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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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.
Tonight at 7, prior to the pregame show, SNY takes us back to the bridge linking the fetid past with the promising future via Mets Yearbook: 1983. The campaign in question yielded the Mets’ seventh consecutive terrible record (68-94) but ended on a reasonably high note (31-29). More foretelling, the season marked the Met debuts of Darryl Strawberry and Keith Hernandez along with the continued establishment of Mookie Wilson and Hubie Brooks. Mix in George Foster’s return to competence, Jesse Orosco’s emergence as relief ace and the late-year glimpses of rookie pitchers Ron Darling and Walt Terrell, and suddenly it didn’t seem so crazy that 1984 might not be as bad as everything that had immediately preceded it.
But that was for another year. For tonight, enjoy the hint of things to come.
Image courtesy of “Mario Mendoza…HOF lock” at Baseball-Fever.
You can lose one game to the Cubs, who are professionals no matter their record. You can appear helpless at the left hand of Travis Wood, whose command was sharp and approach was impeccable. You can waste Johan Santana’s six strong innings because sometimes great pitchers on good nights are outdone by lesser pitchers on their best nights. You can commit a couple of Little League errors in cringe-inducing succession because blooper reels sooner or later capture everybody’s most glaring missteps on video. You can, as the manager advised, put it behind you, grab a good night’s sleep and go get ’em tomorrow after a compressed travel itinerary maybe left you “flat”. And you can reason the winning of them all has yet to be achieved by any team.
Still, it was a rather disgraceful performance by the Mets on Monday night. Not because they lost, not even because of how they went from losing a close one to falling apart amid somebody else’s laugher but because there was a sense that they shouldn’t have to win after playing such a grueling slate for the last month. Gosh, they just played 22 consecutive games against contending teams preceded by three against their division’s currently non-contending perennial champions, and they worked so hard to get to…what was their record against the Phillies, Cardinals, Nationals, Yankees, Rays, Reds, Orioles and Yankees once more?
Twelve wins. Thirteen losses.
Oh.
If that’s the case, what exactly were they letting down from?
Playing a tough Subway Series? You mean the one that’s on the schedule every single year?
Playing in front of raucous crowds under intense scrutiny for three games? You mean as a New York team playing in its own ballpark?
Playing teams that have winning records and playoff hopes? You mean the way the Mets do?
It’s not one loss on a Monday night to the 25-48 Cubs that bothers me. It’s not David Wright’s unsettling refusal to USE TWO HANDS! finally biting him that bothers me. It’s not Lucas Duda’s Your Son Is In Danger Of Failing Right Field notice from his Continuing Education class that bothers me, even though I’m now reflexively cringing when Met defenders habitually gather for informal caucuses under fly balls. It’s not that they couldn’t touch let alone knock Wood, though maybe patience isn’t always a virtue on strike one. It’s this idea, which Terry Collins almost telegraphed beforehand (echoed by the writers and broadcasters around the team before and during the game), that whaddaya want from these fellows? They had a late flight and they had a big (one win, two loss) weekend and, besides, they’re the Mets.
I threw that last bit in there myself, but that seems to be the subtext. They’re the Mets. They can only compete for so long at a high level. They can only be expected to succeed to a certain extent. They’re undermanned and overburdened. Playing a team like the Yankees for three games is going to take a lot out of them. Playing the Yankees on top of playing those other good teams had to be excruciating for them.
Maybe that will be true in the long run. Maybe a team whose bench feels thin because they had to DFA Vinny Rottino to make room in their bullpen for Justin Hampson has been more mirage than previously acknowledged. Maybe the statistical four-way tie for the final playoff spot in which they’re engaged despite losing three straight is a temporary condition. Maybe we’ll next hear that adjusting to Wrigley’s winds or ivy is too much of a challenge for them or that it’s difficult to get up for a last-place team after battling a first-place team or they’re looking ahead to four in L.A. or to the All-Star break two weeks from now.
And because they’re the Mets, maybe we should just go with, as Terry said postgame, “They’re human beings.”
The fine print on doggedly determined underdog teams that rise up and take a bite out of dismissive expectations is they’re prone to getting rapped on the nose by those wielding rolled-up newspapers…or booming bats.
This was a lousy weekend to be the Little Team That Could once it became apparent they Couldn’t. This was a lousy weekend to have not nearly the ability to back up whatever heart you’ve been leading with for nearly three months. This was a lousy weekend that save for Nick Swisher — or “Nick Seizure,” as my Droid’s spell-check insists on calling him — failing to be as tall Friday night as he was irritating for three days, could have been historically abysmal.
All is lost, at least until tonight in Chicago when the Little Team That Can might very well make the Subpar Series a quickly fading memory, given baseball’s eternal equity as the game of redeeming features. Still, their shot at instant redemption doesn’t excuse the spit show the Mets put on Saturday and Sunday, when they proved themselves temporarily incapable of playing with the big boys.
We lost the battle...and then we lost the next battle...but...uh...
Two one-run losses felt like a pair of blowouts, as there are no prizes, not even moral victories, for constantly being behind a run and endlessly staying behind a run. The Mets lived for eighteen innings in the Land of Opportunity but told the Welcome Wagon it wasn’t interested in cashing in. Theoretically, a couple of 9-1 debacles would have been less fun to watch, but I’m not sure how.
OK, that’s probably not true, either. But yeech on Saturday and yeecheven more on Sunday, the latter day featuring much to moan sprinkled by a tad to cheer. There was welcome return by Ruben Tejada; the discovery of Andres Torres, Base-Stealing Weapon; and the inspirational sight of R.A. Dickey taking back with his all a fraction of what he gave up with his arm. Too bad Keith Hernandez wasn’t doing the game, because he would have oozed with old-school pride over R.A. eschewing the “la-di-da” ethos Mex finds so distasteful and running through Chris Stewart to score the first Met run of the game. Too bad it came when the Mets were already down, 4-0, and it didn’t nearly take the spin out of Dickey’s uncommanding knuckler.
R.A. pitched a bad game. Hard to believe, tough to admit, painful to realize not so much because I assumed he’d never again not pitch a one-hitter (though I was beginning to lean that way) but because if we don’t win an R.A. Dickey start, then what do we do?
It was admirable, to a point, the way the Mets pulled R.A. out of his ‘L’ hole and tied things up in the sixth on a series of singles, walks and opposition miscues, but without a proper post-Sabathia followup — say, a big hit of the extra-base variety — leaving the game tied loomed was an invitation to trouble. And trouble wasn’t shy about RSVP’ing in the eighth when Miguel Batista’s second inning of usefulness proved a fairy tale.
Batista shouldn’t have been pitching to Robinson Cano, I suppose, but it kept coming back to the Mets’ inability (or refusal, you’d almost think) to put the saw into what could have been a see-saw thriller. The Yankees take a 6-5 lead? Well, damn it, Mets, take a 7-6 lead. Easy enough to say from here, but the visitors who trailed 3-0 on Saturday and let slip a 5-1 lead on Sunday didn’t seem to have any problem remaking the game in their own image when they had to.
Because, quite frankly, that’s what they do and that’s what we can’t do. Or didn’t. But should’ve.
Six hours and thirty-seven minutes of intracity futility spread over two nationally telecast nights leaves one shy of sustained logic and overloaded with frustration. So let’s call on R.A., whose verbal skills didn’t take a personal day even as his command called in sick, to bright-side this latest episode in municipal shame:
“It didn’t quite live up to the billing. But golly, I’m so proud of our guys who scrapped and fought. We can build off that.”
Going into the game, I was nervous about Chris Young’s fly-ball tendencies given where fly balls hit by the Yankees tend to land, as last night’s Cano/A-Rod/Andruw barrage demonstrated. I didn’t have to be: Young was great, stifling the Yankees through six innings before moving to the seventh. In that frame Young started by walking Mark Teixeira on a close pitch, but then went back to work, getting Nick Swisher to lift a fly ball to right … only Lucas Duda broke back instead of in, and the ball dropped and got past him for what the official scorer nonsensically ruled a double. With Frank Francisco unavailable because his left oblique stiffened up on him (uh-oh), Terry Collins opted to stay with Young against Raul Ibanez instead of calling on Tim Byrdak. Young then made the only pitch of the night he wanted back, one Ibanez hit on a line just over the wall in what’s been rechristened Swisherville.
Bang, just like that it was 3-3. An out later, Jon Rauch had pinch-hitter Eric Chavez in an 0-2 hole and threw a shoulder-high fastball Chavez was meant to chase. It wasn’t a bad pitch at all, and Chavez chased it — somehow depositing it just inside the left-field foul pole for the lead. The Mets then were stymied in the final three innings. First, with Jordany Valdespin on third and one out in the seventh, Boone Logan erased Lucas Duda and Daniel Murphy (sporting a horrific pool-guy mustache) on a flurry of evil breaking pitches. In the eighth, David Robertson’s eventful inning took place entirely at home plate: He struck out Scott Hairston, walked Omar Quintanilla and Josh Thole, then struck out Justin Turner and Kirk Nieuwenhuis. In the ninth, David Wright singled with one out, but Duda looked overeager and struck out against Rafael Soriano, and then Murph got under a pitch just enough to bring it down in Swisher’s glove on the warning track instead of in the hands of a jubilant Mets fan or a bitter Yankee drone.
Ballgame, cue trying not to throw stuff across the room and mar a beautiful New York night with screamed obscenities.
Poor Duda is wearing the goat horns, and not undeservedly so. And after watching his latest misadventures in the outfield, I’m determined that the Mets need to … leave him right where he is.
Tim Marchman wrote a terrific article this morning in The Wall Street Journal, one of the best appraisals of the 2012 Mets I’ve read. In wondering whether the Mets are the National League’s worst good team or its best bad one, Marchman has this to say: “Third baseman Daniel Murphy is playing second and first baseman Lucas Duda is playing right, and this is admirable, not a good idea and better than any alternative, all at once.”
All true. Both Murph and Lucas look better on defense nearly three full months into the season, which is not at all the same thing as saying they look good out there, because they don’t. But there are no real alternatives. Murphy is blocked at third by Wright, as we hope he will continue to be, blocked at first by Ike Davis (ditto) and it would be unfair to send him back out to left without a long spell in winter ball at the very least. The Mets’ only real option is to be patient with Murph at second, and hope he can grow into a Dan Uggla type. (Though if Murph doesn’t start driving the ball with more authority, he’s going to be a supersub.)
The Mets are in the same trap with Duda — he’s blocked at first, even without considering that Ike probably has a lot to do with Wright’s marked improvement across the diamond at third. The Mets would arguably be better off with Duda in left and Hairston in right, but Jason Bay’s contract means he’ll continue to play left when he’s able for the next season and a half, and it’s unfair to jerk Duda between two positions he’s not particularly adept at.
Unless Sandy Alderson has some trade in mind that will reshuffle the deck, the Mets are stuck with the fact that Duda’s medium-term future, at least, is in right. To make the best of that medium-term future, he has to stay there and learn and improve as best he can. And we have to accept that sometimes those lessons will be measured in plays not made and games lost.
Anyway, the Mets will play something we haven’t seen in a while: a rubber game. And it promises to be a fascinating one, with R.A. Dickey and his recently magical knuckler against CC Sabathia, his missing periods and his live fastball.
But then this series has been quietly fascinating. Game 1 turned on a misplay by one right fielder on a ball hit just over the fence. Game 2 turned on a misplay by the other right fielder, setting the stage for a ball hit just over that same fence in approximately the same spot. The Mets jumped out to a Game 2 lead on a home run off a pretty good pitch that curled around the left-field pole. The Yankees took a Game 2 lead for good on a home run off a pretty good pitch that landed in more or less the same place.
Stranger than fiction, but then baseball often is.
To dig up a phrase a very mellow college buddy of mine liked to roll out six or seven times per conversation, Frank Francisco is a trip. I don’t think I’ve thought that about any of our modern-era closers. All my thoughts on our modern-era closers were laced with expletives rarely deleted.
Not that I don’t often find Frank Francisco an [expletive-deleted] trip, mind you, but once you accept that he is going to make your short-term life difficult, you could do worse than to put your trust in him to attain three outs with a two-run cushion.
You couldn’t do much worse, I’m pretty sure, but then again, how would we know? Remember all those easy 1-2-3 saves Franco, Benitez, Looper, Wagner and Rodriguez piled up, particularly in Subway Series affairs?
Neither do I.
The thing that makes him if not quite lovable then a mile shy of detestable — besides his not allowing that two-run cushion to be pecked to pieces — is he straddles the line between not knowing what he’s talking about and knowing exactly what he’s saying. This poultry business, for example…he wasn’t calling the Yankees chickens in the sense that we native-born Americans use that disparaging phrase. He wasn’t even close with it…the way he wasn’t close to the plate in walking Raul Ibañez with one out in the ninth. But his point (that didn’t necessarily need to be spoken) that the Yankees whine and complain? It was dead-on.
They do whine. They do complain. These alleged avatars of buttoned-up professionalism evince a sense of entitlement that is second to none, treating the loss column as a vestigial limb they could never actually be expected to employ. Have you noticed their leadoff hitter for the last umpteen years and the little pause sign he makes in the general direction of the umpire, the “I may be pitched to…now” gesture? This is the organization that for a generation has bellyached about being enough of a draw to be drafted onto Sunday Night Baseball, which makes their existences a chore because, heavens, they have another game the next night in another city!
I don’t know if any of this is precisely what Frank Francisco had in mind when he invoked and then explained his digression, but the more it sunk in, the more apt it was. And though the whole thing was pretty stupid, three cheers for Justin Turner playing “The Chicken Dance” and Tim Byrdak importing a live chicken from Chinatown to frolic in the Mets clubhouse like it was Pete Campbell’s old office, thereby letting Earnest Frank know the Mets would not be cowed by a little chicken talk — no matter how finely programmed the Daveotronic 5000 is to issue benign damage control jockspeak.
We can cluck about it now because after Andres Torres had to do a little Jim Edmonds number to retire Russell Martin, and Frank walked Ibañez and gave up a single to Captain Pause Sign to inject unwanted drama into the ninth inning at Citi Field, Francisco emerged only slightly scathed. Our closer of record (because apparently we have to have one) struck out the murderously dangerous Curtis Granderson and popped Mark Teixeira and his ill-fitting helmet to Omar Quintanilla, who apparently hasn’t seen enough ninth-inning, two-out highlight films to USE TWO HANDS! but cradled the ball anyway, and it was a win for Jon Niese, a save for Frank Francisco and a great relief to us all.
What I liked almost as much as Niese’s mostly solid start; the first-inning, two-out assault on erstwhile family man Andy Pettitte; neither of Nick Swisher’s airplane arms being long enough to bring back Ike Davis’s three-run homer to Erstwhile Utley’s Corner; and slugging Davis, in turn, not having to measure which losses are different from each other, was Francisco facing the reportorial horde afterward. He was smiling a humbly mischievous smile, thanking his Lord for giving him an assist in getting out of that jam and telling the Gotcha Corps that the end result of his Friday hayride through tabloid hell was “awesome”…which was absolutely true.
Way to make chicken salad out of something else altogether.
“Losing to the Yankees is no different than losing to Colorado. What stings is losing to the Marlins. They’re in our division.” —Mets first baseman Ike Davis, June 21, 2012
“I can’t wait to strike out those chickens. I want to strike out the side against them. I’ve done it before.” —Mets closer Frank Francisco, June 22, 2012
“What I’d really like to see, one more time, is not so much a WS win, but the Mets taking back NYC.”
—FAFIF commenter Steve D, June 3, 2012
I’m with Frank and Steve on their sentiments, no matter that Frank was a little impolitic in the context of avoiding the uttering of bulletin board material (or whatever opposing players look at instead of bulletin boards these days), but then again they do call him Frank Frank, presumably for his straightforward manner.
As for Ike, your cool, detached logic does not interest me for the next three days. Don’t lose this weekend, don’t lose to Colorado, don’t lose to the Marlins and don’t use “than” when “from” is correct.
If you’re going to pretend a game is a game is a game, try, “Beating the Yankees is no different from beating Colorado. What’s really great is beating the Marlins. They’re in our division.”
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.
