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 Greg Prince on 1 August 2012 10:52 am If a pitcher can be deemed “major league” after two starts, Matt Harvey would seem to be it. His lifetime mark has dropped to 1-1, which isn’t an accurate reflection of how well he pitched against the Giants Tuesday night and — whatever we think of the usefulness of pitchers’ won-lost records — probably doesn’t foretell how the rest of his career will unfurl.
Nothing really does yet. It’s two starts. Even the swell record he set for most strikeouts by a Met pitcher in his first two outings (one of those records you didn’t know existed to be broken) doesn’t mean much. He passed three guys: Tom Seaver, Dick Selma and Bill Denehy. One guy is Tom Seaver and all that implies; the second guy had the epitome of a journeyman career (42-54 with six clubs in ten seasons); and the third guy’s name endures primarily as the answer to “who did the Mets send to the Washington Senators as compensation for hiring away Gil Hodges?” and, secondarily, for keeping Tom Seaver company on his rookie card. Nobody looking at Harvey is thinking, “He could be another Dick Selma or Bill Denehy!” but we just don’t know.
Pitching, more than any skill in the sport, is a lifetime journey and never-ending adventure. The great Tim Lincecum presents his own evidence that you can never quite know what the next start or the next string of starts is going to bring. At the same stage of his career when the Nieses and Gees and Pelfreys were still getting the hang of pitching at the highest level of baseball — a hang none has yet to fully and completely grasp on a consistent basis — Lincecum was winning a couple of Cy Young awards. Yet at a moment when he couldn’t be any more established as one of the premier pitchers in the game, he couldn’t seem any more vulnerable or hittable.
Except against the Mets, natch, but that’s a whole other story.
The fact that Matt Harvey is making some of us think of Tom Seaver is plenty for right now. It’s not the 18 strikeouts in two starts or Keith Hernandez’s exultation over his “drop-and-drive” delivery or even that he successfully gritted up when betrayed by his fielders while learning to mix pitches that aren’t necessarily his best. What made me believe in Matt Harvey as a major league pitcher in every sense of the word Tuesday night was watching him conduct his postgame media scrum. He was no-nonsense, all-business…you might say drop-and-drive.
I’ve watched hundreds of pitchers field thousands of questions after they’ve pitched. The exercise rarely produces stunning dialogue, but I find the nuances fascinating. Some guys look as if they had to be reminded in Spring Training that this is part of the job and, given their druthers, win or lose, they’d rather be left alone. Some can dissect the key at-bats to within an inch of their lives. Some use these sessions as forums to blend personal philosophy with baseball analysis. Others very subtly, maybe not so subtly, shift the blame for whatever went wrong to their teammates.
Harvey doesn’t know enough to do that last one. He could have. It wouldn’t have endeared him to anybody in his clubhouse, but he wouldn’t have been wrong. His fielders Metted him over but good in the second inning, yet I don’t think it occurred to the kid that it mattered, not if you listened to him after the game.
“In my eyes, if we scored one run, I should have done my part and gotten zeroes, but I didn’t do that tonight,” he said with utmost seriousness. “I didn’t do my job.”
That, of course, is ridiculous. He did his job fine. He got undermined by Met gloves and outpitched, a little, by Lincecum. You can’t throw shutouts every time it’s your turn to go. He’ll learn that if he hasn’t already.
But oh, what a jolt of adrenaline he provided just by putting it all on his shoulders. The words weren’t delivered in self-flagellation, either. It wasn’t “oh god, it’s all my fault!” insecurity. It was the opposite. It was, literally, a declaration that he’s here to win. Nothing about feeling good or being happy to have made his pitches or any of that stuff that drives Bobby Ojeda and, to a lesser extent, me crazy.
“I don’t like to lose,” Harvey said of the outcome, “so obviously I’m not happy about it.”
In that summation I heard Tom Seaver. Specifically, I heard what Seaver said when he was presented with the news that he had won the 1967 National League Rookie of the Year award after his first full year in the majors, a year when his team lost more than 100 games for the fifth season in its six-season existence:
“I want to pitch on a Mets pennant winner and I want to pitch in the first game in the World Series. I want to change things…I don’t want the Mets to be laughed at anymore.”
Harvey didn’t go quite that far. He doesn’t have the standing to say such things, not in MLB service time, not from personal experience. He’s been a Met for a week. He hasn’t observed first-hand how a season starts surprisingly promisingly and then fade into oblivion. He may have some inkling about how this franchise has struggled competitively (because standings are standings) and financially (because Scott Boras is his agent) but none of that was his problem. He’s just a kid with two starts and 18 strikeouts to his ledger.
Making the Mets whole again, however, is something I can picture Harvey making his responsibility, or as much of it as one pitcher can every fifth day. I don’t get the feeling he’s going to be about incremental progress. I wouldn’t rush to slide him into the Seaver category in terms of future performance, because we know there are far more Selmas and Denehys than there are Seavers, but I now carry a hunch that when we read about Harvey, we’re going to be reading less about bad routes to line drives and double play balls thrown away and more about players who insist they play better on those days when Matt Harvey is pitching. That’s what can happen when you have a pitcher who not only doesn’t like to lose but clearly expects to win.
Which is something this franchise hasn’t expected to do in a long time and has yet to demonstrate more than incremental progress toward doing in the long term.
It’s a sad reflection of where the Mets have been that there was genuine disappointment among a swath of its fans that the guy who hit two huge home runs for them on Monday night wasn’t traded by Tuesday afternoon. That’s not how it’s supposed to be. When you root for a team and a player wins you a game, the default instinct is to want to see more of him, not pack his bags.
But when free agent-to-be Scott Hairston showed up at Phone Company Park in San Francisco and dressed in his Mets uniform a day after excelling for the Mets, it was something of a letdown. The prevalent strain of thinking at the trade deadline — which is an hour of mostly evanescent hyperventilation, yet nevertheless a potentially impactful one — was if there’s a way for the Mets to improve themselves meaningfully, do it.
The question becomes, when you’re 50-53 going on 50-54, what do you mean by meaningful? If the cards are stacked a certain way, say so that your record doesn’t sit all that far from a playoff spot, it means getting at least goddamn reliable reliever in your bullpen. If the house of cards has already crumbled, say to the tune of 14 losses in 16 very recent games, it probably means cutting your losses and seeking help less for the current year than for one of the next ones.
Thus, not trading Scott Hairston’s presumably attractive righthanded power bat to a contender for [fill in the blank] was more letdown than relief. I can’t say definitively that it was the wrong move not to make because Sandy Alderson doesn’t let me listen in on his conversations with other GMs, but when the dust settled and Scott Hairston — nice guy, generally solid offensive contributor in a part-time role on a team that exceeded expectations for a while — was still in place, it was fair to ask, “What’s the point?”
The point is always to win the game that’s in front of you, and as long as Scott Hairston is around and is as hot as he’s been lately, he stands a good chance of helping the Mets win games in which lefthanded pitchers are forced to face him. The Mets’ outfield has been a thin stew of part-timers, underdone youngsters, injury victims and Jason Bay. Hairston’s not much of a fielder and he doesn’t necessarily pose a threat to righthanded pitchers, but he’s about as good a bet as the Mets have got out there right now (yet another sad reflection of how things have unraveled).
And if Scott Hairston wasn’t around? Terry Collins would find somebody and play him somewhere. If Hairston was gone and the apparently marginal prospect Alderson maybe could have gotten for him went to Binghamton and developed or didn’t develop, what would be the damage?
Alderson’s explanation during a post-deadline conference call was the 2012 season isn’t over, which is technically true.
“I think there’s a lot of value in, for example, making a run, even if it’s unrealistic. I think there’s a lot of value, for example, in finishing well over .500. I think there’s a lot of value in finishing over .500. I think those things create a perception. What happened or didn’t happen on the deadline may be largely forgotten if a team is able to create a positive impression the second half of the season.”
If making a run is “unrealistic,” then you’re not really making a run. If four months of Scott Hairston on the Mets has helped the Mets be 50-54 instead of 48-56 (his WAR to date is 1.8), perhaps it is fair to conclude Scott Hairston’s value to the Mets, as opposed to a team that is much closer to the postseason, isn’t that great in relative terms. You might even say evaluating him as part of a Mets run as July turns to August is unrealistic.
Perception is an interesting element of Alderson’s answer, though. For argument’s sake, let’s imagine Hairston was traded for whatever Alderson could get to a contender that makes the playoffs. Let’s imagine further that Hairston’s new team is in the Wild Card game and Scott comes up in the eighth inning, with a tie score, and homers off some tough lefty and that team wins. For one day, Scott Hairston will be a big story — and in New York, the spin will be “the Mets traded a postseason hero and got somebody in return who nobody’s ever heard of and won’t likely hear of again,” or something comparably uncomplimentary.
Tough perception. But, like the overkill anxiety attached to the trade deadline, it may be “largely forgotten,” except by those who insist on remembering. Reading between the lines, I get the sense Alderson just doesn’t want the bonus grief that may come with the imaginary middling prospect he received in the imaginary trade for Hairston.
The middle part of his statement intrigues me most, the business about finishing over .500. To my surprise, as a Mets fan who can rattle off without pause every won-lost record the Mets have ever posted (including the two split-season records from 1981), I find myself unmoved by the chance that the Mets might break their three-year string of finishing with a losing record if they can muster 32 wins in their final 58 contests.
The pre-Alderson Mets of 2010 leapt from 70-92 to 79-83 under Omar Minaya and Jerry Manuel. Nobody perceived much progress in the improvement or the proximity to .500. If anybody had, Minaya and Manuel would have been around in 2011. Alderson and Collins ran a club that won fewer games, dropping from 79-83 to 77-85, yet they created a perception of legitimate progress. The seasons followed somewhat similar arcs — tepid start, injection of excitement, eventual dismay — yet 2011 was seen as the platform for genuine growth.
Genuine growth isn’t five more wins in 2012 than 2011, not when the arc doesn’t much change, not when the bottom-line result doesn’t much change, not when the distance the Mets maintain from the heart of the action in the National League pennant race doesn’t much change. Barring a supernatural short-term turnaround by this team (9½ out of the Wild Card at the moment) and concurrent collapses by the five teams ahead of them (all of them with winning records, in case you’re harboring 1973 fantasies), the perception is pretty much set for this season: the Mets looked good for a while but then fell apart; they need help if they’re ever gonna look good longer and not fall apart so readily. And the perception for next season won’t be altered by a subtle improvement over the final two months of this season.
The perception of the Mets that Alderson ultimately wants created is, presumably, that of a consistent winner, one for whom a record above .500 is implicit. Should the Mets be 80-81 heading into Game 162, .500 will be my goal for them. Should they be 81-80, finishing above .500 will be that goal. Otherwise, I’m not interested in statistical consolation prizes. When I do the historical rundown in my head, and I go from 70-92 to 79-83 to 77-85 to whatever 2012 brings, I want totals that shatter .500, with additional games tacked on long after the scheduled 162.
That’s progress. That’s winning. They’re not there yet. They don’t seem close to it. I don’t know when they will be. It’s a sad reflection of where the Mets have been and a sad reflection of where the Mets are.
That’s my perception anyway. I don’t like to lose, so obviously I’m not happy about it.
by Jason Fry on 31 July 2012 3:10 am When it was all finally over and the Mets convened at the mound for a rather muted celebration, Manny Acosta kind of rolled his eyes up at the sky and spread his hands in equal parts thanks and exasperation. It was an entirely appropriate response to his own pitching — in the 10th he walked two guys, gave up an RBI single, and recorded outs on a pop-up and two long drives tracked down by Jordany Valdespin, the last one while staggering on to the warning track.
Or maybe Acosta was just afraid of being eaten by seagulls. Which would have been appropriate too.
Acosta was bad, but he was far from alone — the Mets played an infuriatingly shoddy game that they thoroughly deserved to lose. There was Ronny Cedeno botching a tailor-made double play, Bobby Parnell throwing straight fastballs down the heart of the plate, David Wright flailing at balls nowhere near the strike zone, and a generally deplorable lack of focus. Ike Davis’s night was particularly amazing — he failed to plug the hole, froze on a potential double play, muffed a grounder to set up extra innings and managed to strike out four times. I’ll give you 10-to-1 odds Ike’s dropping his iPhone in the john right about now.
The Mets were saved by a few things:
They had Jeremy Hefner pitching about as well as one could have asked of a man sent to the mound with a half-awake defense. I like Hefner, who looks like he knows what’s he doing out there, whether he’s got a ball or a bat in his hands.
They had Tim Byrdak and Jon Rauch doing their jobs, and Josh Edgin turning in a gutsy performance after Parnell faltered.
They had Valdespin kicking up the energy level as always and Mike Baxter returning and chipping in and Jason Bay quietly having an OK game after a poor start — if Bay hadn’t pushed it and taken third on Baxter’s pinch single in the 10th, that run Acosta gave up would have made it 7-7, and then God help us. (Remember, Baxter never buys a beer in NYC again. We owe him.)
They had the Giants playing equally horrible baseball, with Ryan Theriot and Melky Cabrera and Clay Hensley looking torpid at key moments and Sergio Romo and Santiago Casilla reminding us that we do not, in fact, have a monopoly on sucky bullpens.
And most of all the Mets had Scott Hairston, who saved Hefner with one homer and then rewarded Edgin with his second one. You know how much we hate Shane Victorino in New York? That’s how much my friends who are Giants fans hate Hairston. The Mets ought to do the wise thing as well as the decent thing and trade Hairston to a better place, but in the meantime, I’m sure glad to have him.
Anyway, every year brings a few games that are so hideous that the best thing to do would be to scrub them from highlights shows entirely, for fear that they might infect other baseball teams. But they count too, and it’s your best interests to win them. The Mets did that, and that’s good — even if it felt a lot more like survival than triumph.
by Greg Prince on 30 July 2012 6:54 am Dear Mom & Dad,
Things are going OK at baseball camp, I guess. We just finished playing the kids from Camp Diamondback and we did pretty good. We played four games and won two which is better than we’ve done in a while.
A bunch of the kids on our team did real good. That kid Robert Allen who uses all the big words won a ribbon for throwing a lot of strikeouts on Sunday. That kid David who’s kind of a kiss-ass but is basically a good guy won a ribbon for driving in a run. That kid Daniel won a ribbon for getting more hits. That kid Ike won a special ribbon for all the home runs he hit the other day. That kid Ruben got the “Catch of the Week” ribbon as they call it. That kid Kirk got a haircut and went home. That kid Scott may be going to another camp for the rest of the summer but he’s still here and still getting ribbons for being a righty. That kid Tim hasn’t had any more fights with anybody, not even that kid Josh who the counselors don’t really trust but let play a lot (probably because they couldn’t find anybody else to take his place). That new kid Matt I told you about in my last letter hasn’t won any more ribbons since Thursday but they gave him a pretty big one anyway.
I got another “participant” ribbon which I am enclosing so you can put it with my “attendance” ribbon, my “effort” ribbon, the doctor’s note that says I’m OK and the letter from Coach Terry saying how much he and Head Counselor Sandy and all the other campers like me. Maybe I’ll get one of the other kinds of ribbons before camp is over. Or maybe not.
We’re gonna play the kids from Camp Giant next. I’ll let you know if anything happens. It probably won’t, but you never know. Maybe I shoulda stuck with hockey camp.
See you soon,
Jay
P.S. I forgot to tell you…I GOT A WALK!!!
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.
|
|
