The blog for Mets fans
who like to read
ABOUT US
Faith and Fear in Flushing made its debut on Feb. 16, 2005, the brainchild of two longtime friends and lifelong Met fans.
Greg Prince discovered the Mets when he was 6, during the magical summer of 1969. He is a Long Island-based writer, editor and communications consultant. Contact him here.
Jason Fry is a Brooklyn writer whose first memories include his mom leaping up and down cheering for Rusty Staub. Check out his other writing here.
Got something to say? Leave a comment, or email us at faithandfear@gmail.com. (Sorry, but we have no interest in ads, sponsored content or guest posts.)
Need our RSS feed? It's here.
Visit our Facebook page, or drop by the personal pages for Greg and Jason.
Or follow us on Twitter: Here's Greg, and here's Jason.
|
by Jason Fry on 22 September 2012 1:22 am Goodness is it ever exhausting being a Mets fan sometimes.
On Thursday night, when the Phillies had finished administering a 16-1 pasting of the Mets, Terry Collins accused his team of quitting — or rather, he let his refusal to say they hadn’t quit indicate rather clearly that he thought they had.
On Friday afternoon, horribly but predictably, Collins felt bad about that. A slew of meetings followed, as did a mea culpa session with the beat writers. Collins basically said he’d been trying to motivate his players and miscalculated, and that he regretted it. “I don’t want to ever challenge anybody’s integrity,” he said. “That’s wrong. My players are professionals.”
The Mets receive paychecks for playing baseball, so yes, by that definition they are professionals. By any other definition, their status would be debatable given recent evidence. The Mets went into last night’s game with the Marlins with a 23-47 record since their season’s high-water mark, and fewer wins at Citi Field in the second half than the Atlanta Braves and the Washington Nationals. That’s bending the definition of “professionalism” dangerously far — but it sure seems like a well-chosen example of how a team that’s quit would play baseball.
Honestly, if putting up three hits while getting curb-stomped 16-1 isn’t quitting, I don’t want to see what would happen if the Mets actually did quit. Would they lose 154-0? 2,516-1? Would they arrive at the batter’s box wearing only uniform tops and then fall asleep between pitches? Collins, having finally had enough, was just concluding the same thing every sentient Mets fan concluded a while ago, and it was actually slightly satisfying to hear someone in this organization finally call this bunch out for their chronic listlessness and utter lack of results.
So of course the next day Collins walked back those statements, to use that awful, vaguely political expression you hear a lot these days. From Kevin Burkhardt we heard that his players were upset, and that the damage had been done.
The damage? Heaven forfend! I pictured various Mets flopping on their richly appointed fainting couches, whimpering that their manager was mean and pleading for agents to be called. The hurt feelings of players who are routinely terrible at baseball does not amount to damage. Damage is going 23-47 and plummeting, in rapid order, out of contention and then relevance. Damage is being corrosively awful night after night amid a news blackout about the financial future of the club. Damage is being so predictably inept that the effect is to all but beg a battered fanbase to find something else to do with its earnings and evenings. This is what damage looks like. And this. And lots more places I could point you.
But anyway, yeah, Terry felt bad.
At least he felt bad until the bottom of the first, when Lucas Duda popped up a ball, put his head down and jogged to first.
Duda’s fault was double-barreled. Most obviously, he wasn’t paying attention to the play. More subtly, he hadn’t been paying attention to how the game had gone so far. If he had, he would have noticed that the only obstacles between the ball he’d hit and the ground were various Marlins, which meant the ball’s journey was likely to end amid blades of grass. The Mets won tonight, but hold your applause: The way the Marlins played, the ’62 Mets would have eked out a victory despite most of them being in their eighties if not deceased at the present time. The Marlins’ performance was one of the more amazingly awful examples of baseball I’ve ever seen, which is saying something recently. The men in orange and green and black and silver and puce and gold and turquoise and taupe and whatever the hell else is on those uniforms went about their business as if they were all a) astonishingly hungover; b) suffering from vertigo; or c) both. Collins had a rough Thursday, but Ozzie Guillen spent most of Friday night wearing the kind of expression generally reserved for a dad whose kid just backed the truck too far down the boat ramp, submerging a land vehicle instead of extracting a watercraft.
Anyway, with the Marlins busy desecrating not just the practice but also the very idea of baseball, Duda wound up on first instead of on second. Which led, in rapid order, to Duda winding up on the bench, without even the fig leaf of Collins pretending to be worried about an injury. Our nomadic corner outfielder with the big feet and the eggshell confidence got caught loafing, and so got punished. “I couldn’t turn my head tonight,” said Collins later.
Perhaps tomorrow he’ll feel bad about that too.
Collins arrived in New York with a reputation for being a little too high-strung — the question wasn’t whether he’d snap, but when. He finally has, but not in the way that I imagined he would. He was coldly angry for all the right reasons and then wanly apologetic for all the wrong reasons.
Honestly, I feel bad for Collins. He can’t play the game in lieu of the players who can’t play it. He can’t authorize the funds needed to bring in players who’d be better. He can’t do much except hope that loaded dice will quit coming up snake eyes. And then, after these near-nightly disasters, he has to bottle his frustration and fury and say philosophical things to a roomful of reporters. I can’t imagine what that’s like, day after day after day.
Well, that’s not entirely true. I’m sure it must be exhausting. As an increasingly unwitting fan of the 2012 Mets, I understand that part all too well. I think we all do.
by Greg Prince on 21 September 2012 4:55 am In five years’ time, we’ve gone from being officially eliminated behind a starting pitcher who gallingly showed no emotion when his historically miserable first inning sealed our doom, to being officially eliminated behind a starting pitcher whose emotional brittleness over his historically miserable first inning was uncomfortably apparent.
Either way, the Mets were dead then and they’re dead now. There hasn’t been much that’s been alive and well about them in between.
They died on September 20, 2012, albeit to much less consternation and before approximately a zillion fewer witnesses than was the case when they died on September 30, 2007. The stakes were higher a half-decade ago and the element of surprise inherent in the way their self-inflicted wounds festered much fresher. We’re used to the losing these days. We accept being summarily deleted from mathematical contention as an autumnal inevitability. Quite obviously, so do the Mets.
Jeremy Hefner will never be remembered as any kind of internal villain on the order of T#m Gl@v!ne, the Hall of Fame-bound pitcher whose baseball immortality went on hiatus when it mattered most. Gl@v!ne, it has not been and will never be forgotten, presided over the third of an inning that altered the existence of a franchise as we knew it. He gave up seven runs in his third consecutive putrid outing and made sure that a team that had been reeling for two weeks collapsed with a resounding thud on that season’s final day. He then compounded his competitive sins by answering questions about his performance by displaying all the situational awareness of dry, white toast.
He wasn’t devastated, he said. At worst, he was disappointed. Devastation would imply that the Mets’ fate meant something to him. Disappointment you brush off before calling to confirm dinner reservations.
Hefner, on the other hand, could not have sounded a whole lot more devastated when reporters found him after his Thursday nightmare in which he faced Phillie after Phillie after Phillie and recorded nary an out. Seven batters clad in gray and red came up, not a one of them sat down, unless you count the four who had already scored. Hefner’s brief stay on the mound inadvertently imbued what shaped up as a prototypical meaningless game in September with gobs of meaning. No Mets team had ever taken the field at home and allowed its visitors to grab a quick 8-0 lead. But this one had. All kinds of records related to massive Met ineptitude were en route to being invoked.
And for that, Jeremy sounded very, very sorry…even sorrier than he pitched. Hell, maybe he didn’t pitch all that pitifully considering the Phillies bobbed along like a singles sewing machine and stitched together their eight runs on basically no hard hit balls. But to let Hefner off the hook because, gosh darn it, they fell in and found holes — no. I’m not falling for that. Eight runs in the first inning is eight runs in the first inning. I cringed in empathy for a 26-year-old rookie from Oklahoma whose voice I heard cracking and who was clearly trying to rein in his tear ducts when SNY’s cameras arrived at his stall. I thought about how joyful he sounded less than a month ago when he pitched so effectively against the Astros, not just because he had a good game but because his daughter had just been born. Jeremy Hefner’s a person and I don’t like to hear a person in pain.
But as a Mets fan who has watched Met after Met after Met wander aimlessly across six soul-crushing Septembers — and seen these Mets hide in plain sight since the middle of July — I’m not feeling remotely so generous of spirit. They can cry, they can smash stuff, they can bite each other’s heads off for all I care…and maybe they can fucking run to first base. Maybe they can remember professional baseball implies a touch of professionalism be proffered nightly. Maybe they can stop acting so absolutely helpless for months on end, stop wallowing in their “oh well” culture of acceptance and stop seeming so satisfied that they’re in the big leagues, most of them ignoring any impulse to believe they as a unit are required to attempt to succeed in the big leagues.
I guess they’re not. I guess it’s enough that they demonstrated a capacity for recording successive two-out hits on occasion in May and June and they thus deserve perpetual pats on the head for provisionally exceeding our generally low expectations on their behalf. I guess they want to be congratulated for putting on their pinstriped pants one leg at a time and bothering to physically stay on the field after the Phillies scored eight runs in the top of the first. They did, by gum. They hung around long enough to stand by and observe the Phillies score another seven runs in the goddamn top of the ninth, too. It was over in the top of the first when it was 8-0, yet it wasn’t technically over until it ended 16-1.
Who the fuck loses 16-1 in September? The same outfit that lost 13-0 in August, 11-5 in July, 9-1 in June, 8-0 in May and 18-9 in April; this team whose delusional manager still had the nerve as of last week to talk glowingly about how high they’d “set the bar” for themselves by rising a handful of games over .500 during the season’s first third. According to Terry Collins after the 16-1 exhibition, “This team has played their hearts out for two years against tremendous different odds and things that have happened.”
I have absolutely no idea what he’s talking about.
They’re professional baseball players. They’re supposed to play their hearts out. They are compensated lavishly to play their hearts out. We ask for results, but we settle for honest effort or at least honest interest. Have the Mets, as an entity, looked interested in playing professional baseball since early July? At best, they’ve appeared overmatched and incapable. During their most discouraging stretches, they’ve given little sign they want to do anything but get their obligations over with.
This appears to be a failure on every level. We see bad habits go uncorrected, damaging ruts widen and cluelessness enshroud their every collective move. Where’s the coaching? Where’s the managing? Where’s the preparedness Collins is constantly congratulating himself over? Are the bulk of these players so lacking in talent and/or intelligence that instruction can’t be properly processed by them? Or are the instructors simply lacking in the necessary skill sets?
And, by the way, where the hell is that genius general manager lately? Is his health an issue? Because if it is, I wish him a speedy recovery. But if he’s all right, how come we haven’t seen Sandy Alderson address this mess publicly? Where are his lieutenants? I’d ask about the owners, but, honestly, who in their right mind wants to hear from them?
The players don’t execute, the leaders don’t guide, nobody’s in the ballpark, nobody’s taking responsibility, and on nights like this one, all we’re left with is a nominal superstar mouthing his usual boilerplate, a manger who doesn’t deal in reality, the lingering residue of whispers about one player’s work habits (instead of a legitimate full-throated throttling of all of them) and this poor schnook pitcher who shouldn’t be in anybody’s rotation but is wedged within ours for the time being and whose best moment Thursday came in summoning the poise to admit what nobody else had the good grace or guts to come close to saying out loud.
“I’m embarrassed for myself,” Jeremy Hefner declared in his steadiest voice possible, not having been around the Mets long enough to learn to be properly nonchalant about constant and corrosive losing. “I don’t want to not get an out. I don’t want to sit through a whole nine-inning game that I started. Words can’t even describe how embarrassing that is.”
Words can’t even describe how embarrassing any of this is.
by Greg Prince on 20 September 2012 4:17 am It’s good to know, in some perverse way, that with only two weeks remaining in the flat-out, most embarrassing second half the Mets have ever matriculated down the field, a given Mets loss can still rankle me enough to make me kick a plastic beer cup until it makes a thwack almost as loud as the one Ryan Howard generated against Josh Edgin. I’d have kicked Jonathan Papelbon instead of the cup when this given Mets loss was fully gifted away, but they probably arrest you for that (although in Flushing, I don’t see why punting Papelbon should be a crime).
So many Mets losses at Citi Field since July 8, 2012. What’s one more? My answer would be one more is disgraceful when it robs your legitimately thrilling pitching phenom of the win he earned when he threw seven one-hit innings to bid premature adieu to the starting rotation — the Mets have 14 more starts, yet Matt Harvey will have none — and it’s distasteful when it breathes another 24 hours of life into the Philadelphia Phillies’ mostly hopeless, totally unforeseen playoff chase (amid a multiplicity of Philadelphia Phillies fans, oh joy). The Phillies commenced charging toward the bonus Wild Card slot far too late and from too far back for their ongoing lunge to be taken terribly seriously, but then again, I root for a jest of a team, so who am I to say anything?
How close did the Mets come to not losing a home game for a change Wednesday night? They came so close that there was something historic about how they pulled this particular sickly rabbit from its threadbare hat. Two outs, nobody on, Edgin loses Chase Utley on the slowest-occurring three-two pitch in human annals (Bob Davidson called ball four and Utley mysteriously instigated Occupy Batter’s Box for seconds on end). Then up steps Howard against the rookie reliever you’re not sure should be entrusted with the ninth-inning situation on the line until you are reassured by a companion who shall remain nameless that this is the right call, Howard never hits lefties.
Howard then hits a lefty. Boy does he hit a lefty. 2-1, Mets, becomes 3-2, Phillies, and there’d be a bottom of the ninth, but you didn’t really see any point to it, Mets’ previously established Stengelian “whommy” on Papelbon notwithstanding. These Mets weren’t blowing a 2-1 lead one out from books-putting only to get it back. That would’ve required a third and a fourth run. The Mets rarely do third runs at Citi Field and they never do fourth runs.
But here’s the historic part, and I had an inkling about it even before I had a “baseball source” confirm for me that my Metsie sense wasn’t tingling simply out of justifiable disgust. I’ve been witness to my share of Met meltdowns, just as has any humble citizen of Metsopotamia who spent the 1990s and early 2000s subject to the Franco/Benitez Reign of Terror. Yet having survived Johnny and Armando (and their successors in sadism), why did this specific episode of ninth-inning follies feel so unusually awful?
Because nothing exactly like it had occurred in 23 frigging years. My “baseball source” tells me the last time the Mets lost a home game in which the visitors stuck it to them from behind with a lead-grabbing home run when the Mets were one out from victory was on August 20, 1989. And, oh yeah, of course I remember the incident, ’cause that was the day the Mets’ brief pennant race resurgence died.
We led, 3-1, going to the ninth. Don Aase was pitching versus the Dodgers; he got two quick outs; then he gave up singles to Lenny Harris and Alfredo Griffin; then Willie Randolph — yes, that Willie Randolph — hit his first home run of the year. The Dodgers led, 4-3, tacked on another run and brushed off a Met rally in the bottom of the ninth to hold on, 5-4. It was a bitter loss. The Mets had won 15 of 19 after acquiring Frank Viola and seemed poised to ascend to the top of the National League East. Instead, they got smacked with Terry Pendleton Lite and soon faded from contention.
But at least they had been in contention in August of 1989. In the jury-rigged double-Wild Card world of 2012, where seemingly toasted teams like the Brewers and Phillies stay alive well into September, the Mets evaporated in July and have produced only condensation to prove they ever existed.
To their credit, the Mets have also produced Matt Harvey, and upon my first up-close inspection of the young man, I am willing to confirm that he is the goods. It’s no wonder that before the game, as I watched a haggard Terry Collins listlessly go through the media motions (he’s at that stage of his tenure when, like a president after two years in office, you can’t believe how much he’s aged), the manager suddenly perked up and actually smiled when asked about Harvey being special. Yes, Terry was only too happy to assert, Matt Harvey is special.
Our special young man gave up a cheap leadoff home run to cheap leadoff hitter Jimmy Rollins and then, for seven solid innings, he decommissioned the jukebox: no more hits for the Phillies. If the Mets were going to unplug Harvey, the kid wasn’t going to go out with an acoustic set. He threw hard, he threw deep and he threw great. When he was through, he was en route to being the winner we already consider him.
Matt Harvey was actually able to leave with a lead. Thank David Wright and his delightful detonation of a Cole Hamels pitch in the sixth…and maybe a karmic assist of sorts. David is chasing Ed Kranepool for most hits ever by a Met and has almost tracked him down. He came into this game six behind the Krane’s 1,418. I happened to notice Eddie in the house, sitting in what my friend Sam Maxwell calls the Raymour & Flanagan seats behind home plate. Now and then I’d gaze down there from the Champions Club — of which Ed is a member in good standing since 1969 — and see what the man who has ruled as Met hit king since 1976 was up to. As David approached the plate for his third at-bat of the evening, I spied Ed getting up and leaving…perhaps to go home, perhaps for a refreshment in the Romney Sky360 Club. The moment Ed Kranepool disappeared, though, David Wright homered and moved to within five of 1,418.
Maybe the man who’s held the record for 36 years didn’t want to see it inch that much closer to oblivion. Or maybe Ed just had to use the John or something.
Speaking of Met champions, Wednesday’s blogger night festivities brought my blolleagues and I into substantial pregame contact with an honest-to-goodness 1986 Met, Barry Lyons. Barry was Gary Carter’s backup early in that championship season (before giving way to Ed Hearn) and would return to the roster as a Met mainstay until 1990. I’ve had the good fortune to meet several Met alumni over the past couple of years, but nobody to date has been more giving of his time nor more gracious in his manner than Mr. Lyons of Mississippi, whom I will always remember for one hit that stands out among the 131 he collected as a New York Met.
I asked him if he knew the one I was thinking of. I said “home run,” “Giants” and “pennant race,” and he took it from there.
Barry knew the home run — a grand slam, the only one Lyons launched in the bigs; it lifted the Mets from a 4-3 deficit to an eventual 7-4 triumph.
Barry knew the date — August 20, 1987 (precisely two years before that ghastly Aase-Randolph business), when the Mets desperately needed to make up ground on the Cardinals and did, once their catcher’s sixth-inning salami definitively garnished the David Cone victory that pulled the team to within 2½ games of first place for the first time since May 8.
Barry knew the pitcher — Kelly Downs.
Steve Keane (of the Eddie Kranepool Society, appropriately enough with Eddie in the vicinity) asked Barry if he knew what the pitch was.
“Forkball, I think,” Barry said a quarter-century after the fact.
Well, maybe not. According to Lyons’s quote in Joe Durso’s next-day story in the Times, Downs “threw me a fastball inside on one-and-two, and I got it.”
Twenty-five years later and a competitive universe removed from the halcyon days when the Mets could win 92 games and have it rationally viewed as a subpar season, Josh Edgin threw a fastball, “middle up,” to Ryan Howard. No, actually, Josh corrected himself. It wasn’t a fastball.
“I gave him a meatball.”
Or as Casey Stengel advised one of his beleaguered relievers in 1962 after a key home run had been surrendered, “It couldn’t have been a perfect pitch. Perfect pitches don’t travel that far.”
The Phillies desperately needed to make up ground on the Cardinals, but didn’t. Howard’s hammer blow — the 297th of his career but the first time he’s ever hoisted a two-out, go-ahead homer in a ninth inning — ruined Edgin’s night and deleted a “W” from Harvey’s ledger, but St. Louis won again. Philly’s four behind the Cards, trails L.A. and Milwaukee besides and have only 13 games remaining…and only one against the Mets, a.k.a. the contender’s best friend.
If the Phillies somehow unspool a miracle finish from their remote standing, then what Howard did to Edgin’s fastball will live on in Philadelphia lore. If they don’t, it will be just one home run of hundreds to an accomplished slugger.
In which case, it will never quite compare with what Lyons did to Downs’s fastball that behaves like a forkball in memory. Shoot, 25 years have passed, and Barry and I are still talking about it.
by Greg Prince on 19 September 2012 9:21 am As Charlie Rich taught me when I was just a lad listening to WGBB, people like to talk, lord, don’t they love to talk. When they can’t talk, they whisper. Sometimes the whispering works as such:
• First somebody whispers to somebody about this guy.
• Then somebody disseminates the whispers about the guy.
• Then everybody rushes to ask the guy about what is being whispered about him.
• Now nobody is whispering; everybody is talking out loud.
And that’s how Ike Davis has gone from guy whose season got somewhat better while the Mets’ year was getting much worse to guy the Mets might trade because they cannot allow themselves to keep getting worse every year — and it’s not like Ike Davis by himself is necessarily likely to stop that from happening.
Or something like that.
Ike may have been a guy the Mets were thinking about trading in the offseason, but now we won’t be totally surprised if one of their foundation players from 2010 is gone by 2013. I can’t say I’d have been shocked anyway, if only because you can’t be shocked that a team that nosedives in every second half would think about trading any player, save for a young pitching jewel or two. Teams that are unwatchable aren’t generally loaded with those you’d call untouchable.
But in that way the Mets have of touching things and turning them to mold, Ike, per Adam Rubin’s unnamed “baseball source,” isn’t just a potential trading chip because he’s had good power numbers, ya gotta give up something to get something, and maybe Lucas Duda would get his groove back if rescued from the outfield and shifted to first. The Mets have made it clear to somebody (somebody who talked to Rubin) that they think Ike — who’s hit homers if not his stride — doesn’t quite cotton to coaching and is too much of a night owl in a sport where they play mostly night games, with them fearing that the latter might “influence other young players” in a wayward fashion.
That was the story Rubin had Tuesday morning (except his language originally mentioned the Mets “worry about his impact on other young players away from the ballpark,” which was even more vague and potentially insidious). By Tuesday afternoon, prior to the Mets’ rainout, Ike had to respond to what not 12 hours earlier had been a whisper, and the day before had been nonexistent in the public ear. Ike, 25, was off into a detailed defense of his movie-watching habits and his bedtimes, which I have to admit are topics I’d never before considered. He also insisted he was not “uncoachable,” an assertion Terry Collins, inevitably a part of any story about one of his players, backed up when asked.
Yet now it’s out there. Ike Davis, who recently hosted a Met-studded charity event in memory of his late childhood friend, is reportedly a carouser and a malcontent…according to a source. If you’re a GM from another team, please give the Mets a package of several fine players for him. When he gets enough rest and properly processes advice, he’s really not so bad.
But don’t quote me on that.
by Greg Prince on 18 September 2012 5:25 pm The Mets did the right thing, calling tonight’s game in advance of the forecast deluge. And a Mets game postponed (to Thursday night) in this September is tantamount to a good deed.
Yet I find myself sad that the miserable Mets won’t be playing another miserable game that they were probably going to lose and will probably lose when they get around to making it up. No Mets baseball is a condition that will commence to exist on a going basis come the last out of October 3. It’s hard enough to get used to there not being miserable Mets games when there aren’t supposed to be. When the ones that are scheduled, no matter how miserable, are washed away, and you face a bleak Tuesday night when it’s likely going to rain everything but baseballs, and the miserable Mets won’t be on in the the background of your evening to distract you from everything else on your mind or, maybe for a pitch or two, in the foreground of your attention to sustain you as they’ve sustained you when they haven’t been so miserable…
Let’s just say I find myself sad.
by Jason Fry on 18 September 2012 12:20 am Joshua was very excited about his first-ever night game, crafting a highly detailed case for why he ought to be able to have ice cream very late in the proceedings. I’d been harangued long enough to stop listening very attentively by then, but I believe the gist of it was ice cream in the eighth or ninth inning would allow him to maintain his energy levels way past his bedtime. We did not agree on whether or not this was a positive. (Ice cream was secured in the sixth, by the way.)
Despite my deep worry about my son’s faltering fandom during these dark times, he was on point where R.A. Dickey’s quest for 20 wins was concerned, and with regards to David Wright’s pursuit of Ed Kranepool’s all-time hits mark. And he wouldn’t leave the house until we’d secured “a real Mets hat” for him — no Mr. Met, no reverse colors, but an orange NY on a field of blue. That was reassuring too.
Unfortunately, the effort to keep one young fan true to the orange and blue was almost entirely self-generated. How shall we describe tonight’s Mets game? Well, we could describe it more or less the same way we’ve described a good dozen or so Mets games in recent weeks:
1. The starting pitching was very good.
2. The offense was very bad.
3. The energy level was listless, even counting the 30% to 35% of the house that was rooting for the Phils.
4. The Mets lost.
Dickey will now have to win two out of his final three starts to reach 20. Ah, 20 wins. It’s an arbitrary number, which is fitting since “win” is one of baseball’s most arbitrary stats, not significantly more useful in summing up a player’s value than the game-winning RBI, that long-banished staple of mid-1980s Topps cards. (What dumb stat has done more damage to game strategy: the win or the save? Interesting question.)
Still, baseball was a struggle between the head and heart long before anybody heard of sabermetrics. I want Dickey to win 20 because it’s an evocative number, one that makes me think of Seaver and Gooden and Cone. (I always forget Jerry Koosman and Frank Viola, the former because he had the misfortune to labor in Seaver’s shadow; the latter because he’s not that memorable.) “Twenty-game winner” makes me think of bright promising Aprils and chilly exhausted Septembers. It makes me daydream in that marvelous way baseball encourages, simultaneously looking back in sepia nostalgia and imagining brilliantly colored futures.) Wins are a stupid stat, sure, but one buried too deeply in head and heart alike for me to extract.
Barring something bizarre, there’s no way Dickey can win his 20th in front of a home crowd, which is a shame. (So was the absolute lack of response to his 200th strikeout, though in fairness I saw nothing on any scoreboard that told fans the milestone had been reached.) The possibility of winning that 20th game at home has slipped away amid the recent Mets futility — as Dickey’s chance of winning 20 at all now threatens to slip away, too. Which isn’t what any of us would have wanted, but part and parcel of what’s befallen our franchise since a week before the All-Star break.
I’d hoped Joshua would see Win No. 19 in his final Citi Field visit of the year; failing that, I hoped he’d at least get a barn-burner or a taut, tense little jewel, something that would remind him that baseball’s fun. He got neither. What he got instead was to be expected, unfortunately: an archetypal 2012 second-half Mets game. And so it goes.
by Greg Prince on 17 September 2012 7:44 am Twelve different pitchers have started games for the New York Mets this season. Chris Young has been neither the best nor the worst of the lot, nor, within a universe that briefly included Chris Schwinden, the most obscure among them.
But he is he one I keep forgetting.
I’ve all but forgotten Chris Young is in the Mets’ starting rotation 18 different times, which may say something about me, yet probably says at least a little about him. Physically, at 6’ 10”, he’s a hard guy to miss. Substantively, he’s difficult to pick out in a crowd. His ERA has floated mostly in the fours during the second half of 2012. The Mets have lost 13 of his 18 starts overall. He throws pitches that are hit for mostly anonymous fly balls, with the painful exception of a few that keep flying beyond the reach of his mostly anonymous outfielders. One assumes his sandwich-board of a back is a familiar sight on stadium video screens across the National League in those montages that feature home runs by the home team. You don’t see his face, just YOUNG 55 and…WOW, WHERE DID THAT BALL LAND?
His Sunday in Milwaukee encapsulated the Chris Young experience in 2012. He pitched well enough to win for a club capable of clobbering the opposing pitcher. The Mets, however, aren’t that club. Ryan Braun extended his BrewerVision highlight reel by two long home runs off Young, and Aramis Ramirez added a spiffy clip on his own behalf. Each was a solo blast, which indicates Young was pretty much doing his job except for the moments he didn’t do it that great. It added up to three runs until there were two out in the seventh, which is when Terry Collins came and took the ball. The score was three-nothing. The score would stay three-nothing. The Mets and Young were the ones who would wind up with the nothing.
The phrase that leaps to mind is “serviceable outing”. When Chris Young is on, he’s all right. In baseball, that’s not uncommon. The major league season commences with approximately 150 starting pitchers slotted to take regular turns in 30 starting rotations. Almost immediately, 30 sets of plans change. Outings aren’t serviceable. Pitchers aren’t indestructible. Rehabilitations proceed out of view. Depth is tested. The Mets’ projected starting five of Santana, Dickey, Niese, Gee and Pelfrey ceased to exist in late April. Together, those five guys have started 98 games, leaving roughly a third of the team’s schedule to date to arms that weren’t necessarily counted on to play a leading role in any Mets game in 2012.
More than Schwinden (two starts), Miguel Batista (five) or any of the youngsters who have spanned the hope spectrum from Matt Harvey (nine) to Jeremy Hefner (who?), Chris Young represented the Mets’ depth chart, specifically the segment of it directly beneath the horizontal line that separated PELFREY from utter uncertainty. Young was Sandy Alderson’s provisionally formulated Plan “B” when he signed him coming off anterior capsule surgery during Spring Training. They didn’t need him when April began. They could’ve used somebody like him by May. They got him back in June.
Young went out and proved himself…serviceable. That is to say he pitched regularly, he stayed healthy and sometimes all his fly balls remained in the park, though occasionally their journeys met fewer obstacles than had a pitcher who’s been battling injuries and their aftereffects for several years. Chris Young is unusually tall, but, from the vantage point of the stands and TV, hasn’t seemed particularly imposing. He’s a 4-8 pitcher on a 66-80 team. He’s not the reason the Mets’ season has been in the shop since July. He’s not the part your mechanic has been waiting on. He’s been installed to get the job done. The job is to finish a 162-game season, whatever the results. Young has done that. It’s admirable from a distance (as is the testimony of rookie pitchers like Collin McHugh regarding the veteran counsel Chris has offered without being asked) and it may be encouraging for Young personally, but it’s not particularly exciting.
It’s eight hits over six-and-two-third innings. It’s three home runs. It’s two strikeouts with no walks. It’s 101 pitches. It’s a 3-0 loss. It’s nothing to get excited about at this stage of the season. It’s nothing to get excited about when considering next season. It’s the Mets not at their best; not at their worst; not remotely, as they provide sustenance to yet another September contender, at their most exciting.
It’s Chris Young. Now I remember.
by Jason Fry on 16 September 2012 10:24 am Apologies to anyone who wanted a late-night recitation of Metly things — your correspondent fell asleep somewhere between the conclusion of the game and the beginning of the chronicling.
Honestly, it was the proper reaction to the one of the longer, more pedestrian, less elegant baseball games you’ll see: terrible pitching, bad baserunning, lousy fielding. Particularly in right field, where Norichika Aoki was oddly insistent on playing right field practically in the corner by the foul pole — the same approximate point where you kept seeing VALDESPIN 1 as our right fielder chased yet another ball exploring the limits of Miller Park. I sometimes muse that come January I’d pay a good chunk of money to watch any baseball game, but I think I’d pass that one up even with three feet of snow outside. My word, to quote Keith Hernandez.
Keith and Gary had fun at least — they generally do — though depressingly little of it was related to baseball. At one point Keith was chattering merrily along about a bunch of books he’d just bought, and I really thought the broadcast was about to turn into an earnest discussion of the Marshall Plan and scholarship about it. It would have been preferable.
If you want bright spots for the Mets, I suppose you could count an Ike Davis homer, more solid hitting from Daniel Murphy, and signs of life from Lucas Duda. Though, really, I suspect the Ike homer is the only thing actually of note. Bobby Ojeda discussed it in the postgame (it’s one of my final evening memories before the “nap” that ate the night), but a lot of what’s ailed Ike during a very strange season could just be rust — the rust of a season that was lost and then followed by a less-than-full spring training. As we get to know Ike, it’s becoming apparent that we’ll always have to live with his flailing at off-speed pitches on the outer half and his self-defeating Grote-esque insurgency against the wickedness of umpires. He can make up for that if he’s reasonably productive otherwise and returns to his early consistency at first base, where his soft hands, long reach and calm demeanor have done wonders for all his infielders but most particularly David Wright. Every game gets Ike closer to shaking off the cobwebs of a lost year, so so much the better.
Murphy and Duda? I find it hard to believe their evolution as players has that much further to run. Murph has worked enormously hard to make himself into an adequate second baseman, which here isn’t meant as a disparaging term — he’s come a long way despite no natural knack for the position, full-bore media and fan pressure and the memory of two seasons ruined by knee injuries. A lot of people didn’t think he could do it; he did. But for all that, his defense probably tops out at so-so, and his moderate power of a few years back has disappeared. He’s a few degrees shy of Dan Uggla at a position where you want defensively challenged players to at least be Dan Uggla. Still, with this franchise needing a Marshall Plan of its own (and a treasury to fund it), Murph is the least of our worries. Good teams figure out how to solve Daniel Murphy’s shortcomings; bad teams are glad they have his strengths.
Lucas Duda, on the other hand, is a mess. He can’t play any outfield position, he’s blocked at first base, and as I’ve discussed before, he doesn’t seem to be one of those players who can blithely keep adding runs with his bat while not worrying about subtracting them with his glove, as Dick Stuart and Pedro Guerrero could. When he’s right, Duda has both tremendous power and a discerning eye for the strike zone — but I don’t think he’s going to be right until he’s a first baseman or a designated hitter. I suspect he’ll be traded over the winter in an underwhelming package, then thrive in another uniform. We’ll carp and complain, without remembering that a) his defensive worries had hurt his offense, diminishing his trade value and b) he wasn’t going to do any of that good stuff for us, unfortunately.
Finally, there’s Jenrry Mejia. His outing was a disaster — too many walks, too few missed bats — but the victory was simply being on the field. Garbage time is pretty useless for assessments, but it was made for players such as Mejia — zero-pressure settings in which they can get innings and experience with an eye toward reducing the learning curve when it will matter. Mejia ia still awfully young and has talent. Let him pitch, leave him alone and never, ever say the name “Jerry Manuel” or “Omar Minaya” if he’s within earshot.
Oh, and the game was briefly interrupted by a giant, masterfully folded paper airplane that soared over the field and came to rest near a bemused Murphy. You shouldn’t ever throw things on the field, but once in a very great a grudging exception to the rule — we’ll call it the Michael Sergio Exemption — can be allowed. Murph removed the airplane with a certain careful appreciation for its craft, handing it to a Brewers employee who took it away rather gently.
So it really is true that if you watch baseball faithfully, on a given night you might see something you’ve never seen before. My word.
by Jason Fry on 15 September 2012 1:57 am So this simultaneously struck a chord and was no fun at all. What might improve things?
1) Make a date to see Knuckleball! It’s a terrific movie — a smart, sweet baseball valentine, and a wonderful character study of our own R.A. Dickey, Tim Wakefield and their forerunners as knuckleballers — Phil Niekro, Charlie Hough, Wilbur Wood, Tom Candiotti and Jim Bouton. Plus it uses footage running backwards to heartbreaking effect. (But don’t worry — only once.) I caught an early screening this week; the documentary by Ricki Stern and Annie Sundberg opens Sept. 20 at the IFC Center right here in New York. Don’t miss it.
2) Because you can never get enough R.A., read this by Emma Span. Emma gets a lot of things that go missing in a lot of the Dickey narratives, such as his insane competitiveness and the fact that he’s very far removed from your “typical” let-go-and-let-God knuckleballer. Plus I loved R.A.’s thoughts on a female knuckleballer: Anne Dickey is as much as hero of Knuckleball! as her husband is, and towards the end of the movie we see R.A. playing catch with his daughter. Hey, wouldn’t that be something? Please make her a Met!
3) Read this post by Howard Megdal. Howard’s superb reporting was referenced in my depressing post; in his gracious response, he notes that he still finds joy taking his daughter to Citi Field, and suggests I do the same with my son, whose faith may be wavering but should still enjoy a night at the ballpark. And in fact that’s exactly what I’m doing; Joshua and I will be there Monday night.
4) Read this post by our own Greg Prince. It’s about Ed, who was born to be a Mets fan but found his birthright delayed == but not denied. Welcome, Ed! L’shanah tovah indeed!
5) Whaddya know? The Mets actually won one! David Wright got two hits, moving him within eight of passing Ed Kranepool. Jonathon Niese pitched well, overcoming the Brewers, Larry Vanover’s magical strike zone and his own sometimes less-than-enthusiastic interest in his craft. Lucas Duda hit a home run; so did Daniel Murphy. And Murph and Ruben Tejada combined for one of the niftiest double plays of the year.
by Greg Prince on 14 September 2012 12:20 pm To paraphrase the sentiments first expressed on the cusp of the Great Depression by folk musician Blind Alfred Reed, how can a Mets fan stand such times and live? The Mets rarely win after the All-Star break; they never win at Citi Field; they haven’t won more than they’ve lost in four years; they haven’t won anything of substance in six years; they haven’t won a league championship in 12 years; they haven’t won a World Championship in 26 years; there is no undeniably reassuring indicator at this 65-78 juncture in time that they will win anything ever again. And that’s just the on-the-field picture.
Yet we’re still Mets fans. We may reach bending points but our spirit generally doesn’t break. At worst, we recede from the ever-mounting wreckage when it threatens to topple onto our battered and bruised psyches, and even then not so far away from it that we’re incapable of being pulled back into the daily Met orbit at the first sign of semi-legitimate encouragement. It feels like a curse in this fourth consecutive barren September, but come April, I swear it will feel like a blessing.
Why? Because we root for the Mets. We prefer success, yet we don’t root for it under any given name. We root for the Mets to succeed because that’s who we are. In a sense, we root for ourselves when we root for the Mets — we root for an intermingling of those two entities who have so effectively if mystifyingly become one in our souls.
And sometimes we root for the Mets fan we might have been.
You would wonder who besides small children who’ve yet to discover standings would suddenly take wholeheartedly to this team in its current state of competitive disarray. Who would decide in 2012 to engage, let alone embrace a franchise that its longest-time, most diehard fans can barely stand to face 19 more times before its current edition crumples up and blows away?
I found somebody who can tell me.
His name is Ed, a demographic contemporary of mine, and he has a different kind of story than I’m used to hearing. Ed wrote to me from South Florida last week ostensibly to tell me he liked my book, which was kind of him. I enjoy receiving those sorts of notes (what writer wouldn’t?), but what made his stand out was why he liked my book. It wasn’t because, as I’ve been told a number of times, that my story of being a Mets fan was a stand-in for the reader’s story of being a Mets fan. It was because Ed hadn’t been a Mets fan — should’ve been, could’ve been, but wasn’t.
Here’s Ed with the explanation.
I was born the same year as you in Brooklyn. When you turned 6, you discovered the Mets and became a fan. When I was nearing 6, my father died. Our family moved to Florida, and because of the weirdness of my mom, we were not allowed to talk about my father or life in New York, and we were cut off from my father’s family. I harbored memories of my father and what life would have been like had he not died. Specifically, I thought I would have come to know and love sports had my father not died, both as a player (although how good could I have been being Jewish?) and as a fan.
I was never interested much in sports. However, recently I have been reviewing my life and found out that my father was a Mets fan. I realized as I was approaching 48 years old (and finally in therapy) that I could just dive in and feel a link to my past and my father. So a Mets fan (me) was born 42 years after the fact. It was like you were going back in time to get me at 6 years old, taking me by the hand, and leading me through Mets history so that I could join them in the present.
That the present happens to be 2012 when the Mets have tumbled from a modestly promising start to a horrifyingly familiar finish hasn’t mattered to Ed. How could it to someone who just experienced two thrilling World Series wins for the first time? Who just discovered Shea Stadium, a building he never entered, yet for which he now feels a “great loss”? Who, after more than four decades of tragic remove, sees in a baseball team “my past, lost family, a chance to reconnect” and cherishes a “link to my father and a past I never had…I still get a bit choked up watching the Mets play no matter how they are doing, and I have been watching a lot thinking about my father. It is in my blood, even though I didn’t realize it until recently.”
The link was locked in on Sunday, September 2, when Ed and his wife attended the third game of the Mets’ three-game sweep at Marlins Park. It was the first game of his life. Now, at last, “I was part of their history.” And his role in their history will continue on October 3 in Miami, when — in kinship with his perennial Game 81 brethren and sistren in Queens — he will attend Closing Day. “I have tickets to the Mets’ last regular game of the season,” he says. “Whatever happens, it is going to be a great game.”
And when he’s not at the ballpark, Ed stokes his passion via digital device (“thank G-d for MLB TV which lets me watch the Mets almost anywhere they play”) and wears his passion on his head.
Ever since I have discovered my connection to the Mets, I almost always wear a Mets ball cap. It is amazing how many people talk to me about the Mets: anything from a “Let’s Go Mets” to conversations about families, personal history, etc. A guy in a local store even told me that his father was a secret Mets fan and that he wouldn’t admit it to anyone. Down here in Florida, one doesn’t see too many Mets hats and the Yankees fans seem to far outweigh the Mets fans. But like I tell them, it’s easy to be a Yankees fan.
Ed adds that he has taken to wearing his Mets cap to shul for services instead of a yarmulke. I’m not sure if he’ll keep to that particular kippa for the upcoming High Holy Days, but anything that gets the Mets closer to a Higher place than fourth couldn’t hurt.
Speaking of temples, Ed plans on making his first pilgrimage to Citi Field next season, and I plan to be there to greet him, to show him the Shea Stadium bases and, if he likes, to stroll on over to Flushing Meadows Corona Park with him so he can have a close-up look at the Unisphere, a.k.a. “the huge globe from the World’s Fair” he remembers his family driving by so many times but never saw up close. Of course I’ve been looking over the just-released 2013 schedule and I’ve been getting preliminarily excited about the coming year even as I struggle between wanting to be rid of the current one and reflexively not wanting it to go away so soon, no matter its epic lousiness. This hasn’t been the best year to be a Mets fan, but as Ed from Florida has had the serendipitous timing to remind me as I’m immersed in its day-to-day defeats, there’s never truly a bad year to be a Mets fan.
How could there be? You’re a Mets fan.
As far as a pennant goes, as you have said: there is always next season. But regardless, it is still our team, there is spring training, farm leagues, and then the regular season coming up. And this round, I will be there from the beginning.
L’shanah tovah, you might hear in the days ahead. It means for a good year.
|
|
