So we meet again this weekend…
 
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. |
 3 comments - (Comments closed) | |  Print This Post |  David Wright, Jose Reyes, Should Be Together Still Crazy how the baseball schedule sometimes does this: On Thursday afternoon, August 30, 2012, the New York Mets finished a series with the Philadelphia Phillies at Citizens Bank Park. On Thursday afternoon, August 30, 2007, the New York Mets finished a series with the Philadelphia Phillies at Citizens Bank Park. The circumstances surrounding the respective one-run losses that resulted from these coincidentally slated finales couldn’t have been more different, yet my mind shot directly back five years as I paid half-attention to this year’s model, a 3-2 defeat that prevented a Mets sweep and leaves the Mets one game behind the Phillies in the nonexistent race for third place in the N.L. East. Jon Niese pitched OK, but not as well as Kyle Kendrick. Mike Baxter and Scott Hairston flashed some power but the bigger hits were spun by Kevin Frandsen and endless Ty Wigginton. Jimmy Rollins… Well, Jimmy Rollins has been around a while now, hasn’t he? Five years earlier to the day, Jimmy Rollins was rolling up MVP points as part of the 17-hit attack that effected the harrowing 11-10 Mets loss of that final Thursday afternoon in August, which ended a four-game series that gone 100% in Philadelphia’s direction. By slapping the Mets every which way but loose between August 27 and August 30, the Phillies pulled to within two games of the first-place Mets, scaring the complacency out of a fan base that snickered the previous winter when Rollins had the temerity to announce his team — and not our team — was the team to beat in our division. Rollins backed up his insouciance with a 9-for-19 series and, along with a raging hot band of Phillie teammates, seemed to knock the “in” clear out of the Mets’ inevitability. Then, for two blissful weeks, it was as if it had never happened. The 2007 Mets, so prone to lethargy since the end of May, got their act together and swept Atlanta in Atlanta, took two of three in Cincinnati, swept the Astros at Shea and then won two of three at home from the Braves. The New York lead returned to a rightful bulge of seven games with seventeen to play. We know what happened directly thereafter and what hasn’t happened since. The Mets became distressingly and perennially evitable, the Phillies won the division and the Phillies kept winning divisions. Though there was a gap between the August 27-30 sweep and the collapse that commenced in earnest the weekend of September 14-16, when the Phillies came to Shea (accompanied for the very first time by their fans) and swept three more, I think it’s fair to say our world changed five years ago today. Or at least it offered evidence it was about to change for the much, much worse. As for Rollins and the Phillies, five division titles, two pennants and a world championship is a pretty good half-decade’s work. That’s all ending for them now, as they, like us, are light years removed from the 2012 pennant race and it would take about six Worst Collapses Ever to catapult them into contention at this late stage of the season. Rollins could do no wrong five years ago at this time; he left that to the likes of Billy Wagner, who blew the save that would have salvaged the series for the Mets and maybe held off history for one more year or, if you’re a baseball romantic, forever. If the Mets emerge from that Thursday, August 30, with a win, it’s as possible as it’s not that they repeat as N.L. East champs in 2007, go to the postseason and who knows? Instead, we do know. Jimmy, by the way, isn’t contending for MVP honors this year. As he’s gotten older, he’s somehow grown less mature. On this Thursday, August 30, he loafed to first base on an embarrassing dropped infield popup in the sixth and kept his head hidden well up his rear as he got tagged out in a rundown between second and third in the same inning. Charlie Manuel reintroduced his veteran shortstop to the bench shortly thereafter. None of which helped the Mets in 2012 and none of which reverses the fortunes from 2007. But strange that the same teams were playing on the same day of the week at the same time of day on the same date on the calendar in the same ballpark so close in the same standings, and that Jimmy Rollins was once more at the heart of the story. 11 comments - (Comments closed) | | Print This Post | 2007 Mets, Billy Wagner, Charlie Manuel, Coincidental Scheduling, Jimmy Rollins, Jon Niese, Kevin Frandsen, Kyle Kendrick, Lingering Dismay, Mike Baxter, Phillies, Scott Hairston, Ty Wigginton In a season turned disappointing, Matt Harvey’s performances just get more encouraging. Harvey throws a fastball in the high 90s and supplements it with a good curve and slider and a developing change-up, so this statement wouldn’t seem to be edging too far from the tree trunk. But none of Harvey’s pitches was working particularly well tonight — especially when the batter was Tyler We haven’t thought much about Lucas Duda in weeks, but there he was, socking a two-run homer inside the foul pole, making a moderately difficult running catch in left-center to deny Ryan Howard, and even stealing a base. Duda is a player you root for, one who was put in a less-than-ideal situation and lived down to it, leading to his Buffalo exile. When he’s right, Duda has a precocious eye at the plate and very quick hands, not to mention enormous power. Those things aren’t easy to find. Unfortunately, Duda is also a first baseman who can’t play the positions available to him, something that was made painfully clear this year. His other potential flaw is more interesting to think about: Numerous accounts make it plain that Duda is too open about his self-doubt, which is perfectly forgivable in the real world but a sin in the baseball world. I remember Jason Jacome being shipped out soon after admitting to self-doubt — and Billy Beane’s painful recollection of being unable to get out of his own way mentally, coupled with the realization that dumb, blithely assured Lenny Dykstra had the better recipe for being a baseball player. Where Duda’s concerned, the Mets seem stuck. He’d be better off somewhere he could play first or be a designated hitter, which would keep his mind (and everybody else’s) off his defense. But his poor year at the plate — which quite possibly began with his own struggles on defense — has turned him from prospect to suspect, decreasing his value. So the Mets are left hoping that Duda can find his way in left, which isn’t substantially an improvement over the plan that just landed him in Buffalo. And so we have a dog chasing its tail: Duda needs a change of scenery, but the Mets can’t get enough back for him to make that change of scenery happen. Harvey doesn’t have this baggage — he’s a power pitcher, with no obvious weaknesses except a lack of experience, which ought to fix itself. But things happen to baseball players that you can’t see coming — in fact, such things happen to the vast majority of them. The arc that began with celebrating a childhood phenom gets interrupted somewhere before Cooperstown: Players get hurt, or fail to keep up with opponents’ adjustments, or age before their time, or somehow just misplace that unshakeable belief in themselves. Harvey looks tough and promising, and he is — but so were Hank Webb and David West and Paul Wilson and Bill Pulsipher and Patrick Strange and Philip Humber and Mike Pelfrey. Eventually we all realized they needed a change of scenery. You probably came here expecting a rah-rah post — the Mets have won four in a row, tied the Phillies for third place, and their bullpen suddenly looks like it’s found its footing. And I was planning a rah-rah post, because this is fun and because it would be very, very nice to finish the year looking down at the City of Slovenly Thugs. But something about Harvey and Duda emerging as the heroes of the game derailed that plan. Matt Harvey is a key piece of our future, but not too long ago so was Lucas Duda. Nothing is forever and nothing is assured. 7 comments - (Comments closed) | | Print This Post | Disappointment, Hope, Lucas Duda, Matt Harvey, Prospects I’ve always been fascinated by one-and-done Mets. Like Joe Hietpas and his one ninth-inning appearance behind the plate on the last day of the 2004 season. Like Mike Hessman and his one Mets home run across two months of 2010 despite his being billed in advance as the minor league home run king of minor league home run kings. Like Ray Searage and his 1-0, 1-for-1 Mets career pitching and hitting mark from 1981. Like Brett Hinchliffe’s emergency start in 2001 that resulted in an SOS calling of a cab to get him off the roster before he could cause any more of an emergency (2 IP, 9 H, 1 BB, 8 ER). Like — until further notice — the way Garrett Olson came up on August 8, made one appearance, left it with an ERA of 108.00 and was sent down probably not to be invited back. Matt McDonald, Mets fan, FAFIF reader and talented producer of sports documentaries (including one of my ESPN 30 For 30 favorites, Small Potatoes, about the rise and fall of the USFL) alerts us to an intriguing baseball cause centered on a similar one. He’s working with One At Bat to, as the name would imply, get somebody one at-bat in the major leagues. The would-be batter in question is Adam Greenberg, a vaguely familiar name when Matt brought it up to us. By watching the promotional video Matt’s company, Triple Threat TV, put together, I was reminded of exactly who Adam is. He’s the guy who came up with the Cubs in 2005, made his debut by stepping in the batter’s box against the Marlins’s Valerio De Los Santos and getting plunked on the very first pitch he saw. Or didn’t see. Adam Greenberg suffered a concussion and was removed from the game, never to make it back. It’s not like Adam hasn’t tried to get back, and that’s the cause here. Seven years later, Greenberg is still working, still trying to get an official AB in MLB. He doesn’t have that. All he has is the one PA and one HBP, and he didn’t even get to stand on first. He was pinch-run for by Carlos Zambrano and his career was over. One At Bat asks that it not be so, that Adam gets one more chance before this season is over. Ideally, it would be with the Cubs. They play the Astros late in the campaign in a game that most would describe as meaningless. It would be fantastic if the Cubs could inject a little meaning into it by adding Adam to their roster and sending him up one more time. If he walks and still lacks an official AB, that’s his problem. But he’d get a chance, which is all anybody is asking on his behalf. Watch the brief film Matt sent over and, if so moved, sign the One At Bat petition. Do it for someone whose second chance would really be a first chance. Or do it because Mike Glavine nepotismed his way into seven big league at-bats with the 2003 Mets and this is a lot less creepy than that. 3 comments - (Comments closed) | | Print This Post | Adam Greenberg, Brett Hinchliffe, Cubs, Garrett Olson, Joe Hietpas, Mike Glavine, Mike Hessman, One At Bat, Ray Searage In lost seasons — a subject about which we’re now experts — this is the toughest time. The dreams of contention are gone, and you’ve worked through the disbelief and the anger and come round to acceptance. Yet nobody’s moved on yet. The veterans who have shown themselves to be past their shelf life are still stumbling around out there, with the September call-ups yet to arrive and give you the distraction of hopeful maybes. Players who have had good years are trying to cement favorable impressions, while those who have had bad ones are waxing philosophical or insisting they’ve just found a hitch in their swing/shifted on the rubber/discovered a new regimen. Either way, minds are mostly made up. The exceptions are those few players in the middle, the ones whose seasons aren’t defined yet. (Take Ike Davis and his weird, weird year.) They’re the most frantic ones, hoping to claw success from the last few weeks. Elsewhere there are statistical goals to reach, most obviously 20 wins for R.A. Dickey, but mostly everybody’s getting ready to go home and we’re getting ready to let them. It’s practically a Faith and Fear cliche for me to insist that in such days baseball does still have its pleasures — most notably that, hey, it’s baseball. Which is true, but can sound awfully hollow. The Mets got beat 16-1 and everybody booed and the place was empty but the ushers still enforced ticky-tack rules and Jason Bay struck out nine times and Lucas Duda fell down in the outfield and Ramon Ramirez gave up eight earned in a third of an inning and there was no 7 Super Express but hey, it’s baseball. See what I mean? But then tonight was actually fun. One of the joys of this season turned sour has been the Mets giving the Phillies hell. We spanked them in April, swept them in May, and gave their crabby, violence-prone rooters ample evidence that their reign was over. The Phils have admitted as much, sending Shane Victorino this-a-way and Joe Blanton that-a-way (actually the same way, but hush) and playing out the string with Chase Utley and Ryan Howard returned from injuries and surrounded by fill-ins. They’re a third-place club, and we might still have something to say about that. Finishing third isn’t any great shakes, but finishing third in front of the Phils and Marlins really would make me happy. The Mets certainly did their part tonight, coming back from a 4-1 deficit that saw poor Chris Young down a quartet of runs before he ever recorded an out. Young hung in there, and the Mets clawed back, raising the specter of some crazy 11-10 barn-burner that would be decided in extra innings. As it turned out the game did go extra innings, but not in that fashion: The Mets tied it on a two-run homer by Mike Baxter, evened things up on a David Wright sacrifice fly, lost the lead again on an Utley blast, then used a succession of effective relievers (???!!!) to hold the fort until they could draw even again on a Kelly Shoppach double that Domonic Brown played like a guy walking into a DMV. Then, in the top of the 10th, they ambushed the large, luckless B.J. Rosenberg, with Ike doubling in David, Lucas Duda driving Ike home despite Tim Teufel’s stop sign, and Shoppach paying tribute to the late Neil Armstrong with a blast halfway to the Sea of Tranquility. Mets 9, Phillies 5, thanks to their slugging catcher and effective relievers — the kind of statement that would have got you hauled to Bellevue for most of the 2012 season, but was true tonight. Crazy or not, didn’t it feel a whole lot better than that whole mess at home against the Rockies? It’s not much — the Mets are 60-69, and a .500 season would be quite an accomplishment. But we’re resilient folk. Knock us down with a post-All-Star death spiral and after a little winning streak you catch us looking around and talking about how much fun it was. Because hey, it’s baseball.  Party in the park! As noted yesterday, nice things can happen to people at Citi Field even when they’re not happening to the Mets. When they’re not happening to the Mets, I find myself too grumpy to dwell on them. But with the Mets on a scintillating two-game winning streak, I’m in a good enough mood to mention a couple of nice things I respectively witnessed and was told of recently. Sometimes it helps to not be too handy with one’s devices. A few weeks ago I was at Citi Field, fiddling with my phone during BP, noticing my home page had disappeared. It hadn’t actually disappeared, it turned out. It was just hiding, but I didn’t know that, so I kept messing around with it. And the more I mess around with my phone at Citi Field in particular, I’ve noticed, the quicker its battery life gets sucked up. Kind of the way the battery life of Chris Young and Josh Thole would get sucked up that night. I just happened to have the phone out and in the palm of my hand while a recent Mets-Marlins game was in progress in my presence — the kind of behavior I usually frown upon in myself — when I noticed that literally 36 seconds earlier my Twitter feed was urging anybody celebrating a birthday tonight at Citi Field should Tweet that fact to @Mets. My birthday’s in December, but the reason I was sitting where I was was that night was, in fact, celebrating a birthday. It was Ross Chapman’s 16th, and because it was Ross Chapman’s 16th, where else would he be but at a ballgame? His parents Sharon and Kevin had arranged for a veritable ballpark party for Ross and his friends, inviting a few adults along in the process, me included, for which I was grateful. In a moment of full cognizance, I Tweeted the appropriate hashtag as directed, gave our seat location and explained in as few characters as I am capable that I was with a birthday celebrant this very minute. Maybe, I mused to myself, somebody will swing by with a cake or something. Then, because my battery life was getting dangerously sucked up, I turned the phone off and forgot about it. By doing so, I missed the following four messages from @Mets: • “Congratulations on winning this evening’s #mymetsbirthday. please send your name and hometown.” • “Greg…are you there? We need your response this inning. Your guest must be in his/her seat in the 4th inning” • “Greg we are going to have to offer the prize to another contestant. My apologies” • “Going once…..Going Twice…..” I’m sitting there blissfully ignorant that Ross has won Birthday Fan of the Game because my home page disappeared hours earlier and because my battery does what it does and, for that matter, because three months earlier I had gotten stuck in the elevator in my building, which makes me very conscious of preserving battery life because without being able to call 911 that day in May on my phone, I’m not convinced anyone would’ve noticed me in there for innings on end (a different Mets-Marlins game had just started and I was damned if I was going to miss it while stuck in an elevator…though, to be fair, I did have my radio on me). Anyway, I didn’t know what was going on, until I thought I heard somebody calling my name. Somebody was calling my name. It was the Mets Birthday Crew or whatever they call themselves for this promotion. Maybe I was the only one who Tweeted a birthday 36 seconds in to the promotion. Or maybe somebody figured a birthday celebrant shouldn’t suffer in the face of somebody else’s technological neglect, a.k.a. my not monitoring my phone properly. Whatever, the Mets showed up, Ross was pointed out, he was presented with his Carvel gift certificate (which I’m told a certain Carvel in the middle of New Jersey refuses to honor, but that’s another story) and the birthday boy’s party was featured on CitiVision for the whole park to see, as his mom’s photo can attest. But it doesn’t even have to be your birthday for something good to happen to you out of the blue/orange at Citi Field. Hell, you don’t even have to be Ike Davis taking one final swing against the Astros. At the beginning of the last homestand, the one with all those losses to the Rockies, I detoured from my lovely Monday evening with Sharon and fellow bloggers Taryn Cooper and Ray Stilwell to say hi to my buddy Jim. He and his friend George were raving about those new Pat LaFrieda steak sandwiches, and not just for the usual tasty reasons. See, Jim and George had arrived at the ballpark not long after the gates had opened. After reading the rave reviews, they made a beeline to Pat’s stand beyond center field and were the very first customers of the night. A coupla sandwiches, a coupla beers…it was all looking very promising. Except for one thing. The cash register wouldn’t work. Wouldn’t open. Wouldn’t operate. Nothin’. There’s the food and drink on the other side of the glass and Jim and George are apparently irrevocably separated from it because there’s no practical way to effect a transaction. Jim would not have been surprised to have been expelled from the stadium as some sort of penalty for ordering the stuff in the first place. Yet the matter was resolved in a manner that left our patrons happily dumbfounded. “OK, you get the sandwiches for free.” Whaa…? No, they really did. Jim was disbelieving and offered up compensation, but no, the register malfunction meant this was their lucky day, except for one caveat. “But you don’t get the beer.” “Oh no!” overruled a manager on the scene. “They get the beer, too!” Jim repeated the dialogue for me as if he couldn’t believe that was the outcome. It was almost less believable than how badly the Mets were going to waste R.A. Dickey’s sublime pitching that night. “But you don’t get the beer.” “Oh no! They get the beer, too!” Yes, this was real. Yes, they ate and drank free. Yes, they enjoyed it very much.  Ryder takes his FAFIF shirt out for a Citi Field on-field spin. Stephanie and I have enjoyed telling people we know Ryder Chasin since the day we met him at his Bar Mitzvah in the fall of 2009. If that sounds like an unusual place to meet somebody for the first time, Ryder was no ordinary Bar Mitzvah boy and the site for the celebration of his “becoming a man” not the kind of place where you’d necessarily figure on being any time of year, let alone a windswept November afternoon. That story is here, but I’m happy to report it merely serves as prelude to further chapters of our story together, the latest of them unfolding last Tuesday night at Citi Field — which included some time on the field with Ryder and his dad, Rob. Rob, it happens, knows somebody who knows somebody and…well, we took in batting practice from our own little barricaded alcove (SAT word!); sat in some incredibly close and cushy seats; enjoyed unusually personal attention from the Mets (including two autographs for Ryder from actual Mets Jordany Valdespin and Justin Turner); discovered what the little-known Payson entrance is for (consider it the Citi Field equivalent of Henry Hill’s Copacabana shortcut through the kitchen in GoodFellas); were directed to a complimentary pregame buffet; and watched our favorite team look typically horrible in losing to the Rockies.  ‘Spin takes a shot at getting the Mets going before all turned typically horrible. But we could see it from so close! OK, so you can’t have everything. But with friends like Ryder and Rob, you can come pretty close to feeling like you do. Our thanks to them and whomever they know for letting us all pretend we were not just VIPs but VVIPs for a night. And, of course, thanks to the increasingly vertical Ryder Chasin — not yet 16 but already featuring more height than I’ll ever possess — for still fitting into his Faith and Fear t-shirt and thinking to wear it in a most appropriate setting. 3 comments - (Comments closed) | | Print This Post | Bar Mitzvah, FAFIF Shirt, Goodfellas, Joan Payson, Ryder Chasin, VIP Treatment “And it’s…GONE! Ballgame!” “What?” “Aw, that’s stupid. There’s plenty of work in this league.” “You’re nuts!” “I can’t hear you. My championships are making too much noise.” “‘What’s that, championships? You’re both talking at the same time, and I can’t make out what either of you is saying, something my chicken friend over here doesn’t have a problem with because he doesn’t have any championships and now he’s afraid to play me anymore, so the big chicken is moving to the other league!’” “Yeah? Where do you keep ’em, on that stupid hill?” “Seriously, watch yourself over there, OK? They can be real dicks in that other league.” “You sure we can’t play just one more game?” I went to the game Saturday, had a great time and the Mets won. Oh, how I’ve been waiting what seems like ages to say that. No “despite” need be spoken. Nobody has to say, “Despite the way the game turned out, I had a really great time.” That’s the sort of thing I’ve been saying almost every instant I’ve left Citi Field over the past too many weeks. Lotsa laughs, swell food, pleasant weather, the whole bit. But not the whole bit, because the Mets were biting it whole. The Mets were pitching but not hitting. Or, going back a thousand years, not pitching but maybe hitting. Yippee, there’s a new steak sandwich. Hooray, I took home a batting practice ball. Good for me, I got invited to sit in some beautifully primo seats. And, oh, what marvelous conversation! The Mets lost. The food shouldn’t have tasted good. The balls should’ve been thrown back. The seats should’ve been flipped up in disgust. And the only thing we should’ve been saying to each other is, “This frigging team.” I guess we did say that, but what we really should’ve been saying was stuff like: • “Way to go not wasting R.A.’s seven innings!” • “Fantastic that Turner finally homered!” • “Some kinda catch, Scotty!” • “Jason Bay’s not always completely useless.” Here’s what we didn’t have to say on Saturday: Nothing about how much the bullpen blew because the bullpen was solid and stable for six outs; nothing about how we got beat by a bunch of bananaheads like the AAAstros because we have thus far split two games with those bananaheads; no assigning all our Player of the Game points to a miniature version of Mike Piazza because he’s the only one in a Mets uniform whose bobble was intentional; and no wondering if BTO could remember the words to “Takin’ Care Of Business”. Surprise, surprise, though the Mets win only once a week, Randy and Fred are still capable of getting up every morning from their ’larm clock’s warning to help us celebrate what is hardly routine enough to be considered businesslike (but tradition is tradition). The Mets won! The best part of a very good day at the ballpark was the Mets winning! I went with one of my good friends; I ran into some other good friends; I had a nice if typically overpriced World’s Fare Market gyro for lunch; an uncrowded elevator magically opened on Field Level and whisked my party to Promenade; the vista from 517 was brilliantly expansive; the clouds didn’t threaten; I didn’t absorb a sunburn; no stranger in my vicinity bugged the spit out of me; the LIRR conductor asked me if I was going to “Shea”; and on the way home, at Jamaica, I answered some drunk wearing a BELTRAN 15’s cry of “LET’S GO METS!” with my own “LET’S GO METS!” I love all that stuff. But what I really love is a Mets win. A Mets win — as Liv Tyler said toward the end of That Thing You Do!, I’d forgotten what you fellas looked like. 7 comments - (Comments closed) | | Print This Post | Astros, Bachman-Turner Overdrive, Jason Bay, Justin Turner, R.A. Dickey, Scott Hairston, That Thing You Do, Unfamiliar Sensation of Joy There was a celebration in one clubhouse at Citi Field Friday night, where somebody actually found something unusual in beating the Mets. Houston’s interim manager Tony DeFrancesco — not to be confused with ’70s heartthrob Tony DeFranco of “Heartbeat (It’s A Love Beat)” fame — had just won his first game as a major league manager, as his 40-86 Astros downed Terry Collins’s 57-69 Mets, 3-1. Given that the 2012 Astros have been playing like the 2012 Mets not just for a half but for a whole season (except when they’ve played the 2012 Mets, in which case they might as well be the 1975 Reds) and that DeFrancesco is a local product who slogged through the minor leagues forever before getting what amounts to his big break when he was named Brad Mills’s successor last week, why shouldn’t somebody be a little extra happy in Flushing for one evening? So Tony’s players doused him with champagne and Tony’s family and friends jammed into his office and Tony offered up giddy quotes about how “we’re going to change the attitude, we’re going to change the momentum,” which might indicate a lot of champagne flowed, considering all Tony’s team did was beat the Mets. But what the hell, a lot of people in the man’s life were happy for him. “I’m sure my phone has got a few text messages,” DeFrancesco smilingly told reporters. Terry Collins’s phone, on the other hand? His voice mailbox was pretty nearly full. “Hello, Terry? This is Gil Hodges. I understand you’re having some trouble with those darned Astros. Don’t worry about it. In my best year, we lost to Houston an awful lot, yet things worked out for us. What you need to do is remind your players they’re to conduct themselves like professionals at all times, even when they’re mired in a slump. I found it helpful to march slowly but purposefully from the dugout and remove my left fielder when he wasn’t necessarily giving his all, even though my left fielder was batting .346. According to the statistical printouts I still receive up here, your left fielder is batting…hmm, must be a typo. It says your regular left fielder is batting .148. If that’s not a typo, Terry, I assume you’ve already marched slowly but purposefully from the dugout and removed your left fielder not just from left field but from the premises. And if you have a regular left fielder hitting .148, I also have to assume you have bigger problems than I can advise you on. You’d need a bigger miracle-worker than me to help you out with players like those. Good luck.” “Terry? Joe Frazier here. Ah’m real sorry it’s come to this. Managin’ in New York can be thankless and Ah’ll bet nobody’s thanked you lately for nothin’. ’Course when your team can’t score, can’t catch a break and the front office can’t give ya no help, it’s like tryin’ to trap a possum with raccoon bait. When mah Mets began tumblin’ downhill in 1977, Joe McDonald went out and got me Lenny Randle. He’s the fella who done punched his old manager in the face in Texas. Turned out to be mah best player for mah last few weeks at Shea Stadium. Maybe you gotta play your new guy Kelly Shoppach more or somethin’. He didn’t punch his old manager in the face, just stabbed him in the back, ah hear. Ah dunno. Ah never did, really. Hey, keep after ’em.” BEEP! “Hello? Hello? Terry? Hello? Uh, I don’t know if this is working. If it is, this is Wes Westrum. Listen, uh…hello? Ohmigod, isn’t this connection awful?” 15 comments - (Comments closed) | | Print This Post | Astros, Casey Stengel, George Bamberger, Gil Hodges, Joe Frazier, Team History, Terry Collins, Tony DeFrancesco, Tony DeFranco, Wes Westrum |
Piazza: Catcher, Slugger, Icon, Star by Greg Prince is available from Amazon, Barnes & Noble and other online booksellers. 
Amazin' Again: How the 2015 New York Mets Brought the Magic Back to Queens by Greg Prince is available from Amazon, Barnes & Noble and other online booksellers. 
Volume I of The Happiest Recap: 50+ Years of the New York Mets As Told in 500+ Amazin' Wins by Greg Prince is available in print and for Kindle on Amazon. 
Faith and Fear in Flushing: An Intense Personal History by Greg Prince (foreword by Jason Fry), is available from Amazon, Barnes & Noble and other online booksellers. |
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