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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 2 September 2012 9:02 am After wrapping up their current series in Miami, the Mets re-enter the general baseball conversation for a little while, which has its upside and its down. The upside is everything the Mets do in their succeeding nine games against St. Louis, Atlanta and Washington potentially impacts the playoff picture. The down is that what appears to be Met momentum stands a decent chance of being stifled.
The Mets have been playing games that definitely matter to us as Mets fans and theoretically to them as Mets players but are otherwise second-tier in the late-season scheme of things, and that’s never clearer than in what Frank Sinatra would have called the wee small hours of the morning. See, when I’m not up here writing through the night, I have a tendency to nod off on the living room couch instead of getting up and going to bed like a person when sleep begins to pervade my consciousness. Lately, usually at the persistent suggestion of a ravenous cat, I seem to unwillingly open my eyes in the latter half of a given hour, say at 3:45 AM. When it happens, my thoughts have tended to go like this:
1) “Shut up, Avery, I’ll feed you guys in a minute.”
2) “Gotta go to the bathroom.”
3) “If I turn on MLB Network, I can probably catch Met highlights again.”
When the sub-.500 Mets are playing sub-.500 competition, I know that no matter how scintillating the action — and on Saturday night the Mets scintillated the hell out of the Marlins in the ninth inning — that they are strictly 3:58 AM programming on the likes of Quick Pitch on MLBN. I’ve noticed it all week in my nocturnal maneuvers. Did the Mets take it to the Astros sometime before I went into snooze mode? The Phillies? The Fish? Great! I could always watch the key hits again, no matter my state of alertness. So I look at the clock, I fend off my kitties, I put my bladder on hold and I think:
“Oh good, it’s not quite four in the morning yet. I wanna see Ike’s homer for the eighth time.”
The Mets are playing well again, but they’re playing off the grid. In a vacuum, that’s fine. We don’t need no stinking context to enjoy a rally that would have fit beautifully with the narrative they seemed to be constructing in the season’s first half. Sometimes base hits are base hits. But the ninth-inning hits strung together by Daniel Murphy, David Wright and especially Lucas Duda against Steve Cishek (or Not Josh Johnson, thank Ozzie very much) carried that “late & close” air of CLUTCH! And when they combined to close the gap from 3-1 to 3-2 — despite Ike Davis’s clever attempt to bunt for the first time in his life going awry — I was ready for Mike Baxter to make us love him even more than we already do. But I had also been expecting Ike to not square to bunt but launch a three-run bomb, and he’d struck out, so I shouldn’t have been surprised when Mike from Whitestone popped a ball foul and it was picked out of the air, à la LeBron crowding the boards, by a leaping Jose from Flushing.
Reyes’s nifty grab meant there were two outs but still two on (one of them a pinch-runner named Jason Bay who looked familiar from defensively replacing Duda the night before; man is that guy versatile!) when Andres Torres came up, faced a two-two count and seemed very much struck out by Cishek/Not Johnson to end the game. Jerry Meals, however, called strike three “ball three” and Torres had the good sense to not question it. Two pitches later, he received legitimate ball four and loaded the bases for Kelly Shoppach (or Not Josh Thole).
Shoppach joined the CLUTCH! parade, going straight up the middle with the game-tying RBI, allowing center fielder Justin Ruggiano to do the same, albeit in the helpfully opposite direction. Kelly’s ball darted from the infield into center; Justin’s feet darted from center toward the infield; Justin’s glove was only vaguely involved in the proceedings and allowed Kelly’s ball to keep on darting. Not only did Wright score from third, but Bay pinch-ran home from second and Torres motored on in from first. Shoppach wound up on third, the Mets led, 5-3, default Marlin closer Cishek was ironically replaced by deposed Marlin closer Heath Bell and Frank Francisco, hold on to your hat, was perfect yet again.
What a great win for so many reasons. A comeback is always great. The aggressive approach of Duda on a two-one pitch suggested progress since his involuntary trip to dazzling downtown Buffalo. The removal of Johnson after he threw eight innings of dominating three-hit ball indicated that whatever you think of him, Ozzie Guillen is a gracious host. Torres’s eye on “ball three” was a thing of beauty. Thole patiently waited until September 1 to emerge from his oh-for-ever schneid, which was key because, given the break glass in case of emergency presence of Mike Nickeas on the slightly expanded roster, it meant Terry could securely pinch-run for Josh in the eighth, which got his wet noodle of a bat out of the game in plenty of time for the ninth, otherwise Collins probably doesn’t use righty Shoppach against righty Cishek, and Kelly Shoppach is the best hitting catcher the Mets have had since anybody who wasn’t everybody else they’ve used this year.
From an opposition standpoint, I got to enjoy Jose Reyes, my favorite Met of 2003 to 2011 — and, honestly, still my favorite Met in 2012, albeit in absentia, the way Tom Seaver remained my favorite Met in the late ’70s despite the wacky Red getup he insisted on wearing — looking dashing on defense, professional at the plate and bubbly along the basepaths, and I didn’t have to get stuck with a Marlin victory to do so. And while I have nothing except their affiliation against Cishek or Ruggiano per se, I got a kick out of their being particularly culpable in their team’s loss since David Samson disingenuously campaigned for one or the other, based on very small sample sizes, to replace Giancarlo Stanton on the All-Star team in July when Stanton was injured. Samson is Jeffrey Loria’s longtime accomplice in franchise crime. Anything that reflects badly on Loria or his stooge is a welcome development.
Met wins proffered in pleasing plurals are welcome developments, too, and it’s always preferable to play pluckily rather than get plucked, yet I can’t reflexively take this recent surge as proof that they have suddenly refound their footing. Consider the not so random starting point of August 20, or the beginning of the 13-game stretch when the sub-.500 Mets began playing nothing but sub-.500 competition. Against the similarly lousy Rockies, Astros, Phillies and Marlins, the Mets have gone 6-6, with one to go. If you want to be all Pythagorean about it, the Mets have scored 33 runs in these last dozen games while allowing 33 runs. Overall, for two weeks, they’ve been just as good as the bad teams they’ve been taking on, and vice-versa.
In the last seven games, they’ve stopped being the lousiest among the lousy, and it’s injected those 3:58 AM highlights — right before the Barbasol commercials — with some badly needed joie de vivre. But after Sunday’s finale at the South Florida Lime-o-torium, the Mets move to the front end of Quick Pitch, toward the top of Baseball Tonight, to an element of relevance that transcends our irrevocable obsession with them.
The Mets figure to be part of the pennant race for the next nine games. Everything they do against the Cardinals will matter, and not just to their core loyalists. St. Louis is in a birdfight for the Wild Card. Grounding their winged asses would be a lot bigger than reeling in the Marlins, no matter our distaste for all things aquatic. Then it’s the last visit to Queens from those kings of ancient Met hurt, the Braves, an even more legitimate contender. Chopping Chipper and his disciples at this stage of 2012 would be a lot bigger than having taken it to the Phillies at this stage of 2012, and that’s factoring in that they’re the Phillies. Then, the Nationals come around, a team that’s been the anti-Astros all year long. We took two of three from the hapless Houstons; oh, to do something similar to the wily Washingtonians.
I miss pennant races. I miss watching scoreboards for more than recreational purposes. I miss mattering. Yeah, the Mets always matter to me, but you know what I mean. Impressing the highlight-packaging producers isn’t my cause. I want the Mets to be spunky and feisty while playing up to their competition, not just across it. I want to see them rise above their lousy ranks and give the good teams what for.
Yes, to invoke the hoariest of misunderstood Met clichés, I want relatively meaningful games in September, at least until we’re back to fighting at our weight class again in Milwaukee in a couple of weeks. Beat somebody with something on the line as long as you’re playing somebody with something on the line. That would constitute a true highlight.
by Jason Fry on 1 September 2012 12:37 am R.A. and Matt, three days of this ‘n’ that.
Not the most inspiring slogan, but we’re not the most inspiring team unless R.A. Dickey is continuing his magical season or Matt Harvey is launching his promising career.
Tonight it was the former, with Dickey his usual masterful self, supported by the enlivened bat of Ike Davis and tidy defense from Andres Torres and David Wright and Daniel Murphy. (Yes, that Daniel Murphy.) R.A. won his 17th, going all the way. He should get six more chances to win three more games — in fact, circle that series three weeks from now, against these same Marlins at Citi. I’ve got a feeling.
The only shame was that R.A. had to win No. 17 surrounded by the Super Mario green walls and ultra-blue fish tanks and vomiting-Eurotrash uniforms of the Marlins, the tackiest franchise in the history of sports.
I called them that back in April, and I’m not backing it off by the width of a hair on Greg Dobbs’s chinny-chin-chin pubes.
What’s more, back then I double-barreled my assault on the Marlins with a bitter eruption and a snarling prediction that Team Tasteless and pestilent owner Jeffrey Loria would soon return to their usual cheapjack ways. By “soon,” I meant “two or three years.” In fact, it was two or three months. With a fifth of the season left to go, the Marlins are in last place, have held a fire sale, and are playing to the usual mix of enemy fans and empty seats. In their first year in the new park they sought for so long and lied to half of South Florida to get, the Marlins are third from the bottom in NL attendance.
Bud Selig must be very happy.
Ah, Selig. You can argue all night about what the history books will ultimately say about his reign. Selig played a key role in launching a labor nuclear war, which his side lost, and since then has presided over a generation of peace. He expanded the playoffs this way and that way and every damn way, making a mockery of a 162-game season but also (it must be admitted) ensuring pretty thrilling final weeks of those seasons. He was blind to PEDs, but has belatedly taken part in helping ensure a cleaner game. He is painfully slow to force change (just ask the A’s) and easy to mock, but behind the scenes he’s patiently pushed a group of fractious, childish rich men towards consensus. He’s not an easy man to champion, but he’s also not so easy to dismiss. His legacy as commissioner will be … complicated.
Well, except for one thing that I find hard to forgive. And that’s his cynical plot to contract the Minnesota Twins and the Montreal Expos.
Selig’s contraction plan depended on Carl Pohlad, the horrible skinflint owner of the Twins, and Loria, the New York art dealer who bought the Expos in 1999. Loria’s Expos played the 2000 season without English-language broadcasts while the owner tried to strong-arm Montreal into a new stadium deal; when that failed, the Expos were ticketed for the contractioneer’s ax. The plan fell apart when the Metrodome’s owners won a court case forcing the Twins to honor their stadium lease, after which Pohlad held up Minneapolis for the bulk of the funding for a new stadium. The Expos wound up as the wards of MLB after a complicated bit of faintly obscene congress that saw John Henry acquire the Red Sox and sell the Marlins to Loria, who in turn sold the Expos to MLB. Loria took the Expos’ entire staff and even their office equipment to Miami — I wouldn’t be surprised to hear he personally yanked the thumbtacks out of the walls. MLB, needing two teams for its contraction plan, was stuck with the Expos and so kept them in a kind of baseball coma — when the team had the temerity to enter September 2003 as wild-card contenders, MLB wouldn’t pay pennies on the dollar to let them have September call-ups. Two years later the Expos became the Nationals, who promptly unretired the Expos’ numbers and began pretending they never existed.
Selig’s legacy will be complicated, but he should be embarrassed by that part of it. Which leads me to a theory that I kind of like — that the Marlins are Selig’s karmic comeuppance. Because honestly, this is the team he should have plotted to contract — a dismal franchise in a state that’s only interested in March baseball, a franchise with a succession of repugnant owners, a history of purchased World Series and cynical fire sales, zero identity and half-assed fans who can’t even show up for the first 81 days of an empty, overpriced spectacle, which you’d think life in Miami would have more than prepared them for.
Loria, Selig’s designated grave robber, now sits in a near-empty stadium, his dead eyes skittering from his fish tanks to his ludicrous outfield sculpture to the members of his last-place team that he hasn’t sold yet. Good. There’s no franchise or owner more deserving of such misfortune.
by Greg Prince on 31 August 2012 9:26 am  So we meet again this weekend…
by Greg Prince on 30 August 2012 8:57 pm 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.
by Jason Fry on 30 August 2012 12:37 am 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 Paul Cloyd, who’d never seen a pitch thrown in anger in the big leagues. (For whatever reason, Harvey was incapable of throwing the least-threatening hitter in the Phils’ lineup a strike, which seems weirder than it is, baseball being baseball and all.) Harvey tinkered and fought and gutted his way through, though, and the Mets did just enough to support him.
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.
by Greg Prince on 29 August 2012 4:47 pm 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.
by Jason Fry on 29 August 2012 1:45 am 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.
by Greg Prince on 28 August 2012 3:17 pm  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!”
More dumbfoundedness. That’s two steak sandwiches and two beers, approximately $46 in consumable merchandise, on the arm, as Jim likes to put it.
Yes, this was real. Yes, they ate and drank free. Yes, they enjoyed it very much.
by Greg Prince on 27 August 2012 8:27 pm  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.
by Greg Prince on 26 August 2012 11:46 pm “And it’s…GONE! Ballgame!”
“Ugh! I KNEW I shouldn’t have thrown that pitch!”
“But ya did! I win! Wanna play again?”
“Can’t. Gotta go.”
“OK. What about tomorrow?”
“Can’t.”
“Well, there’s always next time for you to try to get even.”
“Listen, I’ve been meaning to tell you…”
“What? That I just kicked your ass two out of three?”
“Nah, man. This is serious.”
“What?”
“I can’t play with you anymore.”
“What’re you talking about? We play each other all the time! Like since we were born, which was practically the same day!”
“Yeah, I know, but we’re moving.”
“Moving? Where you moving to?”
“The other league.”
“The other league? You’re kidding! We always make fun of the other league!”
“Yeah, I know, but my dad says that’s where he’s gotta go for work, so…”
“Aw, that’s stupid. There’s plenty of work in this league.”
“I know, but what can I do?”
“You and me not in the same league anymore? That’s crazy!”
“They say it’s nice over there.”
“Nice? You’ll get killed! You couldn’t even beat me, and I’m terrible!”
“Hey, I beat you the last time we played. I swept you!”
“That was like forever ago. And I was taking it easy on you.”
“Taking it easy on me? What about all those times I beat you?”
“You beat me? Ha! When?”
“Lotsa times! What about that time you won the championship? Who was it who you could NEVER beat?”
“Who won the championship, though?”
“I should’ve won the championship. I beat you and you beat that kid from the other league, so really I was the champion.”
“You’re nuts!”
“Uh-uh! I beat you like 10 out of 12 times that year!”
“But I won the championship! And that wasn’t the only one!”
“Shut up!”
“Shut up yourself! You were a big cheater and a sore loser that year!”
“Cheater? Says who? Prove it! Prove it!”
“I don’t have to prove it. I won! Even when you tried to get me in trouble, I won!”
“I didn’t tell you to do all that stupid stuff. Only an idiot would’ve gone to a place called Cooter’s after a game!”
“Cooter’s was cool. You were just chicken!”
“Chicken? You were chicken! You were afraid of a little sandpaper!”
“I can’t hear you. My championships are making too much noise.”
“That doesn’t even make sense!”
“What doesn’t make sense is you think you would’ve won if we’d kept playing except I won because I beat you fair and square.”
“I still beat you more. I beat you that time we stayed up all night, too!”
“I beat you that time we just kept playing and playing even though our moms were calling us to come inside!”
“Big deal! You didn’t even make the playoffs that year!”
“‘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!’”
“Oh, you take that back!”
“Or what? You’ll close your roof?”
“I’m glad I’m moving!”
“I’m glad you’re moving, too!”
“You’re such a loser!”
“You’re a bigger loser!”
“Yeah, well…you only just got a no-hitter this year. I’ve got a BUNCH of ’em!”
“Yeah? Where do you keep ’em, on that stupid hill?”
“My hill’s better than that stupid apple!”
“That apple went up twice today! It means I kicked your sorry ass!”
“You’re just lucky I am moving, because otherwise I’d beat your behind so bad next year!”
“Some threat. Where ya gonna do it from, the other league?”
“Don’t you worry, I’ll be back at some point. Maybe not next year or the year after, but we’ll run into each other.”
“Yeah, well…I hope we do.”
“Yeah, well…me too.”
“I can’t believe we’re never going to play each other like regular ‘play each other’ again.”
“Me neither.”
“Seriously, watch yourself over there, OK? They can be real dicks in that other league.”
“You’re just saying that to scare me.”
“I’m not, man, really. They don’t even let you bat normally over there.”
“They don’t?”
“Nope. And you know how you and me play, like with a lotta pitching and just a little hitting?”
“Yeah?”
“It’s the total opposite over there.”
“What?”
“It’s messed up. I’m just saying watch yourself.”
“Don’t worry, I will.”
“Good. Because when we run into each other I want you to be in good enough shape for me to KICK YOUR ASS AGAIN!!!”
“You mean the way I KICK YOUR ASS most of the time?”
“You sure we can’t play just one more game?”
“Nah. I gotta go.”
“Good luck. I mean it.”
“Yeah. See ya.”
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