The blog for Mets fans
who like to read
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.
Got something to say? Leave a comment, or email us at faithandfear@gmail.com. (Sorry, but we have no interest in ads, sponsored content or guest posts.)
Need our RSS feed? It's here.
Visit our Facebook page, or drop by the personal pages for Greg and Jason.
Or follow us on Twitter: Here's Greg, and here's Jason.
|
by Greg Prince on 9 October 2012 5:46 pm Something struck me while the Giants were being demolished by the Reds, 9-0, Sunday and the Nationals were getting stomped by Carlos Beltran’s Cardinals, 12-4, Monday: this never happens to us.
The Mets have never been truly blown out of a postseason game. They’ve never lost one by eight runs. They’ve never lost one by nine runs. They’ve never lost one by more than six runs, and in very few of the 31 postseason losses they’ve been dealt overall (against 43 postseason wins) have they felt hopelessly behind to the extent where you couldn’t take that “Miracle” stuff to heart.
We established a few Octobers ago that the Mets are, pound for pound, perhaps the most competitive postseason team that’s ever been among teams that have made more than the most token of appearances. We’ll establish now that the Mets, even when not succeeding in the worst way possible in these situations, just about always give us our angst’s worth.
If we define a blowout as a loss of seven or more runs, the Mets have never been blown out in a postseason game. If we define a blowout as a game in which you simply can’t imagine the team that’s behind rallying to at least get into a position to possibly come back — and then your lack of imagination is met by the prevailing reality — then the Mets have just about never been blown out. There have only been a relative handful of postseason innings when you could be absolutely certain the Mets were utterly doomed in a given game. Usually they win or sucker you into believing they will.
It may have only produced two World Series trophies instead of the seven for which they were eligible, but at least the Mets haven’t made you want to turn off your sets when it mattered most.
Faint praise, but it’s October and the Mets aren’t playing. Faint praise is sometimes the deepest kind one can muster on their behalf.
1969: The Mets lost only one game in two series, and that was by three runs. They fell behind, 4-0, at Baltimore after four innings of Game One of the World Series, but made it 4-1 in the seventh, and they got the tying run (Rod Gaspar) to the plate. The score stayed, 4-1, and the result was swept aside by the four succeeding Met victories.
1973: Both losses to Cincinnati in the five-game NLCS were one-run heartbreakers, as were the first two losses to Oakland in the World Series. Games Six and Seven, where it was all unfortunately decided, went against us, 3-1 and 5-2. The Mets were down by five after five in the final meeting, but being the Mets, they put a run up in the sixth, another in the ninth and brought the potential tying run up (Wayne Garrett) with two out before it was all over.
1986: Mike Scott may have muffled the Mets’ bats twice in the League Championship Series, but his opposite numbers (Doc Gooden in Game One, Sid Fernandez in Game Four) did all right, and the Mets lost those two dances by respectable scores of 1-0 and 3-1. Having squeezed past the ’Stros in six, the Mets succumbed, 1-0, in Game One of the World Series and didn’t fall hopelessly behind the Red Sox in Game Two — the much-hyped Gooden-Clemens matchup at Shea — until the seventh inning when the Red Sox tacked on a pair to go up on the Mets, 8-3. The final was 9-3. Not at all good, but not quite a blowout. The Mets’ final loss in the Fall Classic was lackluster Game Five, a 4-2 affair in which the Mets trailed, 4-0, after five but sort of fought back late. (The Mets charged from behind far more effectively in Games Six and Seven.)
1988: The most famous and horrible contest of the NLCS, Game Four, was a twelve-inning, 5-4 nailbiter won by the Dodgers to tie the series at two. The Mets’ first loss, set up when Bob Klapisch shot off David Cone’s mouth by proxy over how Jay Howell was little more than a “high school pitcher,” et al, was a 6-3 affair in which the Mets scored once in the ninth before loading the bases with two out for Gary Carter. Game Five, the Monday afternoon hangover that followed the unfortunate events of the fourth game, saw L.A. take a 6-0 lead, but the Mets roar back to within 6-3 in the fifth and 6-4 in the eighth before bowing, 7-4. Game Seven pushed the boundaries of blowout pretty hard, with Ron Darling and miserable defense digging a 6-0 hole in the second at Dodger Stadium. The game ended at that score. Not a classic blowout tally, but the Mets were out of ammunition early.
1999: Only one loss to the Diamondbacks in the Division Series, when the Mets fell behind, 5-1 in Game Two behind good old Kenny Rogers, but had runners on second and third in the seventh for Edgardo Alfonzo. Can’t say the Mets seemed out of it with Fonzie up in a clutch situation…but Edgardo grounded out, the D’Backs tacked on two in the bottom of the seventh and it wound up a 7-1 loss at the BOB. The Mets secured the NLDS at Shea and took on Atlanta in the closest postseason series ever, in which the scores were 4-2, 4-3, 1-0, 3-2, 4-3 (if 7-3 at heart) and 10-9.
2000: The only loss to the Giants was a listless Game One in which San Francisco took a 5-1 lead in the third and the scoring stopped from there. The only loss to the Cardinals was Game Three, in which the Mets trailed, 5-2, entering the fifth but then allowed three runs to St. Louis. Things got pretty quiet at 8-2: not quite a blowout, but not competitive, really. The World Series contained nothing but close games, no matter how they turned out.
2006: The Mets didn’t lose in the NLDS and didn’t taste adversity until Game Two of the NLCS, in which they yielded a 6-4 lead in the seventh and a 6-6 tie in the ninth. Game Three at St. Louis was blowoutesque, with Steve Trachsel permitting five runs in 1+ innings. Darren Oliver restored order on the Met side, but Jeff Suppan and friends never relinquished it on theirs; the Mets lost, 5-0. After tying the series in Game Four, the Mets lost a two-run affair in Game Five. After tying the series in Game Six, the Mets held the Cardinals to a stalemate through eight innings of Game Seven. No happy ending, but no blowout, either.
So we have that going for us.
by Greg Prince on 8 October 2012 6:01 pm
 Somebody cared enough to pay homage to Shea, and it wasn’t a Met. On Sunday, I made my final trip to Shea, from Manhattan to Flushing Meadow on the team bus. Excuse me. Not Shea. Citi Field. Shea is the third of my four kids, all boys. Shea Stadium was the place where the fans would chant Lar-ry! Lar-ry! in that New York singsong, but I got the last laugh. I raked there, spouted off in the papers, had a good time-and the fans let me have it. What more could a ballplayer want?
—Chipper Jones, Sports Illustrated, September 17, 2012
The greatest baseball game I ever experienced — and by experienced, I mean was drawn into totally as a spectator — was Game Six of the 1999 National League Championship Series. That my team lost it and was thus eliminated from that year’s postseason tournament doesn’t detract from its all-encompassing nature. I was never more “into” a game than I was the night of October 19 and earliest morning of October 20, 1999, when the final pitch was a bases-loaded ball four to Andruw Jones from Kenny Rogers and the final score after eleven innings at Turner Field read Atlanta Braves 10 New York Mets 9.
I get exhausted just thinking about it. The Braves have been exhausted every October ever since.
They won the battle, but the conflagration clearly took its emotional toll on them, too. The Braves’ next assignment was the 1999 World Series, which they were swept out of in four straight (by some team or another). Then came 2000, when we anticipated an NLCS rematch. The Mets did their part, defeating the Giants in four. The Braves, though, were still drained from what it took them to eliminate the Mets the year before. The Cardinals swept them three straight in the 2000 NLDS and they were done.
The Braves’ last hurrah was the 2001 NLDS, which they won without a hiccup against the Houston Astros (succumbing to their fourth divisional-round loss in five years; they were obviously still groping about for their bearings after losing the 1986 NLCS to the Mets in what we can now label historically “typical” Game Six fashion). Bolstered by getting back on their traditional winning horse, the Braves went right out in 2001 and…were sent packing by the Diamondbacks in five games.
That was it for the Atlanta Braves and October advancement. They lost first playoff rounds in 2002 (3-2 to San Francisco); 2003 (3-2 to Chicago); 2004 (3-2 to Houston, which finally shook off that 1986 defeat to win its first-ever postseason series); and 2005 (3-1 to Houston again). Before the Braves cut out the middleman and took a postseason hiatus from 2006 to 2009, they lost seven of eight October series after snuffing out the Met dreams of 1999, including five sets in a row, four of them as soon as they could. During that span, their playoff won-lost record measured 11-23.
And Chipper Jones was on hand for all of it. He wasn’t on hand in 2010 when an injury sidelined him from participating in the Braves’ return to postseason action, which was a four-game loss to the Giants in the NLDS. But he was around as the 2011 Braves opted to skip the postseason despite a large Wild Card lead in late August, and he played Friday night in the first immediate-elimination game in postseason history. Quite fitting to have the Braves inaugurate this new feature of October with a signature one-and-done defeat at the hands of the Cardinals.
Chipper Jones joined the Braves full-time in 1995 when they were a juggernaut on their way to their first world championship. They remained a divisional juggernaut for the next decade, but got a little less, shall we say, ’nauty as the Octobers went by. As a result, Chipper Jones was on the active roster as his team was ousted from postseason play on eleven separate occasions, presumably some kind of record. The Yankees beat the Braves. The Marlins beat the Braves. The Padres beat the Braves. Everybody beat the Braves sooner or later except for our beloved Mets, and you could say the Mets got the “sooner” part out of the way back in October of 1969 when they swept the Braves in three to win the first NLCS-decided pennant.
But strain as we might, we can’t pin that on Larry Wayne “Chipper” Jones as he calls it a Hall of Fame career, so what fun is that?
by Greg Prince on 7 October 2012 10:50 am The beginning of a postseason series, when your team isn’t involved and you feel no automatic rooting interest, is a baseball fan’s awkward professional networking cocktail party. You show up out of obligation, you don’t really feel as if you belong, you scan the room for any familiar face and you overcompensate for your discomfort the moment you recognize anyone you used to know even a little.
“Hey,” you thought to yourself when you accepted an invitation to the Colorado Rockies’ event that one time, “there’s Kaz Matsui. We were never close, but he’s the only one here who I’ll have anything to talk about with. Hope he brought his interpreter. Wait — is that Bob Apodaca? I wonder if he’d remember me…”
Mets you weren’t that hung up on in their Mets day briefly become key figures in your October. Even the presence of former Mets farmhands takes on significance suddenly because you figure you and they at least have a little something in common, which is more than you can say for everybody else at the affair. “I guess I should go over and say ‘hi’ to A.J. Burnett. God, this is going to be awkward.”
Chances are the former Mets, Met minor leaguers, Met managers and Met anybodies you encounter have been away a while. Rare is the Met who leaves your midst late in a season and then lands in an exponentially better situation right away. (“Jeff Francouer’s here? He’s in the playoffs? The World Series? Who did he have to fu…Jeff! Good to see ya! We really missed you in September!”) Sometimes the Mets have only been away for months but usually it’s years. It can be many years. In your mind, they’re Met enough, but only because the circumstances compel you to think about them right now. (“Dave? Dave Magadan? Gosh, we haven’t seen each other in what is it? Gotta be fifteen years now. So…you’re working for the Red Sox now, huh?”) Overall, though, the ex-Met affiliation is just a point of entry these Octobers. When you first turn on the games, you’re a Mets fish out of Flushing water. Once you’re into them, you’re swimming along like it’s the most natural thing there is. (“Will you excuse me, Octavio Dotel? I just remembered there’s something I need to tell David Freese. Dave! Dave! Over here!”)
Until October awkwardness becomes October ease, you cling to anything and anybody in whom you can detect a residual aura of orange and blue. It’s for that reason that the bottom of the ninth inning of NLDS Game One between the Reds and the Giants briefly absorbed me Saturday night. With Ron Darling analyzing on TBS and Gary Cohen announcing on ESPN Radio, here were the first four hitters Bruce Bochy sent to the plate in attempt to rally from four runs down:
• Joaquin Arias, 2010 Met
• Xavier Nady, 2006 Met
• Angel Pagan, 2008-2011 Met
• Marco Scutaro, 2002-2003 Met
I’d like to believe Bochy regularly regales his quartet of fellow Met alumni with tales of what it was really like to play 17 games for George Bamberger in 1982 and how, no, Joaquin, it was a lot worse than anything you experienced in your 22 games for Jerry Manuel in 2010…and yes, Marco, I have heard the story about how Bobby Valentine didn’t know who you were when you were called up to the big club in 2002…and Xavier, you have to get over your fear of your reliever teammates getting into cabs…and is Angel in the crapper again?
But that probably doesn’t happen. Bochy and his boys have all, no doubt, moved on from their Met days. They’re not Mets this October. They’re in the playoffs, which is proof enough they’re not Mets. A branch of the military used to advise, “Join the Navy and See the World.” In baseball, it’s leave the Mets and see the World Series — or edge closer to it than you would otherwise.
Anyway, four former Mets batting consecutively in a postseason game under the auspices of a former Mets player had to be some kind of record. How did it work out? Arias singled and advanced to second on a wild pitch; Nady walked; Pagan fouled out; Scutaro walked. Bases full of ex-Mets. Alas for San Francisco, though there was one more helpful wild pitch uncorked by Aroldis Chapman, neither Pablo Sandoval nor Buster Posey could drive anybody in and the Giants lost.
Clearly Bochy needed one more Met to bat. Too bad he’d already used Guillermo Mota to pitch.
Too bad we’d already used Guillermo Mota to pitch, too, but that’s another story.
by Greg Prince on 6 October 2012 3:51 am Nice to see so many Braves fans decided all at once to reject the symbolism inherent in their foam tomahawks and hurl them to the field in protest of what they represent. What surprised me was learning they also found empty Bud Light cans culturally insensitive.
Or maybe they just thought they got jobbed on a BS infield fly call. Yeah, probably that.
The beauty of postseason baseball is focusing on something to which you’ve never given much thought before, and trust me, I’ve not lost a wink on infield flies. Like a good fan, I watched the replays of the non-catch/late-call that brought all of Atlanta’s flotsam down upon the Turner Field grass for convenient collection, and I listened to all the explanations pro and con. I focused on how Andrelton Simmons lofted (more than popped) a ball to shallow mid-range left field; how the Cards’ Pete Kozma tracked it warily from short; how he seemed to be calling off Matt Holliday; how Kozma then called himself off or something like it to allow the ball to fall in; and how the two baserunners on first and second were able to advance 90 feet to second and third while Simmons stood on first. Kozma’s failure to catch Simmons’s fly set the Braves up to pose a frightening one-out threat in the eighth, still down by three yet in great shape to mount a comeback.
Then I focused on every angle TBS provided on Sam Holbrook, who suddenly remembered he has that audition for the “Raise Your Hand if You’re Sure!” spot in the morning. Holbrook decided several seconds after the last minute that Simmons’s ball constituted an infield fly, and thus all that gobbledygook you half-know but don’t really listen to when announcers tell it to you about “runners on first and second with less than two out” was in effect. Holbrook, umpiring left field (because they have that in October), made a call that is interpretative in nature. My interpretation is you really had to be looking to call the infield fly rule on that ball.
Harold Reynolds on MLBN made a sound case for why Simmons’s fly wasn’t all that atypical of what is called an infield fly in the course of the season, but I thought Bill Ripken trumped him when he invoked the part about the “ordinary effort” required by the rule. In this if not exactly extraordinary game but amped-up situation, Kozma was working in parameters clearly beyond the realm of ordinary. It wasn’t quite a routine play and the setting was by no means standard-issue. And Holbrook’s molasses timing in deciding it was sure as shootin’ didn’t help his interpretation appear pristine.
Simmons was out, the two baserunners were sent back to first and second and the normally hospitable folks down Georgia way did a swell impression of us northern aggressors. All in all, there was a literal mess on the field and a figurative mess about the game. It took nearly 20 minutes to gather up and bag the refuse donated by the Brave faithful. But not even a postgame media audience with Pope Torre VI satisfactorily cleared up Holbrook’s sloppy ruling.
It may not have mattered anyway because the Braves were finding ways to not win all night (they did indisputably load the bases with two outs in the eighth to no avail), so what was one more chance gone awry? They were laughable defensively, they lacked the big hits they needed late, Kris Medlen stopped being unbeatable and Chipper Jones can go home and put on his civilian stuff. The Braves stayed three runs in arrears and the 2011 World Champion Cardinals (now with more Beltran!) moved on to play the Nationals.
The Braves hosted the very first regularly scheduled National League Championship Series game 43 years and one day before hosting the very first regularly scheduled National League Wild Card game, if that’s it known as. The Braves lost their first effort at pioneering a new format, falling on October 4, 1969, to — hey, whaddaya know — the New York Mets, 9-5. Phil Niekro had won 23 games that year. Tom Seaver won 25. I recently asked Niekro, when he visited Citi Field to promote the Knuckleball movie, how he prepared to face a pitcher so stylistically opposite him. Phil had a great response: he didn’t face Tom Seaver; he faced a Mets lineup in which Seaver batted ninth.
He didn’t do it that well, actually, because he gave up all nine of those runs, albeit only four of them were earned. But Niekro, Hank Aaron, Orlando Cepeda and their non-Hall of Fame teammates could take solace in that although they were down one game to none to the Mets, there was always tomorrow in the brand spankin’ new best-of-five NLCS. Tomorrow brought an 11-6 loss en route to a three-game Met sweep, but the 1969 Braves had their chance.
Did the 2012 Braves? I don’t mean because of Holbrook’s time-lapse conclusion that the cloud he saw in the sky that he first thought resembled a pony instead looked like an infield fly. My question, at heart, was is one game enough to settle postseason business?
Surely the Cardinals will take their result, as will the Orioles, who ushered the Rangers out of the American League Wild Card game. All 30 teams signed off on this innovation in which two Wild Card teams would emerge after 162 games. Everybody knew two pair of teams would play in a single contests to determine who would enter their League Division Series and who would be the moral equivalent of the fourth-place Mets, done as done can be. The addition was clearly stated in advance of the 2012 season and is easier to interpret than the infield fly rule. So it’s not like Atlanta and Texas can claim they are shocked…shocked…to find imminent elimination going on in here. And though they lost home games, it’s not as if they were shocked…shocked…by markedly inferior opponents. Not only did the Cardinals and Orioles prove themselves of approximately the same caliber as the Braves and Rangers during the year, but in a single baseball game, there is no such thing as an upset.
Anybody can beat anybody for one game. It’s having to do it over several games that makes it challenging. Which is what the postseason is supposed to be — a crucible in which you prove yourself against the best by outlasting the best, not just leaving them in the dust and getting out of Dodge.
The sum total of the 18 Wild Card innings simply didn’t feel like genuine postseason activity. It looked like it, with full houses (even at the Ted) and high tension and sheer urgency. It sounded like it, too, especially with announcers and analysts continually invoking “Game Seven” to underscore the type of stakes at hand. But there was no Game Seven Friday night. There was no Game Five, LDS- or pre-1985 LCS-style. There was no Game Three like those in which the Giants and Dodgers memorably engaged in 1951 and 1962 when divisions didn’t exist and the N.L. settled seasonlong deadlocks via short series.
This wasn’t a short series. This wasn’t a series. It was a single game. We’ve seen playoff spots determined by single games tacked on to the end of the schedule — most notably 13 years ago when the 1999 Mets ousted the Reds to win the Wild Card — but those were tiebreakers. They made sense in the flow of the season to the postseason. Win and we were in. And once we were in, we got to stick around for a minimum of a few days. Same for our opponents, the 1999 Diamondbacks. We got to know them a little. That’s generally how it works when you’re talking playoffs.
Getting to know postseason participants in the context of October’s contours is one of the true pleasures of the annual autumnal festival of baseball. You make new acquaintances in the playoffs. You find out about players you barely knew of for six months. Storylines develop and you get hooked. It’s how, for example, I drifted last year at this time from just being happy lesser-evil St. Louis had beaten the greater evil that was Philadelphia, to rooting for St. Louis’s demise because they were St. Louis and because Milwaukee had waited so long, to coming to grudgingly admire the Cardinals as they forged an unlikely path to the pennant to — against all precedent and better judgment — finding myself not unhappy when they snatched delirious Game Six away from Texas. Simultaneously, I came to know the Rangers in 2011 (and 2010) and felt empathy for them and their fans even if I never got fully on board with their cause.
We have all this extra Metsless time. I enjoy getting to know those who are going to fill it for close to a month. These drive-by Wild Card games, conversely, are all scurry and no linger. At first exposure to this tweak in baseball, the sensation is antithetical to the nature of the sport. I know it’s a gimmick. I know the various reasons given for its existence — award greater value for winning a division; provide more teams a shot in September; inject another dose of excitement into the big picture; rescue us from listening to Mike Francesa plotting the Yankees’ October rotation in August (“I think Andy in Game Two…”) — are code for money. MLB gets to market “Postseason” gear to ten fan bases instead of eight. TBS gets an extra night of programming to wrap around their Conan O’Brien promos. Captain Morgan gets a whole new audience to which to pitch spiced rum.
The first iteration still didn’t quite feel of a piece with October’s pace. But it’s here, even if the 94-68 Braves and 93-69 Rangers no longer are.
Lovers of quality broadcasting rejoice: Gary Cohen will be doing play-by-play of the first two games of the Reds-Giants series on ESPN Radio! That’s 98.7 FM in New York, check local listings elsewhere.
by Greg Prince on 4 October 2012 6:22 am Just for an instant, a halo formed around the 2012 Mets. It happened when Bryan Petersen swung through Bobby Parnell’s two-out, one-two pitch in the bottom of the ninth at Marlins Park early Wednesday evening. It was strike three, but Kelly Shoppach couldn’t hold onto it. Petersen dutifully took off for first, but Shoppach found the handle quickly enough and fired the ball to Ike Davis for the verifying forceout.
The last game of the season was over. The Mets won it, 4-2, beating the Marlins, the only team in their division that finished behind them. They were sending us into winter with a victory. Andres Torres, Scott Hairston and Ike Davis had homered, Jeremy Hefner had thrown seven-and-a-third effective innings. Parnell earned a save. It was a game that felt like it should have been blown open a few times and then it was a game that felt like it might be blown altogether, but in the end, it was what it had to be. It was a win and it was done.
Over WFAN, Howie Rose urged its placement in the books, a bound set of virtual volumes destined for the lacquered shelves, filing cabinets and storage bins of our minds. Those books have got to go somewhere; even digitized, they take up an inordinate amount of space. Still, you find the room for them. I have 44 sets, dating back to 1969, the year I became a Mets fan, right at the moment I wish everybody could have become a Mets fan. I’m pretty sure I think everybody became a Mets fan the same moment I did. It’s why I speak so casually of decades-old Mets results and allegedly obscure Mets names, and it’s why I innately don’t understand when Mets fans use terms like “long-suffering” or “second-class” or “checked out” when it comes to the Mets.
The Mets have never made me suffer. The Mets have never been second to anybody in my pecking order. I have never checked out on the Mets. I’m wholly realistic about their composition and their chances, and I rarely skip an opportunity to express my dismay when I find their overall direction unsatisfactory, but I got here in 1969. Deep down, it will always be 1969 for me. I just assume it is for everybody. I wish it were for all of you.
On SNY, the Mets congratulated one another as teams will do after wins have been achieved in relatively mundane fashion. There was no reason to jump up and down, so they didn’t. The guys who hadn’t been on the field emerged from the visitors’ dugout to greet the guys who had. Collectively, it wasn’t much of a season: 74-88, second from the bottom of the National League East, 20 games out of first, 14 games from the nearest available playoff spot, 49 losses in 77 games since that last juncture on July 8 when the Mets seemed capable of competing to play deep into October.
Individually, there were highlights scattered across 2012 and a few players had forged campaigns of which they could be proud. Hairston, for example, hit 20 home runs despite starting on only 86 occasions. Somewhere in the SNY viewing audience had to be a fan who came to love the Mets more than ever or perhaps for the first time because Scott hit home runs in 2012. That fan has a favorite player who may not be back next year, but the fan of the player will probably stay a fan of the team. Someday, after that allegiance has hardened into lifetime fealty, he or she will wax nostalgic with people he or she has yet to meet. “I’ve been a Mets fan a long time,” the line will go. “I go back to the Scott Hairston era. He was my favorite player when I was a kid. I didn’t know he was only a part-time outfielder. He hit home runs whenever he played and I loved him. I couldn’t believe when they let him go. Oh, and you know who else I really liked on the Mets when I was growing up?”
For somebody, 2012 was their 1969, their introduction to all of this. His or her perception of what the Mets are, can be and always will be will differ from mine because of what they experienced this 74-88 year. The lows will be processed differently. The highs will be appreciated in a whole other prism. It will all make another kind of sense to that lifelong Mets fan because of the way 2012 played out, maybe because of the way 2012 ended. The final game of some future season will be just like that Closing Day in 2012.
“Remember Scott Hairston hitting that two-run homer? Remember Ike Davis reaching 90 RBIs? Remember Jeremy Hefner? He was so awful a couple of weeks earlier and he had two really good starts at the end of the year. Yeah, I know they were against Pittsburgh and Miami, but I really thought he was going to be something. Oh, and you know who else I thought was going to be really good?”
It doesn’t have to be your first go-round and it doesn’t have to be your 44th. You’re on a path with these Mets. Every bound volume is special. Every season means something. Every last game on every schedule is yours if you decide it is so. When that last game is won, that’s even better. That’s the halo. You can, at that instant, feel like I did when my first season ended, which was with a 5-3 victory over the Orioles that crowned my favorite team as 1969 World Champions forever more. The Mets have been World Champions ever since. The 42 seasons in the succeeding 43 that didn’t produce a similar result? I remain unconvinced that those aren’t the aberrations. Thus, I await — sometimes patiently, sometimes less so — the restoration that my inner six-year-old knows as fact is coming someday.
The handshakes and backslaps were over and the halo dissolved as soon as it developed. Sandy Alderson was suddenly on the screen speaking the cool, detached, coded language of the executive class, assuring Kevin Burkhardt that the Mets’ “environment” had continued the improvement that had begun when he and his lieutenants had come to New York two years earlier. Terry Collins, in his role as the gym teacher whose anger-management courses likely worked too well, kept punctuating the positives of 2012. In the SNY studio, Bobby Ojeda was speaking up for my sanity, dismissing chatter about positives. You won 74 games, he kept repeating, there are no positives when you win 74 games.
It sounds harsh now, in the wake of one of those 74 wins (20 of them belonging to one pitcher, another achieved by a pitcher permitting no opposition hits through nine innings), but it was a refreshing drink of candor compared to what Alderson and Collins had been pouring. Ojeda was nailing everything that has been bothering me about this thing I love since the new regime came in. Not that I had much use for the old regime, but these guys never express any sense of urgency about a team that isn’t built to win and, in fact, loses far more often than it wins once they get the hang of it: 22-34 to wind down 2011; 28-49 to conclude 2012.
I’d hate to see what a deteriorating environment would have produced.
Alderson, on whom I find Mets fans project whatever qualities they wish to fit their worldview (Sandy as infallible savior; Sandy as incompetent stooge), had offered his offseason preview to reporters earlier in the day. He didn’t say what I wished he’d say, which would have been:
“Our team’s performance was unacceptable this year. We will evaluate everybody, work hard to make the right choices and put a much better product on the field next year and have a consistently winning one for the long term. We cannot continue to have one year after another like the last four. We recognize that despite a handful of highlights, this was not a good season. We aren’t going to pretend it was. I will not tell you who we might or might not retain or acquire. There’s no point in my giving away our strategy. But everything we do will be motivated by wanting to win.”
He didn’t have to flip over a table or knock a row of recording devices out of his inquisitors’ hands. He could stay cool and detached as he spoke. But he should have emphasized that the Mets are in business to win. It’s hard to tell either by the way they play or the way their upper management talks. And Collins could have built up his pupils’ confidence all he wanted, but he, too, could’ve thrown us a bone with just a little acknowledgement that a professional baseball team has not, in fact, performed well if it disappears down a chute with two months to go year after year. There are budgets, there are injuries, there all kinds of excuses (some of them perfectly legitimate), but a couple of straightforward eyes-on-the-prize sentences don’t cost a cent and they hurt nobody.
Which is why, in the dying weeks of another deadly season, I came to adore Bobby Ojeda being completely off message and on target. A clip of Burkhardt interviewing Hairston had aired. Chris Carlin tossed one underhanded to Bobby O. Hairston had a good season, right? What about a new contract for Scott? If Ojeda had followed up with a nod in Hairston’s direction, I wouldn’t have objected. It’s the kind of thing that’s done after a last game of the season where losing teams are concerned. A small piece of a shattered puzzle fit pretty well. Praise that piece — it’s how ball is played on regional cable network team telecasts.
Ojeda, however, wasn’t having it. Yeah, Scott was fine, he said. But this team won 74 games; nobody looks good when you win 74 games. And he just kept going like that, saying what the general manager and the manager (and the chief operating officer) should have been saying. He was saying the Mets need to win a lot more than 74 games and shouldn’t feel disproportionately good about themselves until they do.
I’d swear I’d follow Bobby Ojeda through the gates of hell, but I figure following him to the end of a fourth consecutive losing season will suffice.
Ten teams will continue to play October baseball in 2012. The Mets aren’t one of them. The Mets haven’t been one of them since October 19, 2006. With the ascension of Davey Johnson’s Nationals, Endy Chavez’s Orioles and Bob Melvin’s amazingly undercompensated Athletics to the playoffs, the list of teams that haven’t qualified for postseason since Adam Wainwright was about to strike out Carlos Beltran (who are both eligible for more baseball this month) is down to seven. Only the Pirates, Royals, Blue Jays, Mariners, Marlins, Astros and Padres have been absent from playoff competition longer than the Mets…and only the Pirates, Royals, Astros and Mets haven’t rustled up as many as 80 wins in any season dating back to 2009.
There have very real budget issues in the years since Called Strike Three. There have been very real injury issues. There was a discredited front office and field manager. There were replacements. But for four long years, the Mets have been one of those teams. And for six going on seven years — a period longer than the interminable void that swallowed the half-decade between the 2000 pennant and the 2006 division title, the Mets have failed to qualify for the best part of the baseball year.
I’d call it urgent. I’d call it unacceptable. I’d call it a shame, not just for this 44-season Mets fan who can at least be bought off with a firm reliance on precedent — remember, I still think 1969 was the norm — but for the Mets fans who keep signing up for this: those who were lured into the life by all that glittered in 1973 or 1986 or 1988 or 1999 or 2000 or 2006…or those whose point of entry was some random encounter with 1963 or 1978 or 1991 or 2004 or 2012.
It doesn’t matter when you became one of us. You’re one of us now and you’re one of us forever. We’re in this together. We sustain ourselves by memory, by habit, by ritual, by hope and by each other. We welcome the voices of Gary, Keith, Ron and Ralph; Kevin, Bobby and Chris; and Howie, Josh, Jim and Eddie into our ears. We cloak ourselves in orange, blue and reduced-for-clearance black. We lobby on behalf of R.A., we negotiate by proxy for David, we want to know when we get to see Zack. We have no catchers we’d ever want to see again yet we can’t wait for them and pitchers to report to Port St. Lucie. We are 1:10 and 7:10 and, as of less than twelve hours ago, 2013.
We love the Mets unconditionally. But we’d love them to win or at least prefer they and their supervisors seem a little more palpably concerned about losing. And as our 51st set of bound volumes is — after 162 entries — put away alongside the previous 50, we don’t believe we’re being unreasonable about it.
by Jason Fry on 3 October 2012 3:50 pm The season is all but over, and ending without me. Last weekend we were at a wedding, and then I headed to Florida to help teach a journalism seminar. The Mets will play their final game while I’m on a plane tonight, meaning that the last significant Mets moment I saw in 2012 was Lucas Duda’s blast off Tim Hudson. Barring Game 162 heroics, in retrospect that was about the right time to check out.
2012 had its bright spots — quite a few, in fact. There was David Wright’s assumption of the top spot in numerous all-time statistical categories; R.A. Dickey’s 20 wins and ferocious pitching; the emergence of Matt Harvey, Ruben Tejada and Jon Niese; the returns of Daniel Murphy and Ike Davis (sort of); and of course Johan Santana giving us the night we never imagined would come. Unfortunately, though, this good news must be weighed against the team’s very grim financial picture, which seems to get more dire every time a Mets official lets us peek behind the Wilpons’ veil of silence about such things.
I think being a Mets fan will be very rough for the next couple of years at least, and maybe a permanent condition until Bud Selig finds some auguries in measurements of continental drift that convince him it’s time to unplug the Wilpons’ respirator.
So how do we endure? By being baseball fans.
I’m not going to talk about the postseason and picking a bandwagon team — we’ll do plenty of that this month. I mean just luxuriating in the beauty, tension and the occasional daffiness of the sport I consider mankind’s greatest artistic achievement.
Beauty and tension? Last night I was at Tropicana Field, watching the Orioles and Rays battle. The Rays had been eliminated Monday night, but the Orioles were trying to grab a share of first place from the Yankees.
This was my second visit to the Trop; the first one came in 2007, and I was struck then by how much it was actually an OK place to see a game. In retrospect, this is proof of the damage to one’s sense of aesthetics done by a childhood in Shea Stadium. Well, either that or I was drunk and/or concussed. Because the Trop is a disaster. It looks like a kid’s science project gone horribly wrong, a cavernous space that deadens sound, with concrete hallways, a seasickly off-kilter roof that leaks, mangy artificial turf and those ridiculous catwalks spiraling around and threatening to interfere with a surprising number of fly balls. Oh, and their museum contains misspelled stuff.
 This isn’t one of them. But look: For all that, the Orioles and the Rays played a hell of a game. James Shields struck out 15, giving up just one hard-hit ball all night, to Chris Davis. Unfortunately for Shields, that one hard-hit ball traveled to the approximate longitude of the Azores — you could hear gasps weirdly echoing around the big terrarium when Davis connected. A parade of Orioles pitchers were even better than Shields, fanning 15 Rays and giving up no hard-hit balls for a 1-0 win. Husband-and-wife Orioles fans were sitting in front of us, and she refused to look at the score of the Red Sox-Yankees game or listen to anyone who tried to tell her. I was enjoying myself and the taut battle below, but she was writhing on every pitch. That’s why I love baseball.
Oh, and when the Rays lost, the entire crowd — Tampa Bay and Baltimore fans alike — immediately began rooting for Boston. That’s also why I love baseball.
For the daffiness, consider this play you may have seen recently: The Nats’ designated Wookiee Michael Morse hit a grand slam at Busch Stadium, a ball the umpires initially ruled had bounced off a wall and was in play, leading to pandemonium on the basepaths. When the umps returned from looking at the video, they correctly ruled that Morse had hit a home run — but the runners had to complete their trips around the bases. And for it to happen legally, the runners had to begin on the bases they’d occupied at the beginning of the play. It took a while to herd four Nats back to their starting points, with Morse winding up at home without a bat in his hands, looking slightly sheepish. At the puckish suggestion of Yadier Molina, he pantomimed a swing of the bat he wasn’t holding, playing home-run charades. I mean, how awesome is that?
I showed Morse’s invisible homer to Joshua (to his delight), and it got me thinking about another play, one I’d read about years ago and that depended on a startling idea: a team recording four legitimate outs on one play.
After a bit of hunting I found the reference — it was to Thomas Boswell’s classic How Life Imitates the World Series, the situation had come up in Cuba, and the play hadn’t actually happened but almost did. Here are the basics: Bases loaded, nobody out, tie game. Batter smokes a ball into the gap, runners from first and second break and are caught off their bases for a triple play. But while they’re being corralled, the runner from third tags up and scores before the third out is recorded. Team in the field appeals that the runner on third left early — which would be a legitimate fourth out. (Boswell says that in the Cuban game, one ump said out and the other said safe, and eventually the run was upheld. My apologies to any Packers fans who just had to read that.) So not a quadruple play, but almost.
Joshua thought that was pretty wonderful, and so did I. And it led me to a play that might actually be stranger, and that at least one source claims really happened in the Pacific Coast League: a triple play in which no defender touches the ball. It works like this: Runners on first and second, nobody out. Batter hits a ball that’s ruled an infield fly, meaning he’s automatically out. Runner on first passes the runner on second, so runner from first is out. Runner from second, perhaps understandably confused, is struck by the ball, so he’s out. Triple play without a defender doing anything other than gawping at the proceedings.
I doubt that ever actually happened — in journalism such yarns are deemed “too good to check” — but there was an unassisted triple play on an infield fly just last year. It happened in an NCAA game, when runners from first and second didn’t realize an infield fly had been called and were tagged out by the shortstop, who also got credit for the putout on the infield fly.
If this ever happens to the Mets, my money would be on poor Daniel Murphy being involved. In the meantime, though, it’s something to appreciate, and one of many reasons to watch despite a Metsian parade of reasons not to.
by Greg Prince on 3 October 2012 1:00 pm 
Thursday night at 7:30, when you’ll have gone about 24 hours without Mets baseball and be Jonesing more than you can imagine for fresh Mets content, turn to SNY and feast your eyes on the debut of Mets Yearbook: 1987. It covers a season I remember unfondly for its failure to be 1986 (worst…92-win year…ever!) but in a format I look forward to seeing. I won’t give away the theme/shtick, but I understand it involves Keith Hernandez, and not just in highlight clips.
Record, watch, enjoy. Vintage Mets is all the Mets we’ll be getting until April. It’s just the way it goes this time of year.
Image courtesy of “Mario Mendoza…HOF lock” at Baseball-Fever.
by Greg Prince on 3 October 2012 4:51 am He won 20 games, 19 of them after tearing an abdominal muscle in his second outing of the year. That he didn’t win a 21st in his last start doesn’t detract one iota from the season he crafted.
Will Cy Young voters hold it against R.A. Dickey that he couldn’t add one final win to his total Tuesday night in Miami? Will he look a little less impressive if Clayton Kershaw (shorn of playoff possibilities) goes out today and strikes out ten Giants to take away from R.A. the one-third of the pitching triple crown he can tentatively claim? Dickey is second to the Dodger ace by 0.15 in ERA and trails a scratched Gio Gonzalez by one in victories. He’s also a bit behind Kershaw in WAR (5.4 to 5.8) and WHIP (1.05 to 1.03, with Matt Cain at 1.04).
But as total packages go — not even taking into account the pain management R.A. had to navigate, never mind that he did things with his primary pitch that nobody in baseball history had ever done — was there a better pitcher in the National League for the length and breadth of the season than R.A. Dickey? Was there anybody else you knew you could count on like you could count on Dickey again and again? And though we’re long overdue to add some major hardware to the Met display case, is a vote that goes against R.A. Dickey really going to make you think any less of what you saw out of him in 2012?
We know what we experienced with this gentleman from April to October, right down the last out wherein he pitched one more discomfort-riddled inning and extricated himself from one last jam. R.A., trailing 3-0, went to the dugout after six at 20-6, 230 K’s and a 2.73 ERA. The win column wouldn’t budge when the Mets didn’t score for him in the seventh, but they shooed away any possible R.A. L in the eighth when they did what teams generally do against Heath Bell. The Mets got the score to 3-3. They couldn’t do more than that, however, and eventually the Marlins — via a nostalgic Jose Reyes triple, a mystifying Jordany Valdespin vapor lock and a redemptive single from golden sombreroan Donovan Solano — skewered Collin McHugh in the eleventh and that was that for Game 161.
It must be late as late can be in the season, because I have to admit I felt good for three Marlins even after the Mets lost: Reyes because I will always love watching that man triple provided it’s not going to cost a Met a 21st win (though I’d have preferred Jordany make with the relay throw to third); Solano because, geez, striking out four times in one game has to be misery incarnate; and Adam Greenberg because Greenberg stepping into the box and striking out once — swinging in the sixth — was uplifting for reasons that had nothing to do with R.A.’s numbers. Adam didn’t lay a bat on any of Dickey’s knucklers, but he got to try, and that’s all he or anybody who signed his One At Bat petition could ask for.
All I’ve asked for out of these undertalented Mets since it became apparent they weren’t really going to contend this year is a sharp effort, game after game. I don’t believe I saw it all that often from mid-July onward. It was instructive to listen to the blatantly honest Bobby Ojeda on Tuesday’s SNY pregame show explain what truly signifies the q-word: quitting. It’s not necessarily not running hard to first; “eyewash” Bobby O called that. The tipoff to the old lefty is when players mentally check out. You see it along the basepaths, Ojeda said, and you see it in the field, specifically when players don’t hit their cutoff men.
Ojeda was responding to a reel of highlights from Monday night’s typically dim second-half performance, strongly implying that not a few Mets had mentally checked out a few days before being permitted to do so physically. That kind of effort is depressing. Conversely, the moments when one witnesses relatively extraordinary effort are stimulating. Tuesday night, Scott Hairston gave that kind of effort in two consecutive plate appearances, each of them on high choppers to third. Both times I thought, “he’s not that fast, he won’t beat it out,” and both times he ran his ass off and beat the throws. The first time it resulted in the run that kept Dickey from taking the loss. The second time it prolonged a rally that ultimately didn’t go anywhere. The gratifying part was watching Hairston staying squarely checked in to a game that was very much up for grabs.
It was the fourth-place Mets and the fifth-place Marlins down at the very nub of the schedule, yet I found Hairston’s hustle, in isolation, as splendid an exhibition of baseball Tuesday night as any taking place in games where playoff races were being decided or extended.
Then, in the postgame, when the alibis usually float slow and methodically, there was more reason to admire a Met. Terry Collins and Dickey revealed the injury that bothered R.A. all season yet didn’t hamper him in any tangible fashion. 20-6, 230, 2.73 (plus 5.4 and 1.05) tells you that much. And, oh yeah, Dickey will lead the league in innings pitched. Not innings pitched with a torn abdominal muscle. Innings pitched, period.
Geez…and I mean that in a good way.
Twenty-one wins might have made R.A.’s case just a tiny bit shinier to the writers who vote on the prizes, but I have to admit I’m fine with him landing precisely on 20 in the company of David Cone and Frank Viola, who, like Dickey, came to the Mets from American League outposts. The only pitchers who ever won more than 20 in a season for the franchise where pitching has tended to be 90 percent of the game were Tom Seaver thrice, Dwight Gooden and Jerry Koosman. Those are the three greatest starting pitchers the Mets have ever had. Each began as a Met and lasted at least a decade before becoming anything but a Met. For stubbornly sentimental reasons, I can live with Tom Terrific, Doctor K and Kooz enduring another offseason as the sole residents of a pantheon that demands “21 OR OVER” for admission. (For future fulfillment, however, I’d be overjoyed if Matt Harvey someday qualifies for membership in their exclusive enclave.)
Within the less ethereal, more immediate Metscape, Dickey and every last one of his acolytes would surely love to have his campaign certified by the first Cy Young awarded to a Met since Gooden received his in 1985. Of course we want to see R.A. accept accolades, if just to hear what words he’d use to describe the sensation. But this season was his season no matter what a bunch of ballots say, and his season was truly a Met season for the ages to all of us who rooted hard for him across every one of those 233.2 innings he threw.
Surely R.A.’s Thesaurus would tell him winning something as mundane as a plaque would be practically superfluous in evaluating what he accomplished in 2012. He won the hearts and minds of Mets fans forever. In our world, there is no higher honor.
by Greg Prince on 2 October 2012 5:54 pm Adam Greenberg gets his second chance for a first impression tonight in Miami. The Marlins responded to his (and his filmmaker advocates’) “position wanted” campaign by saying, in essence, what the hell, it’s a great story, you’ve got a good cause, go put on a uniform, we’ll pinch-hit you in a game that doesn’t much matter otherwise.
Of course tonight’s game matters, not only in the sense that every game matters when there are hardly any left but because someone else who required the benefit of the doubt at a crucial juncture of his career will be going for his 21st win. Hopefully R.A. Dickey will still be on the mound when Ozzie Guillen inserts Adam Greenberg, mostly because it will mean Dickey’s dealing but also because how can you not love the fringe veteran who had to remake himself in the minors as the toughest knuckleballer ever versus the guy who spent seven years picking himself up, dusting himself off and starting all over again?
We’ve got a Cy Young to win here, so business is business, but otherwise, I hope Greenberg has the major league at-bat of his life against the Mets…and since it will technically be his first, I guess he will.
You couldn’t do this so easily at another time of year. Only because baseball expands its rosters from September 1 onward can we dream that a story like this might come true. A few weeks ago there were grumblings about how the addition of players on every team represents a logistical and philosophical pain in the ass, but I don’t see it. Every September, whether our team is contending or, more likely, playing out the string, we look forward to a few new faces brightening our outlook or at least distracting us with their novelty. Sometimes the exercise begins to point your team in the right direction, sometimes it’s just more bookkeeping. Monday night in Miami, when September callup Jeurys Familia threw four shutout innings while walking six as a first-time starter, the results were inconclusive. But it was a new guy and there were new results and, in essence, what the hell?
Adam Greenberg is, in a way, carrying on a great tradition, one whose avatar was a New York Giant whose name lives on in history — but it’s not really the one whose name keeps coming up in the context of Greenberg. “Moonlight Graham” is the easy answer because Graham was portrayed in Field of Dreams, but Graham played his single game in June 1905 and didn’t (at least as the legend goes) try desperately to get on the field again as the season wore on. The Giant I’m thinking of came along six years later. Charles Victor “Victory” Faust was — as strange as this sounds a century hence — John McGraw’s good-luck charm.
Victory Faust was the Giants’ mascot. Not a Mr. Met licensed character kind of mascot, mind you, but a guy who wore a uniform, sat on the bench, was by universal acclimation kind of nuts and wanted to pitch. He wasn’t officially a player but he was determined to be. McGraw wanted him around because when Faust was with the Giants, they won. When he wasn’t, they lost. (Subject that kind of strategy to analytics.) As the 1911 season wound down, and the Giants had their pennant secured, McGraw relented to popular sentiment and used Faust on the mound — twice. The record shows Victory Faust recorded an ERA of 4.50 and no won-lost record.
No harm was done, though the Giants lost the World Series to the Philadelphia A’s because, well, Connie Mack employed a luckier mascot, a hunchback named Louis Van Zeldt. (That may not have been the sole reason, but try and convince the greatest managers of their day it wasn’t.)
None of this is to imply Greenberg is kind of nuts nor little more than a curiosity. The man made it to the majors in 2005, encountered horrifying adversity and plugged away until this moment was in sight. Kudos to the Marlins for seeing the beauty in his quest. Kudos to Dickey for pitching to him as if he’s just another Marlin when he gets his second chance.
And let’s hear it for lasts as we reach the final innings of the Mets’ 51st season. Fifty-one different players have been, shall we say, the Last Met Picked in a given year. In all but two of them, that meant they didn’t get here until September/October and they waited longer than any of their teammates to enter a game as a Met for the very first time. Some pretty good Mets have come out of their ranks.
ALL-TIME LAST-PICKED METS TEAM
C — Joe Hietpas, October 3, 2004
Hietpas’s one Moonlight moment — catching the last half of the last inning of the last game against the about-to-be extinct Montreal Expos — is too good to pass up for this squad.
1B — Ed Kranepool, September 22, 1962
He’s not the all-time Mets hit leader anymore, but he’ll always have mind-boggling longevity and six times to the plate in the Polo Grounds besides.
2B — Anderson Hernandez, September 18, 2005
Great defensively. Offensively…what a glove. When ’05 wore down, we took much pleasure in our infield of the future coalescing as a unit: Mike Jacobs, Anderson Hernandez, Jose Reyes, David Wright. Where did that future go anyway?
SS — Jeff Gardner, September 10, 1991
Buddy Harrelson’s Mets had lost 34 of 46 entering this Tuesday night against Montreal. Gardner had been stuck at Tidewater since 1988. Yet the alchemy was downright Faustian: Gardner went 1-for-3, the Mets won, 9-0, and Pete Schourek tossed a one-hitter.
3B — Roy Staiger, September 7, 1975
My Sporting News crush the summer I was 12. “Why won’t the Mets bring up Roy Staiger?” So they did. My crush didn’t last. Neither did Staiger. Oh well.
LF — Cleon Jones, September 14, 1963
Making his major league debut on the same field where Victory Faust made his (and becoming the last New York player to do so), Jones replaced Duke Carmel in center for Casey Stengel at the Polo Grounds against the Colt .45s in the top of the ninth. He’d start the next day. He’d start a lot of days thereafter, including October 16, 1969, when he caught the final out of the World Series at Shea Stadium.
CF — Lee Mazzilli, September 7, 1976
Mazz would enjoy a couple of big September moments for a team that was playing its last weeks as a winning club for years to come. Homered in his second game against the Cubs. Homered later to all but knock the Pirates out of the division race. Joined a team that featured Seaver, Koosman, Matlack, Harrelson, Kranepool, Millan and Grote. Stuck around to become associated with a team that featured mostly Mazzilli. Came back to win a championship alongside Hernandez, Carter, Strawberry and Gooden.
RF — Fred Lewis, September 4, 2012
Lewis hasn’t done anything these past few weeks worth noting. But it’s either him or John Christensen in this slot, and there are two games left in Lewis’s 2012 if not his Met career, so we can always hope he has his moment before the lights go out tomorrow.
SP — Nolan Ryan, September 11, 1966
Pitched with the Mets until 1971. Remind me to check to see if anything happened with him afterwards.
RP — Randy Myers, October 6, 1985
John Franco’s in the Mets Hall of Fame. Randy Myers could have been.
And the rest…
Tom Parsons, 1964: Traded for Jerry Grote, so thank you for that.
Greg Goossen, 1965: Eternally ten years and change from having a chance to turn 30.
Les Rohr, 1967: Last Met of the busiest personnel year ever — 54 players in all — and the first No. 1 draft choice the Mets ever selected.
Duffy Dyer, 1968: Caught honorably through 1974.
Jessie Hudson, 1969: The quietest and briefest of Miracle Mets.
Dean Chance, 1970: Pennant insurance not cashed in.
Don Rose, 1971: Traded to California with Ryan, whose post-Met career I really promise to check on at some point.
Joe Nolan, 1972: Pinch-hit and caught in the same game Robert Clemente got his 3,000th and final hit.
Bob Apodaca, 1973: Yogi Berra was desperate and sent the rookie to face the Pirates in the ninth inning of a must-have game — Apodaca threw eight balls but the Mets held on. ’Dack became a dependable reliever until injuries cut his career short. Was a successful pitching coach, too, but was purged back when the Mets used to do that sort of thing.
Randy Sterling, 1974: Mets’ top draft pick of 1969, proving the magic of that season didn’t extend everywhere.
Doc Medich, 1977: Ex-Yankee signed off the scrap heap at the season’s tail end for reasons unapparent then and now. Pitched for three teams that year — A’s, Mariners and Mets — that each lost 98 games. Went into medicine presumably to find a cure for terminal lousiness.
Butch Benton, 1978: I’m fairly certain a quarter-page photo of Butch still runs annually in the back of the Mets’ official yearbook, right next to fellow “Future Star” Luis Rosado’s.
Ray Burris, 1979: The Mets were so cheap that they didn’t bring up anybody new in September, but the de Roulets did spring for the grizzled Cub in August.
Scott Holman, 1980: Didn’t turn into Mike Scott, didn’t turn into Ron Darling, didn’t turn into Tim Leary, didn’t even turn into Rick Ownbey, who turned into Keith Hernandez. But he was one of those guys.
Charlie Puleo, 1981: Destined to become the inverse of Pat Zachry in the “traded for Tom Seaver” sense.
Ronn Reynolds, 1982: Had more n’s in his name than he did H’s on his ledger during his first callup.
Mike Fitzgerald, 1983: Announced presence with authority by homering in first at-bat; departure announced something greater when he became part of the package that snagged the Mets Gary Carter.
John Christensen, 1984: Between you and me, he’s probably got nothing to worry about from Fred Lewis.
John Mitchell, 1986: The Mets didn’t need any help the September Mitchell came up. They needed quite a bit when he came back in 1987. He gave them about as much as could be reasonably expected.
John Candelaria, 1987: Another Chance taken on pennant insurance. Another policy invalidated.
David West, 1988: The Jeurys Familia of his first go-round. Shares the name of my late father-in-law whom I never met.
Blaine Beatty, 1989: The good times were ending.
Chris Jelic, 1990: Homered in his final at-bat, left on a high note.
Joe Vitko, 1992: First Met born in the 1970s.
Kenny Greer, 1993: Traded to the Mets for Frank Tanana in September, so he missed most of the carnage of 1993. Didn’t pitch until the 17th inning of a 0-0 game the last week of the season. Kept the score tied. Mets won in the bottom of the 17th. Greer went to 1-0, never pitched again as a Met. Historically perfect timing.
Juan Castillo, 1994: His debut was July 26. The strike was August 11. I’m sure it was nothing personal.
Robert Person, 1995: I saw the Mets sweep a twinight doubleheader started by Person and Reid Cornelius on rainchecks descended from a postponement in early 1994. Those tickets were exchanged at least three times between weather and labor stoppage. An advertisement for patience, one supposes.
Charlie Greene, 1996: I think I’ll just leave this blank.
Carlos Mendoza, 1997: Broke up Dustin Hermanson’s no-hitter on September 13 on a disputed fly ball, disputed in the sense that Fran Healy kept lobbying on air for it be to changed to an error. The Mets would trail, 6-0, in the ninth and score six runs, the last four on Carl Everett’s grand slam off Uggie Urbina. They’d win on Bernard Gilkey’s three-run blast in the eleventh. It stands as one of my favorite games ever. Which is why Carlos Mendoza is no Charlie Greene.
Todd Haney, 1998: The Mets fought for a Wild Card with Todd Hundley, Todd Pratt and Todd Haney. They lost their last five games of the season and became the Todd man out.
Glendon Rusch, 1999: Snuck into action during a lull in one of the most dramatic Met months that’s ever been. Pitched competently for a couple of years thereafter.
Jorge Velandia, 2000: Is leaning over the dugout railing in the mind’s eye.
Mark Corey, 2001: Mets were high on him. Or was it that he was high on the Mets?
Pat Strange, 2002: First Met born in the 1980s. By the way, we’re still waiting for a Met born in the 1990s.
Mike Glavine, 2003: Nepotistic first baseman whose family name remains intact as what would happen on September 30, 2007, wasn’t his sin.
Phil Humber, 2006: Traded for Johan Santana, pitched a no-hitter before Johan Santana — pitched a more perfect no-hitter than Johan Santana. But Johan Santana pitched a no-hitter, so, yeah, it was worth it.
Carlos Muñiz, 2007: Had the tilde on his uniform but his name was pronounced without it, if I recall correctly.
Bobby Parnell, 2008: Cripes, he’s still here, isn’t he?
Tobi Stoner, 2009: Too easy.
Dillon Gee, 2010: If he’s not exactly missed, I do look forward to welcoming him back.
Valentino Pascucci, 2011: A Buffalo Bison in 2012, he was Tweeting a couple of Mondays ago about whatever football game was going on while the Mets were playing. Doesn’t strike me as feeling particularly attached to the organization.
Good luck, Adam. Good luck, Fred. Good luck, R.A. Good night, Victory Faust, wherever you are.
by Greg Prince on 2 October 2012 4:25 am Top Mets brass has descended on Miami for the final series of the year. It’s a shame minority owner Bill Maher isn’t among the traveling party. One of Maher’s recurring features on his HBO program, Real Time, is “Dispatches From the Bubble,” wherein some politician is spotlighted asserting fact-like talking points that are pretty clearly at odds with reality. Maher’s aim is to show these people are living inside a bubble impenetrable to challenging thought or compelling evidence.
Which brings us to the Mets’ decision to retain their coaching staff whole for 2013, a nonmove that might be looked at, broadly speaking, two ways.
1) It could be seen as a vote of confidence not just in the abilities of Dan Warthen, Ricky Bones, Bob Geren, Dave Hudgens, Tom Goodwin and Tim Teufel, but as an indicator that they, under the direction of Terry Collins, are charged with implementing a very precise system of Mets baseball that will transcend the composition of the roster at any given instant. As the Mets continue to promote young players from within, their development will hinge on hearing a consistent organizational voice at the major league level, and these coaches have been determined to be the best delivery vehicle possible for the Met message.
2) It could be seen as easier than repainting the names on the parking spaces.
The trajectory of the 2012 Mets went from giddily good — 31-23; to slogging along — 15-16, albeit with the wins dramatic enough to keep you from noticing they were outnumbered by the losses; to miserable tailspin — 27-48 since July 8, including Monday night’s grim abandonment of pitching, hitting and baserunning fundamentals (the Marlins were no picnic to watch, either, but in the end, they had Giancarlo Stanton and we didn’t). In other words, the 2012 Mets were never that great, despite what Collins keeps telling us, and they’ve been far from decent for a very long time. So why, one is left to wonder, is it imperative to keep in place this set of men who instructed and inspired these Mets to no heights?
I suppose that’s a rhetorical question, because the essence of Collins’s answer — that they work hard and it’s not their fault — sheds no light. I imagine to him, hunkered down with these fellows as he is from day to day, they seem perfectly suited to their tasks. Maybe everybody in the Mets organization knows everybody else is giving it his best and everybody is swell and, besides, from the vantage point of the bubble, this is really a pretty good team that just hit a little rough patch three months ago.
After all, weren’t they eight games over .500 for one day?
Here’s Collins’s explanation for every coach coming back — or, more accurately, why no coach is being reassigned:
“You can get carried away by blaming coaches for a lot of stuff that happens. If you didn’t see a work ethic, I can understand coaching changes. If there were issues that some guys had, I could see that. I was around these guys every single day, and there hasn’t been a day go by where they haven’t tried to stay positive. They haven’t thrown their arms up in the air and said, ‘Well, we can’t help this guy.’ That’s never been an issue.”
One wishes to assume everybody who dons a Mets uniform gives it his all and that the organization isn’t so shocked by seeing full-out effort that it equates basic trying with brilliant succeeding. (Jason Bay always busts it down the line, too.) As for fault, no, I won’t necessarily blame Ramon Ramirez on Warthen or Bones; or Angel Torres on Goodwin; or the various parts of Josh Thole, Mike Nickeas and Kelly Shoppach that don’t function on Geren and Hudgens. No greater fount of wisdom than R.A. Dickey insisted, “Our poor season hasn’t been because of them. Believe me.”
But if the coaches are credited when things work out (Collins lauded their “development backgrounds”), is there any accountability when they don’t? Is there a net-net analysis done to determine if each coach is doing more good than harm? Or that perhaps there are other coaches who could do what the Met coaches do, but better? Is anybody deemed responsible if the bullpen implodes year after year or are the pitching coaches just around to take bows when a starter goes seven innings a few times? When a patient hitting approach yields runs in the first half of a season, is that more telling than when the same approach has perhaps too many oh-and-one holes being dug in the second half? When a coach takes a young player aside to explain how he just erred and what he needs to do to correct his mistake, is the coach to be rewarded for being diligent? Or is the coach to be deemed as ineffectual when the same player does the same stupid thing a week later?
This is still rhetorical because I really don’t know. Year after year when I was a kid, I could count on Rube Walker and Joe Pignatano remaining pitching and bullpen coach, respectively, even when the managers changed, regardless of what the starters and relievers were doing in a given season. It never occurred to me that Eddie Yost, third base coach for eight years, had anything to do with whether the Mets won or lost. I just knew Eddie Yost was always in the third base coach’s box when the game began because Lindsey Nelson would confirm it. I didn’t quite know exactly what difference coaches made then and I don’t know now. I’ve asked from time to time and I’ve watched each of them, true to Collins’s word, hustle all over the field during BP, but I still don’t know.
I do know I don’t like to see people lose their jobs if they don’t truly deserve to, and cosmetic changes don’t really cover up what’s wrong with a bigger picture. Yet in an endeavor where there they literally keep score, and where the score was run up big-time on the Mets for yet another season, it’s just weird that nobody on the management side of the field is judged accountable. Everybody works hard, nothing is anybody’s fault.
The Mets are doing great in the bubble. It’s in the standings where they have their problems.
|
|
