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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Wednesday night, the Fourth of July, you’ll want to pause your annual viewing of 1776 to be reminded of another year that made our country great: 1964, as SNY debuts Mets Yearbook: 1964 at 6:30. As every Mets fan was taught in school, our ballpark was founded in 1964, sewn together from patches of orange and blue by team seamstress Betsy Ross, with the white stripes perfectly laid in by colonial groundskeeper Pete Flynn.
I may be confusing my patriotic folktales, but in any event, the highlight film that includes the opening of Shea Stadium is the highlight film that is not to be missed. If your DVR is like mine, it can handle two simultaneous recordings, which I mention because at the same time SNY shows 1964, TCM shows 1776. The greatest movie musical ever made airs there on the off chance you don’t already own the director’s cut on DVD. 1776 (or America Yearbook: 1776, as I’ve come to think of it) has been regularly anticipated Fourth of July viewing here since 1991, and its 22nd consecutive annual screening is as anticipated as all the others before it.
But I’m really looking forward to Mets Yearbook: 1964 to find out whether those escalators they mentioned in 1963 pan out.
Image courtesy of “Mario Mendoza…HOF lock” at Baseball-Fever.
The o gers’ lone concession to competitiveness Sun ay night was sen ing the rather won erful Clayton Kershaw to the moun , but in the early going not even a Cy Young awar -winning lefty with an evil curveball was enough to ispel the funk that’s settle over o ger Sta ium for the last week — a week that ha seen the o gers possess a lea for a gran total of zero innings. The reason the collapse continue in those early frames? Mostly it was the presence of the luckless ee Gor on, son of Tom. He’ll be goo one ay, but right now he’s as ma ening as young players often are, a rather immature fiel er with his heart stuck on his sleeve to an unhealthy egree. The Mets an o gers were tie at 1-1 in the thir when Gor on turne an inning-en ing ouble play into a fiel er’s choice an a run-scoring error by heaving the ball into the ugout. Was Ruben Teja a further en earing himself to Mets fans with a nifty take-out sli e at secon , you ask? Nope — Gor on just messe it up. Then he promptly messe up the next play too, pulling James Loney off the bag — an Loney contribute a mini- avi Cone by arguing with the ump while avi Wright scampere home with a thir run.
It was enough to rive Kershaw to rink — but if he’ waite a few innings, he might have hit the town with illon Gee, who was un one by his own efense.
That first o ger run came on a Juan Rivera ouble over Lucas u a’s hea — a ball that most right fiel ers woul catch, but u a was frozen for a fatal secon an then lumbere after it to no avail, with the ball plopping own on the e ge of the warning track. Unfortunate, but as his own manager will attest, u a isn’t a right fiel er. Unless they eci e to shift him permanently to left (which woul n’t be a terrible i ea provi e it’s a one-way trip), the Mets will just have to live with such things.
What they shoul n’t have to live with is Ronny Ce eno making painful errors too. In the fifth, Ce eno turne Tony Gwynn Jr.’s attempt to hit into a fiel er’s choice into an all-han s-are-safe affair, failing to erase Juan Uribe at secon . Two hitters later, the Mets gave L.A. another extra out (an a run) when Justin Turner muffe Gor on’s little bouncer at first. Another run came in, an Gee ha given up three where he i n’t eserve to have surren ere any.
An , well, you ha the istinct impression this one wasn’t going the Mets’ way. There was Gor on, running wil in an effort to atone, an Kershaw hol ing the fort, an the Mets’ bullpen in too early for the walls not to start blee ing. Though give the pen mil cre it: With one out an the bases loa e in the seventh, Miguel Batista got Rivera to hit a little comebacker his way. Batista scoope it up an threw it to Mike Nickeas, waiting not terribly far away an rea y to continue what sure looke like an inning-en ing 1-2-3 ouble play, leaving the Mets own just 4-3 an with a puncher’s chance.
The ball went right by Nickeas. Of course it i . After all, it’s har to win baseball games when you’re lacking a certain something that’s conspicuous in its absence, something you take for grante an on’t miss till it’s gone an you realize how often you epen on it.
Long plane ri e back through the night — but a ay off tomorrow. Which is best, because I think it’s safe to say all of us involve — 25 guys in blue an orange an several million frustrate rooters — coul use a blank spot on the sche ule.
I guess I should be more up in Panda arms over David Wright not starting the All-Star Game despite his being not just a better all-around third baseman but probably a better cuddly zoo animal than Pablo Sandoval, yet given the system that produced this silly result, it’s funnier than it is an outrage. David Wright is all-world in 2012 (.355/.449/.564) and a candidate for both MVP and Comeback Player of the Year (if Johan Santana doesn’t win the latter and R.A. Dickey capture the former). Pablo Sandoval is all-nickname and has a momentarily rabid fan base behind him, one that likes hitting “send” a lot. Sure you could get outraged, but why anger at something so clearly farcical? David will show up, be the great team man he always is, enter the game when he is needed and probably get a couple of hits to secure the Mets home-field advantage in the World Series.
Congratulations to the National League for knowing enough to notice it has one of the best third basemen of the past quarter-century in its midst and tap him as a reserve. And same regarding R.A., who should not start the game only if he takes a vow of solidarity to sit with David for a couple of innings. Would have been nice if Johan could be there, but the pitching staff is crowded and he could always use his rest.
Parochial view, but it also has the benefit of truth to it.
I used to watch my team’s games and hope for the best in the vaguest sense of the word. Then June 2012 came along and on its very First night, I received the best. I received the best thing a June game could give. I received the one thing I’d been waiting for my entire life.
Johan Santana tosses first no-hitter in Mets franchise history
And everything changed.
I was so enraptured by that First Night of June that I almost didn’t notice that on the Second afternoon of the month, I got a pretty good day to go with it.
R.A. Dickey shuts out Cards the day after Johan Santana’s no-hitter
Then, five days after that, when I was moping over how my team had reverted to the kind of form that made hoping for the best an exercise in low expectations, the Seventh Afternoon of June assured me a pretty good day
R.A. Dickey first pitcher to nine wins as Mets avert sweep
It was easy to overlook, however, because the next night, the Eighth Night of June, was pretty brutal.
Robinson Cano homers twice as Yankees rough up Johan Santana
There’d been so much hand-wringing on what would happen on that night, particularly by the manager (fretting as he did over all the effort that had gone into giving me the one thing I’d been waiting for my entire life), that you could almost feel it coming. What maybe you couldn’t see coming is what happened five nights later, on the Thirteenth Night of June.
R.A. Dickey allows one hit as Mets topple Rays
This one felt on a par with that First great night of June, which is saying something, because that First great night of June — and forgive me my repetition — is what I’d been waiting for my entire life. This wasn’t quite that, but to say it was almost as good doesn’t do it justice. If it wasn’t what I was waiting for, that’s probably because I had never thought to imagine something quite like it.
And everything changed again.
I was so enraptured by that Thirteenth Night of June, I almost didn’t notice that on the Fourteenth afternoon of the month, I got a different kind of good day to go with it.
Kirk Nieuwenhuis has first career multihomer game as Mets sweep Rays
Lost in the headlines over the big Mets win was the poor performance put forth by the guy who started the month. Then the euphoria attached to these various wins was lost in another momentum-killing swoon. Yet just when I was about to mope as I usually moped, there was what transpired on the Eighteenth Night of June.
Mets’ R.A. Dickey K’s 13 in second one-hitter in row
It was as if an encore had been arranged. It was as if this kind of result and gratification was something you could expect in the way you had trained yourself over a lifetime to expect the worst when you hoped for the best. Now you were almost expecting nothing but the best every five or so nights. You didn’t want to feel entitled, but it wasn’t that kind of expectation. It was the expectation of anticipation…which in itself was almost the reward. You couldn’t wait for what would happen next.
But while I would wait, there’d be another reward on the Nineteenth Night of June.
Johan Santana leads way as Mets blank Orioles for 2nd straight night
Before the First Night of June, you’d have been overjoyed by this kind of evening, for it reminded you of resiliency and determination and indefatigable excellence. Now you were appreciative…but you were mostly hung up on the guy from the night before and what his next outing, on the Twenty-Fourth Night of June, might bring.
Robinson Cano HR lifts Yanks by Mets in Subway Series finale
There’d been so much hyperbolic chatter regarding what would happen on that night, that you could almost see it coming. You were forced to write it off as just one of those things, same as you did the next evening, the Twenty-Fifth Night of June.
Travis Wood, Joe Mather lead way as Cubs down Mets
The entire episode was a disappointment, though embedded in the episode were some satisfying scenes from the guy who had kicked off this month in such high style. Even as his team crumbled around him, he was all right. In another month, “all right” would have been OK…or vice-versa. It’s just that your hopes and your sights had been raised so very high by the so many highlights you had absorbed since the First Night of June.
A couple of which were still to come.
Mets’ R.A. Dickey beats Dodgers, is majors’ first 12-game winner
Yes, your sights had been raised to something like that, something like what you were privileged to stay awake and witness late on the Twenty-Ninth Night of June. And they stayed just as high on the final night of what had been — overall pedestrian team record aside — one of the most magical months through which you as a Mets fan had ever lived.
Johan Santana helps blank Dodgers for 5th time in 6 games
By the Thirtieth Night of June, you could ask for no more. Except, perhaps, whatever July had in store.
THE WONDERS OF JUNE 2012 JUNE 01, 2012: 9.0 IP, 0 H, 0 R, 0 ER, 5 BB, 8 K (J.S.) JUNE 02, 2012: 9.0 IP, 7 H, 0 R, 0 ER, 0 BB, 9 K (R.A.D.) JUNE 07, 2012: 7.1 IP, 4 H, 0 R, 0 ER, 2 BB, 8 K (R.A.D.) JUNE 08, 2012: 5.0 IP, 7 H, 6 R, 6 ER, 1 BB, 5 K (J.S.) JUNE 13, 2012: 9.0 IP, 1 H, 1 R, 0 ER, 0 BB, 12 K (R.A.D.) JUNE 14, 2012: 5.0 IP, 6 H, 4 R, 4 ER, 4 BB, 6 K (J.S.) JUNE 18, 2012: 9.0 IP, 1 H, 0 R, 0 ER, 2 BB, 13 K (R.A.D) JUNE 19, 2012: 6.0 IP, 4 H, 0 R, 0 ER, 2 BB, 5 K (J.S.) JUNE 24, 2012: 6.0 IP, 5 H, 5 R, 5 ER, 3 BB, 3 K (R.A.D.) JUNE 25, 2012: 6.0 IP, 5 H, 2 R, 2 ER, 3 BB, 6 K (J.S.) JUNE 29, 2012: 8.0 IP, 3 H, 0 R, 0 ER, 1 BB, 10 K (R.A.D.) JUNE 30, 2012: 8.0 IP, 3 H, 0 R, 0 ER, 2 BB, 3 K (J.S.)
…because we’re running out of them for R.A. Dickey.
The already-undermanned Dodgers had no chance against a knuckler that was once again unhittable. None whatsoever. The degree of their no-chanceness was such that for a good part of the night we were all grousing about whatever happened to Andres Torres out there on Aaron Harang’s pop fly in the third. Harang’s hit fell in, to the visible irritation of Dickey, as Torres seemed either not to see it or not to react the way you need a center fielder to react. The Dodgers didn’t collect another hit until A.J. Ellis singled in the seventh, which was something of a relief under the circumstances.
(Man, give a fan base a no-hitter every half-century and we immediately get all entitled.)
But then watching R.A. makes you feel like perfection’s within your grasp.
He pitched beautifully, once again, resuming where he left off before that hiccup against Satan’s insurgents. He’s 12-1, with a shot at going into the break (and one presumes the starting assignment for the All-Star Game) with 13 wins. He struck out 10 for the fifth time this season. His numbers in June: 5-0, 0.93 ERA, three complete games.
He can hit too — he put together an intelligent at-bat against Shawn Tolleson in the seventh, singling up the middle.
Oh, and he defends his turf the way the Mets haven’t done in years. After Aaron Harang ended his evening with a suspicious plunking of Ruben Tejada, R.A. waited for the opposing shortstop, Dee Gordon, and hit him in the fanny. Glowers, warnings issued, point made and taken, everyone moved on.
And that’s just what we saw. Between innings perhaps he was improving his calligraphy, or composing a heartbreaking sonnet that works in both English and Latin, or experimenting with cold fusion. He’s R.A. Dickey — I wouldn’t put anything past him.
Nor would I put much past the Mets right now — as is their recent pattern, they’ve followed a frustratingly narcoleptic string of games by walloping the tar out of any team foolish enough to get in their way. Tejada went 4 for 5, continuing his marvelous breakout season, Daniel Murphy slammed another homer, and David Wright started the scoring and made a couple of sparkling plays in the field. It’s an excellent time for another Mets manic phase — the Dodgers are trying to stay afloat until Matt Kemp and Andre Ethier return, the Phillies are teetering on the brink of irrelevance, and the Cubs suck. This is the soft underbelly of the schedule, and here’s hoping the Mets go Wild Kingdom on it.
Which isn’t to say they will, of course: The Mets look alternately like world-beaters and the downtrodden of the Earth, and I’ve decided the truth is that they’ve found the most exciting way to demonstrate that they’re somewhere in between. But that doesn’t apply to Dickey. His rare bad starts are just Amish stitches, humanizing demonstrations of fallibility. And increasingly when he starts, his teammates look on point in a Johanesque way. As with Johan, everyone else involved understands the man on the hill means business, and they’d better live up to his example.
Gosh, I hope the passage directly below doesn’t came back to haunt us tonight as R.A. Dickey of the Mets faces Aaron Harang of the Dodgers. Not that there’s anything nasty about what one of the starters said about the other, but the last time something less than flattering about the L.A. club appeared under a Met pitcher’s byline, the Dodgers were next seen torching David Cone and turning a playoff series irrevocably around.
Thank you, Aaron Harang, wherever you are. I don’t mean this flippantly, or obnoxiously. I mean it sincerely. I’ve never met Aaron Harang, a pitcher for the Padres, but he gives me a lift today and doesn’t even know it. Whenever I have a rough outing — and a I have a brutal one here today — I have a strange custom: I go on my laptop and surf baseball Web sites until I find somebody who had an even worse day than me. It’s not that I delight in other people’s misfortune; it’s just that misery does like company, and after my eighth start of the year I am definitely looking for somebody to point to and say, “Hey, this guy’s a respectable pitcher and he got lit up too.” Harang gave up nine hits and seven runs in four and a third innings against the Rockies. Today he supplies the comfort.
I feel less miserable for knowing this.
That’s R.A. Dickey in one of the 2011 interludes in his memoir, Wherever I Wind Up, recounting the atrocious afternoon he experienced at Minute Maid Park on May 14 of last year. It had indeed been a pretty bad day, dropping his record to 1-5 and inflating his ERA to 5.08. Even yours truly — who’d been nothing but smitten by him since he started surprising us in 2010 — made like an Astro and took a few swings:
We love him for his silver tongue, but only because it’s attached somewhere deep within his Dickeyness to his right arm. Well, we used to love his right arm, but lately the affection has been diminished. Our R.A. romance hinges upon his being a character we can root for: bedevils batters then charms reporters. That’s the bargain.
He’s not living up to the half that counts in the standings.
Sometimes you write something that reads as rather inane in hindsight. I’ve been writing here for eight seasons, so I have a few of those in the archives. This feels particularly stupid to me, not because R.A. — who inflamed my ire that Saturday not so much by pitching badly but by creeping to the edge of blaming his fielders for the base hits he gave up — is an all-world pitcher a year later, but because I rather cavalierly dismissed the way he expresses himself, as if he should only grunt “yep” or “I’uhno” after a loss.
Such a line of thinking proved particularly stupid on my part because once you’ve read Wherever I Wind Up, you realize he is the way he is, no matter how he’s pitching. And bless his heart for being who and what he is, because he’s clearly one of the most compelling characters to ever pull on a Mets uniform.
That we wouldn’t care very much about those personal qualities if he wasn’t getting batters out is beside the point. Of course we wouldn’t. We’re fans. That’s fine. We wouldn’t give a damn what Jon Rauch was Tweeting if he wasn’t on the Mets. We wouldn’t ponder Jason Bay’s headaches if he wasn’t on the Mets. And we wouldn’t get caught up in a singular personality like R.A. Dickey’s if he wasn’t on the Mets and winning like crazy for the Mets.
Though that would be our loss, at least a little.
The subtitle of Dickey’s book mentions “authenticity” and Wherever I Wind Up has plenty of that. It’s a collaboration with Daily News sportswriter Wayne Coffey, and it’s pretty easy to detect what comes from the pro and what comes from the pitcher, but Dickey’s voice is in abundance. What we hear is a guy who was publicly doubted in his profession in ways most of us never are and a guy who overcame the doubts after a long, arduous and humble journey. There’s no triumphalism about Dickey making it in New York after being disregarded by the rest of baseball. Really, there’s very little sense of his having succeeded or reached the end point of the journey. There’s a part of him on display that can’t quite believe he’s indisputably traversed that rubicon.
There’s also a part that seeps through, almost as subtext, that says R.A. Dickey is not a fluke, no matter the pitch he throws and the time it took him to learn it. It’s not as if he wandered out of an English lecture, shed his tweed jacket and decided to pick up a baseball for kicks. This guy was, from childhood on (and what a childhood he reveals), a jock. He doesn’t make a huge deal of it, but we might forget that even this most articulate of athletes is, in fact, an athlete: played all the sports in school, competed in the College World Series, made the Olympic team, was drafted in the first round by Texas. Once his ulnar collateral ligament was discovered to be AWOL, however, it was as if fate’s wires got crossed. In Metsian terms, I’d liken it to the 2006 NLCS: we were supposed to win the pennant, go to the World Series, be world champions and reign happily ever after, or at least have an era to call our own.
Dickey should have had it better than slogging through brief auditions in the majors and toiling season after season in the minors (“the mayor of Oklahoma City” was an office he didn’t seek but it became his unwanted nickname). Then again, if the Rangers don’t notice the picture in which his right arm isn’t hanging the way it’s supposed to…and he’s not thoroughly examined…and his bonus isn’t rescinded…then there’s no redefining struggle — physical as well as spiritual — to make him who he became and, well, then there’s no book. Surely there’d be no R.A. Dickey Met story. Maybe if all is well with that UCL, he gets his money early, he has a good or great career and he’s just some guy on Texas you might pick for your fantasy team.
And maybe if Pedro doesn’t go down and El Duque doesn’t have the calf issue and Trachsel isn’t distracted by marital problems and Wright doesn’t almost completely stop hitting and Duaner Sanchez doesn’t get in a cab, then Yadier Molina is just a swell defensive catcher and we all have framed photos of Carlos Beltran covered in Canyon of Heroes ticker-tape hanging in our dens.
You know how that goes, even if we don’t know exactly what we’re talking about when we talk about the baseball players we watch and criticize and subject to too much HE SUCKS! and maybe too much HE ROCKS! One of the most bracing passages in a book filled with them finds R.A. in a bookstore thumbing through a season preview from not too many springs ago. The authors couldn’t have been quicker to write off this Dickey person as an “alleged prospect,” a “marginal righthander” and someone “who has given no indication that he’s ever going to amount to anything.”
Dickey went on with his career and made the most of it. Everything happened for a reason, and these days it’s happening happily for the guy. You read Wherever I Wind Up, you’ll be glad for him, and not just because he’s 11-1 with a 2.31 ERA as a New York Met.
(Let’s just hope Aaron Harang waits until the offseason to purchase a copy. You never know what’s gonna motivate these fellows.)
The more you watch baseball and the more you mature as a person, the less you are inclined to blithely dismiss the people who play the game in a glib, pejorative fashion. For example, it would have been shallow and unfair of me to have thought, in 2011, “My god, Chris Capuano and Chris Young are two of the most boring people I’ve ever seen pitch for the Mets.”
But I kind of thought so anyway. I was just a callow lad of 48 back then.
At the wised-up age of 49, I see the Chrises for what they are: calm veteran presences who have persevered through injury and recovery, using their wiles and wits to retire batters because their arms will never be what they were when they younger, yet their guts and guile more than make up for it. Sure they’re incredibly low-key and almost never said anything particularly interesting for public consumption when they were teammates — with Young going out for the season early and Capuano muddling through the schedule in a state of mostly mediocrity — but each is pitching at the top of his craft presently. We certainly are lucky to have Chris Young adding gravitas to our rotation; watching him outduel Chris Capuano, who is excelling in his post-Met incarnation, was a real treat Thursday night.
And I’m sure the only reason I kept nodding off on them was the West Coast start time.
How great is “D-O-D-G-E-R-S (Oh Really? No, O’Malley)”? So great that Danny Kaye could almost be forgiven for, in 1962, glorifying a treacherous, greedy franchise five years after it eternally wounded Brooklyn’s soul. We will be rooting against the descendants of those Flatbush refugees for the next four nights, but any excuse to listen to this s-o-n-g is a g-o-o-d o-n-e.
Kaye’s masterpiece defies precise parody, and we don’t generally do series previews, but an homage doesn’t seem out of line here as we wait (and wait) for ten o’clock.
***
So I say D
I say D-O
D-O-D
D-O-D-G
D-O-D-G-E-R-S
Let’s beat L.A.!
M-A-T
T-K-E
T-K-E
E-M-P
Matt Kemp
Matt Kemp
On the DL!
We’ll say that’s OK…
Capuano
Is their ex-Met
Pitching well
He sure showed us
And we’ll send Young
With the same name
To take him on tonight
When you have to choose a Chris
Be sure you do it right…
At the beginning of the season
There was hardly any reason
To doubt the Dodgers’ might
But they’re falling apart
From their awesome start
Gads, what a beautiful sight!
First-place
First-place L.A.
Has slipped into a tie
Their ERA stays low
Their hitting’s barely nigh
Everyone’s achin’
And not just Matt
Ethier pulled somethin’
They’re sans Andre’s bat
We’ve got our guys
Mostly in good trim
Except for our closer
What became of him?
Frank Francisco…
Is on the disabled list!
Dee Gordon steals
A.J. Ellis makes few outs
Kenley Jansen takes his saves
Leaves hardly any doubts
Yet they’ve lost
Lost their big lead
After losing eight of nine
If they lose
Twelve of thirteen
The Mets would think that’s fine
R.A. in L.A.
Will put ’em away
When he authors chapter two
He’ll face Aaron Harang
Harang’ll harumph
For prob’ly a month
As R.A.’s victims do
Johan is next
Against Nathan Eovaldi…
Versus Nathan
To be frank…
I expect a rally
Put some mustard on it, Johan!
Come Sunday night
Gee takes the ball
Against reigning Cy Young
Clayton Kershaw
You can’t win ’em all
So goes the old saw
But maybe we will!
Or maybe we won’t!
In Los Angeles…
At Los Angeles…
Can you believe we scored seventeen runs yesterday?
How strange is it that it’s been 13 months since the Mets visited Wrigley? We say this every year, but it’s strange. Fuck interleague. More games against real rivals, harumph, harumph.
That’s from the email exchange Greg and I had discussing who was recapping what in the Cubs series — a conversation I kept thinking about while watching Wrigley Field turn from Unfriendly Confines on the first two nights to Delightful Ones today.
I grew up loving hating the Cubs. As a child, I relived the glory I’d missed by reading and re-reading tales of black cats and heels being clicked and catchers leaping high in indignation and “Goodnight Leo” and fastballs to forearms. I drifted away from baseball a bit between the ’81 strike and my teenage years, but returned when the Mets did, with Darryl Strawberry and Dwight Gooden and Keith Hernandez and Hubie Brooks as heralds of the resurrection. During the dizzy summer of ’84 Mets were pretty amazin’ too, with a Cubs team of their own to take down — except this time the Cubs refused to follow the script. The Mets finished second, but they were back — and I hated Gary Matthews and Keith Moreland and Rick Sutcliffe as avidly as I’d hated Ron Santo and Bill Hands and Leo Durocher retrospectively.
And Harry Caray. My God, how I hated Harry Caray — and still kind of do. Harry Caray has been dead for 14 years, and the mere memory of him sputtering in phlegmy triumph after a big moment for the Cubs is making me clench my jaw so hard that my teeth hurt.
It was the kind of sports hatred that eventually becomes weirdly like love, blotting out everything else and making normal emotions feel washed out. It’s the kind of sports hatred that eventually breeds an odd appreciation. In the Cubs’ case that appreciation wasn’t for opposing players, as sometimes happens with these things. It couldn’t be, because the Cubs were an ever-changing cast of characters, and a team that never seemed to have an organizational philosophy; rather, they’d flail around until they had a lucky season in which they’d lay waste to their division, like baseball locusts, before losing pathetically or tragically and almost instantly becoming bad again.
No, in the Cubs’ case what I came to appreciate was Wrigley Field.
No duh, you’re saying. But it’s not that I was converted by the ivy and the lack of a third deck and the neighborhood pressed around it and the flags showing the standings — I do like all those things, but if you’re sentient and like baseball, of course you like all those things. What I came to appreciate about Wrigley was the sheer variety of different yet inimitably Wrigleyesque games you could get. There were early-season games where the wind was blowing straight in and everybody dressed like they were preparing for Soldier Field, knowing that one frozen-fingered misplay was lurking out there somewhere and would mean defeat. There were late-summer games where the wind was howling out and the starters eyed the mound like they were being sent to Omaha Beach. There were five-hour games played in intermittently horrible weather that were destined to end with crazy bounces off brick, balls or gloves or players getting lost in the ivy, flukey grounders bounding into the bullpen or a long drive landing in the basket while some hapless outfielder looked up and got showered with beer. The Mets have had their share of pinch-me triumphs at Wrigley, as well as some of their most soul-killing losses — and while you can say that about most every park, something about Wrigley and its howling Cub fans and the emotions I brought to those games make them loom larger in the memory.
The sad thing is that now we see Wrigley so rarely. It can be years before you get all the variations on a Wrigley game, and since the Cubs were banished to the NL Central (which still seems like a made-up thing) the juice has gone out of the rivalry. When we play the Cubs at Citi Field they’re just another team, one whose roster and rotation I lose track of. It’s only when we play them at Wrigley that they still feel a little like the Cubs.
Given the Mets’ history, that’s a shame. Harumph, harumph indeed.
Which isn’t to say I can’t enjoy every single minute of an old-fashioned battering of the Cubs at Wrigley. Because that’s the Mets needed very badly and that’s what they delivered today — a 17-1 all-points smackdown that could have gone for a week and I wouldn’t have been tired of it. After playing enragingly listless semi-baseball for two nights, the Mets shook off their lethargy and gave you good signs all around: Ike Davis chinned up above the .200 bar, Daniel Murphy hit not one but home runs, David Wright had a stellar day, Jon Niese paid attention, Ruben Tejada looked good afield, Lucas Duda ran the bases goofily but wasn’t punished for it, and so on. This was the Mets hitting two grand slams in one inning, the Mets dropping a 23-spot on Harry Caray, the Mets scoring 19 runs in ’64 and having an already-fully formed rooter ask if they’d won. And it was even more fun because while the Mets were lofting balls and watching Cub outfielders backpedal glumly as the summer jet stream took them away, Niese was getting Cubs to beat balls into the ground for Met infielders to send where they belonged. 17-8 is fun; 17-1 is a controlled substance.
My goodness was today fun. My goodness did the last two nights hurt. My goodness is it a shame that we’re done with both of them until 2013.
So I met a friend for drinks around 7. Then, well, it was time to eat, so we did that. Since I was on recap duty, I peeked guiltily at the game a couple of times during dinner. The Mets were up 2-0, which mollified me slightly. Then they were behind. Walking home, I turned on Howie and Josh and the first thing I heard was a reference to how sloppily they were playing. Oh, and by then they were behind.
I got home, watched Met batters club a couple of balls to the warning track to be caught, watched Ike Davis mess up a double play, and though I felt myself getting madder and madder, I was also getting more and more tired. I arranged myself more comfortably, blinked a bit, blinked in a more leisurely fashion, looked up and there were Chris Carlin and Bobby Ojeda.
Had the Mets rallied for a win? Carlin sounded grim. Bobby O. sounded madder than usual. No, they had not.
If you’re thinking, “That was a pretty half-assed evening of duty, Mr. Fry,” well, I just didn’t want to make the actual Mets feel upstaged. Because they were bad. Again. Against the Cubs, who are habitually bad. Not to go all Francesa on you, but losing two out of three to the Cubs isn’t something you can do, at least not if you want to be taken seriously as a playoff contender. And losing three out of three to the Cubs … well, ask me again in six hours or so. Let’s just say that today would not be a good time for Jon Niese to be caught being casual about scouting reports.
If the Mets manage to lose again, something tells me they’re going to be wearing the buffet. Simmering before a bank of microphones after last night’s game, Terry Collins did not sound pleased — not with Lucas Duda’s baserunning, not with the fielding, not with Ike’s deportment, not with Dillon Gee’s pitching, not with anything.
Piazza: Catcher, Slugger, Icon, Star by Greg Prince is available from Amazon, Barnes & Noble and other online booksellers.
Amazin' Again: How the 2015 New York Mets Brought the Magic Back to Queens by Greg Prince is available from Amazon, Barnes & Noble and other online booksellers.
Volume I of The Happiest Recap: 50+ Years of the New York Mets As Told in 500+ Amazin' Wins by Greg Prince is available in print and for Kindle on Amazon.
Faith and Fear in Flushing: An Intense Personal History by Greg Prince (foreword by Jason Fry), is available from Amazon, Barnes & Noble and other online booksellers.
Wednesday night, the Fourth of July, you’ll want to pause your annual viewing of 1776 to be reminded of another year that made our country great: 1964, as SNY debuts Mets Yearbook: 1964 at 6:30. As every Mets fan was taught in school, our ballpark was founded in 1964, sewn together from patches of orange and blue by team seamstress Betsy Ross, with the white stripes perfectly laid in by colonial groundskeeper Pete Flynn.
