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ABOUT US
Faith and Fear in Flushing made its debut on Feb. 16, 2005, the brainchild of two longtime friends and lifelong Met fans.
Greg Prince discovered the Mets when he was 6, during the magical summer of 1969. He is a Long Island-based writer, editor and communications consultant. Contact him here.
Jason Fry is a Brooklyn writer whose first memories include his mom leaping up and down cheering for Rusty Staub. Check out his other writing here.
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by Jason Fry on 21 August 2012 12:54 am Annie, I’ve got a lot of time to hear your theories, and I want to hear every damn one of them. But now I’m tired, and I don’t want to think about baseball and I don’t want to think about quantum physics. I don’t want to think about nothing. I just want to be. — Crash Davis, Bull Durham
There are very, very few things that I love more than baseball. My family, my friends … that’s probably it. Baseball is the filled-in spaces on my calendar for the nine months of the year in which it’s around, and the unhappy absences when it’s not. Baseball is, for all intents and purposes, my religion.
Yet as with all religions, there comes a time when heresy shoves aside faith. Watching baseball played ineptly and tepidly for day after day after day after day does not inspire love. It does not make you look forward to 1:10 and 7:10. It makes filled-in spaces on calendars seem like extra trips to the DMV and or dentist. It makes “I got recap” sound like a chore.
That’s being a Mets fan right now. They are awful — reliably bad in the box score and the standings. But worse than that, they are boring. They aren’t a tragicomedy like the clubs overseen by Casey Stengel or Joe Torre or Dallas Green once upon a time. They’re Art Howe boring and bad — they darken the room.
I was at a wedding this weekend, which was a wonderful time — but by the end I missed my Mets, and never mind that they were getting beaten by the Nationals. I was happy to have a game to take in tonight — for about an hour. By the end of that hour I was mad, and spent the next two tweeting mean things about the team. It didn’t make me feel any better. By the time Mike Baxter flied out, I was just glum and tired.
It’s a familiar feeling, given that the Mets are a horrifying 11-25 since the break, even worse than I’d feared. Given that, I can think of exactly three reasons to watch the Mets until 2013 gets here:
1. David Wright is a home run away from 200. Wright is, of course, a fine player having a good year at the plate (despite a second-half swoon) and an excellent year in the field. More than that, he is decent and patient and loyal — at our last blogger event at Citi Field, I kept my eye on Wright and was amazed at how many times he was asked to sign something or shake hands with someone or chat about something or do this one more thing. It was exhausting to watch, and we weren’t even at game time yet. Wright did it all without complaining or looking like his energy was flagging. It was, in its own way, as superhuman as being able to hit a fastball traveling 95 miles an hour or managing to spear a sizzling grounder that’s already behind your glove. He deserves our thanks and recognition for a well-earned milestone.
2. R.A. Dickey could win 20. At the moment it looks like winning 16 will be a struggle, given how little help Dickey’s getting most nights. But if the Mets step up their mighty post-All-Star-Game winning percentage to a cool .333 or so, that ought to get R.A. to 18 wins or so, and hey, who knows? Dickey is having a remarkable year, one that might be significant not just for him but for the evolution of the pitch he throws. Win or lose, he is a ferocious competitor and a fascinating thinker, and always worth watching.
3. Matt Harvey is good. Harvey is an old-school power pitcher with tremendous potential. He’s got a ways to go, but he looks like he’s learning quickly on the job, and his mindset includes that certain arrogance that comes with being an effective power pitcher. He’s a preview of a better future, and God knows we all need as much of that as we can get right now.
The rest? You can take it. I’m no longer interested in grading Ike Davis’s tantrums after his latest horrible at-bat, or wondering what numbnuts thing Andres Torres will do next, or surveying the pitiful ruin of Jason Bay’s once-proud career. There’s nothing left to see except further evidence that what we see now better not be what we see next April. Which both we and our front office knew some time ago.
The Mets do nothing, and then they do bad things, and then they do dumb things. That’s their blueprint for most games now, as you saw tonight. Dickey pitched well, with the exception of a lone floating knuckler that Tyler Colvin banged off the facing of the Pepsi Porch to tie the game at 1-1. He got no help other than that lone run, and was pulled for a pinch-hitter (the affably useless Justin Turner) in the seventh. Josh Edgin came in for the eighth and in rapid succession made a dismal throwing error, passed up an out at third and then fired a wild slider past Kelly Shoppach to give the Rockies the lead. The Mets tried to fight back in the bottom of the eighth, and Jordany Valdespin came within an eyelash of driving in the tying run with a grounder past first, but he inexplicably slid into the base, slowing himself down enough to be nipped by Colorado’s Matt Belisle on a bang-bang play that Adrian Johnson (he of June’s momentous gift call on Carlos Beltran) got right — and stuck to with quiet dignity while Valdespin raged sufficiently for most umps to throw him out. Good moment in a bad year for MLB umps; bad moment in a so-so year for Valdespin.
So here’s your blueprint for the rest of season: Start figuring out your bandwagon team, wait for Wright to hit No. 200, and then check and see if Dickey or Harvey is pitching. And if they’re not? Go ahead and date that nice woman from the bar, whether she’s proposing Tuesday night or any other evening. Your doctor’s right that you have no time to waste — hell, not mooning over this shipwreck of a team will probably improve your health anyway. No-fly list? Pffft — except for a tasteless Red Grooms montrosity or two, Miami’s awesome. Get on the plane, Ashley.
Or, if you must, get thee to StubHub — we’re probably one more bad homestand from $1 seats at Citi. Look at it as the cover charge for getting that awesome new Pat LaFrieda steak sandwich the bloggers keep going on about. Get there early and eat up. Then figure out something more worthwhile to do with your evening.
by Greg Prince on 20 August 2012 2:25 pm  Thursday night at 6:30, SNY favors us with the 25th installment of the Mets Yearbook series, the 1974 edition. If the editing hasn’t been too fierce, you can look forward to not just highlights not of the 1974 Mets season, but the Mets’ postseason trip to Japan (during which the recently acquired Joe Torre made his Mets quasi-debut). Why would a fifth-place, 71-91 team be invited to represent Major League Baseball? Because the invitations for such things would go out well in advance, and when the Mets were invited, they were still defending National League champions.
The aura of that crown wore off after about three seconds of 1974, the first losing campaign I ever experienced as a Mets fan (but, oh, surely not the last), yet as we’ve seen most of the 24 other times we’ve gazed lovingly upon a freshly revived Mets Yearbook, highlights are in the eye of the beholder of the highlights film viewer.
Which is to say bring on Mets Yearbook: 1974, the greatest public service any regional sports channel has ever rendered to its loyal viewers. Then stay tuned for an SNY special visiting with one of the kids who no doubt watched those 1974 Mets, recently inducted New York Mets Hall of Famer John Franco. It airs at 7:00.
Image courtesy of “Mario Mendoza…HOF lock” at Baseball-Fever.
by Greg Prince on 20 August 2012 1:44 am “You again, my man! What can I do ya for?”
“Cut the crap. You know what I need.”
“I thought I setcha up last night.”
“I need more. C’mon, c’mon…”
“What’sa matter? Last night not enough?”
“It wore off. I need more. C’mon…”
“I dunno…”
“Whaddaya mean you don’t know? Set me up!”
“I’m just playin’ with ya, bro. I knew you’d be back.”
“Great, great, whaddaya got? It’s raining, I’m going crazy waiting.”
“Nothin’ wrong with a little rain. Helps the crops, right?”
“Don’t gimme that! Rain means I gotta wait! The delay is killing me!”
“How about some of this fresh batch of ‘Pregame’? Got it straight from Eddie C.”
“‘Pregame’? That shit’s weak! I need the real stuff!”
“Patience, my man. I think we got some ‘Howie and Josh’. Yeah, tarp’s off this shipment, bro. Help yourself.”
“‘Howie and Josh’? Wasn’t it ‘Howie and Jim’ last night? ‘Howie and Jim’ was real good last night! What happened to ‘Howie and Jim’?”
“Relax, amigo. This stuff’s better. Street name’s ‘Flagship’. Just came in overnight from San Diego. Give it a taste.”
“Oh yeah…oh yeah! ‘Howie and…’”
“‘Howie and Josh,’ that’ll get ya through ’til Monday night.”
“What else? What else? What else ya got?”
“Maybe you’d like to sample a little ‘Hefner’.”
“What? Whofner?”
“‘Hefner’.”
“Never heard of it. Any good?”
“They’re calling it ‘Sixth Starter’ on the street.”
“‘Sixth Starter’? I never heard of no ‘Sixth Starter’. Sounds weird.”
“No, man. Try a hit.”
“Ugh! That’s no good!”
“I’m tellin’ ya, bro, ya gotta let it kick in. In Washington, they get one hit off ‘Hefner,’ and then it’s like…BAM! One hit after another!”
“I can’t wait for something like that to work. What else ya got? I’m Jonesin’ here. I need somethin’ better. The shit I’ve been gettin’ lately ain’t shit! I used to see pictures, man. I used to turn on at 7:10 and see pictures! I ain’t seen pictures since Friday night! I need somethin’!”
“Hold on, hold on…try this.”
“What’s that?”
“Just got it in from my Boston connection. It’s called ‘Shoppach’.”
“‘Shoppach’? What’s ‘Shoppach’?”
“Its street name is ‘the UnThole’. Think of it as a change of pace. Like 7UP back in the day.”
“It’s good?”
“I’m tellin’ ya — it’s different. Not what you’re used to. It might take a second, but it comes highly recommended.”
“Enough sales pitch. Just gimme some.”
“Here ya go…”
“Whoa! This is different! Not amazing different, but different. I can feel it hitting…and kinda like…”
“Catching?”
“Yeah, that’s it, catching!”
“See? That’s why they call it ‘the UnThole’.”
“Whatever, man. Let me get some more of that ‘Shoppach’. It’s better than that weak-ass ‘Nickeas’ shit you were pushing on me earlier this year.”
“Yeah. Sorry about that. Thought it would be better.”
“How much? How much?”
“Just gimme back some of that bullpen stuff from last month if you still got it and we’ll call it square.”
“Done. Hey, can I borrow your phone?”
“My phone? What you want my phone for?”
“I dunno, man. I tried this ‘Shoppach,’ and now I gotta borrow your phone.”
“I’m not givin’ you my phone. Use your own phone.”
“No way, man! I gotta send a text but it can’t be from my phone!”
“Hey, you all right? There might be some side effects from ‘Shoppach’.”
“I can’t use my own phone! Then they’ll know it’s from me!”
“Yeah, one of the side effects might be paranoia or somethin’. Man, take it easy on that ‘Shoppach’. Try a little of this instead.”
“What’s that?”
“It’s good, man. It calms ya down.”
“What is it?”
“It’s, uh…”
“What? WHAT?”
“The street name is ‘Abyss’.”
“‘Abyss’? Didn’t you try to get me hooked on that before?”
“Ya got me. It’s ‘Bay’.”
“No way.”
“Don’t be like that, bro! You know how highly valued this shipment was?”
“Oh no way, man. You tried that on me before. Ain’t my fault you can’t get rid of that ‘Bay’ shit.”
“Bro, think of it as the equivalent of really good rum.”
“Rum?”
“You know, like 151-proof.”
“Really?”
“Well, more like .151, but c’mon, give it another chance.”
“I need somethin’. Fine. Gimme that ‘Bay’ shit again.”
“Here ya go. Now remember it works real slow.”
“I don’t feel nothin’.”
“Nah, man. That means it’s workin’.”
“Nothin’ I’m tellin’ ya. Total zero. What the fuck?”
“Hey man, you said you wanted it.”
“I didn’t want no ‘Bay’!”
“Too late, man. You just had a whole ’nother season of it.”
“I did?”
“Three-quarters of a season. Same thing.”
“Damn. I don’t remember any of it. What just happened?”
“Lost, 5-2. Sorry, bro.”
“Really? It’s all a blur.”
“See? It worked. You’re so into what I got that you probably didn’t even notice it’s 25 of 36.”
“Whatever. I got my fix. I’m good. I’m not messing with any of this anymore.”
“See ya tomorrow night.”
“You’re not hearin’ me. I told ya, I’m good. I’m done with you.”
“Sure, bro, though maybe you forgot about this week.”
“What’s so special about this week?”
“I’m getting some of that stuff in that you like.”
“You mean…”
“Yup. ‘Homestand’.”
“‘Homestand’…nah, man, I don’t care about that. I’m done.”
“Got tickets for ya. Right here…”
“Not interested. Well, lemme just see ’em…”
“Go ahead, bud. Hold ’em for a minute. Feel good in your hands, don’t they?”
“They kinda do. Maybe I’ll take just one…”
“Seven games, bro…”
“Nah, that’s crazy. I’ll just take a couple. Who’s playin’?”
“Rockies. And Astros.”
“Hey, they’re not too good! We could begin to make up some ground! Gimme all ya got!”
by Greg Prince on 18 August 2012 10:52 pm Strange world we live in when the Mets game on what we used to call “free TV” isn’t readily available via the service millions pay for because…well, ya got me. Two corporations are in the middle of a pissing match and it’s the loyal customers who get spritzed.
So what else is new?
 When I took to Twitter to vent over the sudden Mets blackout in my coaxial neck of the woods, the company that owns the cable system to which I susbcribe reached out to let me know it was the fault of the company that owns the channel that airs “free” Mets games, while the company that owns the channel that airs “free” Mets games reached out to let me know it was the fault of the company that owns the cable system. Great moves — transparent, buffoonish PR maneuvers are so much more impressive to the Metsless viewer than cobbling together a settlement.
 Is this what it’s like to be the parent of petulant twins?
Well, the Mets played without my eyes on them but my ears all over them, just as if it was a contention-free Saturday night in August of 2002 or 1992 or 1982 or 1972. In 2012, the Mets weren’t going anywhere, but neither was I, except to my radio, which is not a bad bargain in the post-Hagin era. My devotion to Gary, Keith, Ron and live televised images notwithstanding, I’m always happy to be immersed for a few innings in Howie and Josh. Alas, Josh was off to do a football game somewhere (one that doesn’t count, at that), so it was Howie and Jim Duquette for a few innings and then some. Happy was downgraded to content, but Duquette is amiable and informed and he’s not Wayne Hagin. Plus Howie is always Howie, which is a godsend in any medium.
From what they were telling me, Jon Niese was fairly close to Jon Matlack, Ike Davis channeled the bright side of Dave Kingman, Mike Baxter patrolled deep right like Joel Youngblood and Frank Francisco Skipped in from the bullpen to Lockwood down a save for a change. Only the names of the Expos have been changed to protect the impotent, thus we’ll say the final was Mets 2 Nationals 0 and hope to listen to another good game on Sunday. It is being televised on that channel I suddenly don’t get, so I’ll listen to a bad game if necessary, same as it ever was in 2002 and 1992 and 1982 and 1972.
As Chauncey Gardiner said in another satisfying tale set in Washington, I like to watch. But I’m content to listen. For a true baseball fan, the radio is always like being there.
by Greg Prince on 18 August 2012 5:54 am “I can still play football. I look at films day after day, week in and week out, and I know I can still play. I feel good throwing — there’s not a pass in the book I can’t throw. My arm is good no matter what people say and my legs are okay. I’ve had problems with my knees just once this year. But what can people expect when you get knocked down eight out of 10 times? What the hell do you do?”
That was 33-year-old Joe Namath on December 12, 1976, following a 42-3 Jets loss to the Cincinnati Bengals. Joe threw 15 passes that cold day at Shea. Four of them were completed. Four of them were intercepted.
“You know, my season has been a rollercoaster. A lot of ups and downs. Good days. Bad days. But I’m very positive about everything because I’m coming back from a major surgery, and I’ve been able to be out there every five games. […] Right now my shoulder is fine. I don’t have any issues with it. It’s just that it has been a long season for me.”
That was 33-year-old Johan Santana on Friday night, following a 6-4 Mets loss to the Washington Nationals. Johan set down all nine batters he faced in his first three innings at Nationals Park, but proceeded to give up six earned runs and nine hits in the fourth and fifth, including a grand slam to Michael Morse and a two-run homer to Bryce Harper. He’s allowed at least six earned runs in each of his past five starts, something no Met pitcher has ever done.
Namath, who led the Jets to their greatest glory before injuries overtook his brilliance, never played another game for New York after the debacle against Cincinnati. He was signed by the Rams in 1977, started four games for L.A. before being benched and retired at the end of his thirteenth professional season.
Santana, who is under contract to the Mets through next year (his thirteenth major league season), has crafted a career that can also be described as both brilliant and injury-riddled. While his significance to the Mets franchise is not nearly on a par with what Namath meant to the Jets, he has been, for reassuring stretches and incandescent moments, immensely important around here since 2008. It is his outsized presence that has made his periodic absences resonate so thoroughly. And as with Namath, it is the vivid memory of what Santana has done in a Mets uniform that leaves a Mets fan incredulous that he can look perfectly fine for a while and speak nonchalantly of how perfectly fine he feels afterwards, but somewhere in the middle of that rendition of reality is the starker version: another short outing, another ton of runs, another bushel of passes that wind up in the hands of the Bengal secondary.
When Namath was done as a Jet, his most glorious times were eight years in the past. There would be flashes after Super Bowl III, but it was never the same. The injuries wouldn’t let it be. Johan’s only been a Met for five seasons, and one of those was spent furiously recovering from surgery…as was the offseason that followed it. Really, there was no offseason when it came to rehabilitation.
“I’ve been throwing baseballs since December 15,” Johan mentioned after losing to the Nats, maybe as a legitimate excuse for running on empty in the fourth and fifth innings, maybe as a stream of consciousness an all-time great emits as he tries to figure out why he’s not only not pitching like an all-time great but isn’t pitching remotely passably as of August 17. He says he feels good. Terry Collins says “his command was good” for three innings. Dan Warthen says, “It’s just a matter of building that arm strength back up.” Johan’s been at it since December when everybody else has been throwing baseballs since February. Nobody among those who have a say came out and said Friday that it’s time to call August October and give Johan a rest. But nobody in that group was ruling it out, either.
You never want to rule anything out with guys the ilk of a Namath or a Santana. You’ve seen them do too much to think they’re no more than one pass or one pitch from getting it together and resuming their careers in uninterrupted fashion at the level to which you and they have become accustomed.
Sometimes that’s the problem.
by Greg Prince on 17 August 2012 2:43 pm You know how your various Mets come on the big screen early in the game and tell you not to run on the field and such, and then David Wright caps it off by reminding us that “Mets fans are the greatest fans in the world!”? Here are a few opportunities (besides continuing to support this team through thin and occasionally less thin) to confirm our third baseman’s flattering assessment.
• Saturday, before you go home to your Cablevision household where you will not, as of this writing, be able to enjoy the Mets on Channel 11 (or even if you’re able to see the telecast you’re paying for by some other means), you can give blood at Citi Field. I know, you already give sweat and tears, but the Mets are joining with the American Red Cross on a blood drive from 9 AM to 5 PM in the Caesars Club. Open a vein, help your fellow man and get a pair of tickets for the Mets-Phillies game on September 17. (The Mets maintain a two-game lead on Philadelphia — never mind for what.) Details on the humanitarian effort here.
• On Saturday, September 8, Mets fan Tommy LaBella, who passed away earlier this year at the way-too-soon age of 22, will be remembered at the first annual Tommy LaBella Softball Tournament at D’Onofrio Field in New Rochelle, beginning at 9 AM. Proceeds will benefit the Tommy LaBella Sky’s The Limit Fund — whose mission is to “allow Tommy’s spirit to continue to touch the lives of many by giving back to his community” — and the New Rochelle Little League. There’ll be a silent auction of sports memorabilia and all kinds of fun and games to honor the memory of someone who remains in the hearts of those who knew him best. Visit the fund’s Facebook page here for more information on the event and get a sense of what Tommy meant to his loved ones here.
• Ike Davis, an occasionally threatening presence to National League pitchers (just ask Homer Bailey), is really quite the good-natured lad, and you can help him help others on Sunday, September 9, by attending A Night With Ike Davis (And Teammates), a benefit concert for Solving Kids’ Cancer and the Liddy Shriver Sarcoma Initiative. it takes place at City Winery on Varick Street. Details here.
• Don’t forget our friends who will be running soon to raise funds for the Tug McGraw Foundation in its fight against the scourge of brain cancer: Taryn Cooper, in the New York City Marathon on November 4; and Sharon Chapman, this time in the Trenton Double Cross Half Marathon, on November 10. Give Coop a hand here and Sharon here as they each devote their feet to a great cause.
by Jason Fry on 17 August 2012 12:36 am Matt Harvey is a beast. Just ask the Reds.
Harvey fanned eight, didn’t allow a runner until he hit Ryan Ludwick leading off the fifth (Ludwick, channeling Reggie Sanders, glared death at him), and didn’t allow a hit until three batters later, when Scott Rolen hit a little roller that Justin Turner could only surround. He was superb for 7 2/3, leaning on his heavy fastball with late movement and supplementing it with his slider, curve and the occasional change — which is much, much better than watching him try to be a Rick Reed-type finesse guy. (I’m still baffled by why the Mets kept pushing him to throw so many change-ups in recent starts.) He chipped in a two-run double of his own — yes, Harvey can hit. (Though no, he probably can’t man a corner outfield spot. Sorry.) And if we can tiptoe into the realm of the intangible, I like the way he goes about his business on the mound — he gets the ball and is ready to go, acting as if the mound is his and he’ll dictate what happens on it, thank you very much. Contrast that with, say, Jon Niese wandering around looking put upon when things go wrong.
Oh, and the Mets hit too, from Ike Davis to Mike Baxter to Ruben Tejada to (stop operating heavy machinery) Jason Bay. The bullpen? Well, it was mixed. Bobby Parnell relieved Harvey with the Reds trying to get back into the game and froze Brandon Phillips with a beautiful hook at the knee, Frank Francisco was spectacularly awful in the ninth, but then Jon Rauch erased Wilson Valdez for the win. (Between Valdez and the despicable Miguel Cairo, who knew Cincinnati was the Valhalla for unmemorable, briefly tenured Met infielders?)
Any good Harvey start is going to feel like a preview of the Mets’ hoped-for future, but games like tonight’s are also something a lot simpler: They’re fun, which baseball is supposed to be. It was fun watching Harvey work and seeing if a very, very good Reds team (that’s minus Joey Votto!) could counter what he was doing. It was fun watching the Mets actually hit balls hard, seeing them land away from enemy fielders and then watching Mets touch home plate. It was fun watching Bobby Ojeda not be angry afterwards. It was fun knowing the Mets wouldn’t offer up some ridiculous tweet (“RECAP: Frank Francisco retires two in 9th before Cincy comeback”) that would make me want to set myself on fire on the hood of Dave Howard’s SUV. It was fun reporting for recap duty. It’ll be fun to read the morning reviews. Remember fun?
Fun is so much better than what the Mets have given us lately. Let’s have more of it.
by Jason Fry on 16 August 2012 2:28 am In the bottom of the second inning last night, the umpires made R.A. Dickey cut two small friendship bracelets off the wrist of his glove hand — bracelets his daughters had given to him in January, before he climbed Mount Kilimanjaro.
Yes really.
My suspicions — and those of probably every other Mets fan — immediately focused on Dusty Baker, with some folks on Twitter noting that such gamesmanship could be payback for the Mets complaining about Mat Latos’s loose pockets last night.
But no, that would have made too much sense — Baker was apparently innocent. (Though not of being annoying and destroying young pitchers’ arms.) Suspicions next fell on the umpires — and, for a moment, I wondered about the conspiracy theory making the rounds in the Mets clubhouse that the team doesn’t get close calls because MLB’s umps are still steamed about Sandy Alderson trying to make them accountable more than a decade ago. I haven’t put much stock in the Mets’ musings — their real problem is that they’re not very good — but for a moment you had to wonder. After all, it’s true that MLB’s umps are a childish, cosseted bunch whose performance this year has been dreadful to the point of absurdity. Seriously: You can now watch a week of baseball and be pretty certain to see three or four painfully bad blown calls. We’re headed inevitably for replay, and not just because it effectively already exists in every modern park and is making its way onto fans’ phones. We’re headed that way because MLB’s umps are now so routinely incompetent that ultimate oversight of the game needs to be taken out of their hands.
But supposedly the umps weren’t to blame either — it was MLB, enforcing some absurd ticky-tack rule, and of course doing so selectively. (Here, for instance, is Felix Hernandez post-perfecto with something on his wrist that presumably would have sent last night’s home-plate ump James Hoye to his fainting couch.)
It’s enough to make the blood boil, but honestly, who cares? Someone was being stupid. Dickey was pissed about it, and justifiably so. But as he admitted later, he just wasn’t very good. That’s no sin, particularly not in a 15-4 campaign — R.A. is basically the only reason to watch this moribund club stagger toward the day when they’re told they can stop playing baseball. But he wasn’t exactly compelling viewing last night, as about a billion feet worth of Cincinnati home runs more than demonstrated.
Terry Collins was pissed about the bracelets too, but he looked a lot more pissed about other things — like his vanished offense, or the general air of depressing dead-assedness that’s settled over his club like an endless hangover. The Mets are horrible right now, they’ve been horrible since the All-Star break, and this is the fourth year in a row that they’ve been horrible in the second half. That’s a bad pattern whether you’re plotting a return to contention (perhaps we should aim for relevance first) or trying to sell tickets. Once upon a time, Fred Wilpon was mocked for wanting to see meaningful games in September. I never thought that was as crazy as everybody else did, but jeez — right now “meaningful games in September” seems like a pipe dream. Meaningful games in August would be novel.
Oh, and here are the Mets themselves, after tonight’s loss: “Baxter, Tejada each collect two hits in loss to Reds.” Not mentioned: That those were the only four hits the Mets had. Or that they endured a 6-1 pasting in which the only run scored on a double play that short-circuited the inning. I believe this is what’s known as trying to polish a turd, and I really wish the Mets would stop embarrassing themselves and us with stuff like this. Right now there are 25 guys taking care of that already.
Sigh. I’ll leave you with this: In the top of the second, before Braceletgate turned tragedy into farce, Jordany Valdespin hit a twisting pop into the seats between home and the third-base dugout. As fans windmilled their arms and leaped about, a woman in a Mets t-shirt calmly flicked out her hand and caught the ball. No drama, no fuss — it was pretty damn cool.
It was also easily the most impressive thing someone wearing a Mets shirt did all night.
by Greg Prince on 15 August 2012 3:23 am Once in a while, particularly in a season that’s wandered dutifully into its gone-to-hell portion, the Mets will play a game that, like a piece of black, volcanic glass in Andy Dufresne’s favorite Maine hayfield, has no earthly business on their ledger. It will be tense, it will be tight, it will be gripping…even if ultimately it will be lost.
And you almost knew, as a Mets fan, that the Mets would lose Tuesday night in Cincinnati. You knew it for certain by the middle of the ninth if you couldn’t figure it out earlier. Some games are just like that: more fun than you imagine for a while, then teasingly cruel in their suspense, then just plain mean as they reach their pedestrian, predictable conclusion.
If the Mets could have pushed this thing into extra innings, lightning could have been reset in order to strike. You never know what will happen when you take a scoreless game beyond nine. On April 17, 2010, Pedro Feliciano threw a ground ball double play that preserved a nothing-nothing game through nine and next thing you knew (or, more accurately, next several-dozen things you knew), the Mets were 2-1 winners in 20.
But the key was getting out of the ninth. The Mets and Reds had farcically charged that far with no runs apiece. If it was a pitchers’ duel, it was conducted with banana cream pies at ten paces. Gentlemen, turn around and…SPLAT! Chris Young wasn’t sharp but persevered. Mat Latos wasn’t sharp but persevered. Or did the batters they faced aid the appearance of perseverance? Neither Young nor Latos nor their many successors could have been mound magician enough to have escaped more kinds of jams had they been accidentally locked inside the Welch’s plant past closing.
Leadoff hitters keep reaching? Catcher’s interference called? Runners confidently taking off from first? Pitchers cracking bases-loaded line drives? Pinch-hitters whacking balls to the wall? Doubles abounding? Wild pitches? Control problems? Deep flies? Sinking liners? Perfectly executed sacrifice bunts?
They were all there, yet they didn’t add up to bupkes. No Met could drive in any other Met for nine innings. No Red could drive in any other Red for eight innings, and their were loads of Red chances to do so. At first it seemed Young would snap like an 83-inch twig. Then he shape-shifted into a bendy straw. Then the journey from bending to breaking was imminent. Then he was replaced by Ramon Ramirez, who rescued him, which seemed novel. Then Ramirez was replaced by Bobby Parnell, who dug a customary hole but also tunneled out of it; more novelty. Then Jon Rauch came along and took no mess whatsoever.
While it was true the Mets did nothing of substance to Latos, Sean Marshall and Jose Arredondo despite six hits, four walks, Young’s sizzling liner that landed in Brandon Phillips’s glove, the Scott Hairston rope that reached the left field corner too fast for it to be good for more than one base and the catcher’s interference charged to Ryan Hannigan (shortly after Jordany Valdespin drove Latos to snorting distraction by repeatedly asking for and receiving time), it was truer that the Reds did the exact same amount of damage to Young, Ramirez, Parnell and Rauch despite five singles, four doubles, six walks and the sense of doom that will logically impend when you’re playing a first-place ballclub in their ballpark and your notoriously flammable bullpen is all that separates you from extinction.
Which, of course, is what came to in the bottom of the ninth. It came to Manny Acosta (Frank Francisco — no bargain but technically the best we got — was presumably being saved for the nineteenth and twentieth) walking Phillips and giving up a single to Ryan Ludwick to assure trouble, and Josh Edgin, Terry Collins’s not so new toy, ending it with a mighty assist from Jay Bruce.
The intrigue of 0-0 was over. The 14 Reds left on across eight innings were immaterial. Three Cincinnatians survived to cross the plate on one Bruce swing. The ten men the Mets got as far as first, second or third proved lethal in their failure to gain admission home. The team in first place did what it felt like they were going to do in the middle of the ninth. They won.
The other team…our team…also did what you inevitably discerned they would do. But they made it interesting without being unforgivably aggravating for a while.
So that was different.
by Greg Prince on 14 August 2012 6:22 am Forty seasons of home games at Shea Stadium and Citi Field. Literally hundreds of visits. Wins. Losses. Elation. Heartbreak. The gamut of human emotions. The whole bit.
Except for a ball. I had never gotten a ball from the field of play. Not foul, not fair, not batting practice.
 Mine. But that has changed. Thirty-nine years and one month after attending my first Mets game without my glove — because my camp counselor Marvin told us we’d just lose ’em if we brought ’em — I got a ball. A glove wouldn’t have done me much good in the process of getting the ball. A catcher’s mask, however, would have been dandy.
This was last Wednesday evening, a little more than an hour before gametime, the Blogger Night portion of my second visit to Citi Field over three consecutive days. A little later I’d be a regular fan, sitting with some good friends who had kindly invited me to join them before I knew this would be a Blogger Night, but for now I was being quasi-media, specifically part of the blogger gaggle (or bloggle) interviewing Bobby Ojeda in a Pepsi Porch huddle during Marlin BP.
I was diligently taking notes, mentally preparing my own question for Bobby O about why announcers are suddenly referring to “little” cutters and not just cutters lately, when someone in our ranks shouted, “LOOK OUT!” In that once-a-generation way I have of not reacting properly to onrushing trouble (like the night I graduated from college, opened a can of Old Milwaukee and didn’t think to aim its contents at the nearby sink when they exploded like a geyser, instead mindlessly spritzing the veritable beer fountain at everybody else in the room), I didn’t look up. We’re all the way up here, I thought. What are the odds of a ball reaching us?
My mistake came from forgetting that these weren’t the Mets practicing batting. A little while earlier I stood on the field and watched the Mets swing, at best, for the warning track. Only Daniel Murphy got one over any fence, and then just barely. He surely didn’t reach the Pepsi Porch. No Met did. But this Marlin — and at first I couldn’t tell which one it was — seemed to be doing OK in terms of loft and distance.
“LOOK OUT!” someone shouted again.
There was a commotion and lots of sensible ducking in our tightly gathered group. Even Bobby O, fearless on the mound in his Met heyday as he is behind his SNY desk now, isn’t anxious to take on flying horsehide without a mitt. The ball hits something or somebody. And then it ricochets off the cement and…
…ouch. I mean OUCH! Really OUCH! Damn ball got me in the right jaw. A Major League Baseball when hit by a Major League Baseball player after it’s been tossed slowly by a Major League Baseball coach is HARD! Nothing on my face or in my head seems broken or out of place, but it’s definitely a jarring experience, comparable to being tapped on the rear bumper in stop-and-go traffic. You’re pretty sure you’re OK if you’re not the litigious type but you’re honestly not sure.
The ball smacks my right jaw and then it goes I don’t know where. Somebody, I don’t know who, has it. Then somebody, I do know who, announces that it glanced off his hand in the first place and therefore he is entitled the spoils. He is handed the ball and stands up waving it in the air pretending to be a fan who has caught it on the fly.
Three thoughts instantly cross my mind.
1) Ouch, still.
2) We’re pretending to be working journalists up here, so it’s unbecoming pretending to be fans, thus I find the waving of the ball a little out of place…even though we’re all really just fans with blogs (this Blogger Night business is always put forth courteously and professionally by the Mets, and I’m continually grateful for the opportunity to take part and have a bit of behind-the-scenes access that allows me to write with a different perspective from time to time…but, honestly, the we’re media but not we’re not really media conceit never quite hits the experiential mark as squarely as the ball hit me in the face).
3) I will be goddamned if this story becomes “the ball hit me squarely in the face and I didn’t even get the ball.”
Really, that’s mostly what I’m thinking as Bobby O returns to his seminar on pitching and I reflexively take my reporter’s notebook and whap the guy with the ball on his left shoulder. I whap him once…twice…on the third whap, I get his attention. He turns around.
“Hey! The ball hit me in the face!”
Without a word, the guy stops waving it and wordlessly, honorably hands it to me. I fondle it briefly and then drop it in my bag, returning to my note-taking, stealing only five or six glances at it for the rest of the Ojeda availability.
A few followup thoughts:
1) It’s a BP ball, which is to say it has no 50th Anniversary Mets logo, which is too bad, but after decades of waiting, bloggers can’t be choosers. To be clear, however, it is an OFFICIAL MAJOR LEAGUE BASEBALL for sure; it says so right over Allen H. Selig’s signature.
2) If there was as much poetry in baseball as we like to believe, the ball would have been hit by Carlos Lee, because Carlos Lee hit the only ball I ever retrieved in an OFFICIAL MAJOR LEAGUE BASEBALL game, on July 26, 1999, at new Comiskey Park. Lee is a Miami Marlin these days, so theoretically he could have been reaching out to me again. But it wasn’t Lee. Putting together the fact that it was a lefty and it was a player wearing what from a distance appeared to be “25” (but that’s a coach’s number on the Marlins), I have since deduced that the Marlin who socked me in the jaw was No. 26, Greg Dobbs, who socked Jorge Sosa with a grand slam on September 16, 2007, when he was with the Phillies at one of the hundreds of Mets home games at which I didn’t get a ball (and one of the dozens involving heartbreak). Dobbs and Lee — and Ken Landreaux, my Spring Training 1982 patron — are now forever linked for me. But I still can’t stand him more for the grand slam and everything else he’s done to us as a Phillie/Marlin than I appreciate him for the ball.
3) To be on the field before a game, you have to sign a waiver saying, essentially, that if a ball hits you, the Mets are not responsible. I don’t think that mattered once were in the stands, where your ticket says basically the same thing. Anyway, there was nobody to sue and nothing to sue over. Our PR tender did express concern and I’m sure would have summoned medical help if needed. But I was fine. Or was by morning when the “jarred” feeling dissipated for good.
4) There’s a guy who apparently lives to nab zillions of balls in BP and during games. One is plenty for me, though I make no guarantees I won’t lunge for a second should a ball head toward me in less aggressive fashion in the future. Actually, I’ll probably just do a better job of ducking.
5) Thanks to Chris McShane’s Amazin’ Avenue transcription, I can tell you exactly what Bobby Ojeda said when I asked him what the deal was with the “little cutter,” which I took as some kind of slap at any pitcher who didn’t throw big manly fastballs:
“I think it’s just a word, a descriptive word people use […] You’ll hear, ‘he’s got a deep slider, it’s got some tilt to it.’ We all know tilt, this [gestures as if he’s throwing a slider] is the tilt of a slider. The cutter’s a little bit flatter. The cutter is meant to go in and just get off of the barrel and get inside the label, if you will. That’s the cutter. So when they say, “he’s got a little cutter,” it’s just a term that we throw out there when you have to talk every single day — or write every day, as you guys know — you throw out words, you don’t really mean it as it’s written, you mean it as mildly descriptive.”
Nice of Bobby Ojeda to frame himself as just another communicator groping for a linguistic changeup the way any of us seated around him not sporting a 1986 World Series ring would…except he was the only one sporting a 1986 World Series ring, so that — and the preferring not to take on a red-stitched projectile missile off the bat of Greg Dobbs — might be the only thing he and I truly have in common.
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