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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 29 October 2012 1:15 pm The east side of our backyard is defined by a low brick wall that belongs to the building next to us. The top of it is festooned with loops and whorls and tangles of stuff — some of it’s wandering ivy, but most of it is a few decades’ worth of changing infrastructure. There’s coax, and old phone lines and who knows what else, the extant and the defunct all snarled up together.
That seemed like a logical place to run a string of lights. And baseball lights — little white plastic globes with red stitches — seemed like the logical kind of string lights to get. There are Christmas lights in there too, but looking out the window they’re invisible unless on. The baseball lights, though, are impossible to miss.
The baseball lights are connected to various extension cords that follow the string and the coax and all that stuff, descend the wall, run behind a fence, make a quick dash through the open to the maple tree, then run in the shadows alongside the bottom of the little deck and make another quick dash across the walk, this last little journey taking advantage of a handy little channel between slabs. Then the cord runs down the wall and crosses a slab between the retaining wall and the building and finds its power outlet.
A few years ago I bought a little timer for that outlet. The baseball lights turn on, you’ll be shocked to learn, a little after 7 p.m. each night — I can’t quite get them to switch on obediently at 7:10, but close enough. By 11:30 they shut themselves off. I plug them in on Opening Day. And I unplug them … well, I did it this morning, making a quick dash through the wind and rain of Sandy’s outer bands.
When I get back from Thanksgiving I’ll plug in the Christmas lights, changing the timer setting so they go on a little after 5 p.m. in the ever-earlier winter dark. They’ll stay on until somewhere between New Year’s and Epiphany, depending on the weather and my fortitude. And then there’s nothing but darkness until April.
I’m always happy sitting on my haunches that first April day, fitting the plug into the outlet and making sure the timer’s working — the sun is losing its winter pallor, the spring plants are peeking up out of the thawed soil and the Mets are back. After that day, for nearly seven months I can look out and see the white globes glowing in the evening and know that everything’s as it should be. Until it’s time to acknowledge — with a quick yank on a cord — that it’s not.
It will be a long lonely five months. But that’s always true, and it always passes. In fact, while you were reading this the wait just got a little shorter. And that’s something to smile about.
by Greg Prince on 29 October 2012 3:34 am It seems more than a trophy and some t-shirts should be at stake when you wear the title “World Champions”. I wanna see some real consequences, some real responsibilities. So, San Francisco Giants — if you are indeed championing all of us in this world, what the hell are you going to do about this worst-ever monster storm that’s bearing down on your old hometown?
I suppose making sure we wouldn’t have to worry about missing any additional World Series games amid any potential power outages was the Giants’ first act as our champions. I was hoping for a solution to global climate change, but there’s only so much you can realistically ask out of a baseball team, even the best one in the land.
Congratulations to the recurring champs, whatever the parameters of their jurisdiction. Thanks for getting your reign started before the rains kick in. And, honestly, thanks for getting the Series over with in four straight, even if the fourth game was the first really good one and put me in the mood for maybe three more before calling it winter. Yet, with no disrespect to Our (briefly) Beloved Detroit Tigers, that probably wouldn’t have worked, and not just for reasons pertaining to the reliability of local utilities. This Series belonged to the Giants for far too long to suddenly grow overly tense. You start not winning Game Four, then maybe Verlander remembers he’s Verlander in Game Five, and now it’s Halloween, which would make the optics great in the home of the orange and black for Game Six…
But, nah. This baseball postseason had to end because it was an adjunct of this baseball regular season, an entity that included, you might recall, the long, slow deterioration of the once-promising 2012 New York Mets. Remember them? They seem as distant to us now as the 1912 New York Giants even though they were playing ball in our name fewer than four weeks ago. The longer the 2012 World Series wore on, the longer there was the faintest hint of 74-88 disappointment in the atmosphere. We had to see Baseball 2012 complete its appointed rounds in order to fully start strategizing and self-deluding in advance of Baseball 2013.
Really, we didn’t need a little more postseason baseball now. We need much better Mets baseball soon. And we need monster storms to take sharp right turns into the Atlantic and leave us be. I’ll take that one ASAP, and a better Mets team in April.
Hey World Champion Giants, get on those requests right away, wouldja? It would make our world a whole lot happier.
by Greg Prince on 28 October 2012 11:56 am Blink and you’re missing it, this 2012 World Series. The Tigers certainly seem to have leaned on the fast-forward button without realizing it.
Maybe it’s appropriate how swiftly the first three games have flown by as they’ve landed in Giants territory, and not just because record-level winds are forecast to lift America’s East Coast into the air and plop it somewhere in the middle of Ohio in the coming days. Unless you’re rabidly invested in the projected outcome — which is to say you already owned a set of panda ears before Game One — these have been the kinds of contests you keep tabs on while doing something else.
Or maybe I’m not necessarily speaking for the nation, just myself. I never seem to fully ingest World Series the Tigers are involved in. Four have been played in my lifetime, and what I remember about the lot of them is that I didn’t really see very much of any of them.
1968: The Year of the Tiger…the year before I knew from baseball except for my handful of earliest, inherited ’67 and ’68 baseball cards. I had from that primordial period (and still have, I’m pretty sure) a Joe Sparma, a Mayo Smith, a Willie Horton and, oh yeah, an Al Kaline. But I didn’t grasp who they were for a little while longer. For my seventh birthday, which came a couple of months after the 1969 World Series, at which point I was a fully vested fan, I was given a sports almanac that was already a little out of date. It listed the Detroit Tigers as baseball’s most recent champions, detailing Denny McLain’s 31-6 season; how the Cardinals behind Bob Gibson (17 strikeouts in Game One) took a 3-1 Series lead; and how Mickey Lolich (3-0 in the Series) won Game Seven to complete Detroit’s comeback. It had happened fourteen months earlier, but it was ancient history to my young mind.
1984: I was in college, which is my blanket excuse for having only scattered memories of the Fall Classic when I was a sophomore, junior and, in ’84, senior. If the World Series was a major, I would have muddled through with a “C”. I watched intently my freshman year, Dodgers overcoming the Yankees, because it was the Dodgers overcoming the Yankees and because I kept to myself my first semester and was happy to have something as familiar as the World Series to cling to. The next three — Cardinals vs. Brewers, Phillies vs. Orioles, Tigers vs. Padres — found me immersed collegiately and quite busy the way you’re supposed to at that stage of your life. My sister and brother-in-law were visiting the weekend Detroit wrapped up their first championship in sixteen years. I followed the action a little here, a little there, not all that much. My strongest memory of that five-game set was the waiter at Steak ‘n’ Shake (where I always dragged everybody who came from out of town) telling us he was from Detroit and wished he was there right now.
2006: Scrupulously avoided most of the Tigers’ five-game defeat for reasons completely unrelated to the presence of the Tigers. I’m going to guess I’m not alone on that count here.
And in 2012? Ah, you know. Things to do, places to be, maybe something more compelling on TV (Wednesday night with new episodes of The Middle and Modern Family are almost sacrosanct in our living room, so I had to catch up with Pablo Sandoval’s power display during commercial breaks), maybe another storm of the century to panic over. I watched Prince Fielder thrown out at the plate in Game Two in the company of several serious Giants fans, which made the moment (like Fielder) larger than life, but then I had to skedaddle. I listened to the middle innings that night on ESPN Radio and found myself absorbed by the pitching duel I wasn’t seeing. Once I got home, though, I kept no more than one eye and one ear on the proceedings, not fully settling down with the televised version, really, until the ninth.
Game Three, with the same 2-0 outcome as Game Two, was a little like that, picking it up in bits (the two Giant runs) when I had a moment to sit down and pieces (Ryan Vogelsong taking command) when I was following along on radio. Eventually, I was in front of the TV without looking up at it all that much as Vogelsong gave way to Lincecum, and Lincecum gave way to Romo…but I never changed the channel, at least.
I did see Gregor Blanco make the running, reaching catch in left that instantly evoked Sandy Amoros from 1955. I did fathom Tim Lincecum, accomplished starter turned deadly reliever, was doing something similar to what Sid Fernandez had done on the same night in 1986. I did calculate that the Giants of 2012 are one game from duplicating the sweep the Giants of 1954 laid on the Indians. And I marveled that the World Series perpetuates its past very well even as its present becomes harder to nail down. In San Francisco, this World Series will someday provide precedent and fodder for knowing analogies. In Detroit, too, albeit likely in a sadder context. For the rest of us, maybe we’ll remember some of what we caught here and there. Or maybe we’ll remember what we were doing when — unlike Gregor Blanco — we didn’t catch all that much of it.
by Greg Prince on 26 October 2012 8:51 pm The Village Voice recently and wisely named Alex Belth of Bronx Banter New York’s best sportswriter, and it’s a pleasure to present compelling evidence: “Two Rogers,” Alex’s exploration of the intersection of Roger Kahn and Roger Angell by way of Alex’s father, Don Belth. They’re three fascinating figures, as considered by someone who knows how to fascinate. Check out the story at SB Nation.
by Greg Prince on 26 October 2012 1:08 am In Annie Hall, Alvy Singer (Woody Allen) and Annie Hall (Diane Keaton) are asked — on a split screen, by their respective therapists — to describe the frequency of their, shall we say, adult interactions with one another.
“Hardly ever,” says Alvy. “Maybe three times a week.”
“Constantly,” says Annie. “I’d say three times a week.”
In that vein, I could imagine somebody else taking in the second game of the 2012 World Series and labeling it “boring — there were only two runs scored the whole night,” while I would avow at the exact same instant that it was “fantastic — only two runs scored the whole night!”
A lack of offense is by no means a guarantee of fun, not even when filtered through one’s old-school, purist, National League instincts, but if a game ever benefited from a lack of what others might call “action,” Game Two was it. The Giants scored twice, but not until the seventh and without the benefit of a run-scoring hit. The Tigers didn’t score at all. And that’s…fun?
Totally! Are you kidding? Of course it’s fun! A single, a walk, a bunt hit…and a DP grounder! That’s all the Giants needed to take a seventh-inning lead. And then in the eighth: a walk, a strikeout, a steal, an intentional walk, an unintentional walk and a fly ball. Bam — insurance!
John McGraw would have been tickled. I know I was.
Nothing wrong with one player hitting three home runs in one game, as Pablo Sandoval did in Game One, but slugfests (especially one-sided slugfests) are their most effective when they fall out of the sky. I remember the offensive onslaughts of the latter 1990s. The more common they became, the number I grew. But a game so close that Prince Fielder, who it turns out does not move well for a big man, is sent from first to home — or almost home — on a second-inning double with nobody out because who knows when another Tiger will have another chance?
That’s real entertainment. That’s defense to go with pitching, of which there was plenty between Madison Bumgarner and Doug Fister. Bumgarner gave up only two hits in seven innings while striking out eight. But Fister — four hits in six innings — kept pitching despite taking a ball off the head, for crissake. So I’d call that a pitching duel.
Maybe the Tigers are just cold. Maybe they’ll heat up in Detroit. That would be fine. My N.L. roots are showing and I find myself leaning San Francisco’s way, but I’m willing to risk Giant fans’ happiness in quest of a World Series that goes as long as possible. We had one blowout that was moderately enjoyable if just for the novelty of the Panda going so deep so often and all the joy Phone Company Park radiates when things are going extremely well for the home team. But then we had Bumgarner and Fister starring, and the hitters scuffling to make something happen, and the result was tense beauty — or perhaps beautiful tension.
The remaining games don’t all have to unfold as mysteriously and gorgeously like Game Two, but I tell ya, it’s not a bad blueprint.
by Greg Prince on 24 October 2012 9:41 am Hindsight alert: The Mets should’ve held onto Marco Scutaro. Or they shouldn’t have let him go so soon. Certainly not for so little, which is to say for absolutely nothing.
As sketchy as my recollections of Scutaro’s 75 games hitting .216 in a Mets uniform are, I do recall clearly his beginning and his end. He arrived as an anecdote to which I’ve already made reference once this postseason, but it was so enjoyable, let’s go there again.
Scutaro was called up to the Mets in the about-to-be-wretched summer of 2002. He introduced himself to his new manager, Bobby Valentine, while in the team hotel in Cincinnati. And Valentine told him, hi, good to meet ya, kid…because Valentine had no idea who he was, communication not being a hallmark of the Bobby V-Steve Phillips relationship.
When the manager doesn’t know Marco from Adam, it’s not a good sign for Marco. But the 26-year-old rookie got a big hit early (a pinch-triple that drove in two runs against Montreal) and seemed as good an addition to the ’02 Mets as anybody. Which was a sad commentary in a year when the Mets had added Roberto Alomar and Mo Vaughn, but that’s another story.
Marco became one of those frequent-flier mileage collectors on the Norfolk-to-LaGuardia route. He didn’t impress Bobby, who famously stuck him in the outfield just long enough for a ball to find an out-of-position infielder, and Art Howe had no problem alternately sending him down and ignoring him in 2003. Still, those Mets, a 66-95 juggernaut, could use all the spit and vinegar they could muster, so I figured scrappy Scutaro would be good for a long look in 2004. The Mets had been looking long at Joe McEwing since 2000. Scutaro seemed at least as plausible an option, like a McEwing with talent.
Then, to my proportional shock and surprise (because, let’s face it, how shocked and surprised are you going to get about a backup infielder?), I read in October of 2003 that the A’s had picked up Scutaro and outfielder Matt Watson off waivers. “The Mets let Scutaro go for nothing?” was my reaction, if only to myself. “I thought they loved guys like him. They’ve loved Super Joe for four seasons!”
In the midst of the ’03 postseason, the one in which the Yankees and Red Sox were playing seven games for the American League pennant while Pedro Martinez was having enough of Don Zimmer’s lovable gnome act, the Scutaro-Watson Waiver Transaction Story didn’t gain much traction in the media. “Neither player figured in New York’s plans next season,” was how an mlb.com report summarily dismissed its significance. And soon enough, GM Jim Duquette and whoever pulled the strings above him were on to bigger and better capers, like signing Kaz Matsui to play short and shifting Jose Reyes to second.
Good times.
Anyway, life went on, as did Scutaro, carving a niche for himself out in Oakland, cresting with his six-RBI performance in the 2006 ALDS I assume none of us watched. Stays in Toronto, Boston and Colorado would follow, as a solid reserve player grew into a solid starting shortstop for a couple of years. In late July of this year, the hapless Rockies moved him to the aspirational Giants.
And Marco Scutaro wasn’t Super Joe anymore. He was Superman, batting .362, taking over second base and pushing San Francisco toward a division title. Then he was a whole other brand of superheroic, absorbing a punishing slide from Matt Holliday in the NLCS, picking himself up, dusting himself off and hitting .500 to win MVP honors for the seven-game series. San Fran may or may not have held off the Dodgers without Marco. With him, they are in the World Series tonight.
You know those small trades nobody much notices that three months later can be identified as turning points in the life of a franchise? That’s what Charlie Culberson for Marco Scutaro was for the Giants.
The Mets exposing him to waivers in 2003? It seemed strange but it didn’t feel overly portentous. The club improved every season for the next three seasons, which could lead one to conclude the only thing holding the Mets back in 2002 and 2003 was the recurring presence of that darn Marco Scutaro…but that may be a stretch.
It is a stretch, of course. Players are overlooked and undervalued all the time in this game, especially in hindsight. Scutaro was a Met in the first place because both Cleveland and Milwaukee gave up on him as a minor leaguer. He seemed worth holding onto nine years ago but not out of any great vision that someday he’d be setting the playoffs on fire. I can assure you I’ve given his career more thought in the last week than I have at any time in the past decade, so I’m willing to forgive Duquette his transaction transgression. Besides, the Mets were seeking a potential replacement for their then-interim GM at the very moment Scutaro was snatched away by Billy Beane. What’s major league personnel evaluation when there’s a distraction at hand? True, Beane was just coming off a five-game division series loss to Boston and had been in the midst of the Moneyball controversy all season, but some organizations are more equipped than others to handle distractions.
It may be 98% hindsight at this point, yet nevertheless, it’s kind of retroactively irritating that we had a pretty decent player in our midst and let him go for no particular reason, and with no compensation coming back our way. Never mind the 2012 heroics for the Giants. Scutaro, my insightful friend Rob Emproto contends, has been one of the past decade’s handful of perennially useful utilitymen, along with Ty Wigginton and Jeff Keppinger (the former traded by the Mets for the latter, though that deal was Kris/Anna Benson-centric), “and we let all three slip through our fingers while having a need for this exact type of player the whole time. To me, this was a key problem of the pre-Madoff Mets: they saw what players couldn’t do, not what they could do. They invested almost as much in Kaz Matsui and Luis Castillo alone as they would have had they kept all three of those guys for ten years.”
Hindsight indicates Rob may be onto something. The more prevalent Mets fan fatalism, however, can just as soon conjure a scenario in which we passed on Kaz and Luis and they excelled at our expense while three stiffs named Wigginton, Keppinger and Scutaro cluttered up our roster.
Someday I’ll use the powers of hindsight to conjure a scenario in which things work out for the Mets. It’s just so hard to imagine is all.
by Greg Prince on 23 October 2012 8:41 am You could’ve used the phrase, “The Tigers will meet the Giants in the World Series” in 1908, but Fred Merkle didn’t touch second, Johnny Evers pulled some shenanigans with the first baseball handy and the powers that be got suckered into calling a Giants win over the Cubs a tie, thereby compelling a makeup game that went the wrong way. Thus, the A.L. champion Tigers did not meet the Giants in the World Series in 1908.
You could’ve used the phrase, “The Tigers will meet the Giants in the World Series” in 1934, but the Giants didn’t put enough distance between themselves and the Gashouse Gang Cardinals to overcome the nearness of their manager’s foot to his mouth. Bill Terry had joked before the season, regarding his downtrodden crosstown rivals’ prospective finish, “Is Brooklyn still in the league?” The Dodgers got the last laugh, however, taking a pair of games the Giants desperately needed, ensuring the league flag would fly in St. Louis. Thus, the A.L. champion Tigers did not meet the Giants in the World Series in 1934.
You could’ve used the phrase, “The Tigers will meet the Giants in the World Series” in 1987, but the playoffs had other ideas. The Tigers, heavily favored in the ALCS after they leapfrogged the Blue Jays to win the Eastern Division, were shocked in five games by the seemingly unspectacular 85-77 Minnesota Twins. And even if they hadn’t been, the Giants of Jeffrey Leonard’s one flap down succumbed in seven to St. Louis in the NLCS. Thus, the A.L. East champion Tigers did not meet the Giants — nor did the N.L. West champion Giants meet the Tigers — in the World Series in 1987.
Because of the First Amendment, you could’ve used that phrase in those years or conceivably any year from the birth of the World Series in 1903 clear through to the most recent edition in 2011. Two baseball team names in simultaneous continued use for more than a century would seem a natural for coupling in an October sentence. But for more than a century you couldn’t say it and be accurate about it.
Christy Mathewson did not face Ty Cobb. Hank Greenberg did not stare out at Carl Hubbell. Jack Morris in his prime didn’t have to go after a young Will Clark. No Hal Newhouser vs. Bobby Thomson or Denny McLain vs. Willie Mays, for that matter. So many Tigers and so many Giants have graced the upper echelons of baseball history, yet there was never a Tigers-Giants World Series.
Until now, of course.
The last time we had a situation akin to what’s about to unfold — two pre-expansion franchises that had never previously clashed in the Fall Classic under their ancestral names finally getting together as such to decide the championship — was 1975, when the Reds and Red Sox forged a showdown for the ages. Now, at last, we have the maiden Tigers-Giants World Series. We have Justin Verlander and Buster Posey; Matt Cain and Miguel Cabrera; Octavio Dotel and Angel Pagan, perhaps. We have National League Championship Series Most Valuable Player Marco Scutaro carrying a ten-game postseason hitting streak into what loomed more as MLB Finals more than Fall Classic before this, the 108th World Series, came into full view.
I never saw baseball when it was two leagues sending their first-place finishers off to battle one another. The last time that happened was 1968, the Year of the Tiger, which was also the last time I was too young to know enough to have a favorite sport. For the ensuing quarter-century, four division champions yielded two league champions, which seemed ideal and orderly. Then came tinkering: eight teams, six divisions, a couple of Wild Cards. It seemed less ideal and less orderly, but reasonable enough.
The ten-team setup we’ve just witnessed whittled to two feels, even in the aftermath of four dynamite Division Series and one seven-game League Championship Series, just a shade on the wrong side of overkill. It feels like the NBA playoffs. It feels like it just goes on and on until some Portland Trailblazers or Utah Jazz perennial contender-type team from the ’80s or ’90s — pretty good to very good but not quite extraordinary — emerges to take up half of an officially licensed logo. My sense was the whole thing was less a means to a hallowed end than the penultimate step to the last round of tournament play.
But that feeling evaporated in the ninth inning of San Francisco’s 9-0 blowout of the luck-run-out Cardinals, when the rains enveloped Phone Company Park and 43,056 of the most vocal supporters imaginable grew wetter and louder; and their clothes drenched to deeper and deeper shades of orange and black; and Scutaro, even before there were three outs, was raising his arms to the skies like Andy Dufresne when he “came out clean on the other side” upon tunneling into a downpour of freedom in The Shawshank Redemption. This was no longer merely surviving and advancing in the tournament. This was the pennant about to happen…the National League Pennant, just like the 17 the Giants earned between 1888 and 1954 when they played in Manhattan, just like the four the uprooted version of the same franchise raised in 1962, 1989, 2002 and 2010. The Giants were on the cusp of claiming a 22nd pennant and, with it, the right to play the Tigers, recent recipients of a 10th American League Pennant.
Who among us wouldn’t gleefully stand in the rain to be a part of that?
Baseball gets away with diluting its postseason distinctiveness because it’s had pennants forever and the World Series for nearly as long. Winning the seventh game of the NLCS instantly elevated the 2012 Giants’ status. Suddenly they were pennant-winners. Suddenly they were in the World Series. They were part of this grand continuum, both within their own family lore and along the broader expanse of baseball history. The ratings won’t be as good as they once were and kids won’t be able to stay up for the late innings and the commercials will be hellishly repetitious by the middle innings and there’ll be a million little complaints that things aren’t what they used to be where the World Series is concerned.
But it will be the World Series, which is something that drips with tradition like 43,056 black and orange caps dripped with rain Monday night. It will be laced with the DNA of two ancient and accomplished opponents who have somehow managed to miss each other every October until now. Nobody’s ever before been able to say, “The Tigers will meet the Giants in the World Series,” yet doesn’t it somehow sound comfortingly familiar?
by Greg Prince on 21 October 2012 1:22 pm And then there was one. Or there appears to be.
With Jason Isringhausen’s reiteration of his intention to retire after putting in a yeoman year’s worth of work with the L.A. Angels — though he left the door open a crack in case “some GM is dumb enough to want to sign me” — it means the contingent of 1990s Mets still active has been reduced by 50 percent…from two to one.
We offer a tentative goodbye to Izzy (though we thought he was done after not pitching in the majors in the last half of 2009 and all of 2010) but keep saying hi, how ya doin’ to the World Series-bound Octavio Dotel. Detroit’s Dotel, now pitching for his 423rd team, give or take, made his Met debut on June 26, 1999, starting against and losing to the Atlanta Braves. Unlike every other Met from that decade, Octavio continues to play big league baseball. His enduring availability is a useful bit of information for Jim Leyland, who will need all the bullpen help he can get in the coming days, but it’s really big news for the tracking of two distinctions that go untracked everywhere but here.
We are penciling in Octavio Dotel as the Longest Ago Met Still Active (LAMSA) and declaring him Last Met Standing from 1999.
Both designations, periodically tended to by your friends at Faith and Fear in Flushing, are just what they sound like. LAMSA means no Met who came along before Dotel did — and there were 619 of them — is still playing at baseball’s highest level. Last Met Standing 1999 means nobody else from that sainted season is still on the MLB scene as a player. Izzy, who was traded by the Mets to the A’s that July, was Octavio’s last competition for this honor. We’re sure the Tiger reliever will be relieved to know he outlasted everybody from not only the Mets’ first playoff team in 11 years but everybody from an entire decade that sources report ended nearly 13 years ago, though I could swear it was only last week.
Here are the historical timelines that will sate your ever-growing curiosity on the subject:
LONGEST AGO MET STILL ACTIVE: Chronology
• Felix Mantilla, debuted as a Met, 4/11/1962; last game in the major leagues, 10/2/1966
• Al Jackson, 4/14/1962; 9/26/1969
• Chris Cannizzaro, 4/14/1962*; 9/28/1974
• Ed Kranepool, 9/22/1962; 9/30/1979
• Tug McGraw, 4/18/1965; 9/25/1984
• Nolan Ryan, 9/11/1966; 9/22/1993
• Jesse Orosco, 4/5/1979; 9/27/2003
• John Franco, 4/11/1990; 7/1/2005
• Jeff Kent, 8/28/1992; 9/27/2008
• Jason Isringhausen**, 7/17/1995; 9/19/2012
• Octavio Dotel, 6/26/1999; 10/18/2012 (still active)
* Cannizzaro was Jackson’s catcher on April 14, 1962, at the Polo Grounds, so for LAMSA purposes, he debuted as a Met after his pitcher.
**During Isringhausen’s extensive injury rehabilitation period, Paul Byrd (debuted as a Met on 7/28/1995); Jay Payton (9/1/1998); and Melvin Mora (5/30/1999) could each temporarily lay claim to LAMSA status, but Izzy ultimately outlasted them all.
LAST MET STANDING: 1962-2001
1962-1964: Ed Kranepool (final MLB game: 9/30/1979)
1965: Tug McGraw (9/25/1984)
1966: Nolan Ryan (9/22/1993)
1967: Tom Seaver (9/19/1986)
1968-1971: Nolan Ryan (9/22/1993)
1972-1975: Tom Seaver (9/19/1986)
1976-1977: Lee Mazzilli (10/7/1989)
1978: Alex Treviño (9/30/1990)
1979: Jesse Orosco (9/27/2003)
1980: Hubie Brooks (7/2/1994)
1981-1987: Jesse Orosco (9/27/2003)
1988-1989: David Cone (5/28/2003)
1990-1991: John Franco (7/1/2005)
1992-1994: Jeff Kent (9/27/2008)
1995-1997: Jason Isringhausen (9/19/2012)
1998: Jay Payton (10/3/2010)
1999: Octavio Dotel (10/18/2012; still active)
2000: Melvin Mora (6/29/2011)
2001: Bruce Chen (10/1/2012; still active)
Melvin Mora’s post-2000 longevity doesn’t seem surprising at all given how he blossomed in Baltimore and gave Colorado a late-career boost before finishing up in Arizona at age 39. But if anybody watching the Mets make their valiant charge through September 2001 looked at the roster and determined Bruce Chen — who started the hallowed First Game In New York City After September 11, was traded to Montreal early the next season and roved the big leagues in nearly as itinerant a fashion as Octavio Dotel before finding a home in Kansas City — would be the one to stick in the majors long after everybody else had gone home…well, I congratulate you on your prescience if you were that person.
Chen, who tied for the American League lead in games started in 2012, is signed through 2013 and would appear to have some enough mileage remaining in his 35-year-old left arm to assure he will be standing on a major league mound for a while to come. Then again, you never know who will come out of the woodwork to upset these kinds of apple carts. Chen’s 2001 teammates Timo Perez and Armando Benitez were each part of the Long Island Ducks squad that would eventually waddle its way to the 2012 Atlantic League championship…and before you quack that away as insignificant, so was Lew Ford, who you might have noticed played in the 2012 American League Division Series for the Baltimore Orioles. Hell, C.J. Nitkowski, who appeared in five games for the 2001 Mets and was last seen in the majors in 2005, pitched for Binghamton and Buffalo in 2012 and was reportedly considered for a September callup.
But if Nitkowski couldn’t get called up to the September 2012 Mets, his left arm may not entice another GM, “dumb,” brilliant or somewhere in between.
The longest-ago year from which more than a single Met remains active in the majors is 2002, so it’s not too soon to start contemplating Last Met Standing status from the final season of the Bobby Valentine regime. The prime candidates, based on 2012 activity, are Chen; increasingly vengeful Met tormentor Ty Wigginton; and current NLCS participant Marco Scutaro. They were the only 2002 Mets in the majors this past year, though we shouldn’t forget workhorse turned dark horse Pedro Feliciano, who has spent two years on the Yankee payroll getting his left arm back in shape following the rotator cuff surgery he required after pitching every day for three seasons and twice on Sundays from 2008 through 2010. Pedro crossed over to the dark side of town as a free agent but had the good grace to never actually enter a game for his new employer. Despite a couple of handfuls of rehab appearances in the minors, Pedro’s ledger remains pristine: 459 games as a major leaguer, every one of them as a Met, making him the Ed Kranepool of pitchers until further notice.
As for the years immediately beyond 2002, we’ll repeat our contention from when we last broached this subject, in 2010: “2003 brought Jose Reyes to the big leagues, while 2004 saw the debut of David Wright. If we’re groping around for the last 2003 and 2004 Mets any sooner than the end of this decade at the earliest, then there’s something very wrong with the world.”
We stand by that sentiment, no matter how different that statement looks two years later (and may it not look any more different over the next two years).
by Greg Prince on 20 October 2012 5:08 pm I’ve mostly followed the ongoing National League Championship Series via peripheral vision, not having fully sat down to gaze directly upon the Giants and Cardinals very much given that for their first five games I’ve mostly been doing something else, thinking about something else or literally mostly watching something else (the full power of P-I-P technology only recently having been mastered by your correspondent) while our circuit’s pennant’s fate is being tussled over with only modestly dramatic flourishes. Odd start times, extensive rain delays and a bounty of distractions notwithstanding, I suppose the reason I haven’t been fully engaged in what St. Louis and San Francisco have been doing to each other is the sense that there’s little payoff to be had. We’ve got the 2010 World Champions battling the 2011 World Champions for the right to compete to become 2012 World Champions.
Emotional stakes have been higher in a brand-name sense, but that’s not necessarily fair to the individual participants, for significant changes roil the ranks of every team, even recent titleholders. The Cardinal evolution has been more obvious to our Met-trained eye, given their addition of Carlos Beltran, which has made the Redbirds’ run back toward another MLB Finals not only somewhat palatable but close to desirable. Yeah, I know, Beltran is either the most stupidly underappreciated superstar of our time — quick, someone cite eighteen different metrics and work up a condescending hashtag! — or a big stiff who never tried and never cared. I’ll be over here in the middle ground remembering someone who played hard, played hurt and played very well for my team for nearly seven years without intentionally drawing a fuss in his direction, and I’ll be mostly hoping that he’s in a World Series Wednesday despite his current uniform.
But I can’t say I’m fully committed to that outcome because a) his current uniform has two avian creatures perched smugly on a bat and I can hear them squawking “1985! 1987! 2006!” evermore; and b) I really loved watching a whole bunch of Giants refuse to give in to what loomed as the inevitable in Game Five Friday night.
Out of the corner of my eye, in the corner of my screen, I saw one dive after another, almost all of them resulting in the scooping of a ball that couldn’t be allowed to land anywhere but a glove lest the San Francisco season end at once. There was Pablo Sandoval, usurper of All-Star starting third baseman berths, perhaps, but also The Man when it came to stabbing a hot liner and stanching an early Cardinal rally. There was Hunter Pence, always willing to throw himself all over the grass, occasionally making it work to his advantage. There were our alumni, Marco Scutaro and Angel Pagan, reminding us they had their moments on our behalf. And there was Barry Zito, proffering the best defense possible: pitching shutout ball well into the eighth — and bunting home a run and beating the play at first when it really, really mattered in the fourth.
What those fellas have in common is they mostly had nothing to do with the last Giant championship. Sandoval and Zito have rings, but the so-called Panda was all but glued the bench in 2010 and Zito was written off as a Bayload of wasted millions and omitted from that postseason’s roster. Pence, who became exponentially less distasteful the moment he stopped being rented by the Phillies, toiled in dreary Houston for several years. Scutaro has been the epitome of a journeyman since he briefly made our acquaintance a decade ago. Pagan we know very well.
These five guys banded together to stave off elimination in Game Five, perhaps because they’ve been eliminated far too many times in their respective careers and don’t want to go home before everything ends once again. It’s a grim assignment for any team, whether it’s a Game Four, Five or Six situation. The odds are against you when you’re stuck in that three-something hole. The Giants just climbed out of something similar twice against the Reds before tying that best-of-five at two. Once you’re in a decisive game like that, then you’re no longer staving — you’re striving. But the Giants are still in stave mode. No offense to Our Mr. Beltran, but I hope San Fran can stave around a little longer. It demands your undivided attention when somebody does.
by Greg Prince on 18 October 2012 9:17 pm In the jungle, the mighty jungle of Comerica Park, the Tigers sweep tonight.
Feels good, doesn’t it? No matter how completely predictable this outcome had been for days; no matter the never comfortable fact that we’d rather be rooting for our team than rooting against their team; no matter that the phrase “putting them out of their misery” has rarely rung truer in professional postseason sporting competition, it feels very good.
Of course it does. If you lived through the Octobers when the opposite of this happened with them, you never get tired of Elimination Day. It’s the most wonderful time of the year. And really, this entire American League Championship Series turned what used to be a deep breath of baseball amnesty — time off for good behavior, essentially — into a veritable autumnal festival of Sheadenfreude. It’s as if some beer company marketed an Oktoberfest for gloating and it caught on.
The funny thing (funny ha-ha, funny peculiar; whichever) is if the Orioles had won the fifth game of the first round, everything would have worked out better for them. It would have been written off as a tough series informed by a teamwide slump, and their immortal shortstop — the last remaining barrier that kept them planted on the right side of dignity and a safe distance from demise — would be up on his two feet and preparing for another go-round next year. Instead, it was an utter implosion on every level, wherein their cast of megastars dimmed beyond recognition, their legendary home-field intimidation morphed into a Christian Science Reading Room (with plenty of good seats still available!) and the ability of their acolytes and apologists to say “well, at least we made the playoffs” nullified by their collective desire to forget these playoffs ever happened.
That they were beaten by a team playing markedly better seems beside the point. The 88-win Tigers didn’t necessarily blow them out until Game Four, but except for an instinctual hiccup of anxiety in the ninth inning of the opener, the tight scores never actually felt competitive. I’d dare say the 88-loss Mets could have pulled this thing out in six…and the Mets lost 88 games.
Enough about them. Let’s hear it for the 2012 A.L. Champion Detroit Tigers. Whatever our stray secondary allegiances, we’re all ungrateful slugs if we don’t each immediately and permanently confer Favorite American League Team status upon these modern-day Bengal Belters. They were responsible for executing Elimination Day in 2006 (though we might have been too giddily preoccupied to fully notice); they took care of business in 2011; and now this. All any Mets fan wants out of the junior circuit is someone to make October safe to traverse the sidewalks of New York. The Tigers have done their part for our Metropolitan sanity two falls in a row and three of past seven.
So somebody please cue up Martha & The Vandellas and let us dance in the streets in tribute to Miggy & The Verlanders. Mets fans! Tigers fans! Fans of bombast-free, entitlement-deprived baseball! It doesn’t matter what you wear, just as long as they’re not here.
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