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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 29 July 2012 12:01 pm “It feels good for me, but it would have felt even better if we had won that ballgame.”
“We lost, so I can’t get too excited. If we would’ve won, it would’ve been more exciting.”
“I just wanted to play hard, but it didn’t matter because we lost.”
“It was great while it was happening. but when they kept scoring runs, it really wasn’t that enjoyable, to say the least.”
“It’s bittersweet, for sure.”
These are the worst kinds of quotes. They’re from players who have just enjoyed some of the greatest individual glory they are likely to generate in their major league careers, yet they can’t smile about it because they came in service to a loss.
All of the above quotes, you might have guessed, were issued by Mets — Mets who did great things to no avail. The last of the above sentiments came from Ike Davis Saturday night, who joined the club nobody really wants to be in. It was a wonderful game for the first baseman who struggled so long in 2012 to find a semblance of his groove, and now he’s wailing away on National League pitching.
When a 4-for-4 night hikes your batting average to .216, it’s hard to say you’ve conclusively turned your season around. Let’s get that number to .220, maybe .230, and we’ll call it a resurrection. But you can’t say Ike’s not getting the most out of the low .200s, not when three of those hits Saturday were of the four-base variety and the fourth was a very well-struck single that served as a potential catalyst in what loomed as a very big Met inning.
Davis’s reaching down and stroking a one-two pitch from David Hernandez into right field for a measly single was magnificent hitting in the clutchest of spots. David Wright was on first after walking and the Mets needed base runners and momentum like Chris Young (4 IP, 6 ER) needed to stay back at the team hotel. Ike, after blasting three solo home runs earlier (and they were definitely blasted), delivered just what a team would want in an eighth-inning rally.
But of course these are the 2012 Mets of post-break infamy and they wouldn’t know what to do with an eighth-inning rally if Ike Davis hit them in the head with it. The Mets were down, 6-3, at the time of Ike’s single because nobody else but Ike had bothered to hit anything of note, and the Mets stayed down, 6-3, because after the Davis single, Daniel Murphy’s long fly to center could do no more than chase Wright to third. With one out and two on, the rally was effectively over because the next two batters were Jason Bay and Kirk Nieuwenhuis.
On the 2012 Mets of post-break infamy, is it really necessary to detail what Bay and Nieuwenhuis did with their at-bats?
The Mets cobbled together the possibility of another opportunity to exploit Ike’s hotness in the ninth. They were still trailing, 6-3, when Andres Torres reached first on a strikeout Miguel Montero couldn’t handle from J.J. Putz (which is odd, since he handles current Mets pitchers with ease) and Ruben Tejada, who made a startling, sliding catch under a leaping teammate earlier, singled. Runners on first and second, Ike in the hole, as they say. If Scott Hairston could get on…no, he couldn’t. But if David could keep this going, then the man with three home runs would come up, lefty versus righty, in a most delectable situation. Imagine the first Met four-homer game emerging via ninth-inning, lead-taking grand slam!
Yeah, imagine that.
Wright struck out. Game over. Mets still the Mets, despite the excellent performance put forth by Isaac, your bat-tender.
No wonder he said it was bittersweet. It’s always bittersweet these types of nights and days. They have been since April 11, 1962, when Charlie Neal went 3-for-4 and drove in two runs but the Mets fell to 0-1 lifetime. Neal was hardly the inaugural year king of bittersweet, though. That role fell to Frank “The Big Donkey” Thomas who never hit three home runs in one game as a Met but did homer twice in five separate contests in 1962, each of them at home, all in losing efforts. That includes three games in a row, from August 1 to August 3, with two home runs apiece, one of them encompassing a grand slam and six runs batted in.
“‘I can’t explain it,’ I shrugged when they asked me why all of a sudden I was hitting them out of the Polo Grounds,” Thomas wrote in his 2005 autobiography. “‘That’s what makes this game so interesting.’”
Interesting or not, the Mets lost. Of course they did. When Frank Thomas homered in 1962, which he did 34 times (a Met record until Dave Kingman’s 36 in 1975), the Mets tended to lose. Granted, when anybody did anything in 1962, the Mets tended to lose, but the Big Donkey’s contributions stood out as particularly for naught. Twenty-six of his 34 homers came in losses. And because of his Donkeyish durability, nobody played in more home losses (58) or, for that matter, road losses (59).
If Ike Davis became a modern-day Big Donkey Saturday night in Phoenix, he surely isn’t alone. A while back I began tracking best individual performances by Met position players in regular-season losses (leaving out the scads of brilliant starting-pitching innings Met bullpens went on to detonate and trying not to dwell on Endy Chavez leaving the bases loaded a half-inning after the greatest catch ever in a postseason game). My impetus was the night in 2010 when one Met should have been basking in adulation but was compelled to manfully mutter, “If we would have won that game, it would have been a lot of fun.” My benchmark was 1980, the night I came home and turned on the radio to discover in full-force just how little difference one player can make when his teammates aren’t cooperating.
In tribute to Ike Davis and his 4-for-4, three-homer night in Arizona that came in a 6-3 Met loss on July 28, 2012, we bring you a not necessarily all-inclusive rundown of the Biggest Donkeys of the last more or less third-of-a-century. Like Thomas, they literally did their best, even when the rest of the Mets didn’t. In the end, they could claim, per an old Rodney Dangerfield bit, “I’m all alone here!”
But they didn’t, because you just don’t do that in baseball.
August 5, 1980: Doug Flynn triples three times. Expos beat Mets, 11-5. I tuned in just after Dougie’s third triple, which Bob Murphy reported breathlessly from Olympic Stadium. Oh man, I thought, we must be hammering the hell out of them! Instead we were cutting the deficit from seven to six runs. I didn’t quite understand how something so magnificent could lead to absolutely nothing. In 2010, with thirty years’ perspective, Flynn told Jesse Spector in the Daily News, “It was a good day in that I tied a record, I guess, but a bad day because we got our rear ends kicked.” I thought Donkeys were the ones who did the kicking, but either way, Doug admitted, “It was pretty cool. For not being known for hitting, to tie a major league record, I was pretty excited,” yet “you can’t really celebrate when you lose.”
August 12, 1982: Rusty Staub crowns four-run, sixth-inning rally with a bases-clearing double to give Mets a 5-3 lead at Shea. Before the seventh-inning stretch arrives, the Mets will have used four pitchers to record three outs. Cubs beat Mets, 13-6.
June 26, 1983: Rusty Staub ties the National League record for consecutive pinch-hits with eight to start the ninth at Shea. The hit begins a rally that will see the Mets load the bases and bring the potential tying run to bat with George Foster. But Staub is stranded on third. Phillies beat Mets, 8-4.
June 22, 1985: Rusty Staub hits what turns out be the last home run of his 22-season major league career, a pinch-hit three-run job off Jeff Reardon that gives the Mets a lead in the bottom of the seventh. Expos beat Mets, 5-4.
(You can’t say Donkeys don’t come in orange sometimes.)
October 3, 1985: With Mets desperately needing to beat St. Louis to stay alive in a pennant race for the ages, Keith Hernandez goes 5-for-5 at hostile Busch Stadium and drives in a pair of runs. Cardinals beat Mets, 4-3.
In his diary of that most bittersweet Met season, If At First, Keith admits, “If it has to be a losing effort, I’m glad I don’t make the final out of this particular game, giving the fans still more to gloat about. I’m sorry that Gary [Carter] does.”
August 28, 1988: Gregg Jefferies electrifies Shea with a single and a double in his first two plate appearances as a major league starter, foreshadowing the monster month (and, it is assumed, killer career) that will follow. Giants beat Mets, 7-4.
May 27, 1990: This is sort of about pitching, but not exactly. With two out and the Mets trailing 2-1 in the bottom of the seventh, Dwight Gooden, having allowed two runs (only one earned) and five hits, bats for himself. Gooden homers to left off Ed Whitson to knot the score at two. It’s the third home run of Doc’s career (he will hit seven as a Met, eight overall). Doc goes out for the eighth, surrenders a leadoff single to Fred Lynn, is victimized by a Mike Marshall error on a Bip Roberts sac bunt — putting runners on second and third with nobody out — and, after retiring Robbie Alomar on a groundout and intentionally walking Tony Gwynn to load the bases, is touched for a single through the right side by Joe Carter. With the Mets now trailing 4-2, Davey Johnson removes his starting pitcher. It’s the last time Davey Johnson will do that, as the Mets will be rained out the next night in Cincinnati, and Frank Cashen will replace Davey with Buddy Harrelson the day after that. Padres beat Mets, 8-4.
(Within the 1980-present time frame, another of Gooden’s seven Met home runs plus both of Jason Isringhausen’s and one of Rick Aguilera’s three came in Met losses.)
July 14, 1991: Needing an outfielder and wanting to keep him away from behind the plate, Buddy Harrelson inserts Mackey Sasser in right field for his first start ever at the position. In the top of the first, with Bip Roberts on second, Tony Fernandez lines a ball to deep right. Sasser turns around, crashes into the wall, makes the catch, turns again and fires to Kevin Elster to double off Roberts. Next batter is Tony Gwynn, who crushes a ball above the right field wall. Sasser goes back, leaps and grabs it. Two putouts and an assist in his very first inning as a starting right fielder. Seven innings later, Mackey breaks up Greg Harris’s bid for a no-hitter with a leadoff double. Padres beat Mets, 2-1.
April 26, 1995: Todd Hundley helps christen Coors Field with a sixth-inning grand slam, one of four hits he collects on Opening Night in Colorado. The last big swing, however, belongs to Dante Bichette in the fourteenth, a showy two run homer that elevates the home team. Rockies beat Mets, 11-9.
Other Mets who have hit grand slams in losses since 1980: Gary Carter, 1985; Joe Orsulak, 1994 (pinch-hitting); Cliff Floyd (2005); Carlos Delgado, 2008; Fernando Tatis, 2009; and the ever popular Jason Bay (2011).
May 6, 1995: Edgardo Alfonzo chooses to make his first major league home run an inside-the-park job, which contributes to the building of an 11-4 lead at Riverfront Stadium. It would become the biggest lead the Mets would ever blow. Reds beat Mets, 13-11.
June 18, 1997: In the signature moment of his brief major league career, pinch-runner Steve Bieser coaxes a two-out, eighth-inning balk out of David Cone to score from third base and tie the rubber game of the first Subway Series at Yankee Stadium. Yankees beat Mets, 3-2.
August 5, 1998: En route to setting the Mets’ single-season batting average standard, John Olerud bangs two doubles, one of them for two RBI. He also handles a fifth-inning ground ball and turns it into a 3-6-3-2 triple play, Snow out at first, Kent out at second, Bonds out at home. Giants beat Mets, 6-4.
May 1, 2000: Jay Payton dashes to the Pac Bell Park left-center field wall and leaps above it, his shoulder crashing into the padding, his glove stretched just above the hands of a teenage fan, to rob Bill Mueller of a sure home run to end the bottom of the third inning. Giants beat Mets, 10-3.
May 17, 2001: Desi Relaford starts at short and records an RBI double. Bobby Valentine moves him to the mound for the top of the ninth and he pitches a 1-2-3 frame before singling in the bottom of the ninth. Padres beat Mets, 15-3.
June 26, 2002: Mo Vaughn’s second home run of the night is a blast off Kevin Gryboski that hits about two-thirds of the way up the Budweiser sign on the Shea Stadium scoreboard — an estimated 505 feet — and leaves a dent. Braves beat Mets, 6-3.
August 9, 2005: David Wright needs no stinking glove, as they say. The third baseman lunges into the outfield to snare a Brian Giles bloop base hit in the making with his bare hand. He held on to the ball as he fell to the ground to make the second out of the top of the seventh inning at Petco Park in San Diego. Padres beat Mets, 8-3.
August 21, 2005: All but packed off and sent back to Norfolk after not having played as an emergency callup, Mike Jacobs is given a pinch-hitting assignment on the wrong end of a blowout. He uses that plate appearance, the first of his major league career, to blast a three-run homer and help secure his place on the Mets’ roster for the rest of the season. Jacobs becomes the fourth Met to hit a home run his first time up. Nationals beat Mets, 7-4.
June 4, 2006: Down to the Mets’ last out, rookie Lastings Milledge — in his first week in the majors, three years after the club drafted him in the first round — launches a one-two pitch off former Met closer Armando Benitez over the Shea fence to tie San Francisco in the bottom of the tenth at six. The response from fans in right field is so effusive when Milledge (3-for-4 on the day) trots back to his position to start the eleventh that he exchanges high-fives with them, to the chagrin of manager Willie Randolph and other self-proclaimed traditionalists. Giants beat Mets, 7-6.
June 21, 2006: Jose Reyes hits for the cycle. When he singles to clinch it in the bottom of the eighth, the Ho-ZAY! chant rocks Shea Stadium in earnest for the first time. With Keith Hernandez exulting in the SNY booth that he’s never heard Shea so loud, Billy Wagner comes on for the save in the ninth. Reds beat Mets, 6-5.
August 15, 2006: Jose Reyes hits three homers, good for four RBI at Citizens Bank Park. Phillies beat Mets, 11-4.
(Lest Reyes’s spectacularity, if that’s a word, be thought only to shine in defeat, he crafted one of the most beautiful inside-the-park home runs Shea ever saw in a blowout win in September 2006 — the kind of regular season that was pretty forgiving of Big Donkey-ish episodes.)
August 23, 2007: Marlon Anderson caps a six-run sixth-inning rally with a three-run pinch-homer, giving the homestanding Mets a 7-6 lead, unleashing a wave of euphoria at Shea. Padres beat Mets, 9-8.
September 25, 2007: As Mets cling tenuously to first place, Moises Alou extends team record hitting streak to 29 games with a 4-for-5 night. His last hit is a three-run, ninth-inning double that brings the Mets to within one run of a tie score. Nationals beat Mets, 10-9.
July 26, 2008: Jose Reyes sets tone for Mets offense by doubling to lead off bottom of first and coming around to score on an Endy Chavez triple. He will add a double in the second, a homer in the fourth and a single in the tenth, going 4-for-8 by the time the night is done. In supporting roles, Carlos Delgado homers twice and Fernando Tatis ties the game in the ninth on leadoff home run in the ninth. The game goes fourteen. Cardinals beat Mets, 10-8.
May 19, 2010: In the top of the fourth inning in Washington, Angel Pagan lifts a fly ball to center over the head of Nyjer Morgan that Morgan severely misjudges. Morgan’s leap allows the ball to bounce off the wall into no man’s land. Pagan steams ahead and scores on an inside-the-park homer. In the bottom of the fourth inning, with the bases loaded, Pagan, playing center, dives and catches a sinking liner off the bat of Roger Bernadina. It goes as a sacrifice fly, but it could have been a good deal worse. In the bottom of the fifth inning, Pagan makes another diving, thieving grab of a sinking liner, this time against Cristian Guzman. Baserunners on second and first are caught off guard as the umpires make a deliberate call on the catch. The end result is an 8-2-6-3 triple play, with Pagan overthrowing second, Henry Blanco backing up the throw and Jose Reyes making an unnecessary relay to first. Also of note, unheralded minor league callup R.A. Dickey yields only two runs in six innings. Nationals beat Mets, 5-3.
(This was the loss that got me to gathering other losses that detracted from great individual position player performances, less from historical curiosity but because I was so pissed off the Mets wasted Pagan’s and Dickey’s big nights, and research is how I cope with frustration. Who knew Dickey would have plenty more big games and Pagan…well, he brought us Andres Torres and Ramon Ramirez, didn’t he?)
September 18, 2010: In a moment reminiscent of Kirk Gibson, Luis Hernandez limps around the bases after homering off Tim Hudson. He’s limping because on the previous pitch he fouled a ball of his right foot, requiring the attention of assistant trainer Mike Herbst. He left the game after (finally) scoring. Turns out he broke a bone in his foot and was out for the rest of the season. Braves beat Mets, 4-2.
Luis currently toils with the Rangers’ Round Rock affiliate, not having played in the majors since making it around the bases on one good foot.
May 16, 2011: Another asterisk where pitchers are concerned in this conversation. Down to their last out and with no position players available (David Wright is on the bench, but bound for the DL with back problems), the Mets send Jon Niese to bat. He triples off the glove of Emilio Bonifacio and threatens to tie the game in the bottom of the eleventh inning, but Leo Nuñez strikes out Jose Reyes. Niese’s blow — the fifth pinch-hit by a Met pitcher overall and the third to come in a loss (Dwight Gooden, in 1992, and Brian Bohanon, in 1997, crafted the other two) came one-half inning after Florida reliever Burke Badenhop put his team ahead with an RBI single. Marlins beat Mets, 2-1.
April 27, 2012: Scott Hairston’s single, homer and triple propel the Mets to a 6-2 lead in the fifth inning at Coors Field. In the sixth, Scott adds a double to hit for the cycle to drive in the Mets’ seventh and eighth runs and his third and fourth. But by then, Chris Schwinden and Manny Acosta had allowed eleven runs in the home fifth, so the Mets trail, 13-8. Rockies beat Mets, 18-9.
Three months later, Ike Davis’s inner Donkey came out to bray…humbly, of course. As Doug Flynn warned long into retirement, you can’t sound too happy if your team loses.
Because that would make you sound like an ass.
by Greg Prince on 28 July 2012 6:39 am “Hello?”
“Hey Pelf. I wake ya?”
“That you, Niesey? Nah, you didn’t wake me. I was up fast-forwarding through the opening ceremonies. You watch it already?”
“Not yet. We had a game tonight.”
“Oh yeah?”
“We lost. And I had that dream again.”
“What dream is that?”
“You know, the one where I turn into a lefthanded version of you.”
“Check it out — a flying bicyclist!”
“Pelf, I’m not watching the same thing as you right now.”
“Well, ya should be. This shit is awesome.”
“I can call Maine if you’re busy.”
“Nah, man. Don’t do that. I was like the bad-dream version of him — and he was like the bad-dream version of Heilman. If you call Maine, it’s like that movie where neither of us ever existed.”
“Yeah, well, I wish I never existed after an outing like tonight.”
“Don’t worry about it, man. You signed the extension, right?”
“Yeah. So?”
“Dude, it’s not like the checks don’t clear. I haven’t pitched in months and I still get paid either way. Direct deposit, bitches!”
“Pelf, man, I wanna win. Or at least I don’t wanna lose.”
“Get paid either way. I’m just sayin’.”
“I’m so frustrated right now.”
“I know what you mean. I’m trying to figure out who that old guy is singing about Jude and it’s totally driving me nuts. Paul somebody, but I don’t think it’s Lo Duca.”
“Seriously, Pelf. I can call back.”
“Nah, I’ll put it on pause. What’s up?”
“My ERA is up, and that’s even with the unearned runs I allowed when I totally Pelfed it up in the second inning tonight.”
“Pelfed it up?”
“Oh, sorry. It’s just that we have a name for it, and…I thought you knew.”
“It’s cool. ‘Pelfed it up.’ That’s pretty funny, actually.”
“Anyway, the bases were loaded, and the walls fell in.”
“What’d ya do? Balk? Flinch? Tie your shoelaces together?”
“No. I walked Henry Blanco.”
“Blanco…Blanco…where do I know that name?”
“Used to be our catcher.”
“Tattooed guy — old as fuck, right?”
“Yeah.”
“He’s on the Phillies now?”
“The Phillies? Where’d you get that from? We played Arizona tonight. That’s why I’m calling so late.”
“Oh. I dunno. When I was there we were always playing the Phillies.”
“So…like I was saying, the bases were loaded and I hadn’t walked anybody in weeks, but I walked Henry Blanco, who wasn’t even hitting .200.”
“Harsh.”
“And then their pitcher comes up…”
“Hamels? Did ya hear? That fucker’s being paid a shit ton of money.”
“Pelf! Focus, man. We weren’t playing the Phillies. I’m in Arizona.”
“Chill, bro.”
“Their pitcher hasn’t gotten a hit all year but he lines one into the outfield and now the game is tied and I’m all flustered.”
“Flustered? I hated that shit. That’s how I felt whenever I had the John Maine dream. Which I still do, from time to time.”
“Well, it gets worse. Willie Bloomquist comes up…”
“Who?”
“The Diamondbacks’ leadoff hitter.”
“I don’t remember him. Tell ya the truth, dude, I don’t remember much about being on the Mets anymore. But I just remembered the old guy’s name.”
“What old guy?”
“The Paul guy. McCarthy. But who’s ‘Jude’?”
“ANYWAY, Bloomquist comes up, doesn’t hit the ball more than fifty feet between me and third. David can’t get to it.”
“Beckham?”
“No, Pelf. Not Beckham. Wright — our third baseman?”
“You shoulda seen Beckham, though, Niesey. He had the torch on a speedboat. Is that bold or what?”
“I pick the ball up. I’ve got no play. I know in my head I’ve got no play. I know I gotta eat the ball, that a run’s gonna score from third, but I can still limit the damage.”
“But you threw it anyway?”
“Yup. Clear down the right field line.”
“Dude! You totally Pelfed it up!”
“Yeah, Pelfed it up big-time. Everybody scores, Bloomquist winds up on third, soon we’re losing six to two. Just a mess.”
“Bond.”
“Huh?”
“Bond. James Bond. They’re showing him with that old lady from England.”
“You unpaused the opening ceremonies again, didn’t you?”
“I’m still listening. I can do two things at once. I’m not an idiot, you know.”
“Sorry. Anyway, awful outing. I stayed in for six, but the game was lost.”
“You guys been losing a lot lately, haven’t you?”
“You don’t much follow the team anymore, do ya, Pelf?”
“I dunno, Niesey. I watched the games for a while. Then I watched the highlights on SportsCenter. Then I just kind of forgot about it. It’s weird being off in the summer with nothing to do but ‘rehab’. Kinda fun, but weird. I’d rather be pitching, I guess.”
“Sort of wish you were. We could use all the help we could get right now.”
“What’sa matter? That Spanish guy not getting it done?”
“What Spanish guy?”
“I dunno. Isn’t there always some Spanish guy who’s not getting it done? Or some Japanese guy? Or, come to think of it, some American guy? Or was that me?”
“Pelf, they got you on painkillers still?”
“I dunno, man. Rest of the staff as Pelfed up as you?”
“Lately, yeah. Except for Harvey.”
“Who?”
“Harvey. Matt Harvey. Big kid, first-round draft choice a couple of years ago. Throws hard. Strikes guys out. Totally fearless.”
“Dude, that’s me!”
“No, Pelf, that’s you in your other dream, the one where you developed into…never mind. Any chance we’re gonna see you again this year?”
“I dunno, man. I’m workin’ out, but my agent says I should be careful. Hope I don’t have to go to St. Lucie. St. Lucie sucks. I just wanna get a fresh start next year.”
“I hear that. This year sucks, just like last year sucked and the year before it sucked and the year before that.”
“Totally, dude. I thought the Mets were supposed to be so good when we started there and now it’s like they always suck.”
“We sure do.”
“Yeah, you guys sure do. But tell everybody hi for me. Except for that Harry kid.”
“You mean Harvey?”
“Whoever, man. I don’t like him stealing my dream. Whoa, who’s lighting the torch?”
“OK, Pelf. Talk to ya soon.”
by Greg Prince on 27 July 2012 12:00 pm Scenes from the end of a losing streak:
• Matt Harvey striking out 11 in five-and-a-third shutout innings.
• Matt Harvey showing command of multiple pitches.
• Matt Harvey oozing poise and maturity.
One night in Phoenix and the world’s our oyster.
For one night, anyway.
Per the epidemic of being cautioned against what I’m not supposed to read into the debut outing of a promising pitcher (because Mets fans have zero experience with being let down and thus must have things explained to them as if they just woke up and decided to become Mets fans), I pencil Matt Harvey in for no more than his next start and a hearty “we’ll see.”
Pencils have erasers, Bob Murphy was fond of reminding us, yet you can’t erase what we just saw, no matter what follows, which itself is wholly unknowable and only moderately projectable…even if what we just saw was wholly remarkable and intensely satisfying.
(And why would you want to erase it anyway? When a transcendent pitching performance drops from the heavens into your lap, I recommend cherishing it rather than eyeing it suspiciously as if it’s a prop from an “if you see something, say something” PSA.)
I’m a maestro with facts, figures and context from the past but a perpetual novice where the future is concerned. I don’t get caught up in prospects because they so lack certainty. Precedent lingers in the subconscious to confirm that disconcerting aspect of the Metsopotamian condition. I can truly believe only what I’ve seen and and consider the hint-laden breadcrumbs it leaves behind.
What I saw for five-and-a-third innings hints at hoping the kid can and is allowed to go six next time. That much, I am certain, projects as something to see.
by Jason Fry on 27 July 2012 2:12 am As it turned out, Matt Harvey didn’t need our prayers.
He was superb, fanning a Seaveresque 11 over 5 1/3 innings, surrendering no runs and even hitting for half of the cycle. Then — and this was perhaps even more surprising — the bullpen didn’t blow it. Fireplug reliever Josh Edgin, a fellow 2010 first-round pick, looked very impressive in 1 2/3 innings, Jon Rauch faltered but was picked up by slider-slinging Tim Byrdak, and then Bobby Parnell frightened the bejeezus out of everybody by needing 31 pitches to tiptoe through the ninth, but eventually came out unscathed, freezing Jason Kubel on a fastball to preserve Harvey’s first win.
But back to Harvey.
As I wrote about Stephen Strasburg, there’s just something about a power pitcher. Harvey looks a bit like Tom Terrific, with his butt and legs the engines that drive his fastball, the foundation upon which everything else is built. Harvey gets swinging strikes with that hard fastball that runs a bit — contrast that with, say, Parnell, who throws hard but sees his fastballs turned around all too often. He’s got a diving slider, what looks like a decent curve and a change-up he’s still shaping. A pretty good arsenal, to be sure, but it all works because he can rear back, fire and not get cooked.
Before we anoint Harvey as the Metsiah, though, a couple of caveats.
First of all, he’s young — just 23. He’ll have bad starts, probably a run of them. But we all know this, right?
Second, it looked like all those secondary pitches were very sharp tonight — sharper than we’d heard they were at Buffalo. That’s not always going to be true — it isn’t for the likes of Johan Santana, so it’s certainly not going to be true for a rookie still refining those pitches.
Third, I thought Harvey got some high strikes early — calls I wouldn’t necessarily have expected a rookie to get — and that helped him. It made the Diamondbacks conscious of the high fastball, and took them out of their swing planes, and made it easier for Harvey to change their eye level, and to do everything else. Later in the game, as Harvey tired, his pitches were elevated — and without those early high strikes, I wonder how Harvey would have fared.
But enough caveats. I was glad just to see Harvey up here, as a down payment on the future of the Mets, and I was willing to accept that he’d struggle, and try to be patient. But he didn’t struggle — he was wonderful. He fanned a big-league hitter 11 times and then strode around calmly behind the mound thinking about how to attack the next one in line, and he wasn’t the other team’s fireballer out there; he was ours. At least for a day, that bright Metsian future we keep talking about and hearing about felt more like a when than an if. And boy, did we all need that.
by Jason Fry on 26 July 2012 10:04 am
Brian: I’m not the Messiah!
Arthur: I say you are, Lord, and I should know. I’ve followed a few.
Bill Pulsipher. Jason Isringhausen. Paul Wilson. Octavio Dotel. Billy Traber. Pat Strange. Tyler Yates. Yusmiero Petit. Scott Kazmir. Brian Bannister. Philip Humber. Kevin Mulvey. John Maine. Mike Pelfrey. Alay Soler. Jenrry Mejia. The list goes on and on.
Let’s please remember that Matt Harvey is 23 years old and has never thrown a pitch in anger to a major-league hitter. He’s never walked in from the bullpen and seen that there are 30,000 more people watching than he’s pitched in front before. He’s never seen how big-league hitters ignore that yet-to-be-refined curveball, or watched them coil their bats for that fastball — and not miss it.
He had nothing to do with losing the last 12 of 13. Even if he begins his career with one of its best stretches, he is incapable of making us win the next 12 of 13. He’s a young pitcher. He’s probably going to get beat around and exposed, with the best baseball players in the world providing a pitiless assessment of exactly where he is as a young pitcher. Or if it doesn’t happen the first couple of times through the league, video and word of mouth will do the job soon enough.
He’s here, and that’s good. He’s worked hard enough to get this shot and see where he stands, and that’s deserved. But he can’t save us. And his hard work is just beginning.
by Jason Fry on 25 July 2012 11:06 pm … the Mets went 0-for-August at Shea Stadium.
I remember it all too well. They were 0-13 for the month, with game after game a despairing, infuriating question of when, not if. They then lost the first two home games in September, making the home futility streak 15 straight. The final loss was a 3-2 defeat in 12 innings at the hands of the Marlins, in the first game of a doubleheader. The Mets won the second game 11-5 and the disaster was over — in fact, that win was the first of seven in a row, a streak that came too late to matter and so mostly just aggravated us further.
If you weren’t around for it, well, this current stretch is an excellent re-creation.
This time around the Mets can’t go 0-for-July, as they beat the Phillies (twice!) and the Cubs before the All-Star break, but otherwise things feel awfully familiar. The team looks variously listless and overamped, losing by doing too little and losing by trying to do too much. Should the scenario repeat itself, the only surprising thing would be for this year’s Mets to somehow rebound and win seven straight. Seven more wins before everybody packs up their lockers at Citi Field? More plausible, but let’s not get cocky.
Today’s matinee offered relatively few pleasures. If you’re a Mets fan, there was Ike Davis’s line-drive homer into Utleyville, a fairly courageous start by Jeremy Hefner marred by a couple of gopher balls, and some nice plays by Davis and the recently spiked Ruben Tejada. Otherwise, well, it was all Nats — particularly the work of 24-year-old Stephen Strasburg.
At least on some level, any good pitching performance is a pleasure to watch, whether it’s R.A. Dickey redefining a pitch dismissed as a sideshow or Greg Maddux making the sum of average but perfectly located pitches far more than the sum of their parts. But Strasburg is something else — a classic power pitcher, with thunderbolt fastballs and knee-buckling curves and the power pitcher’s assurance that the game is in his hands. When Strasburg’s on you may not get the done-with-mirrors glee of a solid Dickey outing or the head-shaking thrill of watching a Maddux outthink everybody, but what you get definitely has its pleasures: the sight of a superb physical specimen making a very difficult game look easy. Which is what Strasburg did, from the three pitches he needed to fan Tejada leading off the game to the five required to erase Kirk Nieuwenhuis closing out the seventh. It was a clinic, with no confrontation more impressive than his showdown with David Wright at the end of the sixth. Wright was the tying run, and he got to 2-0 on Strasburg, but the Nats hurler dueled David to a 2-2 draw and then left him looking at a perfect curve settling at the knee. If you’d told Wright it was coming, maybe he’d have been able to flick it into the seats behind first or pop it up. Maybe.
It will be fascinating to watch what the Nats do with Strasburg as he approaches the innings limit mandated for young pitchers coming back from Tommy John surgery. On the one hand, Strasburg is obviously a rare talent, one who might be a 15-game winner for a generation if his golden arm is treated with the TLC it deserves. On the other, one should never assume a good club is the beginning of a dynasty — sometimes the tumblers never again align, and if you don’t go for it you’re soon left with a bunch of Plan Bs and what-ifs. Just ask the 2006 Mets about that one.
If only the 2012 Mets had such dilemmas to ponder. They’re looking at two weeks of bad road — off on a long trudge west, playing at strange hours and in distant cities, with the fresh memory of a winless homestand, Tim Byrdak barking at Josh Thole and Dan Warthen in front of Mr. Met and everybody, and a manager incandescent with frustration. As baseball fans, if nothing else we can say “ya never know” — that incantation is all that keeps the darkness at bay sometimes. But while it’s true that ya never know, there are times when you’ve got a pretty good guess. One shudders to think what the Mets’ record will be on Aug. 7, when they return home to the suddenly unfriendly confines of Citi Field. 2013 may have always been the target year for turning things around, but 2012 was fun until it turned to ashes — and all of a sudden there’s a lot of ashes left to wade through.
by Greg Prince on 25 July 2012 2:06 am Out in Section 106, where a couple of Mets fans willing to plop down in seats about 18 rows behind where they were assigned could spread out and enjoy the night if they ignored the fundamental awfulness of the main attraction, Stephanie made one of the most astute observations of the season that used to be. It was when Justin Turner came to bat in the bottom of the sixth, pinch-hitting for R.A. Dickey after Dickey all at once stopped being statistically unbeatable. A swift 1-1 duel versus Gio Gonzalez had become, without pausing to as much check its GPS, a deadly 5-1 stomping. And now here came Turner, stepping to the plate to his chosen walkup music, “Call Me Maybe” by Carly Rae Jepsen.
“That’s really his song?” Stephanie asked me, surprised that something so poppy infiltrated the ranks of the hardcore, bass-thumping cross-genre jams that are supposed to intimidate opposing pitchers.
“Yup.”
“That’s not very badass.”
No, I said, it’s not. And neither is our team.
They never were. They were plucky as the dickens when the season that used to be was in full optimistic swing, but even then, they were the first team you’d bring home to meet your mother and the last team you’d suspect of elbowing you out of the way to get that last seat on the Super Express. Year after year they admire in hushed tones the elusive element of “swagger” as if it’s a foreign object hidden inside a villain wrestler’s shorts, just out of the view of the ref. The Mets will pose for pictures with any reality show star who can produce a Shea Stadium ticket stub and Tweet pictures of their special dress-up road trips, but you never get the feeling they, in the immortal words of Leo Durocher describing Eddie Stanky, come to kill you. “Nice boys” is what Tom Hanks’s Mr. White would have termed them in That Thing You Do! These days they seem intent on holding open doors for less polite baseball teams as those squads roar by on their way to the pennant race.
It’s not about the music they choose. It’s about the beat that goes on like crazy, to the tune of eleven beatdowns in twelve increasingly poorly contested rumbles.
Turner, by the way, flied out. Everybody flied out or struck out or grounded out or popped out. Almost everybody, that is. Alleged bad seed Jordany Valdespin was permitted a pinch-hitting appearance as the Mets wallowed four runs from the Nats. He strode to the plate to lead off the home eighth to some very harsh-sounding Reggaeton number and whacked his fifth pinch-home run into the Nationals’ bullpen, as if to let them know at least one Met was ready to throw down. That fifth PH HR was a team record for one season. It’s close to a major league record for one season. A small, brief chant of “LET HIM PLAY!” went up around us in deep right, to which I happily lent my vocal support. Valdespin was indeed rewarded by being allowed to hang around and play center field until the otherwise total 5-2 loss was over.
I carry no personal brief for Jordany Valdespin. I’m not selling apparel on his behalf or wrapping myself in his hashtag, but I’m pretty sure that when a cold team has a hot hand, it would be best served by letting that hand grip as many at-bats as possible from the first inning on. Enough with the tired veterans and the nice fellows who the Harpers and Morses and Espinosas look forward to stampeding let alone spiking for years to come. Enough with David Wright, who was once part of a great teamwide future, having to tip his cap to the Washington bleeping Nationals the way he had to tip his cap to the Braves when he was getting his feet wet and the Phillies as his best clubs’ moment passed. David’s had a wonderful season, and he will always be the most gracious, most polite, most genuinely decent superstar in any Met setting, but wow do I groan when I read quotes in which he is compelled to refer to the bleeping Nationals as a team that can “exploit you pretty quickly,” as he did Tuesday.
The Nationals. The Nationals can exploit you pretty quickly. When did that happen? They were entitled to get better, but so were we. I saw a guy in our section wearing a HARPER 34 t-shirt, and I wondered where our shirtworthy everyday rookie lurks, the guy we wait for breathlessly and the guy who rewards us daily almost immediately. For all the happy horsespit over homegrown lineups, I’m pretty sure our last HARPER 34 was WRIGHT 5. The next one may not technically be VALDESPIN 1, but for now, he will do. So let him do already yet. Other than Daniel Murphy, nobody’s been hot of late like Jordany Valdespin is right now, and right now is what matters when you were 46-39 and you are 47-50.
As the Mets faded from view Tuesday and failed to offer any followup to Valdespin’s homer, my mind wandered back to a story about Eddie Murphy’s first season on Saturday Night Live, when the show was in deathly unfunny flux and Murphy, only 19 and not yet a full-fledged cast member but obviously immensely talented, was consigned to mostly background parts in group sketches. He lobbied for more airtime only to be told by idiot producer Jean Doumanian, “You’re a featured player. You’re learning. You have to understand that you have to be guided by us.”
In a matter of months, Doumanian was fired and Murphy was shooting to stardom. Something similar might not happen with Valdespin, but how you can go 1-11 and just keep bypassing the guy who keeps succeeding in the most limited opportunities does not speak well for the management of a team in deathly uncompetitive flux.
Jason Bay — a real sweetheart, everybody insists — was in the starting lineup, however. He went his usual oh-for-whatever but at least the Citi Field A/V squad was merciful enough to blast the volume on the Pearl Jam when he trudged to take his ups so the booing would be drowned out and his feelings wouldn’t sink any lower than his average. (Seriously, “State Of Love And Trust” was twice as loud as Ike’s trusty “Start Me Up” and did have the effect of audibly smothering the new “BOOOOO” overture.)
You could ask what the pluck has happened to these Mets who never gave up and were sweetly stubborn enough to withstand eight daunting frames before turning steely and indefatigable when ninth innings rolled around. I couldn’t tell you where they went, but I would guess they grew discouraged after all the near-misses they’ve been engineering since the All-Star break (which, I think we’d have to agree by acclamation, must have been the Worst…Break…Ever).
They put the potential tying run on second in the ninth Friday night and did not score.
They brought the potential tying run to the plate in the ninth Saturday afternoon and did not score.
They put the potential winning run on second in the ninth Sunday afternoon and did not score.
The Mets put the potential winning run on second in the ninth Monday night and did not score.
By Tuesday night, there was no pluck and no luck. There were two strikeouts and a groundout in the ninth. It couldn’t have been over faster, which was great news for those of us who wanted to catch the 10:17 at Woodside but worse news for those of us who hoped to catch a team or two ahead of us in the season that used to be but isn’t anymore.
by Jason Fry on 24 July 2012 1:25 am Before tonight’s game, our bloggy colleagues at Amazin’ Avenue asked readers to predict how many wins the 47-48 Mets would wind up with.
My answer: 47, though I admitted that might be overly pessimistic.
Tonight the Mets played the kind of game that they’ve specialized in since the break: Fall behind, catch up thanks to a brief insurrection of competence, then wait around doing not much of anything until their defense betrays them, the bullpen implodes, or both. This time, the disaster began with Ruben Tejada dropping a ball thrown into his glove, and metastasized with Pedro Beato getting whacked all over the park. As a result, for the second straight day the Mets wound up having managed to combine extra innings with a blowout loss, which is the kind of difficult maneuver they can stop performing any time now, thanks.
Witnessing it were my poor wife, a bunch of folks dressed as stormtroopers, and Snooki.
Yes, it was Star Wars Night at Citi Field, and no, I didn’t go. I felt doubly disloyal for not doing so, but a) it was hot and nasty out; b) the Mets are demoralizingly terrible right now; and c) at my house it’s pretty much always Star Wars Night anyway.
Instead I lay on the couch and watched it rain and waited for my team to lose.
I definitely felt sorry for Emily, fuming in the rain. Just like I felt sorry for the guys dressed as stormtroopers — from my cameo in armor last year, I can tell you that it’s oppressively sweaty in those outfits on a pleasant night, which tonight was not. I even felt kind of sorry for Snooki. I don’t really mind Snooki — she was sufficiently ridiculous as a regular person that someone thought she should be on TV, so now she’s ridiculous and famous, which isn’t exactly splitting the atom but is kind of a neat trick. And she really is a Mets fan, for which I give her credit, as it’s far from the obvious choice these days. My objection to Snooki had nothing to do with Snooki herself, but rather with the Mets’ tweeting out breathless updates about her doings, as well as giving her the run of the place. Such sad desperation smacked of a middling Arthur Avenue red-sauce joint taking photo after photo of some C-list celebrity for its wall, to be hung between the images of third-rate bandleaders nobody can remember and blowsy actresses who never got their names above the title. I mean, honestly — the Mets usually reserve such royal treatment for Yankees achieving career milestones at their expense.
I’d say we’re better than all that, but the truth is that we’re not. The Mets are astonishingly horrible right now, undone by a combination of bad luck and long-existing flaws. The former will pass; the latter will take considerably more work. And before the game, the man who will have to do that work made the rounds, muttering about buyers and sellers and things having changed over the last four or five days.
Sandy Alderson knows the Mets aren’t buyers, unless they’d like to get busy locking up plane tickets home for the night of Oct. 3. They realistically ought to be sellers, unloading Scott Hairston and Tim Byrdak and listening to offers for Daniel Murphy and Lucas Duda. (Murph doesn’t have enough punch to overcome his defense, and Duda needs to play first base somewhere.) But reading the various beat-writer reports, the impression is that nobody wants what the Mets are selling. Heck, Duda appears ticketed for Buffalo so they can clear roster space for Matt Harvey, promoted a start too late. At least Miguel Batista is gone. I’ve been deprived of my 2012 Mets scapegoat, though fortunately the current roster offers no shortage of fill-ins.
Oh, and Manny Acosta’s back. Yay?
Part of our job is to record stuff for posterity, so here you go: Chris Young was pretty good, deviating from his usual pattern by giving up a two-run homer to Bryce Harper early but then hanging around later than expected. The Mets clawed back on homers by David Wright and Ike Davis and were a hit away from winning it in the ninth after Murph smacked a hit down the line and outran Harper’s arm for a muddy double, but Jason Bay shocked absolutely no one on the planet by grounding out. Roger Bernadina opened the Nats’ 10th with a bloop single off Byrdak, who then got Sandy Leon to hit a comebacker for a sure double play — except Tejada dropped Byrdak’s throw, getting spiked by Bernadina on a hard but clean takeout slide. That opened the floodgates, with Beato coming in and doing ill-advised things and departing with the Nats up 8-2. In the bottom of the 10th, to add insult to injury, the singularly useless Andres Torres approached second base with the delicacy of a hostess seeing a speck of paprika out of place on a deviled egg, politely not disturbing Danny Espinosa in his duties turning the double play. That incensed Keith and Ron, to the extent they were still capable of it, and led Gary Cohen to grouse about optics. Then a few seconds later the game was over and it was time for Bobby Ojeda to yell and point.
After finishing up with the Nats, the Mets head to the west coast — not a prospect any sane fan looks forward to at the end of July when their team is playing well. Buyers? Ha. The Mets ought to have the decency to warn the Marlins and Phillies about the deadweight plummeting toward them.
To answer Amazin’ Avenue’s question more seriously, I’m sure the 2012 Mets can win around 50.
by Greg Prince on 23 July 2012 5:40 am 
Our pal Shannon Shark at Mets Police has an interesting theory that the Mets aren’t an organically occurring baseball team as much as they’re a serialized television drama that I’ve been writing since 1962, which is flattering of him to suggest, but I must reject the notion because I maintain the last few installments of Season 51 have been a little too hacky to be believed.
I’d like to think if I were indeed writing The Mets, I’d come up with something more original than another string of horrifying post-All Star break episodes in which the Mets go down the tubes faster than you can say “nine losses in ten games.” Anybody who’s ever worked with me would know I’d insist we can’t do another story arc like that — we just did a variation of the second-half swoon in Season 50.
And Season 49.
And Season 48.
Yet there are Metsian tics and tendencies that do get repeated over time. Like the casting of Miguel Batista as this year’s Tim Redding. Or Matt Harvey being given essentially the same role Bill Pulsipher won the audition for in Season 34 (only to be mostly written out of the narrative by Season 35). Or the reimagining of kitschy false-hope losses from 1962 as plucky not-quite wins in 2012.
 You don’t wanna get mixed up with a guy like Jordany Valdespin. He’s a loner. A rebel. (Photograph by Sharon Chapman.) This is to say nothing of a development deal for a sequel to Kevin Mitchell, circa 1986: the character is conceived as a fearless and brash rookie who plays almost everywhere and hits everywhere he plays yet scares the bejeesus out of the establishment; they whisper he’s not a “solid citizen” and has “problems with authority figures,” so he mostly languishes on the bench. The dramatic tension revolves around whether the character will be spun off to a new team where he’ll become the star of his own series, tentatively titled ’Spin Off.
Anyway, the Mets, who are real and not a figment of my fevered imagination (I think I’d have written them at least eight more championships by now), lost again on Sunday in classic fashion. They used extra innings, a ton of hits and hardly any runs. How is that classic? The only other time, according to Baseball Reference, that the Mets produced at least 16 hits but no more than 3 runs was in their longest game ever, the 25-inning affair they lost to the Cardinals, 4-3, on September 11, 1974. That night and morning, the Mets went 1-for-17 with runners in scoring position and stranded 1 baserunner for every inning played.
The Mets revived that storyline Sunday, when they produced 16 hits, scored 3 runs and lost again, this time 8-3, which both belies the closeness of the game for the first four hours and represents perfectly how far the Mets ever seemed from prevailing. The RISP totals were a little less brutal than they were 38 years ago — 4-for-19 — but the rate of LOB exceeded one per inning, with 14 Mets reaching base but never coming home. And though the Mets required 13 fewer innings in which to be utterly defeated in 2012, the time of game was a mere 2:21 shorter than 25 innings took in 1974.
Honestly, the Mets didn’t need a dozen innings or nearly five hours to do what they did against the Dodgers. They didn’t need the slick relieving of Ramon Ramirez nor the occasionally accurate umpiring of Mike DiMuro, either. They just needed the bottom of the fifth to illustrate what kind of day it had already been and what kind of day it was going to turn out to be. As an audience member (because, remember, I don’t write this stuff, I just watch it), the whole thing was telegraphed to me in a five-batter sequence.
Batter One, Ruben Tejada: The kid who never takes a bad at-bat mounts an outstanding at-bat. With his team down, 2-1, Ruben swings through two pitches and then goes to work, alternating a foul and a ball before fouling off three pitches in a row. Then he takes ball two. A pair of fouls ensue until ball three. That is so Ruben! But on Nate Eovaldi’s twelfth pitch, Tejada strikes out. That’s not supposed to happen.
Batter Two, Jordany Valdespin: Of course now that Ruben softened him up, Eovaldi will be easy pickin’s for the rest of the patient Mets. Except the next Met up is the notoriously impatient Jordany Valdespin…and why should ’Spin be patient, since he’s obviously a young man in a hurry, his squishy citizenry/allergy to authority be damned. First pitch, Jordany does what Ruben couldn’t do in twelve — he reaches base on a perfectly executed bunt. When was the last time you saw a Met do that?
Batter Three, David Wright: This most solid of Met citizens and hitters had been in a mini-slump, but no more. David lines Eovaldi’s second pitch up the middle for a base hit. Jordany, because he’s Jordany, races to third. It’s first and third, one out, Ike Davis, tenuously not sucking so much lately, is due up, so Don Mattingly lifts Eovaldi before he can be a winning pitcher and brings in lefty Scott Elbert.
Batter Four, Ike Davis: With a golden RBI opportunity before him, Davis goes back to sucking. What appears to be a hard slider away ties him in knots for strike three. Keith Hernandez lets out an audible moan of disgust. As he should.
Batter Five, Daniel Murphy: After a sensational four-hit Friday night, Terry Collins sat Murphy Saturday because Terry Collins bet on the Dodgers, and like Pete Rose, he should be banned from baseball at once because there are signs in every clubhouse reminding uniformed personnel gambling on games is verboten. That’s just one theory. Another is Collins was playing the percentages, and that robotic reliance on lefty-righty matchups paid off when lefty Murph’s understudy, righty Ronny Cedeño, homered off lefty Chris Capuano to turn a 6-2 deficit into a 6-3 deficit. Cedeño also doubled against Capuano, so Terry must have known something the numbers weren’t telling him, since prior to Saturday Ronny was a robust 3-for-23 against Chris while Daniel was a tellingly pathetic 0-for-3. Later in Saturday’s game, Murphy pinch-hit a triple. Sunday, the regular second baseman was back in the lineup and would go 4-for-5 off Dodger pitching, finishing off a weekend during which he went 9-for-11. So…knowing all that, is it possible that the scalding Daniel Murphy would come up and not get the hit to bring Valdespin home from third, tie the score at two and change the complexion of the game and maybe shift the momentum of the Mets’ season? It was indeed possible to the point of being what actually happened. Daniel lifted the fly ball to left that Ike needed, except when Daniel did it there were two out. And once the ball was caught, there were three.
To quickly review the above sequence, Tejada did exactly the kind of thing he is lauded for, but it didn’t pay off; Valdespin and Wright did exactly the kinds of things they are lauded for, and it paid off provisionally; Ike, who had to do just a little something, did absolutely nothing; Murph, who’d been doing everything and would continue to do everything, wasn’t able to do it at that particular moment.
Two hits, no runs, two LOB. Mets still trailing, 2-1.
I’m not sure where I’d seen that kind of half-inning before, but boy it felt so perfectly Mets. Then again, every inning feels that way when you find yourself saying, at whatever speed you prefer, “nine losses in ten games.”
by Greg Prince on 22 July 2012 2:09 am “This is the bad time.”
—Henry Hill, GoodFellas
If I may use the present tense while it’s still technically valid, Miguel Batista doesn’t so much throw pitches for the New York Mets as he contemplates them. Not that any Mets fan necessarily wants Miguel Batista to throw his next pitch unless it’s his last, but my goodness that man is Zen between ball one and ball two, never mind the spiritual journey he takes between ball two and ball three.
I’m sure he’s read Leaves of Grass, but I could swear I saw him staring at blades of grass.
Oh, and then came ball four, twenty or thirty minutes after ball three.
The theme of this series thus far (all seven hours and three minutes of it) seems to be it was slow, but at least it was painful. That would pretty well sum up the 81 pitches Batista contemplated in the first, second and third innings, almost none of them effective, eight of them directly producing baserunners, four of them turning into runs, none of them making a case for the present tense to remain a valid tense for Miguel Batista and the New York Mets.
***
“Tick. Tick. Tick. That’s the sound of your life running out.”
—Jordan Chase to his victims, Dexter, Season Five
Is there any reason think the Mets’ season isn’t on the brink of plunging into its traditional final-third abyss? In All The President’s Men, Deep Throat advised, “Follow the money.” At Citi Field, you could simply follow the bouncing pitchers Saturday and discern how tenuous this .500 team’s competitive standing has become.
One press release and five public address announcements said all you needed to know.
1) The New York Mets today announced the team placed lefthanded pitcher Johan Santana on the 15-Day Disabled List with a right ankle sprain.
2) …and batting ninth and pitching, Number Forty-Seven, Miguel Batista.
3) Now pitching and batting ninth for the Mets, Number Fifty-Three, Jeremy Hefner.
4) …and pitching and batting fifth for the Mets, Number Sixty-Six, Josh Edgin.
5) Now pitching and batting fifth for the Mets, Number Forty, Tim Byrdak.
6) …and pitching and batting seventh, Number Forty-Three, R.A. Dickey.
That’s four pitching changes, each more desperate than the one before it, thanks to the Hail Mary nature of starting Batista. And that bland pronouncement about Friday night’s starter? That seemed to cast a pall on everybody who toes a rubber for a living.
Santana was placed on the DL before the game for Johankle reasons because there’s apparently nothing medically wrong with his shoulder and the Mets couldn’t claim the vapors, the blues or a bad case of lovin’ you as an acceptable reason to shelve him. Maybe the two-week old mishap is throwing his motion out of whack. Something sure is. For the record, Johan says he could keep pitching through his morass. But maybe that’s just the vapors talking.
With Johan cleared from the roster to make room for Hefner, the rest of the available staff responded as if they couldn’t wait to get a league-approved blow themselves. Not a single Mets pitcher retired the first three batters he faced upon entering Saturday’s game. The only Met who threw a one-two-three inning against Los Angeles was Batista, in the second, which was after he allowed a run in the first and before he permitted three in the third, all with two out.
The Dodgers batted seventeen times before the Mets could get to the bottom of their own order. By the time they got there, they wouldn’t let Batista bat. It was the second consecutive game in which the Mets’ starting pitcher never made it to the plate.
Hefner gave up a run in the fourth with two out and a run in the fifth with two out, leaving the Mets behind, 6-2. They endured the indignity of Chris Capuano for seven innings and trailed him, 6-3, upon his exit. The ballpark was more subdued than angry. Batista was long gone and Jason Bay had snuck an RBI single through a friendly hole many frames before and then had the good sense to be double-switched out of the game at some point because it’s not like Jason Bay is indispensable to the cause of a team trying to forge a comeback. So with Batista out and Bay out, there was nobody left worth getting riled up toward.
Subdued, with an undercurrent of mournful. That was Citi Field after seven innings, even with Edgardo Alfonzo bobbleheads tucked safely under seats.
 We Edgardo Alfonzo acolytes not only turned out in droves to accept our Fonzie bobbleheads, we dressed for the occasion as well. Then two Met runs in the eighth, which was exciting. And Dickey in the ninth, which was downright thrilling. It’s always thrilling to see a starting pitcher thrust into any role that’s out of the ordinary. It says somebody seems serious about winning a game in a way not starting Daniel Murphy (four hits Friday night, immense pinch-triple Saturday afternoon) or Jordany Valdespin (the Human Thunderbolt Friday night, pinch-bunt instigator Saturday afternoon) doesn’t.
It was beautiful the way “The Imperial March” blared and R.A. materialized fully formed on the mound to start the ninth. Like Batista in the first, Hefner in the fourth and Edgin in the sixth, Dickey retired the first two batters he faced. But when Dickey did it, mourning became electric. Citi Field was juiced. Just the sight of our savior coming down from the mountain to keep us within 6-5 brightened our late afternoon. He got Kemp. He got Ethier. And if he’d gotten a call from James Hoye, he might have gotten out of the ninth unscathed, sending a charge through his teammates and inspiring them to short out Kenley Jansen for at least one necessary run in the bottom of the inning…maybe two!
But Dickey didn’t get a call — the way the Mets can’t ever get what they want lately — and Loney singled and Uribe homered and it was 8-5.
You couldn’t blame the knuckleball starter turned desperation reliever for not rescuing 24 men stranded up a creek and a season on the brink. But it would have been beautiful if he had.
***
“The Mets got two runners on in the ninth, but couldn’t get over the hump, and went down to their 12th straight defeat. That was to be a Met pattern for their early years. They would get themselves into a seemingly hopeless position, only to rise up off the mat to stage a desperate rally, which invariably fell just short. In their 120 losses, the Mets brought the tying run to the plate in the last inning 56 times. Thirty-nine of their losses were by a single run. ‘He concedes defeat almost daily,’ Robert Teague wrote of the Met fan, ‘but only after the very last Met has been retired.’”
—William Ryczek, The Amazin’ Mets, 1962-1969
Scenes from a Polo Grounds homestand, from just about this time of year, 50 years ago:
• On July 7, 1962, trailing the Cardinals, 3-2, Marv Throneberry tripled with two out in the bottom of the ninth. Gene Woodling grounded out to end the game with the potential tying run on third.
• On July 12, trailing the Dodgers, 3-0, Sammy Taylor walked with two out in the bottom of the ninth. Cliff Cook was then hit by a pitch. Jim Hickman, representing the potential tying run, grounded out to end the game.
• On July 13, the Mets came to bat in the bottom of the eighth, tied at three with the Dodgers. Woodling led off with a triple against Don Drysdale. Hickman went into run. Chris Cannizzaro struck out. Felix Mantilla tapped to Drysdale, who got Hickman at the plate. Throneberry struck out. Al Jackson gave up a leadoff home run in the top of the ninth to Ron Fairly. The Mets went down in order in the bottom of the inning to lose, 5-4.
• On July 15, the Mets went to the bottom of the eighth down seven runs to the Giants. They scored six and had runners on first and second with two out. Juan Marichal came into relieve. He flied out Rod Kanehl to end the inning. The Mets would lose, 9-8.
• On July 16, the Giants increased their lead from 2-1 to 3-1 on a two-out wild pitch in the top of the ninth from Bob L. Miller. In the bottom of the inning, Charlie Neal and Elio Chacon each walked. Choo Choo Coleman popped out and Hickman struck out. Richie Ashburn singled home Neal and sent Chacon to third as the potential tying run. Kanehl flied out to end the game, the Mets losing, 3-2.
• On July 19, Throneberry broke a 5-5 tie against the Pirates with an RBI single in the bottom of the eighth. With Marv on first and Chacon on third, Jay Hook struck out and Ashburn popped out. Hook started the visitors’ ninth by walking Bill Mazeroski, advancing him to second on a wild pitch and seeing him go to third and then home on two flyball outs. It was tied at six. In the bottom of the ninth, Hickman singled with one out but was caught stealing second. The game went to the tenth, where Hook — still pitching — surrendered a leadoff home run to Bob Skinner. In the bottom of the tenth, after Kanehl flied out and Neal fouled out to the catcher, Chacon doubled and Throneberry was intentionally walked. With the tying and winning runs on base, Joe Christopher flied to center. The Mets lost, 7-6.
On July 21, 2012, the Mets trailed, 8-5, in the bottom of the ninth against Dodger closer Kenley Jansen. After Lucas Duda fouled out and Ruben Tejada flied out, Andres Torres and David Wright walked. Scott Hairston then struck out to end the game.
This followed the 7-6 loss of July 20, when the potential winning run, Torres, popped up with two out…two days after July 18, when the Mets trailed the Nationals, 4-1, in the ninth, before Wright homered to lead off, Ike Davis and Duda each struck out, Bay homered and Valdespin struck out to end the game in a Met loss, 4-3…and that happened on the heels of July 17, which was when Valdespin’s three-run pinch homer converted a 2-0 deficit in the top of the ninth into a 3-2 lead, before a Nationals run tied the score in the bottom of the ninth, which was before Josh Thole put the Mets in front, 4-3, in the top of the tenth, which was before the Nationals scored two to win it, 5-4, the last of the runs coming on a wild pitch Thole couldn’t block.
All of which is to say chronically battling back and falling short doesn’t work any better now than it did a half-century ago.
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