the postcard extended as a carrot would come attached to a sales pitch. But, what the hell, two free tickets are two free tickets.
I first called 718/507-TIXX two Fridays ago with an eye on the Cincinnati series. After being put on hold and transferred around the Mets’ ticket office (never being pitched season tickets, by the way), I was told I could look forward to a code for use on mets.com arriving in my in-box by Monday…Tuesday at the latest.
Monday and Tuesday passed, and I didn’t catch a code. So I called again Wednesday morning. I spoke to somebody who apologetically informed me that there must have been a problem somewhere between “the e-mail blast” and “the postcard hit,” as if I had been to the same lack-of-communication seminar he’d been compelled to sit through. “Huh?” was my basic response, but I was assured again I’d be seeing a code by midday Friday, and if I didn’t receive it, then they could do a “workaround,” which sounded either pleasant or ghastly.
Well, Friday came and there was no code, so I called a third time. The person I reached sounded really rattled by the whole concept of customer service. The reason I hadn’t received my magic code yet was a combination of “the system has some problems,” “e-mail addresses got lost” and, I swear, “a lot of people called,” which perhaps overwhelmed those hired to take the calls.
Ohmigod, I thought, the Mets literally can’t give tickets away.
I gently explained that time was running out on your generous offer, that this was Friday and I don’t know how late you guys work, but I’d really like to go to Saturday’s game and it’s not like I’m calling out of the blue asking for free tickets. You invited me.
To my utter shock, a Mets representative called me a little while later and told me he’d do me the solid of sending me my code personally — I’m not sure if this constituted a blast or a workaround — and he really did. I entered it as directed and it resulted in two Excelsior left field tickets with a price of $0.00, two Department of Franco bobbleheads if Stephanie and I were among the first “25,000” on hand and, once Friday got all tied up and rained on, two-ish Mets games for the price of none, provided we showed up a little extra early.
That we did. I don’t think Stephanie was as stoked as I was for the resumption of the fifth suspended game in Mets history, particularly when the forecast was loaded with high wind advisories, but I really sold the uniqueness aspect. “We gotta see this!” I enthused. “They’re gonna play the ninth inning as soon as we get there!”
That they did. They even prefaced it with John Lennon’s “(Just Like) Starting Over” on the PA, a song I last heard at a Mets game on Reopening Night in 1981, the first game after the strike. With that kind of cleverness, how could the Mets lose?
We stood on Field Level and watched Bobby Parnell warm up to his country song of choice (we sure have a lot of players whose intro music implies they’d rather be back home where folks are real and life is simple) before keeping the Braves off the board in the top of the ninth. That’s when it dawned on my lovely wife that, “This could go into extra innings.”
I affirmed that possibility while ostensibly rooting for a quick Met run in the bottom of the ninth though secretly relishing Fox’s window being shattered by a 17-inning marathon. Either way, there was no immediate resolution, just the Mets not scoring. Given the stiff breeze and Stephanie’s desire to sit and eat like a person, we slipped into the Caesars Club and discovered at least one monitor that wasn’t tuned to a hockey game. It was there that we watched the Braves notch two off Brandon Lyon in the top of the tenth and the Mets mount their idea of a rally in the bottom of the tenth, which was John Buck being dinged by Craig Kimbrel and Ike Davis making his weekly contact with a baseball. There was a genuinely warm burst of applause in Caesars when Ike reached first. Nobody really wants to boo him. They just don’t want to tacitly approve of anybody’s sub-.150 average.
As we finished our takeout — Mama’s for me, Daruma for Stephanie — I wondered if we should sit tight. Perhaps Club Amenity was lucky for these Mets. Then again, we also saw them fall behind, 7-5, from the same table, so let’s get out to our seats already and enjoy the big comeback!
We got halfway down the Excelsior concourse when the game ended sans big comeback. So much for history.
Then there was a second game, which wasn’t yet terrible when Stephanie indicated the development of icicles along her extremities would necessitate her return to Caesars for a multiple-inning thaw. Seeing as how we’d gotten our Francos, experienced our two-inning extravaganza in the de facto opener and enjoyed a little sushi and such, I was having a tough time rationalizing subjecting her to a choice between an unseasonable climate or an oversized airport lounge crawling with similarly chilly people drawn from the announced crowd of “27,622”.
“Ya wanna just go?” I asked in the fourth. This get-out-of-Mets-free card was greeted with incredulity (just as it was when it was last issued, in 2008), but it wasn’t exactly waved off. We happened to be at a peak moment of train-schedule synergy and that’s no small thing when you have to change at Jamaica on the weekend.
So we left, six combined innings to our credit and, ultimately, two losses to the Braves for me to reluctantly Log. Stephanie appreciated my rare act of selflessness, but honestly, I figured once the Mets didn’t win Friday’s game on Saturday, there wasn’t going to be much worth bundling up for during Saturday’s game on Saturday. Howie and Josh carried me through the ride home, describing each seam Dillon Gee came apart at, so it was like we were there…except we were warmer and less disgusted by our favorite team.
Summer is supposedly at hand. We should be warming to the possibilities that the baseball season holds in store for us. Instead, getting this one over with sounds more kind than cruel — and that’s no way for baseball fans to think with four months to go. Hence, you might say we beat it out of Citi Field before Citi Field could totally beat it out of us.
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