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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 28 May 2012 12:30 am Hot day at Citi Field: Emily and I easily spent $25 on bottled water, an expense I’d normally decry but accepted uncomplainingly as the cost of remaining upright. Besides his usual helping of hot dogs, Joshua got a massive “fresh-squeezed” lemonade (squeezed from a factory, by the taste of the stuff), a cherry Sno-Cone and a steady flow of instructions to take it easy and not jump around so much.
Down there on the field, R.A. Dickey’s knuckleball was jumping around plenty. It had Padre bats slashing above and below fluttering objects when those bats weren’t parked on shoulders or pinwheeling away from their owners. Over on ESPN New York, Dickey talks about having found new wrinkles in his knuckler: how to change speeds with it, so he effectively has a fastball knuckler and a change-up knuckler, as well as how to elevate the pitch instead of simply letting it tumble through the air on its plateward journey. One of the things that’s fun about Dickey — besides his W.P. Kinsella musings, thoughtful candor and pitbull competitiveness, of course — is the way he treats his knuckleball alternately like a scientist with a tricky experimental subject and an artist with a fickle muse. On Sunday, his knuckler was so good that R.A. sounded like a man who’d proved his theorem and harnessed that muse, even if only for an afternoon: “If you [radically change speeds] and still throw strikes with it, it can be ruthless.”
If ruthlessness was the order of the day on the mound, joy was top-line in the stands. Banner Day was back after 16 years, and it looked very much like a success to me. No, there wasn’t a huge crowd or banners in the thousands — blame jungle weather, years of losing, a multitude of newborn distractions and the once-annual rally having taken an entire generation off. (About which, here’s Greg in the Times.) But the parade was pretty good nonetheless — hundreds of banners, trooped proudly in a loop around the ballpark that took them by judges Howie Rose, Evan Roberts, Rusty Staub and Dwight Gooden. Standing by the railing above the warning track in short left, Emily and Joshua and I offered cheers and raised thumbs.
Shannon Shark, who deserves thanks and congratulations for tirelessly campaigning for Banner Day’s return, has a from-the-field perspective here. He reports that the Mets were cool, fan-friendly and organized, adding that he saw no knucklehead behavior. We didn’t either — of all the banners, I noticed one lament for the lost Jose Reyes (expressed in gentle rhyme) and a single scrawled anti-Wilpon slogan. But the last one was being carried around by some yutz in a Yankee cap, so it barely counts. That’s a success too: My fear was that some fans would see Banner Day as an outlet for the frustration and anger of the last few years, combined with a chance to put one over on the guys in maroon. Which, besides being lousy manners, would have ensured at least another generation in the wilderness for Banner Day.
But that didn’t happen. What we saw instead was banner after banner that fairly sang with the joy, wild hope and occasional self-deprecation of being a Mets fan. Invocations of famous numbers (1o! 41! 16!) and names (Tug! Cleon! Mookie!). Calls to bring back Mettle the Mule. “Camptown Races” rewrites featuring Lucas Duda, Duda. Assurances that no-hitters are overrated anyway. A grinning Endy Chavez against a banner that read THE STRENGTH TO BE THERE, with a real glove emerging from a hole at the wrist. Praise and pride for homegrown Mets, flowers in an NL East garden. Mr. Met, lovingly drawn and held aloft by small hands. A defiant insistence that “WE DON’T STINK LIKE THEY THINK” followed by the quiet addendum “We’re over .500.” Oh, and meanwhile, the PA was playing Casey Stengel talking about the fans’ placards and how he’d gotten distracted reading them. Nice touch!)
There were predictions of 2012 World Series titles, of course. But most of those came with question marks — which is really what being a Mets fan is all about. If you can allow yourself to imagine a spectacle as soulless and awful as a Yankee Banner Day, you know there wouldn’t be a question mark in sight. Mets fans live adorned with them: Where others guarantee victory and expect rewards, we imagine good things that might happen if this goes right and that goes right and if you believe. (After all, ya gotta.)
In recent years the people who run the Mets let two unfortunate tendencies get between the fans and the team: They treated the Mets’ history as an embarrassment to be minimized or ignored, and they looked at any potential situation and tried to figure out what could go wrong. Those same people have made great strides in undoing the first mistake, restoring the classic uniforms, adding a very nice Mets Hall of Fame and starting to fill Citi Field with Mets memories. Today, they took a big step toward undoing the second. Sure, Banner Day could have been a parade of anti-Wilpon signs, or a PR black eye if such signs hadn’t been allowed, or the kind of thing the Yankees wouldn’t do, or some other morsel for the sharp teeth of ravenous back pages. But Banner Day wasn’t any of those things. Instead, it was a pageant of beaming fans showing off placards Casey would have appreciated, the products of hours and hours of hard work and years and years of crazy love for a team that’s often star-crossed and a sport that’s often cruel.
Banner Day is back, a good new beginning for an old tradition. And its return is more evidence the Mets are back, too. Maybe not back as it’s measured in the win-loss column quite yet. (BUT JUST YOU WAIT!) But back in the way that’s always mattered more.
by Greg Prince on 26 May 2012 6:42 pm “Is this heaven?”
“It’s Iowa.”
“I could have sworn this was heaven.”
—The Kinsellas, father and son, Field of Dreams
The Saturday game was a matinee. Planes could be heard rumbling overhead on TV. Rusty Staub was in evidence. High and deep fly balls hit by the home team left the home park for home runs. So-called scrubs excelled. A masterful pitching performance was completed by the ace who started it. A romp became a rout. The whole thing took 2:18. And Banner Day was at hand.
Was this Shea, circa 1973?
It was close enough.
I got a very good feeling watching the Mets overwhelm the Padres this afternoon. Not just a 9-0 feeling, but a feeling that this was a throwback game, the kind of game I could’ve watched on Channel 9…the kind of game when Rusty Staub wasn’t a bobblehead, but a 3-for-5 right fielder robbing Johnny Grubb of a double. Alas, the real Rusty was confined to the SNY booth, but we were OK on the field anyway.
After all, we had Vinny Rottino.
Vinny from Racine (by way of Buffalo) was filling in as we might have had George “The Stork” Theodore do once, and Rottino inked himself in the Met annals with his very first home run. The Stork’s very first home run, walloped off Balor Moore of the Expos on Independence Day 1973, was half of his career output, which is as many as have been hit by modernity’s yeoman catching answer to Duffy Dyer, Mike Nickeas. Nickeas’s second career home run, which put a lovely bow on things in the eighth, was a grand slam.
Of course it was. On a day like this, it would have to be.
Scott Hairston, a little more credentialed but not materially different from your Dave Schneck type, started the Met power trip with a three-run shot in the first, a blast good enough to go out of Shea in 1973 or Citi Field in 2012, if not the old Citi. Same for Vinny, same for Mike. That absurdly dimensioned Citi, however, is so 2011. Today was a hot day, so the ball jumped. When the ball jumps, it should have a chance to clear the outfield walls. Three of ours did.
Nothing the Padres hit was a threat to scale any wall (other than Kiddie Field’s), but to be fair to San Diego, they didn’t hit much of anything. They were facing this Met generation’s version of Tom Seaver, Johan Santana. Righty-lefty stuff notwithstanding, Seaver is the clearest antecedent for Santana in Mets history, especially on a day when Johan is so Terrific. Bob Murphy would have said Santana was wearing the Padres hitters on his watch chain, and indeed our robust ace dealt as if he had early supper reservations in the Diamond Club and was in no way planning on dining late.
The Johan line: 96 pitches, 74 strikes, zero walks, seven punchouts, four hits, no runs obviously, no relievers obviously, nobody like him when he’s this much in command obviously.
I’ve often thought if something’s obvious, there’s no need to say “obviously,” but why not be sure to call attention to how obviously untouchable Johan Santana was during as much of the afternoon as he needed to go the distance (which wasn’t a big chunk of it)? His performance was strongly reminiscent of the way Seaver used to handle the Padres. From 1969 through 1975, encompassing 21 starts, Tom’s record against San Diego ran to 18-1, his ERA was an itsy-bitsy, teeny-weeny, yellow, polka-dot 1.57, and in 183 innings, he struck out 189 Padres while walking only 42 of them. In one game, he fanned 19 Friars, including the last ten in a row; in another, he prevented them from collecting a base hit until the ninth inning.
In an era when complete games by ace pitchers were the rule, Tom Seaver threw 14 in those 21 starts. Johan being 1-for-1 versus the Pads since returning to apparently full health will do for now.
All that’s left to make the nostalgic element of this weekend resonate that much more sweetly would be for thousands to have their bedsheets festooned Sunday morning and for tens of thousands to turn out well before gametime to watch them as Banner Day rises from the ashes. I will be there, not judging the results (I’ll leave that to the likes of Rusty, Doc and Howie) but appreciating that the most Metsian promotion ever is on the march again.
My friend Shannon at Mets Police will be happy to cajole you into showing up tomorrow. And I’ll throw in another link to my Banner Day retrospective that ran in Saturday’s Times to provide a little context as to what this is all about on the off chance that not everybody reading here was a kid at Shea in 1973.
But if you watched the game today, you might as well have been.
by Jason Fry on 26 May 2012 12:47 am The Mets, despite being admirable scratchers and clawers, needed a laugher. Or at least a chuckler. I no longer believe that winning builds character — it seems more likely to me that winning leads others to ascribe character to you — but you can convince me that eking out narrow victories and getting crushed by wide margins causes a young team to be exhausted by July.
Tonight the Mets could relax a little. After a rough first inning (made smoother by a Spider-Man catch against the wall by Mike Baxter), Dillon Gee was in control of the Padres and the game. After a Met three-spot in the fifth, he could cruise. His stuff was good but his location was better — Gee’s best pitch of the night might have been his last one, the culmination of a nine-pitch battle with pinch-hitter Chris Denorfia. It was a 3-2 fastball on the outer edge, at the knees, perfectly placed and unhittable. Denorfia leaned over the plate to regard it with faint hope, then leaned back in dismay as Gee trotted off the mound.
The other happy development in Metland? It was that David Wright went 0 for 3.
To be more specific, Wright went 0 for 3 (dropping his average to a mere .397) but the Mets still won.
So far, David Wright’s 2012 has surpassed the sweetest dreams of the most optimistic Mets fan. (I’ll grant you the existence of such a creature is generally discussed in the same breath as unicorns, yeti and the Loch Ness monster.) At the plate, Wright looks like his pre-Citi self, the precocious hitter for whom an 0-2 count wasn’t a death sentence but the Alfonzoesque prelude to the rest of the at-bat. In the field he looks smooth and sound in a way we haven’t seen since … well, since ever. In the on-deck circle or the dugout, he looks like what we always urged him to be — the unquestioned leader of his baseball team. It’s pinch-me stuff.
But Wright can’t be the whole story. Tonight’s Mets offense began with Lucas Duda banging a home run off the sign overhanging the Mo Zone. It kept rolling with a double from Mike Baxter and a single from Kirk Nieuwenhuis, young outfielders pushing Jason Bay and Andres Torres towards Where Are They Now? status. It concluded with a double down the left-field line from Daniel Murphy and a single rapped back up the middle by Ike Davis. Yes, there was an Ike Davis sighting — though nothing was sweeter than seeing Murphy ambling back to the dugout sending fist pumps and attaboys Ike’s way.
The hope is that Wright will remain to see the Mets emerge from the doldrums of ill luck and thin wallets. But if better times are in the offing, it won’t be because of Wright alone. That won’t work. A brighter future depends on complementary players emerging to share the load — to go 3 for 10 with three runs scored when Wright’s 0 for 3 and never sees second base. At least for one night, the supporting cast was there, and the reviews were excellent.
* * *
Today is Rusty Staub Bobblehead Day, event and player both appreciated by Greg right here. Tomorrow is Banner Day, a wonderful Mets tradition now happily restored. I’m going to send you somewhere else to read about that — to the New York Times, no less. But you’re not really leaving home, because that essay is also by Mr. Prince. It is, to no one’s surprise, wonderful. Enjoy.
by Greg Prince on 25 May 2012 9:21 pm Interrupting Dillon Gee’s good work and some hockey game of local interest to note Saturday’s New York Times includes an essay by yours truly on the Mets’ revival of Banner Day, coming to a ballpark near you Sunday. You can read it here.
by Greg Prince on 25 May 2012 3:47 pm On Saturday, the Mets will distribute 25,000 bobbleheaded likenesses of Daniel Joseph Staub, which is not the same thing as actual likenesses — the resemblance is primarily hair-deep — and may not be enough for the club to satisfy the honoree’s stated wish that “everyone comes out and gets one.” Nobody likes to imagine Customers No. 25,001 and beyond going home emptyhanded.
Still, Rusty Staub Bobblehead Day is inspired stuff, probably the Mets’ boldest bobble choice in their 50th anniversary series. Rusty will be bubble-wrapped, boxed and presented to represent the 1970s Mets, which isn’t the player-decade linkage I would have made off the top of my non-bobblehead. My choice was Tom Seaver, but he got the ’60s and apparently you can’t make everything about Tom Seaver (though I can dream). Staub, however, is the worthiest non-Seaver candidate imaginable. Rusty was here for only four years of the ’70s, and only wore No. 10 for one of those years, but he was a huge impact player during the part of the decade when things were generally going well.
 Orange you glad Rusty made the 1970s less blue? Rusty’s bat, dislodged from the Expos in April 1972, transformed the Mets once the strike-delayed season got underway, making the lineup dangerous and the team a 25-7 powerhouse. His broken hand — which he played with for two weeks — loosened the Mets’ grip on contention, but a year later, a recovered Staub helped lead the charge that resulted in the come-from-behind capture of the 1973 division title. Staub sacrificed his body to make a brilliant catch in Game Four of the NLCS against the Reds, played with searing shoulder pain in the World Series yet hit .423 against the A’s and finished the ’73 postseason with four roundtrippers. Two years later, he became the first Met to drive in more than a hundred runs, racking up 105 ribbies in 1975.
Then he was traded to Detroit for Mickey Lolich for no good reason. Not for no discernible reason — M. Donald Grant wanted him, his 10 & 5 status and his independent thinking out of the clubhouse — but certainly for no good reason. Frank Cashen blessedly brought him back as a free agent in the next decade, and Rusty Staub enjoyed the best second act any Recidivist Met ever had, emerging from 1981 to 1985 as one of the game’s premier pinch-hitters and a budding contender’s gray eminence.
Or orange eminence.
The Rusty Staub of 1972 through 1975 is the one being toasted tomorrow, and the Rusty Staub of today was gracious enough to join the blogger corps on a Mets-arranged conference call the other night. Many fine questions were asked and many forthright answers were offered (read ’em here, courtesy of MetsBlog’s transcription), but left out of the conversation is what an incredibly charitable force he’s been in this community since his playing days wound down. It was Rusty’s Foundation for the families of firefighters and police officers lost in action that was at the fore of New York’s post-9/11 recovery efforts, and it’s Rusty who’s still front and center with his long-running group, hosting another of his annual picnics at Citi Field for its benefit on June 20. Rusty has been listed as one of the Mets’ ambassadors these last thirteen seasons, but the title is almost a formality. Nobody has represented the Mets or baseball better since we first got to know Rusty Staub four decades ago.
Yes, it’s been a long time, which is another thing about Rusty Staub that struck me as I sat on the line and waited for my turn to ask a conference call question. Rusty’s career stretched with the kind of longevity that would impress anyone this side of Jamie Moyer. He came up to the bigs as a Houston Colt .45 in 1963 under manager Harry Craft and he lasted, with distinction, through the Mets’ near-miss pennant race of 1985 under manager Davey Johnson.
Which is when it hit me that a guy who was playing major league baseball in 1963 once played for a manager who is managing in 2012.
When I was given my opportunity to query Ambassador Staub, I asked Rusty for his impressions of Davey, his final skipper in 1984 and 1985 when Johnson was in his first managerial gig, and the current pilot of the first-place Washington Nationals.
“We got along great. He knew as much about when to use me as anybody. I had respect for the way he handled the game. The whole team lacked a little bit of discipline — there’s no question about that. We all know what happened off the field with this team. This was a great group which probably should have won more. But he was very, very good on the field. He doesn’t need my OK to understand that because he’s done well every place he’s ever managed.
“He is his own guy, he goes about it his own way and doesn’t care what anyone else thinks, and that’s probably a good thing for a manager to be. I was happy for him [that] he got another shot in the big leagues, and […] the team is spending a little money on players and doing pretty good.”
If the Johnson Nats keep it up — which conflicts mightily with our contemporary parochial interests, but better them than the rest of the division on the off chance if it can’t be us — we can assume Davey will garner a great deal of attention for doing yet another heckuva job with yet another team. And he should. But though any 2012 success Davey Johnson has is a Davey Johnson story, there’s something about Rusty Staub’s presence at the beginning of Davey’s first chapter as a manager that tickles me no end.
• There’s a guy managing today who managed a player who first played 49 years ago (April 9, 1963, at Colt Stadium, his first hit coming off the Giants’ Jack Sanford in the sixth inning, leading Alvin Dark to bring in future Met Jack Fisher to face future Met Bob Aspromonte).
• There’s a guy managing today who managed a player who hit a home run in the Polo Grounds (July 16, 1963, top of the seventh, nobody on, cutting Al Jackson’s lead to 3-1 in a game the Mets won, 4-3, in walkoff fashion when Norm Sherry singled home Rod Kanehl in a ninth-inning rally set up when a pickoff attempt of Hot Rod went awry at first; the first baseman was…Rusty Staub).
• There’s a guy managing today who managed a player who first played when John F. Kennedy was president (and Barack Obama had just turned 20 months old).
• There’s a guy managing today who managed a player who first played before the Mets ever won a World Series…which was accomplished when that same guy managing today hit a deep fly ball to left field at Shea Stadium on October 16, 1969.
On that last point, the Davey-Rusty duo isn’t exactly alone. A little checking on Baseball Reference, which is as valuable for a curious baseball fan as Rusty’s bat was to Davey’s strategizing 27 years ago, reveals there are three managers active who once managed players whose careers commenced in the 1960s. From longest ago to most recent (relatively speaking), they are:
1. Davey Johnson and Rusty Staub (debuted 1963), Mets, 1984-1985;
2. Bobby Valentine and Nolan Ryan (debuted 1966), Rangers, 1989-1992;
3. Davey Johnson and Mike Torrez (debuted 1967), Mets, 1984;
4. Bobby Valentine and Toby Harrah (debuted 1969), Rangers, 1985-1986;
5. Davey Johnson and George Foster (debuted 1969), Mets, 1984-1986;
6. Jim Leyland and Jerry Reuss (debuted 1969), Pirates, 1990.
From there, a couple of handfuls of early ’70s debuts can be found on the respective all-time rosters of the three veteran managers who helm the Nats, Red Sox and Tigers today. Davey’s other charges who were playing while Richard Nixon was in his first term include Larry Bowa, Dick Tidrow and Tom Paciorek. Bobby V had Paciorek, too, along with future Met pitching coach Charlie Hough, while in Texas.
The three aforementioned managers have truly endured. Leyland endured without pissing too many people off, which explains why his MLB managerial gap — seven years between Colorado and Detroit — wasn’t quite as long as Valentine’s (a decade) and Johnson’s (eleven years). It also indicates managers who are old now once managed when they were pretty young. Although Leyland has had the air of death-warmed-over about him ever since he started steering the Pirates’ ship at the age of 41, he’s nearly nine months younger than Staub. Johnson, who managed his first Mets game at 41, is Rusty’s senior by only about fourteen months. Bobby V was hired away from Davey’s staff by Texas a few days after his 35th birthday.
The Davey-Rusty spread, though nearing a half-century, isn’t a record. It’s probably not all that close to being one. Just for comparison’s sake, in 1935, while running the show as Brooklyn’s second-year skipper, Casey Stengel managed Cooperstown-bound Dazzy Vance, who commenced his major league career in 1915. Thirty years later, at the end of his Met tenure, Casey nurtured rookie Tug McGraw, who would pitch in the big leagues from 1965 until 1984. That puts the Stengel player span, from Dazzy’s introduction to Tug’s finale, at 69 years.
And that’s not necessarily the record, either. Consider that Connie Mack was a player-manager with the 1894 Pirates and managed a shortstop by the name of Bones Ely, who broke in with the Buffalo Bisons of the National League (not to be confused with the Bison-populated Mets of today’s very same National League) in 1884. In 1947, during the twilight of Mack’s fifty years managing the Philadelphia Athletics (owned by the ever-versatile Connie Mack), he brought up young Nellie Fox, whom he traded to the White Sox two years later for the not nearly as immortal Joe Tipton. Soon on his way to the Hall of Fame, Fox lasted clear to 1965, when he finished up as a Houston Astro, a teammate of…yup, Rusty Staub. That makes the Mack player span, from Ely to Nellie, a formidable 81 years.
I’m guessing that’s the record for this sort of thing. And I’m guessing anything involving Connie Mack won’t ever be surpassed for longevity (not even by Jamie Moyer). But Davey’s probably going to be able to give Casey a run for his Dazzy-Tug money down the road. Remember, he’s managing a pretty bright prospect named Bryce Harper, who is the same age in 2012 that Rusty Staub was in 1963. If 19-year-old Harper doesn’t altogether flame out, he’s probably a decent bet to be playing well into the 2020s, maybe into the 2030s. Davey isn’t likely to be his manager then, but Johnson will rightly have him on his permanent record, same as he has Staub. We could be talking by then, if we’re still around, about the Davey span, from Rusty to Bryce, closing in on 70 years.
Which is really just an excuse for us right now to be talking about Rusty Staub’s bobblehead. As the man himself said, everybody should go out and get one.
by Greg Prince on 25 May 2012 8:58 am In light of the dreary weather through which all concerned were compelled to muck Thursday night, the New York Mets have announced tickets from their 11-5 loss to the San Diego Padres can be redeemed for complimentary admission to tonight’s game.
But only if you’ve been bad.
Your conscience would have to wracked by a gaggle of guilt to voluntarily submit to the punishment of another Mets-Padres tilt under dicey skies so immediately soon. “I haven’t suffered enough for my sins, I should also wear a promotional replica batting practice cap that looks like a novelty yarmulke run amok but is even more tasteful thanks to the humongous auto parts chain logo I will display as if a bumper sticker affixed itself to my head.”
Hey, nobody said you had to be a Mets fan. You could’ve quit the habit before 7:10 last night. You could’ve looked at the oddball lineup card Terry Collins handed Jeff Nelson…
Cedeño
Murphy
Wright
Hairston
Duda
Rottino
Torres
Johnson
Hefner
…and begged off, citing, “Who?” Granted, that might not hold up in a court of Met law, since if you’re a murky-Thursday-night kind of Mets fan, you are expected to know your inventory, even if it’s stock from the back of the Quadruple-A warehouse, yet you’d be perfectly within your rights to ask yourself, “How?” How did it come to be that as the 45th game of a generally pleasing season (disturbing frequency of blowout losses notwithstanding) arrived that we wound up with a batting order we’d pick apart for using fake names if we saw a shot of it in the Original Lifetime Movie presentation of The David Wright Story?
Rottino? Johnson? Hefner? The Mets never had anybody on the team like that the year David hit .400 — did they? Who’s ‘Torres’ supposed to be? And Cedeño leading off? David never played with Roger Cedeño — I call continuity error! Oh, and Hairston batting cleanup? That’s totally unrealistic.
The other story point that seemed off was the umpires deciding the game would start in a downpour, though to be fair, the Mets were never better than when the Padres couldn’t properly handle a wet baseball. Even with that element of nature working for us, we could build only a 1-0 lead before the umps determined they could no longer officiate without an ark.
Things became immensely more entertaining during the rain delay, thanks to the airing of Mets Yearbook: 1968 (Kooz still wants spaghetti for dinner) and Mets Yearbook: 1972 (Willie still disembarks from that cable car), but then somebody with no sense of reverence rolled up the tarp and somebody with no sense of what 68-minute rain delays do to starting pitchers sent Jeremy Hefner back to the mound to replicate his two-inning magic.
It couldn’t be done, which was sad less for the predictable outcome than to think about a pitcher making his first major league start, having had his family fly in from Montana to witness it, and then throwing helplessly as it all unraveled like a cheap giveaway cap. Maybe other starters have been allowed to pitch after an hour and eight minutes on pause, but I couldn’t think of any recent examples (other than Eric Stults, I suppose, but we already knew he’s superhuman). Then I realized the Mets wouldn’t have tried this with any of their shall we say real starters. This was the kind of night when you protect a valuable arm and send some stray Bison onto the field to soak up the innings when the gales of November came early. As Jeremy Hefner was that Bison…well, good luck, kid.
When you buy a ticket, you’re not entitled to a win, but you are entitled to something approximating a legitimate attempt to attain one. The Mets (save for Wright, of course) seemed to approach Thursday as if it was a predestined defeat. So why not keep Hefner in the game? Why not roll out whoever in whatever spots in the lineup? Why not forget how many outs there were in any given inning, as Rob Johnson did in the seventh, leading to two Padre runs that made the score 9-3 and the outcome academic…as if it wasn’t already since how were we supposed to beat the baffling Eric Stults anyway?
To be fair, Johnson’s best position is pitcher and Terry was using him to catch.
Other than Mr. .405, the only Met who came out of this looking better than he went into it was Ike Davis, who it was decided will try to find his mojo not way the hell upstate as popularly suggested but while dancing between the major league raindrops when not sitting against Stultsifying lefties. Before Mets Yearbook ran, Sandy Alderson gave some half-Omar’d explanation to Gary and Ron that everybody likes Ike and who knows if a Buffalo miracle cure would work anyway? Resounding vote of confidence cast, Ike came off the bench and delivered a two-run pinch single in the eighth that cut the Padres’ lead from enormous to merely formidable. Ike’s on a two-game hitting streak now and the ol’ average has risen clear to .164.
So it’s not like the Mets were all wet last night.
by Jason Fry on 23 May 2012 9:51 pm On Friday the Toronto Blue Jays made Jon Niese into their personal pinata, whacking him all over the ballpark. It was the worst start of his young career, a game that ended with Rob Johnson on the mound and doing a lot better than the guy he’d started the game catching.
Today, Niese handcuffed the Pittsburgh Pirates rather convincingly, using his cutter and change to great effect, as the Mets just got enough offense and left PNC Park with a 2-1 series win. (And a 19-19 all-time record in the beautiful stadium where horrible things happen, believe it or not.)
What happened in between? A lot of stuff, much of it fascinating — and invisible to us except through secondhand accounts.
After the Toronto debacle, Dan Warthen got excellent distance in heaving Niese under the speeding wheels of a very heavy bus, saying he needed to study more, particularly against teams he hadn’t faced before. It was a pretty damning critique, particularly of a guy who’d just had his free-agent years bought out by a cash-strapped team.
Then, as Adam Rubin reports over at ESPN New York, Niese was summoned to a pitching skull session that included Niese, Warthen, bullpen coach Ricky Bones, Johan Santana and R.A. Dickey. It sounds like it was a Come to Jesus moment for Niese, courtesy of some apostles of pitching, and oh what I wouldn’t have given to be a fly on the wall for that congregation. Niese, one presumes, listened — at least for one start. This was Warthen afterwards, demonstrating his bus-throwing muscles are still in fine shape should he have to use them again: “Sometimes [Niese] trusts his stuff more than realizing that he has to pitch. Today I thought he pitched as well as using stuff.”
Johnson, back in as Niese’s catcher, also helped out by keeping it simple. During today’s pregame bullpen session, he saw that Niese’s cutter and two-seam fastball were particularly good and he was locating them very well. So he leaned hard on those pitches, with Plan B waiting until the Pirates showed they could hit them. They never did.
I have no inclination for advanced stats, unfortunately — but I’m fascinated by them, convinced that they have a lot to teach us about the game we love to watch, whether it’s by confirming hunches, illuminating murky events or exposing biases. It makes me crazy when smart broadcasters who love baseball reject advanced stats haughtily (I’m looking at you, Howie Rose), and merely disappointed when smart fans who love baseball dismiss them cavalierly.
You can’t discuss Ike Davis’s troubles without understanding that his BABIP this year is ridiculously low, or prepare yourself for what’s to come with David Wright without understanding that his BABIP is ridiculously high. And if you rolled your eyes because BABIP sounds funny, c’mon. You’re better than that. Keith Hernandez talking about rib-eye steaks sounds goofy too. FIP and K/BB can tell us interesting things about pitchers and their defense (or lack thereof), and those metrics undoubtedly informed the Mets’ decision to extend Niese. Fielding remains the area where advanced stats are still searching in the dark, experimenting with different models — but even here, the research is no longer theoretical. Joe Maddon and the Tampa Bay Rays are employing defensive shifts with regularity, practices that get Maddon called a mad scientist today (sometimes on SNY, unfortunately) but will be common among the smart teams in five years and reach the dumb teams in 10. It’s all fascinating to me — as is anything that helps me understand baseball better.
But advanced stats aren’t everything, and they aren’t the only lens through which baseball can be illuminated. This isn’t a counter-case to the above — the only people I’ve heard make such universalist claims are old-school traditionalists bashing away at straw men. But it is a useful reminder. I can’t quantify the effect of Niese getting hauled into a room for schooling by Santana and Dickey, but I’m pretty sure it made a difference. I have no numbers to pinpoint Niese’s effort doing prep work in Toronto vs. his effort in Pittsburgh, but the latter sure seems to have been larger than the former. And was Niese’s performance on the field different because of those things? I’m quite confident it was, even though I can’t measure it. Advanced stats teach us that the pitcher can do little or nothing to influence what happens to the ball after it’s hit, which is useful to know. But it’s also useful to better understand what the pitcher did — or didn’t do — before that point. And in the case of today’s game, that process seems to have begun over the weekend, in another country.
Intangible and unquantifiable things are important — but they’re also a catch-all category for a lot of lazy thinking and myth-peddling. I don’t know what the hell “Derek Jeter knows how to win” means, or what “Alex Cora/Jeff Francoeur/Mr. Met is a great clubhouse guy” has to do with anything. For that stuff, well, WFAN awaits. But if you’re going to tell me that Niese was effectively locked in a room with Santana to learn how to size up batters during a game, I’ll listen. If you’re going to tell me what Johnson saw through the bars of his mask and how that shaped the game he called, I’m all ears. Those are intangibles and unquantifiables worth discovering and discussing — and in this case, celebrating.
by Greg Prince on 23 May 2012 1:25 am Ike Davis is neither here nor there right now, which is a shame for Ike and a shame for the Mets. He’s not here in the sense of looking like he’s a part of a team when it’s having its ups, as it did Tuesday night behind R.A. Dickey’s 11 dancing strikeouts, and it’s become impossible not to notice what a contributor he’s become to its intermittent downs. Lord knows he’s not the only one who’s been in a statistical funk. Andres Torres is 1-for-about a million and Mike Nickeas was the hitting equivalent of Rheingold — ice cold and extra dry — before rustling up his biweekly RBI.
But they’re Andres Torres and Mike Nickeas. It would be too blithe to dismiss them as unimportant to the Mets’ short- or long-term fortunes, but there are enough outfielders floating around the roster to sit Torres (or dump his one-year contract if circumstances grow dire enough) and Nickeas is a backup catcher exposed as such when given the opportunity to play, his yeoman handling of R.A.’s knuckleball notwithstanding. They come off as nice guys and I hope they find their groove soon for the sake of their careers and whatever help they can provide the greater good…but they’re Andres Torres and Mike Nickeas.
Ike Davis is a whole other thing, maybe a day from being optioned to a whole other town in a whole other league. Short of going 5-for-5 against Charlie Morton and a passel of Pirate relievers, Ike — a favorite son of Flushing whom we’d prefer not to think of as simply another partially proven youngster — seems inevitably Buffalo-bound. That much is easy to project if tough to swallow, especially for a fan still prone to wearing his WE LIKE IKE shirt with pride. The temptation is to wave off Davis’s potential demotion with “c’mon, this is Ike Davis we’re talking about,” but at the rate he’s gone (.156/.212/.291), Ike has no star left to dim. In the major leagues, more than a quarter of a season into a personal baseball nightmare, the goodwill and the merchandising from 2010 cuts Ike no ice. At this level, there can be no sacred cows, just Bisons in waiting.
Ike’s not there in the sense that he’s not in Buffalo yet. But he should be soon. He has to be.
What’s most painful about watching Ike slouch toward Triple-A is how he’s flailing in his rush to get there. This is the team that takes pitches, works counts and manufactures baserunners, right? If so, Ike’s already on another team. There is no approach from him at the plate right now. Ike faces pitchers like he’s just passing through, knowing that in a matter of minutes he’ll be sitting and stewing again.
His at-bat in the eighth seemed to sum up his season. The Mets had just caught an enormous break when Pedro Alvarez couldn’t pick up Daniel Murphy’s grounder, which allowed an insurance run to score. The Mets had first and second with two out and were facing a pitcher, Juan Cruz, who’d already been driven to distraction by not getting a call he wanted and by Andrew McCutcheon not getting a firm grasp on a fly ball over his head. Never was there a better time to take the first pitch and let the reliever feel a little more pressure in a 3-1 game.
Ike felt the pressure. He swung and lofted a fly so lazy Andy Samberg is making a digital short about it right now. Threat over, inning over, funk deepened.
The Mets won anyway, with Terry Collins popping his nightly dose of Vitamin Byrdak and Frank Francisco keeping everybody’s language suitable for children, but Ike didn’t appear to be any part of it, and not just because he went 0-for-4. 0-for-4? Big deal. The greatest hitter in the universe, David Wright, went 0-for-4. James McDonald made most everybody look more like .156 neophytes than .403 worldbeaters. But, man, the ohfers Ike takes lately are just brutal and his visibly insular reactions to them cringe-inducing. There are brushes with moments of clarity, when an occasional hard-hit line drive shoots toward a rudely waiting webbing, but they’re not built on. He’s totaled two hits and one walk in his last ten games. Whatever defense he brings to bear as the only legitimate first baseman on call doesn’t come close to compensating for the acres of barren production he leaves in the wake of his sullen plate appearances.
If this were about a lousy May after a shaky April, maybe it wouldn’t feel that urgent. But it does. And it’s not because the Mets are in a white-hot, four-way battle for that last Selig-mandated Wild Card spot. The Mets should endeavor to win every game on their schedule, obviously, but this season is really critical for what it starts to tell us about the next few seasons. Ike Davis is a tentpole for what this franchise is supposed to become as it evolves — we hope — from earning pats on the head for not being as bad as people thought to administering kicks in the ass to anybody would get in its way.
If Ike is the Ike of most of 2010 and the part of 2011 before his ankle gave out and valley fever took its toll, then we know we have a genuine force at first base. If Ike is that Ike (which is the only Ike we’d ever seen since he first came up), we know we’re that much closer to contending; and we know re-signing Wright won’t be about gestures or sentimentality but about building a dangerous lineup that will have something to compete for sooner than later; and we can guess David the free agent will be that much more likely to want to stick around if he’s part of that kind of attack in that kind of context.
If Ike is this Ike — the one who couldn’t look more miserable at the plate or on the bench — there’s every reason to question his place in the Mets’ plans, which is a question no one was anticipating having to ask. The phrase Bobby Ojeda would throw around when Mike Pelfrey would get lit up seems applicable in Ike Davis’s case: there are no scholarships at this level. A trip to the next level down, ideally brief but as long as is required to be effective, seems imperative. The kid (all of 25) seems too good and usually too preternaturally confident to be this lost. There’s time to find that Ike Davis, but there’s no point in delaying the search.
I’m not that worried about the Ike Davis of 2012. It’s the Ike Davis of 2013 and beyond that concerns me.
by Jason Fry on 21 May 2012 11:09 pm I sensed trouble from the start.
I’m not sure why I did — the ball Neil Walker hit to begin the bottom of the Pirates’ eighth wasn’t going out and wasn’t parachuting in. It was ticketed for short of the warning track, a quick trot at worst for either the left fielder or the center fielder. But for whatever reason, I sensed trouble. Trouble with a mournful, mocking Chris Isaak croon, trouble like a sign reading DANGER HEARTBREAK DEAD AHEAD. Trouble like Luis Castillo scuttling crablike under the lights at Yankee Stadium, like Shawn Green’s old legs taking a creaky first step along the path of Scott Spiezio’s drive, like Juan Samuel hitching up Todd Hundley and Howard Johnson and Keith Miller for a stagecoach ride through Out of Position Canyon.
You know, trouble.
The ball alighted briefly in the space occupied by both the glove of Kirk Nieuwenhuis and the shoulder of Mike Baxter — the third left fielder of the night — then bounded away. So did Walker, who wound up at third, where the baleful glare of Jon Rauch was of no particular effect. After the inning, I joked that poor Baxter was going to search for the spot in the dugout equidistant between the Mets’ diminutive but scarily intense manager and their gigantic and scarily intense setup man, but I wasn’t exactly laughing. (For the record, SNY’s cameras caught Terry Collins between innings with his arm around a despondent Baxter, looking calm and downright fatherly.)
Of course by then a number of things had already gone wrong.
Like Johan Santana being given a four-run lead and then handing it back, with the first two runs coming via a flurry of doubles in the fourth and the last two coming all at once off the bat of Mike McKenry in the seventh. Not to get all Francesa on you, but you can’t blow a four-run lead against the Pirates. To be saner about it, the post-surgery Santana has been better than any of us could have hoped for, but he’s now mortal — as indomitable as ever above the neck, but inevitably eroded and stretched between the shoulder and the fingertips. This is not to complain or cast aspersions, but to be realistic about things.
After jumping on the glacial Erik Bedard (“Bedard” is apparently French for “Trachsel”), the Mets got handcuffed by a parade of Pittsburgh relievers, but were poised to take the lead in the top of the eighth, with Nieuwenhuis on third with one out. But Mike Nickeas K’d feebly, Baxter walked, and ice-cold Andres Torres grounded a ball up the middle, with Baxter forced at second by an eyelash. The Mets could really use Josh Thole back — he’s no slugger, but he’s become a patient hitter and rarely strikes out; with that needing more time, I agreed with Ron Darling that they might have tried to steal a run (or force the Pirates into more incompetent fielding) by sending Baxter. Instead, the run didn’t come home, and was soon to be mourned.
Of course, this is PNC Park, where all manner of things are mourned. Since the stadium opened — with an exhibition against the Mets, who somehow won — the Mets are 17-19 here, but it feels like a couple of zeroes are missing from that last number. The Mets media guide was no help: It omits 2007 in favor of an extra 2003, which normally I’d blame on the Mets except it’s entirely fitting for that to be screwed up too. Since being wowed by AT&T Park, PNC is the big-league stadium I most want to visit. But I think any Mets fan will understand that I’ve made up my mind to see it when the Pirates are playing one of the other 29 teams.
by Greg Prince on 20 May 2012 8:02 pm Frank Francisco walks the first batter of the ninth and allows a shift-confounding single immediately thereafter. There’s two on, none out, a one-run lead and every reason to believe that the eight runners the Mets had gotten into scoring position but neglected to score were lining up for a big, juicy bite of cosmic retribution. With a, say, 9-5 lead, Francisco could futz around for a couple of batters, yet lurking grand slam specter notwithstanding, we could feel reasonably confident in his ability to push (if not slam) the door shut on the deadly international conspiracy known as the Toronto Blue Jays.
But it wasn’t 9-5. It was 6-5. And I wouldn’t have given you a plug Canadian nickel for the chances of it not being 7-6 or something like it in a matter of metric minutes. The Jays sure like to swing and our closer sure likes to melt. This was not a recipe for a clean getaway day.
Yet here we are, in the cool of the evening, sipping on a refreshing 6-5 win whose peril was real but danger never grew any graver than first and second, nobody out. Francisco defied the rising, thundering snarls of the Rogers Centre throng (the way we’ll sound when Frank revisits Citi Field in another uniform someday…or next time we see he’s still with the Mets) and, à la Andy Dufresne after his crawl through a river of edited-for-television spit, came out clean.
Francisco fell behind Edwin Encarnacion one-and-oh, yet managed to strike him out.
Francisco fell behind J.P. Arencipia two-and-oh, yet managed to strike him out.
Francisco fell behind Eric Thames — now there’s a name that seemed worth reserving for recriminatory reference purposes during future ninth-inning unravelings (“goddammit, this is turning into another fucking Eric Thames at the fucking SkyDome atrocity!”) — two-and-one, yet managed to strike him out.
When Frank got Thames, I had to count to make sure he’d really recorded three outs. He’s out of the inning? We won the game? Really? No way it could have been…not so much “that easy,” because it wasn’t easy, yet I just assumed it would take bases-loaded agony and some David Eckstein type coming up and fouling off 23 or 24 pitches to get even close to a third out.
But mostly I expected Eric Thames to homer.
No, that’s not completely true. I expected Jose Bautista to homer, but Frank held him to that measly single. Maybe we won the game right there. It’s hard to fathom we didn’t put the durned thing away much earlier while Mike Baxter was enjoying his child’s-size cycle — Whopper not included — and David Wright was leaving Met legends in the artificial turf cut-out dust, passing Jose Reyes for second in Met hits and Mike Piazza for first in Met interleague RBIs, and Dillon Gee was showing irrefutable evidence that Texans Do It Better Without Beards (Dear 7 Line: there’s your next shirt). By the light and lively way the Mets were playing, I kind of assumed we were unassailably good for Sunday.
But then we kept forgetting to tack on runs. And Gee ran out of gas. And Parnell was location-optional. And the home team kept swinging. And David dared to strike out with the bases loaded in the eighth. And Darren Oliver, who used to be a Met, and Francisco Cordero, who I’m sure I used to think was Frank Francisco, shut us down in the ninth. And here came the actual Frank Francisco. And Marlins Park came to Toronto. It was going to be last Sunday all over again, except worse, because a series sweep was in the offing.
Until it wasn’t. Which is no small thing when there’s a plane to catch and PNC Park to provide its own time-tested aggravational pull.
The Mets look great, but nearly blow an incredibly winnable game. The Mets look shaky, yet a 41-game season would have them in a one-game Wild Card play-in versus Miami to determine who’d be in the actual one-game Wild Card playoff. We can argue that this second Wild Card spot is a cheap gimmick that rewards teams barely floating above .500, but the Mets are one of those teams and a quarter of the real season in, they are on track to be rewarded. Can’t say their contending status is a phenomenon that will keep up, and I sure as hell wouldn’t bet on it on injury-riddled, experience-lacking principle, but I’m also not ready to bet against these Mets, Frank Francisco and all.
Give me and them another week and I’ll let you know if I’m quite so generous in my weighing of admirable character over assembled talent.
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