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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 1 October 2012 9:42 am Like any properly focused Mets fan, I’ve followed the American League playoff picture with the same overarching desire with which I’ve followed every American League playoff picture: rooting for the Yankees to be eliminated from it. (Request to anybody who wants to chime in with haughty declarations regarding the insignificance of this outcome to overall Met fortunes: stow it; it’s October.) The first barrier, in which the Yankees simply don’t make the playoffs, crumbled Sunday night when the Angels lost to the Rangers, thereby designating our friends to the north as, at the very least, Wild Card entrants. The new and ridiculous setup in which two Wild Cards play a celebrity death match to determine who lives another day is potentially our next hope, but only if the Orioles can continue to be wonderful and what’s left of Bobby Valentine’s Red Sox can be anything at all over these final three games. The proper calibration of O’s at Rays and Sox at Yanks would give Baltimore a division title, which would in turn consign New York’s other baseball team to said Wild Card round versus (almost certainly) the A’s, who are usually a better story than playoff team, but that’s leaning on precedent and getting ahead of ourselves.
My motivation for invoking the postseason three days before we’re altogether done with the 2012 Mets was the glimpse of a 1999 Met I got yesterday while flipping channels that didn’t carry the Mets game (thanks again, Cablevision). The Rays were finishing up a defeat of the White Sox, and in the home dugout at old New Comiskey Park, the Chicago manager was looking pretty darn glum.
And I wondered if it’s worse now for Robin Ventura than it was 13 years ago at this time.
On a team anchored by Mike Piazza and Edgardo Alfonzo, I thought Robin Ventura was everything to the 1999 Mets. He changed the lineup, he changed the defense, I’d dare say he changed the culture. Robin wasn’t rah-rah, but he was reassuringly present, a mature, accomplished player who took the heat off his teammates all summer long. Piazza could be left to rake. Fonzie could be left to blossom. Ventura did the calm, cool, collected talking as far as could be told through the newspapers and broadcasts.
In the fourth week of September, when there was nothing to be calm, cool and collected about, Robin went into the same slump that devoured everybody else on that club. The Mets lost seven in a row. They entered their final weekend series, on this date in 1999, in almost impossible straits: two down for the Wild Card with three to play. We all became experts in the ways of the 1962 Giants, because we were informed they were the only team that had ever overcome that kind of deficit in that kind of time frame to achieve a postseason berth.
Forging a tie and sending the regular season into overtime (which is how San Francisco won the pennant 37 years earlier) was all the Mets could realistically hope for entering those last three games against the Pirates, and the hope wasn’t all that bright as they let the mediocre Bucs drag them into extra innings. But the Mets got runners on in the bottom of the eleventh Friday night at Shea, the Pirates opted to walk Mike Piazza with two out to load the bases and Ventura stepped up…like he’d stepped up so often in 1999. He served a single into center, the Mets pulled out a 3-2 win, Cincinnati would lose in Milwaukee and the comeback of a generation was on. The Mets would earn their tie by Sunday, beat the Reds for the Wild Card on Monday, start playing an NLDS in Phoenix on Tuesday and continue their adventures for two more unforgettable weeks.
Robin Ventura didn’t bring us a world championship, but he brought us those two weeks, and that fortnight was the best time to be a Mets fan since there was a world championship. So it saddened me to look at Robin looking despondent in that White Sox dugout. His team had been in first place almost every day from late May until late September, and now they were about to lose for the tenth time in twelve tries. When the loss went final, the White Sox found themselves three behind the Tigers with three to play, an exponentially deeper hole than Robin’s first Met club faced. The White Sox weren’t supposed to be much of a factor this season, and for their first-year skipper to get them as far as he did was an accomplishment. Yet to come so close (they’d been three up on Detroit with fifteen to play) and have it slip away…that was what 1999 felt like until Robin’s single — the one that went for one base without any controversy — began to turn it around.
It’s probably too late for Ventura’s White Sox in 2012. I remain eternally grateful he was right on time for us in 1999.
by Greg Prince on 1 October 2012 1:30 am By predictably losing on Sunday — between Kris Medlen’s streak and Chipper Jones’s farewell, I had next to no doubt about the outcome at Turner Field — the 73-86 Mets made certain their record in 2012 will not be as good as their record was in 2011 (77-85), which wasn’t as good as their record in 2010 (79-83).
That’s progress?
It’s not, but neither would have been creeping from 77 wins last year to 78 this year. That’s why the Alderson quotes from the trading deadline about finishing over .500 or the “one source said” emphasis on making it to third place did nothing for me. Those aren’t goals. They’re stepping stones. The Mets aren’t within an incremental step from being where they need to be. The more bracing reminders ownership and management receive that they weren’t close to being all-around solid in 2012 — spirited start notwithstanding — the better it will be for all of us in the long run. Remember the emptiness of July, August and September and resolve to start filling the void.
If the Mets had eked out a smidgen of forward statistical motion, I could picture everyone from Jeff Wilpon to Sandy Alderson to Terry Collins contracting tendonitis from patting themselves on the back over minute improvements — and the players getting all giddy from sucking a little less while playing dress-up for their next flight. Never mind the good first-third of this season, when they peaked at 31-23 (which is that high bar Collins keeps alluding to — playing pretty well during a span of 54 games out of 162). Own your subpar performance. Acknowledge it as unacceptable and then put it behind you. Build a better team, one that isn’t above average for a couple of months and dreadful for many more months. Set aside a few keepers and decide nobody else is sacrosanct and every option is on the table.
Those Braves who put the Mets away with no extraordinary effort on Sunday? That’s a better team. Save for two Jon Niese starts, the Mets didn’t share the same planet with them in the second half. There’s talent all over that pitching staff and all over that roster and they’re not even the best team in their own division. They fell on their faces last September and it didn’t stop them from getting back on their feet a season later. The Braves are what I want the Mets to be when they grow up.
by Greg Prince on 30 September 2012 12:37 am Game Six against the Red Sox. The Steve Henderson Game. The Marlon Anderson Game. The Rob Gardner-Chris Short Double Shutout that went 18 innings and was terminated by curfew. The Largest Comeback in Mets History, at the Astrodome, when an 8-0 deficit became an 11-8 win.
The Mets have played some great Saturday night games in their history. Their most recent Saturday night game wasn’t one of them.
I wouldn’t call myself an aficionado of Saturday night Mets games, but I seem to watch all of them and blog most of them. That’s more or less OK, I suppose. I’ve never been one of those people hitting the streets in search of action on Saturday night, not when I was theoretically of an age when action was everything, certainly not two decades deep into married life with a soulmate who’s every bit the homebody I am. On most of my Saturday nights, I’ve mostly looked for something good to watch.
Or failing that, a Mets game.
This Saturday night, the last Saturday night of 2012, wasn’t a bad game if you were a Braves fan. If it had taken place at Citi Field, SNY might have had to have installed a new Cholula meter to measure Craig Kimbrel’s stuff in the ninth inning. The kid quite clearly has hot sauce in his veins. The Mets somehow got two runners on against him, yet there was no chance they were going to score. None. Craig Kimbrel has a .124 batting average against. Think about that: It’s like Craig Kimbrel faces nothing but Jason Bay over and over.
Jason Bay has a .158 batting average for. When it was down to .153 after his first two at-bats, it occurred to me that if you plucked any position player from the minor leagues, the independent leagues, college ball, high school ball, American Legion ball, any organized ball — essentially anybody combining any discernible baseball skill with some semblance of athleticism — and gave him Jason Bay’s 190 at-bats, it seems unlikely that that player wouldn’t exceed .153.
And he would do it for substantially less than $18.125 million.
Mind you, the idea of averaging more than 15 base hits for every 100 at-bats, when .153 is framed in those terms, sounds very impressive to me. But I have no discernible baseball skill and never displayed any semblance of athleticism — plus I’m closing in on 50. So I won’t be one of those blowhards who insists “I could do better than that!” I couldn’t. Many others, however, probably could.
I was thinking that when Bay was 0-for-2. Then he collected a base hit to put with his other 29 from this year, and I thought I was being a little hard on him. Then I was reminded on the replay that his batting average when he swung, as posted on the right field scoreboard, was .153 and it had only just now risen to .158. So, no, I don’t think I’m being at all hard on him.
Conversely, something should probably be said in praise of Chris Young, but…I dunno. I’ve watched this guy be exactly the kind of Met that Met GMs pride themselves on signing: used to be pretty good; encountered genuine adversity; worked incredibly hard to get back; knows how to pitch; can register outs until he can’t; returned to throw game after game that with a few breaks could have been wins but mostly weren’t. Unless a pitcher in that situation has taught himself a knuckleball and kept a journal, those guys just don’t get you to your feet with two strikes. Chris Young has done a fine job of being all the Chris Young he can be. It is commendable, it is admirable, it’s just not…like I said, I dunno.
Chris Young went six adequate innings and gave up two runs. Mike Minor pitched a little longer and a little better. Minor won. Young lost. That could have happened any night of any Met week in 2012, except more IDs were probably checked by Turner Field security given the pronounced presence of those known to be Minor and Young.
In the end on this Saturday night when the Mets ensured their record will be no better than last year’s, my co-MVPs were, per usual, Gary Cohen and Keith Hernandez (who will relinquish their title on Sunday afternoon when they move to Channel 11 and Cablevision flips me their final bird of the season). Upon one of Chipper Jones’s plate appearances, as our announcers paused to heap praise on him like it was Cholula Hot Sauce, a graphic appeared illustrating what a terrific switch-hitter Jones has been. It showed his average against “rightie” pitching and “leftie” pitching.
And as I gasped in the disgust only a nitpicking editor could really gasp, there was honest-to-god cackling coming from the SNY booth. Gary, who has observed the baseball team equivalent of a typographical error for the vast majority of 158 games, couldn’t believe his channel couldn’t spell “righty” and “lefty” properly. Keith seemed pretty amused by Gary’s being floored — and absolutely scandalized a little later when an SNY field mic picked up Scott Hairston’s exploding f-bomb after Scottso flied out.
“Ooh,” was Keith’s reaction to a ballplayer cursing loudly or, perhaps, to a ballplayer’s curse plainly going out over the air. And when Kimbrel caught Lucas Duda standing, looking and helpless to end this Saturday night in Atlanta, “ooh” was pretty much all I had left.
by Greg Prince on 29 September 2012 7:24 am “My goal each time I go out there is to put up a quality start, to give the team a chance to win. When I walk off the mound and our team has a chance to win, that’s satisfaction for me.”
—September 28
Jon Niese is so uninteresting an interview that he thinks introspection is something that goes next to the carburetor in his truck.
“I just go out there and try and execute my pitches and keep the team in the game to give the team the best chance to win.”
—September 21
When it comes to being reflective, Jon Niese is like a bathroom mirror after a hot shower.
“It makes a pitcher feel a lot more comfortable on the mound when you’ve got the lead.”
—September 14
When construction crews want to bore a hole, they ask Jon Niese to break down his latest start.
There may be no duller listen in professional sports — or life — than Jon Niese after he’s pitched the Mets to a win…to which I say, bring on the boring!
Niese has just about nothing to say after he pitches well, but as long as he steadily produces enough to not talk about, which he’s done pretty consistently of late and continued to do in Atlanta Friday night, then there’s no reason not to embrace the tedium he disseminates among the microphones and notepads that dutifully surround him.
It’s a given that there’s only one R.A. Dickey when it comes to postgame chat. But starting pitchers are usually insightful if not wholly fascinating when discussing their craft. The Met tradition is strong in that regard: Seaver, Cone, Leiter, Martinez and Dickey are all-timers. Darling and Ojeda can still rivet, and neither has picked up a ball in more than fifteen years. Santana can talk. Harvey can talk. Pelfrey, Hefner, Gee, Young…they speak well for themselves, too.
Does it matter? Only to the extent that everything about the game of baseball flows from the mound. We understand it better and appreciate it more intently when the pitcher lets us in on his thinking, his approach and his state of mind. We are a more-informed citizenry when our pitchers clue us in as to what’s really going on out there. They’re the ones who know best.
If Niese can talk pitching, he’s too polite to show it. But he can pitch, and that does matter. Over the last two months, he’s given the Mets one solid, unspectacular outing after another, quality starts by definition and utility. Friday, in putting a damper on Chipper Jones Night festivities, he did it again: seven innings, seven baserunners and only three strikeouts but just one run, on a solo homer surrendered to Freddie Freeman. The Braves never otherwise stormed the Met fort, while Lucas Duda successfully infiltrated Tim Hudson’s wigwam with a three-run blast that gave Niese and three relievers sufficient cushion.
It didn’t make for engrossing conversation when reporters visited Niese’s locker afterwards. It didn’t have to. Seven innings of one-run ball says plenty.
by Greg Prince on 28 September 2012 4:29 am You see a lot more meanness in the city
It’s the kind that eats you up inside
Hard to come away with anything
That feels like dignity
Hard to get home with any pride
—Don Henley
The sun is setting on our boys of summer. They’ll be sending their best from Atlanta and Miami for the next six days, and I’ll be in front of my TV and by my radio to receive whatever they care to transmit, but the baseball season as I choose to engage it is over.
The Mets have left Citi Field. You might say the Mets absented themselves from Citi Field for so long that it was impossible to make them out amid the literal and figurative emptiness. They were barely there in the latter half of July, the bulk of August and most of September until very recently. They won four times at home and lost infinitely.
You couldn’t find us, either. Sure, the numbers filed with the league office of fictitious figures claimed a solid-sounding 2,242,803 humans glided through the Citi Field turnstiles to spend time with their beloved Mets, but when was the last time you saw so many people who could be described as hard, green, plastic and unoccupied? And even if that number was remotely legit, it was still the worst official attendance registered in nine Met years.
And yet as stiff a wind as the prevailing trends presented, we all came back together one final time on Thursday. The Mets showed up. We showed up. A Mets game met a Mets crowd the way it almost never does anymore. It was something to see. It was something better to be a part of.
Why did we do it after avoiding the temptation for months or, let’s face it, not being all that tempted? I don’t think there’s a lot of mystery to discerning an answer.
We did it because we could.
We did it because we couldn’t anymore if we didn’t right away.
We did it because of R.A. Dickey.
There’s an old man there from
The Old World
To him it’s all the same
Calls all his customers by name
Every pitch mattered. Every ball’s flight was a story within a larger story. A desperately desired outcome hung in the balance all day, and when outcome met desire at the very end, it added up to — by far — the most exciting hours I’ve experienced in the four-year history of Citi Field.
And this saddened me a little even as it energized me a lot. The pennant race atmosphere we created together, us and R.A. Dickey, had no pennant race attached to it. If R.A. won, the Mets were going to be mired in fourth place. If R.A. lost, the Mets were going to be mired in fourth place. If R.A. was no-decisioned, the Mets were going to be mired in fourth place. The home season was over and the schedule is less than a week from following it into the past tense, and the Mets are definitively a team mired in fourth place and marooned miles from contention.
The pitches still mattered. The outcome was still fantastically gratifying. The individual and the milestone in question were absolutely worthy of our commitment. The thrill of being in on R.A. Dickey’s 20th win of 2012, a first for him and a first for any Met in 22 years, was legitimate and it will likely endure in my memory for as long as I have a memory.
But I couldn’t help but wish there was something more on the line. For the first time since I became a habitual attendee of games at Citi Field, upon the facility’s opening in 2009, it really felt like something was going on around me. The urgency of an immensely popular player attaining his outsized goal was so palpable, that at stray moments I harked back to another Closing Day involving Mets, Pirates and genuine tension.
 The stars come out for a 20th win. (Photo by Sharon Chapman) Dickey’s quest leaned more to the joyfully festive than the unbearably tense: ringing chants of “CY YOUNG!”; recurring bouts of standing ovation; the blue-clad 7 Line Army holding forth beyond center field for nine innings and then some. Nevertheless, it smacked just a little of Home Game 81 at Shea Stadium 13 years ago, when it was mandatory that the Mets beat back the Bucs in order to advance to a one-game playoff that would determine if they could then, and only then, enter the postseason for the first time in 11 years. The business of October 3, 1999, was as pressing as any I’d ever been party to as a Mets fan. That R.A. Dickey’s attempt to capture himself a round number even remotely resembled the afternoon Melvin Mora dashed home on Brad Clontz’s wild pitch to ensure a trip to Cincinnati is a credit to how much R.A. means to a satisfaction-starved fan base that has had little of an enduring nature to cheer since Shea closed and Citi opened.
These days a man makes you somethin’
And you never see his face
But there is no hiding place
R.A. Dickey has been a Met to get behind since 2010, no matter the competitive environment that’s surrounded him. He invested in a pitch, transformed it into a growth industry, installed himself as its CEO and issued each of us a share of stock in his success. Our dividend was his pushing his regional manager to assure him the Closing Day starting assignment. Terry Collins’s six-man rotation was going to spin Dickey into Atlanta, where he’s not particularly effective and where the Mets fans who adore R.A. couldn’t easily support his effort to win a 20th game.
Glad R.A. is a hands-on CEO who gets it. He talked at various points along the way about sharing his big moment with us and us sharing his big moment with him. He understands that the team vs. individual equilibrium, in which the group’s priorities are normally framed as paramount, is pretty pointless when the team is 71-84 and the individual is 19-6. Now and then in the last few weeks, I got the impression the Mets existed mostly to pad R.A.’s stats and provide R.A. a forum to go after Win No. 20.
I’m fine with that. The Mets didn’t seem to exist to do anything else terribly interesting. Why not alter the rotation to get R.A. on the mound in front of us? Why not promote R.A.’s Cy Young candidacy? Why not recognize R.A. is making history when the 2012 Mets have been history since July? If R.A. wins, the Mets win. If R.A. doesn’t win…
I preferred not to consider that an option.
Respectable little murders pay
They get more respectable every day
Don’t worry girl
I’m gonna stick by you
And someday soon we’re gonna get in that car
And get outta here
It was a blast to be in R.A.’s ranks Thursday. I’d practically call it an honor to bear witness to the sixth Mets pitcher clinching the ninth 20-win season in franchise history. Every fifth or sixth day in the second half of 2012, R.A. lifted us from the benign disengagement you’d rightly infer a fourth-place team inspires to full-fledged immersion that seemed perfectly logical as Dickey’s knucklers rode their own private highway from his well-traveled fingertips to Josh Thole’s oversized mitt.
It’s a shame his 20th win didn’t come in service to a better Mets team, but it was enough, I suppose, that R.A. Dickey made the Mets a better team whenever it was his turn to try. And besides, as fans who are unshakeable in our affinity, we need these kinds of stories and these kinds of seasons when the overarching narrative is lacking. Dickey winning his 20th as a tuneup for his projected start in Game Two of the NLDS would be as sweet as that sounds, but given what we know as reality, what could be sweeter than a 72-84 club being redeemed regularly by the presence of a 20-6 savior?
Savior of our sanity if not our season.
So here’s to R.A. Dickey doing all kinds of unprecedented things with a knuckleball and aligning himself alongside Tom Seaver, Jerry Koosman, Dwight Gooden, David Cone and Frank Viola in a roll call you didn’t think was ever going to require lengthening
Here’s to David Wright, newly coronated as all-time Met hit king and comfortingly familiar as striker of the big blow that was the three-run wind beneath R.A.’s 13-strikeout wings in the fifth inning.
Here’s to Ike Davis, the most productive .224 hitter in captivity, for getting us on the scoreboard, and here’s to Andres Torres, Ruben Tejada and Daniel Murphy for sparking the decisive rally.
Here’s to Thole, who can’t hit a lick and doesn’t seem like much of a catcher in general, but he’s behind the plate for R.A. all the time, and R.A. has won 20 games, so there must be something there.
Here’s to Bobby Parnell for being the best available option in a bullpen that has rarely provided many good options in support of any starting pitcher over the past half-dozen campaigns.
And what the hell, here’s to the Pittsburgh Pirates, with the benefit of hindsight, for making the whole thing that much more tense for nine innings. Rod Barajas’s RBI double and homer presented evidence to support my theory that catchers who used to catch a particular pitcher should be able to hit that pitcher like crazy (though Rod Barajas can sit and spin for having done so on this occasion). Travis Snider compelled me to offer grudging sportsmanlike applause while bearing the most gritted of teeth when he robbed — robbed — Mike Baxter of what was going to be the tying home run in the second. Geez, Snider’s climb of the right field fence and his outstretched lunge over it to make Baxter’s 380-foot blast fall one gloved hand shy of paying off out-Endy’d Endy just about. I’ve never seen a better catch in person, and because it wound up not costing R.A., I can ungrit my teeth now.
R.A.’s a 20-game winner. In a season to grimace from, this has surely been a pitcher to smile over.
Maybe we’ll leave come springtime
Meanwhile, have another beer
What would we do without all these jerks anyway?
Besides —
All our friends are here
I’m a maven for showing up on Closing Day, no matter the state of Met contention or lack thereof. I went to my first final scheduled home game of the Mets season in 1985, my second in 1988 and every one of them since 1995. That’s 18 in a row for a total of…hey, 20. I have the feeling I’ve seen that number somewhere.
Anyway, these days are the most special of all Mets days to me. I gravitated to them because of the finality of a season going in the books, but over the years I find another reason I love them: because I run into so many Mets fans who are intent on doing the same thing.
I’m sure R.A. was an added incentive this year — the anticipant vibe at Citi Field was closer to Opening Day II, sans Rodney Dangerfield but including (just a fancy section away from me) Jerry Seinfeld and Matthew Broderick, than sad last day of summer — but even if it was some non-intellectual, non-knuckleballer toeing the rubber in search of something less than a 20th win, I’m certain I would’ve seen a lot of the same faces I’ve come to expect when the Mets are completing their home commitments. For the diehardest among us, attending Home Game 81 is tantamount to a Holy Day of Obligation. The Mets have one more game? We must help them finish it!
When things were going very badly for the Mets most of the time since the middle of the year, I’d now and then hear the question, “Why are you still a Mets fan if they make you so miserable?” Sometimes it would be a theoretical inquiry, sometimes I was queried directly. Here’s my answer:
I love being a Mets fan.
I may complain all day and all night about the Mets, because I want them to be better than they currently are, but you will never, ever hear me complain about being a Mets fan. The 2012 Mets are for six more road games a temporary condition. Mets fandom is forever. If I gripe about their performance or their positioning or any of dozens of off-field foibles, it’s because I know how incredible the Mets can be when more things are going right than wrong for them and how much more Amazin’ they can be beyond that when virtually everything is going right.
Trust me on this one: When it happens again, all the indignities of the current era will be dust in your subconscious. I don’t know when that will be, but I trust it will happen. Or I trust that I’ll continue to trust it will happen and I won’t regret living in that extended state of suspended disbelief.
Honestly, what are people like us going to be — not Mets fans?
There are worse things than rooting for a bad ballclub. There is nothing better than rooting for your ballclub, good or bad, especially when you know you’re not alone. I am reminded annually of how unalone I am in this endeavor on Closing Day. Thank you to those who kept such wonderful company with me yesterday, those who were thoughtful enough to introduce or reintroduce themselves to me in the course of the afternoon and those who make me feel remarkably good about what we do here all year ’round.
We write about a team mired in fourth place. And you read what we write. When I stop and think about that, it leaves me more awestruck than I was when I was staring at Jerry Seinfeld, Matthew Broderick and R.A. Dickey combined.
by Jason Fry on 27 September 2012 1:40 am David Wright now stands alone atop the admittedly rather smallish peak known as All-Time Mets Hits Leaders. He got there with a third-inning tapper up the third-base line, a little excuse-me roller that was thrown away and left Wright waving — perhaps a trifle sheepishly — from second base. It was a small hit for a Met, honestly, but a giant leap for Metkind, carrying David to No. 1,419 and leaving Ed Kranepool behind.
I’d actually been kind of hoping Wright wouldn’t collect No. 1,419 Wednesday night, because I have a ticket for Thursday afternoon, when R.A. Dickey goes for his 39th career Mets victory, which would move him ahead of Ed Lynch, Jack Fisher and (weirdly) Frank Viola and into a tie with John Maine for 23rd on the all-time list. Joshua and I had even engaged in a rather odd debate a couple of nights ago: What would happen if Thursday afternoon’s game went to the bottom of the ninth tied 1-1 with Dickey the pitcher of record and Wright at 1,418 hits, only then David swatted a home run into the Mets’ bullpen? What we wanted to know was MY GOD WHO WOULD GET THE BALL?
We should have such problems, right?
(By the way, the kid and I agreed that Dickey would wind up with it after several long rounds of you first/no after you between two conspicuously team-conscious guys.)
Wanting Wright to wait was a selfish wish, and I’m happy to say I was thrilled for him the moment it was clear he was safe. Wright looks much the same as he did as a rookie in 2004, but all of a sudden we realize he’s been around these parts seemingly forever.
I was at Shea in July 2004 for his first game, having dragged along a colleague from the Journal for a historical milestone I was approximately 50,000 times more interested in than he was. (Our rookie went 0-for-4 as the Mets beat the Expos, improving to .500 for the year.) Since then we’ve seen him as a young player with a precocious grasp of the strike zone, as Cliff Floyd’s good-natured foil, as a dreamer fulfilled spraying Champagne on fans with a soaked cigar in his teeth, as the designated facer of media music after two collapses, as the agonized poster child for Citi Field’s too-distant power alleys, as an anxious leader disastrously expanding the strike zone in an effort to accommodate the weight of the world on his shoulders, as the endpoint of a horrifyingly errant Matt Cain fastball, as a revived presence at the plate and at third base, and as who knows what next. If we close our eyes we can see him wiping his face in his uniform, holding his bat before his eyes like a broadsword and then exhaling deeply before going to work — just as we can probably see him standing in front of his locker, dutiful, patient and Jeteresquely bland-spoken after another bad night of the office.
The face of the franchise? Absolutely. Close your eyes and try that same exercise with anybody else.
I don’t know whether Wright and the Mets are destined to stay on the same path. I get worried when fans talk about re-signing Wright as if that’s solely the Mets’ decision. Their financial future is perilous, and so are their near-term prospects of reaching the playoffs. Wright is decent and loyal, but he also wants to win — and it would be hard to blame him if he’d rather not wait until he’s 32 or 33 to have another chance at that. As No. 1,419 trundled through the grass and Wright streaked for first, I had a thoroughly unwelcome thought: Damned if that doesn’t remind me of Jose Reyes’s last hit as a Met.
I worry that I won’t be able to stop thinking about that. But whatever happens, I’ll also keep thinking of this: At a recent blogger event at Citi Field I stood by the Mets dugout watching Wright after batting practice, and was amazed at how often he was asked to do something — sit down with this camera crew, talk with this reporter, shake hands with this bigwig, take a photo with this family, sign balls for these kids. It was exhausting to watch, let alone go through, and the beginning of the game was still a long ways off. Through it all Wright was gracious and thoughtful, when he would have been absolutely justified in retreating to some corner of the outfield or ducking into the clubhouse for a little peace and quiet. That ought to be part of the applause for his milestone as well.
* * *
Oddly enough, though, on a historic night it was another Met who held my attention.
The last time we saw Jeremy Hefner start a game, he was as bad as a pitcher can be: Seven Phillies came to the plate against him, and all of them reached base. Before he could blink it was 8-0 and Hefner was in the dugout with an Urdanetan ERA for the day of infinity.
Hefner has never exactly struck you as a fit for New York City — he’s a 26-year-old, devout Oklahoman who confessed to Kevin Burkhardt that doing a between-innings interview made him really nervous. His disastrous start found me in a church pew peeking at Gameday, and I silently cursed his name as the carnage reached surreal levels. But my annoyance with Hefner vanished when I saw the footage of him talking to reporters after the game, voice cracking and composure in danger. The Mets had been pasted, sure, but it was one game in a lost season — and as Greg noted, Hefner sounded devastated, not disappointed. Frankly, I was worried about him — worried then and worried tonight as he toed the rubber against the Pirates.
So it was delightful to see him absolutely throttle the Bucs, hitting his location with all of his pitches and having about as fine a game as one could hope for. Asked later if he’d thought about that last start, Hefner didn’t seek refuge in ancient cliches about tomorrow being another day, turning the page, and so on. Yes, he said, he’d thought about it — and it was pretty clear from the look in his eyes and the relief in his voice that he’d thought of little else.
Hefner will start again in Miami next week — as one would expect after seven innings, three hits and no runs. But if he’d had another start like the one against the Phillies, it’s entirely possible he might not have — and conceivable we might never have seen him again.
Hefner’s one of those guys who throws several pitches competently but none impressively, depending on his ability to change speeds and hit spots. He can win when he does those things; when he can’t he’s a good bet to get whacked around. That scouting report could describe thousands of pitchers in baseball history, which is the point: Guys like Hefner aspire to be Greg Maddux or maybe Rick Reed, but the vast majority of them aren’t. If they’re lucky, you find them bouncing around between the back of big-league rotations and stints as spot starters or long men. If they’re unlucky, they get stuck in the minors, putting together long careers that never again break the big-league waterline. The difference between those two fates? It can come down to a start in late September when the bullpen varsity is being saved for the next day and all eyes are elsewhere and your last start was a disaster and you don’t want to think about it but your career may be poised on a knife’s edge.
We’ll hear a lot more about David Wright for years; it’s not clear that Jeremy Hefner will be a name much remarked around here or anywhere else. But what Hefner did was also harder than we might think, and also worthy of appreciation and applause.
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Faith and Fear readers, please offer your support to Shannon Forde of the Mets’ media-relations department. Shannon has always been a great friend to Faith and Fear and our fellow bloggers, and is a wife and mother facing a tough fight against Stage IV breast cancer. Please visit Hope Shines For Shannon and consider attending the November 1 fundraiser in her honor or giving whatever you can to help her family.
by Greg Prince on 26 September 2012 3:14 pm Ed Kranepool will never again seem quite as impressive in the Met imagination after David Wright records one more single, double, triple or home run and owns outright the franchise base hit record. David tied Eddie last night at 1,418. It’s a relatively small number as all-time team marks go and it will look smaller the longer David plays as a Met and the more distance David puts behind it.
But Ed Kranepool will always be Ed Kranepool to those of us who entered Met consciousness when Endless Eddie Kranepool was relentlessly enduring and occasionally excelling. And that will always be impressive.
The following was first posted here on April 3, 2005, pertinent to Eddie’s landing at No. 10 on our One Hundred Greatest Mets of the First Forty Years countdown. Even then, the Top Ten was a bit of a stretch for him, but I really admired the longevity and exclusivity the name Ed Kranepool represented. For a ballclub on which ballplayers didn’t stick around (and still don’t stick around, David Wright pending), longevity and exclusivity seemed worth a few bonus points. Also, the franchise rankings mentioned below have changed as the years have rolled by like an army of Terrence Mann’s Field Of Dreams steamrollers, but that was to be expected. If Ed still ranked impenetrably high in so many Met categories, we’d have to wonder if anybody here could play this game over the past decade.
Anyway, in appreciation of Eddie Kranepool…
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Other teams have had Ed Kranepools — guys whose names are code to outsiders and lapsed loyalists for “oh yeah, that guy, huh?” The name brings a chuckle for more innocent times, when the game wasn’t a business, when a guy like that could play ball. It is doubtful that those teams’ Ed Kranepools are quite the force in their all-time record books as the real Ed Kranepool is in ours. He may be emblematic of an era or three of Mets baseball, but he’s not a mascot.
He played. He played here forever. Play somewhere forever long enough and you’re going to show up mighty high in a lot of categories. When it comes to Met milestones, Ed Kranepool is the antenna adorning the Empire State Building: First in games played by 500-plus; more than a thousand at-bats ahead of the pack; tops in doubles; a slim lead in total bases; even eighth in triples. And since playing the last of his eighteen seasons or season fragments in 1979, a quarter-century has come and gone without anybody seriously challenging his franchise hits record of 1,418.
It is at least partly to Ed Kranepool’s credit that he established such an unbeatable mark. It is also a reflection of the organization for whom he played that it didn’t keep around a guy or two who would’ve broken the record pretty easily in far less time than it took Eddie to set it. The Major League record for career hits is owned by Pete Rose: 4,256. That’s three times as many as Kranepool amassed.
Let’s just say that this is not the most distinguished benchmark in baseball, but 1,418 it is and the 1,418 is his. Don’t do the math to figure out what that translates to over eighteen seasons. Don’t look too closely at Ed Kranepool year-by-year. It’s not impressive. He was an All-Star once (for a team that lost 112 games) and found his groove late in life as a timely pinch-hitter. The story of Krane is not what he accomplished but over how long a period he accomplished it.
With the reserve clause in full effect until his career was almost over, Ed Kranepool wasn’t going anywhere early, especially since he was the Mets’ first glamour signing, glitz apparently not as lustrous as it would become. He showed up just long enough in 1962 so he could forever be the player who remained from the inaugural season. When Jim Hickman was traded following 1966, Eddie became the longest-tenured Met. The 1967 Yearbook refers to him as “The Dean”. For thirteen of his eighteen seasons, Ed Kranepool was in a league of his own on the Mets. He had seen it all: The Polo Grounds; the Memorial Day 1964 marathon doubleheader against the Giants (he played in all 32 innings that Sunday after having played in a twinbill that Saturday in Buffalo); a homer of his own in Game Three against the Orioles; a brief dip down into Tidewater at Hodges’ behest; a renaissance thereafter. He was always the guy who dated back over all those years.
It was amusing when a placard went up in the ’60s to ask if Ed Kranepool was over the hill. It’s astonishing to realize that because Eddie was so young at the beginning — 17 when he played his first game — that in none of his eighteen Met years, not even 1979, was he ever the oldest player on the team for an entire season. When ancient Eddie Kranepool played his final game, he was all of 34.
Ed Kranepool will be among the many Mets greats appearing at the November 1 fundraiser in honor of Shannon Forde, the Mets’ media relations stalwart (and friend of our blogging community) as she battles Stage IV breast cancer. Please look into attending or donating to Shannon’s cause. All information here.
by Greg Prince on 26 September 2012 4:04 am (Before moving on to our usual fun and games, our deepest thoughts and absolute best wishes go out to Shannon Forde, one of the true shining lights of the Mets organization and a great friend to the blogging community, as she battles to beat Stage IV breast cancer. Please visit Hope Shines For Shannon and consider attending the November 1 fundraiser in her honor or giving whatever you can to help her family defray the costs associated with this terrible and serious ordeal. Thank you.)
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You’d figure I’d have enough Mets stockpiled to get me through the winter, but my survivalist instincts told me it wouldn’t hurt to lay in just a little more. Thus, after a surprisingly satisfying weekend at Citi Field, I decided against leaving well enough alone until Closing Day and pretty much just stayed over Monday and Tuesday nights to get some more Mets while it was readily available.
Because you can never have too much baseball.
Laugh now, but when you’re groping around in a few weeks looking for a fourth-place team with which to be enmeshed outdoors for a combined 400 minutes, I’ll have plenty.
I’ll have Monday’s win that extended my unforeseen personal streak of triumph to three and I’ll have Tuesday’s loss, which was permissible for the Mets to lose in whatever fashion they selected (ugly is in vogue, apparently) as long as they promise to get the futility out of their Citi system by Thursday, when they are required to win.
I’ll have twelve Mets runs scored and twelve Pirates runs surrendered. Sounds fair.
I’ll have umpire calls so puzzling (Justin Turner out for admiring second base from up the first base line; Jordany Valdespin safe for transporting the basepath between second and third to the green, green grass of the infield) that they probably accounted for a Seahawk safety.
I’ll have a pair of long-form conversations in my head from which each upshot was the Mets aren’t very good but we (me and my gracious host Paul on Monday; me and my old friend Rob on Tuesday) sure hope they get better and, even if they don’t, we’re Mets fans. What are we gonna be otherwise: not Mets fans?
I’ll have the satisfaction of knowing the world’s most obnoxious Pirates fan — a bellowing, drinking, smoking fool in Excelsior whose asslike behavior transcended the nobility of being a Pirates fan too young to have seen a winning Pirates team (except against the Mets Tuesday) — got himself thrown out of the ballpark by the seventh inning. It took seven innings too long, but Citi Field has a righteous side after all.
I’ll have assurance that my commitment to hoarding Mets doesn’t necessarily push envelopes the way that of others does. Take, for example, the lovely Wanda, a FAFIF reader/evangelist who invited me up to 519 for a stop ‘n’ chat. In the course of an inning, I learned Wanda a) has a 20-game plan; b) will wind up attending 40 games anyway; c) is intimately familiar with the 2013 schedule; d) was worried that showing up Thursday might be a detriment to R.A. Dickey because e) until Monday night, the Mets had lost the previous 17 games Wanda had attended. Now THAT’S a diehard Mets fan. By comparison, my projected 28 games for this year and refusal to match my biorhythms against R.A.’s tells me I’m merely passing through Citi Field on my way to LaGuardia.
I’ll have the promise of Jenrry Mejia from Monday night (boy did he throw tantalizingly hard) and no such thing out of Collin McHugh from Tuesday night. Terry Collins blames use of Collin McHugh for Collin McHugh not pitching well anymore. I feel I’ve heard that excuse a lot.
I’ll have TEJADA 11 to pluck out of my drawer. The 30% discount helped seal my purchase, but the real motivator was the realization that after continuing to sport REYES 7 to excess it was time for a changing of the shortstop t-shirt guard. I mean it’s not like I’m still running around town in ORDOÑEZ 10. Call this a case of drawer-withdrawl, not a cold turkey eviction of all the the fabric I suitably held dear from 2003 to 2011, but least one REYES 7 will be heading out of regular rotation and up to the retirement shelf where Jose will keep PIAZZA 31, MARTINEZ 45 and other distinguished alumni company. Occasionally I will stop by with box scores and a Helmac so they know I still care.
And I’ll have at least a little piece of Mets history for having witnessed David Wright tie Ed Kranepool in the all-time hits department at last with a seventh-inning two-RBI single. They didn’t stop the game and they didn’t wheel a podium and microphone to first base and Scott Hairston didn’t immediately honor David by driving him in (never mind Jon Rauch dishonoring all of us by giving up a 10,000-foot home run to Garrett Jones to put the game out of reach come the ninth) but I stood and applauded about as long as I could without looking or feeling like a loon.
It felt good to know two Mets could pile up 1,418 hits in their Met lifetimes and I felt good for David, whose second half has brought his 2012 numbers down from potentially all-time enormous to something a little north of a really good Lee Mazzilli season. Though I didn’t notice it Tuesday, during the three previous home games I intently watched the Mets’ annual “thank you” video, where each player smiles broadly and gins up gratitude for our patronage. In this year’s edition, Turner is predictably bubbly but fails to pie himself in the face; Tejada hints that English may have yet to crack his top two languages; Thole grins that adorable “Mom! Dad! I just made the traveling squad!” grin of his, same as he does when an equally adorable pooch delivers him the ceremonial first pitch on Bark in the Park Day and you momentarily forget you wish somebody else would catch; Johan is likely spliced in from some other year; Zach Lutz thanks us despite never properly introducing himself; and the big finish is David speaking so deliberately and making no effort to disguise a hauntingly glazed expression that I’m pretty sure his gun-wielding captors are just out of camera range.
“Hey Mets fans. Don’t worry about me. I’m fine. As you can see behind me, they let me dress at this outstanding dressing cubicle in this very comfortable clubhouse and they give me plenty of clothes hangers, none of which I would attempt to use as a weapon to gain my release from this paradise of justice because they treat me very well, please don’t be concerned for my well-being. Mets fans are the greatest fans in the world. I get plenty of exercise and there are ample sports drinks to replenish my fluids. You’re the greatest fans in the world. Please buy tickets to see R.A. go for 20. I renounce my misplay from the Tampa Bay series and call on the governing body of the sport to restore to R.A. the no-hitter of which the imperialist scorer took from him due to my clumsiness as a bourgeois third baseman of the worst kind. All hail the new order. Mets fans are the greatest fans in the world. And if you’re watching this while wearing a Pirates cap, there is absolutely no smoking in the seating bowl at Citi Field. Thank you for your support. Mets fans are the greatest fans in the world.”
That may not be exactly what he said out loud, but I’m pretty sure he blinked it in Morse code.
by Greg Prince on 25 September 2012 3:13 pm Think you like Ike now? At least as good a reason as his two homers and five RBIs last night to applaud Mr. Davis is the commitment he’s made to support Solving Kids’ Cancer and the Liddy Shriver Sarcoma Initiative with his annual fundraising events. The most recent of them took place a couple of weeks ago in Manhattan, and Sam Maxwell covered it in depth via picture and word at Converted Mets Fan. Sam really gets to the soul of what a baseball player (and his teammates) can do via celebrity to help worthwhile causes.
Read Sam on why Ike’s cause is of particular interest to him here and visit Converted Mets Fan regularly. He writes and roots like he was born into Mets fandom.
by Jason Fry on 25 September 2012 1:25 am The Mets’ playoff chances are dead, but after two months without a pulse the team itself is alive.
No, it doesn’t matter. But it’s still nice to see — baseball is a far better companion when your team not only wins but plays with a little panache and offers you some hope for the future.
David Wright singled to left for his 1,416th career hit, meaning he’s three away from claiming the franchise hits record for his own, displacing Ed Kranepool. The last few steps of such chases can often turn agonizing, so it’s unwise to even think about this, but three more Wright hits before Citi Field empties late Thursday afternoon would provide a nice moment for a fanbase that could use as many as possible. Thursday afternoon, of course, already looms large on the calendar. Hmm.
Ike Davis connected for his 29th home run and then for his 30th, then reacted the way Ike Davis tends to react, giving a mellow thumbs-up to “a cool milestone, I guess” and then explaining that the difference between his first and second halves is that “I’m just not awful. … I felt like I had never played baseball before. I kept saying I’m not going to play this bad forever. I don’t think it’s possible for anyone to do that. You guys can pick up a stick and do better than I did.”
Davis has had a very strange season, one you could choose to see as a parable about patience, or perhaps offer up as a Rorschach test. For the former case, let’s recall that on June 8 Davis was hitting a Baysian .158, with 5 homers and 21 RBI. That was the low point; from there he began an agonizingly slow climb towards the distant heights of the Mendoza line. He got to .200 on June 27, slipped above and below that waterline for a while, then left .200 behind for keeps on July 4 — call it Ikedependence Day. He crested .210 for good (let’s hope) on August 4, then topped .220 (ditto) on August 25. He’s now at .227, his high mark for the season, with 30 homers and 88 RBI — the same season, amazingly, in which approximately 99.9999% of Mets fans (including me) were convinced that what Ike needed more than anything was a trip to Buffalo.
If you’re in the Rorschach camp, well, obviously 30 homers and nearly 90 runs driven in ain’t bad at all — last year’s club leader in both categories was Carlos Beltran (15 HR, 66 RBI), despite the fact that Beltran spent the last two months of the season as a San Francisco Giant. Yet Ike’s power numbers mask some pretty profound deficiencies at finding his way to first base unless it’s by trotting: He’s tied for 15th in home runs, but tied for 308th in WAR (Wins Above Replacement) with such notables as old friend Omar Quintanilla. Ike’s 2012 WAR is 0.2 — a rounding error compared with Wright’s gaudy 6.3. A better first half would do a lot to help those numbers, it’s true, but still. Enjoy staring at that inkblot.
Jenrry Mejia, meanwhile, had a strange game of his own. Mejia’s fastball has a lot of natural, enviable life, cutting and darting everywhere, including out of the strike zone, while his curve is pretty good as well. And Mejia looked a lot better than he did in Milwaukee, where he didn’t get a single swing and a miss. But that’s not to say he looked great — it was touch and go whether his pitch count would allow him to last five innings. Happily, he did — and a barrage of Mets runs led to his first career win.
Mejia has been poorly served by the Mets so far in his career — Jerry Manuel and Omar Minaya wrecked his development by bringing him north when he should have been still working up the minor-league ladder, he blew out his elbow, and even this year he’s been yo-yo’ed between starting and relieving. If I’d told you in April 2010 that Mejia would win his first big-league game on Sept. 24, 2012, you would have guessed that a whole lot was going to go wrong.
And you would have been correct — a lot has gone wrong. But despite that, Mejia is shy of his 23rd birthday, with a live arm, a rebuilt elbow, and the most precious thing of all — time.
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