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ABOUT US
Faith and Fear in Flushing made its debut on Feb. 16, 2005, the brainchild of two longtime friends and lifelong Met fans.
Greg Prince discovered the Mets when he was 6, during the magical summer of 1969. He is a Long Island-based writer, editor and communications consultant. Contact him here.
Jason Fry is a Brooklyn writer whose first memories include his mom leaping up and down cheering for Rusty Staub. Check out his other writing here.
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by Greg Prince on 3 November 2012 8:03 pm In his 1970 book, The New York Mets: The Whole Story, Leonard Koppett concluded that by 1967, “the Mets had become a deeply rooted Long Island entity,” an allusion to geographic proximity, customer base and overall vibe. The Mets played in a Queens venue situated conveniently adjacent to the parkways and expressways that fed Nassau County. The families and groups that bought seats in the largest numbers tended to arrive at Shea Stadium — “where New York meets Long Island,” per Metropolitan Area sage William Joel — from the east, and many of their players opted to summer or settle nearby, over the city line. For a generation, there was a trend toward New Yorkers by name becoming Long Islanders by residence. The Mets put down stakes where they did to capitalize on that ongoing population shift. While they never forsook the identity on their birth certificate, let alone their skyline logo, they became, in de facto fashion, a Long Island baseball team.
The maps said Queens, home of the Mets (and the Jets) from 1964 forward, and Brooklyn were part of Long Island, but those of us in Nassau and Suffolk knew different. They were Queens and Brooklyn, part of New York City since 1898. We were Long Island. That wasn’t by any means a boast and it wasn’t necessarily a point of pride. It was enough for us to be included as part of New York. As Louis C.K. once said, when Americans are asked where they’re from, they instinctively estimate upwards to the nearest major city. The Long Island delineation was one we didn’t much think about until we were given a reason to contemplate it.
In the 1970s, we were. Smack in the middle of that decade, there was something verging on special about being a Long Island-based sports fan. Never mind that we had the Mets and the Hofstra-headquartered Jets in our backyard, with the temporarily displaced Yankees and Giants subletting Shea when the regular tenants were away on business trips. We had more going for us than two MLB teams and two NFL teams playing next door.
We had the Nets in the ABA. We had the Islanders in the NHL. We had the Sets in the WTT. We had the Tomahawks in the NLL. In 1975, we had four major league teams — every one of them televised over the air, at least a little — in one sparkling new building, the Nassau Coliseum.
We were Long Island. We weren’t just living close to big-time sports. We had our own big-time sports. We were, one could conclude if one dared, the next big thing.
Granted, the NLL — the National Lacrosse League — was major league only in the sense that I picked up a pamphlet in Roosevelt Field that said the Long Island Tomahawks put the Coliseum over the four-team top, making it the athletic equivalent of Quadrophenia. Perhaps it was an overblown claim, given that we would also have to take seriously World Team Tennis in general and the New York Sets in particular to lend the whole four-team concept validity. A couple of the Sets came to Roosevelt Field in the summer of ’75 and put on a demonstration of what we could see when we put down our pamphlets and came out to the Coliseum, just a few minutes away from the mall and just a few years old at that point.
I don’t know that the fleeting presence of the NLL (box lacrosse) or WTT (star-studded tennis played under television-friendly rules) made LI (ostensibly the suburbs of NYC) a better place to live, but I got a kick out of Long Island feeling just that much more major league because of them, even if the Tomahawks and the Sets were pretty clearly an addendum to our vibrant sporting scene. What really mattered was we had the Nets and we had the Islanders. They played in real leagues and had real futures.
The Nets, who arrived on our shores in 1968 and set up camp in Commack and then West Hempstead after washing out as the New Jersey Americans of Teaneck, were first. Even as a kid entranced by the red, white and blue ball, I knew there was something not quite sturdy about the American Basketball Association and something vaguely absurd about the Nets, not the least of which was their hamfisted attempt to align themselves by rhyme with the Mets and Jets (and how about them Sets?). But perhaps because it included a team wearing a New York moniker, the ABA was framed as a fairly legitimate league at the height of its viability, maybe not on a par with the NBA (which was only 21 years older, yet seemed the paragon of establishment), but plenty real. The ABA, circa February 11, 1972 — the night Nassau Coliseum opened with a 129-121 home team win over the Pittsburgh Condors — was no gimmicky fly-by-night operation. It featured Rick Barry on our beloved Nets and Artis Gilmore on the accursed Kentucky Colonels and Mel Daniels on the irksome Indiana Pacers and Julius Erving on the vexing Virginia Squires…until Erving ultimately replaced NBA-returnee Barry, which made the Nets exponentially more exciting and gave the ABA seemingly longer legs.
We had the best basketball player in the world. Right here. Right here on Long Island. He was from Roosevelt and he played in Uniondale and the word, according to some busybody at the beauty parlor where my mother got her hair done, was he lived in Lido Beach, one town over from us in Long Beach. My mother asked the mother of a friend of mine who lived in Lido whether she could confirm the rumor. That lady, however, wasn’t much of an ABA aficionado.
“Julius and Irving Who?” she inquired.
Maybe she was more in step with Long Island’s interest in Long Island’s professional basketball team than I was. The Nets, I learned only in the aftermath of the ABA, never actually sold out the Coliseum despite Barry leading them to the finals in 1972 and Dr. J winning them championships in 1974 and 1976. I kept telling my parents, who had held Knicks season tickets at exactly the right time in basketball history, that you’ve gotta jump on the Nets while you still can — they’re the next big thing!
And then they were gone. The Coliseum stopped having professional basketball. The ABA stopped existing. Red, white and blue basketballs bounced only in playgrounds. The Nets joined the NBA, but without Julius Erving. He was sold to the 76ers so Nets owner Roy Boe could make his “indemnity fees” nut. The NBA Nets spent one year on Long Island before hoofing it to a neighboring state that technically kept the team local, but not really. I continued to root for the New Jersey Nets, but more in theory than in practice. They no longer had the fun ball or the fun player or the fun league and they were no longer emblematic of my Island.
But we did have the Islanders, which didn’t mean all that much to me when they came skating along on October 7, 1972, as I’ve rarely had the patience to watch hockey for more than two minutes at any one time. The Isles did, however, begin to charm me the first moment they began to remind me of the 1969 Mets, which was early in their third season. I wasn’t all that interested in hockey, but I did love underdogs — especially underdogs who wore blue and orange and made Long Island their logo. They didn’t call themselves Long Island like the Tomahawks would, but they called themselves Islanders. That was taking local identity up a very significant notch.
The chemistry was just right. Within the realm of the National Hockey League, I became an Islanders fan. For a while I rooted for them and the Rangers (who practiced at a rink built where most of their players lived…in Long Beach) when possible, but unlike my continuing to pull for the Nets and the Knicks (since they were born in different leagues) and getting behind both the Jets and the Giants (same basic reason), I could see I’d have to choose between the Rangers and the Islanders (each of them an NHL product their whole lives). So I chose the Islanders. Or they chose me. When the Islanders won their first-ever playoff series, against the Rangers — who were never really “my team” by anything more than default — in April of 1975, I was overjoyed and I never looked back.
Five years later, the Islanders won a Stanley Cup. Then they won three more in the next three years. I never much followed hockey, but every spring I’d be real happy that the last team to stick it out from the Coliseum’s busiest year, the one that outlasted the Tomahawks (who went to their happy hunting ground with the original NLL in 1975) and the Sets (who moved to the Garden and became the Apples before the original WTT volleyed its last in 1978) and the Nets (endlessly obscure in an established league the way they never were when they were intermittent big shots in the fledgling ABA) brought championship after championship to Long Island. Uniondale was a sports capital. The Nassau Coliseum was a sports castle. That tickled me.
The last Islander Cup was won in 1983, the last year the Jets played at Shea. The Islanders’ dynastic aura wore off shortly thereafter. They’ve been mostly bad for a very long time. And soon, they won’t be ours anymore. Like the Nets already have, they are planning to move to Brooklyn…which is Long Island geographically and sort of historically if you remember your American Revolution…but not really.
From four teams at the Coliseum in 1975 to none come 2015. From Nassau County as big league to Nassau County as big nothin’, sportswise; even the Jets quit training here in 2008. Queens, meanwhile, has just the Mets after all these decades. Certainly they’re the one relatively hyperlocal team I would have kept within a county of where I sleep, but still. I’ve never stopped missing the ABA Nets and have maintained my faint allegiance to them in the NBA because I could trace their vaguely absurd ways all the way back to when they were in West Hempstead, back when the Coliseum shimmered as a great next step in their and Long Island’s development. The Brooklyn Nets are almost unrecognizable as the descendants of the team that played in the Island Garden (which an opponent referred to in retrospect as the Long Island Toilet). That’s probably great from a competitive standpoint, but a little sad from a red, white and blue ball lineage perspective. Then again, it’s not like they were going to roll into my immediate vicinity again, so better Flatbush and Atlantic and competent (and accessible by LIRR) than Newark and whatever they’ve been most of the time since 1977.
As for the Islanders, it’s not like I’ve been rushing to the Coliseum to cheer them on all these years. I’ve seen as many of their games there as I saw Nets games and Bob Hope concerts, for that matter: one. I was given a chance to vote them funding for a new arena in 2011 and I declined. I don’t know that I would have done it if the Islanders in Uniondale represented a major portion of my time or my identity. I do know that after living through the opening of one “state-of-the-art” amenity-laden sports venue in recent years, I wasn’t fired up to get another one online. Maybe the Coliseum — which still looks like 1972 from the outside — is outdated. Maybe “outdated” is one of those phrases sports team owners throw around to generate sympathy for their financial cause. Maybe the owner’s been great and the politicians are terrible. Maybe the New York Islanders of Brooklyn will be better off in the long run. Maybe with the trains running right up to the Barclays Center, I’ll see another of their games sometime in the distant future. I actually live pretty close to Uniondale, but not so close that driving there comes easy for me and my motoring anxieties.
But I’ll miss them a little anyway. I’ll miss the concept of being “big league” more than the reality of a perennially lousy club playing in an arena constantly dismissed as obsolete, but concepts are important, too — though mostly when you’re not distracted by more overwhelming concerns, which we sure as hell are on Long Island presently. I don’t know that if the NHL was active at the moment that the Islanders would be hailed as a rallying point for our storm-battered county, or if the so-called Gorton’s Fisherman logo of the mid-’90s would gain new resonance. (At least he was dressed for the occasion.)
I do know I wouldn’t buy any magical healing powers attributed to any sports team playing its games at times like these, just like I don’t infer anything automatically wonderful about people who don’t necessarily curl up and die at the first sign of adversity. Come back around during the third, fourth or fifth sign. Elected officials keep flattering our “resilience” after Sandy. “Long Islanders are tough. They’re resilient,” I keep hearing them say. You know what would make everybody here plenty resilient? Electricity. Gasoline. Unflooded basements. I’m plenty resilient since LIPA did my block a solid and got us going relatively soon after the lights went out. I’m resilient as hell having filled up my tank ahead of the wind and the rain. I live on a high floor and not on top of a body of water — boy, am I resilient.
I’m an amazing Long Islander when everything works. That resilience formula probably applies to the citizens of every county, regardless of the quantity of sports teams residing within its borders.
by Greg Prince on 2 November 2012 2:12 am If you’re familiar with Faith and Fear’s origins story, you know Jason and I “met” on an America Online board approximately 18½ years ago (a time frame not to be confused with nearly two decades, because that would be a chronological impossibility, for crissake) and we took off for Shea Stadium and points unknown from there. That forum was our equivalent of Ted Baxter’s “5,000-watt radio station in Fresno, California,” a city that happens to have been another fortuitous Met breeding ground, come to think of it.
All this time later, there’s suddenly more Mets talk bubbling up from our mid-’90s electronic stomping grounds. I recently heard from one of our old AOL compatriots who let me know he and another fellow from what we’ll call back in the day have caught the orange & blue blogging fever. James Preller (a children’s author whose work boasts at least a partial baseball bent) and Michael Geus call their site, appropriately enough, 2 Guys Talking Mets Baseball. It’s, well, two guys talking Mets baseball, in case the name didn’t give it away. They talk about it with depth and passion and are a welcome addition to the Metsosphere in my book and among my bookmarks. Give their conversation a listen sometimes.
And if you were planning on listening to/participating in the baseball talk at the Hope Shines For Shannon dinner, the aftermath of Super Storm Sandy has forced the rescheduling of this worthwhile event for November 29. More information here — and a great story on Shannon Forde’s indefatigable spirit from Bob Klapisch here.
by Greg Prince on 31 October 2012 12:56 pm We were without power for 31 hours. Big deal, the Mets were without power most of August.
Hope you and yours are all right.
by Greg Prince on 29 October 2012 10:16 pm  LB looks better surrounded by and not submerged in water. It was anything but a dark and stormy night the last time I was in my hometown of Long Beach, a place I’ve seen a lot of the last couple of days on TV as it’s become a body of water instead of merely being surrounded by them. On my most recent trip there, it was the most brilliant of August Sunday afternoons, and I spent it, aurally at least, with my buddies Howie and Josh. I’ll have to tell you about it in some detail one of these evenings when I’m not distracted by wind gusts and power glitches. It was a good day to be with your home team in your hometown.
But in the meantime, a little Howie on the radio would be nice right now, don’t you think? And if we can’t have that, how about some Q&A with Mr. Rose, courtesy of Michael Freund, who recently published this piece in the Jerusalem Post. I’ve been meaning to link to it for a few weeks. The first baseball-free night of the fall, when the world (or perhaps just the New York Metropolitan Area, though to us they’re one and the same) seems to be ending, seems like a good time for a good distraction.
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.
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