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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“And possibly…everybody’ll say, ‘Well, OK, let’s project the positive side of life again,’ you know? The world’s been goin’ on a long time, right? It’s probably gonna go on a long time.” —John Lennon
Two long-running dramatic television series I watched from beginning to end over the past decade (Six Feet Under and Big Love) concluded with a time jump. In both cases, the show’s primary character had met a tragic fate and everybody else was left to make sense of the lingering sadness. But so as not to leave the audience on a down note, we were shown what eventually happened to the survivors. The message in each case was one of hope: life goes on, things get better, we smile again.
In some way, as I took my final steps through Field Level before descending the staircase of the Jackie Robinson Rotunda following resoundingly successful resolution of the first game of the 2013 baseball season, I would have sworn I had suddenly entered a similar epilogue, that after months of barrenness and doubt, this was what it was all leading to: a veritable state of grace not available to our day-to-day comprehension when baseball isn’t being played. On paper, Monday was a beginning — a grand beginning, to be sure — but as much as an Opening Day Mets triumph is, by definition, a start, it felt to me more like we were on the other side of “to be continued…”
The victory, every bit as much as Mets 11 Padres 2, was that baseball was happening and we were happening all around it — and that we got through another offseason. That, I’ve decided after enduring so many of them, is not a feat to be taken as a given.
In a substantive sense, we just endured the autumn of Sandy and the winter of Sandy Hook. If that’s not an offseason to get through, I don’t know what is. The return of the Mets to Citi Field by no means solved problems of such dense and terrible proportions. Amid his introductions of visiting and home team players, Howie Rose read some beautiful words thanking those who helped their neighbors in the struggle after Sandy, all the while pointedly reminding us the work goes on. He read some more beautiful words about those who were murdered at Sandy Hook Elementary School. Nothing has been done to prevent another episode like it from occurring somewhere else. Yet here we were in a baseball stadium, nudged to remember the worst of times before we would allow ourselves to fully engage what we treat as the best of times. It couldn’t have been a coincidence that it all briefly coalesced in ceremony that touched both borders of the emotional spectrum. Life is necessarily more than baseball, but we’re the ones who strive to substitute baseball for life. This was our big chance.
For however long an offseason holds sway, its darkness envelops us so entirely that we’re almost fully convinced it will never end. Yet on Opening Day, by our reckoning, it ends.
And we continue.
In the relatively mundane Mets sense during the offseason now completely vanished, we grappled with the franchise’s usual financial issues. We witnessed our beloved Cy Young winner’s deportation to another country. We weren’t given the opportunity to join a welcome wagon greeting some glittering star enticed to enhance our cast. Mostly we sat and brooded about the grim near term while attempting to lean forward and rationalize that it’s all in service to a brighter long term. The truly fanatical among us picked apart every iota of an offseason seemingly designed to break our hearts or maybe just tear away at our anterior capsules.
Then early one April afternoon, the Mets ceased being a theory to stew over and became a baseball team to cheer for. There was a 2013 Mets about to do something besides exist in concept. There was a baseball season…another baseball season. The season is every baseball fan’s raison d’être, providing the fiber of our very being. Know any non-baseball fans who divide their lives into just two seasons, one of them scornfully dismissed as unnaturally “off”?
We were on Monday, though. We were dressed to the 5’s (and not a few 43’s). We wore grins 162 games wide. We conveniently forgot that the final 161 are always the hardest. I didn’t bother mentioning to any of the many fine people with whom I had the pleasure of sharing the day that this very same ballpark was just as jammed last year at this time, yet was largely deserted four and five months later, even though the same basic thing that drew us in April 2012 was still transpiring down there on the exact same grass and dirt in August and September. I surely didn’t see any need to elaborate that a similar scenario is likely to play out again. You won’t have to grumble about overpriced Promenade tickets when starting pitchers aren’t hitting like position players, homers aren’t being legged out like triples, journeymen relievers aren’t appreciated like crazy and the Mets aren’t routinely squashing anonymous bands of opponents. Practically everything will be marked to move by the middle of August and almost nobody won’t declare they don’t have something better to do in September. It’s how it’s worked for the Mets for several seasons when the seasons themselves are what threaten to never end. The realm of possibility leaves little wiggle room for it to not happen again this season.
But p’shaw! to that kind of thinking on the first day we continue with our baseball. We were too busy congratulating each other on having the good sense to embrace what was directly in front of us. “It’s Opening Day,” we told each other again and again, as if that explained it all…which it pretty much did.
The Mets winning by nine happily explained the rest.
I’ll be fortunate enough to be watching somewhat up close and personal in Flushing today, but for those who aren’t among the 42,000 or so who will account for yet another of those magical Citi Field attendance records management is so fond of periodically revealing, the New York Mets will be on TV in one of their usual time slots on one of their usual channels this afternoon, and that, of course, is spectacular. I’m generally happy to see the Mets appear on television in other non-SNY contexts as well (there’s an award that recognizes the phenomenon, you know), and anything that, shall we say, shakes up the roster is a welcome development. But this much-ballyhooed reality show the Mets are collaborating on with Fox Sports 1? It seems…I don’t know…
I think the term for it is “trainwreck”.
Or is “undignified” the word I’m groping for? This is a franchise that once spent a season trotting a reportedly incontinent mule around its stadium’s warning track, so to deem anything post-Mettle as not quite up to vaunted Metropolitan standards might be harsh, let alone historically myopic. And if I look at the bright side (which seems the right place to look on Opening Day), maybe this whole idea that they’re guaranteeing one lucky fan a spot on the Mets before this season ends is truly what this team has always been about.
After all, the name of the show speaks volumes. They’re calling it Anybody Here Can Play This Game, which explains why they’re asking aspirants to show up at the Casey Stengel entrance on the third base side today starting at 11 AM to sign up. I like the democratic nature of the proposal: You, too, can be a New York Met. I like that it’s not a gimmick, or a gimmick within a gimmick. It’s a pretty straightforward proposal:
• You go to the portal marked STENGEL
• You tell them you’re here for the reality show
• They take your information
• They tell you at what point Tuesday to come back to try out
• They hand you your Amway Courtesy Card, redeemable through the sixth inning only, and wish you luck
It all sounds a little cheesy until you read the fine print and see they’re not kidding around, no more so than the Marlins were when they did their one decent thing and signed Adam Greenberg. Skeptics said that was about entertainment or whatever, but Greenberg got in shape and got his at-bat (against R.A. Dickey…somebody else who benefited massively from a big break). The big difference here is Fox Sports 1 is opening Anybody Here Can Play This Game to, appropriately enough, not just anybody with professional baseball-playing experience, but anybody at all. Or anybody who’s a Mets fan who signs the appropriate waiver.
So the first round of tryouts begins Tuesday, and the coaches/producers go about their whittling and their interviewing (including a “Mets Knowledge” test for which I apparently provided a few questions after they contacted me in rather vague fashion asking for “some help on a special project”) and the whole thing circles back to Citi Field during the All-Star Game. That’s when the outgoing Mr. McCarver and the intolerable Mr. Buck announce the winner in the middle of the fifth inning, right after the tribute to Mariano Rivera when David Wright or whoever’s representing the Mets changes his uniform to No. 42 for the rest of the night and everybody else follows in turn. Then it’s off and running for the chosen one: a couple of weeks at St. Lucie, a couple at Binghamton, some finishing school with the Las Vegas 51s and, when September rolls around and the 25-man becomes the 40-man, that person (actually, they haven’t said the winner will necessarily be a man, so maybe we’re in for more history than we realize) will be the starting center fielder for the New York Mets in a regulation Major League Baseball game.
Maybe there’s a caveat in the covenant among the Mets, MLB, News Corp. and the creative team (those would be the same guys who promoted Greenberg’s story so effectively) that if the team is somehow in the pennant race on September 1 that the deal is off, but given how much Fox is hyping this program and how much they need Fox Sports 1 to garner legitimacy after its debut this summer — not to mention how little leverage lame duck Terry Collins or his interim replacement would have by then — I doubt it.
I also doubt the Mets will be in a pennant race on September 1, but one miracle at a time.
A show like Anybody Here Can Play This Game should ideally be something to celebrate. It’s about striving and making dreams come true. It harks back to the oft-told tale of John Pappas, who wheedled his way into a tryout in St. Petersburg that very first Met spring of 1962. He insisted he’d been getting his arm loose under the 59th Street Bridge and was ready to solve the expansion team’s projected pitching woes. Johnny Murphy, then the chief of scouting, tried to brush him off, but the beat writers needed a good story (because Casey Stengel wasn’t enough of one) and Pappas got his moment in the sun, even if it was over in a blink.
Pappas never made the bigs, but Murphy you’ll recognize as a New York Mets Hall of Famer, the general manager who put the finishing touches on the 1969 World Champions. He definitely had a different, perhaps more focused or serious view of his job than its current, nuanced occupant, Sandy Alderson. I’ve honestly enjoyed my brief interactions with the dry-witted executive in whose hands we’ve entrusted our long-term baseball hopes and happiness, but consider that Alderson…
a) was always a little too eager on those blogger conference calls to talk television with our friend Shannon Shark — and by the way, let us add our congratulations to the chorus of hosannas for the erstwhile Mets Police maven on his well-deserved appointment to succeed Dave Howard as the club’s head of business operations;
b) goaded Jay Horwitz into taking a more outsized public role, the results of which have included his incessant, inimitable Tweeting, the rash of stories about his cell phone mishaps and his star turn dancing the Citi Field Shake; and
c) transformed into a veritable Sandy C.K. this winter as he went on the record with those killer bits about his outfield’s shortcomings.
Or “what outfield?” as the GM fancies asking.
Now it all comes together. Alderson’s offseason was essentially one long establishing shot: he releases Jason Bay; he eschews Scott Hairston; he goes to great lengths to imply Michael Bourn might be en route (including all that talk about draft picks); he throws in some asides about one Upton or another; and then he conveniently comes up with a heretofore unknown named Collin Cowgill, which is as made-for-TV a name as you could imagine. Then the Mets go through this whole charade of auditioning one outfielder after another in St. Lucie, with den Dekker getting hurt, Nieuwenhuis not hitting and Valdespin somehow managing to “forget” to wear his cup against Justin Verlander. All of that just to wind up with an alliteration, a reclamation and a defensive miscalculation as the supposed everyday starting outfield?
When I read that it was going to be, from left to right, Duda, Cowgill and Byrd, no platoon (because who could possibly crack that tough a troika?), it seemed like something you could purchase at Catch Of The Day…a little too fishy, if you will. But now that we know about Anybody Here Can Play This Game, it all adds up. The stage is literally set for the center fielder who’ll come out of this reality show competition a real live Met, eligible for induction into The Holy Books and everything. What wouldn’t have been the least bit believable anywhere else, not even in Houston — where Fernando Martinez couldn’t stay healthy long enough to play on Opening Night — makes all the sense in the world in its own very Metsian way.
It doesn’t have to be a trainwreck. It doesn’t have to be undignified. But yes, somehow, it does have to be the Mets, doesn’t it?
Think about it, though, as the Mets return to being part of our regularly scheduled programming at 1:10 PM. Who else could it be on this day of all days?
Oh, it’s time to start livin’
Time to take a little from this world we’re given
Time to take time
’Cause spring will turn to fall
In just no time at all….
—Berthe, from Pippin
“Hey Greg.”
“Hey Winter.”
“I’m making some sugar-free cocoa. It’ll be ready in a minute.”
“That’s OK. I don’t want any.”
“And I’m gonna fix that tear in your parka.”
“You don’t need to do that.”
“I left the shovel by the door, right where you can get to it.”
“Listen, Winter, you have to get going.”
“Hold on, I’m turning up the thermostat. Ooh, cocoa’s ready.”
“No, I told you.”
“Fine. You want tea?”
“Winter. It’s over.”
“What’s over?”
“You. Me. We. You’re out of my life.”
“Don’t be silly. Our six-month anniversary is this week.”
“We’re not celebrating it.”
“What are you talking about? You love commemorating anniversaries.”
“Not this one. We’re through.”
“But what about all the fun we had?”
“It wasn’t fun.”
“How could you say that? Think of all the good times we’ve had since that night in early October I moved in?”
“I let you in because I had no choice. You showed up the second last season ended and I couldn’t turn you away.”
“And you’re glad you did.”
“No, I’m not. It was always going to be temporary. It just felt like an eternity.”
“Oh, come on. What about all those nights we spent watching TV?”
“That’s because there was no Mets game on.”
“We went to that Jets game together.”
“Because there was no Mets game to go to.”
“And that Nets game — you loved Barclays Center.”
“I liked it fine but would have been nowhere near it if the Mets had been playing.”
“Are you telling me all those sports meant nothing to you?”
“Compared to baseball, no. They didn’t.”
“Not even March Madness?”
“Not even March Madness.”
“And when we watched other stuff?”
“Would’ve rather watched the Mets.”
“And when we went out and did things?”
“I didn’t care very much about any of it. I was just passing the time with you. And by the way, I hated going out in your weather.”
“That again? You’re bringing up my weather? How could you be so insensitive? That gets to my essential nature!”
“Your essential nature sucks.”
“Take that back!”
“When you take back your stupid superstorm and your early nor’easter and your crazy blizzard and your howling winds and your miserable black ice I slipped on that night in January outside the train station.”
“You’re going to bring that up again?”
“Ice! Frozen into the street! Who leaves ice frozen into the street where you can’t see it?”
“What’s wrong with ice? It’s bracing!”
“It’s deadly! And you’re insane!”
“Oh, you’re just mad because I forgot to turn on the Islanders game for you.”
“I don’t want to watch the Islanders.”
“They have Howie Roooose…”
“I’ll have all the Howie Rose I want starting tomorrow.”
“This is about baseball, isn’t it?”
“Of course it’s about baseball! Do you know me at all after six months?”
“We had baseball.”
“What baseball? When?”
“The playoffs! The World Series!”
“Not the same.”
“The awards!”
“Filler.”
“The transactions!”
“Filler. And depressing, mostly.”
“A full slate of exhibition games!”
“Didn’t count.”
“The WBC!”
“The what?”
“The World Baseball Classic. You said you liked it!”
“I was desperate. I don’t even remember the WBC anymore.”
“What about all these preview magazines I got you when you were complaining about my temperature? Here, I’ll read you something about the Mets if it means that much to you…‘With Johan Santana poised to make a comeback…’”
“Now you’re embarrassing yourself.”
“I did everything I could for you.”
“You couldn’t do anything for me.”
“You’re an ungrateful bastard!”
“You’re a cold bitch!”
“I told you! That’s who I am! I was born this way!”
“Go be born that way somewhere else. I’m leaving for the ballpark tomorrow morning. As soon as I’m out that door, you’re not going to be here anymore.”
“Y’know, it’s not like it doesn’t get chilly at Citi Field.”
“Oh, there may be a chill in the air, but at least I know IT knows when to get out of my life.”
“Fine. I’ll go. But I’ll be back.”
“Winter, I’m gonna be so overjoyed tomorrow that I’m gonna forget I’m ever going to see you again.”
Come Monday, the Mets are slated to introduce nine men who’ve never been Mets before. When the names Scott Atchison, John Buck, Greg Burke, Marlon Byrd, Collin Cowgill, Latroy Hawkins, Brandon Lyon, Anthony Recker and Scott Rice are called, I’ll applaud because they are now part of my team. Some may disappear from the roster before making a lasting impression, some may become sadly synonymous with some regrettable misstep, some may legitimately earn their next hearty hand as they create the kind of tangible bond with me that I figure to recall fondly in this space in the years ahead.
Given how we become attached to certain players, it surprises me that it almost doesn’t matter who lines up and tips a cap on Opening Day. The group is the thing here more than its particular members when you’re considering the composition of a 25-man band. Obviously there’s always going to be a handful we take to heart in a given year or through a string of them, but I never insist on specificity of participants when it comes to going to see the Mets, Opening Day or any day. It’s the Mets. That’s all I need to know.
Not everything I love works quite like that.
The Spinners from the late 1970s on were Henry Fambrough, John Edwards, Billy Henderson, Pervis Jackson and Bobby Smith. Four-fifths of the group had been together from their beginnings in the 1950s, when they were known as the Domingoes, just kids dreaming of the big time in Detroit. Edwards was the veritable newcomer, replacing Philippé Wynne, who replaced G.C. Cameron, who replaced…well, there was one spot in the group that wasn’t always so stable, but the lineup remained remarkably intact for the longest time. When I finally got to see my favorite group perform live in 1997, the Spinners definitely had some mileage on them, but they were still the Spinners as they’d been for a couple of decades. And they were gorgeous.
I’m sorry it took me so long to experience them in person, but I’m grateful I caught them when I did. The Spinners couldn’t stay those Spinners forever. Edwards would suffer a stroke in 2000. Henderson passed away in 2007, Jackson in 2008. And earlier this month, Bobbie Smith — his glistening tenor as much the signature voice of the group as anybody’s — succumbed to illness at the age of 76. Fambrough is all who is left.
But there are still Spinners touring. There were in the weeks prior to Smith’s death and I imagine there will continue to be. Younger members picked up the mics in order to keep on spreading what I believe is some of the most beautiful music ever composed, recorded and performed. “I’ll Be Around”. “Could It Be I’m Falling In Love”. “One Of A Kind (Love Affair)”. “Ghetto Child.” “Mighty Love.” “Then Came You”. “Games People Play”. “Rubberband Man”. Music like that deserves to be played and heard.
Yet I have to admit that when the Spinners came to Westbury in February, as Smith was making what turned out to be his final rounds, I didn’t think much about seeing them again. The ratio was three new members, two originals. I don’t doubt they put on a fine show — judging by an episode of TV One’s Unsung from a couple of years ago, the new guys are talented and each member was still a trouper — but to me, the Spinners were the Spinners I saw in 1997, just in time. With the exception of Edwards, those were the Spinners who rolled out the hits with which I fell in love when I was a kid and grew to love even more as an adult.
Those Spinners can’t play Westbury anymore. But I’ll always have my boxed set. And its contents will always play for me.
The Mets I’ll go to see Monday? Like the Mets I went to see the last time they were in Flushing, they are what happens when the group doesn’t stay together, though I understand more readily what an impossibility that would be. Attrition, substitution, cold/calculating business decisions…when you get right down to it, none of it is really that much of an impediment to my being in their audience.
Santana’s done. Dickey’s traded. Reyes runs. Alfonzo walks. Gooden is not invited back. Seaver slips away twice. I say goodbye to Beltran, to Martinez, to Floyd, to Piazza, to Ordoñez, to Ventura, to Reed, to Mora, to Olerud, to Brogna, to Orsulak, to Strawberry, to Myers, to Hernandez, to Backman, to Brooks, to Flynn, to Henderson, to Grote, to Unser, to Staub, clear back to Swoboda. Guys I really liked and guys I truly loved stopped being Mets. Sometimes it was for better, sometimes it was for worse, sometimes it didn’t wind up making all that much difference. On Opening Day, a couple of dozen men identified as Mets will line up and tip their caps. I will applaud their presence, whoever they are.
I’m ready for another 162 fresh performances, because as much as I cherish the greatest hits, I’m dying to dig on the new material. I hope for harmony and high notes. I’ll settle for a good beat administered in the other direction now and then.
I’m not the most observant person in any room when it comes to physical attributes, but I was always taken aback by Johan Santana’s shoulders. Speaking strictly as a Mets fan, I could’ve spent a lifetime on those shoulders. They seemed capable of defying latitude and going on forever — which wouldn’t be worth observing except for the cliché about that very special ballplayer who can put a team on his shoulders and carry it by himself. It’s a phrase usually applied to home run hitters. Yet approximately every fifth day when things functioned as they were supposed to, Johan Santana elevated us like nobody else in our midst could.
We rode atop those shoulders intermittently across five years. Why just intermittently? Because things function as they’re supposed to only that often around the New York Mets. One look at Johan Santana at his best or simply as his standard-issue self would tell you he wasn’t a natural fit for their uniform. They probably had to special-order him a jersey. The Mets aren’t accustomed to having someone with shoulders quite so broad on their side. Everybody’s usually too slender or slumps too much.
And I’m not talking physique here.
Johan carried us when he could, which became an increasingly infrequent circumstance until it reached a point where his carrying a baseball and firing it to a catcher posed a clear and present danger to himself. But on those occasions when he really picked us up and transported us to places Mets fans rarely got to visit, he made sure we’d never forget it. I can’t actually confirm “never,” because we haven’t had the chance to test our memories against eternity — plus most memories don’t measure up to the task of remembering everything that doesn’t deserve forgetting — but I feel pretty confident in declaring Johan gave us at least a couple of ironclad forget-him-nots in the half-decade he spent now and then towering over our otherwise low-rise landscape.
There was an afternoon in September. There was a night in June. The fact that I need not elaborate one iota says what needs to be said about the width and breadth of Johan Santana’s shoulders, his skills, his stamina, his stuff. Toss in heart and guts and whatnot. There were some other sparkling performances, too, but before you could spend much time lingering on those nights and days, there was always a meniscus or an anterior capsule or some other less well-known body part lurking to ruin the view. You become a Mets fan, you learn about all kinds of anatomy you hadn’t heard of before. You join the Mets, something’s bound to go wrong with parts of you that seemed just fine in Minnesota or wherever. You subject yourself to repair, you rehabilitate as hard as you can, you make your way back and eventually something else doesn’t work to factory specifications. The people who pay you — and pay you very well — estimate you’ll return again any day or week or month now…or perhaps your career is over.
The Mets can never get their story straight when that happens. “You’ll see him when you see him” would be as good a status report as any to issue. “We don’t know — do we look like we know?” would be reasonably accurate, too. And if you’re contemplating the time frame the Mets suggest regarding any given player’s availability after injury, just multiply it by infinity so it will be a nice surprise should he return at all.
Somewhere in the current Spring Training, Johan Santana was the Mets’ Opening Day pitcher in waiting. Then he was out or in or being backdated or guilty of not being in shape or pushing himself unwisely to prove…well, whatever he was trying to prove, he needn’t have bothered. This was February and March. This didn’t mean a whole lot. He proved himself on an afternoon in September, a night in June.
Two games on those shoulders unlike any we’d ever seen. Two games that transcended everything about his team and the era it limped through on those fifth days when neither he nor anybody could carry us quite so surely, serenely and stratospherically. Is it any wonder one of those shoulders finds itself unable to carry on any longer?
Need a boost? The Happiest Recap: First Base (1962-1973) will lift you up, Amazin’ win after Amazin’ win. Check it out here.
Congratulations to our three contest winners: Matthew Fillare, Kevin Connell and Franco Salandra, each of whom hunkered down and earned a DVD copy of Knuckleball, courtesy of the good folks at MPI/FilmBuff. If you didn’t win one but want to own one, that, too, can be arranged.
Here are the answers to our R.A. Dickey quiz:
1. R.A. Dickey pitched three one-hitters as a Met. Who were the culprits who broke up each potential no-hitter in those respective games?
Cole Hamels of the Phillies on August 13, 2010; B.J. Upton of the Rays on June 13, 2012; and Wilson Betemit of the Orioles on June 18, 2012. Only Upton’s was the subject of a Met appeal regarding the scoring decision (it was denied).
2. In R.A. Dickey’s first season on the Mets, he led all starters on the staff in ERA. Who led the team in wins and strikeouts, respectively? In 2010, R.A. Dickey pitched to a 2.84 ERA, Mike Pelfrey won 15 games and Jon Niese struck out 148 batters (while Johan Santana led the staff with four complete games despite missing the final month of the season). The previous time the three Met pitching triple-crown categories were topped by three different pitchers was 1997 when Rick Reed had the lowest ERA, Bobby Jones had the most wins and Dave Mlicki totaled the most strikeouts.
3. Which two longtime Mets broadcasters of yore hailed from R.A. Dickey’s home state? We’re talking Tennessee, and announcers Lindsey Nelson (1962-1978) and Tim McCarver (1983-1998) were the most famous Volunteer Statesmen associated with the Mets before Dickey. The most famous Met player from Tennessee prior to R.A.’s emergence? Collierville’s Marvelous Marv Throneberry (1962-1963).
4. In the only game R.A. Dickey pitched at Shea Stadium, who was the one player to register three hits off him? Fernando Tatis, starting at third base in one of only three games David Wright didn’t that season, went 3-for-3 as Dickey threw seven shutout innings in the Mariners’ 11-0 win of June 24, 2008.
5. Who joined Gary Cohen and Keith Hernandez in the SNY booth the night R.A. Dickey beat the Detroit Tigers at Citi Field in 2010? (Hint: the answer is not Ron Darling.)
Jerry Seinfeld sat in, called Jose Reyes’s fifth-inning home run and gave Mets fans watching at home a great show as R.A. and Frankie Rodriguez teamed on a five-hit shutout on June 23, 2010.
6. Two future Mets besides R.A. Dickey were selected in the first round of the 1996 amateur draft — who were they? Before the Rangers chose R.A. with the 18th pick in the nation, the Pirates, at No. 1, took Kris Benson and the Cardinals used the third pick on Braden Looper. They’d be teammates on the 2004-2005 Mets. (Rob Stratton, taken 13th by the Mets in the first round, never made it to the majors.)
7. What name did Gary Cohen assign the series in which R.A. Dickey won his first game as a New York Met as soon as that series was over? The Goose Egg Sweep; the Phillies failed to score across 27 glorious innings between May 25 and May 27, 2010. Six of those innings were R.A.’s, making his Citi Field debut in the series opener.
8. R.A. Dickey pitched a minor league one-hitter that facilitated his getting called up to the Mets. Who got that one hit against him? Fernando Perez of the Durham Bulls, who led off with a single on April 29, 2010. His last professional action, according to Baseball-Reference, came in 2011 for the same Mets’ Buffalo Triple-A club for which R.A. pitched the year before.
9. Who were the respective first and last batters R.A. Dickey struck out as a Met? First: Cristian Guzman of the Nationals on May 19, 2010. Last: Gorkys Hernandez of the Marlins on October 2, 2012.
10. What did you love most about R.A. Dickey’s tenure as a New York Met? (No correct answer — I’m just curious.) Every Mets fan loved/loves R.A. in his or her own way…
• Matthew: “After several dark years, he single-handedly brought my love of baseball back stronger than it had ever been. And that the love we Mets fans’ had for him — even in his now absence — ultimately came together and bore this fruit that pines for our former loves but understands that some birds aren’t meant to be caged.” (And then, as if angling for extra credit given my fondness for a particular prison-set movie, Matthew included this incredibly appropriate image and one word that explains it all: “Zihuatanejo”.)
• Kevin: “Can’t really put into words why I loved him so much, the emotions are too strong. Quick story on when I knew it was all-time Met love: I remember thinking when I went to see him for the first time in 2012, “this guy is really special, on and off the field,” and then I heard him come to the plate with the Game of Thrones theme playing, and I just quivered. Jocks aren’t supposed to love stories about, well, dungeons and dragons — only geeks like me are!”
• Franco: “Humble, gamer, loved the team and the town.”
Thanks to each of our winners for sharing their Dickeyest thoughts. Thanks once more to MPI/Film Buff for promotional considerations. You can check out more about a terrific documentary/romance here; if you want to complete your Dickey libR.A.ry, the paperback edition of Wherever I Wind Up is now available as well.
And one more time before our no longer caged bird flies north to Toronto to start 2013, thanks R.A. Sometimes it’s hard to believe it was real, but it was.
There’s a press release getting play here and there trumpeting a magical “index” of Sports Fan Loyalty, the kind of thing that comes around on the eve of a new season. It also tends to lunge at the native lingo by suggesting “it’s critical that team marketers do accurate scouting regarding the strategic ball they intend to pitch to fans,” as if anybody in baseball or the world has ever spoken like that. Nomenclature notwithstanding, this index claims to offer a handle on why fans are loyal to whatever degree they are to their team. Three of the four factors boil down to, essentially, “a team needs to win a lot and triumph noisily enough in order to sate a disproportionate share of frontrunners in its standard metropolitan statistical area.” In other news, the sun is coming up in the east tomorrow.
Yet the fourth factor cited in the release is one I find legitimately interesting.
History and Tradition: “[Are] the game and the team part of the fans’ and community rituals, institutions and beliefs?”
The biggest slice of the press release’s pie chart — 35% — is devoted to History and Tradition, implying that nothing could be more important in this particular scheme of things. Even if you put aside the unlikelihood that sports fan loyalty can be accounted for so neatly and accurately, it would figure intuitively that if you’re talking about the state of being loyal, you’d need something abiding to be loyal to. That, in turn, would seem to jibe with how deeply a given team and the sport it plays have burrowed into the local bloodstream.
And the M-E-T-S of New York town? They rank 26th of 30 MLB teams in engendering fan loyalty by this study’s standards and methodology, though I’m not sure if that’s supposed to mean Mets fans are to be considered the 26th most loyal in Major League Baseball, ahead of only the Mariners, Pirates, Royals and Astros. Since the company putting out this release wants to offer its services to sports franchises (so as to share the proprietary secrets of pitching better strategic ball, presumably), I’d say the fault lies not in ourselves, but in our star-devoid team, along with its implied failure to weave itself effectively into the indigenous culture.
Because if there’s one thing an actual as opposed to theoretical Mets fan is, it’s bleeping loyal. There may not be as many of us in and around New York as there were when the Mets won more consistently than they lost, but don’t imply that our “base” or “core” hasn’t outperformed the product it’s been sold these past several years.
The press release claims its index measures “intensity” of fan support. Well, who’s more intense than us? Who gets more wrapped up in this stuff than we do? The release invokes “emotional drivers” — who gets more emotional than a Mets fan? This identity isn’t based on quantitative factors like championships, playoff appearances and reflected glory. We love the Mets because we love the Mets. I wouldn’t call our love unquestioning, given that we are a relentlessly inquisitive bunch, but I would call Mets fan loyalty unshakable at its core and at its base. It will be on vivid display in a hundred different ways one week from today inside and outside a ballpark in Flushing, but all ya gotta do, really, is visit a hundred different sites, blogs and feeds to see it in action right this very minute.
(I can’t speak to the frontrunners among Mets fans. Given the prevailing competitive conditions, I haven’t seen too many in our ranks lately.)
It’s not us saddling you with a bad-looking grade in this press release, dear Mets organization. It’s you. We’re the history and tradition unto ourselves because we’ve had to be. On some counts you’ve caught up with us, but only after you allowed your brand equity to fade into the woodwork, rejecting too much history and too many traditions for too long. You’ve brought back some cherished iconography but only after you hid it away or forgot about it completely. It was we who questioned you and reminded you like it mattered to us…which it did. I’m glad you responded. I’m sorry you needed the nudge.
In the wake of the just-announced departure of Dave Howard (on whose watch certain traditions disappeared but, thankfully, later re-emerged), the Mets should soon name a new head of business operations. I hope that person — as well as the ownership to which he or she reports — views Mets history and Mets tradition as a living, going priority, not merely a box to be perfunctorily checked once in a while. Ya do that, ya get ticket prices in line and ya keep cultivating that young pitching, I’d say we’re a good bet to rise out of the bottom five any year now.
Knuckleball is classified as a documentary, but that’s not quite right. At the very least, it should be cross-referenced as a romance. When you watch the DVD — three copies of which we’re happy to offer those who win our contest below — you’ll fall in love with R.A. Dickey all over again.
This may be a dangerous time to remember how fond you were of Dickey, in case you’ve somehow forgotten. R.A.’s in Toronto, and all we have left of him are our memories and what stand now as two welcome memorials to his time here.
Dickey’s book, Wherever I Wind Up, is out in paperback. It includes a new epilogue covering 2012: his climb up Kilimanjaro; the reaction to his published revelations of the child abuse he suffered; his experience on the bench watching Johan Santana throw the Mets’ first no-hitter — wherein somebody sadly/sloppily attributed Lucas Duda’s home run to Kirk Nieuwenhuis; and his Cy Young season (he loved us appreciating his 20th win as much as we loved appreciating it). Nothing about the trade or the contract-extension negotiations that went awry in advance of it. As if to remind us a year has gone by since Dickey’s journey was literally and figuratively elevated to dizzying heights, the cover of the paperback edition features R.A. in no immediately discernible uniform, whereas the front of the hardcover version, discussed here last summer, portrayed him as a Met.
As does Knuckleball, the movie released to festivals and art houses in 2012, when it was impossible to imagine R.A. Dickey as anything but a Met. Even if you read Wherever I Wind Up and soaked up every iota of Dickeyana that came along as he was regularly befuddling opposing batters (it’s hard to say they were hitters), you’ll want Knuckleball anyway. You’ll want R.A. Dickey as a Met, lovingly and gorgeously preserved in action. You’ll want R.A. talking the knuckler and being the knuckleballer. You’ll want to hear him address and evince that certain “otherness” that made him so attractive to us. That’s the heart of the movie, that this is a pitch almost nobody throws (even if, as R.A. says with the tiniest speck of resentment, almost everybody thinks they can) and, ergo, nobody can really understand what it means to throw.
R.A. and his fellow knucklers get the pitch and they get each other. It’s what binds the fellowship among Dickey, Tim Wakefield, Charlie Hough and Phil Niekro. We meet them, too, though there’s no doubt who we’re most interested in. Those guys are important to the story nonetheless. Anybody with enough strength can throw a fastball. It takes a village to deliver a knuckleball.
But all it will take to get a copy of Knuckleball delivered to you is to win our contest, sponsored by MPI/FilmBuff, which is graciously providing three DVDs for Faith and Fear readers. The package includes not just the movie but a couple of hours of absorbing extras: a lot of Jim Bouton, a helping of Tom Candiotti, a visit to R.A.’s high school, some chat from some managers and so forth. Yes, you will want to win one of these.
And how can you do that? By answering a not terribly long, not terribly difficult (if reasonably challenging) Faith and Fear quiz, presented here:
CONTEST UPDATE: WE HAVE OUR WINNERS
1. R.A. Dickey pitched three one-hitters as a Met. Who were the culprits who broke up each potential no-hitter in those respective games?
2. In R.A. Dickey’s first season on the Mets, he led all starters on the staff in ERA. Who led the team in wins and strikeouts, respectively?
3. Which two longtime Mets broadcasters of yore hailed from R.A. Dickey’s home state?
4. In the only game R.A. Dickey pitched at Shea Stadium, who was the one player to register three hits off him?
5. Who joined Gary Cohen and Keith Hernandez in the SNY booth the night R.A. Dickey beat the Detroit Tigers at Citi Field in 2010? (Hint: the answer is not Ron Darling.)
6. Two future Mets besides R.A. Dickey were selected in the first round of the 1996 amateur draft — who were they?
7. What name did Gary Cohen assign the series in which R.A. Dickey won his first game as a New York Met as soon as that series was over?
8. R.A. Dickey pitched a minor league one-hitter that facilitated his getting called up to the Mets. Who got that one hit against him?
9. Who were the respective first and last batters R.A. Dickey struck out as a Met?
10. What did you love most about R.A. Dickey’s tenure as a New York Met? (No correct answer — I’m just curious.)
The first three sets of correct answers (do not leave No. 10 blank) to be sent to faithandfear@gmail.com by Thursday, March 28, 11:59 PM EDT will win the DVD from MPI/FilmBuff. And if you don’t win, or you want to take the easy way out, you can purchase Knuckleballhere.
And if you’re looking for the revised edition of Wherever I Wind Up, you can check it out here; it’s worthwhile despite that Nieuwenhuis/Duda mixup.
Thanks to Knuckleball, you can still have a little Dickey now…and, presumably, a lot of d’Arnaud later.
I’ve decided there are three junctures of the Spring Training schedule that make the endless nature of the exhibition interregnum worthwhile.
First, there’s that inaugural Spring Training broadcast, when those voices you value most greet you for the first time in a proper context in months. You might have heard them announcing hockey or college basketball but, respectfully, screw that. You are baseball to us. Thank you for speaking as you should.
Next, there’s that moment when March’s behavior seems utterly normal. It means we’ve been at it just long enough to get comfortable with the season whose pieces are being put into place but not so long that we can’t stand to more than glance at fake games that don’t count. There was a night a few weeks ago when I told my wife I’d get to something as soon as I knew for sure that this game I’m watching is going to be called a tie — that’s Spring thinking, and you know you can’t live like this much longer. (I believe the formal name for this condition, when you realize what a crock Spring Training has become, is Stocker-Home Syndrome.)
Finally and best of all is the spring game that waves you around third base, when the whole thing feels closer to real than it did the game before and the calendar confirms you’re not kidding yourself. From this game on, you can tolerate staring at St. Lucie and the insertion of random minor leaguers to fill out eighth innings and going without otherwise engaged Howie or Gary for another day because you know the berm is turning.
Saturday was my “finally” day, the day the plates started shifting from store-brand plastic to the good china. On Saturday, 2013 began to inch closer not in theory, but in “only nine days to go!” actuality. On Saturday, the radio wasn’t wasting my time with substitutions and diversions, but was engaging me with an almost authentic baseball game. On Saturday, the sun filtered through the living room window as if to get the lighting right for what have gone from numbingly repetitive rehearsals to legitimate out-of-town previews. There are a few performances left to get the kinks out and then the curtain rises and stays risen for six months.
It’s so close, I’m looking for a spoon with which to taste it. I can even detect a soupçon of confidence in the outfield if I swish the ingredients around in my head enough.
They’re all we’re getting, apparently. Lucas Duda, Collin Cowgill, Marlon Byrd, Mike Baxter and my man Jordany Valdespin (the more they write about was a misfit he is, the more I’m determined to go down in flames with him) will constitute, by definition, a major league outfield very soon because in 1960, a franchise was awarded to some rich New York people and membership dues have apparently been kept up ever since. That is to say that when Terry Collins writes whatever combination of the above names into left, center and right, these cats no longer loom as elements of the worst outfield ever.
No, they get every chance to prove it. Or prove they’re not it. They can stop depressing us on paper and begin impressing us on grass. Or they can get on with the business of sucking out loud volubly enough that next thing ya know, Kirk Nieuwenhuis will be deemed fully healed and Matt den Dekker judged competent to hit. If we comport ourselves like real ladies and gentlemen and eat all our convenience fees, Stand-Pat Sandy Alderson — who was going to get Michael Bourn or Justin Upton so much that he didn’t need to keep Scott Hairston around — might even grope about 29 other organizations for a marginal upgrade.
It’s an unfortunate “army you have” situation as we enter the 2013 campaign, but our outfield won’t always be so Rumsfeldian in nature. Maybe it will be the army we wish to have if enough things don’t go wrong, never mind actually go right. Duda’s back to walloping and allowing us to dream he’s concocted from the same Chemical X that made the Powerpuff Girls so formidable. Everybody’s in love with the way Cowgill “plays the game,” what with running hard and stuff (doesn’t take much to get a reputation, apparently). Byrd, we’ve been reminded by management, was an All-Star as recently as the dawn of this decade. Baxter is Mike from Whitestone, so lay off. And Jordany’s only done everything right on the field all Spring long despite being abandoned on the bench by Collins last September when that would’ve been a good time to see what he could do on a daily basis besides wear the wrong shirt into the clubhouse and no cup outside of it.
Individually or together the supposedly Feeble Five could surprise some cynics. Or the lot of them could play to common expectation. But the good part of that possible outcome is their performance will be on the record and it’s not likely they’ll be planted in the outfield forever. Occasionally Alderson does act for the present, like when he discharged several underperforming relievers in early 2011 as soon as it was disgustingly obvious they were not helping matters. Two years later we’re still constantly shuffling the bullpen deck, but who even notices when the outfield is so terrible? Or not so terrible, maybe it will turn out.
Don’tcha see the beauty, though? We’re going to get a handle on whether the anti-hype is accurate. We really are. We may not like the handle…or the handle that comes after it…or the one after that. But in just over a week, it will be a real handle discerned from real games in the real season.
For better or worse or somewhere in between, the five Mets outfielders and I are ready.
Congratulations to David Wright, named Mets captain after a distinguished, classy nine years on the field and the usual tatty nine weeks or so of Mets mini-drama, replacing what should have been a couple of hours behind closed doors.
I was briefly amused by Wright’s decision not to wear a captain’s C, as if the Mets uniform is or ever has been an exemplar of understated, classical design. I didn’t pay attention to every pixel and stream yesterday, but it’s somewhere between possible and likely that Wright was talking uniforms while wearing a blinding two-tone cap with a mascot on it.
But then I decided Wright was (w)right, and therein lay a lesson. He exists in a world where the Mets are better than this, from their uniforms to their way of dealing with the media, fans and their own players to their W-L record. At times he has been the only hint that such a world is possible. Yet he sees those possibilities, and has invariably tried to make them realities, whether it’s speaking to one more reporter or being kind to one more kid or playing through one more injury. At the risk of simultaneously grabbing a shopworn phrase and using it for small reasons, he has been the change he wants to see in his baseball world.
And that’s a C anyone can see.
* * *
Yesterday, with the Mets on the field in Port St. Lucie, I found myself thinking about a Met who’s rarely been front and center: Jeremy Hefner.
Hefner just turned 27, and for much of his admittedly short Met career I’ve thought of him as an equally poor man’s Pat Misch, which is mean but didn’t seem off the mark. Hefner’s been one of those guys with a lot of pitches — fastball, slider, change — and good command, but no true out pitch. Occasionally guys like that turn out to be Greg Maddux (or Rick Reed), but most of the time they don’t. Most of the time they bounce up and down between roles and levels, settling in as roster-fillers somewhere. You root for them — it’s hard not to — but you also don’t expect them to stick around.
I also pegged Hefner as the Met most likely to express profound relief once he was no longer a Met, based on my first glimpses of him as a devout Oklahoman who was visibly nervous about an in-game interview with Kevin Burkhardt. There’s nothing whatsoever wrong with any of those things, but they seemed like a mismatch for New York, and I assumed Hefner would be a lot happier in Texas or St. Louis or Kansas City, where the media aren’t quite so ravenous and the klieg lights aren’t quite so blinding.
But every player who ascends to major-league baseball is both a world-class athlete and a monstrous competitor. And though we can generally tell a lot about a player by their 27th birthday, that crystal ball is not perfect. Sometimes guys figure stuff out. Not many of them, it’s true, but it does happen. A Dillon Gee evades his statistical fortune and becomes a reliable big-league starter. A Ronny Cedeno rethinks his approach at the plate and gets on base. Or recall that when Terry Collins arrived, a lot of us reviewed his jittery tenure in Anaheim and set our watches for when his freakouts would alienate the Mets. Two years into his time as manager, if anything we’ve criticized Collins for not freaking out at the Mets enough.
But back to Hefner. On a dreary September night he retired not one single Phillie as the Mets got beat by 15, and I was worried about him when he faced the cameras afterwards looking like a cracked egg. Five days later, he went seven innings against the Pirates, holding them to three hits and no runs. Nobody much noticed, but I was impressed. It must be awful to fail horribly at your craft in public, and then to answer a million questions about it and prepare for the next time amid more questions and go out and try again, all in public. That’s pressure I’ll likely never experience, and can’t imagine. Hefner went through it and came out the other side having crafted a satisfying little baseball moral.
And this spring? He’s been quite capable — and looked like something of a different pitcher, using an improved cutter to miss bats in bushels.
Word of that cutter will get out, as it does. Hefner could pitch lights-out and still find himself in the pen or in Las Vegas once Johan Santana returns. It’s entirely possible that his March possibilities will be forgotten amid June realities.
But still: Sometimes guys figure stuff out. In forecasting the Mets’ Plan B rotation, the conversation has gone from “or Jeremy Hefner I guess” to “Jeremy Hefner, obviously.” That’s a testament to Hefner’s hard work and a reason to hope — for him and for us.
And after all, isn’t that what spring training’s for?
Piazza: Catcher, Slugger, Icon, Star by Greg Prince is available from Amazon, Barnes & Noble and other online booksellers.
Amazin' Again: How the 2015 New York Mets Brought the Magic Back to Queens by Greg Prince is available from Amazon, Barnes & Noble and other online booksellers.
Volume I of The Happiest Recap: 50+ Years of the New York Mets As Told in 500+ Amazin' Wins by Greg Prince is available in print and for Kindle on Amazon.
Faith and Fear in Flushing: An Intense Personal History by Greg Prince (foreword by Jason Fry), is available from Amazon, Barnes & Noble and other online booksellers.
